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• What are developer's problems with helpful error messages?

  - by Moo-Juice

  It continue to astounds me that, in this day and age, products that have years of use under their belt, built by teams of professionals, still to this day - fail to provide helpful error messages to the user. In some cases, the addition of just a little piece of extra information could save a user hours of trouble. A program that generates an error, generated it for a reason. It has everything at its disposal to inform the user as much as it can, why something failed. And yet it seems that providing information to aid the user is a low-priority. I think this is a huge failing. One example is from SQL Server. When you try and restore a database that is in use, it quite rightly won't let you. SQL Server knows what processes and applications are accessing it. Why can't it include information about the process(es) that are using the database? I know not everyone passes an Applicatio_Name attribute on their connection string, but even a hint about the machine in question could be helpful. Another candidate, also SQL Server (and mySQL) is the lovely string or binary data would be truncated error message and equivalents. A lot of the time, a simple perusal of the SQL statement that was generated and the table shows which column is the culprit. This isn't always the case, and if the database engine picked up on the error, why can't it save us that time and just tells us which damned column it was? On this example, you could argue that there may be a performance hit to checking it and that this would impede the writer. Fine, I'll buy that. How about, once the database engine knows there is an error, it does a quick comparison after-the-fact, between values that were going to be stored, versus the column lengths. Then display that to the user. ASP.NET's horrid Table Adapters are also guilty. Queries can be executed and one can be given an error message saying that a constraint somewhere is being violated. Thanks for that. Time to compare my data model against the database, because the developers are too lazy to provide even a row number, or example data. (For the record, I'd never use this data-access method by choice, it's just a project I have inherited!). Whenever I throw an exception from my C# or C++ code, I provide everything I have at hand to the user. The decision has been made to throw it, so the more information I can give, the better. Why did my function throw an exception? What was passed in, and what was expected? It takes me just a little longer to put something meaningful in the body of an exception message. Hell, it does nothing but help me whilst I develop, because I know my code throws things that are meaningful. One could argue that complicated exception messages should not be displayed to the user. Whilst I disagree with that, it is an argument that can easily be appeased by having a different level of verbosity depending on your build. Even then, the users of ASP.NET and SQL Server are not your typical users, and would prefer something full of verbosity and yummy information because they can track down their problems faster. Why to developers think it is okay, in this day and age, to provide the bare minimum amount of information when an error occurs? It's 2011 guys, come on.

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• Distinctly LINQ &ndash; Getting a Distinct List of Objects

  - by David Totzke

  Let’s say that you have a list of objects that contains duplicate items and you want to extract a subset of distinct items.  This is pretty straight forward in the trivial case where the duplicate objects are considered the same such as in the following example: List<int> ages = new List<int> { 21, 46, 46, 55, 17, 21, 55, 55 }; IEnumerable<int> distinctAges = ages.Distinct(); Console.WriteLine("Distinct ages:"); foreach (int age in distinctAges) { Console.WriteLine(age); } /* This code produces the following output: Distinct ages: 21 46 55 17 */ What if you are working with reference types instead?  Imagine a list of search results where items in the results, while unique in and of themselves, also point to a parent.  We’d like to be able to select a bunch of items in the list but then see only a distinct list of parents.  Distinct isn’t going to help us much on its own as all of the items are distinct already.  Perhaps we can create a class with just the information we are interested in like the Id and Name of the parents.  public class SelectedItem { public int ItemID { get; set; } public string DisplayName { get; set; } } We can then use LINQ to populate a list containing objects with just the information we are interested in and then get rid of the duplicates. IEnumerable<SelectedItem> list = (from item in ResultView.SelectedRows.OfType<Contract.ReceiptSelectResults>() select new SelectedItem { ItemID = item.ParentId, DisplayName = item.ParentName }) .Distinct(); Most of you will have guessed that this didn’t work.  Even though some of our objects are now duplicates, because we are working with reference types, it doesn’t matter that their properties are the same, they’re still considered unique.  What we need is a way to define equality for the Distinct() extension method. IEqualityComparer<T> Looking at the Distinct method we see that there is an overload that accepts an IEqualityComparer<T>.  We can simply create a class that implements this interface and that allows us to define equality for our SelectedItem class. public class SelectedItemComparer : IEqualityComparer<SelectedItem> { public new bool Equals(SelectedItem abc, SelectedItem def) { return abc.ItemID == def.ItemID && abc.DisplayName == def.DisplayName; } public int GetHashCode(SelectedItem obj) { string code = obj.DisplayName + obj.ItemID.ToString(); return code.GetHashCode(); } } In the Equals method we simply do whatever comparisons are necessary to determine equality and then return true or false.  Take note of the implementation of the GetHashCode method.  GetHashCode must return the same value for two different objects if our Equals method says they are equal.  Get this wrong and your comparer won’t work .  Even though the Equals method returns true, mismatched hash codes will cause the comparison to fail.  For our example, we simply build a string from the properties of the object and then call GetHashCode() on that. Now all we have to do is pass an instance of our IEqualitlyComarer<T> to Distinct and all will be well: IEnumerable<SelectedItem> list =     (from item in ResultView.SelectedRows.OfType<Contract.ReceiptSelectResults>()         select new SelectedItem { ItemID = item.dahfkp, DisplayName = item.document_code })                         .Distinct(new SelectedItemComparer());   Enjoy. Dave Just because I can… Technorati Tags: LINQ,C#

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• Automating XNA Performance Testing?

  - by Grofit

  I was wondering what peoples approaches or thoughts were on automating performance testing in XNA. Currently I am looking at only working in 2d, but that poses many areas where performance can be improved with different implementations. An example would be if you had 2 different implementations of spatial partitioning, one may be faster than another but without doing some actual performance testing you wouldn't be able to tell which one for sure (unless you saw the code was blatantly slow in certain parts). You could write a unit test which for a given time frame kept adding/updating/removing entities for both implementations and see how many were made in each timeframe and the higher one would be the faster one (in this given example). Another higher level example would be if you wanted to see how many entities you can have on the screen roughly without going beneath 60fps. The problem with this is to automate it you would need to use the hidden form trick or some other thing to kick off a mock game and purely test which parts you care about and disable everything else. I know that this isnt a simple affair really as even if you can automate the tests, really it is up to a human to interpret if the results are performant enough, but as part of a build step you could have it run these tests and publish the results somewhere for comparison. This way if you go from version 1.1 to 1.2 but have changed a few underlying algorithms you may notice that generally the performance score would have gone up, meaning you have improved your overall performance of the application, and then from 1.2 to 1.3 you may notice that you have then dropped overall performance a bit. So has anyone automated this sort of thing in their projects, and if so how do you measure your performance comparisons at a high level and what frameworks do you use to test? As providing you have written your code so its testable/mockable for most parts you can just use your tests as a mechanism for getting some performance results... === Edit === Just for clarity, I am more interested in the best way to make use of automated tests within XNA to track your performance, not play testing or guessing by manually running your game on a machine. This is completely different to seeing if your game is playable on X hardware, it is more about tracking the change in performance as your game engine/framework changes. As mentioned in one of the comments you could easily test "how many nodes can I insert/remove/update within QuadTreeA within 2 seconds", but you have to physically look at these results every time to see if it has changed, which may be fine and is still better than just relying on playing it to see if you notice any difference between version. However if you were to put an Assert in to notify you of a fail if it goes lower than lets say 5000 in 2 seconds you have a brittle test as it is then contextual to the hardware, not just the implementation. Although that being said these sort of automated tests are only really any use if you are running your tests as some sort of build pipeline i.e: Checkout - Run Unit Tests - Run Integration Tests - Run Performance Tests - Package So then you can easily compare the stats from one build to another on the CI server as a report of some sort, and again this may not mean much to anyone if you are not used to Continuous Integration. The main crux of this question is to see how people manage this between builds and how they find it best to report upon. As I said it can be subjective but as knowledge will be gained from the answers it seems a worthwhile question.

