Search Results

Search found 1783 results on 72 pages for 'computation theory'.

Page 71/72 | < Previous Page | 67 68 69 70 71 72  | Next Page >

  • How to Stich to Image objects in Java

    - by Imran
    Hi, I have a scenario in which i`m getting a number of tiles (e.g.12) from my mapping server. Now for buffering and offline functions I need to join them all back again so that we have to deal with 1 single image object instead of 12. I ve tried to do it without JAI my code is below. package imagemerge; import java.awt.*; import java.awt.image.*; import java.awt.event.*; public class ImageSticher extends WindowAdapter { Image tile1; Image tile2; Image result; ColorModel colorModel; int width,height,widthr,heightr; //int t1,t2; int t12[]; public ImageSticher() { } public ImageSticher (Image img1,Image img2,int w,int h) { tile1=img1; tile2=img2; width=w; height=h; colorModel=ColorModel.getRGBdefault(); } public Image horizontalStich() throws Exception { widthr=width*2; heightr=height; t12=new int[widthr * heightr]; int t1[]=new int[width*height]; PixelGrabber p1 =new PixelGrabber(tile1, 0, 0, width, height, t1, 0, width); p1.grabPixels(); int t2[]=new int[width*height]; PixelGrabber p2 =new PixelGrabber(tile2, 0, 0, width, height, t1, 0, width); p2.grabPixels(); int y, x, rp, rpi; int red1, red2, redr; int green1, green2, greenr; int blue1, blue2, bluer; int alpha1, alpha2, alphar; for(y=0;y<heightr;y++) { for(x=0;x<widthr;x++) { //System.out.println(x); rpi=y*widthr+x; // index of resulting pixel; rp=0; //initializing resulting pixel System.out.println(rpi); if(x<(widthr/2)) // x is less than width , copy first tile { //System.out.println("tile1="+x); blue1 = t1[rpi] & 0x00ff; // ERROR occurs here green1=(t1[rpi] >> 8) & 0x00ff; red1=(t1[rpi] >> 16) & 0x00ff; alpha1 = (t1[rpi] >> 24) & 0x00ff; redr = (int)(red1 * 1.0); // copying red band pixel into redresult,,,,1.0 is the alpha valye redr = (redr < 0)?(0):((redr>255)?(255):(redr)); greenr = (int)(green1 * 1.0); // redr = (int)(red1 * 1.0); // greenr = (greenr < 0)?(0):((greenr>255)?(255):(greenr)); bluer = (int)(blue1 * 1.0); bluer = (bluer < 0)?(0):((bluer>255)?(255):(bluer)); alphar = 255; //resulting pixel computed rp = (((((alphar << 8) + (redr & 0x0ff)) << 8) + (greenr & 0x0ff)) << 8) + (bluer & 0x0ff); } else // index is ahead of half way...copy second tile { blue2 = t2[rpi] & 0x00ff; // blue band bit of first tile green2=(t2[rpi] >> 8) & 0x00ff; red2=(t2[rpi] >> 16) & 0x00ff; alpha2 = (t2[rpi] >> 24) & 0x00ff; redr = (int)(red2 * 1.0); // copying red band pixel into redresult,,,,1.0 is the alpha valye redr = (redr < 0)?(0):((redr>255)?(255):(redr)); greenr = (int)(green2 * 1.0); // redr = (int)(red2 * 1.0); // greenr = (greenr < 0)?(0):((greenr>255)?(255):(greenr)); bluer = (int)(blue2 * 1.0); bluer = (bluer < 0)?(0):((bluer>255)?(255):(bluer)); alphar = 255; //resulting pixel computed rp = (((((alphar << 8) + (redr & 0x0ff)) << 8) + (greenr & 0x0ff)) << 8) + (bluer & 0x0ff); } t12[rpi] = rp; // copying resulting pixel in the result int array which will be converted to image } } MemoryImageSource mis; if (t12!=null) { mis = new MemoryImageSource(widthr, heightr, colorModel, t12, 0, widthr); result = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().createImage(mis); return result; } return null; } } now to check the my theory Im trying to join or stich two tiles horizontaly but im getting the error : java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 90000 at imagemerge.ImageSticher.horizontalStich(ImageSticher.java:69) at imageStream.ImageStream.getImage(ImageStream.java:75) at imageStream.ImageStream.main(ImageStream.java:28) is there some kind of limitation because when stiching two images of 300 x 300 horizontally it means the resulting image will be 600 x 300 ... that would make 180000 index size but its giving error at 90000, what am I doing wrong here

    Read the article

  • Neural Network Always Produces Same/Similar Outputs for Any Input

    - by l33tnerd
    I have a problem where I am trying to create a neural network for Tic-Tac-Toe. However, for some reason, training the neural network causes it to produce nearly the same output for any given input. I did take a look at Artificial neural networks benchmark, but my network implementation is built for neurons with the same activation function for each neuron, i.e. no constant neurons. To make sure the problem wasn't just due to my choice of training set (1218 board states and moves generated by a genetic algorithm), I tried to train the network to reproduce XOR. The logistic activation function was used. Instead of using the derivative, I multiplied the error by output*(1-output) as some sources suggested that this was equivalent to using the derivative. I can put the Haskell source on HPaste, but it's a little embarrassing to look at. The network has 3 layers: the first layer has 2 inputs and 4 outputs, the second has 4 inputs and 1 output, and the third has 1 output. Increasing to 4 neurons in the second layer didn't help, and neither did increasing to 8 outputs in the first layer. I then calculated errors, network output, bias updates, and the weight updates by hand based on http://hebb.mit.edu/courses/9.641/2002/lectures/lecture04.pdf to make sure there wasn't an error in those parts of the code (there wasn't, but I will probably do it again just to make sure). Because I am using batch training, I did not multiply by x in equation (4) there. I am adding the weight change, though http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ai-faq/neural-nets/part2/section-2.html suggests to subtract it instead. The problem persisted, even in this simplified network. For example, these are the results after 500 epochs of batch training and of incremental training. Input |Target|Output (Batch) |Output(Incremental) [1.0,1.0]|[0.0] |[0.5003781562785173]|[0.5009731800870864] [1.0,0.0]|[1.0] |[0.5003740346965251]|[0.5006347214672715] [0.0,1.0]|[1.0] |[0.5003734471544522]|[0.500589332376345] [0.0,0.0]|[0.0] |[0.5003674110937019]|[0.500095157458231] Subtracting instead of adding produces the same problem, except everything is 0.99 something instead of 0.50 something. 5000 epochs produces the same result, except the batch-trained network returns exactly 0.5 for each case. (Heck, even 10,000 epochs didn't work for batch training.) Is there anything in general that could produce this behavior? Also, I looked at the intermediate errors for incremental training, and the although the inputs of the hidden/input layers varied, the error for the output neuron was always +/-0.12. For batch training, the errors were increasing, but extremely slowly and the errors were all extremely small (x10^-7). Different initial random weights and biases made no difference, either. Note that this is a school project, so hints/guides would be more helpful. Although reinventing the wheel and making my own network (in a language I don't know well!) was a horrible idea, I felt it would be more appropriate for a school project (so I know what's going on...in theory, at least. There doesn't seem to be a computer science teacher at my school). EDIT: Two layers, an input layer of 2 inputs to 8 outputs, and an output layer of 8 inputs to 1 output, produces much the same results: 0.5+/-0.2 (or so) for each training case. I'm also playing around with pyBrain, seeing if any network structure there will work. Edit 2: I am using a learning rate of 0.1. Sorry for forgetting about that. Edit 3: Pybrain's "trainUntilConvergence" doesn't get me a fully trained network, either, but 20000 epochs does, with 16 neurons in the hidden layer. 10000 epochs and 4 neurons, not so much, but close. So, in Haskell, with the input layer having 2 inputs & 2 outputs, hidden layer with 2 inputs and 8 outputs, and output layer with 8 inputs and 1 output...I get the same problem with 10000 epochs. And with 20000 epochs. Edit 4: I ran the network by hand again based on the MIT PDF above, and the values match, so the code should be correct unless I am misunderstanding those equations. Some of my source code is at http://hpaste.org/42453/neural_network__not_working; I'm working on cleaning my code somewhat and putting it in a Github (rather than a private Bitbucket) repository. All of the relevant source code is now at https://github.com/l33tnerd/hsann.

    Read the article

  • Problem measuring N times the execution time of a code block

    - by Nazgulled
    EDIT: I just found my problem after writing this long post explaining every little detail... If someone can give me a good answer on what I'm doing wrong and how can I get the execution time in seconds (using a float with 5 decimal places or so), I'll mark that as accepted. Hint: The problem was on how I interpreted the clock_getttime() man page. Hi, Let's say I have a function named myOperation that I need to measure the execution time of. To measure it, I'm using clock_gettime() as it was recommend here in one of the comments. My teacher recommends us to measure it N times so we can get an average, standard deviation and median for the final report. He also recommends us to execute myOperation M times instead of just one. If myOperation is a very fast operation, measuring it M times allow us to get a sense of the "real time" it takes; cause the clock being used might not have the required precision to measure such operation. So, execution myOperation only one time or M times really depends if the operation itself takes long enough for the clock precision we are using. I'm having trouble dealing with that M times execution. Increasing M decreases (a lot) the final average value. Which doesn't make sense to me. It's like this, on average you take 3 to 5 seconds to travel from point A to B. But then you go from A to B and back to A 5 times (which makes it 10 times, cause A to B is the same as B to A) and you measure that. Than you divide by 10, the average you get is supposed to be the same average you take traveling from point A to B, which is 3 to 5 seconds. This is what I want my code to do, but it's not working. If I keep increasing the number of times I go from A to B and back A, the average will be lower and lower each time, it makes no sense to me. Enough theory, here's my code: #include <stdio.h> #include <time.h> #define MEASUREMENTS 1 #define OPERATIONS 1 typedef struct timespec TimeClock; TimeClock diffTimeClock(TimeClock start, TimeClock end) { TimeClock aux; if((end.tv_nsec - start.tv_nsec) < 0) { aux.tv_sec = end.tv_sec - start.tv_sec - 1; aux.tv_nsec = 1E9 + end.tv_nsec - start.tv_nsec; } else { aux.tv_sec = end.tv_sec - start.tv_sec; aux.tv_nsec = end.tv_nsec - start.tv_nsec; } return aux; } int main(void) { TimeClock sTime, eTime, dTime; int i, j; for(i = 0; i < MEASUREMENTS; i++) { printf(" » MEASURE %02d\n", i+1); clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, &sTime); for(j = 0; j < OPERATIONS; j++) { myOperation(); } clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, &eTime); dTime = diffTimeClock(sTime, eTime); printf(" - NSEC (TOTAL): %ld\n", dTime.tv_nsec); printf(" - NSEC (OP): %ld\n\n", dTime.tv_nsec / OPERATIONS); } return 0; } Notes: The above diffTimeClock function is from this blog post. I replaced my real operation with myOperation() because it doesn't make any sense to post my real functions as I would have to post long blocks of code, you can easily code a myOperation() with whatever you like to compile the code if you wish. As you can see, OPERATIONS = 1 and the results are: » MEASURE 01 - NSEC (TOTAL): 27456580 - NSEC (OP): 27456580 For OPERATIONS = 100 the results are: » MEASURE 01 - NSEC (TOTAL): 218929736 - NSEC (OP): 2189297 For OPERATIONS = 1000 the results are: » MEASURE 01 - NSEC (TOTAL): 862834890 - NSEC (OP): 862834 For OPERATIONS = 10000 the results are: » MEASURE 01 - NSEC (TOTAL): 574133641 - NSEC (OP): 57413 Now, I'm not a math wiz, far from it actually, but this doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. I've already talked about this with a friend that's on this project with me and he also can't understand the differences. I don't understand why the value is getting lower and lower when I increase OPERATIONS. The operation itself should take the same time (on average of course, not the exact same time), no matter how many times I execute it. You could tell me that that actually depends on the operation itself, the data being read and that some data could already be in the cache and bla bla, but I don't think that's the problem. In my case, myOperation is reading 5000 lines of text from an CSV file, separating the values by ; and inserting those values into a data structure. For each iteration, I'm destroying the data structure and initializing it again. Now that I think of it, I also that think that there's a problem measuring time with clock_gettime(), maybe I'm not using it right. I mean, look at the last example, where OPERATIONS = 10000. The total time it took was 574133641ns, which would be roughly 0,5s; that's impossible, it took a couple of minutes as I couldn't stand looking at the screen waiting and went to eat something.

    Read the article

  • How to implement Cocoa copyWithZone on derived object in MonoMac C#?

    - by Justin Aquadro
    I'm currently porting a small Winforms-based .NET application to use a native Mac front-end with MonoMac. The application has a TreeControl with icons and text, which does not exist out of the box in Cocoa. So far, I've ported almost all of the ImageAndTextCell code in Apple's DragNDrop example: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/DragNDropOutlineView/Listings/ImageAndTextCell_m.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40008831-ImageAndTextCell_m-DontLinkElementID_6, which is assigned to an NSOutlineView as a custom cell. It seems to be working almost perfectly, except that I have not figured out how to properly port the copyWithZone method. Unfortunately, this means the internal copies that NSOutlineView is making do not have the image field, and it leads to the images briefly vanishing during expand and collapse operations. The objective-c code in question is: - (id)copyWithZone:(NSZone *)zone { ImageAndTextCell *cell = (ImageAndTextCell *)[super copyWithZone:zone]; // The image ivar will be directly copied; we need to retain or copy it. cell->image = [image retain]; return cell; } The first line is what's tripping me up, as MonoMac does not expose a copyWithZone method, and I don't know how to otherwise call it. Update Based on current answers and additional research and testing, I've come up with a variety of models for copying an object. static List<ImageAndTextCell> _refPool = new List<ImageAndTextCell>(); // Method 1 static IntPtr selRetain = Selector.GetHandle ("retain"); [Export("copyWithZone:")] public virtual NSObject CopyWithZone(IntPtr zone) { ImageAndTextCell cell = new ImageAndTextCell() { Title = Title, Image = Image, }; Messaging.void_objc_msgSend (cell.Handle, selRetain); return cell; } // Method 2 [Export("copyWithZone:")] public virtual NSObject CopyWithZone(IntPtr zone) { ImageAndTextCell cell = new ImageAndTextCell() { Title = Title, Image = Image, }; _refPool.Add(cell); return cell; } [Export("dealloc")] public void Dealloc () { _refPool.Remove(this); this.Dispose(); } // Method 3 static IntPtr selRetain = Selector.GetHandle ("retain"); [Export("copyWithZone:")] public virtual NSObject CopyWithZone(IntPtr zone) { ImageAndTextCell cell = new ImageAndTextCell() { Title = Title, Image = Image, }; _refPool.Add(cell); Messaging.void_objc_msgSend (cell.Handle, selRetain); return cell; } // Method 4 static IntPtr selRetain = Selector.GetHandle ("retain"); static IntPtr selRetainCount = Selector.GetHandle("retainCount"); [Export("copyWithZone:")] public virtual NSObject CopyWithZone (IntPtr zone) { ImageAndTextCell cell = new ImageAndTextCell () { Title = Title, Image = Image, }; _refPool.Add (cell); Messaging.void_objc_msgSend (cell.Handle, selRetain); return cell; } public void PeriodicCleanup () { List<ImageAndTextCell> markedForDelete = new List<ImageAndTextCell> (); foreach (ImageAndTextCell cell in _refPool) { uint count = Messaging.UInt32_objc_msgSend (cell.Handle, selRetainCount); if (count == 1) markedForDelete.Add (cell); } foreach (ImageAndTextCell cell in markedForDelete) { _refPool.Remove (cell); cell.Dispose (); } } // Method 5 static IntPtr selCopyWithZone = Selector.GetHandle("copyWithZone:"); [Export("copyWithZone:")] public virtual NSObject CopyWithZone(IntPtr zone) { IntPtr copyHandle = Messaging.IntPtr_objc_msgSendSuper_IntPtr(SuperHandle, selCopyWithZone, zone); ImageAndTextCell cell = new ImageAndTextCell(copyHandle) { Image = Image, }; _refPool.Add(cell); return cell; } Method 1: Increases the retain count of the unmanaged object. The unmanaged object will persist persist forever (I think? dealloc never called), and the managed object will be harvested early. Seems to be lose-lose all-around, but runs in practice. Method 2: Saves a reference of the managed object. The unmanaged object is left alone, and dealloc appears to be invoked at a reasonable time by the caller. At this point the managed object is released and disposed. This seems reasonable, but on the downside the base type's dealloc won't be run (I think?) Method 3: Increases the retain count and saves a reference. Unmanaged and managed objects leak forever. Method 4: Extends Method 3 by adding a cleanup function that is run periodically (e.g. during Init of each new ImageAndTextCell object). The cleanup function checks the retain counts of the stored objects. A retain count of 1 means the caller has released it, so we should as well. Should eliminate leaking in theory. Method 5: Attempt to invoke the copyWithZone method on the base type, and then construct a new ImageAndTextView object with the resulting handle. Seems to do the right thing (the base data is cloned). Internally, NSObject bumps the retain count on objects constructed like this, so we also use the PeriodicCleanup function to release these objects when they're no longer used. Based on the above, I believe Method 5 is the best approach since it should be the only one that results in a truly correct copy of the base type data, but I don't know if the approach is inherently dangerous (I am also making some assumptions about the underlying implementation of NSObject). So far nothing bad has happened "yet", but if anyone is able to vet my analysis then I would be more confident going forward.

