Search Results

Search found 1898 results on 76 pages for 'structures'.

Page 70/76 | < Previous Page | 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76  | Next Page >

• Adventures in Lab Management Configuration: Part 2 of 3

  - by Enrique Lima

  The first post was the high level overview. Now it is time for the details on what was done to the existing CMMI Project based on CMMI v 4.2. The first step was to go into Visual Studio, then from the Team Project Collection Settings and then to the Process Template Manager.  Once there, it was a matter of selecting the appropriate template (MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0) and download to a point I could reference later (for example C:\Templates). Then on to using the steps from the guidance post. Since I was using an x64 deployment, I will make reference to the path as <toolpath>, however the actual path to reference in a 64-bit environment is “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE”. As I mentioned on the previous post, make sure to first perform a backup of the Configuration, Collection and Warehouse DBs.  If you did not apply any changes to the names and such, then you will find those as tfs_Configuration, tfs_DefaultCollection and tfs_Warehouse. Now, the work needed with the witadmin tool: That includes the uploading of the structures that differ from v4.2 to v5.0 There is likely going to be an issue with the naming of some fields. For example, TFS 2010 likes something along the lines of “Area ID”, whereas TFS 2008 would have had it as “AreaID”.  So, this will need to be corrected.  Some posts will have you go through this after the errors pop up.  I would recommend doing this process prior to executing the importwitd process.  witadmin listfields /collection:<path to collection> > c:\ListFields.txt Review the following fields: AreaID, review the Name property and validate if it states “AreaID”, the you will need to rename the Name field to reflect “Area ID”. ExternalLinkCount, RelatedLinkCount, HyperLinkCount, AttachedFileCount and IterationID would be the other fields to check. To correct the issue, then execute the following: witadmin changefield /collection:<path to collection> /n:"System.ExternalLinkCount" /name:"External Link Count" Repeat for Area ID, Related Link Count, Hyperlink Count, Attached File Count and Iteration ID.  Once this is done, proceed with the commands below. witadmin importwitd /collection:<path to collection> /p:<project> /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\WorkItem Tracking\TypeDefinitions\TestCase.xml" witadmin importwitd /collection:<path to collection> /p:<project> /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\WorkItem Tracking\TypeDefinitions\SharedStep.xml" witadmin importcategories /collection:<path to collection> /p:<project> /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\WorkItem Tracking\categories.xml" Modifications to the Bug Definition: First step is to export the existing definition. witadmin exportwitd /collection<path to collection> /p:<project> /n:bug /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\MyBug.xml" Make modifications to recently exported MyBug.xml file.  Details for the modification are here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff452591.aspx#ModifyTask Once the changes are done, proceed with the import command witadmin importwitd /collection:<path to collection> /p: <project> /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\MyBug.xml" Repeat the process for the the Scenario or Requirement Type Definition witadmin exportwitd /collection<path to collection> /p:<project> /n:requirement /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\MyRequirement.xml" Make modifications to recently exported MyRequirement.xml file.  Details for the modification are here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff452591.aspx#ModifyTask Once the changes are done, proceed with the import command witadmin importwitd /collection:<path to collection> /p: <project> /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\MyRequirement.xml" Provide the Bug Field Mapping definition, after creating the file as specified here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff452591.aspx#TCMBugFieldMapping tcm bugfieldmapping /import /mappingfile:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\bugfieldmappings.xml" /collection:<path to collection> /teamproject:<project name>

  Read the article

• Modularity through HTTP

  - by Michael Williamson

  As programmers, we strive for modularity in the code we write. We hope that splitting the problem up makes it easier to solve, and allows us to reuse parts of our code in other applications. Object-orientation is the most obvious of many attempts to get us closer to this ideal, and yet one of the most successful approaches is almost accidental: the web. Programming languages provide us with functions and classes, and plenty of other ways to modularize our code. This allows us to take our large problem, split it into small parts, and solve those small parts without having to worry about the whole. It also makes it easier to reason about our code. So far, so good, but now that we’ve written our small, independent module, for example to send out e-mails to my customers, we’d like to reuse it in another application. By creating DLLs, JARs or our platform’s package container of choice, we can do just that – provided our new application is on the same platform. Want to use a Java library from C#? Well, good luck – it might be possible, but it’s not going to be smooth sailing. Even if a library exists, it doesn’t mean that using it going to be a pleasant experience. Say I want to use Java to write out an XML document to an output stream. You’d imagine this would be a simple one-liner. You’d be wrong: import org.w3c.dom.*; import java.io.*; import javax.xml.transform.*; import javax.xml.transform.dom.*; import javax.xml.transform.stream.*; private static final void writeDoc(Document doc, OutputStream out) throws IOException { try { Transformer t = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer(); t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.DOCTYPE_SYSTEM, doc.getDoctype().getSystemId()); t.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(out)); } catch (TransformerException e) { throw new AssertionError(e); // Can't happen! } } Most of the time, there is a good chance somebody else has written the code before, but if nobody can understand the interface to that code, nobody’s going to use it. The result is that most of the code we write is just a variation on a theme. Despite our best efforts, we’ve fallen a little short of our ideal, but the web brings us closer. If we want to send e-mails to our customers, we could write an e-mail-sending library. More likely, we’d use an existing one for our language. Even then, we probably wouldn’t have niceties like A/B testing or DKIM signing. Alternatively, we could just fire some HTTP requests at MailChimp, and get a whole slew of features without getting anywhere near the code that implements them. The web is inherently language agnostic. So long as your language can send and receive text over HTTP, and probably parse some JSON, you’re about as well equipped as anybody. Instead of building libraries for a specific language, we can build a service that almost every language can reuse. The text-based nature of HTTP also helps to limit the complexity of the API. As SOAP will attest, you can still make a horrible mess using HTTP, but at least it is an obvious horrible mess. Complex data structures are tedious to marshal to and from text, providing a strong incentive to keep things simple. By contrast, spotting the complexities in a class hierarchy is often not as easy. HTTP doesn’t solve every problem. It probably isn’t such a good idea to use it inside an inner loop that’s executed thousands of times per second. What’s more, the HTTP approach might introduce some new problems. We often need to add a thin shim to each application that we wish to communicate over HTTP. For instance, we might need to write a small plugin in PHP if we want to integrate WordPress into our system. Suddenly, instead of a system written in one language, we’re maintaining a system with several distinct languages and platforms. Even then, we should strive to avoid re-implementing the same old thing. As programmers, we consistently underestimate both the cost of building a system and the ongoing maintenance. If we allow ourselves to integrate existing applications, even if they’re in unfamiliar languages, we save ourselves those development and maintenance costs, as well as being able to pick the best solution for our problem. Thanks to the web, HTTP is often the easiest way to get there.