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• Things to install on a new machine – revisited

  - by RoyOsherove

  as I prepare to get a new dev machine at work, I write the things I am going to install on it, before writing the first line of code on that machine: Control Freak Tools: Everything Search Engine – a free and amazingly fast search engine for files all over your machine. (just file names, not inside files). This is so fast I use it almost as a replacement for my start menu, but it’s also great for finding those files that get hidden and tucked away in dark places on my system. Ever had a situation where you needed to see exactly how many copies of X.dll were hiding on your machine and where? this tool is perfect for that. Google Chrome. It’s just fast. very fast. and Firefox has become the IE of alternative browsers in terms of speed and memory. Don’t even get me started on IE. TweetDeck – get a complete view of what’s up on twitter Total Commander – my still favorite file manager, over five years now. KatMouse – will scroll any window your hovering on, even if it’s not an active window, when you use scroll the wheel on it. PowerIso or Daemon Tools – for loading up ISO images of discs LogMeIn Ignition – quick access to your LogMeIn computers for online Backup: JungleDisk or BackBlaze KeePass – save important passwords MS Security Essentials – free anti virus that’s quoest and doesn’t make a mess of your system. for home: uTorrent – a torrent client that can read rss feeds (like the ones from ezrss.it ) Camtasia Studio and SnagIt – for recording and capturing the screen, and then adding cool effects on top. Foxit PDF Reader – much faster that adove reader. Toddler Keys (for home) – for when your baby wants to play with your keyboard. Live Writer – for writing blog posts for Lenovo ThinkPads – Lenovo System Update – if you have a “custom” system instead of the one that came built in, this will keep all your lenovo drivers up to date. FileZilla – for FTP stuff All the utils from sysinternals, (or try the live-links) especially: AutoRuns for deciding what’s really going to load at startup, procmon to see what’s really going on with processes in your system   Developer stuff: Reflector. Pure magic. Time saver. See source code of any compiled assembly. Resharper. Great for productivity and navigation across your source code FinalBuilder – a commercial build automation tool. Love it. much better than any xml based time hog out there. TeamCity – a great visual and friendly server to manage continuous integration. powerful features. Test Lint – a free addin for vs 2010 I helped create, that checks your unit tests for possible problems and hints you about it. TestDriven.NET – a great test runner for vs 2008 and 2010 with some powerful features. VisualSVN – a commercial tool if you use subversion. very reliable addin for vs 2008 and 2010 Beyond Compare – a powerful file and directory comparison tool. I love the fact that you can right click in windows exporer on any file and select “select left side to compare”, then right click on another file and select “compare with left side”. Great usability thought! PostSharp 2.0 – for addind system wide concepts into your code (tracing, exception management). Goes great hand in hand with.. SmartInspect – a powerful framework and viewer for tracing for your application. lots of hidden features. Crypto Obfuscator – a relatively new obfuscation tool for .NET that seems to do the job very well. Crypto Licensing – from the same company –finally a licensing solution that seems to really fit what I needed. And it works. Fiddler 2 – great for debugging and tracing http traffic to and from your app. Debugging Tools for Windows and DebugDiag  - great for debugging scenarios. still wanting more? I think this should keep you busy for a while.   Regulator and Regulazy – for testing and generating regular expressions Notepad 2 – for quick editing and viewing with syntax highlighting

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• Grouping data in LINQ with the help of group keyword

  - by vik20000in

  While working with any kind of advanced query grouping is a very important factor. Grouping helps in executing special function like sum, max average etc to be performed on certain groups of data inside the date result set. Grouping is done with the help of the Group method. Below is an example of the basic group functionality.     int[] numbers = { 5, 4, 1, 3, 9, 8, 6, 7, 2, 0 };         var numberGroups =         from num in numbers         group num by num % 5 into numGroup         select new { Remainder = numGroup.Key, Numbers = numGroup };  In the above example we have grouped the values based on the reminder left over when divided by 5. First we are grouping the values based on the reminder when divided by 5 into the numgroup variable.  numGroup.Key gives the value of the key on which the grouping has been applied. And the numGroup itself contains all the records that are contained in that group. Below is another example to explain the same. string[] words = { "blueberry", "abacus", "banana", "apple", "cheese" };         var wordGroups =         from num in words         group num by num[0] into grp         select new { FirstLetter = grp.Key, Words = grp }; In the above example we are grouping the value with the first character of the string (num[0]). Just like the order operator the group by clause also allows us to write our own logic for the Equal comparison (That means we can group Item by ignoring case also by writing out own implementation). For this we need to pass an object that implements the IEqualityComparer<string> interface. Below is an example. public class AnagramEqualityComparer : IEqualityComparer<string> {     public bool Equals(string x, string y) {         return getCanonicalString(x) == getCanonicalString(y);     }      public int GetHashCode(string obj) {         return getCanonicalString(obj).GetHashCode();     }         private string getCanonicalString(string word) {         char[] wordChars = word.ToCharArray();         Array.Sort<char>(wordChars);         return new string(wordChars);     } }  string[] anagrams = {"from   ", " salt", " earn", "  last   ", " near "}; var orderGroups = anagrams.GroupBy(w => w.Trim(), new AnagramEqualityComparer()); Vikram  

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• Pie Charts Just Don't Work When Comparing Data - Number 10 of Top 10 Reasons to Never Ever Use a Pie

  - by Tony Wolfram

  When comparing data, which is what a pie chart is for, people have a hard time judging the angles and areas of the multiple pie slices in order to calculate how much bigger one slice is than the others. Pie Charts Don't Work A slice of pie is good for serving up a portion of desert. It's not good for making a judgement about how big the slice is, what percentage of 100 it is, or how it compares to other slices. People have trouble comparing angles and areas to each other. Controlled studies show that people will overestimate the percentage that a pie slice area represents. This is because we have trouble calculating the area based on the space between the two angles that define the slice. This picture shows how a pie chart is useless in determing the largest value when you have to compare pie slices.   You can't compare angles and slice areas to each other. Human perception and cognition is poor when viewing angles and areas and trying to make a mental comparison. Pie charts overload the working memory, forcing the person to make complicated calculations, and at the same time make a decision based on those comparisons. What's the point of showing a pie chart when you want to compare data, except to say, "well, the slices are almost the same, but I'm not really sure which one is bigger, or by how much, or what order they are from largest to smallest. But the colors sure are pretty. Plus, I like round things. Oh,was I suppose to make some important business decision? Sorry." Bad Choices and Bad Decisions Interaction Designers, Graphic Artists, Report Builders, Software Developers, and Executives have all made the decision to use pie charts in their reports, software applications, and dashboards. It was a bad decision. It was a poor choice. There are always better options and choices, yet the designer still made the decision to use a pie chart. I'll expore why people make such poor choices in my upcoming blog entires. (Hint: It has more to do with emotions than with analytical thinking.) I've outlined my opinions and arguments about the evils of using pie charts in "Countdown of Top 10 Reasons to Never Ever Use a Pie Chart." Each of my next 10 blog entries will support these arguments with illustrations, examples, and references to studies. But my goal is not to continuously and endlessly rage against the evils of using pie charts. This blog is not about pie charts. This blog is about understanding why designers choose to use a pie chart. Why, when give better alternatives, and acknowledging the shortcomings of pie charts, do designers over and over again still freely choose to place a pie chart in a report? As an extra treat and parting shot, check out the nice pie chart that Wikipedia uses to illustrate the United States population by state.   Remember, somebody chose to use this pie chart, with all its glorious colors, and post it on Wikipedia for all the world to see. My next blog will give you a better alternative for displaying comparable data - the sorted bar chart.

