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• The way I think about Diagnostic tools

  - by Daniel Moth

  Every software has issues, or as we like to call them "bugs". That is not a discussion point, just a mere fact. It follows that an important skill for developers is to be able to diagnose issues in their code. Of course we need to advance our tools and techniques so we can prevent bugs getting into the code (e.g. unit testing), but beyond designing great software, diagnosing bugs is an equally important skill. To diagnose issues, the most important assets are good techniques, skill, experience, and maybe talent. What also helps is having good diagnostic tools and what helps further is knowing all the features that they offer and how to use them. The following classification is how I like to think of diagnostics. Note that like with any attempt to bucketize anything, you run into overlapping areas and blurry lines. Nevertheless, I will continue sharing my generalizations ;-) It is important to identify at the outset if you are dealing with a performance or a correctness issue. If you have a performance issue, use a profiler. I hear people saying "I am using the debugger to debug a performance issue", and that is fine, but do know that a dedicated profiler is the tool for that job. Just because you don't need them all the time and typically they cost more plus you are not as familiar with them as you are with the debugger, doesn't mean you shouldn't invest in one and instead try to exclusively use the wrong tool for the job. Visual Studio has a profiler and a concurrency visualizer (for profiling multi-threaded apps). If you have a correctness issue, then you have several options - that's next :-) This is how I think of identifying a correctness issue Do you want a tool to find the issue for you at design time? The compiler is such a tool - it gives you an exact list of errors. Compilers now also offer warnings, which is their way of saying "this may be an error, but I am not smart enough to know for sure". There are also static analysis tools, which go a step further than the compiler in identifying issues in your code, sometimes with the aid of code annotations and other times just by pointing them at your raw source. An example is FxCop and much more in Visual Studio 11 Code Analysis. Do you want a tool to find the issue for you with code execution? Just like static tools, there are also dynamic analysis tools that instead of statically analyzing your code, they analyze what your code does dynamically at runtime. Whether you have to setup some unit tests to invoke your code at runtime, or have to manually run your app (and interact with it) under the tool, or have to use a script to execute your binary under the tool… that varies. The result is still a list of issues for you to address after the analysis is complete or a pause of the execution when the first issue is encountered. If a code path was not taken, no analysis for it will exist, obviously. An example is the GPU Race detection tool that I'll be talking about on the C++ AMP team blog. Another example is the MSR concurrency CHESS tool. Do you want you to find the issue at design time using a tool? Perform a code walkthrough on your own or with colleagues. There are code review tools that go beyond just diffing sources, and they help you with that aspect too. For example, there is a new one in Visual Studio 11 and searching with my favorite search engine yielded this article based on the Developer Preview. Do you want you to find the issue with code execution? Use a debugger - let’s break this down further next. This is how I think of debugging: There is post mortem debugging. That means your code has executed and you did something in order to examine what happened during its execution. This can vary from manual printf and other tracing statements to trace events (e.g. ETW) to taking dumps. In all cases, you are left with some artifact that you examine after the fact (after code execution) to discern what took place hoping it will help you find the bug. Learn how to debug dump files in Visual Studio. There is live debugging. I will elaborate on this in a separate post, but this is where you inspect the state of your program during its execution, and try to find what the problem is. More from me in a separate post on live debugging. There is a hybrid of live plus post-mortem debugging. This is for example what tools like IntelliTrace offer. If you are a tools vendor interested in the diagnostics space, it helps to understand where in the above classification your tool excels, where its primary strength is, so you can market it as such. Then it helps to see which of the other areas above your tool touches on, and how you can make it even better there. Finally, see what areas your tool doesn't help at all with, and evaluate whether it should or continue to stay clear. Even though the classification helps us think about this space, the reality is that the best tools are either extremely excellent in only one of this areas, or more often very good across a number of them. Another approach is to offer a toolset covering all areas, with appropriate integration and hand off points from one to the other. Anyway, with that brain dump out of the way, in follow-up posts I will dive into live debugging, and specifically live debugging in Visual Studio - stay tuned if that interests you. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• BPM Suite 11gR1 Released

  - by Manoj Das

  This morning (April 27th, 2010), Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 became available for download from OTN and eDelivery. If you have been following our plans in this area, you know that this is the release unifying BEA ALBPM product, which became Oracle BPM10gR3, with the Oracle stack. Some of the highlights of this release are: BPMN 2.0 modeling and simulation Web based Process Composer for BPMN and Rules authoring Zero-code environment with full access to Oracle SOA Suite’s rich set of application and other adapters Process Spaces – Out-of-box integration with Web Center Suite Process Analytics – Native process cubes as well as integration with Oracle BAM You can learn more about this release from the documentation. Notes about downloading and installing Please note that Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 is delivered and installed as part of SOA 11.1.1.3.0, which is a sparse release (only incremental patch). To install: Download and install SOA 11.1.1.2.0, which is a full release (you can find the bits at the above location) Download and install SOA 11.1.1.3.0 During configure step (using the Fusion Middleware configuration wizard), use the Oracle Business Process Management template supplied with the SOA Suite11g (11.1.1.3.0) If you plan to use Process Spaces, also install Web Center 11.1.1.3.0, which also is delivered as a sparse release and needs to be installed on top of Web Center 11.1.1.2.0 Some early feedback We have been receiving very encouraging feedback on this release. Some quotes from partners are included below: “I just attended a preview workshop on BPM Studio, Oracle's BPMN 2.0 tool, held by Clemens Utschig Utschig from Oracle HQ. The usability and ease to get started are impressive. In the business view analysts can intuitively start modeling, then developers refine in their own, more technical view. The BPM Studio sets itself apart from pure play BPMN 2.0 tools by being seamlessly integrated inside a holistic SOA / BPM toolset: BPMN models are placed in SCA-Composites in SOA Suite 11g. This allows to abstract away the complexities of SOA integration aspects from business process aspects. For UIs in BPMN tasks, you have the richness of ADF 11g based Frontends. With BPM Studio we architects have a new modeling and development IDE that gives us interesting design challenges to grasp and elaborate, since many things BPMN 2.0 are different from good ol' BPEL. For example, for simple transformations, you don't use BPEL "assign" any more, but add the transformation directly to the service call. There is much less XPath involved. And, there is no translation from model to BPEL code anymore, so the awkward process model to BPEL roundtrip, which never really worked as well as it looked on marketing slides, is obsolete: With BPMN 2.0 "the model is the code". Now, these are great times to start the journey into BPM! Some tips: Start Projects smoothly, with initial processes being not overly complex and not using the more esoteric areas of BPMN, to manage the learning path and to stay successful with each iteration. Verify non functional requirements by conducting performance and load tests early. As mentioned above, separate all technical integration logic into SOA Suite or Oracle Service Bus. And - share your experience!” Hajo Normann, SOA Architect - Oracle ACE Director - Co-Leader DOAG SIG SOA   "Reuse of components across the Oracle 11G Fusion Middleware stack, like for instance a Database Adapter, is essential. It improves stability and predictability of the solution. BPM just is one of the components plugging into the stack and reuses all other components." Mr. Leon Smiers, Oracle Solution Architect, Capgemini   “I had the opportunity to follow a hands-on workshop held by Clemens for Oracle partners and I was really impressed of the overall offering of BPM11g. BPM11g allows the execution of BPMN 2.0 processes, without having to transform/translate them first to BPEL in order to be executable. The fact that BPMN uses the same underlying service infrastructure of SOA Suite 11g has a lot of benefits for us already familiar with SOA Suite 11g. BPMN is just another SCA component within a SCA composite and can (re)use all the existing components like Rules, Human Workflow, Adapters and Mediator. I also like the fact that BPMN runs on the same service engine as BPEL. By that all known best practices for making a BPEL  process reliable are valid for BPMN processes as well. Last but not least, BPMN is integrated into the superior end-to-end tracing of SOA Suite 11g. With BPM11g, Oracle offers a very competitive product which will have a big effect on the IT market. Clemens and Jürgen: Thanks for the great workshop! I’m really looking forward to my first project using Oracle BPM11g!” Guido Schmutz, Technology Manager / Oracle ACE Director for Fusion Middleware and SOA, Company:  Trivadis Some earlier feedback were summarized in this post.

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• Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

  - by Michael Hylton

  Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group.  I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara.  Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time:  1) The Dynamic Customer Journey:  Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations.  Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this.  2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance.  Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation.  As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides.  3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond.  Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not.  It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond.  In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires.  All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am.  Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks.  There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com.  A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang.  As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now.  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon?  J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast?  J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

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• OSB/OSR/OER in One Domain - QName violates loader constraints

  - by John Graves

  For demos, testing and prototyping, I wanted a single domain which contained three servers:OSB - Oracle Service BusOSR - Oracle Service RegistryOER - Oracle Enterprise Repository These three can work together to help with service governance in an enterprise.  When building out the domain, I found errors in the OSR server due to some conflicting classes from the OSB.  This wouldn't be an issue if each server was given a unique classpath setting with the node manager, but I was having the node manager use the standard startup scripts. The domain's bin/setDomainEnv.sh script has a large set of extra libraries added for OSB which look like this: if [ "${POST_CLASSPATH}" != "" ] ; then POST_CLASSPATH="${COMMON_COMPONENTS_HOME}/modules/oracle.jrf_11.1.1/jrf.jar${CLASSPATHSEP}${POST_CLASSPATH}" export POST_CLASSPATH else POST_CLASSPATH="${COMMON_COMPONENTS_HOME}/modules/oracle.jrf_11.1.1/jrf.jar" export POST_CLASSPATH fi if [ "${PRE_CLASSPATH}" != "" ] ; then PRE_CLASSPATH="${COMMON_COMPONENTS_HOME}/modules/oracle.jdbc_11.1.1/ojdbc6dms.jar${CLASSPATHSEP}${PRE_CLASSPATH}" export PRE_CLASSPATH else PRE_CLASSPATH="${COMMON_COMPONENTS_HOME}/modules/oracle.jdbc_11.1.1/ojdbc6dms.jar" export PRE_CLASSPATH fi POST_CLASSPATH="${POST_CLASSPATH}${CLASSPATHSEP}/oracle/fmwhome/Oracle_OSB1/soa/modules/oracle.soa.common.adapters_11.1.1/oracle.soa.common.adapters.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/lib/version.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/lib/alsb.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/3rdparty/lib/j2ssh-ant.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/3rdparty/lib/j2ssh-common.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/3rdparty/lib/j2ssh-core.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/3rdparty/lib/j2ssh-dameon.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/3rdparty/classes${CLASSPATHSEP}\ ${ALSB_HOME}/lib/external/log4j_1.2.8.jar${CLASSPATHSEP}\ ${DOMAIN_HOME}/config/osb" I didn't take the time to sort out exactly which jar was causing the problem, but I simply surrounded this block with a conditional statement: if [ "${SERVER_NAME}" == "osr_server1" ] ; then POST_CLASSPATH=""else if [ "${POST_CLASSPATH}" != "" ] ; then POST_CLASSPATH="${COMMON_COMPONENTS_HOME}/modules/oracle.jrf_11.1.1/jrf.jar${CLASSPATHSEP}${POST_CLASSPATH}" export POST_CLASSPATH else POST_CLASSPATH="${COMMON_COMPONENTS_HOME}/modules/oracle.jrf_11.1.1/jrf.jar" export POST_CLASSPATH fi if [ "${PRE_CLASSPATH}" != "" ] ; then PRE_CLASSPATH="${COMMON_COMPONENTS_HOME}/modules/oracle.jdbc_11.1.1/ojdbc6dms.jar${CLASSPATHSEP}${PRE_CLASSPATH}" export PRE_CLASSPATH else PRE_CLASSPATH="${COMMON_COMPONENTS_HOME}/modules/oracle.jdbc_11.1.1/ojdbc6dms.jar" export PRE_CLASSPATH fi POST_CLASSPATH="${POST_CLASSPATH}${CLASSPATHSEP}/oracle/fmwhome/Oracle_OSB1/soa/modules/oracle.soa.common.adapters_11.1.1/oracle.soa.common.adapters.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/lib/version.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/lib/alsb.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/3rdparty/lib/j2ssh-ant.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/3rdparty/lib/j2ssh-common.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/3rdparty/lib/j2ssh-core.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/3rdparty/lib/j2ssh-dameon.jar\ ${CLASSPATHSEP}${ALSB_HOME}/3rdparty/classes${CLASSPATHSEP}\ ${ALSB_HOME}/lib/external/log4j_1.2.8.jar${CLASSPATHSEP}\ ${DOMAIN_HOME}/config/osb" fi I could have also just done an if [ ${SERVER_NAME} = "osb_server1" ], but I would have also had to include the AdminServer because they are needed there too.  Since the oer_server1 didn't mind, I did the negative case as shown above. To help others find this post, I'm including the error that was reported in the OSR server before I made this change. ####<Mar 30, 2012 4:20:28 PM EST> <Error> <HTTP> <localhost.localdomain> <osr_server1> <[ACTIVE] ExecuteThread: '0' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'> <<WLS Kernel>> <> <11d1def534ea1be0:30e96542:13662023753:-8000-000000000000001c> <1333084828916> <BEA-101017> <[ServletContext@470316600[app:registry module:registry.war path:/registry spec-version:null]] Root cause of ServletException. java.lang.LinkageError: Class javax/xml/namespace/QName violates loader constraints at com.idoox.wsdl.extensions.PopulatedExtensionRegistry.<init>(PopulatedExtensionRegistry.java:84) at com.idoox.wsdl.factory.WSDLFactoryImpl.newDefinition(WSDLFactoryImpl.java:61) at com.idoox.wsdl.xml.WSDLReaderImpl.parseDefinitions(WSDLReaderImpl.java:419) at com.idoox.wsdl.xml.WSDLReaderImpl.readWSDL(WSDLReaderImpl.java:309) at com.idoox.wsdl.xml.WSDLReaderImpl.readWSDL(WSDLReaderImpl.java:272) at com.idoox.wsdl.xml.WSDLReaderImpl.readWSDL(WSDLReaderImpl.java:198) at com.idoox.wsdl.util.WSDLUtil.readWSDL(WSDLUtil.java:126) at com.systinet.wasp.admin.PackageRepositoryImpl.validateServicesNamespaceAndName(PackageRepositoryImpl.java:885) at com.systinet.wasp.admin.PackageRepositoryImpl.registerPackage(PackageRepositoryImpl.java:807) at com.systinet.wasp.admin.PackageRepositoryImpl.updateDir(PackageRepositoryImpl.java:611) at com.systinet.wasp.admin.PackageRepositoryImpl.updateDir(PackageRepositoryImpl.java:643) at com.systinet.wasp.admin.PackageRepositoryImpl.update(PackageRepositoryImpl.java:553) at com.systinet.wasp.admin.PackageRepositoryImpl.init(PackageRepositoryImpl.java:242) at com.idoox.wasp.ModuleRepository.loadModules(ModuleRepository.java:198) at com.systinet.wasp.WaspImpl.boot(WaspImpl.java:383) at org.systinet.wasp.Wasp.init(Wasp.java:151) at com.systinet.transport.servlet.server.Servlet.init(Unknown Source) at weblogic.servlet.internal.StubSecurityHelper$ServletInitAction.run(StubSecurityHelper.java:283) at weblogic.security.acl.internal.AuthenticatedSubject.doAs(AuthenticatedSubject.java:321) at weblogic.security.service.SecurityManager.runAs(SecurityManager.java:120) at weblogic.servlet.internal.StubSecurityHelper.createServlet(StubSecurityHelper.java:64) at weblogic.servlet.internal.StubLifecycleHelper.createOneInstance(StubLifecycleHelper.java:58) at weblogic.servlet.internal.StubLifecycleHelper.<init>(StubLifecycleHelper.java:48) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.prepareServlet(ServletStubImpl.java:539) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.execute(ServletStubImpl.java:244) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl.execute(ServletStubImpl.java:184) at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext$ServletInvocationAction.wrapRun(WebAppServletContext.java:3732) at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext$ServletInvocationAction.run(WebAppServletContext.java:3696) at weblogic.security.acl.internal.AuthenticatedSubject.doAs(AuthenticatedSubject.java:321) at weblogic.security.service.SecurityManager.runAs(SecurityManager.java:120) at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.securedExecute(WebAppServletContext.java:2273) at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.execute(WebAppServletContext.java:2179) at weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletRequestImpl.run(ServletRequestImpl.java:1490) at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:256) at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:221)