    Read the article

  • Trouble with copying dictionaries and using deepcopy on an SQLAlchemy ORM object

    - by Az
    Hi there, I'm doing a Simulated Annealing algorithm to optimise a given allocation of students and projects. This is language-agnostic pseudocode from Wikipedia: s ? s0; e ? E(s) // Initial state, energy. sbest ? s; ebest ? e // Initial "best" solution k ? 0 // Energy evaluation count. while k < kmax and e > emax // While time left & not good enough: snew ? neighbour(s) // Pick some neighbour. enew ? E(snew) // Compute its energy. if enew < ebest then // Is this a new best? sbest ? snew; ebest ? enew // Save 'new neighbour' to 'best found'. if P(e, enew, temp(k/kmax)) > random() then // Should we move to it? s ? snew; e ? enew // Yes, change state. k ? k + 1 // One more evaluation done return sbest // Return the best solution found. The following is an adaptation of the technique. My supervisor said the idea is fine in theory. First I pick up some allocation (i.e. an entire dictionary of students and their allocated projects, including the ranks for the projects) from entire set of randomised allocations, copy it and pass it to my function. Let's call this allocation aOld (it is a dictionary). aOld has a weight related to it called wOld. The weighting is described below. The function does the following: Let this allocation, aOld be the best_node From all the students, pick a random number of students and stick in a list Strip (DEALLOCATE) them of their projects ++ reflect the changes for projects (allocated parameter is now False) and lecturers (free up slots if one or more of their projects are no longer allocated) Randomise that list Try assigning (REALLOCATE) everyone in that list projects again Calculate the weight (add up ranks, rank 1 = 1, rank 2 = 2... and no project rank = 101) For this new allocation aNew, if the weight wNew is smaller than the allocation weight wOld I picked up at the beginning, then this is the best_node (as defined by the Simulated Annealing algorithm above). Apply the algorithm to aNew and continue. If wOld < wNew, then apply the algorithm to aOld again and continue. The allocations/data-points are expressed as "nodes" such that a node = (weight, allocation_dict, projects_dict, lecturers_dict) Right now, I can only perform this algorithm once, but I'll need to try for a number N (denoted by kmax in the Wikipedia snippet) and make sure I always have with me, the previous node and the best_node. So that I don't modify my original dictionaries (which I might want to reset to), I've done a shallow copy of the dictionaries. From what I've read in the docs, it seems that it only copies the references and since my dictionaries contain objects, changing the copied dictionary ends up changing the objects anyway. So I tried to use copy.deepcopy().These dictionaries refer to objects that have been mapped with SQLA. Questions: I've been given some solutions to the problems faced but due to my über green-ness with using Python, they all sound rather cryptic to me. Deepcopy isn't playing nicely with SQLA. I've been told thatdeepcopy on ORM objects probably has issues that prevent it from working as you'd expect. Apparently I'd be better off "building copy constructors, i.e. def copy(self): return FooBar(....)." Can someone please explain what that means? I checked and found out that deepcopy has issues because SQLAlchemy places extra information on your objects, i.e. an _sa_instance_state attribute, that I wouldn't want in the copy but is necessary for the object to have. I've been told: "There are ways to manually blow away the old _sa_instance_state and put a new one on the object, but the most straightforward is to make a new object with __init__() and set up the attributes that are significant, instead of doing a full deep copy." What exactly does that mean? Do I create a new, unmapped class similar to the old, mapped one? An alternate solution is that I'd have to "implement __deepcopy__() on your objects and ensure that a new _sa_instance_state is set up, there are functions in sqlalchemy.orm.attributes which can help with that." Once again this is beyond me so could someone kindly explain what it means? A more general question: given the above information are there any suggestions on how I can maintain the information/state for the best_node (which must always persist through my while loop) and the previous_node, if my actual objects (referenced by the dictionaries, therefore the nodes) are changing due to the deallocation/reallocation taking place? That is, without using copy?

    Read the article

  • SetWindowHookEx and execution blocking

    - by Kalaz
    Hello, I just wonder... I mainly use .NET but now I started to investigate WINAPI calls. For example I am using this piece of code to hook to the API functions. It starts freezing, when I try to debug the application... using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Threading; using System.Windows.Forms; public class Keyboard { private const int WH_KEYBOARD_LL = 13; private const int WM_KEYDOWN = 0x0100; private static LowLevelKeyboardProc _proc = HookCallback; private static IntPtr _hookID = IntPtr.Zero; public static event Action<Keys,bool, bool> KeyDown; public static void Hook() { new Thread(new ThreadStart(()=> { _hookID = SetHook(_proc); Application.Run(); })).Start(); } public static void Unhook() { UnhookWindowsHookEx(_hookID); } private static IntPtr SetHook(LowLevelKeyboardProc proc) { using (Process curProcess = Process.GetCurrentProcess()) using (ProcessModule curModule = curProcess.MainModule) { return SetWindowsHookEx(WH_KEYBOARD_LL, proc, GetModuleHandle(curModule.ModuleName), 0); } } private delegate IntPtr LowLevelKeyboardProc( int nCode, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam); private static IntPtr HookCallback( int nCode, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam) { if (nCode >= 0 && wParam == (IntPtr)WM_KEYDOWN) { int vkCode = Marshal.ReadInt32(lParam); Keys k = (Keys) vkCode; if (KeyDown != null) { KeyDown.BeginInvoke(k, IsKeyPressed(VirtualKeyStates.VK_CONTROL), IsKeyPressed(VirtualKeyStates.VK_SHIFT),null,null); } } return CallNextHookEx(_hookID, nCode, wParam, lParam); } private static bool IsKeyPressed(VirtualKeyStates virtualKeyStates) { return (GetKeyState(virtualKeyStates) & (1 << 7))==128; } [DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] private static extern IntPtr SetWindowsHookEx(int idHook, LowLevelKeyboardProc lpfn, IntPtr hMod, uint dwThreadId); [DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)] private static extern bool UnhookWindowsHookEx(IntPtr hhk); [DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] private static extern IntPtr CallNextHookEx(IntPtr hhk, int nCode, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam); [DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] private static extern IntPtr GetModuleHandle(string lpModuleName); [DllImport("user32.dll")] static extern short GetKeyState(VirtualKeyStates nVirtKey); } enum VirtualKeyStates : int { VK_LBUTTON = 0x01, VK_RBUTTON = 0x02, VK_CANCEL = 0x03, VK_MBUTTON = 0x04, // VK_XBUTTON1 = 0x05, VK_XBUTTON2 = 0x06, // VK_BACK = 0x08, VK_TAB = 0x09, // VK_CLEAR = 0x0C, VK_RETURN = 0x0D, // VK_SHIFT = 0x10, VK_CONTROL = 0x11, VK_MENU = 0x12, VK_PAUSE = 0x13, VK_CAPITAL = 0x14, // VK_KANA = 0x15, VK_HANGEUL = 0x15, /* old name - should be here for compatibility */ VK_HANGUL = 0x15, VK_JUNJA = 0x17, VK_FINAL = 0x18, VK_HANJA = 0x19, VK_KANJI = 0x19, // VK_ESCAPE = 0x1B, // VK_CONVERT = 0x1C, VK_NONCONVERT = 0x1D, VK_ACCEPT = 0x1E, VK_MODECHANGE = 0x1F, // VK_SPACE = 0x20, VK_PRIOR = 0x21, VK_NEXT = 0x22, VK_END = 0x23, VK_HOME = 0x24, VK_LEFT = 0x25, VK_UP = 0x26, VK_RIGHT = 0x27, VK_DOWN = 0x28, VK_SELECT = 0x29, VK_PRINT = 0x2A, VK_EXECUTE = 0x2B, VK_SNAPSHOT = 0x2C, VK_INSERT = 0x2D, VK_DELETE = 0x2E, VK_HELP = 0x2F, // VK_LWIN = 0x5B, VK_RWIN = 0x5C, VK_APPS = 0x5D, // VK_SLEEP = 0x5F, // VK_NUMPAD0 = 0x60, VK_NUMPAD1 = 0x61, VK_NUMPAD2 = 0x62, VK_NUMPAD3 = 0x63, VK_NUMPAD4 = 0x64, VK_NUMPAD5 = 0x65, VK_NUMPAD6 = 0x66, VK_NUMPAD7 = 0x67, VK_NUMPAD8 = 0x68, VK_NUMPAD9 = 0x69, VK_MULTIPLY = 0x6A, VK_ADD = 0x6B, VK_SEPARATOR = 0x6C, VK_SUBTRACT = 0x6D, VK_DECIMAL = 0x6E, VK_DIVIDE = 0x6F, VK_F1 = 0x70, VK_F2 = 0x71, VK_F3 = 0x72, VK_F4 = 0x73, VK_F5 = 0x74, VK_F6 = 0x75, VK_F7 = 0x76, VK_F8 = 0x77, VK_F9 = 0x78, VK_F10 = 0x79, VK_F11 = 0x7A, VK_F12 = 0x7B, VK_F13 = 0x7C, VK_F14 = 0x7D, VK_F15 = 0x7E, VK_F16 = 0x7F, VK_F17 = 0x80, VK_F18 = 0x81, VK_F19 = 0x82, VK_F20 = 0x83, VK_F21 = 0x84, VK_F22 = 0x85, VK_F23 = 0x86, VK_F24 = 0x87, // VK_NUMLOCK = 0x90, VK_SCROLL = 0x91, // VK_OEM_NEC_EQUAL = 0x92, // '=' key on numpad // VK_OEM_FJ_JISHO = 0x92, // 'Dictionary' key VK_OEM_FJ_MASSHOU = 0x93, // 'Unregister word' key VK_OEM_FJ_TOUROKU = 0x94, // 'Register word' key VK_OEM_FJ_LOYA = 0x95, // 'Left OYAYUBI' key VK_OEM_FJ_ROYA = 0x96, // 'Right OYAYUBI' key // VK_LSHIFT = 0xA0, VK_RSHIFT = 0xA1, VK_LCONTROL = 0xA2, VK_RCONTROL = 0xA3, VK_LMENU = 0xA4, VK_RMENU = 0xA5, // VK_BROWSER_BACK = 0xA6, VK_BROWSER_FORWARD = 0xA7, VK_BROWSER_REFRESH = 0xA8, VK_BROWSER_STOP = 0xA9, VK_BROWSER_SEARCH = 0xAA, VK_BROWSER_FAVORITES = 0xAB, VK_BROWSER_HOME = 0xAC, // VK_VOLUME_MUTE = 0xAD, VK_VOLUME_DOWN = 0xAE, VK_VOLUME_UP = 0xAF, VK_MEDIA_NEXT_TRACK = 0xB0, VK_MEDIA_PREV_TRACK = 0xB1, VK_MEDIA_STOP = 0xB2, VK_MEDIA_PLAY_PAUSE = 0xB3, VK_LAUNCH_MAIL = 0xB4, VK_LAUNCH_MEDIA_SELECT = 0xB5, VK_LAUNCH_APP1 = 0xB6, VK_LAUNCH_APP2 = 0xB7, // VK_OEM_1 = 0xBA, // ';:' for US VK_OEM_PLUS = 0xBB, // '+' any country VK_OEM_COMMA = 0xBC, // ',' any country VK_OEM_MINUS = 0xBD, // '-' any country VK_OEM_PERIOD = 0xBE, // '.' any country VK_OEM_2 = 0xBF, // '/?' for US VK_OEM_3 = 0xC0, // '`~' for US // VK_OEM_4 = 0xDB, // '[{' for US VK_OEM_5 = 0xDC, // '\|' for US VK_OEM_6 = 0xDD, // ']}' for US VK_OEM_7 = 0xDE, // ''"' for US VK_OEM_8 = 0xDF, // VK_OEM_AX = 0xE1, // 'AX' key on Japanese AX kbd VK_OEM_102 = 0xE2, // "<>" or "\|" on RT 102-key kbd. VK_ICO_HELP = 0xE3, // Help key on ICO VK_ICO_00 = 0xE4, // 00 key on ICO // VK_PROCESSKEY = 0xE5, // VK_ICO_CLEAR = 0xE6, // VK_PACKET = 0xE7, // VK_OEM_RESET = 0xE9, VK_OEM_JUMP = 0xEA, VK_OEM_PA1 = 0xEB, VK_OEM_PA2 = 0xEC, VK_OEM_PA3 = 0xED, VK_OEM_WSCTRL = 0xEE, VK_OEM_CUSEL = 0xEF, VK_OEM_ATTN = 0xF0, VK_OEM_FINISH = 0xF1, VK_OEM_COPY = 0xF2, VK_OEM_AUTO = 0xF3, VK_OEM_ENLW = 0xF4, VK_OEM_BACKTAB = 0xF5, // VK_ATTN = 0xF6, VK_CRSEL = 0xF7, VK_EXSEL = 0xF8, VK_EREOF = 0xF9, VK_PLAY = 0xFA, VK_ZOOM = 0xFB, VK_NONAME = 0xFC, VK_PA1 = 0xFD, VK_OEM_CLEAR = 0xFE } It works well even if you put messagebox into the event or something that blocks execution. But it gets bad if you try to put breakpoint into the event. Why? I mean event is not run in the same thread that the windows hook is. That means that It shouldn't block HookCallback. It does however... I would really like to know why is this happening. My theory is that Visual Studio when breaking execution temporarily stops all threads and that means that HookCallback is blocked... Is there any book or valuable resource that would explain concepts behind all of this threading?