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• Oracle Forms Migration to ADF - Webinar vom ORACLE Partner PITSS

  - by Thomas Leopold

    Tuesday, February 22, 2011 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM CET Free Webinar Re-Engineering Legacy Oracle Forms Migration from Forms to ADF - A Case Study Join Oracle's Grant Ronald and PITSS to see a software architecture comparison of Oracle Forms and ADF and a live step-by-step presentation on how to achieve a successful migration. Learn about various migration options, challenges and best practices to protect your current investment in Oracle Forms. PL/SQL is without match for what it does: manipulating data in the database. If you blindly migrate all your PL/SQL to Java you will, in all probability, end up with less maintainable and less efficient code. Instead you should consider which code it best left as PL/SQL..." Grant Ronald - "Migrating Oracle Forms to Fusion: Myth or Magic Bullet?" Re-Engineering existing business logic is mandatory for your legacy Forms application to take advantage of the new Software architectures like ADF. The PITSS.CON solution combines the deep understanding of Oracle Forms and Reports applications architecture with powerful re-engineering capabilities that allows the developer community to protect the investment in the existing Forms applications and to concentrate on fine-tuning and customization of the modernized functionality rather than manually recreating every module and business logic from bottom up. Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/971702250   PITSS GmbHKönigsdorferstrasse 25D-82515 WolfratshausenDo not forget to check out these Free Webinars in March! Thursday, March 3, 2011 Upgrade and Modernize Your Application to Forms 11g Registration/Information Tuesday, March 15, 2011 Shaping the Future for your Oracle Forms Application:Forms 11g, ADF, APEX Registration/Information Tuesday, March 29, 2011 Oracle Forms Modernization to APEX Registration/Information Registration is limited, so sign up  today!Presented By:        Grant Ronald, Senior Group Product Manager,Oracle       Magdalena Serban, Product Manager,PITSS   Contact Us:            PITSS in Americas +1 248.740.0935 [email protected] www.pitssamerica.com       PITSS in Europe +49 (0) 717287 5200 [email protected] www.pitss.com   White Paper:      From Oracle Forms to Oracle ADF and JEE     © Copyright 2010 PITSS GmbH, Wolfratshausen, Stuttgart, München; Managing Directors: Dipl.-Ing. Andreas Gaede, Michael Kilimann, Dipl.-Ing. Dirk Fleischmann Commercial Register: HRB 125471 at District Court Munich. All rights reserved. Any duplication or further treatment in any medium, in parts or as a whole, requires a written agreement. If you do not want to receive invitations for events, meetings and seminars from us, then please click here.

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• Exceptional DBA 2011 Jeff Moden on why you should enter in 2012

  - by RedAndTheCommunity

  My "reign" as the Red Gate Exceptional DBA is almost over and I was asked to say a few words about this wonderful award. Having been one of those folks that shied away from entering the contest during the first 3 years of the award, I thought I'd spend the time encouraging DBAs of all types to enter. Winning this award has some obvious benefits. You win a trip to PASS including money towards your flight, paid hotel stay, and, of course, paid admission. You win a wonderful bundle of software from Red Gate to make your job as a DBA a whole lot easier. You also win some pretty incredible notoriety for your resume. After all, it's not everyone who wins a worldwide contest. To date, there are only 4 of us in the world who have won this award. You could be number 5! For me, all of that pales in comparison to what I found out during the entry process. I'm very confident in my skills, but I'm also humble. It was suggested to me that I enter the contest when it first started. I just couldn't bring myself to nominate myself. When the 2011 nomination period opened up, several people again suggested that I enter, so I swallowed hard and asked several co-workers to have a look at the online nomination form and, if they thought me worthy, to write a nomination for me. I won't bore you with the details, but what they wrote about me was one of the most incredible rewards that I could ever have hoped to receive. I had no idea of the impact that I'd made on my co-workers. Even if I hadn't made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top. "Even if I hadn't made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top." There's only one named winner and 4 "runners up" in this competition every year but don't let that discourage you. Enter this competition. Even if you work in the proverbial "Mom'n'Pop" shop, get your boss and the people you work with directly to nominate you. Even if you don't make it to the top 5, you might just find out that you're more of a winner than you think. If you're too proud to ask them, then take the time to nominate yourself instead of shying away like I did for the first 3 years. You work hard as a DBA and, as David Poole once said, if you're the first person that people ask for help rather than one of the last, then you're probably an Exceptional DBA. It's time to stand up and be counted! Win or lose, the entry process can be a huge reward in itself. It was for me. Thank you, Red Gate, for giving me such a wonderful opportunity. Thanks for listening folks and for all that you do as DBAs. As 'Red Green' says, "We're all in this together and I'm pullin' for ya". --Jeff Moden Red Gate Exceptional DBA 2011

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• Migrating SQL Server Databases – The DBA’s Checklist (Part 3)

  - by Sadequl Hussain

  Continuing from Part 2 of the Database Migration Checklist series: Step 10: Full-text catalogs and full-text indexing This is one area of SQL Server where people do not seem to take notice unless something goes wrong. Full-text functionality is a specialised area in database application development and is not usually implemented in your everyday OLTP systems. Nevertheless, if you are migrating a database that uses full-text indexing on one or more tables, you need to be aware a few points. First of all, SQL Server 2005 now allows full-text catalog files to be restored or attached along with the rest of the database. However, after migration, if you are unable to look at the properties of any full-text catalogs, you are probably better off dropping and recreating it. You may also get the following error messages along the way: Msg 9954, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 The Full-Text Service (msftesql) is disabled. The system administrator must enable this service. This basically means full text service is not running (disabled or stopped) in the destination instance. You will need to start it from the Configuration Manager. Similarly, if you get the following message, you will also need to drop and recreate the catalog and populate it. Msg 7624, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Full-text catalog ‘catalog_name‘ is in an unusable state. Drop and re-create this full-text catalog. A full population of full-text indexes can be a time and resource intensive operation. Obviously you will want to schedule it for low usage hours if the database is restored in an existing production server. Also, bear in mind that any scheduled job that existed in the source server for populating the full text catalog (e.g. nightly process for incremental update) will need to be re-created in the destination. Step 11: Database collation considerations Another sticky area to consider during a migration is the collation setting. Ideally you would want to restore or attach the database in a SQL Server instance with the same collation. Although not used commonly, SQL Server allows you to change a database’s collation by using the ALTER DATABASE command: ALTER DATABASE database_name COLLATE collation_name You should not be using this command for no reason as it can get really dangerous.  When you change the database collation, it does not change the collation of the existing user table columns.  However the columns of every new table, every new UDT and subsequently created variables or parameters in code will use the new setting. The collation of every char, nchar, varchar, nvarchar, text or ntext field of the system tables will also be changed. Stored procedure and function parameters will be changed to the new collation and finally, every character-based system data type and user defined data types will also be affected. And the change may not be successful either if there are dependent objects involved. You may get one or multiple messages like the following: Cannot ALTER ‘object_name‘ because it is being referenced by object ‘dependent_object_name‘. That is why it is important to test and check for collation related issues. Collation also affects queries that use comparisons of character-based data.  If errors arise due to two sides of a comparison being in different collation orders, the COLLATE keyword can be used to cast one side to the same collation as the other. Continues…

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• Introducing functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

  - by Giorgio

  This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming is getting a lot of attention. I have only used OOP languages for my work (C++ and Java) but I am trying to learn some FP in my free time because I find it very interesting. So, I started learning Haskell three years ago and Scala last summer. I plan to learn some SML and Caml as well, and to brush up my (little) knowledge of Scheme. Well, a lot of plans (too ambitious?) but I hope I will find the time to learn at least the basics of FP during the next few years. What is important for me is how functional programming works and how / whether I can use it for some real projects. I have already developed small tools in Haskell. In spite of my strong interest for FP, I find it difficult to understand why functional programming constructs are being added to languages like C#, Java, C++, and so on. As a developer interested in FP, I find it more natural to use, say, Scala or Haskell, instead of waiting for the next FP feature to be added to my favourite non-FP language. In other words, why would I want to have only some FP in my originally non-FP language instead of looking for a language that has a better support for FP? For example, why should I be interested to have lambdas in Java if I can switch to Scala where I have much more FP concepts and access all the Java libraries anyway? Similarly: why do some FP in C# instead of using F# (to my knowledge, C# and F# can work together)? Java was designed to be OO. Fine. I can do OOP in Java (and I would like to keep using Java in that way). Scala was designed to support OOP + FP. Fine: I can use a mix of OOP and FP in Scala. Haskell was designed for FP: I can do FP in Haskell. If I need to tune the performance of a particular module, I can interface Haskell with some external routines in C. But why would I want to do OOP with just some basic FP in Java? So, my main point is: why are non-functional programming languages being extended with some functional concept? Shouldn't it be more comfortable (interesting, exciting, productive) to program in a language that has been designed from the very beginning to be functional or multi-paradigm? Don't different programming paradigms integrate better in a language that was designed for it than in a language in which one paradigm was only added later? The first explanation I could think of is that, since FP is a new concept (it isn't new at all, but it is new for many developers), it needs to be introduced gradually. However, I remember my switch from imperative to OOP: when I started to program in C++ (coming from Pascal and C) I really had to rethink the way in which I was coding, and to do it pretty fast. It was not gradual. So, this does not seem to be a good explanation to me. Or can it be that many non-FP programmers are not really interested in understanding and using functional programming, but they find it practically convenient to adopt certain FP-idioms in their non-FP language? IMPORTANT NOTE Just in case (because I have seen several language wars on this site): I mentioned the languages I know better, this question is in no way meant to start comparisons between different programming languages to decide which is better / worse. Also, I am not interested in a comparison of OOP versus FP (pros and cons). The point I am interested in is to understand why FP is being introduced one bit at a time into existing languages that were not designed for it even though there exist languages that were / are specifically designed to support FP.