  Read the article

• Namespaces are obsolete

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  To those of us who have been around for a while, namespaces have been part of the landscape. One could even say that they have been defining the large-scale features of the landscape in question. However, something happened fairly recently that I think makes this venerable structure obsolete. Before I explain this development and why it’s a superior concept to namespaces, let me recapitulate what namespaces are and why they’ve been so good to us over the years… Namespaces are used for a few different things: Scope: a namespace delimits the portion of code where a name (for a class, sub-namespace, etc.) has the specified meaning. Namespaces are usually the highest-level scoping structures in a software package. Collision prevention: name collisions are a universal problem. Some systems, such as jQuery, wave it away, but the problem remains. Namespaces provide a reasonable approach to global uniqueness (and in some implementations such as XML, enforce it). In .NET, there are ways to relocate a namespace to avoid those rare collision cases. Hierarchy: programmers like neat little boxes, and especially boxes within boxes within boxes. For some reason. Regular human beings on the other hand, tend to think linearly, which is why the Windows explorer for example has tried in a few different ways to flatten the file system hierarchy for the user. 1 is clearly useful because we need to protect our code from bleeding effects from the rest of the application (and vice versa). A language with only global constructs may be what some of us started programming on, but it’s not desirable in any way today. 2 may not be always reasonably worth the trouble (jQuery is doing fine with its global plug-in namespace), but we still need it in many cases. One should note however that globally unique names are not the only possible implementation. In fact, they are a rather extreme solution. What we really care about is collision prevention within our application. What happens outside is irrelevant. 3 is, more than anything, an aesthetical choice. A common convention has been to encode the whole pedigree of the code into the namespace. Come to think about it, we never think we need to import “Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Agent” and that would be very hard to remember. What we want to do is bring nHibernate into our app. And this is precisely what you’ll do with modern package managers and module loaders. I want to take the specific example of RequireJS, which is commonly used with Node. Here is how you import a module with RequireJS: var http = require("http"); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This is of course importing a HTTP stack module into the code. There is no noise here. Let’s break this down. Scope (1) is provided by the one scoping mechanism in JavaScript: the closure surrounding the module’s code. Whatever scoping mechanism is provided by the language would be fine here. Collision prevention (2) is very elegantly handled. Whereas relocating is an afterthought, and an exceptional measure with namespaces, it is here on the frontline. You always relocate, using an extremely familiar pattern: variable assignment. We are very much used to managing our local variable names and any possible collision will get solved very easily by picking a different name. Wait a minute, I hear some of you say. This is only taking care of collisions on the client-side, on the left of that assignment. What if I have two libraries with the name “http”? Well, You can better qualify the path to the module, which is what the require parameter really is. As for hierarchical organization, you don’t really want that, do you? RequireJS’ module pattern does elegantly cover the bases that namespaces used to cover, but it also promotes additional good practices. First, it promotes usage of self-contained, single responsibility units of code through the closure-based, stricter scoping mechanism. Namespaces are somewhat more porous, as using/import statements can be used bi-directionally, which leads us to my second point… Sane dependency graphs are easier to achieve and sustain with such a structure. With namespaces, it is easy to construct dependency cycles (that’s bad, mmkay?). With this pattern, the equivalent would be to build mega-components, which are an easier problem to spot than a decay into inter-dependent namespaces, for which you need specialized tools. I really like this pattern very much, and I would like to see more environments implement it. One could argue that dependency injection has some commonalities with this for example. What do you think? This is the half-baked result of some morning shower reflections, and I’d love to read your thoughts about it. What am I missing?

  Read the article

• MERGE gives better OUTPUT options

  - by Rob Farley

  MERGE is very cool. There are a ton of useful things about it – mostly around the fact that you can implement a ton of change against a table all at once. This is great for data warehousing, handling changes made to relational databases by applications, all kinds of things. One of the more subtle things about MERGE is the power of the OUTPUT clause. Useful for logging.   If you’re not familiar with the OUTPUT clause, you really should be – it basically makes your DML (INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE/MERGE) statement return data back to you. This is a great way of returning identity values from INSERT commands (so much better than SCOPE_IDENTITY() or the older (and worse) @@IDENTITY, because you can get lots of rows back). You can even use it to grab default values that are set using non-deterministic functions like NEWID() – things you couldn’t normally get back without running another query (or with a trigger, I guess, but that’s not pretty). That inserted table I referenced – that’s part of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ work that goes on with all DML changes. When you insert data, this internal table called inserted gets populated with rows, and then used to inflict the appropriate inserts on the various structures that store data (HoBTs – the Heaps or B-Trees used to store data as tables and indexes). When deleting, the deleted table gets populated. Updates get a matching row in both tables (although this doesn’t mean that an update is a delete followed by an inserted, it’s just the way it’s handled with these tables). These tables can be referenced by the OUTPUT clause, which can show you the before and after for any DML statement. Useful stuff. MERGE is slightly different though. With MERGE, you get a mix of entries. Your MERGE statement might be doing some INSERTs, some UPDATEs and some DELETEs. One of the most common examples of MERGE is to perform an UPSERT command, where data is updated if it already exists, or inserted if it’s new. And in a single operation too. Here, you can see the usefulness of the deleted and inserted tables, which clearly reflect the type of operation (but then again, MERGE lets you use an extra column called $action to show this). (Don’t worry about the fact that I turned on IDENTITY_INSERT, that’s just so that I could insert the values) One of the things I love about MERGE is that it feels almost cursor-like – the UPDATE bit feels like “WHERE CURRENT OF …”, and the INSERT bit feels like a single-row insert. And it is – but into the inserted and deleted tables. The operations to maintain the HoBTs are still done using the whole set of changes, which is very cool. And $action – very convenient. But as cool as $action is, that’s not the point of my post. If it were, I hope you’d all be disappointed, as you can’t really go near the MERGE statement without learning about it. The subtle thing that I love about MERGE with OUTPUT is that you can hook into more than just inserted and deleted. Did you notice in my earlier query that my source table had a ‘src’ field, that wasn’t used in the insert? Normally, this would be somewhat pointless to include in my source query. But with MERGE, I can put that in the OUTPUT clause. This is useful stuff, particularly when you’re needing to audit the changes. Suppose your query involved consolidating data from a number of sources, but you didn’t need to insert that into the actual table, just into a table for audit. This is now very doable, either using the INTO clause of OUTPUT, or surrounding the whole MERGE statement in brackets (parentheses if you’re American) and using a regular INSERT statement. This is also doable if you’re using MERGE to just do INSERTs. In case you hadn’t realised, you can use MERGE in place of an INSERT statement. It’s just like the UPSERT-style statement we’ve just seen, except that we want nothing to match. That’s easy to do, we just use ON 1=2. This is obviously more convoluted than a straight INSERT. And it’s slightly more effort for the database engine too. But, if you want the extra audit capabilities, the ability to hook into the other source columns is definitely useful. Oh, and before people ask if you can also hook into the target table’s columns... Yes, of course. That’s what deleted and inserted give you.

  Read the article

• Provocative Tweets From the Dachis Social Business Summit

  - by Mike Stiles

  On June 20, all who follow social business and how social is changing how we do business and internal business structures, gathered in London for the Dachis Social Business Summit. In addition to Oracle SVP Product Development, Reggie Bradford, brands and thought leaders posed some thought-provoking ideas and figures. Here are some of the most oft-tweeted points, and our thoughts that they provoked. Tweet: The winners will be those who use data to improve performance.Thought: Everyone is dwelling on ROI. Why isn’t everyone dwelling on the opportunity to make their product or service better (as if that doesn’t have an effect on ROI)? Big data can improve you…let it. Tweet: High performance hinges on integrated teams that interact with each other.Thought: Team members may work well with each other, but does the team as a whole “get” what other teams are doing? That’s the key to an integrated, companywide workforce. (Internal social platforms can facilitate that by the way). Tweet: Performance improvements come from making the invisible visible.Thought: Many of the factors that drive customer behavior and decisions are invisible. Through social, customers are now showing us what we couldn’t see before…if we’re paying attention. Tweet: Games have continuous feedback, which is why they’re so engaging.  Apply that to business operations.Thought: You think your employees have an obligation to be 100% passionate and engaged at all times about making you richer. Think again. Like customers, they must be motivated. Visible insight that they’re advancing on their goals helps. Tweet: Who can add value to the data?  Data will tend to migrate to where it will be most effective.Thought: Not everybody needs all the data. One team will be able to make sense of, use, and add value to data that may be irrelevant to another team. Like a strategized football play, the data has to get sent to the spot on the field where it’s needed most. Tweet: The sale isn’t the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the start of a new marketing cycle.Thought: Another reason the ROI question is fundamentally flawed. The sale is not the end of the potential return on investment. After-the-sale service and nurturing begins where the sales “victory” ends. Tweet: A dead sale is one that’s not shared.  People must be incentivized to share.Thought: Guess what, customers now know their value to you as marketers on your behalf. They’ll tell people about your product, but you’ve got to answer, “Why should I?” And you’ve got to answer it with something substantial, not lame trinkets. Tweet: Social user motivations are competition, affection, excellence and curiosity.Thought: Your followers will engage IF; they can get something for doing it, love your culture so much they want you to win, are consistently stunned at the perfection and coolness of your products, or have been stimulated enough to want to know more. Tweet: In Europe, 92% surveyed said they couldn’t care less about brands.Thought: Oh well, so much for loving you or being impressed enough with your products & service that they want you to win. We’ve got a long way to go. Tweet: A complaint is a gift.Thought: Our instinct where complaints are concerned is to a) not listen, b) dismiss the one who complains as a kook, c) make excuses, and d) reassure ourselves with internal group-think that they’re wrong and we’re right. It’s the perfect recipe for how to never, ever grow or get better. In a way, this customer cares more than you do. Tweet: 78% of consumers think peer recommendation is the best form of advertising.  Eventually, engagement is going to eat advertising.Thought: Why is peer recommendation best? Trust. If a friend tells me how great a movie was, I believe him. He has credibility with me. He’s seen it, and he could care less if I buy a ticket. He’s telling me it was awesome because he sincerely believes that it was.  That’s gold. Tweet: 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. Thought: This “how mad can we make our customers without losing them” strategy has to end. The customer experience has actual monetary value, money you’re probably leaving on the table. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng

