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• Retrieve Records from paypal csv file

  - by Pankaj Khurana

  Hi, I want to retrieve all the records from paypal csv file where type='Payment Processed' and store it in a database table.It should be available in the following format: 'Heading':'Value' The format of the csv is: "Transaction ID","Reference Transaction ID","Date","Type","Subject","Item Number","Item Name","Invoice ID","Name","Email","Shipping Name","Shipping Address Line 1","Shipping Address Line 2","Shipping Address City","Shipping State/Province","Shipping Zip/Postal Code","Shipping Address Country","Shipping Method","Address Status","Contact Phone Number","Gross Amount","Receipt ID","Custom Field","Option 1 Name","Option 1 Value","Option 2 Name","Option 2 Value","Note","Auction Site","Auction User ID","Item URL","Auction Closing Date","Insurance Amount","Currency","Fees","Net Amount","Shipping & Handling Amount","Sales Tax Amount","To Email","Time","Time Zone" "1T","",5/5/2010 2:10:44 PM,"Payment Processed","CFP Self Study Kit","1","CFP Self Study Kit","","User1","[email protected]","","","","","","","","","N","","68.18","R1","","","","","","","","","",,"","USD","-2.62","65.56","0","0","[email protected]","01:40","Asia/Calcutta" "2T","",5/19/2010 4:04:08 PM,"Payment Processed","CFP Self Study Kit","1","CFP Self Study Kit","","User2","[email protected]","","","","","","","","","N","","68.18","R2","","","","","","","","","",,"","USD","-2.62","65.56","0","0","[email protected]","03:34","Asia/Calcutta" "3T","1RT",5/19/2010 5:28:45 PM,"Currency Conversion Completed","","","",""," ","","","","","","","","","","N","","17492.6","","","","","","","","","","",,"","INR","0","17492.6","0","0","","04:58","Asia/Calcutta" "4T","2RT",5/19/2010 5:28:45 PM,"Currency Conversion Completed","","","",""," ","","","","","","","","","","N","","-393.36","","","","","","","","","","",,"","USD","0","-393.36","0","0","","04:58","Asia/Calcutta" "5T","",5/19/2010 5:28:45 PM,"Transfer to Bank Initiated","P1006","","P1006",""," ","","","","","","","","","","N","","-17492.6","","","","","","","","","","",,"","INR","0","-17492.6","0","0","","04:58","Asia/Calcutta" "6T","",5/20/2010 5:38:02 PM,"Transfer to Bank Completed","P1006","","P1006",""," ","","","","","","","","","","N","","-17492.6","","","","","","","","","","",,"","INR","0","-17492.6","0","0","","05:08","Asia/Calcutta" "7T","",5/21/2010 12:32:37 PM,"Payment Processed","FP - LVC Plus","","FP - LVC Plus","","User3","[email protected]","User3","NEW DELHI","BEHIND KARNATAKA BANK LD","SOUTH","NEW DELHI","110023","IN","","N","","283.96","","","","","","","","","","",,"","USD","-9.95","274.01","0","0","[email protected]","00:02","Asia/Calcutta" "8T","",5/25/2010 4:40:48 PM,"Transfer to Bank Initiated","P1006","","P1006",""," ","","","","","","","","","","N","","-12569.85","","","","","","","","","","",,"","INR","0","-12569.85","0","0","","04:10","Asia/Calcutta" "9T","3RT",5/25/2010 4:40:48 PM,"Currency Conversion Completed","","","",""," ","","","","","","","","","","N","","-274.01","","","","","","","","","","",,"","USD","0","-274.01","0","0","","04:10","Asia/Calcutta" "10T","4RT",5/25/2010 4:40:48 PM,"Currency Conversion Completed","","","",""," ","","","","","","","","","","N","","12569.85","","","","","","","","","","",,"","INR","0","12569.85","0","0","","04:10","Asia/Calcutta" "11T","",5/26/2010 4:57:39 PM,"Transfer to Bank Completed","P1006","","P1006",""," ","","","","","","","","","","N","","-12569.85","","","","","","","","","","",,"","INR","0","-12569.85","0","0","","04:27","Asia/Calcutta" "Total","-247.05 USD","-15.19","-262.24" "Total","0.00 INR","0.00","0.00" Please help me on this Thanks

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• Will Apple bundle the Mono Touch runtime with every iPhone?

  - by Zoran Simic

  It strikes me as a good idea for Apple to negotiate with Novell and bundle the Mono Touch runtime (only the runtime of course) into every iPhone and iPod Touch. Perhaps even make it a "one time install" that automatically gets downloaded from the App Store the first time one downloads an app build with Mono Touch, making every subsequent Mono Touch app much lighter to download (without the runtime). Doing so would be similar in a way to adding Bootcamp to OS X: it would make it easier for C# developers to join the party, but that wouldn't mean these developers will all stick to C#... What convinced me to buy a Mac is Bootcamp - I figured I could always install Windows if I didn't like OS X (and I liked the hardware, so no problem there). 6 months later, I'm using OS X full time... Would there be any technical issues in doing so? I see only advantages for all parties, not one disadvantage to anyone (except maybe for the few unfortunate Apple employees who would have to test the crap out of the Mono Touch runtime before bundling it): Novell wins because Mono Touch becomes much more viable (Mono Touch apps become much lighter all of the sudden) Developers win because now there's one more tool in the tool belt Many C# Developers would be very interested by this Apple wins because that would bring even more attention to the platform, more revenue in developer fees, more potential great apps, etc Users win because less space is used by different Apps having copies of the same runtime accumulating on their devices Would there be a major technical obstacle in bundling Mono Touch to iPhone OS? Edit: Changed the title from "Should" to "Will Apple bundle the runtime?", I think the consensus on predicting that means a lot to those considering going with Mono Touch.

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• Looking for a web based, embeddable file manager

  - by Kristi H.

  I'm looking for a web based, embeddable file manager. I haven't found anything suitable through Google or the Stack Overflow archives. Does anyone know of a file manager that meets the following criteria? The file manager must… …be embeddable (e.g. Flash or a Java applet) …run from my server (no storing uploads in a remote location) …be licensed for business use (fees are okay) …let me disable uploads. Users shouldn't be able to upload files, only download them …allow me to tag files and/or place them in folders …let me disable authentication or handle it from the backend. My app already has a login system and I don't want to make users log in twice …allow users to select and download multiple files …have an attractive interface The file manager should… …have an external config file …display thumbnail previews for files …be skinnable …be actively developed or at least actively maintained Thanks for your help. I need a sophisticated file manager and I'd like to avoid writing it from scratch.

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• Access report not showing data

  - by Brian Smith

  I have two queries that I am using to generate a report from, the problem is when I run the report, three fields do not show any data at all for some reason. Query 1: SELECT ClientSummary.Field3 AS PM, ClientSummary.[Client Nickname 2] AS [Project #], ClientSummary.[Client Nickname 1] AS Customer, ClientSummary.[In Reference To] AS [Job Name], ClientSummary.Field10 AS Contract, (select sum([Billable Slip Value]) from Util_bydate as U1 where U1.[Client Nickname 2] = ClientSummary.[Client Nickname 2]) AS [This Week], (select sum([Billable Slip Value]) from Util as U2 where U2.[Client Nickname 2] = ClientSummary.[Client Nickname 2] ) AS [To Date], [To Date]/[Contract] AS [% Spent], 0 AS Backlog, ClientSummary.[Total Slip Fees & Costs] AS Billed, ClientSummary.Payments AS Paid, ClientSummary.[Total A/R] AS Receivable, [Forms]![ReportMenu]![StartDate] AS [Start Date], [Forms]![ReportMenu]![EndDate] AS [End Date] FROM ClientSummary; Query 2: SELECT JobManagement_Summary.pm, JobManagement_Summary.[project #], JobManagement_Summary.Customer, JobManagement_Summary.[Job Name], JobManagement_Summary.Contract, IIf(IsNull([This Week]),0,[This Week]) AS [N_This Week], IIf(IsNull([To Date]),0,[To Date]) AS [N_To Date], [% Spent], JobManagement_Summary.Backlog, JobManagement_Summary.Billed, JobManagement_Summary.Paid, JobManagement_Summary.Receivable, JobManagement_Summary.[Start Date], JobManagement_Summary.[End Date] FROM JobManagement_Summary; When I run the report from query 2 these 3 fields don't appear. N_This Week, N_To Date and % Spent. All have no data. It isn't the IIF functions, as it doesn't matter if I have those in there or remove them. Any thoughts? If I connect directly to the first recordset it works fine, but then SQL throws the error message: Multi-level GROUP BY cause not allowed in subquery. Is there any way to get around that message to link to it directly or does anyone have ANY clue why these fields are coming back blank? I am at wits end here!