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• SQL SERVER – Sends backups to a Network Folder, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3

  - by pinaldave

  Let me tell you about one of the most useful SQL tools that every DBA should use – it is SQLBackupAndFTP. I have been using this tool since 2009 – and it is the first program I install on a SQL server. Download a free version, 1 minute configuration and your daily backups are safe in the cloud. In summary, SQLBackupAndFTP Creates SQL Server database and file backups on schedule Compresses and encrypts the backups Sends backups to a network folder, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3 Sends email notifications of job’s success or failure SQLBackupAndFTP comes in Free and Paid versions (starting from $29) – see version comparison. Free version is fully functional for unlimited ad hoc backups or for scheduled backups of up to two databases – it will be sufficient for many small customers. What has impressed me from the beginning – is that I understood how it works and was able to configure the job from a single form (see Image 1 – Main form above) Connect to you SQL server and select databases to be backed up Click “Add backup destination” to configure where backups should go to (network, FTP Server, Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3) Enter your email to receive email confirmations Set the time to start daily full backups (or go to Settings if you need Differential or  Transaction Log backups on a flexible schedule) Press “Run Now” button to test You can get to this form if you click “Settings” buttons in the “Schedule section”. Select what types of backups and how often you want to run them and you will see the scheduled backups in the “Estimated backup plan” list A detailed tutorial is available on the developer’s website. Along with SQLBackupAndFTP setup gives you the option to install “One-Click SQL Restore” (you can install it stand-alone too) – a basic tool for restoring just Full backups. However basic, you can drag-and-drop on it the zip file created by SQLBackupAndFTP, it unzips the BAK file if necessary, connects to the SQL server on the start, selects the right database, it is smart enough to restart the server to drop open connections if necessary – very handy for developers who need to restore databases often. You may ask why is this tool is better than maintenance tasks available in SQL Server? While maintenance tasks are easy to set up, SQLBackupAndFTP is still way easier and integrates solution for compression, encryption, FTP, cloud storage and email which make it superior to maintenance tasks in every aspect. On a flip side SQLBackupAndFTP is not the fanciest tool to manage backups or check their health. It only works reliably on local SQL Server instances. In other words it has to be installed on the SQL server itself. For remote servers it uses scripting which is less reliable. This limitations is actually inherent in SQL server itself as BACKUP DATABASE command  creates backup not on the client, but on the server itself. This tool is compatible with almost all the known SQL Server versions. It works with SQL Server 2008 (all versions) and many of the previous versions. It is especially useful for SQL Server Express 2005 and SQL Server Express 2008, as they lack built in tools for backup. I strongly recommend this tool to all the DBAs. They must absolutely try it as it is free and does exactly what it promises. You can download your free copy of the tool from here. Please share your experience about using this tool. I am eager to receive your feedback regarding this article. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)   Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Exceptional DBA 2011 Jeff Moden on why you should enter in 2012

  - by Red and the Community

  My "reign" as the Red Gate Exceptional DBA is almost over and I was asked to say a few words about this wonderful award. Having been one of those folks that shied away from entering the contest during the first 3 years of the award, I thought I’d spend the time encouraging DBAs of all types to enter. Winning this award has some obvious benefits. You win a trip to PASS including money towards your flight, paid hotel stay, and, of course, paid admission. You win a wonderful bundle of software from Red Gate to make your job as a DBA a whole lot easier. You also win some pretty incredible notoriety for your resume. After all, it’s not everyone who wins a worldwide contest. To date, there are only 4 of us in the world who have won this award. You could be number 5! For me, all of that pales in comparison to what I found out during the entry process. I’m very confident in my skills, but I’m also humble. It was suggested to me that I enter the contest when it first started. I just couldn’t bring myself to nominate myself. When the 2011 nomination period opened up, several people again suggested that I enter, so I swallowed hard and asked several co-workers to have a look at the online nomination form and, if they thought me worthy, to write a nomination for me. I won’t bore you with the details, but what they wrote about me was one of the most incredible rewards that I could ever have hoped to receive. I had no idea of the impact that I’d made on my co-workers. Even if I hadn’t made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top. “Even if I hadn’t made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top.” There’s only one named winner and 4 "runners up" in this competition every year but don’t let that discourage you. Enter this competition. Even if you work in the proverbial "Mom’n'Pop" shop, get your boss and the people you work with directly to nominate you. Even if you don’t make it to the top 5, you might just find out that you’re more of a winner than you think. If you’re too proud to ask them, then take the time to nominate yourself instead of shying away like I did for the first 3 years. You work hard as a DBA and, as David Poole once said, if you’re the first person that people ask for help rather than one of the last, then you’re probably an Exceptional DBA. It’s time to stand up and be counted! Win or lose, the entry process can be a huge reward in itself. It was for me. Thank you, Red Gate, for giving me such a wonderful opportunity. Thanks for listening folks and for all that you do as DBAs. As ‘Red Green’ says, "We’re all in this together and I’m pullin’ for ya". –Jeff Moden Red Gate Exceptional DBA 2011

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• Release Management as Orchestra

  - by ericajanine

  I read an excellent, concise article (http://www.buildmeister.com/articles/software_release_management_best_practices) on the basics of release management practices. In the article, it states "Release Management is often likened to the conductor of an orchestra, with the individual changes to be implemented the various instruments within it." I played in music ensembles for years, so this is especially close to my heart as example. I learned most of my discipline from hours and hours of practice at the hand of a very skilled conductor and leader. I also learned that the true magic in symphonic performance is one where everyone involved is focused on one sound, one goal. In turn, that solid focus creates a sound and experience bigger than just mechanics alone accomplish. In symphony, a conductor's true purpose is to make you, a performer, better so the overall sound and end product is better. The big picture (the performance of the composition) is the end-game, and all musicians in the orchestra know without question their part makes up an important but incomplete piece of that performance. A good conductor works with each section (e.g. group) to ensure their individual pieces are solid. Let's restate: The conductor leads and is responsible for ensuring those pieces are solid. While the performers themselves are doing the work, the conductor is the final authority on when the pieces are ready or not. If not, the conductor initiates the efforts to get them ready or makes the decision to scrap their parts altogether for the sake of an overall performance. Let it sink in, because it's clear--It is not the performer's call if they play their part as agreed, it's the conductor's final call to allow it. In comparison, if a software release manager is a conductor, the only way for that manager to be effective is to drive the overarching process and execution of individual pieces of a software development lifecycle. It does not mean the release manager performs each and every piece, it means the release manager has oversight and influence because the end-game is a successful software enhancin a useable environment. It means the release manager, not the developer or development manager, has the final call if something goes into a software release. Of course, this is not a process of autocracy or dictation of absolute rule, it's cooperative effort. But the release manager must have the final authority to make a decision if something is ready to be added to the bigger piece, the overall symphony of software changes being considered for package and release. It also goes without saying a release manager, like a conductor, must have full autonomy and isolation from other software groups. A conductor is the one on the podium waving a little stick at the each section and cueing them for their parts, not yelling from the back of the room while also playing a tuba and taking direction from the horn section. I have personally seen where release managers are relegated to being considered little more than coordinators, red-tapers to "satisfy" the demands of an audit group without being bothered to actually respect all that a release manager gives a group willing to employ them fully. In this dysfunctional scenario, development managers, project managers, business users, and other stakeholders have been given nearly full clearance to demand and push their agendas forward, causing a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario where an inherent conflict will ensue. Depending on the strength, determination for peace, and willingness to overlook a built-in expectation that is wrong, the release manager here must face the crafted conflict head-on and diffuse it as quickly as possible. Then, the release manager must clearly make a case why a change cannot be released without negative impact to all parties involved. If a political agenda is solely driving a software release, there IS no symphony, there is no "software lifecycle". It's just out-of-tune noise. More importantly, there is no real conductor. Sometimes, just wanting to make a beautiful sound is not enough. If you are a release manager, are you freed up enough to move, to conduct the sections of software creation to ensure a solid release performance is possible? If not, it's time to take stock in what your role actually is and see if that is what you truly want to achieve in your position. If you are, then you can successfully build your career and that of the people in your groups to create truly beautiful software (music) together.