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• Oracle Database 12c Spatial: Vector Performance Acceleration

  - by Okcan Yasin Saygili-Oracle

  Most business information has a location component, such as customer addresses, sales territories and physical assets. Businesses can take advantage of their geographic information by incorporating location analysis and intelligence into their information systems. This allows organizations to make better decisions, respond to customers more effectively, and reduce operational costs – increasing ROI and creating competitive advantage. Oracle Database, the industry’s most advanced database,  includes native location capabilities, fully integrated in the kernel, for fast, scalable, reliable and secure spatial and massive graph applications. It is a foundation for deploying enterprise-wide spatial information systems and locationenabled business applications. Developers can extend existing Oracle-based tools and applications, since they can easily incorporate location information directly in their applications, workflows, and services. Spatial Features The geospatial data features of Oracle Spatial and Graph option support complex geographic information systems (GIS) applications, enterprise applications and location services applications. Oracle Spatial and Graph option extends the spatial query and analysis features included in every edition of Oracle Database with the Oracle Locator feature, and provides a robust foundation for applications that require advanced spatial analysis and processing in the Oracle Database. It supports all major spatial data types and models, addressing challenging business-critical requirements from various industries, including transportation, utilities, energy, public sector, defense and commercial location intelligence. Network Data Model Graph Features The Network Data Model graph explicitly stores and maintains a persistent data model withnetwork connectivity and provides network analysis capability such as shortest path, nearest neighbors, within cost and reachability. It loads partitioned networks into memory on demand, overcomingthe limitations of in-memory analysis. Partitioning massive networks into manageable sub-networkssimplifies the network analysis. RDF Semantic Graph Features RDF Semantic Graph has native support for World Wide Web Consortium standards. It has open, scalable, and secure features for storing RDF/OWL ontologies anddata; native inference with OWL 2, SKOS and user-defined rules; and querying RDF/OWL data withSPARQL 1.1, Java APIs, and SPARQLgraph patterns in SQL. Video: Oracle Spatial and Graph Overview Oracle spatial is embeded on oracle database product. So ,we can use oracle installer (OUI).The Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) is used to install Oracle Database software. OUI is a graphical user interface utility that enables you to view the Oracle software that is installed on your machine, install new Oracle Database software, and delete Oracle software that you no longer need to use. Online Help is available to guide you through the installation process. One of the installation options is to create a database. If you select database creation, OUI automatically starts Oracle Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) to guide you through the process of creating and configuring a database. If you do not create a database during installation, you must invoke DBCA after you have installed the software to create a database. You can also use DBCA to create additional databases. For installing Oracle Database 12c you may check the Installing Oracle Database Software and Creating a Database tutorial under the Oracle Database 12c 2-Day DBA Series.You can always check if spatial is available in your database using  "select comp_id, version, status, comp_name from dba_registry where comp_id='SDO';"   One of the most notable improvements with Oracle Spatial and Graph 12c can be seen in performance increases in vector data operations. Enabling the Spatial Vector Acceleration feature (available with the Spatial option) dramatically improves the performance of commonly used vector data operations, such as sdo_distance, sdo_aggr_union, and sdo_inside. With 12c, these operations also run more efficiently in parallel than in prior versions through the use of metadata caching. For organizations that have been facing processing limitations, these enhancements enable developers to make a small set of configuration changes and quickly realize significant performance improvements. Results include improved index performance, enhanced geometry engine performance, optimized secondary filter optimizations for Spatial operators, and improved CPU and memory utilization for many advanced vector functions. Vector performance acceleration is especially beneficial when using Oracle Exadata Database Machine and other large-scale systems. Oracle Spatial and Graph vector performance acceleration builds on general improvements available to all SDO_GEOMETRY operations in these areas: Caching of index metadata, Concurrent update mechanisms, and Optimized spatial predicate selectivity and cost functions. These optimizations enable more efficient use of: CPU, Memory, and Partitioning Resulting in substantial query performance improvements.UsageTo accelerate the performance of spatial operators, it is recommended that you set the SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION database system parameter to the value TRUE. (This parameter is authorized for use only by licensed Oracle Spatial users, and its default value is FALSE.) You can set this parameter for the whole system or for a single session. To set the value for the whole system, do either of the following:Enter the following statement from a suitably privileged account:   ALTER SYSTEM SET SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE;Add the following to the database initialization file (xxxinit.ora):   SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE;To set the value for the current session, enter the following statement from a suitably privileged account:   ALTER SESSION SET SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE; Checkout the complete list of new features on Oracle.com @ http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/spatialandgraph/overview/index.html Spatial and Graph Data Sheet (PDF) Spatial and Graph White Paper (PDF)

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• Plan Caching and Query Memory Part I – When not to use stored procedure or other plan caching mechanisms like sp_executesql or prepared statement

  - by sqlworkshops

    The most common performance mistake SQL Server developers make: SQL Server estimates memory requirement for queries at compilation time. This mechanism is fine for dynamic queries that need memory, but not for queries that cache the plan. With dynamic queries the plan is not reused for different set of parameters values / predicates and hence different amount of memory can be estimated based on different set of parameter values / predicates. Common memory allocating queries are that perform Sort and do Hash Match operations like Hash Join or Hash Aggregation or Hash Union. This article covers Sort with examples. It is recommended to read Plan Caching and Query Memory Part II after this article which covers Hash Match operations.   When the plan is cached by using stored procedure or other plan caching mechanisms like sp_executesql or prepared statement, SQL Server estimates memory requirement based on first set of execution parameters. Later when the same stored procedure is called with different set of parameter values, the same amount of memory is used to execute the stored procedure. This might lead to underestimation / overestimation of memory on plan reuse, overestimation of memory might not be a noticeable issue for Sort operations, but underestimation of memory will lead to spill over tempdb resulting in poor performance.   This article covers underestimation / overestimation of memory for Sort. Plan Caching and Query Memory Part II covers underestimation / overestimation for Hash Match operation. It is important to note that underestimation of memory for Sort and Hash Match operations lead to spill over tempdb and hence negatively impact performance. Overestimation of memory affects the memory needs of other concurrently executing queries. In addition, it is important to note, with Hash Match operations, overestimation of memory can actually lead to poor performance.   To read additional articles I wrote click here.   In most cases it is cheaper to pay for the compilation cost of dynamic queries than huge cost for spill over tempdb, unless memory requirement for a stored procedure does not change significantly based on predicates.   The best way to learn is to practice. To create the below tables and reproduce the behavior, join the mailing list by using this link: www.sqlworkshops.com/ml and I will send you the table creation script. Most of these concepts are also covered in our webcasts: www.sqlworkshops.com/webcasts   Enough theory, let’s see an example where we sort initially 1 month of data and then use the stored procedure to sort 6 months of data.   Let’s create a stored procedure that sorts customers by name within certain date range.   --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com create proc CustomersByCreationDate @CreationDateFrom datetime, @CreationDateTo datetime as begin       declare @CustomerID int, @CustomerName varchar(48), @CreationDate datetime       select @CustomerName = c.CustomerName, @CreationDate = c.CreationDate from Customers c             where c.CreationDate between @CreationDateFrom and @CreationDateTo             order by c.CustomerName       option (maxdop 1)       end go Let’s execute the stored procedure initially with 1 month date range.   set statistics time on go --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-01-31' go The stored procedure took 48 ms to complete.     The stored procedure was granted 6656 KB based on 43199.9 rows being estimated.       The estimated number of rows, 43199.9 is similar to actual number of rows 43200 and hence the memory estimation should be ok.       There was no Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler.      Now let’s execute the stored procedure with 6 month date range. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-06-30' go The stored procedure took 679 ms to complete.      The stored procedure was granted 6656 KB based on 43199.9 rows being estimated.      The estimated number of rows, 43199.9 is way different from the actual number of rows 259200 because the estimation is based on the first set of parameter value supplied to the stored procedure which is 1 month in our case. This underestimation will lead to sort spill over tempdb, resulting in poor performance.      There was Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler.    To monitor the amount of data written and read from tempdb, one can execute select num_of_bytes_written, num_of_bytes_read from sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(2, NULL) before and after the stored procedure execution, for additional information refer to the webcast: www.sqlworkshops.com/webcasts.     Let’s recompile the stored procedure and then let’s first execute the stored procedure with 6 month date range.  In a production instance it is not advisable to use sp_recompile instead one should use DBCC FREEPROCCACHE (plan_handle). This is due to locking issues involved with sp_recompile, refer to our webcasts for further details.   exec sp_recompile CustomersByCreationDate go --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-06-30' go Now the stored procedure took only 294 ms instead of 679 ms.    The stored procedure was granted 26832 KB of memory.      The estimated number of rows, 259200 is similar to actual number of rows of 259200. Better performance of this stored procedure is due to better estimation of memory and avoiding sort spill over tempdb.      There was no Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler.       Now let’s execute the stored procedure with 1 month date range.   --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-01-31' go The stored procedure took 49 ms to complete, similar to our very first stored procedure execution.     This stored procedure was granted more memory (26832 KB) than necessary memory (6656 KB) based on 6 months of data estimation (259200 rows) instead of 1 month of data estimation (43199.9 rows). This is because the estimation is based on the first set of parameter value supplied to the stored procedure which is 6 months in this case. This overestimation did not affect performance, but it might affect performance of other concurrent queries requiring memory and hence overestimation is not recommended. This overestimation might affect performance Hash Match operations, refer to article Plan Caching and Query Memory Part II for further details.    Let’s recompile the stored procedure and then let’s first execute the stored procedure with 2 day date range. exec sp_recompile CustomersByCreationDate go --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-01-02' go The stored procedure took 1 ms.      The stored procedure was granted 1024 KB based on 1440 rows being estimated.      There was no Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler.      Now let’s execute the stored procedure with 6 month date range. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-06-30' go   The stored procedure took 955 ms to complete, way higher than 679 ms or 294ms we noticed before.      The stored procedure was granted 1024 KB based on 1440 rows being estimated. But we noticed in the past this stored procedure with 6 month date range needed 26832 KB of memory to execute optimally without spill over tempdb. This is clear underestimation of memory and the reason for the very poor performance.      There was Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler. Unlike before this was a Multiple pass sort instead of Single pass sort. This occurs when granted memory is too low.      Intermediate Summary: This issue can be avoided by not caching the plan for memory allocating queries. Other possibility is to use recompile hint or optimize for hint to allocate memory for predefined date range.   Let’s recreate the stored procedure with recompile hint. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com drop proc CustomersByCreationDate go create proc CustomersByCreationDate @CreationDateFrom datetime, @CreationDateTo datetime as begin       declare @CustomerID int, @CustomerName varchar(48), @CreationDate datetime       select @CustomerName = c.CustomerName, @CreationDate = c.CreationDate from Customers c             where c.CreationDate between @CreationDateFrom and @CreationDateTo             order by c.CustomerName       option (maxdop 1, recompile)       end go Let’s execute the stored procedure initially with 1 month date range and then with 6 month date range. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-01-30' exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-06-30' go The stored procedure took 48ms and 291 ms in line with previous optimal execution times.      The stored procedure with 1 month date range has good estimation like before.      The stored procedure with 6 month date range also has good estimation and memory grant like before because the query was recompiled with current set of parameter values.      The compilation time and compilation CPU of 1 ms is not expensive in this case compared to the performance benefit.     Let’s recreate the stored procedure with optimize for hint of 6 month date range.   --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com drop proc CustomersByCreationDate go create proc CustomersByCreationDate @CreationDateFrom datetime, @CreationDateTo datetime as begin       declare @CustomerID int, @CustomerName varchar(48), @CreationDate datetime       select @CustomerName = c.CustomerName, @CreationDate = c.CreationDate from Customers c             where c.CreationDate between @CreationDateFrom and @CreationDateTo             order by c.CustomerName       option (maxdop 1, optimize for (@CreationDateFrom = '2001-01-01', @CreationDateTo ='2001-06-30'))       end go Let’s execute the stored procedure initially with 1 month date range and then with 6 month date range.   --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-01-30' exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-06-30' go The stored procedure took 48ms and 291 ms in line with previous optimal execution times.    The stored procedure with 1 month date range has overestimation of rows and memory. This is because we provided hint to optimize for 6 months of data.      The stored procedure with 6 month date range has good estimation and memory grant because we provided hint to optimize for 6 months of data.       Let’s execute the stored procedure with 12 month date range using the currently cashed plan for 6 month date range. --Example provided by www.sqlworkshops.com exec CustomersByCreationDate '2001-01-01', '2001-12-31' go The stored procedure took 1138 ms to complete.      2592000 rows were estimated based on optimize for hint value for 6 month date range. Actual number of rows is 524160 due to 12 month date range.      The stored procedure was granted enough memory to sort 6 month date range and not 12 month date range, so there will be spill over tempdb.      There was Sort Warnings in SQL Profiler.      As we see above, optimize for hint cannot guarantee enough memory and optimal performance compared to recompile hint.   This article covers underestimation / overestimation of memory for Sort. Plan Caching and Query Memory Part II covers underestimation / overestimation for Hash Match operation. It is important to note that underestimation of memory for Sort and Hash Match operations lead to spill over tempdb and hence negatively impact performance. Overestimation of memory affects the memory needs of other concurrently executing queries. In addition, it is important to note, with Hash Match operations, overestimation of memory can actually lead to poor performance.   Summary: Cached plan might lead to underestimation or overestimation of memory because the memory is estimated based on first set of execution parameters. It is recommended not to cache the plan if the amount of memory required to execute the stored procedure has a wide range of possibilities. One can mitigate this by using recompile hint, but that will lead to compilation overhead. However, in most cases it might be ok to pay for compilation rather than spilling sort over tempdb which could be very expensive compared to compilation cost. The other possibility is to use optimize for hint, but in case one sorts more data than hinted by optimize for hint, this will still lead to spill. On the other side there is also the possibility of overestimation leading to unnecessary memory issues for other concurrently executing queries. In case of Hash Match operations, this overestimation of memory might lead to poor performance. When the values used in optimize for hint are archived from the database, the estimation will be wrong leading to worst performance, so one has to exercise caution before using optimize for hint, recompile hint is better in this case. I explain these concepts with detailed examples in my webcasts (www.sqlworkshops.com/webcasts), I recommend you to watch them. The best way to learn is to practice. To create the above tables and reproduce the behavior, join the mailing list at www.sqlworkshops.com/ml and I will send you the relevant SQL Scripts.     Register for the upcoming 3 Day Level 400 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005 Performance Monitoring & Tuning Hands-on Workshop in London, United Kingdom during March 15-17, 2011, click here to register / Microsoft UK TechNet.These are hands-on workshops with a maximum of 12 participants and not lectures. For consulting engagements click here.     Disclaimer and copyright information:This article refers to organizations and products that may be the trademarks or registered trademarks of their various owners. Copyright of this article belongs to R Meyyappan / www.sqlworkshops.com. You may freely use the ideas and concepts discussed in this article with acknowledgement (www.sqlworkshops.com), but you may not claim any of it as your own work. This article is for informational purposes only; you use any of the suggestions given here entirely at your own risk.   R Meyyappan [email protected] LinkedIn: http://at.linkedin.com/in/rmeyyappan

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• Meet our 2009 Oracle Graduates in South Africa