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• Which database I can used and relationship in it ??

  - by mimo-hamad

  My projece make me confused which I didn't find clear things that make me understand the required database and the relationships in it So, would a super one help me to solve it ?!! ;D this is required: 1) Model the data stored in the database (Identify the entities, roles, relationships, constraints, etc.) 2) Write the Oracle commands to create the database, find appropriate data, and populate the database 3) Write five different queries on your database, using the SELECT/FROM/WHERE construct provided in SQL. Your five queries should illustrate several different aspects of database querying, such as: a. Queries over more than one relation (by listing more than one relation in the FROM clause) b. Queries involving aggregate functions, such as SUM, COUNT, and AVG c. Queries involving complicated selects and joins d. Queries involving GROUP BY, HAVING or other similar functions. e. Queries that require the use of the DISTINCT keyword. And this the condition that we need to determine it to solve the required Q's above : 5) It is desired to develop an Internet membership club to buy products at special prices online. To join, new members must be referred by another existing member of the club. The system will keep the following information for each member: The member ID, referring member, birth date, member name, address, phone, mobile, credit card type, number and expiration date. The items are always shipped to the member's address noted in the membership application. The shipping fees will differ for each order.For each item to be requested, the member will select an item from a long list of possible items. For each item in the database, we store an item ID, an item name, description, and list price. The list price will be different from the actual sale price. The available quantity and the back-ordered quantity (the back-ordered quantity is the quantity on-order by the club from its suppliers) is also noted

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• looking to streamline my RSS feed mashup

  - by Mark Cejas

  Hello crafty developers, I have aggregated RSS feeds from various sources with RSSowl, fetching directly from the social mention API. The RSS feeds are categorized into the following major categories: blogs, news, twitter, Q&A and social networking sites. Each major category is nested with a common group of RSS feeds that represent a particular client/brand ontology. Merging these feeds into the RSSowl reader application, allows me to conduct and save refined search queries (from the aggregated data) into a single file - that I can then tag and further segment for analysis. This scheme is utilized for my own research needs and has helped me considerably. However, I find this RSS mashup scheme kinda clumsy, it requires quite a bit of time to initially organize all of the feeds and I would like to be able to do further natural language processing to the data as well as eventually be able to rank the collected list of URL's into some order of media prominence - right I don't want to pay the ridiculous radian6 web analytics fees, when my intuition is telling me that with a bit of 'elbow grease' I can maybe leverage some available resources online to develop a functional low scale web mining application and get some good intelligence from it. I am now starting to learn a little about computer science - my background is in physical science/statistics so is my thinking in the right track? So, I guess I am imagining an application that allows me to query in a refined manner. A manner that allows me to search for keyword combinations, applying AND/OR operators, selectively focus my queries into particular sources - like a collection of blogs or twitter, or social networking communities, then save the results of my queries into a structured format that can then be manipulated and explored. Am I dreaming? I just had to get all of this out. any bit of advice and insight would be hugely appreciated. my best, Mark

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• Why is this MySQL INSERT INTO running twice?

  - by stuboo

  I'm attempting to use the mysql insert statement below to add information to a database table. When I execute the script, however, the insert statement is run twice. Here's the URL mysite.com/save.php?Body=p220,c180 Thanks in advance. <?php //tipping fees application require('base.inc.php'); require('functions.inc.php'); // connect to the database & save this message there try { $dbh = new PDO("mysql:host=$dbhost;dbname=$dbname", $dbuser, $dbpass); //$number = formatPhone($_REQUEST['From']); //if($number != 'xxx-xxx-xxxx'){die('SMS from unknown number');} // kill this if from anyone but mike $message = $_REQUEST['Body']; //$Sid = $_REQUEST['SmsSid']; $now = time(); echo $message; $message = explode(",",$message); echo '<pre>'; print_r($message); echo 'message count = '.count($message); echo '</pre>'; $i = 0; $j = count($message); while($i<$j){ $quantity =$message[$i]; $material = substr($quantity, 0, 1); $amount = substr($quantity, 1); switch ($material) { case 'p': $m = "paper"; break; case 'c': $m = "containers"; break; default: $m = "other"; } $count = $dbh->exec("INSERT INTO tippingtotals(sid,time,material,weight) VALUES('$i+$j','$now','$m','$amount')"); echo $count; echo '<br />'; $i++; } //close the database connection $dbh = null; } catch(PDOException $e) { echo $e->getMessage(); } ?>

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• Are there any less costly alternatives to Amazon's Relational Database Services (RDS)?

  - by swapnonil

  Hi All, I have the following requirement. I have with me a database containing the contact and address details of at least 2000 members of my school alumni organization. We want to store all that information in a relation model so that This data can be created and edited on demand. This data is always backed up and should be simple to restore in case the master copy becomes unusable. All sensitive personal information residing in this database is guaranteed to be available only to authorized users. This database won't be online in the first 6 months. It will become online only after a website is built on top of it. I am not a DBA and I don't want to spend time doing things like backups. I thought Amazon's RDS with it's automatic backup facility was the perfect solution for our needs. The only problem is that being a voluntary organization we cannot spare the monthly $100 to $150 fees this service demands. So my question is, are there any less costlier alternatives to Amazon's RDS?

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• Are there any less costlier alternatives to Amazon's Relational Database Services (RDS)?

  - by swapnonil

  Hi All, I have the following requirement. I have with me a database containing the contact and address details of at least 2000 members of my school alumni organization. We want to store all that information in a relation model so that This data can be created and edited on demand. This data is always backed up and should be simple to restore in case the master copy becomes unusable. All sensitive personal information residing in this database is guaranteed to be available only to authorized users. This database won't be online in the first 6 months. It will become online only after a website is built on top of it. I am not a DBA and I don't want to spend time doing things like backups. I thought Amazon's RDS with it's automatic backup facility was the perfect solution for our needs. The only problem is that being a voluntary organization we cannot spare the monthly $100 to $150 fees this service demands. So my question is, are there any less costlier alternatives to Amazon's RDS?

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• Anything like Heroku for PHP or .NET?

  - by Wayne M

  In my area PHP is very widespread, so is .NET. Ruby not so much; most places have never heard of it. For some personal things I am "forced" to choose Rails because I want to take advantage of Heroku - the ability to deploy and scale on the cloud very easily is the main reason. Also, they offer a small FREE plan that I can use for demo sites or, in this case, for my business' static page; as a totally bootstrapped startup I have maybe $50 or so in initial capital and cannot afford to pay monthly fees while I'm getting started. Are there any similar offerings for other languages? Specifically, I really like the small, 5MB site for free that Heroku offers - is there anything like that for PHP and/or .NET? I'm not even that concerned about the "cloud" part, but that would be a nice bonus. If there is, I might be able to kill two birds with one stone and pick up a useful skill as I'm doing my own thing instead of using something that nobody else knows or cares about. I should add I'm specifically interested in something that offers a free plan. As I said, Heroku has a 5mb plan that you can have as many as you want for free; I have yet to find anything similar for any other platform, and to be honest I'm not too thrilled about using Ruby on Rails for everything simply to take advantage of this.