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• Adobe Photoshop CS5 vs Photoshop CS5 extended

  - by Edward

  Adobe Photoshop has been an industry standard for most web designers & photographers worldwide. Photoshop CS5 has made photography editing much more refined and the composition process has become much easier than ever before.  To study the advantage of Photoshop CS5 extended over Photoshop CS5 we have written this comparison article, with both a Designer’s & Photographer’s perspective. Hopefully it shall help you in your buying/upgrade decision. Photoshop CS5 Photoshop CS5 has refining feature with powerful photography tools. It made editing process easy as fewer steps are involved to remove noise, add grain, create vignettes, correct lens distortions, sharpen, and create HDR images. It has quick image correction and color and tone control for professional purpose. Intelligent image editing and enhancement , extraordinary advanced compositing has made it a better tool than earlier versions for photographers. It allows users to accelerate workflow with fast performance on 64-bit Windows® and Mac hardware systems and smoother interactions due to more GPU-accelerated features. It also boasts of a state-of-the-art processing with Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 6 and helps to maximize creative impact. It provides for tremendous precision and freedom. It allows user to easily select intricate image elements, such as hair and create realistic painting effects. It also allows to remove any image element and see the space fill in almost magically. It has easy access to core editing and streamlined work flow and flexible work ambience. It has creative tools and contents. Photoshop CS5 Extended Photoshop CS5 extended is quite innovative and has incorporated 3D elements to 2D artwork directly within digital imaging application, which enables user to do an easy on-ramp to 3D image creation. It also provides for 3D editing. It has intelligent image editing and enhancement. It offers advance composing and has extraordinary painting and drawing toolset. It provides for video and animation designing. It helps to work with specialized images for architecture, manufacturing, engineering, science, and medicine. Where CS5 extended scores over CS5 CS5 extended has many features, which were not included in CS5. These features make it score more over CS5. These features are: Technology for creating 3D extrusion 3D material library and picker Field depth for 3D 3D merging and scene composition improvements 3D workflow improvement Customization of 3D features Image based light source Shadow catcher for shadow creation Enhanced ray tracer Context sensitive widgets, which allows easy control of objects, lights and cameras. Overlays for materials and mesh boundaries Photoshop CS5 extended is far better than CS5 as it incorporates all the features of CS5 and have more advanced features. It allows 3D creation and editing and has other advanced tools to make it better. Redefining the Image-Editing Experience  : A Photographer’s point of View Photoshop CS5 delivers amazing features and creative options so even new users can perform advanced image manipulations and compositions. Breath taking image intelligence behind Content-Aware Fill magically removes any image detail or object, examines the surroundings and seamlessly fills in the space left behind. Lighting, tone and noise of the surrounding area can be matched. New Refine Edge makes nearly-impossible image selections possible. Masking was never easier, the toughest types of edges, such as hair and foliage seem easier to fix. To sum up following are few advantages of CS5 extended over previous versions 64-bit processing Content Aware Fill Refine Edge, “makes nearly-impossible image selections impossible” HDR Pro, including ghost artifact removal and HDR toning, which gives the look of HDR with a single exposure New brush options Improved image management with enhanced Adobe Bridge Lens corrections Improved black-and-white conversions Puppet Warp: Precisely reposition or warp any image element Adobe Camera Raw 6 Upgrade Buy Online Pricing and Availability Adobe Photoshop CS5 and CS5 Extended are available through Adobe Authorized Resellers & the Adobe Store. Estimated street price for Adobe Photoshop CS5 is US$699 and US$999 for Photoshop CS5 Extended. Upgrade pricing and volume licensing are also available. Related posts:10 Free Alternatives for Adobe Photoshop Software Web based Alternatives to Photoshop 15 Useful Adobe Illustrator Tutorials For Designers

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• Exceptional DBA 2011 Jeff Moden on why you should enter in 2012

  - by RedAndTheCommunity

  My "reign" as the Red Gate Exceptional DBA is almost over and I was asked to say a few words about this wonderful award. Having been one of those folks that shied away from entering the contest during the first 3 years of the award, I thought I'd spend the time encouraging DBAs of all types to enter. Winning this award has some obvious benefits. You win a trip to PASS including money towards your flight, paid hotel stay, and, of course, paid admission. You win a wonderful bundle of software from Red Gate to make your job as a DBA a whole lot easier. You also win some pretty incredible notoriety for your resume. After all, it's not everyone who wins a worldwide contest. To date, there are only 4 of us in the world who have won this award. You could be number 5! For me, all of that pales in comparison to what I found out during the entry process. I'm very confident in my skills, but I'm also humble. It was suggested to me that I enter the contest when it first started. I just couldn't bring myself to nominate myself. When the 2011 nomination period opened up, several people again suggested that I enter, so I swallowed hard and asked several co-workers to have a look at the online nomination form and, if they thought me worthy, to write a nomination for me. I won't bore you with the details, but what they wrote about me was one of the most incredible rewards that I could ever have hoped to receive. I had no idea of the impact that I'd made on my co-workers. Even if I hadn't made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top. "Even if I hadn't made it to the top 5 for the award, I had already won something very near and dear that no one can ever top." There's only one named winner and 4 "runners up" in this competition every year but don't let that discourage you. Enter this competition. Even if you work in the proverbial "Mom'n'Pop" shop, get your boss and the people you work with directly to nominate you. Even if you don't make it to the top 5, you might just find out that you're more of a winner than you think. If you're too proud to ask them, then take the time to nominate yourself instead of shying away like I did for the first 3 years. You work hard as a DBA and, as David Poole once said, if you're the first person that people ask for help rather than one of the last, then you're probably an Exceptional DBA. It's time to stand up and be counted! Win or lose, the entry process can be a huge reward in itself. It was for me. Thank you, Red Gate, for giving me such a wonderful opportunity. Thanks for listening folks and for all that you do as DBAs. As 'Red Green' says, "We're all in this together and I'm pullin' for ya". --Jeff Moden Red Gate Exceptional DBA 2011

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• Oracle Big Data Software Downloads

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Companies have been making business decisions for decades based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, is a potential treasure trove of less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined for useful information. Oracle offers a broad integrated portfolio of products to help you acquire and organize these diverse data sources and analyze them alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data Connectors Downloads here, includes: Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Release 2.1.0 Oracle Loader for Hadoop Release 2.1.0 Oracle Data Integrator Companion 11g Oracle R Connector for Hadoop v 2.1 Oracle Big Data Documentation The Oracle Big Data solution offers an integrated portfolio of products to help you organize and analyze your diverse data sources alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data, Release 2.2.0 - E41604_01 zip (27.4 MB) Integrated Software and Big Data Connectors User's Guide HTML PDF Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Application Adapter for Hadoop Apache Hadoop is designed to handle and process data that is typically from data sources that are non-relational and data volumes that are beyond what is handled by relational databases. Typical processing in Hadoop includes data validation and transformations that are programmed as MapReduce jobs. Designing and implementing a MapReduce job usually requires expert programming knowledge. However, when you use Oracle Data Integrator with the Application Adapter for Hadoop, you do not need to write MapReduce jobs. Oracle Data Integrator uses Hive and the Hive Query Language (HiveQL), a SQL-like language for implementing MapReduce jobs. Employing familiar and easy-to-use tools and pre-configured knowledge modules (KMs), the application adapter provides the following capabilities: Loading data into Hadoop from the local file system and HDFS Performing validation and transformation of data within Hadoop Loading processed data from Hadoop to an Oracle database for further processing and generating reports Oracle Database Loader for Hadoop Oracle Loader for Hadoop is an efficient and high-performance loader for fast movement of data from a Hadoop cluster into a table in an Oracle database. It pre-partitions the data if necessary and transforms it into a database-ready format. Oracle Loader for Hadoop is a Java MapReduce application that balances the data across reducers to help maximize performance. Oracle R Connector for Hadoop Oracle R Connector for Hadoop is a collection of R packages that provide: Interfaces to work with Hive tables, the Apache Hadoop compute infrastructure, the local R environment, and Oracle database tables Predictive analytic techniques, written in R or Java as Hadoop MapReduce jobs, that can be applied to data in HDFS files You install and load this package as you would any other R package. Using simple R functions, you can perform tasks such as: Access and transform HDFS data using a Hive-enabled transparency layer Use the R language for writing mappers and reducers Copy data between R memory, the local file system, HDFS, Hive, and Oracle databases Schedule R programs to execute as Hadoop MapReduce jobs and return the results to any of those locations Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS, you can use an Oracle Database to access and analyze data residing in Hadoop in these formats: Data Pump files in HDFS Delimited text files in HDFS Hive tables For other file formats, such as JSON files, you can stage the input in Hive tables before using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS. Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS uses external tables to provide Oracle Database with read access to Hive tables, and to delimited text files and Data Pump files in HDFS. Related Documentation Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop Library HTML Oracle R Enterprise HTML Oracle NoSQL Database HTML Recent Blog Posts Big Data Appliance vs. DIY Price Comparison Big Data: Architecture Overview Big Data: Achieve the Impossible in Real-Time Big Data: Vertical Behavioral Analytics Big Data: In-Memory MapReduce Flume and Hive for Log Analytics Building Workflows in Oozie