  Read the article

• What Counts For a DBA: Fitness

  - by Louis Davidson

  If you know me, you can probably guess that physical exercise is not really my thing. There was a time in my past when it a larger part of my life, but even then never in the same sort of passionate way as a number of our SQL friends.  For me, I find that mental exercise satisfies what I believe to be the same inner need that drives people to run farther than I like to drive on most Saturday mornings, and it is certainly just as addictive. Mental fitness shares many common traits with physical fitness, especially the need to attain it through repetitive training. I only wish that mental training burned off a bacon cheeseburger in the same manner as does jogging around a dewy park on Saturday morning. In physical training, there are at least two goals, the first of which is to be physically able to do a task. The second is to train the brain to perform the task without thinking too hard about it. No matter how long it has been since you last rode a bike, you will be almost certainly be able to hop on and start riding without thinking about the process of pedaling or balancing. If you’ve never ridden a bike, you could be a physics professor /Olympic athlete and still crash the first few times you try, even though you are as strong as an ox and your knowledge of the physics of bicycle riding makes the concept child’s play. For programming tasks, the process is very similar. As a DBA, you will come to know intuitively how to backup, optimize, and secure database systems. As a data programmer, you will work to instinctively use the clauses of Transact-SQL DML so that, when you need to group data three ways (and not four), you will know to use the GROUP BY clause with GROUPING SETS without resorting to a search engine.  You have the skill. Making it naturally then requires repetition and experience is the primary requirement, not just simply learning about a topic. The hardest part of being really good at something is this difference between knowledge and skill. I have recently taken several informative training classes with Kimball University on data warehousing and ETL. Now I have a lot more knowledge about designing data warehouses than before. I have also done a good bit of data warehouse designing of late and have started to improve to some level of proficiency with the theory. Yet, for all of this head knowledge, it is still a struggle to take what I have learned and apply it to the designs I am working on.  Data warehousing is still a task that is not yet deeply ingrained in my brain muscle memory. On the other hand, relational database design is something that no matter how much or how little I may get to do it, I am comfortable doing it. I have done it as a profession now for well over a decade, I teach classes on it, and I also have done (and continue to do) a lot of mental training beyond the work day. Sometimes the training is just basic education, some reading blogs and attending sessions at PASS events.  My best training comes from spending time working on other people’s design issues in forums (though not nearly as much as I would like to lately). Working through other people’s problems is a great way to exercise your brain on problems with which you’re not immediately familiar. The final bit of exercise I find useful for cultivating mental fitness for a data professional is also probably the nerdiest thing that I will ever suggest you do.  Akin to running in place, the idea is to work through designs in your head. I have designed more than one database system that would revolutionize grocery store operations, sales at my local Target store, the ordering process at Amazon, and ways to improve Disney World operations to get me through a line faster (some of which they are starting to implement without any of my help.) Never are the designs truly fleshed out, but enough to work through structures and processes.  On “paper”, I have designed database systems to catalog things as trivial as my Lego creations, rental car companies and my audio and video collections. Once I get the database designed mentally, sometimes I will create the database, add some data (often using Red-Gate’s Data Generator), and write a few queries to see if a concept was realistic, but I will rarely fully flesh out the database since I have no desire to do any user interface programming anymore.  The mental training allows me to keep in practice for when the time comes to do the work I love the most for real…even if I have been spending most of my work time lately building data warehouses.  If you are really strong of mind and body, perhaps you can mix a mental run with a physical run; though don’t run off of a cliff while contemplating how you might design a database to catalog the trees on a mountain…that would be contradictory to the purpose of both types of exercise.

  Read the article

• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 6): 9i Query Performance

  - by Simon Cooper

  All throughout the EAP and beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, our main request was support for Oracle 9i. After releasing version 1.0 with support for 10g and 11g, our next step was then to get version 1.1 of SCfO out with support for 9i. However, there were some significant problems that we had to overcome first. This post will concentrate on query execution time. When we first tested SCfO on a 9i server, after accounting for various changes to the data dictionary, we found that database registration was taking a long time. And I mean a looooooong time. The same database that on 10g or 11g would take a couple of minutes to register would be taking upwards of 30 mins on 9i. Obviously, this is not ideal, so a poke around the query execution plans was required. As an example, let's take the table population query - the one that reads ALL_TABLES and joins it with a few other dictionary views to get us back our list of tables. On 10g, this query takes 5.6 seconds. On 9i, it takes 89.47 seconds. The difference in execution plan is even more dramatic - here's the (edited) execution plan on 10g: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 108K| 939 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 108K| 939 || 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 108K| 938 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 103K| 762 || 4 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 2058 | 3 ||* 20 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 73472 | 759 || 21 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 2097 | 3 ||* 34 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 39920 | 755 || 35 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 7 || 58 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 39104 | 748 || 59 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 6704 | 668 || 89 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2025 | 5 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 277 | 11 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And the same query on 9i: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 16P| 55G|| 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 16P| 55G|| 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 16P| 862M|| 3 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 5251G| 992K|| 4 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 4243M| 2578 || 5 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 2669K| 1440 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 ||* 50 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | ||* 66 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| ||* 80 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| ||* 96 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have a look at the cost column. 10g's overall query cost is 939, and 9i is 55,000,000,000 (or more precisely, 55,496,472,769). It's also having to process far more data. What on earth could be causing this huge difference in query cost? After trawling through the '10g New Features' documentation, we found item 1.9.2.21. Before 10g, Oracle advised that you do not collect statistics on data dictionary objects. From 10g, it advised that you do collect statistics on the data dictionary; for our queries, Oracle therefore knows what sort of data is in the dictionary tables, and so can generate an efficient execution plan. On 9i, no statistics are present on the system tables, so Oracle has to use the Rule Based Optimizer, which turns most LEFT JOINs into nested loops. If we force 9i to use hash joins, like 10g, we get a much better plan: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 7587K| 3704 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 7587K| 3704 ||* 2 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 7587K| 822 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 5262K| 616 ||* 4 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 2980K| 465 ||* 5 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 710K| 432 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 || 50 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| 104 || 78 | VIEW | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | 14 || 93 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| 31 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| 28 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's much more like it. This drops the execution time down to 24 seconds. Not as good as 10g, but still an improvement. There are still several problems with this, however. 10g introduced a new join method - a right outer hash join (used in the first execution plan). The 9i query optimizer doesn't have this option available, so forcing a hash join means it has to hash the ALL_TABLES table, and furthermore re-hash it for every hash join in the execution plan; this could be thousands and thousands of rows. And although forcing hash joins somewhat alleviates this problem on our test systems, there's no guarantee that this will improve the execution time on customers' systems; it may even increase the time it takes (say, if all their tables are partitioned, or they've got a lot of materialized views). Ideally, we would want a solution that provides a speedup whatever the input. To try and get some ideas, we asked some oracle performance specialists to see if they had any ideas or tips. Their recommendation was to add a hidden hook into the product that allowed users to specify their own query hints, or even rewrite the queries entirely. However, we would prefer not to take that approach; as well as a lot of new infrastructure & a rewrite of the population code, it would have meant that any users of 9i would have to spend some time optimizing it to get it working on their system before they could use the product. Another approach was needed. All our population queries have a very specific pattern - a base table provides most of the information we need (ALL_TABLES for tables, or ALL_TAB_COLS for columns) and we do a left join to extra subsidiary tables that fill in gaps (for instance, ALL_PART_TABLES for partition information). All the left joins use the same set of columns to join on (typically the object owner & name), so we could re-use the hash information for each join, rather than re-hashing the same columns for every join. To allow us to do this, along with various other performance improvements that could be done for the specific query pattern we were using, we read all the tables individually and do a hash join on the client. Fortunately, this 'pure' algorithmic problem is the kind that can be very well optimized for expected real-world situations; as well as storing row data we're not using in the hash key on disk, we use very specific memory-efficient data structures to store all the information we need. This allows us to achieve a database population time that is as fast as on 10g, and even (in some situations) slightly faster, and a memory overhead of roughly 150 bytes per row of data in the result set (for schemas with 10,000 tables in that means an extra 1.4MB memory being used during population). Next: fun with the 9i dictionary views.