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• Options for organizing android app with multiple independent apps

  - by lazyguy

  Problem Definition: We have a fairly large app which has multiple use cases such that they are all independent of each other. For example lets say we have a1, a2, a3 & a4 modules that are independent apps or use cases for our main app 'A'. The independent a1, a2, a3, a4 are all purchasable apps such that the user goes to our website instead of play store and activate either a1 or a2 by paying some fees on our website. So basically App 'A' is a free app in play-store and is sort of Dashboard with buttons to launch a1, a2, a3, a4. When the user click on lets say a1 button then we will check if a1 is already installed and launch it but if it is not present then give the user a link to download it. Option 1: Have a main app 'A' and a1, a2, a3, a4 as library project. But with this approach the main app A is too big in size. Option 2: Have a1, a2, a3, a4 build as separate .apk and then put in the assets folder of main app 'A' and then install them as needed. Again size of main app A is bigger. Option 3: Upload a1, a2, a3, a4 to a third party website or play store and download from it as needed. This way the main app remains lighter. Observation: In all these approaches there will be an independent app installed with its own icon on users phone. So basically user can launch from either the Dashboard (which will eventually launch an intent from Activity in a1 app) or user can directly launch app a1. Follow-up Question: Is there any other solution that anyone can suggest to tackle this kind of problem? Another things is by going this approach app a1, a2, a3, a4 can be developed & tested independently of each other.

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• mysql join with conditional

  - by Conor H

  Hi There, I am currently working on a MySQL query that contains a table: TBL:lesson_fee -fee_type_id (PRI) -lesson_type_id (PRI) -lesson_fee_amount this table contains the fees for a particular 'lesson type' and there are different 'fee names' (fee_type). Which means that there can be many entries in this table for one 'lesson type' In my query I am joining this table onto the rest of the query via the 'lesson_type' table using: lesson_fee INNER JOIN (other joins here) ON lesson_fee.lesson_type_id = lesson_type.lesson_type_id The problem with this is that it is currently returning duplicate data in the result. 1 row for every duplicate entry in the 'lesson fee' table. I am also joining the 'fee type' table using this 'fee_type_id' Is there a way of telling MySQL to say "Join the lesson_fee table rows that have lesson_fee.lesson_type_id and fee_type_id = client.fee_type_id". UPDATE: Query: SELECT lesson_booking.lesson_booking_id,lesson_fee.lesson_fee_amount FROM fee_type INNER JOIN (lesson_fee INNER JOIN (color_code INNER JOIN (employee INNER JOIN (horse_owned INNER JOIN (lesson_type INNER JOIN (timetable INNER JOIN (lesson_booking INNER JOIN CLIENT ON client.client_id = lesson_booking.client_id) ON lesson_booking.timetable_id = timetable.timetable_id) ON lesson_type.lesson_type_id = timetable.lesson_type_id) ON horse_owned.horse_owned_id = lesson_booking.horse_owned_id) ON employee.employee_id = timetable.employee_id) ON employee.color_code_id = color_code.color_code_id) ON lesson_fee.lesson_type_id = lesson_type.lesson_type_id) ON lesson_fee.fee_type_id = client.fee_type_id WHERE booking_date = '2010-04-06' ORDER BY lesson_booking_id ASC How do I keep the format(indentation) of my query?

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• What would be a good Database strategy to manage these two product options?

  - by bemused

  I have a site that allows users to purchase "items" (imagine it as an Advertisement, or a download). There are 2 ways to purchase. Either a subscription, 70 items within 1 month (use them or lose them--at the end of the month your count is 0) or purchase each item individually as you need it. So the user could subscribe and get 70/month or pay for 10 and use them when they want until the 10 are gone. Maybe it's the late hour, but I can't isolate a solution I like and thought some users here would surely have stumbled upon something similar. One I can imagine is webhosts. They sell hosting for monthy fees and sell counts of things like you get 5 free domains with our reseller account. or something like a movie download site, you can subscribe and get 100 movies each month, or pay for a one-time package of 10 movies. so is this a web of tables and where would be a good cross between the product a user has purchased and how many they have left? products productID, productType=subscription, consumable, subscription&consumable subscriptions SubscriptionID, subscriptionStartDate, subscriptionEndDate, consumables consumableID, consumableName UserProducts userID,productID,productType ,consumptionLimit,consumedCount (if subscription check against dates), otherwise just check that consumedCount is < than limit. Usually I can layout my data in a way that I know it will work the way I expect, but this one feels a little questionable to me. Like there is a hidden detail that is going to creep up later. That's why I decided to ask for help if someone in the vast expanse can enlighten me with their wisdom and experience and clue me in to a satisfying strategy. Thank you.

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• Where to get laptop replacement parts?

  - by wai

  I am sure some of us have older laptops that still works but just one or two parts started not working very well. However, to send it back to the manufacturer for repair might not be worth the money (as some of them even charge consultation fees just to have it checked) as these old laptops are most probably well beyond warranty. Replacing these one or two parts could give your laptop a new lease of life. For example, I have a Dell Inspiron 640m which the fan recently failed. Everything else still works. I know enough to open up the laptop (after reading the service manual) and put it back together again, hence a replacement fan could save it. However, finding these parts turned out to be difficult. I guess I wouldn't be able to get it from Dell since I have been searching around the Dell forums and concluded if I were going to get Dell to at least talk to me, I would have to pay some money (since my warranty expired). I found this online:- http://www.parts-people.com/index.php?action=item&id=3725 However, as I don't live in the United States, shipping alone would cost me 3 times more than the part in question. In addition, if there's a problem, it would be difficult because I probably would have to mail the parts back (costing more money). One of my friend spilled water on her Macbook, she sent it back to Apple and they told her the cost of repairing it exceeds that of buying a new Macbook. They probably have to change everything except the LCD screen. I opened it up and found that most of the parts are still working, only the RAM had fried. Replaced it and it's working again. For some time before discovering only the RAM fried, I was toying with the idea of replacing the logic board myself but looks like I didn't have to. =) Now I know there's a site for Macbooks used replacement parts:- http://www.ifixit.com/ The question is, does anyone know where to get replacement parts at their own locality? It might benefit the community as a whole. Someone might know a local computer store that sells precisely just the things we needed (for now, I hope to find a shop that sells just the fan). If you own a laptop which you had an easy experience finding the replacement parts, do post that as well. PS: I wish laptop manufacturers have outlets where they sell these replacement parts (or at least let you place an order).

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• Where to get laptop replacement parts?

  - by wai

  I am sure some of us have older laptops that still works but just one or two parts started not working very well. However, to send it back to the manufacturer for repair might not be worth the money (as some of them even charge consultation fees just to have it checked) as these old laptops are most probably well beyond warranty. Replacing these one or two parts could give your laptop a new lease of life. For example, I have a Dell Inspiron 640m which the fan recently failed. Everything else still works. I know enough to open up the laptop (after reading the service manual) and put it back together again, hence a replacement fan could save it. However, finding these parts turned out to be difficult. I guess I wouldn't be able to get it from Dell since I have been searching around the Dell forums and concluded if I were going to get Dell to at least talk to me, I would have to pay some money (since my warranty expired). I found this online:- http://www.parts-people.com/index.php?action=item&id=3725 However, as I don't live in the United States, shipping alone would cost me 3 times more than the part in question. In addition, if there's a problem, it would be difficult because I probably would have to mail the parts back (costing more money). One of my friend spilled water on her Macbook, she sent it back to Apple and they told her the cost of repairing it exceeds that of buying a new Macbook. They probably have to change everything except the LCD screen. I opened it up and found that most of the parts are still working, only the RAM had fried. Replaced it and it's working again. For some time before discovering only the RAM fried, I was toying with the idea of replacing the logic board myself but looks like I didn't have to. =) Now I know there's a site for Macbooks used replacement parts:- http://www.ifixit.com/ The question is, does anyone know where to get replacement parts at their own locality? It might benefit the community as a whole. Someone might know a local computer store that sells precisely just the things we needed (for now, I hope to find a shop that sells just the fan). If you own a laptop which you had an easy experience finding the replacement parts, do post that as well. PS: I wish laptop manufacturers have outlets where they sell these replacement parts (or at least let you place an order).