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• Reconciling the Boy Scout Rule and Opportunistic Refactoring with code reviews

  - by t0x1n

  I am a great believer in the Boy Scout Rule: Always check a module in cleaner than when you checked it out." No matter who the original author was, what if we always made some effort, no matter how small, to improve the module. What would be the result? I think if we all followed that simple rule, we'd see the end of the relentless deterioration of our software systems. Instead, our systems would gradually get better and better as they evolved. We'd also see teams caring for the system as a whole, rather than just individuals caring for their own small little part. I am also a great believer in the related idea of Opportunistic Refactoring: Although there are places for some scheduled refactoring efforts, I prefer to encourage refactoring as an opportunistic activity, done whenever and wherever code needs to cleaned up - by whoever. What this means is that at any time someone sees some code that isn't as clear as it should be, they should take the opportunity to fix it right there and then - or at least within a few minutes Particularly note the following excerpt from the refactoring article: I'm wary of any development practices that cause friction for opportunistic refactoring ... My sense is that most teams don't do enough refactoring, so it's important to pay attention to anything that is discouraging people from doing it. To help flush this out be aware of any time you feel discouraged from doing a small refactoring, one that you're sure will only take a minute or two. Any such barrier is a smell that should prompt a conversation. So make a note of the discouragement and bring it up with the team. At the very least it should be discussed during your next retrospective. Where I work, there is one development practice that causes heavy friction - Code Review (CR). Whenever I change anything that's not in the scope of my "assignment" I'm being rebuked by my reviewers that I'm making the change harder to review. This is especially true when refactoring is involved, since it makes "line by line" diff comparison difficult. This approach is the standard here, which means opportunistic refactoring is seldom done, and only "planned" refactoring (which is usually too little, too late) takes place, if at all. I claim that the benefits are worth it, and that 3 reviewers will work a little harder (to actually understand the code before and after, rather than look at the narrow scope of which lines changed - the review itself would be better due to that alone) so that the next 100 developers reading and maintaining the code will benefit. When I present this argument my reviewers, they say they have no problem with my refactoring, as long as it's not in the same CR. However I claim this is a myth: (1) Most of the times you only realize what and how you want to refactor when you're in the midst of your assignment. As Martin Fowler puts it: As you add the functionality, you realize that some code you're adding contains some duplication with some existing code, so you need to refactor the existing code to clean things up... You may get something working, but realize that it would be better if the interaction with existing classes was changed. Take that opportunity to do that before you consider yourself done. (2) Nobody is going to look favorably at you releasing "refactoring" CRs you were not supposed to do. A CR has a certain overhead and your manager doesn't want you to "waste your time" on refactoring. When it's bundled with the change you're supposed to do, this issue is minimized. The issue is exacerbated by Resharper, as each new file I add to the change (and I can't know in advance exactly which files would end up changed) is usually littered with errors and suggestions - most of which are spot on and totally deserve fixing. The end result is that I see horrible code, and I just leave it there. Ironically, I feel that fixing such code not only will not improve my standings, but actually lower them and paint me as the "unfocused" guy who wastes time fixing things nobody cares about instead of doing his job. I feel bad about it because I truly despise bad code and can't stand watching it, let alone call it from my methods! Any thoughts on how I can remedy this situation ?

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• Functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

  - by Giorgio

  This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming is getting a lot of attention. I have only used OOP languages for my work (C++ and Java) but I am trying to learn some FP in my free time because I find it very interesting. So, I started learning Haskell three years ago and Scala last summer. I plan to learn some SML and Caml as well, and to brush up my (little) knowledge of Scheme. Well, a lot of plans (too ambitious?) but I hope I will find the time to learn at least the basics of FP during the next few years. What is important for me is how functional programming works and how / whether I can use it for some real projects. I have already developed small tools in Haskell. In spite of my strong interest for FP, I find it difficult to understand why functional programming constructs are being added to languages like C#, Java, C++, and so on. As a developer interested in FP, I find it more natural to use, say, Scala or Haskell, instead of waiting for the next FP feature to be added to my favourite non-FP language. In other words, why would I want to have only some FP in my originally non-FP language instead of looking for a language that has a better support for FP? For example, why should I be interested to have lambdas in Java if I can switch to Scala where I have much more FP concepts and access all the Java libraries anyway? Similarly: why do some FP in C# instead of using F# (to my knowledge, C# and F# can work together)? Java was designed to be OO. Fine. I can do OOP in Java (and I would like to keep using Java in that way). Scala was designed to support OOP + FP. Fine: I can use a mix of OOP and FP in Scala. Haskell was designed for FP: I can do FP in Haskell. If I need to tune the performance of a particular module, I can interface Haskell with some external routines in C. But why would I want to do OOP with just some basic FP in Java? So, my main point is: why are non-functional programming languages being extended with some functional concept? Shouldn't it be more comfortable (interesting, exciting, productive) to program in a language that has been designed from the very beginning to be functional or multi-paradigm? Don't different programming paradigms integrate better in a language that was designed for it than in a language in which one paradigm was only added later? The first explanation I could think of is that, since FP is a new concept (it isn't new at all, but it is new for many developers), it needs to be introduced gradually. However, I remember my switch from imperative to OOP: when I started to program in C++ (coming from Pascal and C) I really had to rethink the way in which I was coding, and to do it pretty fast. It was not gradual. So, this does not seem to be a good explanation to me. Also, I asked myself if my impression is just plainly wrong due to lack of knowledge. E.g., do C# and C++11 support FP as extensively as, say, Scala or Caml do? In this case, my question would be simply non-existent. Or can it be that many non-FP programmers are not really interested in using functional programming, but they find it practically convenient to adopt certain FP-idioms in their non-FP language? IMPORTANT NOTE Just in case (because I have seen several language wars on this site): I mentioned the languages I know better, this question is in no way meant to start comparisons between different programming languages to decide which is better / worse. Also, I am not interested in a comparison of OOP versus FP (pros and cons). The point I am interested in is to understand why FP is being introduced one bit at a time into existing languages that were not designed for it even though there exist languages that were / are specifically designed to support FP.