  Read the article

• Exiting a reboot loop

  - by user12617035

  If you're in a situation where the system is panic'ing during boot, you can use # boot net -s to regain control of your system. In my case, I'd added some diagnostic code to a (PCI) driver (that is used to boot the root filesystem). There was a bug in the driver, and each time during boot, the bug occurred, and so caused the system to panic: ... 000000000180b950 genunix:vfs_mountroot+60 (800, 200, 0, 185d400, 1883000, 18aec00) %l0-3: 0000000000001770 0000000000000640 0000000001814000 00000000000008fc %l4-7: 0000000001833c00 00000000018b1000 0000000000000600 0000000000000200 000000000180ba10 genunix:main+98 (18141a0, 1013800, 18362c0, 18ab800, 180e000, 1814000) %l0-3: 0000000070002000 0000000000000001 000000000180c000 000000000180e000 %l4-7: 0000000000000001 0000000001074800 0000000000000060 0000000000000000 skipping system dump - no dump device configured rebooting... If you're logged in via the console, you can send a BREAK sequence in order to gain control of the firmware's (OBP's) prompt. Enter Ctrl-Shift-[ in order to get the TELNET prompt. Once telnet has control, enter this: telnet> send brk You'll be presented with OBP's prompt: ok You then enter the following in order to boot into single-user mode via the network: ok boot net -s Note that booting from the network under Solaris will implicitly cause the system to be INSTALLED with whatever software had last been configured to be installed. However, we are using boot net -s as a "handle" with which to get at the Solaris prompt. Once at that prompt, we can perform actions as root that will let us back out our buggy driver (ok... MY buggy driver :-)) ...and replace it with the original, non-buggy driver. Entering the boot command caused the following output, as well as left us at the Solaris prompt (in single-user-mode): Sun Blade 1500, No Keyboard Copyright 1998-2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.16.4, 1024 MB memory installed, Serial #53463393. Ethernet address 0:3:ba:2f:c9:61, Host ID: 832fc961. Rebooting with command: boot net -s Boot device: /pci@1f,700000/network@2 File and args: -s 1000 Mbps FDX Link up Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet 4000 1000 Mbps FDX Link up Requesting Internet address for 0:3:ba:2f:c9:61 SunOS Release 5.10 Version Generic_118833-17 64-bit Copyright 1983-2005 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Use is subject to license terms. Booting to milestone "milestone/single-user:default". Configuring devices. Using RPC Bootparams for network configuration information. Attempting to configure interface bge0... Configured interface bge0 Requesting System Maintenance Mode SINGLE USER MODE # Our goal is to now move to the directory containing the buggy driver and replace it with the original driver (that we had saved away before ever loading our buggy driver! :-) However, since we booted from the network, the root filesystem ("/") is NOT mounted on one of our local disks. It is mounted on an NFS filesystem exported by our install server. To verify this, enter the following command: # mount | head -1 / on my-server:/export/install/media/s10u2/solarisdvd.s10s_u2dvd/latest/Solaris_10/Tools/Boot remote/read/write/setuid/devices/dev=4ac0001 on Wed Dec 31 16:00:00 1969 As a result, we have to create a temporary mount point and then mount the local disk onto that mount point: # mkdir /tmp/mnt # mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /tmp/mnt Note that your system will not necessarily have had its root filesystem on "c0t0d0s0". This is something that you should also have recorded before you ever loaded your.. er... "my" buggy driver! :-) One can find the local disk mounted under the root filesystem by entering: # df -k / Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 76703839 4035535 71901266 6% / To continue with our example, we can now move to the directory of buggy-driver in order to replace it with the original driver. Note that /tmp/mnt is prefixed to the path of where we'd "normally" find the driver: # cd /tmp/mnt/platform/sun4u/kernel/drv/sparcv9 # ls -l pci\* -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 288504 Dec 6 15:38 pcisch -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 288504 Dec 6 15:38 pcisch.aar -rwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 211616 Jun 8 2006 pcisch.orig # cp -p pcisch.orig pcisch We can now synchronize any in-memory filesystem data structures with those on disk... and then reboot. The system will then boot correctly... as expected: # sync;sync # reboot syncing file systems... done Sun Blade 1500, No Keyboard Copyright 1998-2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.16.4, 1024 MB memory installed, Serial #xxxxxxxx. Ethernet address 0:3:ba:2f:c9:61, Host ID: yyyyyyyy. Rebooting with command: boot Boot device: /pci@1e,600000/ide@d/disk@0,0:a File and args: SunOS Release 5.10 Version Generic_118833-17 64-bit Copyright 1983-2005 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Use is subject to license terms. Hostname: my-host NIS domain name is my-campus.Central.Sun.COM my-host console login: ...so that's how it's done! Of course, the easier way is to never write a buggy-driver... but.. then.. we all "have an eraser on the end of each of our pencils"... don't we ? :-) "...thank you... and good night..."

  Read the article

• IE7 not digesting JSON: "parse error" [resolved]

  - by Kenny Leu

  While trying to GET a JSON, my callback function is NOT firing. $.ajax({ type:"GET", dataType:'json', url: myLocalURL, data: myData, success: function(returned_data){alert('success');} }); The strangest part of this is that my JSON(s) validates on JSONlint this ONLY fails on IE7...it works in Safari, Chrome, and all versions of Firefox, (EDIT: and even in IE8). If I use 'error', then it reports "parseError"...even though it validates! Is there anything that I'm missing? Does IE7 not process certain characters, data structures (my data doesn't have anything non-alphanumeric, but it DOES have nested JSONs)? I have used tons of other AJAX calls that all work (even in IE7), but with the exception of THIS call. An example data return (EDIT: This is a structurally-complete example, meaning it is only missing a few second-tier fields, but follows this exact hierarchy)here is: {"question":{ "question_id":"19", "question_text":"testing", "other_crap":"none" }, "timestamp":{ "response":"answer", "response_text":"the text here" } } I am completely at a loss. Hopefully someone has some insight into what's going on...thank you! EDIT Here's a copy of the SIMPLEST case of dummy data that I'm using...it still doesn't work in IE7. { "question":{ "question_id":"20", "question_text":"testing :", "adverse_party":"none", "juris":"California", "recipients":"Carl Chan" } } EDIT 2 I am starting to doubt that it is a JSON issue...but I have NO idea what else it could be. Here are some other resources that I've found that could be the cause, but they don't seem to work either: http://firelitdesign.blogspot.com/2009/07/jquerys-getjson.html (Django uses Unicode by default, so I don't think this is causing it) Anybody have any other ideas? ANSWER I finally managed to figure it out...mostly via tedious trial-and-error. I want to thank everyone for their suggestions...as soon as I have 15 rep, I'll upvote you, I promise. :) There was basically no way that you guys could have figured it out, because the issue turned out to be a strange bug between IE7 and Django (my research didn't bring up any similar issues). We were basically using Django template language to generate our JSON...and in the midst of this particular JSON, we were using custom template tags: {% load customfilter %} { "question":{ "question_id":"{{question.id}}", "question_text":"{{question.question_text|customfilterhere}}" } } As soon as I deleted anything related to the customfilter, IE7 was able to parse the JSON perfectly! We still don't have a workaround yet, but at least we now know what's causing it. Has anyone seen any similar issues? Once again, thank you everyone for your contributions.