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• SQLAuthority News – Learning Trip – Traveling to Learn SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  I am currently traveling to Delhi to learn SQL Server in person from my friend. You can read more details about why am I learning SQL Server.  I have signed up for the course End to End SQL Server Business Intelligence at Koenig Solutions. Yesterday I blogged about my registration experience and today I am going to write about my  experience once I arrived at Delhi. From Ahmedabad to Delhi I stay with my wife and daughter in Bangalore (IT Hub of India), my hometown is Ahmedabad. My parents stay in city nearby Ahmedabad. I decided to spend few days with my folks before I sign up for 3 days of solid learning. I had selected an early morning flight to Delhi. I landed at 8:30 AM in Delhi. As soon as I checked email in my mobile I was really glad that I had received details of my pick up vehicle from Koenig. I walked out of the airport and I noticed that a driver was waiting with a placard with my name and photo associated with it. He was in Koenig uniform so there was no chance to make mistakes. In minutes of landing in Delhi I was in my transport heading to the Koenig Training Center. After the quick introduction driver handed me a bag (to be precise Eco friendly bag). The bag contained following items: My registration form All necessary documents in print which I had received earlier A Printed Book of the course next day INR 1000 (What?) I was glad to receive the bag but I was very confused with the Rs 1000. I decided to figure this out once I reach to the training center. Arriving at Koenig Inn Deluxe Koenig registration fees include all the stay and meals. I had opted for Koenig Inn Deluxe as my stay as it was recommended by my friend as well it was the right economical choice for me. When I reached to my accommodation, they were well aware of my arrival and was immediately led to my spacious room. The room is well equipped with all the amenities (hot water, air condition, coffee table, munching snacks,  and free internet) and the staff is very friendly. I immediately got ready as I had to go to Koenig Training Center to meet Center Head for a quick introduction. Koenig Inn Delux Koenig Training Center The training center is within five minutes of distance from the accommodation. I was lead to center head right away and had a very meaningful conversation with Ms Hema regarding my learning goals. She gave me a quick tour of the training center. I was amazed with the numbers of lab rooms they have in the center. The labs are spacious and give the most needed hand’s on experience to the users. I was led to the lab where I was suppose to learn my class the very next day as well I was provided my trainer’s profile. Mystery of Rs 1000 Well, after all this I have still not forgotten why I was provided Rs 1000 when arrived at the airport. When I asked about that I was told that because many students comes from foreign places and they may not have Indian Currency when they land at airport. This was for their immediate consumption till they arrive at the training center. Later on they can get their currency converted to local currency at Koenig Travel Desk. My curiosity was satisfied but I had not expected this answer. I am amazed at the attention to the details. Koenig Travel Desk When I heard about Koenig Travel Desk, I remembered that I have few friends in Delhi and Gurgaon. I had completed all of the formalities so I had reset of the day on my hand. I requested the travel desk if they can arrange a day cab for me so I can visit my friends in Guragon. Within 10 minutes I was on my way to Gurgaon. Telerik India Office Visit What did I do in Guragaon? I met my friends Abhishek Kant, Dhananjay Kumar and Amit Chowdhary. I visited Telerik India office and we had an excellent conversation on various aspects of technology and community. The Telerik India office is very spacious and Abhishek Kant (Telerik India Country Manager) gave us a quick tour of the office. We had an excellent lunch and dinner. One thing is for sure – the day was well spent. Pinal Dave, Dhananjay Kumar and Abhishek Kant Later evening I returned to my accommodation and decided to read up a few of the topics which I was going to learn next day. In tomorrow’s blog post I will discuss about my learning experience. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

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• top Tweets SOA Partner Community – May 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity SOA Community BPMN2.0 Oracle notations poster from eaiesb http://wp.me/p10C8u-pu Torsten WinterbergLook out for new Oracle #BPM edition coming up soon: The Oracle BPM Standard edtion! Great news for easy entry, small licence fees. Yes! Danilo Schmiedel Had a great chat with customer yesterday about #OracleBPM. Next step will be a 5day event combining modeling and implementation @soacommunity Frank Nimphius Still reading "Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g Handbook". Excellent resource for a non-SOA but ADF guy like me ;-) Oracle New webcast: Maximize #Oracle #WebLogic Server ROI with Oracle #Enterprise #Manager 12c on May 2 at 10 am PT. Register http://bit.ly/JFUrR9 OTNArchBeat@OTNArchBeat BPM in Financial Services Industry | Sanjeev Sharma http://bit.ly/HCCxui JDeveloper & ADF BPEL 11.1.1.6 Certified for Prebuilt E-Business Suite 12.1.3 SOA Integrations http://dlvr.it/1V9SxR Oracle UPK & Tutor Collaborate Attendees: Visit the UPK demo pod, SIGS, and sessions: If you are attending Collaborate 2012 - Sun. http://bit.ly/J39z65 Heidi Buelow see #fmw track RT @demed: Are you going to #KSCOPE12 in San Antonio, June 24-28? http://kscope12.com/component/ seminar/seminarslist?topicsid=6 Use promo code Fusion for discount! Sabine Leitner #SIG #Middleware 15.05. Frankfurt #Oracle #DOAG Planung & Aufbau WebLogic Server #WLS http://bit.ly/HKsCWV @OracleWebLogic @soacommunity SOA Community MDS explorer by Red Samurai http://wp.me/p10C8u-pp Biemond &reg; Retrieve or set a HTTP header from Oracle BPEL: With Oracle SOA Suite 11g patch 12928372 you can finally retrie http://bit.ly/JejTHC Lucas Jellema Call for papers for UKOUG 2012 has opened: http://techandebs.ukoug.org /default.asp?p=9306 (deadline 1st of June) OTNArchBeat BPM API usage: List all BPM Processes for a user | Kavitha Srinivasan http://bit.ly/IJKVfj demed SOA, Cloud + Service Tech symposium (London, Sep 24-25) call for paper is open http://www.servicetechsymposium. com /call2012.php @techsymp #oraclesoa OracleBlogs Lessons learned configuring OER 11g Workflows http://ow.ly/1iMsKh OTNArchBeat Scripting WebLogic Admin Server Startup | Antony Reynolds http://bit.ly/IH5ciU orclateamsoa A-Team Blog #ateam: BPM API usage: List all BPM Processes for a user http://ow.ly/1iJADp Lucas Jellema Just blogged about our Live FMW Application Development show during OBUG 2012, next Tuesday 24th April in Maastricht: OracleBlogs OEG integration with OSB/OWSM - 11g http://ow.ly/1iKx7G SOA Community SOA Community Newsletter April 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pl Frank DorstRT @whitehorsesnl: Whiteblog: BPM Process Spaces in Oracle Webcenter (Patch Set 5(http://bit.ly/Hxzh29) #soacommunity #bpm #oracle) David Shaffer The Advanced SOA suite training class next week in Redwood City is full! Learned a lot about accepting credit card payments. OTNArchBeat Running Built-In Test Simulator with SOA Suite Healthcare 11g in PS4 and PS5 | Shub Lahiri http://bit.ly/IgI8GN SOA Community Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards 2012, Call for Nominations #ofmaward #soa #bpm #soacommunity OTNArchBeat Updated SOA Documents now available in ITSO Reference Library http://bit.ly/I3Y6Sg Oracle Middleware Data Integrator & SOA - why 2 products better than one for integration? Webcast: Apr 24 10 AM PT http://bit.ly/IzmtKR Andrejus Baranovskis Red Samurai MDS Cleaner V2.0 http://fb.me/FxLVz82w SOA Community “@rluttikhuizen: Chapter 4 of SOA Made Simple book "Classification of Services" ready for collegial review” can #soacommunity get a preview? Xavier Verhaeghe #Gartner figures are out: #Oracle top in App Server market share (43.1%) and Relational #Database, too (48.8%) in 2011 Sabine Leitner WLS12c, Exa*, IDM, EM12c, DB @ Private, Public, Hybrid #Cloud Event 26.04. FFM #Oracle http://bit.ly/zcRuxi @OracleCloudZone @soacommunity Michel Schildmeijer@wlscommunity @MiddlewareMagic @OTNArchBeat @Oracle_Fusion Oracle WebLogic / SOA Suite 11g HACMP Cluster take-over http://lnkd.in/G78qMd Oracle Middleware Hear how ODI and SOA's unified approach are key to untangling your business. April 24 10AM PT http://bit.ly/IdcsUz #Oracle OTNArchBeat Using SAP Adapter with OSB 11g (PS3) | Shub Lahiri http://bit.ly/IswR9K SOA Community Integrating with Oracle Fusion Applications: Discovering Integration Artifacts https://blogs.oracle.com/governance /entry/integrating_with_oracle_fusion_ applications #soacommunity #oer #governance OracleBlogs Tuning B2B Server Engine Threads in SOA Suite 11g http://ow.ly/1iH5bx OracleBlogs Top Tweets SOA Partner Community April 2012 http://ow.ly/1iVHfA SOA Community Oracle SOA Suite 11g Database Growth Management http://wp.me/p10C8u-pi Sabine Leitner WLS12c,Exa*,IDM,EM12c, DB @ Private, Public, Hybrid #Cloud Event 24.04. München #Oracle http://bit.ly/zcRuxi @OracleCloudZone @soacommunity SOA Community Testing Business Rules by Mark Nelson http://redstack.wordpress.com/2012/ 04/18/testing-business-rules/ #soacommunity #soa #rules #oracle SOA CommunityTop Tweets SOA Partner Community - April 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pn OTNArchBeat Webcast: Untangle Your Business with Oracle Unified SOA and Data Integration - April 24 http://bit.ly/IQexqT OTNArchBeat"Do more with SOA Integration: Best of Packt" contributors include @gschmutz, @llaszews, many others http://amzn.to/HVWwYt ServiceTechSymposium Symposium agenda page coming together - page launched today with keynotes, sessions to be added shortly. http://www.servicetechsymposium.com /agenda2012.php SOA Community Shipping Specialization plaques - congratulation #Fujitsu - request yours https://soacommunity.wordpress. com/2011/02/23/who-are-the-soa-experts-specialization-recognized-by-customers/ #soacommunity #OPN http://pic.twitter.com/YMRm2ion ServiceTechSymposium call for Presentations Submission Deadline Moved Up to May 21, 2012. Send your presentations submissions ASAP! ServiceTechSymposium Symposium Keynote by Vicente Navarro, European Space Agency, added to agenda: "SOA & Service-Orientation at the European Space Agency" SOA Community Running a large #soa project? Make sure you read - Oracle SOA Suite 11g Database Growth Management #soacommunity #opn SOA Community List all BPM Processes for a user by Yogesh l #bpm #oracle #soacommunity  For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: soacommunity, twitter,Oracle,SOA Community,Jürgen Kress,OPN,SOA,BPM