    Read the article

  • The impossible inline Javascript delay/sleep

    - by trex005
    There is a JavaScript function, of which I have zero control of the code, which calls a function that I wrote. My function uses DOM to generate an iFrame, defines it's src and then appends it to another DOM element. However, before my function returns, and thus allows continued execution of the containing function, it is imperative that the iFrame be fully loaded. Here are the things that I have tried and why they do not work : 1. The SetTimeout option : 99.999% of the time, this is THE answer. As a matter of fact, in the past decade that I have been mentoring in JavaScript, I have always insisted that code could always be refactored to use this option, and never believed a scenario existed where that was not the case. Well, I finally found one! The problem is that because my function is being called inline, if the very next line is executed before my iFrame finishes loading, it totally neuters my script, and since the moment my script completes, the external script continues. A callback of sorts will not work 2. The "Do nothing" loop :This option you use while(//iFrame is not loaded){//do nothing}. In theory this would not return until the frame is loaded. The problem is that since this hogs all the resources, the iFrame never loads. This trick, although horribly unprofessional, dirty etc. will work when you just need an inline delay, but since I require an external thread to complete, it will not.In FF, after a few seconds, it pauses the script and an alert pops up stating that there is an unresponsive script. While that alert is up, the iFrame is able to load, and then my function is able to return, but having the browser frozen for 10 seconds, and then requiring the user to correctly dismiss an error is a no go. 3. The model dialogue : I was inspired by the fact that the FF popup allowed the iFrame to load while halting the execution of the function, and thinking about it, I realized that it is because the modal dialogue, is a way of halting execution yet allowing other threads to continue! Brilliant, so I decided to try other modal options. Things like alert() work beautifully! When it pops up, even if only up for 1/10th of a second, the iFrame is able to complete, and all works great. And just in case the 1/10 of a second is not sufficient, I can put the model dialogue in the while loop from solution 2, and it would ensure that the iFrame is loaded in time. Sweet right? Except for the fact that I now have to pop up a very unprofessional dialogue for the user to dismiss in order to run my script. I fought with myself about this cost/benefit of this action, but then I encountered a scenario where my code was called 10 times on a single page! Having to dismiss 10 alerts before acessing a page?! That reminds me of the late 90s script kiddie pages, and is NOT an option. 4. A gazillion other delay script out there:There are about 10 jQuery delay or sleep functions, some of them actually quite cleverly developed, but none worked. A few prototype options, and again, none I found could do it! A dozen or so other libraries and frameworks claimed they had what I needed, but alas they all conspired to give me false hope. I am convinced that since a built in model dialogue can halt execution, while allowing other threads to continue, there must be some code accessible way to do the same thing with out user input. The Code is literally thousands upon thousands of lines and is proprietary, so I wrote this little example of the problem for you to work with. It is important to note the ONLY code you are able to change is in the onlyThingYouCanChange function Test File : <html> <head> </head> </html> <body> <div id='iFrameHolder'></div> <script type='text/javascript'> function unChangeableFunction() { new_iFrame = onlyThingYouCanChange(document.getElementById('iFrameHolder')); new_iFrame_doc = (new_iFrame.contentWindow || new_iFrame.contentDocument); if(new_iFrame_doc.document)new_iFrame_doc=new_iFrame_doc.document; new_iFrame_body = new_iFrame_doc.body; if(new_iFrame_body.innerHTML != 'Loaded?') { //The world explodes!!! alert('you just blew up the world! Way to go!'); } else { alert('wow, you did it! Way to go!'); } } var iFrameLoaded = false; function onlyThingYouCanChange(objectToAppendIFrameTo) { iFrameLoaded = false; iframe=document.createElement('iframe'); iframe.onload = new Function('iFrameLoaded = true'); iframe.src = 'blank_frame.html'; //Must use an HTML doc on the server because there is a very specific DOM structure that must be maintained. objectToAppendIFrameTo.appendChild(iframe); var it = 0; while(!iFrameLoaded) //I put the limit on here so you don't { //If I was able to put some sort of delay here that paused the exicution of the script, but did not halt all other browser threads, and did not require user interaction we'd be golden! //alert('test'); //This would work if it did not require user interaction! } return iframe; } unChangeableFunction(); </script> </body> blank_frame.html : <html> <head> </head> <body style='margin:0px'>Loaded?</body> </html>

    Read the article

  • timer_getoverrun() doesn't behave as expected when using sleep()

    - by dlp
    Here is a program that uses a POSIX per-process timer alongside the sleep subroutine. The signal used by the timer has been set to SIGUSR1 rather than SIGALRM, since SIGALRM may be used internally by sleep, but it still doesn't seem to work. I have run the program using the command line timer-overruns -d 1 -n 10000000 (1 cs interval) so, in theory, we should expect 100 overruns between calls to sigwaitinfo. However, timer_getoverrun returns 0. I have also tried a version using a time-consuming for loop to introduce the delay. In this case, overruns are recorded. Does anyone know why this happens? I am running a 3.4 Linux kernel. Program source /* * timer-overruns.c */ #include <unistd.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <signal.h> #include <time.h> // Signal to be used for timer expirations #define TIMER_SIGNAL SIGUSR1 int main(int argc, char **argv) { int opt; int d = 0; int r = 0; // Repeat indefinitely struct itimerspec its; its.it_interval.tv_sec = 0; its.it_interval.tv_nsec = 0; // Parse arguments while ((opt = getopt(argc, argv, "d:r:s:n:")) != -1) { switch (opt) { case 'd': // Delay before calling sigwaitinfo() d = atoi(optarg); break; case 'r': // Number of times to call sigwaitinfo() r = atoi(optarg); break; case 's': // Timer interval (seconds) its.it_interval.tv_sec = its.it_value.tv_sec = atoi(optarg); break; case 'n': // Timer interval (nanoseconds) its.it_interval.tv_nsec = its.it_value.tv_nsec = atoi(optarg); break; default: /* '?' */ fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s [-d signal_accept_delay] [-r repetitions] [-s interval_seconds] [-n interval_nanoseconds]\n", argv[0]); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } } // Check sanity of command line arguments short e = 0; if (d < 0) { fprintf(stderr, "Delay (-d) cannot be negative!\n"); e++; } if (r < 0) { fprintf(stderr, "Number of repetitions (-r) cannot be negative!\n"); e++; } if (its.it_interval.tv_sec < 0) { fprintf(stderr, "Interval seconds value (-s) cannot be negative!\n"); e++; } if (its.it_interval.tv_nsec < 0) { fprintf(stderr, "Interval nanoseconds value (-n) cannot be negative!\n"); e++; } if (its.it_interval.tv_nsec > 999999999) { fprintf(stderr, "Interval nanoseconds value (-n) must be < 1 second.\n"); e++; } if (e > 0) exit(EXIT_FAILURE); // Set default values if not specified if (its.it_interval.tv_sec == 0 && its.it_interval.tv_nsec == 0) { its.it_interval.tv_sec = its.it_value.tv_sec = 1; its.it_value.tv_nsec = 0; } printf("Running with timer delay %d.%09d seconds\n", (int) its.it_interval.tv_sec, (int) its.it_interval.tv_nsec); // Will be waiting for signals synchronously, so block the one in use. sigset_t sigset; sigemptyset(&sigset); sigaddset(&sigset, TIMER_SIGNAL); sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, &sigset, NULL ); // Create and arm the timer struct sigevent sev; timer_t timer; sev.sigev_notify = SIGEV_SIGNAL; sev.sigev_signo = TIMER_SIGNAL; sev.sigev_value.sival_ptr = timer; timer_create(CLOCK_REALTIME, &sev, &timer); timer_settime(timer, TIMER_ABSTIME, &its, NULL ); // Signal handling loop int overruns; siginfo_t si; // Make the loop infinite if r = 0 if (r == 0) r = -1; while (r != 0) { // Sleeping should cause overruns if (d > 0) sleep(d); sigwaitinfo(&sigset, &si); // Check that the signal is from the timer if (si.si_code != SI_TIMER) continue; overruns = timer_getoverrun(timer); if (overruns > 0) { printf("Timer overrun occurred for %d expirations.\n", overruns); } // Decrement r if not repeating indefinitely if (r > 0) r--; } return EXIT_SUCCESS; }

    Read the article

  • bandwidth throttling C linux

    - by bob moch
    hi im currently creating a function to create a sleep time i can pause between packets for my port scanner im creating for personal/educational use for my home network. what im currently doing is opening /proc/net/dev and reading the 9th set of digits for the eth0 interface to find out the current packets being set and then reading it again and doing some math to figure out a delay to sleep between sending a packet to a port to identify it and fingerprint it. my problem is that no matter what throttle % i use it always seems to send the same rate of packets. i think its mainly my way of mathematically creating my sleep delay. edit:: dont mind the function declaration and the struct stuff all im doing is spawning this function in a thread and passing a pointer to a struct to the function, recreating the struct locally and then freeing the passed structs memory. void *bandwidthmonitor_cmd(void *param) { char cmdline[1024], *bytedata[19]; int i = 0, ii = 0; long long prevbytes = 0, currentbytes = 0, elapsedbytes = 0, byteusage = 0, maxthrottle = 0; command_struct bandwidth = *((command_struct *)param); free(param); //printf("speed: %d\n throttle: %d\n\n", UPLOAD_SPEED, bandwidth.throttle); maxthrottle = UPLOAD_SPEED * bandwidth.throttle / 100; //printf("max throttle:%lld\n", maxthrottle); FILE *f = fopen("/proc/net/dev", "r"); if(f != NULL) { while(1) { while(fgets(cmdline, sizeof(cmdline), f) != NULL) { cmdline[strlen(cmdline)] = '\0'; if(strncmp(cmdline, " eth0", 6) == 0) { bytedata[0] = strtok(cmdline, " "); while(bytedata[i] != NULL) { i++; bytedata[i] = strtok(NULL, " "); } bytedata[i + 1] = '\0'; currentbytes = atoi(bytedata[9]); } } i = 0; rewind(f); elapsedbytes = currentbytes - prevbytes; prevbytes = currentbytes; byteusage = 8 * (elapsedbytes / 1024); //printf("usage:%lld\n",byteusage); if(ii & 0x40) { SLEEP += (maxthrottle - byteusage) * -1.1;//-2.5; if(SLEEP < 0){ SLEEP = 0; } //printf("sleep:%d\n", SLEEP); } usleep(25000); ii++; } } return NULL; } SLEEP and UPLOAD_SPEED are global variables and UPLOAD_SPEED is in kb/s and generated via a speedtest function that gets the upload speed of my computer. this function is running inside a POSIX thread updating SLEEP which my threads doing the socket work grab to sleep by after every packet. as testing instead of only doing the ports i want to check i make it do all the ports over and over again so i can run dstat on a machine to check bandwidth and no matter what bandwidth.throttle is set to it always seems to generate the same amount of bandwidth to the dstat machine. the way i calculate how much i "should" throttle by is by finding the maximum throttle speed which is defined as maxthrottle = upload_speed * throttle / 100; for example if my upload speed was 1000kb/s and my throttle was 90 (90%) my max throttle would be 900kb/s from there it would find the current bytes sent from /proc/net/dev and then find my sleep time via incrementing or decrementing it via sleep += (maxthrottle - bytesysed) * -1.1; this should in theory increase or decrease the sleep time based on how many bytes used there are. the if(ii & 0x40) statement is just for some moderation control. it makes it so it only sets sleep to a new time every 30-40 iterations. final notes: the main problem is that the sleep timer does not seem to modify the speed of packets being set. or maybe its just my implementation because on a freshly restarted machine where /proc/net/dev has low numbers of bytes sent it seems to raise the sleep timer accordingly on my 60kb/s upload machine (ex if i set the throttle to 2 it will incline the sleep timer until network bandwidth out reaches the max bandwidth threshold, but when i try running it on a server which as been online forever it doesnt seem to work as nicely if at all. if anyone can suggest a new method of monitoring the network to adjust a sleep delay then let me know or if anyone sees a flaw in my code. thank you.