  Read the article

• Creating an Objective-C++ Static Library in Xcode

  - by helixed

  So I've developed an engine for the iPhone with which I'd like to build a couple different games. Rather than copy and paste the files for the engine inside of each game's project directory, I'd a way to link to the engine from each game, so if I need to make a change to it I only have to do so once. After reeding around a little bit, it seems like static libraries are the best way to do this on the iPhone. I created a new project called Skeleton and copied all of my engine files over to it. I used this guide to create a static library, and I imported the library into a project called Chooser. However, when I tried to compile the project, Xcode started complaining about some C++ data structures I included in a file called ControlScene.mm. Here's my build errors: "operator delete(void*)", referenced from: -[ControlScene dealloc] in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) -[ControlScene init] in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) __gnu_cxx::new_allocator<operation_t>::deallocate(operation_t*, unsigned long)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) __gnu_cxx::new_allocator<operation_t*>::deallocate(operation_t**, unsigned long)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) "operator new(unsigned long)", referenced from: -[ControlScene init] in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) __gnu_cxx::new_allocator<operation_t*>::allocate(unsigned long, void const*)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) __gnu_cxx::new_allocator<operation_t>::allocate(unsigned long, void const*)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) "std::__throw_bad_alloc()", referenced from: __gnu_cxx::new_allocator<operation_t*>::allocate(unsigned long, void const*)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) __gnu_cxx::new_allocator<operation_t>::allocate(unsigned long, void const*)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) "___cxa_rethrow", referenced from: std::_Deque_base<operation_t, std::allocator<operation_t> >::_M_create_nodes(operation_t**, operation_t**)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) std::_Deque_base<operation_t, std::allocator<operation_t> >::_M_initialize_map(unsigned long)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) "___cxa_end_catch", referenced from: std::_Deque_base<operation_t, std::allocator<operation_t> >::_M_create_nodes(operation_t**, operation_t**)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) std::_Deque_base<operation_t, std::allocator<operation_t> >::_M_initialize_map(unsigned long)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) "___gxx_personality_v0", referenced from: ___gxx_personality_v0$non_lazy_ptr in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) ___gxx_personality_v0$non_lazy_ptr in libSkeleton.a(MenuLayer.o) "___cxa_begin_catch", referenced from: std::_Deque_base<operation_t, std::allocator<operation_t> >::_M_create_nodes(operation_t**, operation_t**)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) std::_Deque_base<operation_t, std::allocator<operation_t> >::_M_initialize_map(unsigned long)in libSkeleton.a(ControlScene.o) ld: symbol(s) not found collect2: ld returned 1 exit status If anybody could offer some insight as to why these problems are occuring, I'd appreciate it. Thanks, helixed

  Read the article

• Lots of questions about file I/O (reading/writing message strings)

  - by Nazgulled

  Hi, For this university project I'm doing (for which I've made a couple of posts in the past), which is some sort of social network, it's required the ability for the users to exchange messages. At first, I designed my data structures to hold ALL messages in a linked list, limiting the message size to 256 chars. However, I think my instructors will prefer if I save the messages on disk and read them only when I need them. Of course, they won't say what they prefer, I need to make a choice and justify the best I can why I went that route. One thing to keep in mind is that I only need to save the latest 20 messages from each user, no more. Right now I have an Hash Table that will act as inbox, this will be inside the user profile. This Hash Table will be indexed by name (the user that sent the message). The value for each element will be a data structure holding an array of size_t with 20 elements (20 messages like I said above). The idea is to keep track of the disk file offsets and bytes written. Then, when I need to read a message, I just need to use fseek() and read the necessary bytes. I think this could work nicely... I could use just one single file to hold all messages from all users in the network. I'm saying one single file because a colleague asked an instructor about saving the messages from each user independently which he replied that it might not be the best approach cause the file system has it's limits. That's why I'm thinking of going the single file route. However, this presents a problem... Since I only need to save the latest 20 messages, I need to discard the older ones when I reach this limit. I have no idea how to do this... All I know is about fread() and fwrite() to read/write bytes from/to files. How can I go to a file offset and say "hey, delete the following X bytes"? Even if I could do that, there's another problem... All offsets below that one will be completely different and I would have to process all users mailboxes to fix the problem. Which would be a pain... So, any suggestions to solve my problems? What do you suggest?

  Read the article

• can I access a struct inside of a struct without using the dot operator?

  - by yan bellavance

  I have 2 structures that have 90% of their fields the same. I want to group those fields in a structure but I do not want to use the dot operator to access them. The reason is I already coded with the first structure and have just created the second one. before: struct{ int a; int b; int c; object1 name; } str1; struct{ int a; int b; int c; object2 name; } str2; now I would create a third struct: struct{ int a; int b; int c; } str3; and would change the str1 and atr2 to this: struct{ str3 str; object1 name; } str1; struct { str3 str; object2 name; } str2; Finally I would like to be able to access a,b and c by doing: str1 myStruct; myStruct.a; myStruct.b; myStruct.c; and not: myStruct.str.a; myStruct.str.b; myStruct.str.c; Is there a way to do such a thing. The reason for doing this is I want keep the integrety of the data if chnges to the struct were to occur and to not repeat myself and not have to change my existing code and not have fields nested too deeply. RESOLVED: thx for all your answers. The final way of doing it so that I could use auto-completion also was the following: struct str11 { int a; int b; int c; }; typedef struct str22 : public str11 { QString name; }hi;

  Read the article

• Does my fat-client application belong in the MVC pattern?

  - by boatingcow

  The web-based application I’m currently working on is growing arms and legs! It’s basically an administration system which helps users to keep track of bookings, user accounts, invoicing etc. It can also be accessed via a couple of different websites using a fairly crude API. The fat-client design loosely follows the MVC pattern (or perhaps MVP) with a php/MySQL backend, Front Controller, several dissimilar Page Controllers, a liberal smattering of object-oriented and procedural Models, a confusing bunch of Views and templates, some JavaScripts, CSS files and Flash objects. The programmer in me is a big fan of the principle of “Separation of Concerns” and on that note, I’m currently trying to figure out the best way to separate and combine the various concerns as the project grows and more people contribute to it. The problem we’re facing is that although JavaScript (or Flash with ActionScript) is normally written with the template, hence part of the View and decoupled from the Controller and Model, we find that it actually encompasses the entire MVC pattern... Swap an image with an onmouseover event - that’s Behaviour. Render a datagrid - we’re manipulating the View. Send the result of reordering a list via AJAX - now we’re in Control. Check a form field to see if an email address is in a valid format - we’re consulting the Model. Is it wise to let the database people write up the validation Model with jQuery? Can the php programmers write the necessary Control structures in JavaScript? Can the web designers really write a functional AJAX form for their View? Should there be a JavaScript overlord for every project? If the MVC pattern could be applied to the people instead of the code, we would end up with this: Model - the database boffins - “SELECT * FROM mind WHERE interested IS NULL” Control - pesky programmers - “class Something extends NothingAbstractClass{…}” View - traditionally the domain of the graphic/web designer - “” …and a new layer: Behaviour - interaction and feedback designer - “CSS3 is the new black…” So, we’re refactoring and I’d like to stick to best practice design, but I’m not sure how to proceed. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so would anyone have any hints or tips as to what pattern I should be looking at or any code samples from someone who’s already done the dirty work? As the programmer guy, how can I rewrite the app for backend and front end whilst keeping the two separate? And before you ask, yes I’ve looked at Zend, CodeIgnitor, Symfony, etc., and no, they don’t seem to cross the boundary between server logic and client logic!

  Read the article

• Automatically generate table of function pointers in C.