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• What Will Happen to Real Estate Leases when Operating Leases are Gone?

  - by Theresa Hickman

  Many people are concerned about what will happen to real estate leases when FASB and IASB abolish operating leases. They plan to unveil the proposed standards on treating leases this summer as part of the convergence project but no "finalized ruling" is expected for at least a year because it will need to get formal consensus from many players, such as the SEC, American Association of Investors, Congress, the Big Four, American Associate of Realtors, the international equivalents of these, etc. If your accounting is a bit rusty, an Operating Lease is where you lease equipment or some asset for a shorter period than the actual (expected) life of the asset and then give the asset back while it still has some useful life in it. (Think leasing a car). Because an Operating Lease does not contain any of the provisions that would qualify it as a Capital Lease, the lease is not treated as a sale or purchase and hits the lessee's rental expense and the lessor's revenue. So it all stays on the P&L (assuming no prepayments are made). Capital Leases, on the other hand, hit lessee's and lessor's balance sheets because the asset is treated as a sale. (I'm ignoring interest and depreciation here to emphasize my point). Question: What will happen to real estate leases when Operating Leases go away and how will Oracle Financials address these changes? Before I attempt to address these questions, here's a real-life example to expound on some of the issues: Let's say a U.S. retailer leases a store in a mall for 15 years. Under U.S. GAAP, the lease is considered an operating or expense lease. Will that same lease be considered a capital lease under IFRS? Real estate leases are supposedly going to be capitalized under IFRS. If so, will everyone need to change all leases from operating to capital? Or, could we make some adjustments so we report the lease as an expense for operations reporting but capitalize it for SEC reporting? Would all aspects of the lease be capitalized, or would some line items still be expensed? For example, many retail store leases are defined to include (1) the agreed-to rent amount; (2) a negotiated increase in base rent, e.g., maybe a 5% increase in Year 5; (3) a sales rent component whereby the retailer pays a variable additional amount based on the sales generated in the prior month; (4) parking lot maintenance fees. Would the entire lease be capitalized, or would some portions still be expensed? To help answer these questions, I met up with our resident accounting expert and walking encyclopedia, Seamus Moran. Here's what he had to say: Oracle is aware of the potential changes specific to reporting/capitalization of real estate leases; i.e., we are aware that FASB and IASB have identified real estate leases as one of the areas for standards convergence. Oracle stays apprised of the on-going convergence through our domain expertise staff, our relationship with customers, our market awareness, and, of course, our relationships with the Big 4. This is part of our normal process with respect to regulatory compliance worldwide. At this time, Oracle expects that the standards convergence committee will make a recommendation about reporting standards for real estate leases in about a year. Following typical procedures, we also expect that the recommendation will be up for review for a year, and customers will then need to start reporting to the new standard about a year after that. So that means we would expect the first customer to report under the new standard in maybe 3 years. Typically, after the new standard is finalized and distributed, we find that our customers then begin to evaluate how they plan to meet the new standard. And through groups like the Customer Advisory Boards (CABs), our customers tell us what kind of product changes are needed in order to satisfy their new reporting requirements. Of course, Oracle is also working with the Big 4 and Accenture and other implementers in order to ascertain that these recommended changes will indeed meet new reporting standards. So the best advice we can offer right now is, stay apprised of the standards convergence committee; know that Oracle is also staying abreast of developments; get involved with your CAB so your voice is heard; know that Oracle products continue to be GAAP compliant, and we will continue to maintain that as our standard. But exactly what is that "standard"--we need to wait on the standards convergence committee. In a nut shell, operating leases will become either capital leases or month to month rentals, but it is still too early, too political and too uncertain to call out at this point.

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• ACORD LOMA Session Highlights Policy Administration Trends

  - by [email protected]

  Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance, attended and is blogging from the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week. Above: Paul Vancheri, Chief Information Officer, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company. Vancheri gave a presentation during the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum about the key elements of modern policy administration systems and how insurers can mitigate risk during legacy system migrations to safely introduce new technologies. When I had a few particularly challenging honors courses in college my father, a long-time technology industry veteran, used to say, "If you don't know how to do something go ask the experts. Find someone who has been there and done that, don't be afraid to ask the tough questions, and apply and build upon what you learn." (Actually he still offers this same advice today.) That's probably why my favorite sessions at industry events, like the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week, are those that include insight on industry trends and case studies from carriers who share their experiences and offer best practices based upon their own lessons learned. I had the opportunity to attend a particularly insightful session Wednesday as Craig Weber, senior vice president of Celent's Insurance practice, and Paul Vancheri, CIO of Fidelity Life Investments, presented, "Managing the Dynamic Insurance Landscape: Enabling Growth and Profitability with a Modern Policy Administration System." Policy Administration Trends Growing the business is the top issue when it comes to IT among both life and annuity and property and casualty carriers according to Weber. To drive growth and capture market share from competitors, carriers are looking to modernize their core insurance systems, with 65 percent of those CIOs participating in recent Celent research citing plans to replace their policy administration systems. Weber noted that there has been continued focus and investment, particularly in the last three years, by software and technology vendors to offer modern, rules-based, configurable policy administration solutions. He added that these solutions are continuing to evolve with the ongoing aim of helping carriers rapidly meet shifting business needs--whether it is to launch new products to market faster than the competition, adapt existing products to meet shifting consumer and /or regulatory demands, or to exit unprofitable markets. He closed by noting the top four trends for policy administration either in the process of being adopted today or on the not-so-distant horizon for the future: Underwriting and service desktops New business automation Convergence of ultra-configurable and domain content-rich systems Better usability and screen design Mitigating the Risk When Making the Decision to Modernize Third-party analyst research from advisory firms like Celent was a key part of the due diligence process for Fidelity as it sought a replacement for its legacy policy administration system back in 2005, according to Vancheri. The company's business opportunities were outrunning system capability. Its legacy system had not been upgraded in several years and was deficient from a functionality and currency standpoint. This was constraining the carrier's ability to rapidly configure and bring new and complex products to market. The company sought a new, modern policy administration system, one that would enable it to keep pace with rapid and often unexpected industry changes and ahead of the competition. A cross-functional team that included representatives from finance, actuarial, operations, client services and IT conducted an extensive selection process. This process included deep documentation review, pilot evaluations, demonstrations of required functionality and complex problem-solving, infrastructure integration capability, and the ability to meet the company's desired cost model. The company ultimately selected an adaptive policy administration system that met its requirements to: Deliver ease of use - eliminating paper and rework, while easing the burden on representatives to sell and service annuities Provide customer parity - offering Web-based capabilities in alignment with the company's focus on delivering a consistent customer experience across its business Deliver scalability, efficiency - enabling automation, while simplifying and standardizing systems across its technology stack Offer desired functionality - supporting Fidelity's product configuration / rules management philosophy, focus on customer service and technology upgrade requirements Meet cost requirements - including implementation, professional services and licenses fees and ongoing maintenance Deliver upon business requirements - enabling the ability to drive time to market for new products and flexibility to make changes Best Practices for Addressing Implementation Challenges Based upon lessons learned during the company's implementation, Vancheri advised carriers to evaluate staffing capabilities and cultural impacts, review business requirements to avoid rebuilding legacy processes, factor in dependent systems, and review policies and practices to secure customer data. His formula for success: upfront planning + clear requirements = precision execution. Achieving a Return on Investment Vancheri said the decision to replace their legacy policy administration system and deploy a modern, rules-based system--before the economic downturn occurred--has been integral in helping the company adapt to shifting market conditions, while enabling growth in its direct channel sales of variable annuities. Since deploying its new policy admin system, the company has reduced its average time to market for new products from 12-15 months to 4.5 months. The company has since migrated its other products to the new system and retired its legacy system, significantly decreasing its overall product development cycle. From a processing standpoint Vancheri noted the company has achieved gains in automation, information, and ease of use, resulting in improved real-time data edits, controls for better quality, and tax handling capability. Plus, with by having only one platform to manage, the company has simplified its IT environment and is well positioned to deliver system enhancements for greater efficiencies. Commitment to Continuing the Investment In the short and longer term future Vancheri said the company plans to enhance business functionality to support money movement, wire automation, divorce processing on payout contracts and cost-based tracking improvements. It also plans to continue system upgrades to remain current as well as focus on further reducing cycle time, driving down maintenance costs, and integrating with other products. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance focused on life/annuities and enterprise document automation.

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• IBM "per core" comparisons for SPECjEnterprise2010

  - by jhenning

  I recently stumbled upon a blog entry from Roman Kharkovski (an IBM employee) comparing some SPECjEnterprise2010 results for IBM vs. Oracle. Mr. Kharkovski's blog claims that SPARC delivers half the transactions per core vs. POWER7. Prior to any argument, I should say that my predisposition is to like Mr. Kharkovski, because he says that his blog is intended to be factual; that the intent is to try to avoid marketing hype and FUD tactic; and mostly because he features a picture of himself wearing a bike helmet (me too). Therefore, in a spirit of technical argument, rather than FUD fight, there are a few areas in his comparison that should be discussed. Scaling is not free For any benchmark, if a small system scores 13k using quantity R1 of some resource, and a big system scores 57k using quantity R2 of that resource, then, sure, it's tempting to divide: is  13k/R1 > 57k/R2 ? It is tempting, but not necessarily educational. The problem is that scaling is not free. Building big systems is harder than building small systems. Scoring  13k/R1  on a little system provides no guarantee whatsoever that one can sustain that ratio when attempting to handle more than 4 times as many users. Choosing the denominator radically changes the picture When ratios are used, one can vastly manipulate appearances by the choice of denominator. In this case, lots of choices are available for the resource to be compared (R1 and R2 above). IBM chooses to put cores in the denominator. Mr. Kharkovski provides some reasons for that choice in his blog entry. And yet, it should be noted that the very concept of a core is: arbitrary: not necessarily comparable across vendors; fluid: modern chips shift chip resources in response to load; and invisible: unless you have a microscope, you can't see it. By contrast, one can actually see processor chips with the naked eye, and they are a bit easier to count. If we put chips in the denominator instead of cores, we get: 13161.07 EjOPS / 4 chips = 3290 EjOPS per chip for IBM vs 57422.17 EjOPS / 16 chips = 3588 EjOPS per chip for Oracle The choice of denominator makes all the difference in the appearance. Speaking for myself, dividing by chips just seems to make more sense, because: I can see chips and count them; and I can accurately compare the number of chips in my system to the count in some other vendor's system; and Tthe probability of being able to continue to accurately count them over the next 10 years of microprocessor development seems higher than the probability of being able to accurately and comparably count "cores". SPEC Fair use requirements Speaking as an individual, not speaking for SPEC and not speaking for my employer, I wonder whether Mr. Kharkovski's blog article, taken as a whole, meets the requirements of the SPEC Fair Use rule www.spec.org/fairuse.html section I.D.2. For example, Mr. Kharkovski's footnote (1) begins Results from http://www.spec.org as of 04/04/2013 Oracle SUN SPARC T5-8 449 EjOPS/core SPECjEnterprise2010 (Oracle's WLS best SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS/core result on SPARC). IBM Power730 823 EjOPS/core (World Record SPECjEnterprise2010 EJOPS/core result) The questionable tactic, from a Fair Use point of view, is that there is no such metric at the designated location. At www.spec.org, You can find the SPEC metric 57422.17 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for Oracle and You can also find the SPEC metric 13161.07 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for IBM. Despite the implication of the footnote, you will not find any mention of 449 nor anything that says 823. SPEC says that you can, under its fair use rule, derive your own values; but it emphasizes: "The context must not give the appearance that SPEC has created or endorsed the derived value." Substantiation and transparency Although SPEC disclaims responsibility for non-SPEC information (section I.E), it says that non-SPEC data and methods should be accurate, should be explained, should be substantiated. Unfortunately, it is difficult or impossible for the reader to independently verify the pricing: Were like units compared to like (e.g. list price to list price)? Were all components (hw, sw, support) included? Were all fees included? Note that when tpc.org shows IBM pricing, there are often items such as "PROCESSOR ACTIVATION" and "MEMORY ACTIVATION". Without the transparency of a detailed breakdown, the pricing claims are questionable. T5 claim for "Fastest Processor" Mr. Kharkovski several times questions Oracle's claim for fastest processor, writing You see, when you publish industry benchmarks, people may actually compare your results to other vendor's results. Well, as we performance people always say, "it depends". If you believe in performance-per-core as the primary way of looking at the world, then yes, the POWER7+ is impressive, spending its chip resources to support up to 32 threads (8 cores x 4 threads). Or, it just might be useful to consider performance-per-chip. Each SPARC T5 chip allows 128 hardware threads to be simultaneously executing (16 cores x 8 threads). The Industry Standard Benchmark that focuses specifically on processor chip performance is SPEC CPU2006. For this very well known and popular benchmark, SPARC T5: provides better performance than both POWER7 and POWER7+, for 1 chip vs. 1 chip, for 8 chip vs. 8 chip, for integer (SPECint_rate2006) and floating point (SPECfp_rate2006), for Peak tuning and for Base tuning. For example, at the 8-chip level, integer throughput (SPECint_rate2006) is: 3750 for SPARC 2170 for POWER7+. You can find the details at the March 2013 BestPerf CPU2006 page SPEC is a trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, www.spec.org. The two specific results quoted for SPECjEnterprise2010 are posted at the URLs linked from the discussion. Results for SPEC CPU2006 were verified at spec.org 1 July 2013, and can be rechecked here.