    Read the article

  • Microsoft and jQuery

    - by Rick Strahl
    The jQuery JavaScript library has been steadily getting more popular and with recent developments from Microsoft, jQuery is also getting ever more exposure on the ASP.NET platform including now directly from Microsoft. jQuery is a light weight, open source DOM manipulation library for JavaScript that has changed how many developers think about JavaScript. You can download it and find more information on jQuery on www.jquery.com. For me jQuery has had a huge impact on how I develop Web applications and was probably the main reason I went from dreading to do JavaScript development to actually looking forward to implementing client side JavaScript functionality. It has also had a profound impact on my JavaScript skill level for me by seeing how the library accomplishes things (and often reviewing the terse but excellent source code). jQuery made an uncomfortable development platform (JavaScript + DOM) a joy to work on. Although jQuery is by no means the only JavaScript library out there, its ease of use, small size, huge community of plug-ins and pure usefulness has made it easily the most popular JavaScript library available today. As a long time jQuery user, I’ve been excited to see the developments from Microsoft that are bringing jQuery to more ASP.NET developers and providing more integration with jQuery for ASP.NET’s core features rather than relying on the ASP.NET AJAX library. Microsoft and jQuery – making Friends jQuery is an open source project but in the last couple of years Microsoft has really thrown its weight behind supporting this open source library as a supported component on the Microsoft platform. When I say supported I literally mean supported: Microsoft now offers actual tech support for jQuery as part of their Product Support Services (PSS) as jQuery integration has become part of several of the ASP.NET toolkits and ships in several of the default Web project templates in Visual Studio 2010. The ASP.NET MVC 3 framework (still in Beta) also uses jQuery for a variety of client side support features including client side validation and we can look forward toward more integration of client side functionality via jQuery in both MVC and WebForms in the future. In other words jQuery is becoming an optional but included component of the ASP.NET platform. PSS support means that support staff will answer jQuery related support questions as part of any support incidents related to ASP.NET which provides some piece of mind to some corporate development shops that require end to end support from Microsoft. In addition to including jQuery and supporting it, Microsoft has also been getting involved in providing development resources for extending jQuery’s functionality via plug-ins. Microsoft’s last version of the Microsoft Ajax Library – which is the successor to the native ASP.NET AJAX Library – included some really cool functionality for client templates, databinding and localization. As it turns out Microsoft has rebuilt most of that functionality using jQuery as the base API and provided jQuery plug-ins of these components. Very recently these three plug-ins were submitted and have been approved for inclusion in the official jQuery plug-in repository and been taken over by the jQuery team for further improvements and maintenance. Even more surprising: The jQuery-templates component has actually been approved for inclusion in the next major update of the jQuery core in jQuery V1.5, which means it will become a native feature that doesn’t require additional script files to be loaded. Imagine this – an open source contribution from Microsoft that has been accepted into a major open source project for a core feature improvement. Microsoft has come a long way indeed! What the Microsoft Involvement with jQuery means to you For Microsoft jQuery support is a strategic decision that affects their direction in client side development, but nothing stopped you from using jQuery in your applications prior to Microsoft’s official backing and in fact a large chunk of developers did so readily prior to Microsoft’s announcement. Official support from Microsoft brings a few benefits to developers however. jQuery support in Visual Studio 2010 means built-in support for jQuery IntelliSense, automatically added jQuery scripts in many projects types and a common base for client side functionality that actually uses what most developers are already using. If you have already been using jQuery and were worried about straying from the Microsoft line and their internal Microsoft Ajax Library – worry no more. With official support and the change in direction towards jQuery Microsoft is now following along what most in the ASP.NET community had already been doing by using jQuery, which is likely the reason for Microsoft’s shift in direction in the first place. ASP.NET AJAX and the Microsoft AJAX Library weren’t bad technology – there was tons of useful functionality buried in these libraries. However, these libraries never got off the ground, mainly because early incarnations were squarely aimed at control/component developers rather than application developers. For all the functionality that these controls provided for control developers they lacked in useful and easily usable application developer functionality that was easily accessible in day to day client side development. The result was that even though Microsoft shipped support for these tools in the box (in .NET 3.5 and 4.0), other than for the internal support in ASP.NET for things like the UpdatePanel and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit as well as some third party vendors, the Microsoft client libraries were largely ignored by the developer community opening the door for other client side solutions. Microsoft seems to be acknowledging developer choice in this case: Many more developers were going down the jQuery path rather than using the Microsoft built libraries and there seems to be little sense in continuing development of a technology that largely goes unused by the majority of developers. Kudos for Microsoft for recognizing this and gracefully changing directions. Note that even though there will be no further development in the Microsoft client libraries they will continue to be supported so if you’re using them in your applications there’s no reason to start running for the exit in a panic and start re-writing everything with jQuery. Although that might be a reasonable choice in some cases, jQuery and the Microsoft libraries work well side by side so that you can leave existing solutions untouched even as you enhance them with jQuery. The Microsoft jQuery Plug-ins – Solid Core Features One of the most interesting developments in Microsoft’s embracing of jQuery is that Microsoft has started contributing to jQuery via standard mechanism set for jQuery developers: By submitting plug-ins. Microsoft took some of the nicest new features of the unpublished Microsoft Ajax Client Library and re-wrote these components for jQuery and then submitted them as plug-ins to the jQuery plug-in repository. Accepted plug-ins get taken over by the jQuery team and that’s exactly what happened with the three plug-ins submitted by Microsoft with the templating plug-in even getting slated to be published as part of the jQuery core in the next major release (1.5). The following plug-ins are provided by Microsoft: jQuery Templates – a client side template rendering engine jQuery Data Link – a client side databinder that can synchronize changes without code jQuery Globalization – provides formatting and conversion features for dates and numbers The first two are ports of functionality that was slated for the Microsoft Ajax Library while functionality for the globalization library provides functionality that was already found in the original ASP.NET AJAX library. To me all three plug-ins address a pressing need in client side applications and provide functionality I’ve previously used in other incarnations, but with more complete implementations. Let’s take a close look at these plug-ins. jQuery Templates http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/templates/ Client side templating is a key component for building rich JavaScript applications in the browser. Templating on the client lets you avoid from manually creating markup by creating DOM nodes and injecting them individually into the document via code. Rather you can create markup templates – similar to the way you create classic ASP server markup – and merge data into these templates to render HTML which you can then inject into the document or replace existing content with. Output from templates are rendered as a jQuery matched set and can then be easily inserted into the document as needed. Templating is key to minimize client side code and reduce repeated code for rendering logic. Instead a single template can be used in many places for updating and adding content to existing pages. Further if you build pure AJAX interfaces that rely entirely on client rendering of the initial page content, templates allow you to a use a single markup template to handle all rendering of each specific HTML section/element. I’ve used a number of different client rendering template engines with jQuery in the past including jTemplates (a PHP style templating engine) and a modified version of John Resig’s MicroTemplating engine which I built into my own set of libraries because it’s such a commonly used feature in my client side applications. jQuery templates adds a much richer templating model that allows for sub-templates and access to the data items. Like John Resig’s original Micro Template engine, the core basics of the templating engine create JavaScript code which means that templates can include JavaScript code. To give you a basic idea of how templates work imagine I have an application that downloads a set of stock quotes based on a symbol list then displays them in the document. To do this you can create an ‘item’ template that describes how each of the quotes is renderd as a template inside of the document: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div><div>${LastPrice}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div><div>${LastQuoteTimeString}</div> </div> </script> The ‘template’ is little more than HTML with some markup expressions inside of it that define the template language. Notice the embedded ${} expressions which reference data from the quote objects returned from an AJAX call on the server. You can embed any JavaScript or value expression in these template expressions. There are also a number of structural commands like {{if}} and {{each}} that provide for rudimentary logic inside of your templates as well as commands ({{tmpl}} and {{wrap}}) for nesting templates. You can find more about the full set of markup expressions available in the documentation. To load up this data you can use code like the following: <script type="text/javascript"> //var Proxy = new ServiceProxy("../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/"); $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnGetQuotes").click(GetQuotes); }); function GetQuotes() { var symbols = $("#txtSymbols").val().split(","); $.ajax({ url: "../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/GetStockQuotes", data: JSON.stringify({ symbols: symbols }), // parameter map type: "POST", // data has to be POSTed contentType: "application/json", timeout: 10000, dataType: "json", success: function (result) { var quotes = result.d; var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); $("#quoteDisplay").empty().append(jEl); }, error: function (xhr, status) { alert(status + "\r\n" + xhr.responseText); } }); }; </script> In this case an ASMX AJAX service is called to retrieve the stock quotes. The service returns an array of quote objects. The result is returned as an object with the .d property (in Microsoft service style) that returns the actual array of quotes. The template is applied with: var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); which selects the template script tag and uses the .tmpl() function to apply the data to it. The result is a jQuery matched set of elements that can then be appended to the quote display element in the page. The template is merged against an array in this example. When the result is an array the template is automatically applied to each each array item. If you pass a single data item – like say a stock quote – the template works exactly the same way but is applied only once. Templates also have access to a $data item which provides the current data item and information about the tempalte that is currently executing. This makes it possible to keep context within the context of the template itself and also to pass context from a parent template to a child template which is very powerful. Templates can be evaluated by using the template selector and calling the .tmpl() function on the jQuery matched set as shown above or you can use the static $.tmpl() function to provide a template as a string. This allows you to dynamically create templates in code or – more likely – to load templates from the server via AJAX calls. In short there are options The above shows off some of the basics, but there’s much for functionality available in the template engine. Check the documentation link for more information and links to additional examples. The plug-in download also comes with a number of examples that demonstrate functionality. jQuery templates will become a native component in jQuery Core 1.5, so it’s definitely worthwhile checking out the engine today and get familiar with this interface. As much as I’m stoked about templating becoming part of the jQuery core because it’s such an integral part of many applications, there are also a couple shortcomings in the current incarnation: Lack of Error Handling Currently if you embed an expression that is invalid it’s simply not rendered. There’s no error rendered into the template nor do the various  template functions throw errors which leaves finding of bugs as a runtime exercise. I would like some mechanism – optional if possible – to be able to get error info of what is failing in a template when it’s rendered. No String Output Templates are always rendered into a jQuery matched set and there’s no way that I can see to directly render to a string. String output can be useful for debugging as well as opening up templating for creating non-HTML string output. Limited JavaScript Access Unlike John Resig’s original MicroTemplating Engine which was entirely based on JavaScript code generation these templates are limited to a few structured commands that can ‘execute’. There’s no code execution inside of script code which means you’re limited to calling expressions available in global objects or the data item passed in. This may or may not be a big deal depending on the complexity of your template logic. Error handling has been discussed quite a bit and it’s likely there will be some solution to that particualar issue by the time jQuery templates ship. The others are relatively minor issues but something to think about anyway. jQuery Data Link http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/data-link/ jQuery Data Link provides the ability to do two-way data binding between input controls and an underlying object’s properties. The typical scenario is linking a textbox to a property of an object and have the object updated when the text in the textbox is changed and have the textbox change when the value in the object or the entire object changes. The plug-in also supports converter functions that can be applied to provide the conversion logic from string to some other value typically necessary for mapping things like textbox string input to say a number property and potentially applying additional formatting and calculations. In theory this sounds great, however in reality this plug-in has some serious usability issues. Using the plug-in you can do things like the following to bind data: person = { firstName: "rick", lastName: "strahl"}; $(document).ready( function() { // provide for two-way linking of inputs $("form").link(person); // bind to non-input elements explicitly $("#objFirst").link(person, { firstName: { name: "objFirst", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); $("#objLast").link(person, { lastName: { name: "objLast", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); }); This code hooks up two-way linking between a couple of textboxes on the page and the person object. The first line in the .ready() handler provides mapping of object to form field with the same field names as properties on the object. Note that .link() does NOT bind items into the textboxes when you call .link() – changes are mapped only when values change and you move out of the field. Strike one. The two following commands allow manual binding of values to specific DOM elements which is effectively a one-way bind. You specify the object and a then an explicit mapping where name is an ID in the document. The converter is required to explicitly assign the value to the element. Strike two. You can also detect changes to the underlying object and cause updates to the input elements bound. Unfortunately the syntax to do this is not very natural as you have to rely on the jQuery data object. To update an object’s properties and get change notification looks like this: function updateFirstName() { $(person).data("firstName", person.firstName + " (code updated)"); } This works fine in causing any linked fields to be updated. In the bindings above both the firstName input field and objFirst DOM element gets updated. But the syntax requires you to use a jQuery .data() call for each property change to ensure that the changes are tracked properly. Really? Sure you’re binding through multiple layers of abstraction now but how is that better than just manually assigning values? The code savings (if any) are going to be minimal. As much as I would like to have a WPF/Silverlight/Observable-like binding mechanism in client script, this plug-in doesn’t help much towards that goal in its current incarnation. While you can bind values, the ‘binder’ is too limited to be really useful. If initial values can’t be assigned from the mappings you’re going to end up duplicating work loading the data using some other mechanism. There’s no easy way to re-bind data with a different object altogether since updates trigger only through the .data members. Finally, any non-input elements have to be bound via code that’s fairly verbose and frankly may be more voluminous than what you might write by hand for manual binding and unbinding. Two way binding can be very useful but it has to be easy and most importantly natural. If it’s more work to hook up a binding than writing a couple of lines to do binding/unbinding this sort of thing helps very little in most scenarios. In talking to some of the developers the feature set for Data Link is not complete and they are still soliciting input for features and functionality. If you have ideas on how you want this feature to be more useful get involved and post your recommendations. As it stands, it looks to me like this component needs a lot of love to become useful. For this component to really provide value, bindings need to be able to be refreshed easily and work at the object level, not just the property level. It seems to me we would be much better served by a model binder object that can perform these binding/unbinding tasks in bulk rather than a tool where each link has to be mapped first. I also find the choice of creating a jQuery plug-in questionable – it seems a standalone object – albeit one that relies on the jQuery library – would provide a more intuitive interface than the current forcing of options onto a plug-in style interface. Out of the three Microsoft created components this is by far the least useful and least polished implementation at this point. jQuery Globalization http://github.com/jquery/jquery-global Globalization in JavaScript applications often gets short shrift and part of the reason for this is that natively in JavaScript there’s little support for formatting and parsing of numbers and dates. There are a number of JavaScript libraries out there that provide some support for globalization, but most are limited to a particular portion of globalization. As .NET developers we’re fairly spoiled by the richness of APIs provided in the framework and when dealing with client development one really notices the lack of these features. While you may not necessarily need to localize your application the globalization plug-in also helps with some basic tasks for non-localized applications: Dealing with formatting and parsing of dates and time values. Dates in particular are problematic in JavaScript as there are no formatters whatsoever except the .toString() method which outputs a verbose and next to useless long string. With the globalization plug-in you get a good chunk of the formatting and parsing functionality that the .NET framework provides on the server. You can write code like the following for example to format numbers and dates: var date = new Date(); var output = $.format(date, "MMM. dd, yy") + "\r\n" + $.format(date, "d") + "\r\n" + // 10/25/2010 $.format(1222.32213, "N2") + "\r\n" + $.format(1222.33, "c") + "\r\n"; alert(output); This becomes even more useful if you combine it with templates which can also include any JavaScript expressions. Assuming the globalization plug-in is loaded you can create template expressions that use the $.format function. Here’s the template I used earlier for the stock quote again with a couple of formats applied: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div> <div>${$.format(LastPrice,"N2")}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div> <div>${$.format(LastQuoteTime,"MMM dd, yyyy")}</div> </div> </script> There are also parsing methods that can parse dates and numbers from strings into numbers easily: alert($.parseDate("25.10.2010")); alert($.parseInt("12.222")); // de-DE uses . for thousands separators As you can see culture specific options are taken into account when parsing. The globalization plugin provides rich support for a variety of locales: Get a list of all available cultures Query cultures for culture items (like currency symbol, separators etc.) Localized string names for all calendar related items (days of week, months) Generated off of .NET’s supported locales In short you get much of the same functionality that you already might be using in .NET on the server side. The plugin includes a huge number of locales and an Globalization.all.min.js file that contains the text defaults for each of these locales as well as small locale specific script files that define each of the locale specific settings. It’s highly recommended that you NOT use the huge globalization file that includes all locales, but rather add script references to only those languages you explicitly care about. Overall this plug-in is a welcome helper. Even if you use it with a single locale (like en-US) and do no other localization, you’ll gain solid support for number and date formatting which is a vital feature of many applications. Changes for Microsoft It’s good to see Microsoft coming out of its shell and away from the ‘not-built-here’ mentality that has been so pervasive in the past. It’s especially good to see it applied to jQuery – a technology that has stood in drastic contrast to Microsoft’s own internal efforts in terms of design, usage model and… popularity. It’s great to see that Microsoft is paying attention to what customers prefer to use and supporting the customer sentiment – even if it meant drastically changing course of policy and moving into a more open and sharing environment in the process. The additional jQuery support that has been introduced in the last two years certainly has made lives easier for many developers on the ASP.NET platform. It’s also nice to see Microsoft submitting proposals through the standard jQuery process of plug-ins and getting accepted for various very useful projects. Certainly the jQuery Templates plug-in is going to be very useful to many especially since it will be baked into the jQuery core in jQuery 1.5. I hope we see more of this type of involvement from Microsoft in the future. Kudos!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery  ASP.NET  

    Read the article

  • Why is Java EE 6 better than Spring ?