  - by jeremytrimble

  I'm looking for a way to automatically (as part of the compilation/build process) generate a "table" of function pointers in C. Specifically, I want to generate an array of structures something like: typedef struct { void (*p_func)(void); char * funcName; } funcRecord; /* Automatically generate the lines below: */ extern void func1(void); extern void func2(void); /* ... */ funcRecord funcTable[] = { { .p_func = &func1, .funcName = "func1" }, { .p_func = &func2, .funcName = "func2" } /* ... */ }; /* End automatically-generated code. */ ...where func1 and func2 are defined in other source files. So, given a set of source files, each of which which contain a single function that takes no arguments and returns void, how would one automatically (as part of the build process) generate an array like the one above that contains each of the functions from the files? I'd like to be able to add new files and have them automatically inserted into the table when I re-compile. I realize that this probably isn't achievable using the C language or preprocessor alone, so consider any common *nix-style tools fair game (e.g. make, perl, shell scripts (if you have to)). But Why? You're probably wondering why anyone would want to do this. I'm creating a small test framework for a library of common mathematical routines. Under this framework, there will be many small "test cases," each of which has only a few lines of code that will exercise each math function. I'd like each test case to live in its own source file as a short function. All of the test cases will get built into a single executable, and the test case(s) to be run can be specified on the command line when invoking the executable. The main() function will search through the table and, if it finds a match, jump to the test case function. Automating the process of building up the "catalog" of test cases ensures that test cases don't get left out (for instance, because someone forgets to add it to the table) and makes it very simple for maintainers to add new test cases in the future (just create a new source file in the correct directory, for instance). Hopefully someone out there has done something like this before. Thanks, StackOverflow community!

  Read the article

• Backbone.Marionette - Collection within CompositeView, which itself is nested in a CollectionView

  - by nicefinly

  *UPDATE: The problem probably involves the tour-template as I've discovered that it thinks the 'name' attribute is undefined. This leads me to think that it's not an array being passed on to the ToursView, but for some reason a string. * After studying similar questions on StackOverflow: How to handle nested CompositeView using Backbone.Marionette? How do you properly display a Backbone marionette collection view based on a model javascript array property? Nested collections with Backbone.Marionette ... and Derick Bailey's excellent blog's on this subject: http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2012/04/05/composite-views-tree-structures-tables-and-more/ ... including the JSFiddle's: http://jsfiddle.net/derickbailey/AdWjU/ I'm still having trouble with a displaying the last node of a nested CollectionView of CompositeViews. It is the final CollectionView within each CompositeView that is causing the problem. CollectionView { CompositeView{ CollectionView {} //**<-- This is the troublemaker!** } } NOTE: I have already made a point of creating a valid Backbone.Collection given that the collection passed on to the final, child CollectionView is just a simple array. Data returned from the api to ToursList: [ { "id": "1", "name": "Venice", "theTours": "[ {'name': u'test venice'}, {'name': u'test venice 2'} ]" }, { "id": "2", "name": "Rome", "theTours": "[ {'name': u'Test rome'} ]" }, { "id": "3", "name": "Dublin", "theTours": "[ {'name': u'test dublin'}, {'name': u'test dublin 2'} ]" } ] I'm trying to nest these in a dropdown where the nav header is the 'name' (i.e. Dublin), and the subsequent li 's are the individual tour names (i.e. 'test dublin', 'test dublin2', etc.) Tour Models and Collections ToursByLoc = TastypieModel.extend({}); ToursList = TastypieCollection.extend({ model: ToursByLoc, url:'/api/v1/location/', }); Tour Views ToursView = Backbone.Marionette.ItemView.extend({ template: '#tour-template', tagName: 'li', }); ToursByLocView = Backbone.Marionette.CompositeView.extend({ template: '#toursByLoc-template', itemView: ToursView, initialize: function(){ //As per Derick Bailey's comments regarding the need to pass on a //valid Backbone.Collection to the child CollectionView //REFERENCE: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12163118/nested-collections-with-backbone-marionette var theTours = this.model.get('theTours'); this.collection = new Backbone.Collection(theTours); }, appendHtml: function(collectionView, itemView){ collectionView.$('div').append(itemView.el); } }); ToursListView = Backbone.Marionette.CollectionView.extend({ itemView: ToursByLocView, }); Templates <script id="tour-template" type="text/template"> <%= name %> </script> <script id="toursByLoc-template" type="text/template"> <li class="nav-header"><%= name %></li> <div class="indTours"></div> <li class="divider"></li> </script>

  Read the article

• Approaches to create a nested tree structure of NSDictionaries?

  - by d11wtq

  I'm parsing some input which produces a tree structure containing NSDictionary instances on the branches and NSString instance at the nodes. After parsing, the whole structure should be immutable. I feel like I'm jumping through hoops to create the structure and then make sure it's immutable when it's returned from my method. We can probably all relate to the input I'm parsing, since it's a query string from a URL. In a string like this: a=foo&b=bar&a=zip We expect a structure like this: NSDictionary { "a" => NSDictionary { 0 => "foo", 1 => "zip" }, "b" => "bar" } I'm keeping it just two-dimensional in this example for brevity, though in the real-world we sometimes see var[key1][key2]=value&var[key1][key3]=value2 type structures. The code hasn't evolved that far just yet. Currently I do this: - (NSDictionary *)parseQuery:(NSString *)queryString { NSMutableDictionary *params = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary]; NSArray *pairs = [queryString componentsSeparatedByString:@"&"]; for (NSString *pair in pairs) { NSRange eqRange = [pair rangeOfString:@"="]; NSString *key; id value; // If the parameter is a key without a specified value if (eqRange.location == NSNotFound) { key = [pair stringByReplacingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding]; value = @""; } else { // Else determine both key and value key = [[pair substringToIndex:eqRange.location] stringByReplacingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding]; if ([pair length] > eqRange.location + 1) { value = [[pair substringFromIndex:eqRange.location + 1] stringByReplacingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding]; } else { value = @""; } } // Parameter already exists, it must be a dictionary if (nil != [params objectForKey:key]) { id existingValue = [params objectForKey:key]; if (![existingValue isKindOfClass:[NSDictionary class]]) { value = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:existingValue, [NSNumber numberWithInt:0], value, [NSNumber numberWithInt:1], nil]; } else { // FIXME: There must be a more elegant way to build a nested dictionary where the end result is immutable? NSMutableDictionary *newValue = [NSMutableDictionary dictionaryWithDictionary:existingValue]; [newValue setObject:value forKey:[NSNumber numberWithInt:[newValue count]]]; value = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithDictionary:newValue]; } } [params setObject:value forKey:key]; } return [NSDictionary dictionaryWithDictionary:params]; } If you look at the bit where I've added FIXME it feels awfully clumsy, pulling out the existing dictionary, creating an immutable version of it, adding the new value, then creating an immutable dictionary from that to set back in place. Expensive and unnecessary? I'm not sure if there are any Cocoa-specific design patterns I can follow here?

  Read the article

• Minimalistic tools for developer documentation

  - by Pekka

  I am currently working on a large PHP CMS / Framework and documenting it extensively as I go along. In addition to phpdoc-style inline comments, I need to document XML structures, details on concepts and practices, write HOWTOs and so on. At the moment, I am using simple OpenOffice documents for that, but I'm unhappy with it and looking for a "real" documentation system. So, I am looking for recommendations for robust, minimalistic, easy-to-use documentation software. I have tried a number of Wikis, most prominently Dokuwiki. I like the open-minded approach, the freedom in editing, and the simplicity, but they provide little support in structuring a multi-chapter documentation, and make basic reorganisation tasks very difficult (e.g. moving pages to a different namespace). Working with the plugins is Cumbersome, and they are not really easy to use. Open Source would be a plus but is not a requirement. Thanks for all the suggestions. I have not had time to look into each one in detail. I will be trying Sphinx, especially because it provides so much support for a good structure. I may update this post later when I'm done and report how it worked out. The suggestions Trac's built-in wiki which is great but for my taste provides too little support for keeping a structure - it's perfect though for "normal", smaller size project documentation Markdown my current favourite because of its minimalism, however not sure yet whether maintaining a structure will be easy enough. A Markdown-Based system would of course be very easy to extend, e.g. to look up cross references from the project's code base. Of course it would be great to find something that already has that out of the box. The DocBook format and to edit, the commercial Oxygen XML Editor - a great standard for building documentation, no doubt. Maybe too "technical" for my purposes as I need something to open quickly, write into and go on coding. Still always worth a mention. Sphinx an Open Source, Python based documentation generator, promising structured documentation and extensive cross-referencing. Interesting and will take a look. Confluence a commercial but very affordable Wiki. XWiki, an Open Source playing in Confluence's league with numerous extensions and connectors to Eclipse and Microsoft Office. TiddlyWiki an open-source Wiki.