  - by anca.rosu

  Focusing on the broader Oracle community, Oracle South Africa initiated its first skills development programme in May 1988. Since its inception the programme has developed and improved and every year more graduates are taken on board. The Oracle Graduate Programme is made up of specific learning paths designed around customer, partner and Oracle specifications and is structured to meet the urgent skills requirements in the Oracle “economy”. The training programmes have a specific duration and incorporate both theoretical and practical application of Oracle product sets. It is aimed at creating: Meaningful employment for graduates; Learning opportunities for individuals within the organization so that career growth opportunities are exploited to the fullest; Capacity building for small enterprises which is aligned to Oracle’s Enterprise Development Programme Meet our five graduates who joined us in December 2008 and have spent over a year with us! Let’s get their initial feedback on the graduate programme and on their assignment to Jordan. Lector   On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “The Oracle Graduate Programme is an experience of a life time. I would not trade it for anything. It’s challenging and rewarding. I am proud and happy to be in an organization like Oracle” On the assignment in Jordan: "Friendly, welcoming people, world class instructors always willing to go the extra mile. What more can you ask for?"   Lungile On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “I joined Oracle as part of the graduate intake for pre-sales in order to develop my skills and knowledge. Working at Oracle has been an overwhelmingly positive experience as it has encouraged me to progress with my personal development. I am hugely grateful. It has been a great challenge and an awesome opportunity.” On the assignment to Jordan: “Going to Jordan was a great opportunity and the experience of a lifetime. The people were very welcoming and friendly. The culture was totally different from ours - the food, the clothes and the weather. It was an amazingly different experience to work from Sunday to Thursday with Friday and Saturday as the weekend.” Thabo On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “Life is an infinite learning path. I truly value growth. I believe for one to grow, one needs to be challenged to your full potential. The Oracle Graduate Programme offers real growth – and so much more.” On the assignment to Jordan: “I was amazed by the cultural differences. I now understood that to be part of the global community, I must embrace our similarities and understand our differences.”   Albeauty On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “Responsibility, dedication, focus and taking initiative … these are the key points I learned from Oracle. It is such an honour to finally be part of the Oracle family. The graduate programme itself was a great experience as I managed to learn how Oracle operates – it has been the highlight of my year. I believe that my hard work will assist in the growth of the company.” On the Jordan assignment: “A memory worth embracing. Going to Jordan was a great opportunity as I learned a lot with respect to integration between different cultures and getting to adapt to all things different. I, along with almost every other graduate, discovered that Oracle is far more than a database company. Now I know there is far more to the ‘Big Red’ name.” Emmanuel On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “The programme gave me invaluable exposure to the ICT sector and also provided an opportunity to travel, network and exchange ideas with others. The formal training helped me to improve my presentation skills and gave me a better understanding of business etiquette and communication.” On the assignment to Jordan: “It was my first trip abroad. It was a great chance to get to know each other. I had the opportunity to share ideas, share personal stuff as a team. We met experts who gave us superb training in Oracle Technologies. It was great.”   If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com.   Technorati Tags: Oracle community,South Africa,Graduate Programme,Jordan,Technologies

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• Create Orchard Module in a Separate Project

  - by Steve Michelotti

  The Orchard Project is a new OOS Microsoft project that is being developed up on CodePlex. From the Orchard home page on CodePlex, it states “Orchard project is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through modules and themes.” The Orchard Project site contains additional information including documentation and walkthroughs. The ability to create a composite solution based on a collection of modules is a compelling feature. In Orchard, these modules can just be created as simple MVC Areas or they can also be created inside of stand-alone web application projects.  The walkthrough for writing an Orchard module that is available on the Orchard site uses a simple Area that is created inside of the host application. It is based on the Orchard MIX presentation. This walkthrough does an effective job introducing various Orchard concepts such as hooking into the navigation system, theme/layout system, content types, and more.  However, creating an Orchard module in a separate project does not seem to be concisely documented anywhere. Orchard ships with several module OOTB that are in separate assemblies – but again, it’s not well documented how to get started building one from scratch. The following are the steps I took to successfully get an Orchard module in a separate project up and running. Step 1 – Download the OrchardIIS.zip file from the Orchard Release page. Unzip and open up the solution. Step 2 – Add your project to the solution. I named my project “Orchard.Widget” and used and “MVC 2 Empty Web Application” project type. Make sure you put the physical path inside the “Modules” sub-folder to the main project like this: At this point the solution should look like: Step 3 – Add assembly references to Orchard.dll and Orchard.Core.dll. Step 4 – Add a controller and view.  I’ll just create a Hello World controller and view. Notice I created the view as a partial view (*.ascx). Also add the [Themed] attribute to the top of the HomeController class just like the normal Orchard walk through shows it. Step 5 – Add Module.txt to the project root. The is a very important step. Orchard will not recognize your module without this text file present.  It can contain just the name of your module: name: Widget Step 6 – Add Routes.cs. Notice I’ve given an area name of “Orchard.Widget” on lines 26 and 33. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Web.Mvc; 4: using System.Web.Routing; 5: using Orchard.Mvc.Routes; 6:   7: namespace Orchard.Widget 8: { 9: public class Routes : IRouteProvider 10: { 11: public void GetRoutes(ICollection<RouteDescriptor> routes) 12: { 13: foreach (var routeDescriptor in GetRoutes()) 14: { 15: routes.Add(routeDescriptor); 16: } 17: } 18:   19: public IEnumerable<RouteDescriptor> GetRoutes() 20: { 21: return new[] { 22: new RouteDescriptor { 23: Route = new Route( 24: "Widget/{controller}/{action}/{id}", 25: new RouteValueDictionary { 26: {"area", "Orchard.Widget"}, 27: {"controller", "Home"}, 28: {"action", "Index"}, 29: {"id", ""} 30: }, 31: new RouteValueDictionary(), 32: new RouteValueDictionary { 33: {"area", "Orchard.Widget"} 34: }, 35: new MvcRouteHandler()) 36: } 37: }; 38: } 39: } 40: } Step 7 – Add MainMenu.cs. This will make sure that an item appears in the main menu called “Widget” which points to the module. 1: using System; 2: using Orchard.UI.Navigation; 3:   4: namespace Orchard.Widget 5: { 6: public class MainMenu : INavigationProvider 7: { 8: public void GetNavigation(NavigationBuilder builder) 9: { 10: builder.Add(menu => menu.Add("Widget", item => item.Action("Index", "Home", new 11: { 12: area = "Orchard.Widget" 13: }))); 14: } 15:   16: public string MenuName 17: { 18: get { return "main"; } 19: } 20: } 21: } Step 8 – Clean up web.config. By default Visual Studio adds numerous sections to the web.config. The sections that can be removed are: appSettings, connectionStrings, authentication, membership, profile, and roleManager. Step 9 – Delete Global.asax. This project will ultimately be running from inside the Orchard host so this “sub-site” should not have its own Global.asax.   Now you’re ready the run the app.  When you first run it, the “Widget” menu item will appear in the main menu because of the MainMenu.cs file we added: We can then click the “Widget” link in the main menu to send us over to our view:   Packaging From start to finish, it’s a relatively painless experience but it could be better. For example, a Visual Studio project template that encapsulates aspects from this blog post would definitely make it a lot easier to get up and running with creating an Orchard module.  Another aspect I found interesting is that if you read the first paragraph of the walkthrough, it says, “You can also develop modules as separate projects, to be packaged and shared with other users of Orchard CMS (the packaging story is still to be defined, along with marketplaces for sharing modules).” In particular, I will be extremely curious to see how the “packaging story” evolves. The first thing that comes to mind for me is: what if we explored MvcContrib Portable Areas as a potential mechanism for this packaging? This would certainly make things easy since all artifacts (aspx, aspx, images, css, javascript) are all wrapped up into a single assembly. Granted, Orchard does have its own infrastructure for layouts and themes but it seems like integrating portable areas into this pipeline would not be a difficult undertaking. Maybe that’ll be the next research task. :)

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• Killing Stuck Child JVM's

  - by ACShorten

  Note: This facility only applies to Oracle Utilities Application Framework products using COBOL. In some situations, the Child JVM's may spin. This causes multiple startup/shutdown Child JVM messages to be displayed and recursive child JVM's to be initiated and shunned. If the following: Unable to establish connection on port …. after waiting .. seconds.The issue can be caused intermittently by CPU spins in connection to the creation of new processes, specifically Child JVMs. Recursive (or double) invocation of the System.exit call in the remote JVM may be caused by a Process.destroy call that the parent JVM always issues when shunning a JVM. The issue may happen when the thread in the parent JVM that is responsible for the recycling gets stuck and it affects all child JVMs. If this issue occurs at your site then there are a number of options to address the issue: Configure an Operating System level kill command to force the Child JVM to be shunned when it becomes stuck. Configure a Process.destroy command to be used if the kill command is not configured or desired. Specify a time tolerance to detect stuck threads before issuing the Process.destroy or kill commands. Note: This facility is also used when the Parent JVM is also shutdown to ensure no zombie Child JVM's exit. The following additional settings must be added to the spl.properties for the Business Application Server to use this facility: spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command – Specify the command to kill the Child JVM process. This can be a command or specify a script to execute to provide additional information. The kill.command property can accept two arguments, {pid} and {jvmNumber}, in the specified string. The arguments must be enclosed in curly braces as shown here. Note: The PID will be appended to the killcmd string, unless the {pid} and {jvmNumber} arguments are specified. The jvmNumber can be useful if passed to a script for logging purposes. Note: If a script is used it must be in the path and be executable by the OS user running the system. spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy.enabled – Specify whether to use the Process.destroy command instead of the kill command. Specify true or false. Default value is false. Note: Unless otherwise required, it is recommended to use the kill command option if shunning JVM's is an issue. There this value can remain its default value, false, unless otherwise required. spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.delaysecs – Specify the number of seconds to wait for the Child JVM to terminate naturally before issuing the Process.destroy or kill commands. Default is 10 seconds. For example: spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command=kill -9 {pid} {jvmNumber}spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy.enabled=falsespl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.delaysecs=10 When a Child JVM is to be recycled, these properties are inspected and the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command, executed if provided. This is done after waiting for spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.delaysecs seconds to give the JVM time to shut itself down. The spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy.enabled property must be set to true AND the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command omitted for the original Process.destroy command to be used on the process. Note: By default the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy enabled is set to false and is therefore disabled. If neither spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command nor spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy.enabled is specified, child JVMs will not beforcibly killed. They will be left to shut themselves down (which may lead to orphan JVMs). If both are specified, the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command is preferred and spl.runtime.cobol.remote.destroy.enabled defaulted to false.It is recommended to invoke a script to issue the direct kill command instead of directly using the kill -9 commands.For example, the following sample script ensures that the process Id is an active cobjrun process before issuing the kill command: forcequit.sh #!/bin/shTHETIME=`date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"`if [ "$1" = "" ]then  echo "$THETIME: Process Id is required" >>$SPLSYSTEMLOGS/forcequit.log  exit 1fijavaexec=cobjrunps e $1 | grep -c $javaexecif [ $? = 0 ]then  echo "$THETIME: Process $1 is an active $javaexec process -- issuing kill-9 $1" >>$SPLSYSTEMLOGS/forcequit.log  kill -9 $1exit 0else  echo "$THETIME: Process id $1 is not a $javaexec process or not active --  kill will not be issued" >>$SPLSYSTEMLOGS/forcequit.logexit 1fi This script's name would then be specified as the value for the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command property, for example: spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command=forcequit.sh The forcequit script does not have any explicit parameters but pid is passed automatically. To use the jvmNumber parameter it must explicitly specified in the command. For example, to call script forcequit.sh and pass it the pid and the child JVM number, specify it as follows: spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command=forcequit.sh {pid} {jvmNumber} The script can then use the JVM number for logging purposes or to further ensure that the correct pid is being killed.If the arguments are omitted, the pid is automatically appended to the spl.runtime.cobol.remote.kill.command string. To use this facility the following patches must be installed: Patch 13719584 for Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1, Patches 13684595 and 13634933 for Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.2 Group Fix 4 (as Patch 13640668) for Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.1.

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• FairScheduling Conventions in Hadoop

  - by dan.mcclary

  While scheduling and resource allocation control has been present in Hadoop since 0.20, a lot of people haven't discovered or utilized it in their initial investigations of the Hadoop ecosystem. We could chalk this up to many things: Organizations are still determining what their dataflow and analysis workloads will comprise Small deployments under tests aren't likely to show the signs of strains that would send someone looking for resource allocation options The default scheduling options -- the FairScheduler and the CapacityScheduler -- are not placed in the most prominent position within the Hadoop documentation. However, for production deployments, it's wise to start with at least the foundations of scheduling in place so that you can tune the cluster as workloads emerge. To do that, we have to ask ourselves something about what the off-the-rack scheduling options are. We have some choices: The FairScheduler, which will work to ensure resource allocations are enforced on a per-job basis. The CapacityScheduler, which will ensure resource allocations are enforced on a per-queue basis. Writing your own implementation of the abstract class org.apache.hadoop.mapred.job.TaskScheduler is an option, but usually overkill. If you're going to have several concurrent users and leverage the more interactive aspects of the Hadoop environment (e.g. Pig and Hive scripting), the FairScheduler is definitely the way to go. In particular, we can do user-specific pools so that default users get their fair share, and specific users are given the resources their workloads require. To enable fair scheduling, we're going to need to do a couple of things. First, we need to tell the JobTracker that we want to use scheduling and where we're going to be defining our allocations. We do this by adding the following to the mapred-site.xml file in HADOOP_HOME/conf: <property> <name>mapred.jobtracker.taskScheduler</name> <value>org.apache.hadoop.mapred.FairScheduler</value> </property> <property> <name>mapred.fairscheduler.allocation.file</name> <value>/path/to/allocations.xml</value> </property> <property> <name>mapred.fairscheduler.poolnameproperty</name> <value>pool.name</value> </property> <property> <name>pool.name</name> <value>${user.name}</name> </property> What we've done here is simply tell the JobTracker that we'd like to task scheduling to use the FairScheduler class rather than a single FIFO queue. Moreover, we're going to be defining our resource pools and allocations in a file called allocations.xml For reference, the allocation file is read every 15s or so, which allows for tuning allocations without having to take down the JobTracker. Our allocation file is now going to look a little like this <?xml version="1.0"?> <allocations> <pool name="dan"> <minMaps>5</minMaps> <minReduces>5</minReduces> <maxMaps>25</maxMaps> <maxReduces>25</maxReduces> <minSharePreemptionTimeout>300</minSharePreemptionTimeout> </pool> <mapreduce.job.user.name="dan"> <maxRunningJobs>6</maxRunningJobs> </user> <userMaxJobsDefault>3</userMaxJobsDefault> <fairSharePreemptionTimeout>600</fairSharePreemptionTimeout> </allocations> In this case, I've explicitly set my username to have upper and lower bounds on the maps and reduces, and allotted myself double the number of running jobs. Now, if I run hive or pig jobs from either the console or via the Hue web interface, I'll be treated "fairly" by the JobTracker. There's a lot more tweaking that can be done to the allocations file, so it's best to dig down into the description and start trying out allocations that might fit your workload.