    - by arungupta
    Java EE 6 was released over 2 years ago and now there are 14 compliant application servers. In all my talks around the world, a question that is frequently asked is Why should I use Java EE 6 instead of Spring ? There are already several blogs covering that topic: Java EE wins over Spring by Bill Burke Why will I use Java EE instead of Spring in new Enterprise Java projects in 2012 ? by Kai Waehner (more discussion on TSS) Spring to Java EE migration (Part 1 and 2, 3 and 4 coming as well) by David Heffelfinger Spring to Java EE - A Migration Experience by Lincoln Baxter Migrating Spring to Java EE 6 by Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker at NLJUG Moving from Spring to Java EE 6 - The Age of Frameworks is Over at TSS Java EE vs Spring Shootout by Rohit Kelapure and Reza Rehman at JavaOne 2011 Java EE 6 and the Ewoks by Murat Yener Definite excuse to avoid Spring forever - Bert Ertman and Arun Gupta I will try to share my perspective in this blog. First of all, I'd like to start with a note: Thank you Spring framework for filling the interim gap and providing functionality that is now included in the mainstream Java EE 6 application servers. The Java EE platform has evolved over the years learning from frameworks like Spring and provides all the functionality to build an enterprise application. Thank you very much Spring framework! While Spring was revolutionary in its time and is still very popular and quite main stream in the same way Struts was circa 2003, it really is last generation's framework - some people are even calling it legacy. However my theory is "code is king". So my approach is to build/take a simple Hello World CRUD application in Java EE 6 and Spring and compare the deployable artifacts. I started looking at the official tutorial Developing a Spring Framework MVC Application Step-by-Step but it is using the older version 2.5. I wasn't able to find any updated version in the current 3.1 release. Next, I downloaded Spring Tool Suite and thought that would provide some template samples to get started. A least a quick search did not show any handy tutorials - either video or text-based. So I searched and found a link to their SVN repository at src.springframework.org/svn/spring-samples/. I tried the "mvc-basic" sample and the generated WAR file was 4.43 MB. While it was named a "basic" sample it seemed to come with 19 different libraries bundled but it was what I could find: ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-validator-4.1.0.Final.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jcl-over-slf4j-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-1.6.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-jsptags-1.0.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.16.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar And it is not even using any database! The app deployed fine on GlassFish 3.1.2 but the "@Controller Example" link did not work as it was missing the context root. With a bit of tweaking I could deploy the application and assume that the account got created because no error was displayed in the browser or server log. Next I generated the WAR for "mvc-ajax" and the 5.1 MB WAR had 20 JARs (1 removed, 2 added): ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-validator-4.1.0.Final.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-core-asl-1.6.4.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-mapper-asl-1.6.4.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jcl-over-slf4j-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-1.6.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.16.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar 2 more JARs for just doing Ajax. Anyway, deploying this application gave the following error: Caused by: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.codehaus.jackson.map.SerializationConfig.<init>(Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/ClassIntrospector;Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/AnnotationIntrospector;Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/introspect/VisibilityChecker;Lorg/codehaus/jackson/map/jsontype/SubtypeResolver;)V    at org.springframework.samples.mvc.ajax.json.ConversionServiceAwareObjectMapper.<init>(ConversionServiceAwareObjectMapper.java:20)    at org.springframework.samples.mvc.ajax.json.JacksonConversionServiceConfigurer.postProcessAfterInitialization(JacksonConversionServiceConfigurer.java:40)    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.applyBeanPostProcessorsAfterInitialization(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:407) Seems like some incorrect repos in the "pom.xml". Next one is "mvc-showcase" and the 6.49 MB WAR now has 28 JARs as shown below: ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/aspectjrt-1.6.10.jar./WEB-INF/lib/commons-fileupload-1.2.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/commons-io-2.0.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/el-api-2.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-validator-4.1.0.Final.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-core-asl-1.8.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jackson-mapper-asl-1.8.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/javax.inject-1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jcl-over-slf4j-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jdom-1.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/joda-time-1.6.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-api-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-impl-1.2.jar./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.16.jar./WEB-INF/lib/rome-1.0.0.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar./WEB-INF/lib/validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar The app at least deployed and showed results this time. But still no database! Next I tried building "jpetstore" and got the error: [ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project org.springframework.samples.jpetstore:Could not resolve dependencies for project org.springframework.samples:org.springframework.samples.jpetstore:war:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT: Failed to collect dependencies for [commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload:jar:1.2.1 (compile), org.apache.struts:com.springsource.org.apache.struts:jar:1.2.9 (compile), javax.xml.rpc:com.springsource.javax.xml.rpc:jar:1.1.0 (compile), org.apache.commons:com.springsource.org.apache.commons.dbcp:jar:1.2.2.osgi (compile), commons-io:commons-io:jar:1.3.2 (compile), hsqldb:hsqldb:jar:1.8.0.7 (compile), org.apache.tiles:tiles-core:jar:2.2.0 (compile), org.apache.tiles:tiles-jsp:jar:2.2.0 (compile), org.tuckey:urlrewritefilter:jar:3.1.0 (compile), org.springframework:spring-webmvc:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT (compile), org.springframework:spring-orm:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT (compile), org.springframework:spring-context-support:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT (compile), org.springframework.webflow:spring-js:jar:2.0.7.RELEASE (compile), org.apache.ibatis:com.springsource.com.ibatis:jar:2.3.4.726 (runtime), com.caucho:com.springsource.com.caucho:jar:3.2.1 (compile), org.apache.axis:com.springsource.org.apache.axis:jar:1.4.0 (compile), javax.wsdl:com.springsource.javax.wsdl:jar:1.6.1 (compile), javax.servlet:jstl:jar:1.2 (runtime), org.aspectj:aspectjweaver:jar:1.6.5 (compile), javax.servlet:servlet-api:jar:2.5 (provided), javax.servlet.jsp:jsp-api:jar:2.1 (provided), junit:junit:jar:4.6 (test)]: Failed to read artifact descriptor for org.springframework:spring-webmvc:jar:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT: Could not transfer artifact org.springframework:spring-webmvc:pom:3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT from/to JBoss repository (http://repository.jboss.com/maven2): Access denied to: http://repository.jboss.com/maven2/org/springframework/spring-webmvc/3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT/spring-webmvc-3.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT.pom It appears the sample is broken - maybe I was pulling from the wrong repository - would be great if someone were to point me at a good target to use here. With a 50% hit on samples in this repository, I started searching through numerous blogs, most of which have either outdated information (using XML-heavy Spring 2.5), some piece of configuration (which is a typical "feature" of Spring) is missing, or too much complexity in the sample. I finally found this blog that worked like a charm. This blog creates a trivial Spring MVC 3 application using Hibernate and MySQL. This application performs CRUD operations on a single table in a database using typical Spring technologies.  I downloaded the sample code from the blog, deployed it on GlassFish 3.1.2 and could CRUD the "person" entity. The source code for this application can be downloaded here. More details on the application statistics below. And then I built a similar CRUD application in Java EE 6 using NetBeans wizards in a couple of minutes. The source code for the application can be downloaded here and the WAR here. The Spring Source Tool Suite may also offer similar wizard-driven capabilities but this blog focus primarily on comparing the runtimes. The lack of STS tutorials was slightly disappointing as well. NetBeans however has tons of text-based and video tutorials and tons of material even by the community. One more bit on the download size of tools bundle ... NetBeans 7.1.1 "All" is 211 MB (which includes GlassFish and Tomcat) Spring Tool Suite  2.9.0 is 347 MB (~ 65% bigger) This blog is not about the tooling comparison so back to the Java EE 6 version of the application .... In order to run the Java EE version on GlassFish, copy the MySQL Connector/J to glassfish3/glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/ext directory and create a JDBC connection pool and JDBC resource as: ./bin/asadmin create-jdbc-connection-pool --datasourceclassname \\ com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlDataSource --restype \\ javax.sql.DataSource --property \\ portNumber=3306:user=mysql:password=mysql:databaseName=mydatabase \\ myConnectionPool ./bin/asadmin create-jdbc-resource --connectionpoolid myConnectionPool jdbc/myDataSource I generated WARs for the two projects and the table below highlights some differences between them: Java EE 6 Spring WAR File Size 0.021030 MB 10.87 MB (~516x) Number of files 20 53 (> 2.5x) Bundled libraries 0 36 Total size of libraries 0 12.1 MB XML files 3 5 LoC in XML files 50 (11 + 15 + 24) 129 (27 + 46 + 16 + 11 + 19) (~ 2.5x) Total .properties files 1 Bundle.properties 2 spring.properties, log4j.properties Cold Deploy 5,339 ms 11,724 ms Second Deploy 481 ms 6,261 ms Third Deploy 528 ms 5,484 ms Fourth Deploy 484 ms 5,576 ms Runtime memory ~73 MB ~101 MB Some points worth highlighting from the table ... 516x WAR file, 10x deployment time - With 12.1 MB of libraries (for a very basic application) bundled in your application, the WAR file size and the deployment time will naturally go higher. The WAR file for Spring-based application is 516x bigger and the deployment time is double during the first deployment and ~ 10x during subsequent deployments. The Java EE 6 application is fully portable and will run on any Java EE 6 compliant application server. 36 libraries in the WAR - There are 14 Java EE 6 compliant application servers today. Each of those servers provide all the functionality like transactions, dependency injection, security, persistence, etc typically required of an enterprise or web application. There is no need to bundle 36 libraries worth 12.1 MB for a trivial CRUD application. These 14 compliant application servers provide all the functionality baked in. Now you can also deploy these libraries in the container but then you don't get the "portability" offered by Spring in that case. Does your typical Spring deployment actually do that ? 3x LoC in XML - The number of XML files is about 1.6x and the LoC is ~ 2.5x. So much XML seems circa 2003 when the Java language had no annotations. The XML files can be further reduced, e.g. faces-config.xml can be replaced without providing i18n, but I just want to compare stock applications. Memory usage - Both the applications were deployed on default GlassFish 3.1.2 installation and any additional memory consumed as part of deployment/access was attributed to the application. This is by no means scientific but at least provides an initial ballpark. This area definitely needs more investigation. Another table that compares typical Java EE 6 compliant application servers and the custom-stack created for a Spring application ... Java EE 6 Spring Web Container ? 53 MB (tcServer 2.6.3 Developer Edition) Security ? 12 MB (Spring Security 3.1.0) Persistence ? 6.3 MB (Hibernate 4.1.0, required) Dependency Injection ? 5.3 MB (Framework) Web Services ? 796 KB (Spring WS 2.0.4) Messaging ? 3.4 MB (RabbitMQ Server 2.7.1) 936 KB (Java client 936) OSGi ? 1.3 MB (Spring OSGi 1.2.1) GlassFish and WebLogic (starting at 33 MB) 83.3 MB There are differentiating factors on both the stacks. But most of the functionality like security, persistence, and dependency injection is baked in a Java EE 6 compliant application server but needs to be individually managed and patched for a Spring application. This very quickly leads to a "stack explosion". The Java EE 6 servers are tested extensively on a variety of platforms in different combinations whereas a Spring application developer is responsible for testing with different JDKs, Operating Systems, Versions, Patches, etc. Oracle has both the leading OSS lightweight server with GlassFish and the leading enterprise Java server with WebLogic Server, both Java EE 6 and both with lightweight deployment options. The Web Container offered as part of a Java EE 6 application server not only deploys your enterprise Java applications but also provide operational management, diagnostics, and mission-critical capabilities required by your applications. The Java EE 6 platform also introduced the Web Profile which is a subset of the specifications from the entire platform. It is targeted at developers of modern web applications offering a reasonably complete stack, composed of standard APIs, and is capable out-of-the-box of addressing the needs of a large class of Web applications. As your applications grow, the stack can grow to the full Java EE 6 platform. The GlassFish Server Web Profile starting at 33MB (smaller than just the non-standard tcServer) provides most of the functionality typically required by a web application. WebLogic provides battle-tested functionality for a high throughput, low latency, and enterprise grade web application. No individual managing or patching, all tested and commercially supported for you! Note that VMWare does have a server, tcServer, but it is non-standard and not even certified to the level of the standard Web Profile most customers expect these days. Customers who choose this risk proprietary lock-in since VMWare does not seem to want to formally certify with either Java EE 6 Enterprise Platform or with Java EE 6 Web Profile but of course it would be great if they were to join the community and help their customers reduce the risk of deploying on VMWare software. Some more points to help you decide choose between Java EE 6 and Spring ... Freedom to choose container - There are 14 Java EE 6 compliant application servers today, with a variety of open source and commercial offerings. A Java EE 6 application can be deployed on any of those containers. So if you deployed your application on GlassFish today and would like to scale up with your demands then you can deploy the same application to WebLogic. And because of the portability of a Java EE 6 application, you can even take it a different vendor altogether. Spring requires a runtime which could be any of these app servers as well. But why use Spring when all the required functionality is already baked into the application server itself ? Spring also has a different definition of portability where they claim to bundle all the libraries in the WAR file and move to any application server. But we saw earlier how bloated that archive could be. The equivalent features in Spring runtime offerings (mainly tcServer) are not all open source, not as mature, and often require manual assembly.  Vendor choice - The Java EE 6 platform is created using the Java Community Process where all the big players like Oracle, IBM, RedHat, and Apache are conritbuting to make the platform successful. Each application server provides the basic Java EE 6 platform compliance and has its own competitive offerings. This allows you to choose an application server for deploying your Java EE 6 applications. If you are not happy with the support or feature of one vendor then you can move your application to a different vendor because of the portability promise offered by the platform. Spring is a set of products from a single company, one price book, one support organization, one sustaining organization, one sales organization, etc. If any of those cause a customer headache, where do you go ? Java EE, backed by multiple vendors, is a safer bet for those that are risk averse. Production support - With Spring, typically you need to get support from two vendors - VMWare and the container provider. With Java EE 6, all of this is typically provided by one vendor. For example, Oracle offers commercial support from systems, operating systems, JDK, application server, and applications on top of them. VMWare certainly offers complete production support but do you really want to put all your eggs in one basket ? Do you really use tcServer ? ;-) Maintainability - With Spring, you are likely building your own distribution with multiple JAR files, integrating, patching, versioning, etc of all those components. Spring's claim is that multiple JAR files allow you to go à la carte and pick the latest versions of different components. But who is responsible for testing whether all these versions work together ? Yep, you got it, its YOU! If something does not work, who patches and maintains the JARs ? Of course, you! Commercial support for such a configuration ? On your own! The Java EE application servers manage all of this for you and provide a well-tested and commercially supported bundle. While it is always good to realize that there is something new and improved that updates and replaces older frameworks like Spring, the good news is not only does a Java EE 6 container offer what is described here, most also will let you deploy and run your Spring applications on them while you go through an upgrade to a more modern architecture. End result, you get the best of both worlds - keeping your legacy investment but moving to a more agile, lightweight world of Java EE 6. A message to the Spring lovers ... The complexity in J2EE 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 led to the genesis of Spring but that was in 2004. This is 2012 and the name has changed to "Java EE 6" :-) There are tons of improvements in the Java EE platform to make it easy-to-use and powerful. Some examples: Adding @Stateless on a POJO makes it an EJB EJBs can be packaged in a WAR with no special packaging or deployment descriptors "web.xml" and "faces-config.xml" are optional in most of the common cases Typesafe dependency injection is now part of the Java EE platform Add @Path on a POJO allows you to publish it as a RESTful resource EJBs can be used as backing beans for Facelets-driven JSF pages providing full MVC Java EE 6 WARs are known to be kilobytes in size and deployed in milliseconds Tons of other simplifications in the platform and application servers So if you moved away from J2EE to Spring many years ago and have not looked at Java EE 6 (which has been out since Dec 2009) then you should definitely try it out. Just be at least aware of what other alternatives are available instead of restricting yourself to one stack. Here are some workshops and screencasts worth trying: screencast #37 shows how to build an end-to-end application using NetBeans screencast #36 builds the same application using Eclipse javaee-lab-feb2012.pdf is a 3-4 hours self-paced hands-on workshop that guides you to build a comprehensive Java EE 6 application using NetBeans Each city generally has a "spring cleanup" program every year. It allows you to clean up the mess from your house. For your software projects, you don't need to wait for an annual event, just get started and reduce the technical debt now! Move away from your legacy Spring-based applications to a lighter and more modern approach of building enterprise Java applications using Java EE 6. Watch this beautiful presentation that explains how to migrate from Spring -> Java EE 6: List of files in the Java EE 6 project: ./index.xhtml./META-INF./person./person/Create.xhtml./person/Edit.xhtml./person/List.xhtml./person/View.xhtml./resources./resources/css./resources/css/jsfcrud.css./template.xhtml./WEB-INF./WEB-INF/classes./WEB-INF/classes/Bundle.properties./WEB-INF/classes/META-INF./WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/persistence.xml./WEB-INF/classes/org./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/AbstractFacade.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/Person.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/Person_.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonController$1.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonController$PersonControllerConverter.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonController.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/PersonFacade.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/util./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/util/JsfUtil.class./WEB-INF/classes/org/javaee/javaeemysql/util/PaginationHelper.class./WEB-INF/faces-config.xml./WEB-INF/web.xml List of files in the Spring 3.x project: ./META-INF ./META-INF/MANIFEST.MF./WEB-INF./WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml./WEB-INF/classes./WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties./WEB-INF/classes/org./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/controller ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/controller/MainController.class ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/domain ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/domain/Person.class ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/service ./WEB-INF/classes/org/krams/tutorial/service/PersonService.class ./WEB-INF/hibernate-context.xml ./WEB-INF/hibernate.cfg.xml ./WEB-INF/jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/addedpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/addpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/deletedpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/editedpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/editpage.jsp ./WEB-INF/jsp/personspage.jsp ./WEB-INF/lib ./WEB-INF/lib/antlr-2.7.6.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/aopalliance-1.0.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/c3p0-0.9.1.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/cglib-nodep-2.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-beanutils-1.8.3.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-collections-3.2.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-digester-2.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/commons-logging-1.1.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/dom4j-1.6.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/ejb3-persistence-1.0.2.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-annotations-3.4.0.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-commons-annotations-3.1.0.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-core-3.3.2.GA.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/javassist-3.7.ga.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/jstl-1.1.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/jta-1.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/junit-4.8.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.14.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/mysql-connector-java-5.1.14.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/persistence-api-1.0.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.6.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.6.1.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-aop-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-support-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-jdbc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-orm-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-tx-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/standard-1.1.2.jar ./WEB-INF/lib/xml-apis-1.0.b2.jar ./WEB-INF/spring-servlet.xml ./WEB-INF/spring.properties ./WEB-INF/web.xml So, are you excited about Java EE 6 ? Want to get started now ? Here are some resources: Java EE 6 SDK (including runtime, samples, tutorials etc) GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 3.1.2 (Community) Oracle GlassFish Server 3.1.2 (Commercial) Java EE 6 using WebLogic 12c and NetBeans (Video) Java EE 6 with NetBeans and GlassFish (Video) Java EE with Eclipse and GlassFish (Video)