  Read the article

• NoSQL DB for .Net document-based database (ECM)

  - by Dane

  I'm halfway through coding a basic multi-tenant SaaS ECM solution. Each client has it's own instance of the database / datastore, but the .Net app is single instance. The documents are pretty much read only (i.e. an image archive of tiffs or PDFs) I've used MSSQL so far, but then started thinking this might be viable in a NoSQL DB (e.g. MongoDB, CouchDB). The basic premise is that it stores documents, each with their own particular indexes. Each tenant can have multiple document types. e.g. One tenant might have an invoice type, which has Customer ID, Invoice Number and Invoice Date. Another tenant might have an application form, which has Member Number, Application Number, Member Name, and Application Date. So far I've used the old method which Sharepoint (used?) to use, and created a document table which has int_field_1, int_field_2, date_field_1, date_field_2, etc. Then, I've got a "mapping" table which stores the customer specific index name, and the database field that will map to. I've avoided the key-value pair model in the DB due to volume of documents. This way, we can support multiple document types in the one table, and get reasonably high performance out of it, and allow for custom document type searches (i.e. user selects a document type, then they're presented with a list of search fields). However, a NoSQL DB might make this a lot simpler, as I don't need to worry about denormalizing the document. However, I've just got concerns about the rest of the data around a document. We store an "action history" against the document. This tracks views, whether someone emails the document from within the system, and other "future" functionality (e.g. faxing). We have control over the document load process, so we can manipulate the data however it needs to be to get it in the document store (e.g. assign unique IDs). Users will not be adding in their own documents, so we shouldn't need to worry about ACID compliance, as the documents are relatively static. So, my questions I guess : Is a NoSQL DB a good fit Is MongoDB the best for Asp.Net (I saw Raven and Velocity, but they're still kinda beta) Can I store a key for each document, and then store the action history in a MSSQL DB with this key? I don't need to do joins, it would be if a person clicks "View History" against a document. How would performance compare between the two (NoSQL DB vs denormalized "document" table) Volumes would be up to 200,000 new documents per month for a single tenant. My current scaling plan with the SQL DB involves moving the SQL DB into a cluster when certain thresholds are reached, and then reviewing partitioning and indexing structures.

  Read the article

• Difficulties getting GraphViz working as a library in C++

  - by DistortedLojik

  Am working on a program that will allow a graph of nodes to be displayed and then updated visually as the nodes themselves are updated. I am fairly new to Visual Studio 2010 and am following the GraphViz guide located at http://www.graphviz.org/pdf/libguide.pdf in order to get GraphViz working as a library. I have the following code which is taken straight from the pdf linked above. #include <graphviz\gvc.h> #include <graphviz\cdt.h> #include <graphviz\graph.h> #include <graphviz\pathplan.h> using namespace std; int main(int argc, char **argv) { Agraph_t *g; Agnode_t *n, *m; Agedge_t *e; Agsym_t *a; GVC_t *gvc; /* set up a graphviz context */ gvc = gvContext(); /* parse command line args - minimally argv[0] sets layout engine */ gvParseArgs(gvc, argc, argv); /* Create a simple digraph */ g = agopen("g", AGDIGRAPH); n = agnode(g, "n"); m = agnode(g, "m"); e = agedge(g, n, m); /* Set an attribute - in this case one that affects the visible rendering */ agsafeset(n, "color", "red", ""); /* Compute a layout using layout engine from command line args */ gvLayoutJobs(gvc, g); /* Write the graph according to -T and -o options */ gvRenderJobs(gvc, g); /* Free layout data */ gvFreeLayout(gvc, g); /* Free graph structures */ agclose(g); /* close output file, free context, and return number of errors */ return (gvFreeContext(gvc)); } After compiling I get the following errors which indicate that I do not have it correctly linked. 1>main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gvFreeContext referenced in function _main 1>main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _agclose referenced in function _main 1>main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gvFreeLayout referenced in function _main 1>main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gvRenderJobs referenced in function _main 1>main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gvLayoutJobs referenced in function _main 1>main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _agsafeset referenced in function _main 1>main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _agedge referenced in function _main 1>main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _agnode referenced in function _main 1>main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _agopen referenced in function _main 1>main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gvParseArgs referenced in function _main 1>main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _gvContext referenced in function _main Within the VC++ Directories I have C:\Program Files (x86)\Graphviz2.26.3\include in the Include Directories and C:\Program Files (x86)\Graphviz2.26.3\lib\release\lib in the Library Directories Any help would be greatly appreciated to help get this working. Thank you.

  Read the article

• Fuzzy Regex, Text Processing, Lexical Analysis?

  - by justinzane

  I'm not quite sure what terminology to search for, so my title is funky... Here is the workflow I've got: Semi-structured documents are scanned to file. The files are OCR'd to text. The text is parsed into Python objects The objects are serialized (to SQL, JSON, whatever) for use. The documents are structures like this: HEADER blah blah, Page ### blah Garbage text... 1. Question Text... continued until now. A. Choice text... adsadsf. B. Another Choice... 2. Another Question... I need to extract the questions and choices. The problem is that, because the text is OCR output, there are occasional strange substitutions like '2' - 'Z' which makes ordinary regular expressions useless. I've tried the Levenshtein module and it helps, but it requires prior knowledge of what edit distance is to be expected. I don't know whether I'm looking to create a parser? a lexer? something else? This has lead me down all kinds of interesting but nonrelevant paths. Guidance would be greatly appreciated. Oh, also, the text is generally from specific technical domains, so general spelling tools are not so helpful. Regarding the structure of the documents, there is no clear visual pattern -- like line breaks or indentation -- with the exception of the fact that "questions" usually begin a line. Crap on the document can cause characters to appear before the actual beginning of the line, which means that something along the lines of r'^[0-9]+' does not reliably work. Though the "questions" always begin with an int, a period and a space; the OCR can substitute other characters or skip characters. This is not so much a problem with Tesseract or Cunieform, rather with the poor quality of the paper documents. # Note: for the project in question, it was decided that having a human prep the OCR'd text was better that spending the time coding a solution. I'd still love good pointers, however.

  Read the article

• Is this way of storing typed objects in memory good?

  - by Pindatjuh

  This is an "is this okay, or can it be done better" question. Topic: Storing typed objects in memory. Background information: I'm building a compiler for the x86-32 platform for my language. My goal includes typed objects. Idea: Every primitive is a semi-class (it can be used as if it was a normal class, but it's stored more compact). Every class is represented by primitives and some meta-data (containing class-properties, inheritance stuff, etc.). The meta-data is complex: it doesn't use fields but instead context-switches. For primitives, the meta-data is very small, compared to a "real" class, which is alot bigger. This enables another idea that "primitives are objects", in my language, which I found nessecairy. Example: If I have an array of 32 booleans, then the pure content of this array is exactly 4 byte (32 bits of booleans). The meta-data will contain flags that the type is an array of booleans, which contains 32 entries. The meta-data is very compacted, on bit-level: using a sort of "packing" mechanism, which is read by a FSM at runtime, when doing inspection of the type (like when passing the object to methods for checking, etc.) For instance (read from left to right, top to bottom, remember vertical possition when going to the right, and check nearest column header for meaning of switch): Primitive? Array? Type-Meta 1 Byte? || Size (1 byte) 1 1 [...] 1 [...] done 0 2 Bytes? || Size (2 bytes) 1 [...] done || Size (4 bytes) 0 [...] done Integer? 1 Byte? 2 Bytes? 0 1 0 1 done 1 done 0 done Boolean? Byte? 0 1 0 done 1 done More-Primitives 0 .... Class-Stuff (Huge) 0 ... (After reaching done the data is inserted. || = byte alignement. [...] is variable sized. ... is not described here, for simplicity. And let's call them cost-based-data-structures.) For an array of 32 booleans containing all true values, the memory for this type would be (read top-down): 1 Primitive 1 Array 1 ArrayType: Primitive 0 Not-Array 0 Not-Integer 1 Boolean 0 Not-Byte (thus bit) 1 Integer Size: 1 Byte 00100000 Array size 11111111 11111111 11111111 11111111 Data Thus, 8 bytes represent 32 booleans in an array: 11100101 00100000 11111111 11111111 11111111 11111111 Is this okay, or can it be done better?