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• LINQ and ordering of the result set

  - by vik20000in

  After filtering and retrieving the records most of the time (if not always) we have to sort the record in certain order. The sort order is very important for displaying records or major calculations. In LINQ for sorting data the order keyword is used. With the help of the order keyword we can decide on the ordering of the result set that is retrieved after the query.  Below is an simple example of the order keyword in LINQ.     string[] words = { "cherry", "apple", "blueberry" };     var sortedWords =         from word in words         orderby word         select word; Here we are ordering the data retrieved based on the string ordering. If required the order can also be made on any of the property of the individual like the length of the string.     var sortedWords =         from word in words         orderby word.Length         select word; You can also make the order descending or ascending by adding the keyword after the parameter.     var sortedWords =         from word in words         orderby word descending         select word; But the best part of the order clause is that instead of just passing a field you can also pass the order clause an instance of any class that implements IComparer interface. The IComparer interface holds a method Compare that Has to be implemented. In that method we can write any logic whatsoever for the comparision. In the below example we are making a string comparison by ignoring the case. string[] words = { "aPPLE", "AbAcUs", "bRaNcH", "BlUeBeRrY", "cHeRry"}; var sortedWords = words.OrderBy(a => a, new CaseInsensitiveComparer());  public class CaseInsensitiveComparer : IComparer<string> {     public int Compare(string x, string y)     {         return string.Compare(x, y, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase);     } }  But while sorting the data many a times we want to provide more than one sort so that data is sorted based on more than one condition. This can be achieved by proving the next order followed by a comma.     var sortedWords =         from word in words         orderby word , word.length         select word; We can also use the reverse() method to reverse the full order of the result set.     var sortedWords =         from word in words         select word.Reverse();                                 Vikram

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• Java Developer Days India Trip Report

  - by reza_rahman

  You are probably aware of Oracle's decision to discontinue the relatively resource intensive regional JavaOnes in favor of more Java Developer Days, virtual events and deeper involvement with independent conferences. In comparison to the regional JavaOnes, Java Developer Days are smaller, shorter (typically one full day), more focused (mostly Oracle speakers/topics) and more local (targeting cities). For those who have been around the Java ecosystem for a few years, they are basically the current incarnation of the highly popular and developer centric Sun Tech Days. October 21st through October 25th I spoke at Java Developer Days India. This was basically three separate but identical events in the cities of Pune (October 21st), Chennai (October 24th) and Bangalore (October 25th). For those with some familiarity with India, other than Hyderabad these cities are India's IT powerhouses. The events were basically focused on Java EE. I delivered five of the sessions (yes, you read that right), while my friend NetBeans Group Product Manager Ashwin Rao delivered three talks. Jagadish Ramu from the GlassFish team India helped me out in Bangalore by delivering two sessions. It was also a pleasure to introduce my co-contributor to the Cargo Tracker Java EE Blue Prints project Vijay Nair at Bangalore during the opening talk. I thought it was a great dynamic between Ashwin and I flipping between talking about the new features and demoing live code in NetBeans. The following were my sessions (source PDF and abstracts posted as usual on my SlideShare account): JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond Building Java HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 What’s New in Java Message Service 2 JAX-RS 2: New and Noteworthy in the RESTful Web Services API Using NoSQL with JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE The event went well and was packed in all three cities. The Q&A was great and Indian developers were particularly generous with kind words :-). It seemed the event and our presence was appreciated in the truest sense which I must say is a rarity. The events were exhausting but very rewarding at the same time. As hectic as the three city trip was I tried to see at least some of the major sights (mostly at night) since this was my very first time to India. I think the slideshow below is a good representation of the riddle wrapped up in an enigma that is India (and the rest of the Indian sub-continent for that matter): Ironically enough what struck me the most during this trip is the woman pictured below - Shushma. My chauffeur, tour guide and friend for a day, she fluidly navigated the madness that is Mumbai traffic with skills that would make Evel Knievel blush while simultaneously pointing out sights and prompting me to take pictures (Mumbai was my stopover and gateway to/from India). In some ways she is probably the most potent symbol of the new India. When we parted ways I told her she should take solace in the fact she has won mostly without a fight a potentially hazardous battle her sisters across the Arabian sea are still fighting. I'm not sure she entirely understood the significance of what I told her. I hope that she did. I also had occasion to take a pretty cool local bus ride from Chennai to Bangalore instead of yet another boring flight. All in all I really enjoyed the trip to India and hope to return again soon. Jai Hind :-)!

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• Why your Netapp is so slow...

  - by Darius Zanganeh

  Have you ever wondered why your Netapp FAS box is slow and doesn't perform well at large block workloads?  In this blog entry I will give you a little bit of information that will probably help you understand why it’s so slow, why you shouldn't use it for applications that read and write in large blocks like 64k, 128k, 256k ++ etc..  Of course since I work for Oracle at this time, I will show you why the ZS3 storage boxes are excellent choices for these types of workloads. Netapp’s Fundamental Problem The fundamental problem you have running these workloads on Netapp is the backend block size of their WAFL file system.  Every application block on a Netapp FAS ends up in a 4k chunk on a disk. Reference:  Netapp TR-3001 Whitepaper Netapp has proven this lacking large block performance fact in at least two different ways. They have NEVER posted an SPC-2 Benchmark yet they have posted SPC-1 and SPECSFS, both recently. In 2011 they purchased Engenio to try and fill this GAP in their portfolio. Block Size Matters So why does block size matter anyways?  Many applications use large block chunks of data especially in the Big Data movement.  Some examples are SAS Business Analytics, Microsoft SQL, Hadoop HDFS is even 64MB! Now let me boil this down for you.  If an application such MS SQL is writing data in a 64k chunk then before Netapp actually writes it on disk it will have to split it into 16 different 4k writes and 16 different disk IOPS.  When the application later goes to read that 64k chunk the Netapp will have to again do 16 different disk IOPS.  In comparison the ZS3 Storage Appliance can write in variable block sizes ranging from 512b to 1MB.  So if you put the same MSSQL database on a ZS3 you can set the specific LUNs for this database to 64k and then when you do an application read/write it requires only a single disk IO.  That is 16x faster!  But, back to the problem with your Netapp, you will VERY quickly run out of disk IO and hit a wall.  Now all arrays will have some fancy pre fetch algorithm and some nice cache and maybe even flash based cache such as a PAM card in your Netapp but with large block workloads you will usually blow through the cache and still need significant disk IO.  Also because these datasets are usually very large and usually not dedupable they are usually not good candidates for an all flash system.  You can do some simple math in excel and very quickly you will see why it matters.  Here are a couple of READ examples using SAS and MSSQL.  Assume these are the READ IOPS the application needs even after all the fancy cache and algorithms.   Here is an example with 128k blocks.  Notice the numbers of drives on the Netapp! Here is an example with 64k blocks You can easily see that the Oracle ZS3 can do dramatically more work with dramatically less drives.  This doesn't even take into account that the ONTAP system will likely run out of CPU way before you get to these drive numbers so you be buying many more controllers.  So with all that said, lets look at the ZS3 and why you should consider it for any workload your running on Netapp today.  ZS3 World Record Price/Performance in the SPC-2 benchmark ZS3-2 is #1 in Price Performance $12.08ZS3-2 is #3 in Overall Performance 16,212 MBPS Note: The number one overall spot in the world is held by an AFA 33,477 MBPS but at a Price Performance of $29.79.  A customer could purchase 2 x ZS3-2 systems in the benchmark with relatively the same performance and walk away with $600,000 in their pocket.

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• Thinktecture.IdentityModel: Comparing Strings without leaking Timinig Information

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  Paul Hill commented on a recent post where I was comparing HMACSHA256 signatures. In a nutshell his complaint was that I am leaking timing information while doing so – or in other words, my code returned faster with wrong (or partially wrong) signatures than with the correct signature. This can be potentially used for timing attacks like this one. I think he got a point here, especially in the era of cloud computing where you can potentially run attack code on the same physical machine as your target to do high resolution timing analysis (see here for an example). It turns out that it is not that easy to write a time-constant string comparer due to all sort of (unexpected) clever optimization mechanisms in the CLR. With the help and feedback of Paul and Shawn I came up with this: Structure the code in a way that the CLR will not try to optimize it In addition turn off optimization (just in case a future version will come up with new optimization methods) Add a random sleep when the comparison fails (using Shawn’s and Stephen’s nice Random wrapper for RNGCryptoServiceProvider). You can find the full code in the Thinktecture.IdentityModel download. [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoOptimization)] public static bool IsEqual(string s1, string s2) {     if (s1 == null && s2 == null)     {         return true;     }       if (s1 == null || s2 == null)     {         return false;     }       if (s1.Length != s2.Length)     {         return false;     }       var s1chars = s1.ToCharArray();     var s2chars = s2.ToCharArray();       int hits = 0;     for (int i = 0; i < s1.Length; i++)     {         if (s1chars[i].Equals(s2chars[i]))         {             hits += 2;         }         else         {             hits += 1;         }     }       bool same = (hits == s1.Length * 2);       if (!same)     {         var rnd = new CryptoRandom();         Thread.Sleep(rnd.Next(0, 10));     }       return same; }

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• Personal Technology – Excel Tip: Comparing Excel Files