    Read the article

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

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

    Read the article

  • Extending Oracle CEP with Predictive Analytics

    - by vikram.shukla(at)oracle.com
    Introduction: OCEP is often used as a business rules engine to execute a set of business logic rules via CQL statements, and take decisions based on the outcome of those rules. There are times where configuring rules manually is sufficient because an application needs to deal with only a small and well-defined set of static rules. However, in many situations customers don't want to pre-define such rules for two reasons. First, they are dealing with events with lots of columns and manually crafting such rules for each column or a set of columns and combinations thereof is almost impossible. Second, they are content with probabilistic outcomes and do not care about 100% precision. The former is the case when a user is dealing with data with high dimensionality, the latter when an application can live with "false" positives as they can be discarded after further inspection, say by a Human Task component in a Business Process Management software. The primary goal of this blog post is to show how this can be achieved by combining OCEP with Oracle Data Mining® and leveraging the latter's rich set of algorithms and functionality to do predictive analytics in real time on streaming events. The secondary goal of this post is also to show how OCEP can be extended to invoke any arbitrary external computation in an RDBMS from within CEP. The extensible facility is known as the JDBC cartridge. The rest of the post describes the steps required to achieve this: We use the dataset available at http://blogs.oracle.com/datamining/2010/01/fraud_and_anomaly_detection_made_simple.html to showcase the capabilities. We use it to show how transaction anomalies or fraud can be detected. Building the model: Follow the self-explanatory steps described at the above URL to build the model.  It is very simple - it uses built-in Oracle Data Mining PL/SQL packages to cleanse, normalize and build the model out of the dataset.  You can also use graphical Oracle Data Miner®  to build the models. To summarize, it involves: Specifying which algorithms to use. In this case we use Support Vector Machines as we're trying to find anomalies in highly dimensional dataset.Build model on the data in the table for the algorithms specified. For this example, the table was populated in the scott/tiger schema with appropriate privileges. Configuring the Data Source: This is the first step in building CEP application using such an integration.  Our datasource looks as follows in the server config file.  It is advisable that you use the Visualizer to add it to the running server dynamically, rather than manually edit the file.    <data-source>         <name>DataMining</name>         <data-source-params>             <jndi-names>                 <element>DataMining</element>             </jndi-names>             <global-transactions-protocol>OnePhaseCommit</global-transactions-protocol>         </data-source-params>         <connection-pool-params>             <credential-mapping-enabled></credential-mapping-enabled>             <test-table-name>SQL SELECT 1 from DUAL</test-table-name>             <initial-capacity>1</initial-capacity>             <max-capacity>15</max-capacity>             <capacity-increment>1</capacity-increment>         </connection-pool-params>         <driver-params>             <use-xa-data-source-interface>true</use-xa-data-source-interface>             <driver-name>oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver</driver-name>             <url>jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1522:orcl</url>             <properties>                 <element>                     <value>scott</value>                     <name>user</name>                 </element>                 <element>                     <value>{Salted-3DES}AzFE5dDbO2g=</value>                     <name>password</name>                 </element>                                 <element>                     <name>com.bea.core.datasource.serviceName</name>                     <value>oracle11.2g</value>                 </element>                 <element>                     <name>com.bea.core.datasource.serviceVersion</name>                     <value>11.2.0</value>                 </element>                 <element>                     <name>com.bea.core.datasource.serviceObjectClass</name>                     <value>java.sql.Driver</value>                 </element>             </properties>         </driver-params>     </data-source>   Designing the EPN: The EPN is very simple in this example. We briefly describe each of the components. The adapter ("DataMiningAdapter") reads data from a .csv file and sends it to the CQL processor downstream. The event payload here is same as that of the table in the database (refer to the attached project or do a "desc table-name" from a SQL*PLUS prompt). While this is for convenience in this example, it need not be the case. One can still omit fields in the streaming events, and need not match all columns in the table on which the model was built. Better yet, it does not even need to have the same name as columns in the table, as long as you alias them in the USING clause of the mining function. (Caveat: they still need to draw values from a similar universe or domain, otherwise it constitutes incorrect usage of the model). There are two things in the CQL processor ("DataMiningProc") that make scoring possible on streaming events. 1.      User defined cartridge function Please refer to the OCEP CQL reference manual to find more details about how to define such functions. We include the function below in its entirety for illustration. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <jdbcctxconfig:config     xmlns:jdbcctxconfig="http://www.bea.com/ns/wlevs/config/application"     xmlns:jc="http://www.oracle.com/ns/ocep/config/jdbc">        <jc:jdbc-ctx>         <name>Oracle11gR2</name>         <data-source>DataMining</data-source>               <function name="prediction2">                                 <param name="CQLMONTH" type="char"/>                      <param name="WEEKOFMONTH" type="int"/>                      <param name="DAYOFWEEK" type="char" />                      <param name="MAKE" type="char" />                      <param name="ACCIDENTAREA"   type="char" />                      <param name="DAYOFWEEKCLAIMED"  type="char" />                      <param name="MONTHCLAIMED" type="char" />                      <param name="WEEKOFMONTHCLAIMED" type="int" />                      <param name="SEX" type="char" />                      <param name="MARITALSTATUS"   type="char" />                      <param name="AGE" type="int" />                      <param name="FAULT" type="char" />                      <param name="POLICYTYPE"   type="char" />                      <param name="VEHICLECATEGORY"  type="char" />                      <param name="VEHICLEPRICE" type="char" />                      <param name="FRAUDFOUND" type="int" />                      <param name="POLICYNUMBER" type="int" />                      <param name="REPNUMBER" type="int" />                      <param name="DEDUCTIBLE"   type="int" />                      <param name="DRIVERRATING"  type="int" />                      <param name="DAYSPOLICYACCIDENT"   type="char" />                      <param name="DAYSPOLICYCLAIM" type="char" />                      <param name="PASTNUMOFCLAIMS" type="char" />                      <param name="AGEOFVEHICLES" type="char" />                      <param name="AGEOFPOLICYHOLDER" type="char" />                      <param name="POLICEREPORTFILED" type="char" />                      <param name="WITNESSPRESNT" type="char" />                      <param name="AGENTTYPE" type="char" />                      <param name="NUMOFSUPP" type="char" />                      <param name="ADDRCHGCLAIM"   type="char" />                      <param name="NUMOFCARS" type="char" />                      <param name="CQLYEAR" type="int" />                      <param name="BASEPOLICY" type="char" />                                     <return-component-type>char</return-component-type>                                                      <sql><![CDATA[             SELECT to_char(PREDICTION_PROBABILITY(CLAIMSMODEL, '0' USING *))               AS probability             FROM (SELECT  :CQLMONTH AS MONTH,                                            :WEEKOFMONTH AS WEEKOFMONTH,                          :DAYOFWEEK AS DAYOFWEEK,                           :MAKE AS MAKE,                           :ACCIDENTAREA AS ACCIDENTAREA,                           :DAYOFWEEKCLAIMED AS DAYOFWEEKCLAIMED,                           :MONTHCLAIMED AS MONTHCLAIMED,                           :WEEKOFMONTHCLAIMED,                             :SEX AS SEX,                           :MARITALSTATUS AS MARITALSTATUS,                            :AGE AS AGE,                           :FAULT AS FAULT,                           :POLICYTYPE AS POLICYTYPE,                            :VEHICLECATEGORY AS VEHICLECATEGORY,                           :VEHICLEPRICE AS VEHICLEPRICE,                           :FRAUDFOUND AS FRAUDFOUND,                           :POLICYNUMBER AS POLICYNUMBER,                           :REPNUMBER AS REPNUMBER,                           :DEDUCTIBLE AS DEDUCTIBLE,                            :DRIVERRATING AS DRIVERRATING,                           :DAYSPOLICYACCIDENT AS DAYSPOLICYACCIDENT,                            :DAYSPOLICYCLAIM AS DAYSPOLICYCLAIM,                           :PASTNUMOFCLAIMS AS PASTNUMOFCLAIMS,                           :AGEOFVEHICLES AS AGEOFVEHICLES,                           :AGEOFPOLICYHOLDER AS AGEOFPOLICYHOLDER,                           :POLICEREPORTFILED AS POLICEREPORTFILED,                           :WITNESSPRESNT AS WITNESSPRESENT,                           :AGENTTYPE AS AGENTTYPE,                           :NUMOFSUPP AS NUMOFSUPP,                           :ADDRCHGCLAIM AS ADDRCHGCLAIM,                            :NUMOFCARS AS NUMOFCARS,                           :CQLYEAR AS YEAR,                           :BASEPOLICY AS BASEPOLICY                 FROM dual)                 ]]>         </sql>        </function>     </jc:jdbc-ctx> </jdbcctxconfig:config> 2.      Invoking the function for each event. Once this function is defined, you can invoke it from CQL as follows: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <wlevs:config xmlns:wlevs="http://www.bea.com/ns/wlevs/config/application">   <processor>     <name>DataMiningProc</name>     <rules>        <query id="q1"><![CDATA[                     ISTREAM(SELECT S.CQLMONTH,                                   S.WEEKOFMONTH,                                   S.DAYOFWEEK, S.MAKE,                                   :                                         S.BASEPOLICY,                                    C.F AS probability                                                 FROM                                 StreamDataChannel [NOW] AS S,                                 TABLE(prediction2@Oracle11gR2(S.CQLMONTH,                                      S.WEEKOFMONTH,                                      S.DAYOFWEEK,                                       S.MAKE, ...,                                      S.BASEPOLICY) AS F of char) AS C)                       ]]></query>                 </rules>               </processor>           </wlevs:config>   Finally, the last stage in the EPN prints out the probability of the event being an anomaly. One can also define a threshold in CQL to filter out events that are normal, i.e., below a certain mark as defined by the analyst or designer. Sample Runs: Now let's see how this behaves when events are streamed through CEP. We use only two events for brevity, one normal and other one not. This is one of the "normal" looking events and the probability of it being anomalous is less than 60%. Event is: eventType=DataMiningOutEvent object=q1  time=2904821976256 S.CQLMONTH=Dec, S.WEEKOFMONTH=5, S.DAYOFWEEK=Wednesday, S.MAKE=Honda, S.ACCIDENTAREA=Urban, S.DAYOFWEEKCLAIMED=Tuesday, S.MONTHCLAIMED=Jan, S.WEEKOFMONTHCLAIMED=1, S.SEX=Female, S.MARITALSTATUS=Single, S.AGE=21, S.FAULT=Policy Holder, S.POLICYTYPE=Sport - Liability, S.VEHICLECATEGORY=Sport, S.VEHICLEPRICE=more than 69000, S.FRAUDFOUND=0, S.POLICYNUMBER=1, S.REPNUMBER=12, S.DEDUCTIBLE=300, S.DRIVERRATING=1, S.DAYSPOLICYACCIDENT=more than 30, S.DAYSPOLICYCLAIM=more than 30, S.PASTNUMOFCLAIMS=none, S.AGEOFVEHICLES=3 years, S.AGEOFPOLICYHOLDER=26 to 30, S.POLICEREPORTFILED=No, S.WITNESSPRESENT=No, S.AGENTTYPE=External, S.NUMOFSUPP=none, S.ADDRCHGCLAIM=1 year, S.NUMOFCARS=3 to 4, S.CQLYEAR=1994, S.BASEPOLICY=Liability, probability=.58931702982118561 isTotalOrderGuarantee=true\nAnamoly probability: .58931702982118561 However, the following event is scored as an anomaly with a very high probability of  89%. So there is likely to be something wrong with it. A close look reveals that the value of "deductible" field (10000) is not "normal". What exactly constitutes normal here?. If you run the query on the database to find ALL distinct values for the "deductible" field, it returns the following set: {300, 400, 500, 700} Event is: eventType=DataMiningOutEvent object=q1  time=2598483773496 S.CQLMONTH=Dec, S.WEEKOFMONTH=5, S.DAYOFWEEK=Wednesday, S.MAKE=Honda, S.ACCIDENTAREA=Urban, S.DAYOFWEEKCLAIMED=Tuesday, S.MONTHCLAIMED=Jan, S.WEEKOFMONTHCLAIMED=1, S.SEX=Female, S.MARITALSTATUS=Single, S.AGE=21, S.FAULT=Policy Holder, S.POLICYTYPE=Sport - Liability, S.VEHICLECATEGORY=Sport, S.VEHICLEPRICE=more than 69000, S.FRAUDFOUND=0, S.POLICYNUMBER=1, S.REPNUMBER=12, S.DEDUCTIBLE=10000, S.DRIVERRATING=1, S.DAYSPOLICYACCIDENT=more than 30, S.DAYSPOLICYCLAIM=more than 30, S.PASTNUMOFCLAIMS=none, S.AGEOFVEHICLES=3 years, S.AGEOFPOLICYHOLDER=26 to 30, S.POLICEREPORTFILED=No, S.WITNESSPRESENT=No, S.AGENTTYPE=External, S.NUMOFSUPP=none, S.ADDRCHGCLAIM=1 year, S.NUMOFCARS=3 to 4, S.CQLYEAR=1994, S.BASEPOLICY=Liability, probability=.89171554529576691 isTotalOrderGuarantee=true\nAnamoly probability: .89171554529576691 Conclusion: By way of this example, we show: real-time scoring of events as they flow through CEP leveraging Oracle Data Mining.how CEP applications can invoke complex arbitrary external computations (function shipping) in an RDBMS.

    Read the article

  • ZFS for Database Log Files

    - by user12620111
    I've been troubled by drop outs in CPU usage in my application server, characterized by the CPUs suddenly going from close to 90% CPU busy to almost completely CPU idle for a few seconds. Here is an example of a drop out as shown by a snippet of vmstat data taken while the application server is under a heavy workload. # vmstat 1  kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu  r b w   swap  free  re  mf pi po fr de sr s3 s4 s5 s6   in   sy   cs us sy id  1 0 0 130160176 116381952 0 16 0 0 0 0  0  0  0  0  0 207377 117715 203884 70 21 9  12 0 0 130160160 116381936 0 25 0 0 0 0 0  0  0  0  0 200413 117162 197250 70 20 9  11 0 0 130160176 116381920 0 16 0 0 0 0 0  0  1  0  0 203150 119365 200249 72 21 7  8 0 0 130160176 116377808 0 19 0 0 0 0  0  0  0  0  0 169826 96144 165194 56 17 27  0 0 0 130160176 116377800 0 16 0 0 0 0  0  0  0  0  1 10245 9376 9164 2  1 97  0 0 0 130160176 116377792 0 16 0 0 0 0  0  0  0  0  2 15742 12401 14784 4 1 95  0 0 0 130160176 116377776 2 16 0 0 0 0  0  0  1  0  0 19972 17703 19612 6 2 92  14 0 0 130160176 116377696 0 16 0 0 0 0 0  0  0  0  0 202794 116793 199807 71 21 8  9 0 0 130160160 116373584 0 30 0 0 0 0  0  0 18  0  0 203123 117857 198825 69 20 11 This behavior occurred consistently while the application server was processing synthetic transactions: HTTP requests from JMeter running on an external machine. I explored many theories trying to explain the drop outs, including: Unexpected JMeter behavior Network contention Java Garbage Collection Application Server thread pool problems Connection pool problems Database transaction processing Database I/O contention Graphing the CPU %idle led to a breakthrough: Several of the drop outs were 30 seconds apart. With that insight, I went digging through the data again and looking for other outliers that were 30 seconds apart. In the database server statistics, I found spikes in the iostat "asvc_t" (average response time of disk transactions, in milliseconds) for the disk drive that was being used for the database log files. Here is an example:                     extended device statistics     r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b device     0.0 2053.6    0.0 8234.3  0.0  0.2    0.0    0.1   0  24 c3t60080E5...F4F6d0s0     0.0 2162.2    0.0 8652.8  0.0  0.3    0.0    0.1   0  28 c3t60080E5...F4F6d0s0     0.0 1102.5    0.0 10012.8  0.0  4.5    0.0    4.1   0  69 c3t60080E5...F4F6d0s0     0.0   74.0    0.0 7920.6  0.0 10.0    0.0  135.1   0 100 c3t60080E5...F4F6d0s0     0.0  568.7    0.0 6674.0  0.0  6.4    0.0   11.2   0  90 c3t60080E5...F4F6d0s0     0.0 1358.0    0.0 5456.0  0.0  0.6    0.0    0.4   0  55 c3t60080E5...F4F6d0s0     0.0 1314.3    0.0 5285.2  0.0  0.7    0.0    0.5   0  70 c3t60080E5...F4F6d0s0 Here is a little more information about my database configuration: The database and application server were running on two different SPARC servers. Storage for the database was on a storage array connected via 8 gigabit Fibre Channel Data storage and log file were on different physical disk drives Reliable low latency I/O is provided by battery backed NVRAM Highly available: Two Fibre Channel links accessed via MPxIO Two Mirrored cache controllers The log file physical disks were mirrored in the storage device Database log files on a ZFS Filesystem with cutting-edge technologies, such as copy-on-write and end-to-end checksumming Why would I be getting service time spikes in my high-end storage? First, I wanted to verify that the database log disk service time spikes aligned with the application server CPU drop outs, and they did: At first, I guessed that the disk service time spikes might be related to flushing the write through cache on the storage device, but I was unable to validate that theory. After searching the WWW for a while, I decided to try using a separate log device: # zpool add ZFS-db-41 log c3t60080E500017D55C000015C150A9F8A7d0 The ZFS log device is configured in a similar manner as described above: two physical disks mirrored in the storage array. This change to the database storage configuration eliminated the application server CPU drop outs: Here is the zpool configuration: # zpool status ZFS-db-41   pool: ZFS-db-41  state: ONLINE  scan: none requested config:         NAME                                     STATE         ZFS-db-41                                ONLINE           c3t60080E5...F4F6d0  ONLINE         logs           c3t60080E5...F8A7d0  ONLINE Now, the I/O spikes look like this:                     extended device statistics                  r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b device     0.0 1053.5    0.0 4234.1  0.0  0.8    0.0    0.7   0  75 c3t60080E5...F8A7d0s0                     extended device statistics                  r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b device     0.0 1131.8    0.0 4555.3  0.0  0.8    0.0    0.7   0  76 c3t60080E5...F8A7d0s0                     extended device statistics                  r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b device     0.0 1167.6    0.0 4682.2  0.0  0.7    0.0    0.6   0  74 c3t60080E5...F8A7d0s0     0.0  162.2    0.0 19153.9  0.0  0.7    0.0    4.2   0  12 c3t60080E5...F4F6d0s0                     extended device statistics                  r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b device     0.0 1247.2    0.0 4992.6  0.0  0.7    0.0    0.6   0  71 c3t60080E5...F8A7d0s0     0.0   41.0    0.0   70.0  0.0  0.1    0.0    1.6   0   2 c3t60080E5...F4F6d0s0                     extended device statistics                  r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b device     0.0 1241.3    0.0 4989.3  0.0  0.8    0.0    0.6   0  75 c3t60080E5...F8A7d0s0                     extended device statistics                  r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t  %w  %b device     0.0 1193.2    0.0 4772.9  0.0  0.7    0.0    0.6   0  71 c3t60080E5...F8A7d0s0 We can see the steady flow of 4k writes to the ZIL device from O_SYNC database log file writes. The spikes are from flushing the transaction group. Like almost all problems that I run into, once I thoroughly understand the problem, I find that other people have documented similar experiences. Thanks to all of you who have documented alternative approaches. Saved for another day: now that the problem is obvious, I should try "zfs:zfs_immediate_write_sz" as recommended in the ZFS Evil Tuning Guide. References: The ZFS Intent Log Solaris ZFS, Synchronous Writes and the ZIL Explained ZFS Evil Tuning Guide: Cache Flushes ZFS Evil Tuning Guide: Tuning ZFS for Database Performance