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• Creating a Reverse Proxy with URL Rewrite for IIS

  - by OWScott

  There are times when you need to reverse proxy through a server. The most common example is when you have an internal web server that isn’t exposed to the internet, and you have a public web server accessible to the internet. If you want to serve up traffic from the internal web server, you can do this through the public web server by creating a tunnel (aka reverse proxy). Essentially, you can front the internal web server with a friendly URL, even hiding custom ports. For example, consider an internal web server with a URL of http://10.10.0.50:8111. You can make that available through a public URL like http://tools.mysite.com/ as seen in the following image. The URL can be made public or it can be used for your internal staff and have it password protected and/or locked down by IP address. This is easy to do with URL Rewrite and IIS. You will also need Application Request Routing (ARR) installed even though for a simple reverse proxy you won’t use most of ARR’s functionality. If you don’t already have URL Rewrite and ARR installed you can do so easily with the Web Platform Installer. A lot can be said about reverse proxies and many different situations and ways to route the traffic and handle different URL patterns. However, my goal here is to get you up and going in the easiest way possible. Then you can dig in deeper after you get the base configuration in place. URL Rewrite makes a reverse proxy very easy to set up. Note that the URL Rewrite Add Rules template doesn’t include Reverse Proxy at the server level. That’s not to say that you can’t create a server-level reverse proxy, but the URL Rewrite rules template doesn’t help you with that. Getting Started First you must create a website on your public web server that has the public bindings that you need. Alternately, you can use an existing site and route using conditions for certain traffic. After you’ve created your site then open up URL Rewrite at the site level. Using the “Add Rule(s)…” template that is opened from the right-hand actions pane, create a new Reverse Proxy rule. If you receive a prompt (the first time) that the proxy functionality needs to be enabled, select OK. This is telling you that a proxy can route traffic outside of your web server, which happens to be our goal in this case. Be aware that reverse proxy rules can be dangerous if you open sites from inside you network to the world, so just be aware of what you’re doing and why. The next and final step of the template asks a few questions. The first textbox asks the name of the internal web server. In our example, it’s 10.10.0.50:8111. This can be any URL, including a subfolder like internal.mysite.com/blog. Don’t include the http or https here. The template assumes that it’s not entered. You can choose whether to perform SSL Offloading or not. If you leave this checked then all requests to the internal server will be over HTTP regardless of the original web request. This can help with performance and SSL bindings if all requests are within a trusted network. If the network path between the two web servers is not completely trusted and safe then uncheck this. Next, the template enables you to create an outbound rule. This is used to rewrite links in the page to look like your public domain name rather than the internal domain name. Outbound rules have a lot of CPU overhead because the entire web content needs to be parsed and updated. However, if you need it, then it’s well worth the extra CPU hit on the web server. If you check the “Rewrite the domain names of the links in HTTP responses” checkbox then the From textbox will be filled in with what you entered for the inbound rule. You can enter your friendly public URL for the outbound rule. This will essentially replace any reference to 10.10.0.50:8111 (or whatever you enter) with tools.mysite.com in all <a>, <form>, and <img> tags on your site. That’s it! Well, there is a lot more that you can do, this but will give you the base configuration. You can now visit www.mysite.com on your public web server and it will serve up the site from your internal web server. You should see two rules show up; one inbound and one outbound. You can edit these, add conditions, and tweak them further as needed. One common issue that can occur without outbound rules has to do with compression. If you run into errors with the new proxied site, try turning off compression to confirm if that’s the issue. Here’s a link with details on how to deal with compression and outbound rules. I hope this was helpful to get started and to see how easy it is to create a simple reverse proxy using URL Rewrite for IIS.

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• Querying Visual Studio project files using T-SQL and Powershell

  - by jamiet

  Earlier today I had a need to get some information out of a Visual Studio project file and in this blog post I’m going to share a couple of ways of going about that because I’m pretty sure I won’t be the only person that ever wants to do this. The specific problem I was trying to solve was finding out how many objects in my database project (i.e. in my .dbproj file) had any warnings suppressed but the techniques discussed below will work pretty well for any Visual Studio project file because every such file is simply an XML document, hence it can be queried by anything that can query XML documents. Ever heard the phrase “when all you’ve got is hammer everything looks like a nail”? Well that’s me with querying stuff – if I can write SQL then I’m writing SQL. Here’s a little noddy database project I put together for demo purposes: Two views and a stored procedure, nothing fancy. I suppressed warnings for [View1] & [Procedure1] and hence the pertinent part my project file looks like this:   <ItemGroup>    <Build Include="Schema Objects\Schemas\dbo\Views\View1.view.sql">      <SubType>Code</SubType>      <SuppressWarnings>4151,3276</SuppressWarnings>    </Build>    <Build Include="Schema Objects\Schemas\dbo\Views\View2.view.sql">      <SubType>Code</SubType>    </Build>    <Build Include="Schema Objects\Schemas\dbo\Programmability\Stored Procedures\Procedure1.proc.sql">      <SubType>Code</SubType>      <SuppressWarnings>4151</SuppressWarnings>    </Build>  </ItemGroup>  <ItemGroup> Note the <SuppressWarnings> elements – those are the bits of information that I am after. With a lot of help from folks on the SQL Server XML forum  I came up with the following query that nailed what I was after. It reads the contents of the .dbproj file into a variable of type XML and then shreds it using T-SQL’s XML data type methods: DECLARE @xml XML; SELECT @xml = CAST(pkgblob.BulkColumn AS XML) FROM   OPENROWSET(BULK 'C:\temp\QueryingProjectFileDemo\QueryingProjectFileDemo.dbproj' -- <-Change this path!                    ,single_blob) AS pkgblob                    ;WITH XMLNAMESPACES( 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003' AS ns) SELECT  REVERSE(SUBSTRING(REVERSE(ObjectPath),0,CHARINDEX('\',REVERSE(ObjectPath)))) AS [ObjectName]        ,[SuppressedWarnings] FROM   (        SELECT  build.query('.') AS [_node]        ,       build.value('ns:SuppressWarnings[1]','nvarchar(100)') AS [SuppressedWarnings]        ,       build.value('@Include','nvarchar(1000)') AS [ObjectPath]        FROM    @xml.nodes('//ns:Build[ns:SuppressWarnings]') AS R(build)        )q And here’s the output: And that’s it – an easy way of discovering which warnings have been suppressed and for which objects in your database projects. I won’t bother going over the code as it is fairly self-explanatory – peruse it at your leisure.   Once I had the SQL above I figured I’d share it around a little in case it was ever useful to anyone else; hence I’m writing this blog post and I also posted it on the Visual Studio Database Development Tools forum at FYI: Discover which objects have had warnings suppressed. Luckily Kevin Goode saw the thread and he posted a different solution to the same problem, one that uses Powershell. The advantage of Kevin’s Powershell approach is that it is easy to analyse many .dbproj files at the same time. Below is Kevin’s code which I have tweaked ever so slightly so that it produces the same results as my SQL script (I just want any object that had had a warning suppressed whereas Kevin was querying specifically for warning 4151):   cd 'C:\Temp\QueryingProjectFileDemo\' cls $projects = ls -r -i *.dbproj Foreach($project in $projects) { $xml = new-object System.Xml.XmlDocument $xml.set_PreserveWhiteSpace( $true ) $xml.Load($project) #$xpath = @{Start="/e:Project/e:ItemGroup/e:Build[e:SuppressWarnings=4151]/@Include"} #$xpath = @{Start="/e:Project/e:ItemGroup/e:Build[contains(e:SuppressWarnings,'4151')]/@Include"} $xpath = @{Start="/e:Project/e:ItemGroup/e:Build[e:SuppressWarnings]/@Include"} $ns = @{ e = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003" } $xml | Select-Xml -XPath $xpath.Start -Namespace $ns |Select -Expand Node | Select -expand Value } and here’s the output: Nice reusable Powershell and SQL scripts – not bad for an evening’s work. Thank you to Kevin for allowing me to share his code. Don’t forget that these techniques can easily be adapted to query any Visual Studio project file, they’re only XML documents after all! Doubtless many people out there already have code for doing this but nonetheless here is another offering to the great script library in the sky. Have fun! @Jamiet

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• Maintaining packages with code - Adding a property expression programmatically

  Every now and then I've come across scenarios where I need to update a lot of packages all in the same way. The usual scenario revolves around a group of packages all having been built off the same package template, and something needs to updated to keep up with new requirements, a new logging standard for example.You'd probably start by updating your template package, but then you need to address all your existing packages. Often this can run into the hundreds of packages and clearly that's not a job anyone wants to do by hand. I normally solve the problem by writing a simple console application that looks for files and patches any package it finds, and it is an example of this I'd thought I'd tidy up a bit and publish here. This sample will look at the package and find any top level Execute SQL Tasks, and change the SQL Statement property to use an expression. It is very simplistic working on top level tasks only, so nothing inside a Sequence Container or Loop will be checked but obviously the code could be extended for this if required. The code that actually sets the expression is shown below, the rest is just wrapper code to find the package and to find the task. /// <summary> /// The CreationName of the Tasks to target, e.g. Execute SQL Task /// </summary> private const string TargetTaskCreationName = "Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Tasks.ExecuteSQLTask.ExecuteSQLTask, Microsoft.SqlServer.SQLTask, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91"; /// <summary> /// The name of the task property to target. /// </summary> private const string TargetPropertyName = "SqlStatementSource"; /// <summary> /// The property expression to set. /// </summary> private const string ExpressionToSet = "@[User::SQLQueryVariable]"; .... // Check if the task matches our target task type if (taskHost.CreationName == TargetTaskCreationName) { // Check for the target property if (taskHost.Properties.Contains(TargetPropertyName)) { // Get the property, check for an expression and set expression if not found DtsProperty property = taskHost.Properties[TargetPropertyName]; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(property.GetExpression(taskHost))) { property.SetExpression(taskHost, ExpressionToSet); changeCount++; } } } This is a console application, so to specify which packages you want to target you have three options: Find all packages in the current folder, the default behaviour if no arguments are specified TaskExpressionPatcher.exe .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Find all packages in a specified folder, pass the folder as the argument TaskExpressionPatcher.exe C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\ .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Find a specific package, pass the file path as the argument TaskExpressionPatcher.exe C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\Package.dtsx The code was written against SQL Server 2005, but just change the reference to Microsoft.SQLServer.ManagedDTS to be the SQL Server 2008 version and it will work fine. If you get an error Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.DtsRuntimeException: The package failed to load due to error 0xC0011008… then check that the package is from the correct version of SSIS compared to the referenced assemblies, 2005 vs 2008 in other words. Download Sample Project TaskExpressionPatcher.zip (6 KB)

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• Much Ado About Nothing: Stub Objects