  - by Pinal Dave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versionsfrom SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. I have been writing about Excel Tips over my blog and thought it would be great to share one interesting tips here as a guest blog here. Assume a situation where you want to compare multiple excel files. Here is a typical scenario I have encountered as a common activity. Assume you are sending an Excel file with tons of data, formulae and multiple sheets. Now you are requesting your colleague to validate the file and if required change content for correctness. After receiving the file from your colleague, now you want to know what changes were made by this person to your document. Now here is a cool new addition to Excel 2013 that can help you achieve this task. To get to this option, click the INQUIRE Tab. Incase you don’t have the INQUIRE Tab, check Options using INQUIRE blog. In that post, we discuss all the other options of INQUIRE tab. Once you are on the INQUIRE Tab, select “Compare Files” button as shown in the figure above. This brings a dialog as below. If you are on Windows 8 or Windows 7 OS, search for an application called “Spreadsheet Compare 2013”. Ultimately both the options lead us to the same application. If you are using the stand alone app, once the App initializes, click the “Compare files” options from the toolbar. Make sure to give two different Excel files as shown in the figure above. After selecting the Excel Sheets, you can see the Compare tool has a number of other options to play from. We will talk about some of them later in this post. Just below our toolbar is a colorful side-by-side comparison of both our excel sheets. We can also see the various Tab’s from each file. There is a meaning for each of our color coding which will be discussed next. As you saw above, the color coding has a meaning. For example the bottom pane lists each of the color coding and most importantly each of the changes as compared side-by-side. The detailed information shown below can be exported using the “Export Results” options from the toolbar as a separate Excel Workbook or can be copied to clipboard to be used later. The final piece of the puzzle is to show a graphical view of these differences results based on each category. We cannot drill down per se, but this is a great way to know that the maximum changes seem to be based on “Cell Formats” and then few “Calculated Values” have changed. The INQUIRE option and Spreadsheet Compare 2013 tool is part of Excel 2013. So as you explore using the new version of Excel, there are many such hidden features that are worth exploring. Do let us know if you enjoyed learning a new feature today and I hope you will play around with this feature in your day-today challenges when working with Excel files. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Excel, Personal Technology

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• MIXing it Up a Bit

  - by andrewbrust

  Another March, another MIX.  For the fifth year running now, Microsoft has chosen to put on a conference aimed less at software development, per se, and more at the products, experiences and designs that software development can generate.  In all four prior MIX events, the focus of the show, its keynotes and breakout sessions has been on Web products.  On day 1 of MIX 2010 that focus shifted to Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7). What little we had seen of WP7 had been shown to us in a keynote presentation, given by Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last month.  And today, Mr. Belfiore reprised his showmanship for the MIX 2010 audience.  Joe showed us the ins and outs of WP7 and, in a breakout session, even gave us a sneak peek of Office (specifically, Excel) on WP7.  We didn’t get to see that one month ago in Barcelona, nor did get to see email messages opened for reading, which we saw today. But beyond a tour of the phone itself, impressive though that is, we got to see apps running on it.  Those apps included Associated Press news, Seesmic (a major Twitter client) and Foursquare (a social media darling).  All three ran, ran well, and looked markedly different and better from their corresponding versions on iPhone and Android.  And the games we saw looked even better. To me though, the best demos involved the creation of WP7 apps, using Silverlight in Visual Studio and Expression Blend.  These demos were so effective because they showed important apps being built in very few steps, and by Microsoft executives to boot.  Scott Guthrie showed us how to build a Twitter API app in Visual Strudio.   Jon Harris showed us how to build a photo management and viewer application in Expression Blend, using virtually no code.  Demos of apps built from scratch to F5 without the benefit of a teacher, could be challenging.  But they went off fine, without a hitch and without a ton of opaque, generated code.  Everything written, be it C# or XAML, was easily understood, and the results were impressive. That means lots of developers can do this, and I think it means a lot will.  What I’ve seen, thus far, of iPhone and Android development looks very tedious by comparison.  Development for those platforms involve a collection of tools that integrate only to a point.  Dev work for WP7 involves use of Visual Studio, Silverlight and the same debugging experience .NET developers already know.  This was very exciting for me. All the demos harkened back to days of building apps for with Visual Basic…design the front-end, put in code-behind and then hit F5.  And that makes sense, because the phone platform, and the PC of the early 90s are both, essentially, client OS machines.  The Web was minimal and the “device” was everything. Same is true of this phone.  It’s a client app contraption that fits in your pocket. And if the platforms are comparable, hopefully so too will be the draw of ease-of-development.   WP7 has the potential to make mobile developers want to switch over, and to convince enterprise developers to get into the phone scene.  Will this propel the new phone platform to new heights, and restore Microsoft’s competiveness in the mobile arena? I hope so.  I think so.  And if Microsoft uses developers to build themselves a victory, that would be beneficial and would show that Microsoft has learned from its failures, as well as its successes.  Today I saw a few beautiful apps.  Tomorrow I hope I see a slew of others; maybe not as polished, but plentiful, attractive and stable.  That would be a victory for Microsoft, and for developers.  And it would show everyone else that developers are the kingmakers.  They need cheap, efficient dev tools and lots of respect.  Microsoft has always been the company to provide that.  Hopefully, with WP7, they will return to that persona and see how very timeless it is.

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• My Take on Hadoop World 2011

  - by Jean-Pierre Dijcks

  I’m sure some of you have read pieces about Hadoop World and I did see some headlines which were somewhat, shall we say, interesting? I thought the keynote by Larry Feinsmith of JP Morgan Chase & Co was one of the highlights of the conference for me. The reason was very simple, he addressed some real use cases outside of internet and ad platforms. The following are my notes, since the keynote was recorded I presume you can go and look at Hadoopworld.com at some point… On the use cases that were mentioned: ETL – how can I do complex data transformation at scale Doing Basel III liquidity analysis Private banking – transaction filtering to feed [relational] data marts Common Data Platform – a place to keep data that is (or will be) valuable some day, to someone, somewhere 360 Degree view of customers – become pro-active and look at events across lines of business. For example make sure the mortgage folks know about direct deposits being stopped into an account and ensure the bank is pro-active to service the customer Treasury and Security – Global Payment Hub [I think this is really consolidation of data to cross reference activity across business and geographies] Data Mining Bypass data engineering [I interpret this as running a lot of a large data set rather than on samples] Fraud prevention – work on event triggers, say a number of failed log-ins to the website. When they occur grab web logs, firewall logs and rules and start to figure out who is trying to log in. Is this me, who forget his password, or is it someone in some other country trying to guess passwords Trade quality analysis – do a batch analysis or all trades done and run them through an analysis or comparison pipeline One of the key requests – if you can say it like that – was for vendors and entrepreneurs to make sure that new tools work with existing tools. JPMC has a large footprint of BI Tools and Big Data reporting and tools should work with those tools, rather than be separate. Security and Entitlement – how to protect data within a large cluster from unwanted snooping was another topic that came up. I thought his Elephant ears graph was interesting (couldn’t actually read the points on it, but the concept certainly made some sense) and it was interesting – when asked to show hands – how the audience did not (!) think that RDBMS and Hadoop technology would overlap completely within a few years. Another interesting session was the session from Disney discussing how Disney is building a DaaS (Data as a Service) platform and how Hadoop processing capabilities are mixed with Database technologies. I thought this one of the best sessions I have seen in a long time. It discussed real use case, where problems existed, how they were solved and how Disney planned some of it. The planning focused on three things/phases: Determine the Strategy – Design a platform and evangelize this within the organization Focus on the people – Hire key people, grow and train the staff (and do not overload what you have with new things on top of their day-to-day job), leverage a partner with experience Work on Execution of the strategy – Implement the platform Hadoop next to the other technologies and work toward the DaaS platform This kind of fitted with some of the Linked-In comments, best summarized in “Think Platform – Think Hadoop”. In other words [my interpretation], step back and engineer a platform (like DaaS in the Disney example), then layer the rest of the solutions on top of this platform. One general observation, I got the impression that we have knowledge gaps left and right. On the one hand are people looking for more information and details on the Hadoop tools and languages. On the other I got the impression that the capabilities of today’s relational databases are underestimated. Mostly in terms of data volumes and parallel processing capabilities or things like commodity hardware scale-out models. All in all I liked this conference, it was great to chat with a wide range of people on Oracle big data, on big data, on use cases and all sorts of other stuff. Just hope they get a set of bigger rooms next time… and yes, I hope I’m going to be back next year!

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