    Read the article

  • Why isn't my operator overloading working properly?

    - by Mithrax
    I have the following Polynomial class I'm working on: #include <iostream> using namespace std; class Polynomial { //define private member functions private: int coef[100]; // array of coefficients // coef[0] would hold all coefficients of x^0 // coef[1] would hold all x^1 // coef[n] = x^n ... int deg; // degree of polynomial (0 for the zero polynomial) //define public member functions public: Polynomial::Polynomial() //default constructor { for ( int i = 0; i < 100; i++ ) { coef[i] = 0; } } void set ( int a , int b ) //setter function { //coef = new Polynomial[b+1]; coef[b] = a; deg = degree(); } int degree() { int d = 0; for ( int i = 0; i < 100; i++ ) if ( coef[i] != 0 ) d = i; return d; } void print() { for ( int i = 99; i >= 0; i-- ) { if ( coef[i] != 0 ) { cout << coef[i] << "x^" << i << " "; } } } // use Horner's method to compute and return the polynomial evaluated at x int evaluate ( int x ) { int p = 0; for ( int i = deg; i >= 0; i-- ) p = coef[i] + ( x * p ); return p; } // differentiate this polynomial and return it Polynomial differentiate() { if ( deg == 0 ) { Polynomial t; t.set ( 0, 0 ); return t; } Polynomial deriv;// = new Polynomial ( 0, deg - 1 ); deriv.deg = deg - 1; for ( int i = 0; i < deg; i++ ) deriv.coef[i] = ( i + 1 ) * coef[i + 1]; return deriv; } Polynomial Polynomial::operator + ( Polynomial b ) { Polynomial a = *this; //a is the poly on the L.H.S Polynomial c; for ( int i = 0; i <= a.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] += a.coef[i]; for ( int i = 0; i <= b.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] += b.coef[i]; c.deg = c.degree(); return c; } Polynomial Polynomial::operator += ( Polynomial b ) { Polynomial a = *this; //a is the poly on the L.H.S Polynomial c; for ( int i = 0; i <= a.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] += a.coef[i]; for ( int i = 0; i <= b.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] += b.coef[i]; c.deg = c.degree(); for ( int i = 0; i < 100; i++) a.coef[i] = c.coef[i]; a.deg = a.degree(); return a; } Polynomial Polynomial::operator -= ( Polynomial b ) { Polynomial a = *this; //a is the poly on the L.H.S Polynomial c; for ( int i = 0; i <= a.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] += a.coef[i]; for ( int i = 0; i <= b.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] -= b.coef[i]; c.deg = c.degree(); for ( int i = 0; i < 100; i++) a.coef[i] = c.coef[i]; a.deg = a.degree(); return a; } Polynomial Polynomial::operator *= ( Polynomial b ) { Polynomial a = *this; //a is the poly on the L.H.S Polynomial c; for ( int i = 0; i <= a.deg; i++ ) for ( int j = 0; j <= b.deg; j++ ) c.coef[i+j] += ( a.coef[i] * b.coef[j] ); c.deg = c.degree(); for ( int i = 0; i < 100; i++) a.coef[i] = c.coef[i]; a.deg = a.degree(); return a; } Polynomial Polynomial::operator - ( Polynomial b ) { Polynomial a = *this; //a is the poly on the L.H.S Polynomial c; for ( int i = 0; i <= a.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] += a.coef[i]; for ( int i = 0; i <= b.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] -= b.coef[i]; c.deg = c.degree(); return c; } Polynomial Polynomial::operator * ( Polynomial b ) { Polynomial a = *this; //a is the poly on the L.H.S Polynomial c; for ( int i = 0; i <= a.deg; i++ ) for ( int j = 0; j <= b.deg; j++ ) c.coef[i+j] += ( a.coef[i] * b.coef[j] ); c.deg = c.degree(); return c; } }; int main() { Polynomial a, b, c, d; a.set ( 7, 4 ); //7x^4 a.set ( 1, 2 ); //x^2 b.set ( 6, 3 ); //6x^3 b.set ( -3, 2 ); //-3x^2 c = a - b; // (7x^4 + x^2) - (6x^3 - 3x^2) a -= b; c.print(); cout << "\n"; a.print(); cout << "\n"; c = a * b; // (7x^4 + x^2) * (6x^3 - 3x^2) c.print(); cout << "\n"; d = c.differentiate().differentiate(); d.print(); cout << "\n"; cout << c.evaluate ( 2 ); //substitue x with 2 cin.get(); } Now, I have the "-" operator overloaded and it works fine: Polynomial Polynomial::operator - ( Polynomial b ) { Polynomial a = *this; //a is the poly on the L.H.S Polynomial c; for ( int i = 0; i <= a.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] += a.coef[i]; for ( int i = 0; i <= b.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] -= b.coef[i]; c.deg = c.degree(); return c; } However, I'm having difficulty with my "-=" operator: Polynomial Polynomial::operator -= ( Polynomial b ) { Polynomial a = *this; //a is the poly on the L.H.S Polynomial c; for ( int i = 0; i <= a.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] += a.coef[i]; for ( int i = 0; i <= b.deg; i++ ) c.coef[i] -= b.coef[i]; c.deg = c.degree(); // overwrite value of 'a' with the newly computed 'c' before returning 'a' for ( int i = 0; i < 100; i++) a.coef[i] = c.coef[i]; a.deg = a.degree(); return a; } I just slightly modified my "-" operator method to overwrite the value in 'a' and return 'a', and just use the 'c' polynomial as a temp. I've put in some debug print statement and I confirm that at the time of computation, both: c = a - b; and a -= b; are computed to the same value. However, when I go to print them, their results are different: Polynomial a, b; a.set ( 7, 4 ); //7x^4 a.set ( 1, 2 ); //x^2 b.set ( 6, 3 ); //6x^3 b.set ( -3, 2 ); //-3x^2 c = a - b; // (7x^4 + x^2) - (6x^3 - 3x^2) a -= b; c.print(); cout << "\n"; a.print(); cout << "\n"; Result: 7x^4 -6x^3 4x^2 7x^4 1x^2 Why is my c = a - b and a -= b giving me different results when I go to print them?

    Read the article

  • Anyone have ideas for solving the "n items remaining" problem on Internet Explorer?

    - by CMPalmer
    In my ASP.Net app, which is javascript and jQuery heavy, but also uses master pages and .Net Ajax pieces, I am consistently seeing on the status bar of IE 6 (and occasionally IE 7) the message "2 items remaining" or "15 items remaining" followed by "loading somegraphicsfile.png|gif ." This message never goes away and may or may not prevent some page functionality from running (it certainly seems to bog down, but I'm not positive). I can cause this to happen 99% of the time by just refreshing an .aspx age, but the number of items and, sometimes, the file it mentions varies. Usually it is 2, 3, 12, 13, or 15. I've Googled for answers and there are several suggestions or explanations. Some of them haven't worked for us, and others aren't practical for us to implement or try. Here are some of the ideas/theories: IE isn't caching images right, so it repeatedly asks for the same image if the image is repeated on the page and the server assumes that it should be cached locally since it's already served it in that page context. IE displays the images correctly, but sits and waits for a server response that never comes. Typically the file it says it is waiting on is repeated on the page. The page is using PNG graphics with transparency. Indeed it is, but they are jQuery-UI Themeroller generated graphics which, according to the jQuery-UI folks, are IE safe. The jQuery-UI components are the only things using PNGs. All of our PNG references are in CSS, if that helps. I've changed some of the graphics from PNG to GIF, but it is just as likely to say it's waiting for somegraphicsfile.png as it is for somegraphicsfile.gif Images are being specified in CSS and/or JavaScript but are on things that aren't currently being displayed (display: none items for example). This may be true, but if it is, then I would think preloading images would work, but so far, adding a preloader doesn't do any good. IIS's caching policy is confusing the browser. If this is true, it is only Microsoft server SW having problems with Microsoft's browser (which doesn't surprise me at all). Unfortunately, I don't have much control over the IIS configuration that will be hosting the app. Has anyone seen this and found a way to combat it? Particularly on ASP.Net apps with jQuery and jQuery-UI? UPDATE One other data point: on at least one of the pages, just commenting out the jQuery-UI Datepicker component setup causes the problem to go away, but I don't think (or at least I'm not sure) if that fixes all of the pages. If it does "fix" them, I'll have to swap out plug-ins because that functionality needs to be there. There doesn't seem to be any open issues against jQuery-UI on IE6/7 currently... UPDATE 2 I checked the IIS settings and "enable content expiration" was not set on any of my folders. Unchecking that setting was a common suggestion for fixing this problem. I have another, simpler, page that I can consistently create the error on. I'm using the jQuery-UI 1.6rc6 file (although I've also tried jQuery-UI 1.7.1 with the same results). The problem only occurs when I refresh the page that contains the jQuery-UI Datepicker. If I comment out the Datepicker setup, the problem goes away. Here are a few things I notice when I do this: This page always says "(1 item remaining) Downloading picture http:///images/Calendar_scheduleHS.gif", but only when reloading. When I look at HTTP logging, I see that it requests that image from the server every time it is dynamically turned on, without regard to caching. All of the requests for that graphic are complete and return the graphic correctly. None are marked code 200 or 304 (indicating that the server is telling IE to use the cached version). Why it says waiting on that graphic when all of the requests have completed I have no idea. There is a single other graphic on the page (one of the UI PNG files) that has a code 304 (Not Modified). On another page where I managed to log HTTP traffic with "2 items remaining", two different graphic files (both UI PNGs) had a 304 as well (but neither was the one listed as "Downloading". This error is not innocuous - the page is not fully responsive. For example, if I click on one of the buttons which should execute a client-side action, the page refreshes. Going away from the page and coming back does not produce the error. I have moved the script and script references to the bottom of the content and this doesn't affect this problem. The script is still running in the $(document).ready() though (it's too hairy to divide out unless I absolutely have to). FINAL UPDATE AND ANSWER There were a lot of good answers and suggestions below, but none of them were exactly our problem. The closest one (and the one that led me to the solution) was the one about long running JavaScript, so I awarded the bounty there (I guess I could have answered it myself, but I'd rather reward info that leads to solutions). Here was our solution: We had multiple jQueryUI datepickers that were created on the $(document).ready event in script included from the ASP.Net master page. On this client page, a local script's $(document).ready event had script that destroyed the datepickers under certain conditions. We had to use "destroy" because the previous version of datepicker had a problem with "disable". When we upgraded to the latest version of jQuery UI (1.7.1) and replaced the "destroy"s with "disable"s for the datepickers, the problem went away (or mostly went away - if you do things too fast while the page is loading, it is still possible to get the "n items remaining" status). My theory as to what was happening goes like this: The page content loads and has 12 or so text boxes with the datepicker class. The master page script creates datepickers on those text boxes. IE queues up requests for each calendar graphic independently because IE doesn't know how to properly cache dynamic image requests. Before the requests get processed, the client area script destroys those datepickers so the graphics are no longer needed. IE is left with some number of orphaned requests that it doesn't know what to do with.