  - by user9154181

  The Solaris 11 link-editor (ld) contains support for a new type of object that we call a stub object. A stub object is a shared object, built entirely from mapfiles, that supplies the same linking interface as the real object, while containing no code or data. Stub objects cannot be executed — the runtime linker will kill any process that attempts to load one. However, you can link to a stub object as a dependency, allowing the stub to act as a proxy for the real version of the object. You may well wonder if there is a point to producing an object that contains nothing but linking interface. As it turns out, stub objects are very useful for building large bodies of code such as Solaris. In the last year, we've had considerable success in applying them to one of our oldest and thorniest build problems. In this discussion, I will describe how we came to invent these objects, and how we apply them to building Solaris. This posting explains where the idea for stub objects came from, and details our long and twisty journey from hallway idea to standard link-editor feature. I expect that these details are mainly of interest to those who work on Solaris and its makefiles, those who have done so in the past, and those who work with other similar bodies of code. A subsequent posting will omit the history and background details, and instead discuss how to build and use stub objects. If you are mainly interested in what stub objects are, and don't care about the underlying software war stories, I encourage you to skip ahead. The Long Road To Stubs This all started for me with an email discussion in May of 2008, regarding a change request that was filed in 2002, entitled: 4631488 lib/Makefile is too patient: .WAITs should be reduced This CR encapsulates a number of cronic issues with Solaris builds: We build Solaris with a parallel make (dmake) that tries to build as much of the code base in parallel as possible. There is a lot of code to build, and we've long made use of parallelized builds to get the job done quicker. This is even more important in today's world of massively multicore hardware. Solaris contains a large number of executables and shared objects. Executables depend on shared objects, and shared objects can depend on each other. Before you can build an object, you need to ensure that the objects it needs have been built. This implies a need for serialization, which is in direct opposition to the desire to build everying in parallel. To accurately build objects in the right order requires an accurate set of make rules defining the things that depend on each other. This sounds simple, but the reality is quite complex. In practice, having programmers explicitly specify these dependencies is a losing strategy: It's really hard to get right. It's really easy to get it wrong and never know it because things build anyway. Even if you get it right, it won't stay that way, because dependencies between objects can change over time, and make cannot help you detect such drifing. You won't know that you got it wrong until the builds break. That can be a long time after the change that triggered the breakage happened, making it hard to connect the cause and the effect. Usually this happens just before a release, when the pressure is on, its hard to think calmly, and there is no time for deep fixes. As a poor compromise, the libraries in core Solaris were built using a set of grossly incomplete hand written rules, supplemented with a number of dmake .WAIT directives used to group the libraries into sets of non-interacting groups that can be built in parallel because we think they don't depend on each other. From time to time, someone will suggest that we could analyze the built objects themselves to determine their dependencies and then generate make rules based on those relationships. This is possible, but but there are complications that limit the usefulness of that approach: To analyze an object, you have to build it first. This is a classic chicken and egg scenario. You could analyze the results of a previous build, but then you're not necessarily going to get accurate rules for the current code. It should be possible to build the code without having a built workspace available. The analysis will take time, and remember that we're constantly trying to make builds faster, not slower. By definition, such an approach will always be approximate, and therefore only incremantally more accurate than the hand written rules described above. The hand written rules are fast and cheap, while this idea is slow and complex, so we stayed with the hand written approach. Solaris was built that way, essentially forever, because these are genuinely difficult problems that had no easy answer. The makefiles were full of build races in which the right outcomes happened reliably for years until a new machine or a change in build server workload upset the accidental balance of things. After figuring out what had happened, you'd mutter "How did that ever work?", add another incomplete and soon to be inaccurate make dependency rule to the system, and move on. This was not a satisfying solution, as we tend to be perfectionists in the Solaris group, but we didn't have a better answer. It worked well enough, approximately. And so it went for years. We needed a different approach — a new idea to cut the Gordian Knot. In that discussion from May 2008, my fellow linker-alien Rod Evans had the initial spark that lead us to a game changing series of realizations: The link-editor is used to link objects together, but it only uses the ELF metadata in the object, consisting of symbol tables, ELF versioning sections, and similar data. Notably, it does not look at, or understand, the machine code that makes an object useful at runtime. If you had an object that only contained the ELF metadata for a dependency, but not the code or data, the link-editor would find it equally useful for linking, and would never know the difference. Call it a stub object. In the core Solaris OS, we require all objects to be built with a link-editor mapfile that describes all of its publically available functions and data. Could we build a stub object using the mapfile for the real object? It ought to be very fast to build stub objects, as there are no input objects to process. Unlike the real object, stub objects would not actually require any dependencies, and so, all of the stubs for the entire system could be built in parallel. When building the real objects, one could link against the stub objects instead of the real dependencies. This means that all the real objects can be built built in parallel too, without any serialization. We could replace a system that requires perfect makefile rules with a system that requires no ordering rules whatsoever. The results would be considerably more robust. We immediately realized that this idea had potential, but also that there were many details to sort out, lots of work to do, and that perhaps it wouldn't really pan out. As is often the case, it would be necessary to do the work and see how it turned out. Following that conversation, I set about trying to build a stub object. We determined that a faithful stub has to do the following: Present the same set of global symbols, with the same ELF versioning, as the real object. Functions are simple — it suffices to have a symbol of the right type, possibly, but not necessarily, referencing a null function in its text segment. Copy relocations make data more complicated to stub. The possibility of a copy relocation means that when you create a stub, the data symbols must have the actual size of the real data. Any error in this will go uncaught at link time, and will cause tragic failures at runtime that are very hard to diagnose. For reasons too obscure to go into here, involving tentative symbols, it is also important that the data reside in bss, or not, matching its placement in the real object. If the real object has more than one symbol pointing at the same data item, we call these aliased symbols. All data symbols in the stub object must exhibit the same aliasing as the real object. We imagined the stub library feature working as follows: A command line option to ld tells it to produce a stub rather than a real object. In this mode, only mapfiles are examined, and any object or shared libraries on the command line are are ignored. The extra information needed (function or data, size, and bss details) would be added to the mapfile. When building the real object instead of the stub, the extra information for building stubs would be validated against the resulting object to ensure that they match. In exploring these ideas, I immediately run headfirst into the reality of the original mapfile syntax, a subject that I would later write about as The Problem(s) With Solaris SVR4 Link-Editor Mapfiles. The idea of extending that poor language was a non-starter. Until a better mapfile syntax became available, which seemed unlikely in 2008, the solution could not involve extentions to the mapfile syntax. Instead, we cooked up the idea (hack) of augmenting mapfiles with stylized comments that would carry the necessary information. A typical definition might look like: # DATA(i386) __iob 0x3c0 # DATA(amd64,sparcv9) __iob 0xa00 # DATA(sparc) __iob 0x140 iob; A further problem then became clear: If we can't extend the mapfile syntax, then there's no good way to extend ld with an option to produce stub objects, and to validate them against the real objects. The idea of having ld read comments in a mapfile and parse them for content is an unacceptable hack. The entire point of comments is that they are strictly for the human reader, and explicitly ignored by the tool. Taking all of these speed bumps into account, I made a new plan: A perl script reads the mapfiles, generates some small C glue code to produce empty functions and data definitions, compiles and links the stub object from the generated glue code, and then deletes the generated glue code. Another perl script used after both objects have been built, to compare the real and stub objects, using data from elfdump, and validate that they present the same linking interface. By June 2008, I had written the above, and generated a stub object for libc. It was a useful prototype process to go through, and it allowed me to explore the ideas at a deep level. Ultimately though, the result was unsatisfactory as a basis for real product. There were so many issues: The use of stylized comments were fine for a prototype, but not close to professional enough for shipping product. The idea of having to document and support it was a large concern. The ideal solution for stub objects really does involve having the link-editor accept the same arguments used to build the real object, augmented with a single extra command line option. Any other solution, such as our prototype script, will require makefiles to be modified in deeper ways to support building stubs, and so, will raise barriers to converting existing code. A validation script that rederives what the linker knew when it built an object will always be at a disadvantage relative to the actual linker that did the work. A stub object should be identifyable as such. In the prototype, there was no tag or other metadata that would let you know that they weren't real objects. Being able to identify a stub object in this way means that the file command can tell you what it is, and that the runtime linker can refuse to try and run a program that loads one. At that point, we needed to apply this prototype to building Solaris. As you might imagine, the task of modifying all the makefiles in the core Solaris code base in order to do this is a massive task, and not something you'd enter into lightly. The quality of the prototype just wasn't good enough to justify that sort of time commitment, so I tabled the project, putting it on my list of long term things to think about, and moved on to other work. It would sit there for a couple of years. Semi-coincidentally, one of the projects I tacked after that was to create a new mapfile syntax for the Solaris link-editor. We had wanted to do something about the old mapfile syntax for many years. Others before me had done some paper designs, and a great deal of thought had already gone into the features it should, and should not have, but for various reasons things had never moved beyond the idea stage. When I joined Sun in late 2005, I got involved in reviewing those things and thinking about the problem. Now in 2008, fresh from relearning for the Nth time why the old mapfile syntax was a huge impediment to linker progress, it seemed like the right time to tackle the mapfile issue. Paving the way for proper stub object support was not the driving force behind that effort, but I certainly had them in mind as I moved forward. The new mapfile syntax, which we call version 2, integrated into Nevada build snv_135 in in February 2010: 6916788 ld version 2 mapfile syntax PSARC/2009/688 Human readable and extensible ld mapfile syntax In order to prove that the new mapfile syntax was adequate for general purpose use, I had also done an overhaul of the ON consolidation to convert all mapfiles to use the new syntax, and put checks in place that would ensure that no use of the old syntax would creep back in. That work went back into snv_144 in June 2010: 6916796 OSnet mapfiles should use version 2 link-editor syntax That was a big putback, modifying 517 files, adding 18 new files, and removing 110 old ones. I would have done this putback anyway, as the work was already done, and the benefits of human readable syntax are obvious. However, among the justifications listed in CR 6916796 was this We anticipate adding additional features to the new mapfile language that will be applicable to ON, and which will require all sharable object mapfiles to use the new syntax. I never explained what those additional features were, and no one asked. It was premature to say so, but this was a reference to stub objects. By that point, I had already put together a working prototype link-editor with the necessary support for stub objects. I was pleased to find that building stubs was indeed very fast. On my desktop system (Ultra 24), an amd64 stub for libc can can be built in a fraction of a second: % ptime ld -64 -z stub -o stubs/libc.so.1 -G -hlibc.so.1 \ -ztext -zdefs -Bdirect ... real 0.019708910 user 0.010101680 sys 0.008528431 In order to go from prototype to integrated link-editor feature, I knew that I would need to prove that stub objects were valuable. And to do that, I knew that I'd have to switch the Solaris ON consolidation to use stub objects and evaluate the outcome. And in order to do that experiment, ON would first need to be converted to version 2 mapfiles. Sub-mission accomplished. Normally when you design a new feature, you can devise reasonably small tests to show it works, and then deploy it incrementally, letting it prove its value as it goes. The entire point of stub objects however was to demonstrate that they could be successfully applied to an extremely large and complex code base, and specifically to solve the Solaris build issues detailed above. There was no way to finesse the matter — in order to move ahead, I would have to successfully use stub objects to build the entire ON consolidation and demonstrate their value. In software, the need to boil the ocean can often be a warning sign that things are trending in the wrong direction. Conversely, sometimes progress demands that you build something large and new all at once. A big win, or a big loss — sometimes all you can do is try it and see what happens. And so, I spent some time staring at ON makefiles trying to get a handle on how things work, and how they'd have to change. It's a big and messy world, full of complex interactions, unspecified dependencies, special cases, and knowledge of arcane makefile features... ...and so, I backed away, put it down for a few months and did other work... ...until the fall, when I felt like it was time to stop thinking and pondering (some would say stalling) and get on with it. Without stubs, the following gives a simplified high level view of how Solaris is built: An initially empty directory known as the proto, and referenced via the ROOT makefile macro is established to receive the files that make up the Solaris distribution. A top level setup rule creates the proto area, and performs operations needed to initialize the workspace so that the main build operations can be launched, such as copying needed header files into the proto area. Parallel builds are launched to build the kernel (usr/src/uts), libraries (usr/src/lib), and commands. The install makefile target builds each item and delivers a copy to the proto area. All libraries and executables link against the objects previously installed in the proto, implying the need to synchronize the order in which things are built. Subsequent passes run lint, and do packaging. Given this structure, the additions to use stub objects are: A new second proto area is established, known as the stub proto and referenced via the STUBROOT makefile macro. The stub proto has the same structure as the real proto, but is used to hold stub objects. All files in the real proto are delivered as part of the Solaris product. In contrast, the stub proto is used to build the product, and then thrown away. A new target is added to library Makefiles called stub. This rule builds the stub objects. The ld command is designed so that you can build a stub object using the same ld command line you'd use to build the real object, with the addition of a single -z stub option. This means that the makefile rules for building the stub objects are very similar to those used to build the real objects, and many existing makefile definitions can be shared between them. A new target is added to the Makefiles called stubinstall which delivers the stub objects built by the stub rule into the stub proto. These rules reuse much of existing plumbing used by the existing install rule. The setup rule runs stubinstall over the entire lib subtree as part of its initialization. All libraries and executables link against the objects in the stub proto rather than the main proto, and can therefore be built in parallel without any synchronization. There was no small way to try this that would yield meaningful results. I would have to take a leap of faith and edit approximately 1850 makefiles and 300 mapfiles first, trusting that it would all work out. Once the editing was done, I'd type make and see what happened. This took about 6 weeks to do, and there were many dark days when I'd question the entire project, or struggle to understand some of the many twisted and complex situations I'd uncover in the makefiles. I even found a couple of new issues that required changes to the new stub object related code I'd added to ld. With a substantial amount of encouragement and help from some key people in the Solaris group, I eventually got the editing done and stub objects for the entire workspace built. I found that my desktop system could build all the stub objects in the workspace in roughly a minute. This was great news, as it meant that use of the feature is effectively free — no one was likely to notice or care about the cost of building them. After another week of typing make, fixing whatever failed, and doing it again, I succeeded in getting a complete build! The next step was to remove all of the make rules and .WAIT statements dedicated to controlling the order in which libraries under usr/src/lib are built. This came together pretty quickly, and after a few more speed bumps, I had a workspace that built cleanly and looked like something you might actually be able to integrate someday. This was a significant milestone, but there was still much left to do. I turned to doing full nightly builds. Every type of build (open, closed, OpenSolaris, export, domestic) had to be tried. Each type failed in a new and unique way, requiring some thinking and rework. As things came together, I became aware of things that could have been done better, simpler, or cleaner, and those things also required some rethinking, the seeking of wisdom from others, and some rework. After another couple of weeks, it was in close to final form. My focus turned towards the end game and integration. This was a huge workspace, and needed to go back soon, before changes in the gate would made merging increasingly difficult. At this point, I knew that the stub objects had greatly simplified the makefile logic and uncovered a number of race conditions, some of which had been there for years. I assumed that the builds were faster too, so I did some builds intended to quantify the speedup in build time that resulted from this approach. It had never occurred to me that there might not be one. And so, I was very surprised to find that the wall clock build times for a stock ON workspace were essentially identical to the times for my stub library enabled version! This is why it is important to always measure, and not just to assume. One can tell from first principles, based on all those removed dependency rules in the library makefile, that the stub object version of ON gives dmake considerably more opportunities to overlap library construction. Some hypothesis were proposed, and shot down: Could we have disabled dmakes parallel feature? No, a quick check showed things being build in parallel. It was suggested that we might be I/O bound, and so, the threads would be mostly idle. That's a plausible explanation, but system stats didn't really support it. Plus, the timing between the stub and non-stub cases were just too suspiciously identical. Are our machines already handling as much parallelism as they are capable of, and unable to exploit these additional opportunities? Once again, we didn't see the evidence to back this up. Eventually, a more plausible and obvious reason emerged: We build the libraries and commands (usr/src/lib, usr/src/cmd) in parallel with the kernel (usr/src/uts). The kernel is the long leg in that race, and so, wall clock measurements of build time are essentially showing how long it takes to build uts. Although it would have been nice to post a huge speedup immediately, we can take solace in knowing that stub objects simplify the makefiles and reduce the possibility of race conditions. The next step in reducing build time should be to find ways to reduce or overlap the uts part of the builds. When that leg of the build becomes shorter, then the increased parallelism in the libs and commands will pay additional dividends. Until then, we'll just have to settle for simpler and more robust. And so, I integrated the link-editor support for creating stub objects into snv_153 (November 2010) with 6993877 ld should produce stub objects PSARC/2010/397 ELF Stub Objects followed by the work to convert the ON consolidation in snv_161 (February 2011) with 7009826 OSnet should use stub objects 4631488 lib/Makefile is too patient: .WAITs should be reduced This was a huge putback, with 2108 modified files, 8 new files, and 2 removed files. Due to the size, I was allowed a window after snv_160 closed in which to do the putback. It went pretty smoothly for something this big, a few more preexisting race conditions would be discovered and addressed over the next few weeks, and things have been quiet since then. Conclusions and Looking Forward Solaris has been built with stub objects since February. The fact that developers no longer specify the order in which libraries are built has been a big success, and we've eliminated an entire class of build error. That's not to say that there are no build races left in the ON makefiles, but we've taken a substantial bite out of the problem while generally simplifying and improving things. The introduction of a stub proto area has also opened some interesting new possibilities for other build improvements. As this article has become quite long, and as those uses do not involve stub objects, I will defer that discussion to a future article.

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• Can't install graphic drivers in 12.04