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• Keep it Professional &ndash; Multiple Environments

  - by AjarnMark

  I have certainly been reading blogs a whole lot more than writing them the last several weeks, and it’s about time I got back to writing.  I have been collecting several topics and references for blog posts…some of which will probably just never get written as the timeliness of the topics fade over time.  Nonetheless, I’m back, and I think it is time to revive my Doing Business Right series, this time coming from the slant of managing a development team rather than the previous angle of being self-employed.  First up: separating Dev, Test, and Prod. A few months ago, Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT) wrote a great post about separating your Dev, Test/UAT, and Prod environments.  This post covers all the important points such as removing Developer access from both PROD and UAT, and the importance of proper deployment (a.k.a. promotion) procedures.  I won’t repeat it all here, go read the original!  But what I do want to address is what I believe to be the #1 excuse people use for not having separate environments:  Money.  I discussed this briefly in my comment on Colin’s post at the time, but let me repeat it here and expand on it a bit. Don’t let the size of your company or the size of its budget dictate whether you do things professionally or not.  I am convinced that most developers and development teams would agree that it is a best practice to have separate environments for development, testing, and production (a.k.a. Live).  So why don’t they?  Because they think that it means separate servers which means more money.  While having separate physical servers for the different environments would be ideal, it is not an absolute requirement in order to make this work.  Here are a few ideas: Use multiple instances of SQL Server and multiple Web Sites with Headers or Ports.  For no additional fees* you can install multiple instances of SQL Server on the same machine.  This gives you a nice separation, allowing you to even use the same database names as will appear in PROD, yet isolating the data and security access.  And in IIS, you can create multiple Web Sites on the same server just by using Host Headers or different port numbers to separate them.  This approach does still pose the risk of non-Prod environments impacting performance on Prod, but when your application is busy enough for that to be a concern, you can probably afford one of the other options. Use desktop PCs instead of servers.  Instead of investing in full server-grade hardware, you can mimic the separate environments on old desktop PCs and at least get functional equivalency, if not performance matching.  The last I checked, Microsoft did not require separate licensing for SQL Server if that installation was used exclusively for dev or test purposes*.  There may be some version or performance differences between this approach and what you have in Prod, but you have isolated test from impacting Prod resources this way. Virtualization.  This is of course one of the hot topics of the day, and I would be remiss if I did not suggest this.  It is quite easy these days to setup virtual machines so that, again, your environments are fairly isolated from one another, and you retain all the security and procedural benefits of having separate environments. So the point is, keep your high professional standards intact.  You don’t need to compromise on using proper procedure just because you work in a small company with a small budget.  Keep doing things the right way! By the way, where I work, our DEV environment is not on a server.  All development is done on the developer’s individual workstation where it can be isolated from other developers’ work for the duration of writing the code, but also where the developers have to reconcile (merge) differences in code under concurrent development.  This usually means that each change is executed multiple times (once per developer to update their environments with the latest changes from others) giving us an extra, informal. test deployment before even going to the Test/UAT server.  It also means that if the network goes down, the developers can continue to hum along because they are not dependent on networked resources.  In fact, they will likely be even more productive because they aren’t being interrupted by email…but that’s another post I need to write. * I am not a lawyer, nor a licensing specialist, but it appeared to be so the last time I checked.  When in doubt, consult an expert on the topic.

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• Financial Management: Why Move to the Cloud?

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Terrance Wampler, Vice President, Financials Product Strategy, Oracle I’ve spent my career designing and developing financial management systems, most of it at Oracle. Every single day I either meet with our customers or talk to them on the phone. The time is usually spent discussing various business challenges facing CFOs and Controllers, who are running Oracle’s Financials. Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about cloud computing and whether it makes sense for finance to go to the cloud. Here are some pros and cons that might help you make that decision. Let’s start with the benefits of cloud solutions. The first is savings. With cloud services, you pay only for those commodities that you use. That makes you feel like you're getting better value for your money. Plus, you can preserve your cash for your core business and you can get a better matching of expenses and revenues. So, at the top of the list is lower total cost of ownership. The second point has to do with optimization. With cloud services, you’ll need less IT infrastructure so you can optimize your IT resources for better-value, higher-end projects. This also leads to greater financial visibility, where there's a clear cost for the set of services or features replaced by cloud services. And, the last benefit is what I call acceleration. You can save money by speeding up the initialization and deployment of the project. You don't have to deal with IT infrastructure and you can start implementing right away. We did a quick survey of about 70 CFOs at the CFO Summit last month in New York City. We asked them why they were looking at cloud services, and not necessarily just for financials. The No. 1 response was perceived lower cost of ownership. But of course there are risks to consider. The first thing most people think about in the cloud is security and ownership of data. So, will your data really be safe? Can you meet your own privacy policy requirements? Do you really want your private financial data exposed? Do you trust the provider? Is what you see really your data? Do you own it or is it managed by someone else? Security is a big concern that comes with an emotional component. The next thing in the risk category is reliability. Is the provider proven? You’re taking what you have control over – for example, standards and policies and internal service level agreements – away from your IT department and giving it to someone else. Will you still be able to adapt to shifts in your business? Will the provider be able to grow with your business effectively? Reliability means having a provider that can give you the service infrastructure that you need. And then there’s performance, which has two components in terms of risk. Going forward, will the provider be able to scale the infrastructure or service level if you have new employees or new businesses? And second, will the price you negotiate and the rate you lock in cover additional costs and rising service fees? Another piece is cost. What happens if you don't get the service level you want? What if you end the service? What happens, if after a few years, you send the service out for bid and change service? Can you move your data? Can you move the applications? Do the integrations work? These are cost components people don’t always take into account. And, the final piece is the business case. The perception is that you can get started really quickly with cloud. It has a perceived lower cost of total ownership and it feels cool because it's cloud. But do you have a good business case for moving to the cloud? Your total cost of ownership is over three years; then you’ll renew it, so your TCO is six years. Have you compared that to other internal services that you’re offering? You might already have product that you can run this new business or division on. In that same survey at the CFO Summit, the execs thought the biggest perceived risks were security of data, ability to move data back, and the ability to create a business case to actually justify the risks. So that’s the list of pros and cons. Not to leave you hanging, I will do another post on how to balance these pros and cons and make the right decision for your business.

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• Process Centric Banking: Loan Origination Solution