  Read the article

• POD global object initialization

  - by paercebal

  I've got bitten today by a bug. The following source can be copy/pasted (and then compiled) into a main.cpp file #include <iostream> // The point of SomeGlobalObject is for its // constructor to be launched before the main // ... struct SomeGlobalObject { SomeGlobalObject() ; } ; // ... // Which explains the global object SomeGlobalObject oSomeGlobalObject ; // A POD... I was hoping it would be constructed at // compile time when using an argument list struct MyPod { short m_short ; const char * const m_string ; } ; // declaration/Initialization of a MyPod array MyPod myArrayOfPod[] = { { 1, "Hello" }, { 2, "World" }, { 3, " !" } } ; // declaration/Initialization of an array of array of void * void * myArrayOfVoid[][2] = { { (void *)1, "Hello" }, { (void *)2, "World" }, { (void *)3, " !" } } ; // constructor of the global object... Launched BEFORE main SomeGlobalObject::SomeGlobalObject() { std::cout << "myArrayOfPod[0].m_short : " << myArrayOfPod[0].m_short << std::endl ; std::cout << "myArrayOfVoid[0][0] : " << myArrayOfVoid[0][0] << std::endl ; } // main... What else ? int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { return 0 ; } MyPod being a POD, I believed there would be no constructors. Only initialization at compile time. Thus, the global object SomeGlobalObject would have no problem to use the global array of PODs upon its construction. The problem is that in real life, nothing is so simple. On Visual C++ 2008 (I did not test on other compilers), upon execution myArrayOfPodis not initialized, even ifmyArrayOfVoid` is initialized. So my questions is: Are C++ compilers not supposed to initialize global PODs (including POD structures) at compilation time ? Note that I know global variable are evil, and I know that one can't be sure of the order of creation of global variables declared in different compilation units. The problem here is really the POD C-like initialization which seems to call a constructor (the default, compiler-generated one?). And to make everyone happy: This is on debug. On release, the global array of PODs is correctly initialized.

  Read the article

• Vbscript - Creating a script that mirrors several sets of folders

  - by Kenny Bones

  Ok, this is my problem. I'm doing a logonscript that basically copies Microsoft Word templates from a serverpath on to a local path of each computer. This is done using a check for group membership. If MemberOf(ObjGroupDict, "g_group1") Then oShell.Run "%comspec% /c %LOGONSERVER%\SYSVOL\mydomain.com\scripts\ROBOCOPY \\server\Templates\Group1\OFFICE2003\ " & TemplateFolder & "\" & " * /E /XO", 0, True End If Previously I used the /MIR switch of robocopy, which is exellent. But, if a user is member of more than one group, the /MIR switch removes the content from the first group, since it's mirroring the content from the second group. Meaning, I can't have both contents. This is "solved" by not using the /MIR switch and just let the content get copied anyway. BUT the whole idea of having the templates on a server is so that I can control the content the users receive through the script. So if I delete a file or folder from the server path, this doesn't replicate on the local computer. Since I don't use the /MIR switch anymore. Comprende? So, what do I do? I did a small script that basically checks the folders and files and then removes them accordingly, but this actually ended up being the same functionality as the /MIR switch anyway. How do I solve this problem? Edit: I've found that what I actually need is a routine that scans my local template folder for files and folders and checks if the same structure exists in any of the source template folders. The server template folders are set up like this: \\fileserver\templates\group1\ \\fileserver\templates\group2\ \\fileserver\templates\group3\ \\fileserver\templates\group4\ \\fileserver\templates\group5\ \\fileserver\templates\group6\ And the script that does the copying is structures like this (pseudo): If User is MemberOf (group1) Then RoboCopy.exe \\fileserver\templates\group1\ c:\templates\workgroup *.* /E /XO End if If User is MemberOf (group2) Then RoboCopy.exe \\fileserver\templates\group2\ c:\templates\workgroup *.* /E /XO End if If User is MemberOf (group3) Then RoboCopy.exe \\fileserver\templates\group3\ c:\templates\workgroup *.* /E /XO End if Etc etc With the /E switch, I make sure it copies subfolders as well. And the /XO switch only copies files and folders that are newer than those in my local path. But it doesn't consider if the local path contains files or folders that doesn't exist on the server template path. So after the copying is done, I would like to check if any of the files or folders on my c:\templates\workgroup actually exists in either of the sources. And if they don't, delete them from my local path. Something that could be combined in these memberchecks perhaps?

  Read the article

• Prolog: Sentence Parser Problem

  - by Devon

  Hey guys, Been sat here for hours now just staring at this code and have no idea what I'm doing wrong. I know what's happening from tracing the code through (it is going on an eternal loop when it hits verbPhrase). Any tips are more then welcome. Thank you. % Knowledge-base det(the). det(a). adjective(quick). adjective(brown). adjective(orange). adjective(sweet). noun(cat). noun(mat). noun(fox). noun(cucumber). noun(saw). noun(mother). noun(father). noun(family). noun(depression). prep(on). prep(with). verb(sat). verb(nibbled). verb(ran). verb(looked). verb(is). verb(has). % Sentece Structures sentence(Phrase) :- append(NounPhrase, VerbPhrase, Phrase), nounPhrase(NounPhrase), verbPhrase(VerbPhrase). sentence(Phrase) :- verbPhrase(Phrase). nounPhrase([]). nounPhrase([Head | Tail]) :- det(Head), nounPhrase2(Tail). nounPhrase(Phrase) :- nounPhrase2(Phrase). nounPhrase(Phrase) :- append(NP, PP, Phrase), nounPhrase(NP), prepPhrase(PP). nounPhrase2([]). nounPhrase2(Word) :- noun(Word). nounPhrase2([Head | Tail]) :- adjective(Head), nounPhrase2(Tail). prepPhrase([]). prepPhrase([Head | Tail]) :- prep(Head), nounPhrase(Tail). verbPhrase([]). verbPhrase(Word) :- verb(Word). verbPhrase([Head | Tail]) :- verb(Head), nounPhrase(Tail). verbPhrase(Phrase) :- append(VP, PP, Phrase), verbPhrase(VP), prepPhrase(PP).

  Read the article

• Can I append to a preprocessor macro?

  - by JCSalomon

  Is there any way in standard C—or with GNU extensions—to append stuff to a macro definition? E.g., given a macro defined as #define quux_list X(foo) X(bar) can I append X(bas) so that it now expands as if I’d defined it #define quux_list X(foo) X(bar) X(bas)? I’m playing with discriminated/tagged unions along these lines: struct quux_foo { int x; }; struct quux_bar { char *s; }; struct quux_bas { void *p; }; enum quux_type {quux_foo, quux_bar, quux_bas}; struct quux { enum quux_type type; union { struct quux_foo foo; struct quux_bar bar; struct quux_bas bas; } t; }; I figure this is a good place for the X-macro. If I define a macro #define quux_table X(foo) X(bar) X(bas) the enumeration & structure can be defined thus, and never get out of sync: #define X(t) quux_ ## t, enum quux_type {quux_table}; #undef X #define X(t) struct quux_ ## t t; struct quux { enum quux_type type; union {quux_table} t; }; #undef X Of course, the quux_* structures can get out of sync, so I’d like to do something like this, only legally: struct quux_foo { int x; }; #define quux_table quux_table X(foo) struct quux_bar { char *s; }; #define quux_table quux_table X(bar) struct quux_bas { void *p; }; #define quux_table quux_table X(bas) (Well, what I really want to be able to do is something like member_struct(quux, foo) { int x; }; but I’m well aware that macros cannot be (re)defined from within macros.) Anyhow, that’s my motivating example. Is there a way to accomplish this? Boost.Preprocessor examples are fine, if you can show me how to make the X-macro technique work with that library.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76  | Next Page >