  - by yinon

  The driver is ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver. After clicking Activate, it asks for my password and starts downloading. Then it shows an error message: 2012-10-03 16:16:04,227 DEBUG: updating <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> 2012-10-03 16:16:06,172 DEBUG: reading modalias file /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/modules.alias 2012-10-03 16:16:06,383 DEBUG: reading modalias file /usr/share/jockey/modaliases/b43 2012-10-03 16:16:06,386 DEBUG: reading modalias file /usr/share/jockey/modaliases/disable-upstream-nvidia 2012-10-03 16:16:06,456 DEBUG: loading custom handler /usr/share/jockey/handlers/pvr-omap4.py 2012-10-03 16:16:06,506 WARNING: modinfo for module omapdrm_pvr failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module omapdrm_pvr 2012-10-03 16:16:06,509 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.PVROmap4Driver from name PVROmap4Driver 2012-10-03 16:16:06,682 DEBUG: PowerVR SGX proprietary graphics driver for OMAP 4 not available 2012-10-03 16:16:06,682 DEBUG: loading custom handler /usr/share/jockey/handlers/cdv.py 2012-10-03 16:16:06,727 WARNING: modinfo for module cedarview_gfx failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module cedarview_gfx 2012-10-03 16:16:06,728 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.CdvDriver from name CdvDriver 2012-10-03 16:16:06,728 DEBUG: cdv.available: falling back to default 2012-10-03 16:16:06,772 DEBUG: Intel Cedarview graphics driver availability undetermined, adding to pool 2012-10-03 16:16:06,772 DEBUG: loading custom handler /usr/share/jockey/handlers/vmware-client.py 2012-10-03 16:16:06,781 WARNING: modinfo for module vmxnet failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module vmxnet 2012-10-03 16:16:06,781 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.VmwareClientHandler from name VmwareClientHandler 2012-10-03 16:16:06,795 DEBUG: VMWare Client Tools availability undetermined, adding to pool 2012-10-03 16:16:06,796 DEBUG: loading custom handler /usr/share/jockey/handlers/fglrx.py 2012-10-03 16:16:06,801 WARNING: modinfo for module fglrx_updates failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module fglrx_updates 2012-10-03 16:16:06,805 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.FglrxDriverUpdate from name FglrxDriverUpdate 2012-10-03 16:16:06,805 DEBUG: fglrx.available: falling back to default 2012-10-03 16:16:06,833 DEBUG: ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver (post-release updates) availability undetermined, adding to pool 2012-10-03 16:16:06,836 WARNING: modinfo for module fglrx failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module fglrx 2012-10-03 16:16:06,840 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.FglrxDriver from name FglrxDriver 2012-10-03 16:16:06,840 DEBUG: fglrx.available: falling back to default 2012-10-03 16:16:06,873 DEBUG: ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver availability undetermined, adding to pool 2012-10-03 16:16:06,873 DEBUG: loading custom handler /usr/share/jockey/handlers/dvb_usb_firmware.py 2012-10-03 16:16:06,925 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.DvbUsbFirmwareHandler from name DvbUsbFirmwareHandler 2012-10-03 16:16:06,926 DEBUG: Firmware for DVB cards not available 2012-10-03 16:16:06,926 DEBUG: loading custom handler /usr/share/jockey/handlers/nvidia.py 2012-10-03 16:16:06,961 WARNING: modinfo for module nvidia_96 failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module nvidia_96 2012-10-03 16:16:06,967 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.NvidiaDriver96 from name NvidiaDriver96 2012-10-03 16:16:06,968 DEBUG: nvidia.available: falling back to default 2012-10-03 16:16:06,980 DEBUG: XorgDriverHandler(nvidia_96, nvidia-96, None): Disabling as package video ABI xorg-video-abi-10 does not match X.org video ABI xorg-video-abi-11 2012-10-03 16:16:06,980 DEBUG: NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver not available 2012-10-03 16:16:06,983 WARNING: modinfo for module nvidia_current failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module nvidia_current 2012-10-03 16:16:06,987 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.NvidiaDriverCurrent from name NvidiaDriverCurrent 2012-10-03 16:16:06,987 DEBUG: nvidia.available: falling back to default 2012-10-03 16:16:07,015 DEBUG: NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver availability undetermined, adding to pool 2012-10-03 16:16:07,018 WARNING: modinfo for module nvidia_current_updates failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module nvidia_current_updates 2012-10-03 16:16:07,021 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.NvidiaDriverCurrentUpdates from name NvidiaDriverCurrentUpdates 2012-10-03 16:16:07,022 DEBUG: nvidia.available: falling back to default 2012-10-03 16:16:07,066 DEBUG: NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (post-release updates) availability undetermined, adding to pool 2012-10-03 16:16:07,069 WARNING: modinfo for module nvidia_173_updates failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module nvidia_173_updates 2012-10-03 16:16:07,072 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.NvidiaDriver173Updates from name NvidiaDriver173Updates 2012-10-03 16:16:07,073 DEBUG: nvidia.available: falling back to default 2012-10-03 16:16:07,105 DEBUG: NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (post-release updates) availability undetermined, adding to pool 2012-10-03 16:16:07,112 WARNING: modinfo for module nvidia_173 failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module nvidia_173 2012-10-03 16:16:07,118 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.NvidiaDriver173 from name NvidiaDriver173 2012-10-03 16:16:07,119 DEBUG: nvidia.available: falling back to default 2012-10-03 16:16:07,159 DEBUG: NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver availability undetermined, adding to pool 2012-10-03 16:16:07,166 WARNING: modinfo for module nvidia_96_updates failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module nvidia_96_updates 2012-10-03 16:16:07,171 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.NvidiaDriver96Updates from name NvidiaDriver96Updates 2012-10-03 16:16:07,171 DEBUG: nvidia.available: falling back to default 2012-10-03 16:16:07,188 DEBUG: XorgDriverHandler(nvidia_96_updates, nvidia-96-updates, None): Disabling as package video ABI xorg-video-abi-10 does not match X.org video ABI xorg-video-abi-11 2012-10-03 16:16:07,188 DEBUG: NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (post-release updates) not available 2012-10-03 16:16:07,188 DEBUG: loading custom handler /usr/share/jockey/handlers/madwifi.py 2012-10-03 16:16:07,195 WARNING: modinfo for module ath_pci failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module ath_pci 2012-10-03 16:16:07,195 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.MadwifiHandler from name MadwifiHandler 2012-10-03 16:16:07,196 DEBUG: Alternate Atheros "madwifi" driver availability undetermined, adding to pool 2012-10-03 16:16:07,196 DEBUG: loading custom handler /usr/share/jockey/handlers/sl_modem.py 2012-10-03 16:16:07,213 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.SlModem from name SlModem 2012-10-03 16:16:07,234 DEBUG: Software modem not available 2012-10-03 16:16:07,234 DEBUG: loading custom handler /usr/share/jockey/handlers/broadcom_wl.py 2012-10-03 16:16:07,239 WARNING: modinfo for module wl failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module wl 2012-10-03 16:16:07,277 DEBUG: Instantiated Handler subclass __builtin__.BroadcomWLHandler from name BroadcomWLHandler 2012-10-03 16:16:07,277 DEBUG: Broadcom STA wireless driver availability undetermined, adding to pool 2012-10-03 16:16:07,278 DEBUG: all custom handlers loaded 2012-10-03 16:16:07,278 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'pci:v00008086d000027D8sv00001043sd000082EAbc04sc03i00') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,568 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'snd_hda_intel'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,699 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'snd_hda_intel', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,699 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'snd_hda_intel'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,699 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'snd_hda_intel', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,699 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'input:b0000v0000p0000e0000-e0,5,kramlsfw6,') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,704 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'evbug'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,704 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'evbug', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,704 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'pci:v00008086d000027DAsv00001043sd00008179bc0Csc05i00') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,707 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'i2c_i801'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,707 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'i2c_i801', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,707 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'acpi:PNP0C01:') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,707 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'acpi:PNP0B00:') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,707 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'pci:v00001969d00001026sv00001043sd00008304bc02sc00i00') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,710 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'atl1e'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,710 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'atl1e', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,710 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'input:b0003v04F2p0816e0111-e0,1,4,11,14,k71,72,73,74,75,77,79,7A,7B,7C,7D,7E,7F,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,8A,8C,8E,96,98,9E,9F,A1,A3,A4,A5,A6,AD,B0,B1,B2,B3,B4,B7,B8,B9,BA,BB,BC,BD,BE,BF,C0,C1,C2,F0,ram4,l0,1,2,sfw') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,711 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'evbug'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,711 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'evbug', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,711 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'mac_hid'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,711 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'mac_hid', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,711 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'platform:pcspkr') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,711 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'pcspkr'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,711 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'pcspkr', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,712 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'snd_pcsp'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,712 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'snd_pcsp', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,712 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'usb:v1D6Bp0001d0302dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,724 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'input:b0019v0000p0001e0000-e0,1,k74,ramlsfw') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,724 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'evbug'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,724 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'evbug', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,724 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'mac_hid'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,724 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'mac_hid', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,724 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'acpi:PNP0C04:') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,724 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'platform:eisa') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,725 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'pci:v00008086d000027CCsv00001043sd00008179bc0Csc03i20') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,728 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'platform:Fixed MDIO bus') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,728 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'pci:v00008086d000029C0sv00001043sd000082B0bc06sc00i00') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,731 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'usb:v045Ep0766d0101dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,777 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'snd_usb_audio'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,777 DEBUG: no corresponding handler available for {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'snd_usb_audio', 'jockey_handler': 'KernelModuleHandler'} 2012-10-03 16:16:07,777 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'acpi:PNP0F03:PNP0F13:') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,777 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'acpi:PNP0000:') 2012-10-03 16:16:07,777 DEBUG: querying driver db <jockey.detection.LocalKernelModulesDriverDB instance at 0xb7231a0c> about HardwareID('modalias', 'pci:v00001002d000095C5sv0000174Bsd0000E400bc03sc00i00') 2012-10-03 16:16:08,072 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'fglrx_updates', 'package': 'fglrx-updates'} 2012-10-03 16:16:08,133 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt None 2012-10-03 16:16:08,134 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use 2012-10-03 16:16:08,072 DEBUG: found match in handler pool xorg:fglrx_updates([FglrxDriverUpdate, nonfree, disabled] ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver (post-release updates)) 2012-10-03 16:16:08,136 WARNING: modinfo for module fglrx_updates failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module fglrx_updates 2012-10-03 16:16:08,147 DEBUG: fglrx.available: falling back to default 2012-10-03 16:16:08,173 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt None 2012-10-03 16:16:08,173 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use 2012-10-03 16:16:08,162 DEBUG: got handler xorg:fglrx_updates([FglrxDriverUpdate, nonfree, disabled] ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver (post-release updates)) 2012-10-03 16:16:08,173 DEBUG: searching handler for driver ID {'driver_type': 'kernel_module', 'kernel_module': 'fglrx', 'package': 'fglrx'} 2012-10-03 16:16:08,184 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt None 2012-10-03 16:16:08,184 DEBUG: fglrx is not the alternative in use 2012-10-03 16:16:08,173 DEBUG: found match in handler pool xorg:fglrx([FglrxDriver, nonfree, disabled] ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver) 2012-10-03 16:16:08,187 WARNING: modinfo for module fglrx failed: ERROR: modinfo: could not find module fglrx 2012-10-03 16:16:08,190 DEBUG: fglrx.available: falling back to default 2012-10-03 16:16:08,216 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt None . . . 2012-10-03 16:18:10,552 DEBUG: install progress initramfs-tools 62.500000 2012-10-03 16:18:22,249 DEBUG: install progress libc-bin 62.500000 2012-10-03 16:18:23,251 DEBUG: Selecting previously unselected package dkms. (Reading database ... 142496 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking dkms (from .../dkms_2.2.0.3-1ubuntu3_all.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package fakeroot. Unpacking fakeroot (from .../fakeroot_1.18.2-1_i386.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package fglrx-updates. Unpacking fglrx-updates (from .../fglrx-updates_2%3a8.960-0ubuntu1.1_i386.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package fglrx-amdcccle-updates. Unpacking fglrx-amdcccle-updates (from .../fglrx-amdcccle-updates_2%3a8.960-0ubuntu1.1_i386.deb) ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Processing triggers for ureadahead ... ureadahead will be reprofiled on next reboot dpkg: error processing libxss1 (--configure): package libxss1 is already installed and configured dpkg: error processing chromium-codecs-ffmpeg (--configure): package chromium-codecs-ffmpeg is already installed and configured dpkg: error processing chromium-browser (--configure): package chromium-browser is already installed and configured dpkg: error processing chromium-browser-l10n (--configure): package chromium-browser-l10n is already installed and configured Setting up dkms (2.2.0.3-1ubuntu3) ... No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Setting up fakeroot (1.18.2-1) ... update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/fakeroot-sysv to provide /usr/bin/fakeroot (fakeroot) in auto mode. Setting up fglrx-updates (2:8.960-0ubuntu1.1) ... update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf to provide /etc/ld.so.conf.d/i386-linux-gnu_GL.conf (i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) in auto mode. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /etc/OpenCL/vendors/amdocl64.icd because associated file /usr/lib/fglrx/etc/OpenCL/vendors/amdocl64.icd (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /usr/lib32/libaticalcl.so because associated file /usr/lib32/fglrx/libaticalcl.so (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /usr/lib32/libaticalrt.so because associated file /usr/lib32/fglrx/libaticalrt.so (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf to provide /etc/ld.so.conf.d/x86_64-linux-gnu_GL.conf (x86_64-linux-gnu_gl_conf) in auto mode. update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated) Loading new fglrx-updates-8.960 DKMS files... First Installation: checking all kernels... Building only for 3.2.0-29-generic-pae Building for architecture i686 Building initial module for 3.2.0-29-generic-pae Done. fglrx_updates: Running module version sanity check. - Original module - No original module exists within this kernel - Installation - Installing to /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/updates/dkms/ depmod...... DKMS: install completed. update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated) Processing triggers for bamfdaemon ... Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index... Setting up fglrx-amdcccle-updates (2:8.960-0ubuntu1.1) ... Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ... update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-29-generic-pae Processing triggers for libc-bin ... ldconfig deferred processing now taking place Errors were encountered while processing: libxss1 chromium-codecs-ffmpeg chromium-browser chromium-browser-l10n Error in function: SystemError: E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) 2012-10-03 16:18:23,256 ERROR: Package failed to install: Selecting previously unselected package dkms. (Reading database ... 142496 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking dkms (from .../dkms_2.2.0.3-1ubuntu3_all.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package fakeroot. Unpacking fakeroot (from .../fakeroot_1.18.2-1_i386.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package fglrx-updates. Unpacking fglrx-updates (from .../fglrx-updates_2%3a8.960-0ubuntu1.1_i386.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package fglrx-amdcccle-updates. Unpacking fglrx-amdcccle-updates (from .../fglrx-amdcccle-updates_2%3a8.960-0ubuntu1.1_i386.deb) ... Processing triggers for man-db ... Processing triggers for ureadahead ... ureadahead will be reprofiled on next reboot dpkg: error processing libxss1 (--configure): package libxss1 is already installed and configured dpkg: error processing chromium-codecs-ffmpeg (--configure): package chromium-codecs-ffmpeg is already installed and configured dpkg: error processing chromium-browser (--configure): package chromium-browser is already installed and configured dpkg: error processing chromium-browser-l10n (--configure): package chromium-browser-l10n is already installed and configured Setting up dkms (2.2.0.3-1ubuntu3) ... No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Setting up fakeroot (1.18.2-1) ... update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/fakeroot-sysv to provide /usr/bin/fakeroot (fakeroot) in auto mode. Setting up fglrx-updates (2:8.960-0ubuntu1.1) ... update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf to provide /etc/ld.so.conf.d/i386-linux-gnu_GL.conf (i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) in auto mode. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /etc/OpenCL/vendors/amdocl64.icd because associated file /usr/lib/fglrx/etc/OpenCL/vendors/amdocl64.icd (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /usr/lib32/libaticalcl.so because associated file /usr/lib32/fglrx/libaticalcl.so (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /usr/lib32/libaticalrt.so because associated file /usr/lib32/fglrx/libaticalrt.so (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf to provide /etc/ld.so.conf.d/x86_64-linux-gnu_GL.conf (x86_64-linux-gnu_gl_conf) in auto mode. update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated) Loading new fglrx-updates-8.960 DKMS files... First Installation: checking all kernels... Building only for 3.2.0-29-generic-pae Building for architecture i686 Building initial module for 3.2.0-29-generic-pae Done. fglrx_updates: Running module version sanity check. - Original module - No original module exists within this kernel - Installation - Installing to /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/updates/dkms/ depmod...... DKMS: install completed. update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated) Processing triggers for bamfdaemon ... Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index... Setting up fglrx-amdcccle-updates (2:8.960-0ubuntu1.1) ... Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ... update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-29-generic-pae Processing triggers for libc-bin ... ldconfig deferred processing now taking place Errors were encountered while processing: libxss1 chromium-codecs-ffmpeg chromium-browser chromium-browser-l10n Error in function: SystemError: E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) 2012-10-03 16:18:23,590 WARNING: /sys/module/fglrx_updates/drivers does not exist, cannot rebind fglrx_updates driver 2012-10-03 16:18:43,601 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf 2012-10-03 16:18:43,601 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use 2012-10-03 16:18:43,617 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf 2012-10-03 16:18:43,617 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use 2012-10-03 16:18:54,143 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf 2012-10-03 16:18:54,144 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use 2012-10-03 16:18:54,154 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf 2012-10-03 16:18:54,154 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use 2012-10-03 16:18:54,182 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx): target_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf 2012-10-03 16:18:54,182 DEBUG: XorgDriverHandler(%s, %s).enabled(): No X.org driver set, not checking 2012-10-03 16:18:54,215 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf 2012-10-03 16:18:54,215 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use 2012-10-03 16:18:54,229 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf 2012-10-03 16:18:54,229 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use 2012-10-03 16:18:54,268 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf 2012-10-03 16:18:54,268 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use 2012-10-03 16:18:54,279 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf 2012-10-03 16:18:54,279 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use 2012-10-03 16:18:54,298 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx): target_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf 2012-10-03 16:18:54,298 DEBUG: XorgDriverHandler(%s, %s).enabled(): No X.org driver set, not checking 2012-10-03 16:18:57,828 DEBUG: Shutting down I don't know how to troubleshoot from looking at the log file, could somebody assist me with this please? You can download the log file at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/a59d2hyabo02q5z/jockey.log

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• Silverlight Cream for January 11, 2011 -- #1024

  - by Dave Campbell

  1,000 blogposts is quite a few, but to die-hard geeks, 1000 isn't the number... 1K is the number, and today is my 1K blogpost! I've been working up to this for at least 11 months. Way back at MIX10, I approached some vendors about an idea I had. A month ago I contacted them and others, and everyone I contacted was very generous and supportive of my idea. My idea was not to run a contest, but blog as normal, and whoever ended up on my 1K post would get some swag... and I set a cut-off at 13 posts. So... blogging normally, I had some submittals, and then ran my normal process to pick up the next posts until I hit a total of 13. To provide a distribution channel for the swag, everyone on the list, please send me your snail mail (T-shirts) and email (licenses) addresses as soon as possible.   I'd like to thank the following generous sponsors for their contributions to my fun (in alphabetic order): and Rachel Hawley for contributing 4 Silverlight control sets First Floor Software and Koen Zwikstra for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Spy and Sara Faatz/Jason Beres for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Data Visualization controls and Svetla Stoycheva for contributing T-Shirts for everyone on the post and Ina Tontcheva for contributing 13 licenses for RadControls for Silverlight + RadControls for Windows Phone and Charlene Kozlan for contributing 1 combopack standard, 2 DataGrid for Silverlight, and 2 Listbox for Silverlight Standard And now finally...in this Issue: Nigel Sampson, Jeremy Likness, Dan Wahlin, Kunal Chowdhurry, Alex Knight, Wei-Meng Lee, Michael Crump, Jesse Liberty, Peter Kuhn, Michael Washington, Tau Sick, Max Paulousky, Damian Schenkelman Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties" Dan Wahlin WP7: "Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers" Nigel Sampson Expression Blend: "PathListBox: making data look cool" Alex Knight From SilverlightCream.com: Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers Nigel Sampson blogged about WP7 Gestures, the Toolkit, and using Gestures as Triggers, and actually makes it looks simple :) Jounce Part 9: Static and Dynamic Module Management Jeremy Likness has episode 9 of his explanation of his MVVM framework, Jounce, up... and a big discussion of Modules and Module Management from a Jounce perspective. Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties Dan Wahlin takes a page from one of his teaching opportunities, and shares his knowledge of Dependency Properties with us... beginning with what they are, defining them in code, and demonstrating their use. Customizing Silverlight ChildWindow Style using Blend Kunal Chowdhurry has a great post up about getting your Child Windows to match the look & feel of the rest of youra app... plus a bunch of Blend goodness thrown in. PathListBox: making data look cool File this post by Alex Knight in the 'holy crap' file along with the others in this series! ... just check out that cool Ticker Style Path ListBox at the top of the blog... too cool! Web Access in Windows Phone 7 Apps Wei-Meng Lee has the 3rd part of his series on WP7 development up and in this one is discussing Web Access... I mean *discussing* it... tons of detail, code, and explanation... great post. Prevent your Silverlight XAP file from caching in your browser. Michael Crump helps relieve stress on Silverlight developers everywhere by exploring how to avoid caching of your XAP in the browser... (WPFS) MVVM Light Toolkit: Soup To Nuts Part I Jesse Liberty continues his Windows Phone from Scratch series with a new segment exploring Laurent Bugnion's MVVMLight Toolkit beginning with acquiring and installing the toolkit, then proceeds to discuss linking the View and ViewModel, the ViewModel Locator, and page navigation. Silverlight: Making a DateTimePicker Peter Kuhn attacks a problem that crops up on the forums a lot -- a DateTimePicker control for Silverlight... following the "It's so simple to build one yourself" advice, he did so, and provides the code for all of us! Windows Phone 7 Animated Button Press Michael Washington took exception to button presses that gave no visual feedback and produced a behavior that does just that. Using TweetSharp in a Windows Phone 7 app Tau Sick demonstrates using TweetSharp to put a twitter feed into a WP7 app, as he did in "Hangover Helper"... all the instructions from getting Tweeetshaprt to the code necessary. Bindable Application Bar Extensions for Windows Phone 7 Max Paulousky has a post discussing some real extensions to the ApplicationBar for WP7.. he begins with a bindable application bar by Nicolas Humann that I've missed, probably because his blog is in French... and extends it to allow using DelegateCommand. How to: Load Prism modules packaged in a separate XAP file in an OOB application Damian Schenkelman posts about Prism, AppModules in separate XAPs and running OOB... if you've tried this, you know it's a hassle.. Damian has the solution. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-making-windows-awesome-since-2011.aspxPuppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC. Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note: Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0. An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM). A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub). Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows. Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post. Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet. Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft). At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)! Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin! It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources! Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs. As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense. You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows. Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.