  - by Manish Palaparthy

  There is an old proverb that goes, "The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory". So, we keep doing numerous "Proof of Concepts" with our own products on various business cases to analyze them deeply, understand and explain to our customers. We then present our learnings as they happened. The awareness of each PoC should help readers increase the trustworthiness of the results coming out of these PoCs. I present one such PoC where we invested a lot of time&effort.  Process Centric Banking : Loan Origination Solution Loan Origination is a process by which a borrower applies for a new loan and the lender processes that application. Loan origination includes the series of steps taken by the bank from the point the customer shows interest in a loan product all the way to disbursal of funds. The Loan Origination process is relevant for many kind of lenders in Financial services: Banks, Credit Unions, NBFCs(Non Banking Financial Companies) and so on. For simplicity sake, I will use "Bank" as the lending institution in the rest of my article.  Loan Origination is one of the core processes for Banks as it is the process by which the it creates assets against which the Institution earns most of its profits from. A well tuned loan origination process can affect the Bank in many positive ways. Banks have always shown great interest in automating the loan origination process for the above reason. However, due the constant changes in customer environment, market dynamics, prevailing economic conditions, cost pressures & regulatory environment they run into lot of challenges. Let me categorize some of these challenges for you Customer Environment Multiple Channels: Customer can use any of the available channels (Internet Banking, Email, Fax, Branch, Phone Banking, ATM, Broker, Mobile, Snail Mail) to perform all or some of the activities related to her Visibility into the origination process: Expect immediate update on the status of loan processing & alert messages Reduced Turn Around Time: Expect loans to be processed with least turn around time Reduced loan processing fees: Partly due to market dynamics the customer expects the loan processing fee to be negligible Market Dynamics Competitive environment:  The competition keeps creating many variants of loan products to attract customers, the bank needs to create similar product variants with better offers to attract customers or keep existing ones Ability to migrate loans from one vendor to another: It has become really easy for retail customers to move from one bank to the other given the low fee of loan processing and highly attractive offers. How does the bank protect it's customer base while actively engaging with potential customers banking with competitor banks Flexibility to react to market developments: Market development greatly influence loan processing, underwriting, asset valuation, risk mitigation rules. Can the bank modify rules and policies, the idea is not just to react to market developments but to pro-actively manage new developments Economic conditions Constant change in various rates and their implications on the rates and rules applied when on-boarding a loan: How quickly can the bank apply changes to rates offered to customers when the central bank changes various rates Requirements of Audit by the central banker: Tough economic conditions have demanded much more stringent audit rules and tests. The banks needs to produce ready reports(historic & operational) for audit compliance Risk Mitigation: While risk mitigation has always been a key concern for the bank, this is the area where the bank's underwriters & risk analysts spend the maximum time when processing a loan application. In order to reduce TAT the bank cannot compromise on its risk mitigation strategies Cost pressures Reduce Cost of processing per application: To deliver a reduced loan processing fee to the customer, the bank needs to keep its cost per processing loan application low. Meet customer TAT expectations while reducing the queues and the systems being used to process the loan application: The loan application could potentially be spending a lot of time waiting in the queue for further processing. Different volumes & patterns of applications demand different queuing algorithms. The bank needs to have real-time visibility into these queues and have the flexibility to change queuing algorithms at runtime  Increase the use of electronic communication and reduce the branch channel usage: Lesser automation leads not only leads to Increased turn around time, it also impacts more costs to reach out to customers The objective of our PoC was to implement a Loan Origination Solution whose ownership lies with the bank and effectively meet the challenges listed above. We built a simple story board for the solution We then went about implementing our storyboard using Oracle BPM Suite, Webcenter Content : Imaging. The web UI has been built on ADF technolgies, while the integration with core-services has been implemented using the underlying SOA infrastructure. The BPM process model is quite exhaustive can meet all the challenges listed above to reasonable degree. A bank intending to implement an end-to-end Loan Origination Solution has multiple options at it's disposal. It can Develop a customer Loan Origination Application from scratch: Gives maximum opportunity to build what you want but inflexible to upgrade and maintain. Higher TCO in long term Buy a Packaged application & customize it: Customizing a generic loan application can be tedious and prove as difficult as above. Build it using many disparate & un-integrated tools: Initially seems easier than developing from scratch. But, without integrated tool sets this is not a viable approach either or A solution based on a Framework: Independent Services and Business Process Modeling provide decoupled architecture that is flexible. We built this framework end-to-end with processes the core process of loan origination & several sub-processes such as Analyse and define customer needs, customer credit verification, identity check processes, legal review process, New customer registration & risk assessment.

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• What developer conferences are you going to this year?

  - by mbcrump

  This short list is what I consider to be the “cream-of-the-crop” in developer conferences. This is also a list of the conferences that I plan on attending in 2011. If you feel your conference is just as good, then shoot me an email at [michael[at]michaelcrump[dot]net, and if possible I will check it out.   In-Person Event Las Vegas on April 18th-22nd, 2011 Redmond on October 17th-21st, 2011 Orlando on December 5th-9th, 2011 Visual Studio Live – I attended this event in November of last year and blogged about my experience. I am also planning on going back to the Orlando session in December of this year. So what did I like the most about this event? Being able to interact one-on-one with a majority of the speakers. If you read my blog post then you will see a list of the speakers that I met up with. I also made a lot of great connections with other professional developers all over the world. They are having an event in Las Vegas on April 18th-22nd. I noticed at this event that they have added a new track on mobile. Being a big fan of mobile, I feel that this is a great move. They also have a great selection for Silverlight Developers including Billy Hollis and Rocky Lhotka. For the full lineup of conference tracks, sessions and speakers visit http://bit.ly/VSLiveTrks. If you are interested in this then you can register here by February 16th. I must add that you can save $300 bucks by getting the early-bird special.   Virtual Conference SSWUG (DBTechCon) - holds the largest virtual conference in the information technology industry. It is also special to me because they selected a majority of my Silverlight content for the April conference. No traveling fees and all of the sessions are recorded so you can watch them on-demand for $189 bucks (early-bird special). For the entire speaker list then click here. The session list has also been published. If you are interested in this then you can register here.   In-Person Event Knoxville, TN on June 3rd/4th 2011. Codestock.org – If you live in the South then you have heard of CodeStock. To my knowledge, they have only had 3 events so far and they were a huge success. It was such a success that after the last event, everyone was telling me how good it was and how much they enjoyed it. They currently have a call for speakers going on right now, so if you have sessions then be sure to submit yours. So, what makes them stand out? Well for starters Michael Neal (organizer) developed an open API so conference attendees could build their own apps for the sessions. They also encouraged their speakers to go to other sessions instead of stay in a “speaker-room”. Another cool feature is that they are uploading videos from the conference so everyone can benefit. They are currently looking for sponsorship, so help out if you can.   In-Person Event Redmond, WA on October 28/29 2011 *NOT 100% SURE AT THIS POINT* PDC 11 – OK, so the logo should be pdc11 but its not out yet. This event is located on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, WA. It is probably one of the most well known conferences for developers to attend. One of the big perks from this event is that you typically come away with free stuff. In 2010 they gave away Windows 7 Phones. I remember years earlier they gave away laptops. This of course isn’t the only reason to go, you may get to tour the Microsoft campus. Since pdc is a huge event, you can view all the events for free. Mike Taulty created a nice Silverlight application that consumes the OData feed. You can download it here. If everything goes as planned, I will be at all of these events. If you plan on going then send me a tweet and we will do lunch or dinner. I love meeting new developers and talking .net.  Subscribe to my feed

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• Asp.net hosting equivalent of Dreamhost (pricing, features and support)

  - by Cherian

  Disclaimer: I have browsed http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/asp.net+hosting and didn’t find anything quite similar in value to Dreamhost. One of the biggest impediments IMHO for developing web applications on asp.net is the cost of deployment. I am not talking about building sites like Stackoverflow.com or plentyoffish.com. This is about sites that are bigger than brochureware and smaller than ones that require dedicated servers. Let me give you an example. xmec.org is an asp.net site I maintain for my college alumni. On an average it’s slated to hit around 1000-1100 views per day. At present it’s hosted on godaddy. The service is so damn pathetic; I am using it only because of the lack of options. The site doesn’t scale (no, it’s not the code) and the web control panels are extremely slow. The money I pay doesn’t justify the service or the performance. Every deployment push is a visit to the infuriating web control panel to set the permissions and the root directories. Had I developed it in python, this would have been deployed on Dreamhost.com with $10/year hosting fees (they have offers running all throughout) 50 GB space 5 MySQL Databases Shell / FTP Users POP / SMTP Access Unlimited Domains hosting Unlimited Sub domains hosting Unlimited Domains Forwarded/Mirrored Custom DNS (These are the only ones I could think of. More at the feature page) With a dream host shell, I even have a svn checked-out version of wordpress for my blog. Now, that’s control! To my question: Is there any asp.net (preferably .net 3.5. Dreamhost keeps on updating versions every fortnight) hosting company providing remotely similar feature-sets and pricing like Dreamhost. My requirements are: Less than $15-25/ year Typical WISP minus PHP .net 3.5 SP1 Full Trust mode(I can live with medium trust, if not for the IL emitting libraries) Isolated Application Pool 5 – 10 MySQL db’s Unlimited domain hosting MsSql 2005 or 2008 FTP support At Least 5 GB space SMTP IIS 7 Log files Accessibility Moderately good control panel Scripting, shell support Nominal bandwidth Another case in point: Recently I’ve been contemplating building a tool-website to find duplicates and weird characters in my Google contacts and fix them. With asp.net, the best part is that I can do this with LINQ to XML in less than 100 lines of code. What’s bad is the hosting part. I don’t think I stand to make any money out of this and therefore can’t afford to host it on GoGrid or DiscountAsp.net. Godaddy is not an option either. If I do this in python, I can push to this my existing $10 Dreamhost account with another domain pointed. No extra cost. Svn exported with scripts (capability) to change the connection string! Looking at the problem holistically, I think I represent a large breed of programmers playing it cheap and experimenting different things on a regular basis, one of which will become the next twitter/digg.

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