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• Is Linear Tape File System (LTFS) Best For Transportable Storage?

  - by rickramsey

  Those of us in tape storage engineering take a lot of pride in what we do, but understand that tape is the right answer to a storage problem only some of the time. And, unfortunately for a storage medium with such a long history, it has built up a few preconceived notions that are no longer valid. When I hear customers debate whether to implement tape vs. disk, one of the common strikes against tape is its perceived lack of usability. If you could go back a few generations of corporate acquisitions, you would discover that StorageTek engineers recognized this problem and started developing a solution where a tape drive could look just like a memory stick to a user. The goal was to not have to care about where files were on the cartridge, but to simply see the list of files that were on the tape, and click on them to open them up. Eventually, our friends in tape over at IBM built upon our work at StorageTek and Sun Microsystems and released the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) feature for the current LTO5 generation of tape drives as an open specification. LTFS is really a wonderful feature and we’re proud to have taken part in its beginnings and, as you’ll soon read, its future. Today we offer LTFS-Open Edition, which is free for you to use in your in Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 environment - not only on your LTO5 drives, but also on your Oracle StorageTek T10000C drives. You can download it free from Oracle and try it out. LTFS does exactly what its forefathers imagined. Now you can see immediately which files are on a cartridge. LTFS does this by splitting a cartridge into two partitions. The first holds all of the necessary metadata to create a directory structure for you to easily view the contents of the cartridge. The second partition holds all of the files themselves. When tape media is loaded onto a drive, a complete file system image is presented to the user. Adding files to a cartridge can be as simple as a drag-and-drop just as you do today on your laptop when transferring files from your hard drive to a thumb drive or with standard POSIX file operations. You may be thinking all of this sounds nice, but asking, “when will I actually use it?” As I mentioned at the beginning, tape is not the right solution all of the time. However, if you ever need to physically move data between locations, tape storage with LTFS should be your most cost-effective and reliable answer. I will give you a few use cases examples of when LTFS can be utilized. Media and Entertainment (M&E), Oil and Gas (O&G), and other industries have a strong need for their storage to be transportable. For example, an O&G company hunting for new oil deposits in remote locations takes very large underground seismic images which need to be shipped back to a central data center. M&E operations conduct similar activities when shooting video for productions. M&E companies also often transfers files to third-parties for editing and other activities. These companies have three highly flawed options for transporting data: electronic transfer, disk storage transport, or tape storage transport. The first option, electronic transfer, is impractical because of the expense of the bandwidth required to transfer multi-terabyte files reliably and efficiently. If there’s one place that has bandwidth, it’s your local post office so many companies revert to physically shipping storage media. Typically, M&E companies rely on transporting disk storage between sites even though it, too, is expensive. Tape storage should be the preferred format because as IDC points out, “Tape is more suitable for physical transportation of large amounts of data as it is less vulnerable to mechanical damage during transportation compared with disk" (See note 1, below). However, tape storage has not been used in the past because of the restrictions created by proprietary formats. A tape may only be readable if both the sender and receiver have the same proprietary application used to write the file. In addition, the workflows may be slowed by the need to read the entire tape cartridge during recall. LTFS solves both of these problems, clearing the way for tape to become the standard platform for transferring large files. LTFS is open and, as long as you’ve downloaded the free reader from our website or that of anyone in the LTO consortium, you can read the data. So if a movie studio ships a scene to a third-party partner to add, for example, sounds effects or a music score, it doesn’t have to care what technology the third-party has. If it’s written back to an LTFS-formatted tape cartridge, it can be read. Some tape vendors like to claim LTFS is a “standard,” but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s a specification at this point, not a standard. That said, we’re already seeing application vendors create functionality to write in an LTFS format based on the specification. And it’s my belief that both customers and the tape storage industry will see the most benefit if we all follow the same path. As such, we have volunteered to lead the way in making LTFS a standard first with the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), and eventually through to standard bodies such as American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Expect to hear good news soon about our efforts. So, if storage transportability is one of your requirements, I recommend giving LTFS a look. It makes tape much more user-friendly and it’s free, which allows tape to maintain all of its cost advantages over disk! Note 1 - IDC Report. April, 2011. “IDC’s Archival Storage Solutions Taxonomy, 2011” - Brian Zents Website Newsletter Facebook Twitter

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• Integration with Multiple Versions of BizTalk HL7 Accelerator Schemas

  - by Paul Petrov

  Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 comes with multiple versions of the HL7 implementation. One of the typical integration tasks is to receive one format and transmit another. For example, system A works HL7 v2.4 messages, system B with v2.3, and system C with v2.2. The system A is exchanging messages with B and C. The logical solution is to create schemas in separate namespaces for each system and assign maps on send ports. Schematic diagram of the messaging solution is shown below:   Nothing is complex about that conceptually. On the implementation level things can get nasty though because of the elaborate nature of HL7 schemas and sheer amount of message types involved. If trying to implement maps directly in BizTalk Map Editor one would quickly get buried by thousands of links between subfields of HL7 segments. Since task is repetitive because HL7 segments are reused between message types it's natural to take advantage of such modular structure and reduce amount of work through reuse. Here's where it makes sense to switch from visual map editor to old plain XSLT. The implementation is done in three steps. First, create XSL templates to map from segments of one version to another. This can be done using BizTalk Map Editor subsequently copying and modifying generated XSL code to create one xsl:template per segment. Group all segments for format mapping in one XSL file (we call it SegmentTemplates.xsl). Here's how template for the PID segment (Patient Identification) would look like this: <xsl:template name="PID"> <PID_PatientIdentification> <xsl:if test="PID_PatientIdentification/PID_1_SetIdPatientId"> <PID_1_SetIdPid> <xsl:value-of select="PID_PatientIdentification/PID_1_SetIdPatientId/text()" /> </PID_1_SetIdPid> </xsl:if> <xsl:for-each select="PID_PatientIdentification/PID_2_PatientIdExternalId"> <PID_2_PatientId> <xsl:if test="CX_0_Id"> <CX_0_Id> <xsl:value-of select="CX_0_Id/text()" /> </CX_0_Id> </xsl:if> <xsl:if test="CX_1_CheckDigit"> <CX_1_CheckDigitSt> <xsl:value-of select="CX_1_CheckDigit/text()" /> </CX_1_CheckDigitSt> </xsl:if> <xsl:if test="CX_2_CodeIdentifyingTheCheckDigitSchemeEmployed"> <CX_2_CodeIdentifyingTheCheckDigitSchemeEmployed> <xsl:value-of select="CX_2_CodeIdentifyingTheCheckDigitSchemeEmployed/text()" /> </CX_2_CodeIdentifyingTheCheckDigitSchemeEmployed> . . . // skipped for brevity This is the most tedious and time consuming part. Templates can be created for only those segments that are used in message interchange. Once this is done the rest goes much easier. The next step is to create message type specific XSL that references (imports) segment templates XSL file. Inside this file simple call segment templates in appropriate places. For example, beginning of the mapping XSL for ADT_A01 message would look like this:   <xsl:import href="SegmentTemplates_23_to_24.xslt" />  <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" method="xml" version="1.0" />   <xsl:template match="/">    <xsl:apply-templates select="s0:ADT_A01_23_GLO_DEF" />  </xsl:template>   <xsl:template match="s0:ADT_A01_23_GLO_DEF">    <ns0:ADT_A01_24_GLO_DEF>      <xsl:call-template name="EVN" />      <xsl:call-template name="PID" />      <xsl:for-each select="PD1_PatientDemographic">        <xsl:call-template name="PD1" />      </xsl:for-each>      <xsl:call-template name="PV1" />      <xsl:for-each select="PV2_PatientVisitAdditionalInformation">        <xsl:call-template name="PV2" />      </xsl:for-each> This code simply calls segment template directly for required singular elements and in for-each loop for optional/repeating elements. And lastly, create BizTalk map (btm) that references message type specific XSL. It is essentially empty map with Custom XSL Path set to appropriate XSL: In the end, you will end up with one segment templates file that is referenced by many message type specific XSL files which in turn used by BizTalk maps. Once all segment maps are created they are widely reusable and all the rest work is very simple and clean.

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• Superpower Your Touchpad Computer with Scrybe

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you looking for a way to help your Touchpad computer make you more productive?  Here’s a quick look at Scrybe, a new application from Synaptics that lets you superpower it. Touchpad devices have become increasingly more interesting as they’ve included support for multi-touch gestures.  Scrybe takes it to the next level and lets you use your touchpad as an application launcher.  You can launch any application, website, or complete many common commands on your computer with a simple gesture.  Scrybe works with most modern Synaptics touchpads, which are standard on most laptops and netbooks.  It is optimized for newer multi-touch touchpads, but can also work with standard single-touch touchpads.  It works on Windows 7, Vista, and XP, so chances are it will work with your laptop or netbook. Get Started With Scrybe Head over to the Scrybe website and download the latest version (link below).  You are asked to enter your email address, name, and information about your computer…but you actually only have to enter your email address.  Click Download when finished. Run the installer when it’s download.  It will automatically download the latest Synaptics driver for your touchpad and any other components needed for Scrybe.  Note that the Scrybe installer will ask to install the Yahoo! toolbar, so uncheck this to avoid adding this worthless browser toolbar. Using Scrybe To open an application or website with a gesture, press 3 fingers on your touchpad at once, or if your touchpad doesn’t support multi-touch gestures, then press Ctrl+Alt and press 1 finger on your touchpad.  This will open the Scrype input pane; start drawing a gesture, and you’ll see it on the grey square.  The input pane shows some default gestures you can try. Here we drew an “M”, which opens our default Music player.  As soon as you finish the gesture and lift up your finger, Scrybe will open the application or website you selected. A notification balloon will let you know what gesture was preformed. When you’re entering your gesture, the input pane will show white “ink”.  The “ink” will turn blue if the command is recognized, but will turn red if it isn’t.  If Scrybe doesn’t recognize your command, press 3 fingers and try again. Scrybe Control Panel You can open the Scrybe Control panel to enter or change commands by entering a box-like gesture, or right-clicking the Scrybe icon in your system tray and selecting “Scrybe Control Panel”. Scrybe has many pre-configured gestures that you can preview and even practice. All of the gestures in the Popular tab are preset and cannot be changed.  However, the ones in the favorites tab can be edited.  Select the gesture you wish to edit, and click the gear icon to change it.  Here we changed the email gesture to open Hotmail instead of the default Yahoo Mail. Scrybe can also help you perform many common Windows commands such as Copy and Undo.  Select the Tools tab to see all of these commands.   Scrybe has many settings you may wish to change.  Select the Preferences button in the Control Panel to change these.  Here’s some of the settings we changed. Uncheck “Display a message” to turn off the tooltip notifications when you enter a gesture Uncheck “Show symbol hints” to turn off the sidebar on the input pane Select the search engine you want to open with the Search Gesture.  The default is Yahoo, but you can choose your favorite. Adding a new Scrybe Gesture The default Scrybe options are useful, but the best part is that you can assign gestures to your own programs or websites.  Open the Scrybe control panel, and click the plus sign on the bottom left corner.  Enter a name for your gesture, and then choose if it is for a website or an application. If you want the gesture to open a website, enter the address in the box. Alternately, if you want your gesture to open an application, select Launch Application and then either enter the path to the application, or click the button beside the Launch field and browse to it. Now click the down arrow on the blue box and choose one of the gestures for your application or website. Your new gesture will show up under the Favorites tab in the Scrybe control panel, and you can use it whenever you want from Scrybe, or practice the gesture by selecting the Practice button. Conclusion If you enjoy multi-touch gestures, you may find Scrybe very useful on your laptop or netbook.  Scrybe recognizes gestures fairly easily, even if you don’t enter them perfectly correctly.  Just like pinch-to-zoom and two-finger scroll, Scrybe can quickly become something you miss on other laptops. Download Scrybe (registration required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fixing Firefox Scrolling Problems with Dell Synaptics TouchpadRemove Synaptics Touchpad Icon from System TrayRoll Back Troublesome Device Drivers in Windows VistaChange Your Computer Name in Windows 7 or VistaLet Somebody Use Your Computer Without Logging Off in Ubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

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• New Replication, Optimizer and High Availability features in MySQL 5.6.5!

  - by Rob Young

  As the Product Manager for the MySQL database it is always great to announce when the MySQL Engineering team delivers another great product release.  As a field DBA and developer it is even better when that release contains improvements and innovation that I know will help those currently using MySQL for apps that range from modest intranet sites to the most highly trafficked web sites on the web.  That said, it is my pleasure to take my hat off to MySQL Engineering for today's release of the MySQL 5.6.5 Development Milestone Release ("DMR"). The new highlighted features in MySQL 5.6.5 are discussed here: New Self-Healing Replication ClustersThe 5.6.5 DMR improves MySQL Replication by adding Global Transaction Ids and automated utilities for self-healing Replication clusters.  Prior to 5.6.5 this has been somewhat of a pain point for MySQL users with most developing custom solutions or looking to costly, complex third-party solutions for these capabilities.  With 5.6.5 these shackles are all but removed by a solution that is included with the GPL version of the database and supporting GPL tools.  You can learn all about the details of the great, problem solving Replication features in MySQL 5.6 in Mat Keep's Developer Zone article.  New Replication Administration and Failover UtilitiesAs mentioned above, the new Replication features, Global Transaction Ids specifically, are now supported by a set of automated GPL utilities that leverage the new GTIDs to provide administration and manual or auto failover to the most up to date slave (that is the default, but user configurable if needed) in the event of a master failure. The new utilities, along with links to Engineering related blogs, are discussed in detail in the DevZone Article noted above. Better Query Optimization and ThroughputThe MySQL Optimizer team continues to amaze with the latest round of improvements in 5.6.5. Along with much refactoring of the legacy code base, the Optimizer team has improved complex query optimization and throughput by adding these functional improvements: Subquery Optimizations - Subqueries are now included in the Optimizer path for runtime optimization.  Better throughput of nested queries enables application developers to simplify and consolidate multiple queries and result sets into a single unit or work. Optimizer now uses CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as default for DATETIME columns - For simplification, this eliminates the need for application developers to assign this value when a column of this type is blank by default. Optimizations for Range based queries - Optimizer now uses ready statistics vs Index based scans for queries with multiple range values. Optimizations for queries using filesort and ORDER BY.  Optimization criteria/decision on execution method is done now at optimization vs parsing stage. Print EXPLAIN in JSON format for hierarchical readability and Enterprise tool consumption. You can learn the details about these new features as well all of the Optimizer based improvements in MySQL 5.6 by following the Optimizer team blog. You can download and try the MySQL 5.6.5 DMR here. (look under "Development Releases")  Please let us know what you think!  The new HA utilities for Replication Administration and Failover are available as part of the MySQL Workbench Community Edition, which you can download here .Also New in MySQL LabsAs has become our tradition when announcing DMRs we also like to provide "Early Access" development features to the MySQL Community via the MySQL Labs.  Today is no exception as we are also releasing the following to Labs for you to download, try and let us know your thoughts on where we need to improve:InnoDB Online OperationsMySQL 5.6 now provides Online ADD Index, FK Drop and Online Column RENAME.  These operations are non-blocking and will continue to evolve in future DMRs.  You can learn the grainy details by following John Russell's blog.InnoDB data access via Memcached API ("NotOnlySQL") - Improved refresh of an earlier feature releaseSimilar to Cluster 7.2, MySQL 5.6 provides direct NotOnlySQL access to InnoDB data via the familiar Memcached API. This provides the ultimate in flexibility for developers who need fast, simple key/value access and complex query support commingled within their applications.Improved Transactional Performance, ScaleThe InnoDB Engineering team has once again under promised and over delivered in the area of improved performance and scale.  These improvements are also included in the aggregated Spring 2012 labs release:InnoDB CPU cache performance improvements for modern, multi-core/CPU systems show great promise with internal tests showing:    2x throughput improvement for read only activity 6x throughput improvement for SELECT range Read/Write benchmarks are in progress More details on the above are available here. You can download all of the above in an aggregated "InnoDB 2012 Spring Labs Release" binary from the MySQL Labs. You can also learn more about these improvements and about related fixes to mysys mutex and hash sort by checking out the InnoDB team blog.MySQL 5.6.5 is another installment in what we believe will be the best release of the MySQL database ever.  It also serves as a shining example of how the MySQL Engineering team at Oracle leads in MySQL innovation.You can get the overall Oracle message on the MySQL 5.6.5 DMR and Early Access labs features here. As always, thanks for your continued support of MySQL, the #1 open source database on the planet!

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• SUPINFO International University in Mauritius

  Since a while I'm considering to pick up my activities as a student and I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science. Personal motivation I mean after all this years as a professional software (and database) developer I have the personal urge to complete this part of my education. Having various certifications by Microsoft and being awarded as an Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) twice looks pretty awesome on a resume but having a "proper" degree would just complete my package. During the last couple of years I already got in touch with C-SAC (local business school with degree courses), the University of Mauritius and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT to check the options to enroll as an experienced software developer. Quite frankly, it was kind of alienating to receive that feedback: Start from scratch! No seriously? Spending x amount of years to sit for courses that might be outdated and form part of your daily routine? Probably being in an awkward situation in which your professional expertise might exceed the lecturers knowledge? I don't know... but if that's path to walk... Well, then I might have to go for it. SUPINFO International University Some weeks ago I was contacted by the General Manager, Education Recruitment and Development of Medine Education Village, Yamal Matabudul, to have a chat on how the local IT scene, namely the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC), could assist in their plans to promote their upcoming campus. Medine went into partnership with the French-based SUPINFO International University and Mauritius will be the 36th location world-wide for SUPINFO. Actually, the concept of SUPINFO is very likely to the common understanding of an apprenticeship in Germany. Not only does a student enroll into the programme but will also be placed into various internships as part of the curriculum. It's a big advantage in my opinion as the person stays in touch with the daily procedures and workflows in the real world of IT. Statements like "We just received a 'crash course' of information and learned new technology which is equivalent to 1.5 months of lectures at the university" wouldn't form part of the experience of such an education. Open Day at the Medine Education Village Last Saturday, Medine organised their Open Day and it was the official inauguration of the SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. It's now listed on their website, too - but be warned, the site is mainly in French language although the courses are all done in English. Not only was it a big opportunity to "hang out" on the campus of Medine but it was great to see the first professional partners for their internship programme, too. Oh, just for the records, IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. will also be among the future employers for SUPINFO students. More about that in an upcoming blog entry. Open Day at Medine Education Village - SUPINFO International University in Mauritius Mr Alick Mouriesse, President of SUPINFO, arrived the previous day and he gave all attendees a great overview of the roots of SUPINFO, the general development of the educational syllabus and their high emphasis on their partnerships with local IT companies in order to assist their students to get future jobs but also feel the heartbeat of technology live. Something which is completely missing in classic institutions of tertiary education in Computer Science. And since I was on tour with my children, as usual during weekends, he also talked about the outlook of having a SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. Apart from the close connection to IT companies and providing internships to students, SUPINFO clearly works on an international level. Meaning students of SUPINFO can move around the globe and can continue their studies seamlessly. For example, you might enroll for your first year in France, then continue to do 2nd and 3rd year in Canada or any other country with a SUPINFO campus to earn your bachelor degree, and then live and study in Mauritius for the next 2 years to achieve a Master degree. Having a chat with Dale Smith, Expand Technologies, after his interesting session on Technological Entrepreneurship - TechPreneur More questions by other craftsmen of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community And of course, this concept works in any direction, giving Mauritian students a huge (!) opportunity to live, study and work abroad. And thanks to this, Medine already announced that there will be new facilities near Cascavelle to provide dormitories and other facilities to international students coming to our island. Awesome! Okay, but why SUPINFO? Well, coming back to my original statement - I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science - SUPINFO has a process called Validation of Acquired Experience (VAE) which is tailor-made for employees in the field of IT, and allows you to enroll in their course programme. I already got in touch with their online support chat but was only redirected to some FAQs on their website, unfortunately. So, during the Open Day I seized the opportunity to have an one-on-one conversation with Alick Mouriesse, and he clearly encouraged me to gather my certifications and working experience. SUPINFO does an individual evaluation prior to their assignment regarding course level, and hopefully my chances of getting some modules ahead of studies are looking better than compared to the other institutes. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to go down the easy route but why should someone sit for "Database 101" or "Principles of OOP" when applying and preaching database normalisation and practicing Clean Code Developer are like flesh and blood? Anyway, I'll be off to get my transcripts of certificates together with my course assignments from the old days at the university. Yes, I studied Applied Chemistry for a couple of years before intersecting into IT and software development particularly... ;-)

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• Maintaining packages with code - Adding a property expression programmatically

  Every now and then I've come across scenarios where I need to update a lot of packages all in the same way. The usual scenario revolves around a group of packages all having been built off the same package template, and something needs to updated to keep up with new requirements, a new logging standard for example.You'd probably start by updating your template package, but then you need to address all your existing packages. Often this can run into the hundreds of packages and clearly that's not a job anyone wants to do by hand. I normally solve the problem by writing a simple console application that looks for files and patches any package it finds, and it is an example of this I'd thought I'd tidy up a bit and publish here. This sample will look at the package and find any top level Execute SQL Tasks, and change the SQL Statement property to use an expression. It is very simplistic working on top level tasks only, so nothing inside a Sequence Container or Loop will be checked but obviously the code could be extended for this if required. The code that actually sets the expression is shown below, the rest is just wrapper code to find the package and to find the task. /// <summary> /// The CreationName of the Tasks to target, e.g. Execute SQL Task /// </summary> private const string TargetTaskCreationName = "Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Tasks.ExecuteSQLTask.ExecuteSQLTask, Microsoft.SqlServer.SQLTask, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91"; /// <summary> /// The name of the task property to target. /// </summary> private const string TargetPropertyName = "SqlStatementSource"; /// <summary> /// The property expression to set. /// </summary> private const string ExpressionToSet = "@[User::SQLQueryVariable]"; .... // Check if the task matches our target task type if (taskHost.CreationName == TargetTaskCreationName) { // Check for the target property if (taskHost.Properties.Contains(TargetPropertyName)) { // Get the property, check for an expression and set expression if not found DtsProperty property = taskHost.Properties[TargetPropertyName]; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(property.GetExpression(taskHost))) { property.SetExpression(taskHost, ExpressionToSet); changeCount++; } } } This is a console application, so to specify which packages you want to target you have three options: Find all packages in the current folder, the default behaviour if no arguments are specified TaskExpressionPatcher.exe .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Find all packages in a specified folder, pass the folder as the argument TaskExpressionPatcher.exe C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\ .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Find a specific package, pass the file path as the argument TaskExpressionPatcher.exe C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\Package.dtsx The code was written against SQL Server 2005, but just change the reference to Microsoft.SQLServer.ManagedDTS to be the SQL Server 2008 version and it will work fine. If you get an error Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.DtsRuntimeException: The package failed to load due to error 0xC0011008… then check that the package is from the correct version of SSIS compared to the referenced assemblies, 2005 vs 2008 in other words. Download Sample Project TaskExpressionPatcher.zip (6 KB)

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• Stumbling Through: Making a case for the K2 Case Management Framework

  I have recently attended a three-day training session on K2s Case Management Framework (CMF), a free framework built on top of K2s blackpearl workflow product, and I have come away with several different impressions for some of the different aspects of the framework.  Before we get into the details, what is the Case Management Framework?  It is essentially a suite of tools that, when used together, solve many common workflow scenarios.  The tool has been developed over time by K2 consultants that have realized they tend to solve the same problems over and over for various clients, so they attempted to package all of those common solutions into one framework.  Most of these common problems involve workflow process that arent necessarily direct and would tend to be difficult to model.  Such solutions could be achieved in blackpearl alone, but the workflows would be complex and difficult to follow and maintain over time.  CMF attempts to simplify such scenarios not so much by black-boxing the workflow processes, but by providing different points of entry to the processes allowing them to be simpler, moving the complexity to a middle layer.  It is not a solution in and of itself, development is still required to tie the pieces together. CMF is under continuous development, both a plus and a minus in that bugs are fixed quickly and features added regularly, but it may be difficult to know which versions are the most stable.  CMF is not an officially supported K2 product, which means you will not get technical support but you will get access to the source code. The example given of a business process that would fit well into CMF is that of a file cabinet, where each folder in said file cabinet is a case that contains all of the data associated with one complaint/customer/incident/etc. and various users can access that case at any time and take one of a set of pre-determined actions on it.  When I was given that example, my first thought was that any workflow I have ever developed in the past could be made to fit this model there must be more than just this model to help decide if CMF is the right solution.  As the training went on, we learned that one of the key features of CMF is SharePoint integration as each case gets a SharePoint site created for it, and there are a number of excellent web parts that can be used to design a portal for users to get at all the information on their cases.  While CMF does not require SharePoint, without it you will be missing out on a huge portion of functionality that CMF offers.  My opinion is that without SharePoint integration, you may as well write your workflows and other components the old fashioned way. When I heard that each case gets its own SharePoint site created for it, warning bells immediately went off in my head as I felt that depending on the data load, a CMF enabled solution could quickly overwhelm SharePoint with thousands of sites so we have yet another deciding factor for CMF:  Just how many cases will your solution be creating?  While it is not necessary to use the site-per-case model, it is one of the more useful parts of the framework.  Without it, you are losing a big chunk of what CMF has to offer. When it comes to developing on top of the Case Management Framework, it becomes a matter of configuring what makes up a case, what can be done to a case, where each action on a case should take the user, and then typing up actions to case statuses.  This last step is one that I immediately warmed up to, as just about every workflow Ive designed in the past needed some sort of mapping table to set the status of a work item based on the action being taken definitely one of those common solutions that it is good to see rolled up into a re-useable entity (and it gets a nice configuration UI to boot!).  This concept is a little different than traditional workflow design, in that you dont have to think of an end-to-end process around passing a case along a path, rather, you must envision the case as central object with workflow threads branching off of it and doing their own thing with the case data.  Certainly there can be certain workflow threads that get rather complex, but the idea is that they RELATE to the case, they dont BECOME the case (though it is still possible with action->status mappings to prevent certain actions in certain cases, so it isnt always a wide-open free for all of actions on a case). I realize that this description of the Case Management Framework merely scratches the surface on what the product actually can do, and I dont think Ive conclusively defined for what sort of business scenario you can make a case for Case Management Framework.  What I do hope to have accomplished with this post is to raise awareness of CMF there is a (free!) product out there that could potentially simplify a tangled workflow process and give (for free!) a very useful set of SharePoint web parts and a nice set of (free!) reports.  The best way to see if it will truly fit your needs is to give it a try did I mention it is FREE?  Er, ok, so it is free, but only obtainable at this time for K2 partnersDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Populate a WCF syndication podcast using MP3 ID3 metadata tags

  - by brian_ritchie

  In the last post, I showed how to create a podcast using WCF syndication.  A podcast is an RSS feed containing a list of audio files to which users can subscribe.  The podcast not only contains links to the audio files, but also metadata about each episode.  A cool approach to building the feed is reading this metadata from the ID3 tags on the MP3 files used for the podcast. One library to do this is TagLib-Sharp.  Here is some sample code: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: var taggedFile = TagLib.File.Create(f); 2: var fileInfo = new FileInfo(f); 3: var item = new iTunesPodcastItem() 4: { 5: title = taggedFile.Tag.Title, 6: size = fileInfo.Length, 7: url = feed.baseUrl + fileInfo.Name, 8: duration = taggedFile.Properties.Duration, 9: mediaType = feed.mediaType, 10: summary = taggedFile.Tag.Comment, 11: subTitle = taggedFile.Tag.FirstAlbumArtist, 12: id = fileInfo.Name 13: }; 14: if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(taggedFile.Tag.Album)) 15: item.publishedDate = DateTimeOffset.Parse(taggedFile.Tag.Album); This reads the ID3 tags into an object for later use in creating the syndication feed.  When the MP3 is created, these tags are set...or they can be set after the fact using the Properties dialog in Windows Explorer.  The only "hack" is that there isn't an easily accessible tag for "subtitle" or "published date" so I used other tags in this example. Feel free to change this to meet your purposes.  You could remove the subtitle & use the file modified data for example. That takes care of the episodes, for the feed level settings we'll load those from an XML file: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <iTunesPodcastFeed 3: baseUrl ="" 4: title="" 5: subTitle="" 6: description="" 7: copyright="" 8: category="" 9: ownerName="" 10: ownerEmail="" 11: mediaType="audio/mp3" 12: mediaFiles="*.mp3" 13: imageUrl="" 14: link="" 15: /> Here is the full code put together. Read the feed XML file and deserialize it into an iTunesPodcastFeed classLoop over the files in a directory reading the ID3 tags from the audio files .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: public static iTunesPodcastFeed CreateFeedFromFiles(string podcastDirectory, string podcastFeedFile) 2: { 3: XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(iTunesPodcastFeed)); 4: iTunesPodcastFeed feed; 5: using (var fs = File.OpenRead(Path.Combine(podcastDirectory, podcastFeedFile))) 6: { 7: feed = (iTunesPodcastFeed)serializer.Deserialize(fs); 8: } 9: foreach (var f in Directory.GetFiles(podcastDirectory, feed.mediaFiles)) 10: { 11: try 12: { 13: var taggedFile = TagLib.File.Create(f); 14: var fileInfo = new FileInfo(f); 15: var item = new iTunesPodcastItem() 16: { 17: title = taggedFile.Tag.Title, 18: size = fileInfo.Length, 19: url = feed.baseUrl + fileInfo.Name, 20: duration = taggedFile.Properties.Duration, 21: mediaType = feed.mediaType, 22: summary = taggedFile.Tag.Comment, 23: subTitle = taggedFile.Tag.FirstAlbumArtist, 24: id = fileInfo.Name 25: }; 26: if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(taggedFile.Tag.Album)) 27: item.publishedDate = DateTimeOffset.Parse(taggedFile.Tag.Album); 28: feed.Items.Add(item); 29: } 30: catch 31: { 32: // ignore files that can't be accessed successfully 33: } 34: } 35: return feed; 36: } Usually putting a "try...catch" like this is bad, but in this case I'm just skipping over files that are locked while they are being uploaded to the web site.Here is the code from the last couple of posts.  

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