    Read the article

  • Large Object Heap Fragmentation

    - by Paul Ruane
    The C#/.NET application I am working on is suffering from a slow memory leak. I have used CDB with SOS to try to determine what is happening but the data does not seem to make any sense so I was hoping one of you may have experienced this before. The application is running on the 64 bit framework. It is continuously calculating and serialising data to a remote host and is hitting the Large Object Heap (LOH) a fair bit. However, most of the LOH objects I expect to be transient: once the calculation is complete and has been sent to the remote host, the memory should be freed. What I am seeing, however, is a large number of (live) object arrays interleaved with free blocks of memory, e.g., taking a random segment from the LOH: 0:000> !DumpHeap 000000005b5b1000 000000006351da10 Address MT Size ... 000000005d4f92e0 0000064280c7c970 16147872 000000005e45f880 00000000001661d0 1901752 Free 000000005e62fd38 00000642788d8ba8 1056 <-- 000000005e630158 00000000001661d0 5988848 Free 000000005ebe6348 00000642788d8ba8 1056 000000005ebe6768 00000000001661d0 6481336 Free 000000005f214d20 00000642788d8ba8 1056 000000005f215140 00000000001661d0 7346016 Free 000000005f9168a0 00000642788d8ba8 1056 000000005f916cc0 00000000001661d0 7611648 Free 00000000600591c0 00000642788d8ba8 1056 00000000600595e0 00000000001661d0 264808 Free ... Obviously I would expect this to be the case if my application were creating long-lived, large objects during each calculation. (It does do this and I accept there will be a degree of LOH fragmentation but that is not the problem here.) The problem is the very small (1056 byte) object arrays you can see in the above dump which I cannot see in code being created and which are remaining rooted somehow. Also note that CDB is not reporting the type when the heap segment is dumped: I am not sure if this is related or not. If I dump the marked (<--) object, CDB/SOS reports it fine: 0:015> !DumpObj 000000005e62fd38 Name: System.Object[] MethodTable: 00000642788d8ba8 EEClass: 00000642789d7660 Size: 1056(0x420) bytes Array: Rank 1, Number of elements 128, Type CLASS Element Type: System.Object Fields: None The elements of the object array are all strings and the strings are recognisable as from our application code. Also, I am unable to find their GC roots as the !GCRoot command hangs and never comes back (I have even tried leaving it overnight). So, I would very much appreciate it if anyone could shed any light as to why these small (<85k) object arrays are ending up on the LOH: what situations will .NET put a small object array in there? Also, does anyone happen to know of an alternative way of ascertaining the roots of these objects? Thanks in advance. Update 1 Another theory I came up with late yesterday is that these object arrays started out large but have been shrunk leaving the blocks of free memory that are evident in the memory dumps. What makes me suspicious is that the object arrays always appear to be 1056 bytes long (128 elements), 128 * 8 for the references and 32 bytes of overhead. The idea is that perhaps some unsafe code in a library or in the CLR is corrupting the number of elements field in the array header. Bit of a long shot I know... Update 2 Thanks to Brian Rasmussen (see accepted answer) the problem has been identified as fragmentation of the LOH caused by the string intern table! I wrote a quick test application to confirm this: static void Main() { const int ITERATIONS = 100000; for (int index = 0; index < ITERATIONS; ++index) { string str = "NonInterned" + index; Console.Out.WriteLine(str); } Console.Out.WriteLine("Continue."); Console.In.ReadLine(); for (int index = 0; index < ITERATIONS; ++index) { string str = string.Intern("Interned" + index); Console.Out.WriteLine(str); } Console.Out.WriteLine("Continue?"); Console.In.ReadLine(); } The application first creates and dereferences unique strings in a loop. This is just to prove that the memory does not leak in this scenario. Obviously it should not and it does not. In the second loop, unique strings are created and interned. This action roots them in the intern table. What I did not realise is how the intern table is represented. It appears it consists of a set of pages -- object arrays of 128 string elements -- that are created in the LOH. This is more evident in CDB/SOS: 0:000> .loadby sos mscorwks 0:000> !EEHeap -gc Number of GC Heaps: 1 generation 0 starts at 0x00f7a9b0 generation 1 starts at 0x00e79c3c generation 2 starts at 0x00b21000 ephemeral segment allocation context: none segment begin allocated size 00b20000 00b21000 010029bc 0x004e19bc(5118396) Large object heap starts at 0x01b21000 segment begin allocated size 01b20000 01b21000 01b8ade0 0x00069de0(433632) Total Size 0x54b79c(5552028) ------------------------------ GC Heap Size 0x54b79c(5552028) Taking a dump of the LOH segment reveals the pattern I saw in the leaking application: 0:000> !DumpHeap 01b21000 01b8ade0 ... 01b8a120 793040bc 528 01b8a330 00175e88 16 Free 01b8a340 793040bc 528 01b8a550 00175e88 16 Free 01b8a560 793040bc 528 01b8a770 00175e88 16 Free 01b8a780 793040bc 528 01b8a990 00175e88 16 Free 01b8a9a0 793040bc 528 01b8abb0 00175e88 16 Free 01b8abc0 793040bc 528 01b8add0 00175e88 16 Free total 1568 objects Statistics: MT Count TotalSize Class Name 00175e88 784 12544 Free 793040bc 784 421088 System.Object[] Total 1568 objects Note that the object array size is 528 (rather than 1056) because my workstation is 32 bit and the application server is 64 bit. The object arrays are still 128 elements long. So the moral to this story is to be very careful interning. If the string you are interning is not known to be a member of a finite set then your application will leak due to fragmentation of the LOH, at least in version 2 of the CLR. In our application's case, there is general code in the deserialisation code path that interns entity identifiers during unmarshalling: I now strongly suspect this is the culprit. However, the developer's intentions were obviously good as they wanted to make sure that if the same entity is deserialised multiple times then only one instance of the identifier string will be maintained in memory.

    Read the article

  • Problem in Apache CXF (Simple Frontend): 'Already connected'

    - by seanizer
    I am using apache CXF for the first time. I am trying to establish a connection based on the CXF simple front end (Configuration notes) technology. I can't really see what I've done wrong, but I am getting a weird error (see below). I have also posted this question to [email protected], but I haven't received a response yet. Perhaps someone here can help. The service bean that is wrapped here is a Spring / JPA service that does not know anything about the web, I want to use simple frontend to publish it as a web service without having to annotate it with Jax-ws etc. (This works in theory). Here's my configuration: Server: <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:simple="http://cxf.apache.org/simple" xmlns:soap="http://cxf.apache.org/bindings/soap" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context" xmlns:cs="http://[www.mycompany.com]/coupon/service" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd http://cxf.apache.org/bindings/soap http://cxf.apache.org/schemas/configuration/soap.xsd http://cxf.apache.org/simple http://cxf.apache.org/schemas/simple.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd" default-autowire="byType" > <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf.xml" /> <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-soap.xml" /> <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-http.xml" /> <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-http-binding.xml" /> <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-servlet.xml" /> <import resource="classpath*:persistenceContext.xml" /> <!—my service implementation --> <!-- serviceClass points to an interface --> <simple:server id="server" serviceBean="couponService" serviceClass="[com.mycompany].MyServiceInterface" bindingId="http://apache.org/cxf/binding/http" address="/${wsdl.path}" serviceName="cs:couponService" endpointName="cs:couponServicePort" > <simple:dataBinding> <bean class="org.apache.cxf.aegis.databinding.AegisDatabinding" /> </simple:dataBinding> <simple:binding> <soap:soapBinding version="1.2" mtomEnabled="true" /> </simple:binding> </simple:server> <context:property-placeholder location="classpath:service.properties" /> </beans> Client: <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:simple="http://cxf.apache.org/simple" xmlns:soap="http://cxf.apache.org/bindings/soap" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context" xmlns:oxm=http://www.springframework.org/schema/oxm xmlns:cs="http://[www.mycompany.com]/coupon/service" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd http://cxf.apache.org/bindings/soap http://cxf.apache.org/schemas/configuration/soap.xsd http://cxf.apache.org/simple http://cxf.apache.org/schemas/simple.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-3.0.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/oxm http://www.springframework.org/schema/oxm/spring-oxm-3.0.xsd" default-autowire="byType" > <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf.xml" /> <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-http.xml" /> <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-http-binding.xml" /> <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-soap.xml" /> <simple:client id="couponService" wsdlLocation="${wsdl.url}?wsdl" serviceName="cs:couponService" endpointName="cs:couponServicePort" transportId="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http" address="${wsdl.url}" bindingId="http://apache.org/cxf/binding/http" serviceClass="[com.mycompany].MyServiceInterface"> <simple:dataBinding> <bean class="org.apache.cxf.aegis.databinding.AegisDatabinding" /> </simple:dataBinding> <simple:binding> <soap:soapBinding mtomEnabled="true" version="1.2" /> </simple:binding> </simple:client> <context:property-placeholder location="classpath:service.properties" /> On the client side, I inject the generated service into my web application (I am using wicket but that should be irrelevant) and when I call service methods on it I get an IllegalStateException from java.net.HttpURLConnection saying the connection is already open. Here’s the stack trace: java.lang.IllegalStateException: IllegalStateException invoking http://localhost:9999/services/coupon: Already connected at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27) at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:513) at org.apache.cxf.transport.http.HTTPConduit$WrappedOutputStream.mapException(HTTPConduit.java:2058) at org.apache.cxf.transport.http.HTTPConduit$WrappedOutputStream.close(HTTPConduit.java:2048) at org.apache.cxf.transport.AbstractConduit.close(AbstractConduit.java:66) at org.apache.cxf.transport.http.HTTPConduit.close(HTTPConduit.java:639) at org.apache.cxf.interceptor.MessageSenderInterceptor$MessageSenderEndingInterceptor.handleMessage(MessageSenderInterceptor.java:62) at org.apache.cxf.phase.PhaseInterceptorChain.doIntercept(PhaseInterceptorChain.java:243) at org.apache.cxf.binding.http.interceptor.DatabindingOutSetupInterceptor.handleMessage(DatabindingOutSetupInterceptor.java:91) at org.apache.cxf.phase.PhaseInterceptorChain.doIntercept(PhaseInterceptorChain.java:243) at org.apache.cxf.endpoint.ClientImpl.invoke(ClientImpl.java:487) at org.apache.cxf.endpoint.ClientImpl.invoke(ClientImpl.java:313) at org.apache.cxf.endpoint.ClientImpl.invoke(ClientImpl.java:265) at org.apache.cxf.frontend.ClientProxy.invokeSync(ClientProxy.java:73) at org.apache.cxf.frontend.ClientProxy.invoke(ClientProxy.java:68) at $Proxy30.createIndividualUserCouponsJob(Unknown Source) at [com.mycompany].coupons.web.app.dummycontent.DummyContentInitializer.addSomeIndividualCoupons(DummyContentInitializer.java:84) at [com.mycompany].coupons.web.app.dummycontent.DummyContentInitializer.addSomeCoupons(DummyContentInitializer.java:68) at [com.mycompany].coupons.web.app.dummycontent.DummyContentInitializer.init(DummyContentInitializer.java:50) at org.apache.wicket.Application.callInitializers(Application.java:843) at org.apache.wicket.Application.initializeComponents(Application.java:678) at org.apache.wicket.protocol.http.WicketFilter.init(WicketFilter.java:725) at org.apache.wicket.protocol.http.WicketServlet.init(WicketServlet.java:219) at javax.servlet.GenericServlet.init(GenericServlet.java:241) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.initServlet(ServletHolder.java:433) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.doStart(ServletHolder.java:256) at org.mortbay.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:40) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.initialize(ServletHandler.java:617) at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.Context.startContext(Context.java:139) at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.startContext(WebAppContext.java:1218) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.doStart(ContextHandler.java:500) at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.doStart(WebAppContext.java:448) at org.mortbay.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:40) at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.doStart(HandlerWrapper.java:117) at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.doStart(Server.java:220) at org.mortbay.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:40) at [com.mycompany].coupons.web.test.Start.main(Start.java:45) Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Already connected at java.net.HttpURLConnection.setFixedLengthStreamingMode(HttpURLConnection.java:103) at org.apache.cxf.transport.http.HTTPConduit$WrappedOutputStream.thresholdNotReached(HTTPConduit.java:1889) at org.apache.cxf.io.AbstractThresholdOutputStream.close(AbstractThresholdOutputStream.java:99) at org.apache.cxf.transport.http.HTTPConduit$WrappedOutputStream.close(HTTPConduit.java:1980) This happens the first time a service call is made, and the only URLConnection that is opened before that is that of the wsdl. I have searched the web for similar problems, but all I found was a bug using rest that has already been fixed. I am trying to use the simple frontend, as my service is not annotated with jax-ws annotations and I would like to keep it that way. Can someone help? Thanks in advance. Sean

    Read the article

  • Bacula & Multiple Tape Devices, and so on

    - by Tom O'Connor
    Bacula won't make use of 2 tape devices simultaneously. (Search for #-#-# for the TL;DR) A little background, perhaps. In the process of trying to get a decent working backup solution (backing up 20TB ain't cheap, or easy) at $dayjob, we bought a bunch of things to make it work. Firstly, there's a Spectra Logic T50e autochanger, 40 slots of LTO5 goodness, and that robot's got a pair of IBM HH5 Ultrium LTO5 drives, connected via FibreChannel Arbitrated Loop to our backup server. There's the backup server.. A Dell R715 with 2x 16 core AMD 62xx CPUs, and 32GB of RAM. Yummy. That server's got 2 Emulex FCe-12000E cards, and an Intel X520-SR dual port 10GE NIC. We were also sold Commvault Backup (non-NDMP). Here's where it gets really complicated. Spectra Logic and Commvault both sent respective engineers, who set up the library and the software. Commvault was running fine, in so far as the controller was working fine. The Dell server has Ubuntu 12.04 server, and runs the MediaAgent for CommVault, and mounts our BlueArc NAS as NFS to a few mountpoints, like /home, and some stuff in /mnt. When backing up from the NFS mountpoints, we were seeing ~= 290GB/hr throughput. That's CRAP, considering we've got 20-odd TB to get through, in a <48 hour backup window. The rated maximum on the BlueArc is 700MB/s (2460GB/hr), the rated maximum write speed on the tape devices is 140MB/s, per drive, so that's 492GB/hr (or double it, for the total throughput). So, the next step was to benchmark NFS performance with IOzone, and it turns out that we get epic write performance (across 20 threads), and it's like 1.5-2.5TB/hr write, but read performance is fecking hopeless. I couldn't ever get higher than 343GB/hr maximum. So let's assume that the 343GB/hr is a theoretical maximum for read performance on the NAS, then we should in theory be able to get that performance out of a) CommVault, and b) any other backup agent. Not the case. Commvault seems to only ever give me 200-250GB/hr throughput, and out of experimentation, I installed Bacula to see what the state of play there is. If, for example, Bacula gave consistently better performance and speeds than Commvault, then we'd be able to say "**$.$ Refunds Plz $.$**" #-#-# Alas, I found a different problem with Bacula. Commvault seems pretty happy to read from one part of the mountpoint with one thread, and stream that to a Tape device, whilst reading from some other directory with the other thread, and writing to the 2nd drive in the autochanger. I can't for the life of me get Bacula to mount and write to two tape drives simultaneously. Things I've tried: Setting Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 in the Director, File and Storage Daemons Setting Prefer Mounted Volumes = no in the Job Definition Setting multiple devices in the Autochanger resource. Documentation seems to be very single-drive centric, and we feel a little like we've strapped a rocket to a hamster, with this one. The majority of example Bacula configurations are for DDS4 drives, manual tape swapping, and FreeBSD or IRIX systems. I should probably add that I'm not too bothered if this isn't possible, but I'd be surprised. I basically want to use Bacula as proof to stick it to the software vendors that they're overpriced ;) I read somewhere that @KyleBrandt has done something similar with a modern Tape solution.. Configuration Files: *bacula-dir.conf* # # Default Bacula Director Configuration file Director { # define myself Name = backuphost-1-dir DIRport = 9101 # where we listen for UA connections QueryFile = "/etc/bacula/scripts/query.sql" WorkingDirectory = "/var/lib/bacula" PidDirectory = "/var/run/bacula" Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 Password = "yourekiddingright" # Console password Messages = Daemon DirAddress = 0.0.0.0 #DirAddress = 127.0.0.1 } JobDefs { Name = "DefaultFileJob" Type = Backup Level = Incremental Client = backuphost-1-fd FileSet = "Full Set" Schedule = "WeeklyCycle" Storage = File Messages = Standard Pool = File Priority = 10 Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/%c.bsr" } JobDefs { Name = "DefaultTapeJob" Type = Backup Level = Incremental Client = backuphost-1-fd FileSet = "Full Set" Schedule = "WeeklyCycle" Storage = "SpectraLogic" Messages = Standard Pool = AllTapes Priority = 10 Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/%c.bsr" Prefer Mounted Volumes = no } # # Define the main nightly save backup job # By default, this job will back up to disk in /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir Job { Name = "BackupClient1" JobDefs = "DefaultFileJob" } Job { Name = "BackupThisVolume" JobDefs = "DefaultTapeJob" FileSet = "SpecialVolume" } #Job { # Name = "BackupClient2" # Client = backuphost-12-fd # JobDefs = "DefaultJob" #} # Backup the catalog database (after the nightly save) Job { Name = "BackupCatalog" JobDefs = "DefaultFileJob" Level = Full FileSet="Catalog" Schedule = "WeeklyCycleAfterBackup" # This creates an ASCII copy of the catalog # Arguments to make_catalog_backup.pl are: # make_catalog_backup.pl <catalog-name> RunBeforeJob = "/etc/bacula/scripts/make_catalog_backup.pl MyCatalog" # This deletes the copy of the catalog RunAfterJob = "/etc/bacula/scripts/delete_catalog_backup" Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/%n.bsr" Priority = 11 # run after main backup } # # Standard Restore template, to be changed by Console program # Only one such job is needed for all Jobs/Clients/Storage ... # Job { Name = "RestoreFiles" Type = Restore Client=backuphost-1-fd FileSet="Full Set" Storage = File Pool = Default Messages = Standard Where = /srv/bacula/restore } FileSet { Name = "SpecialVolume" Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = /mnt/SpecialVolume } Exclude { File = /var/lib/bacula File = /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir File = /proc File = /tmp File = /.journal File = /.fsck } } # List of files to be backed up FileSet { Name = "Full Set" Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = /usr/sbin } Exclude { File = /var/lib/bacula File = /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir File = /proc File = /tmp File = /.journal File = /.fsck } } Schedule { Name = "WeeklyCycle" Run = Full 1st sun at 23:05 Run = Differential 2nd-5th sun at 23:05 Run = Incremental mon-sat at 23:05 } # This schedule does the catalog. It starts after the WeeklyCycle Schedule { Name = "WeeklyCycleAfterBackup" Run = Full sun-sat at 23:10 } # This is the backup of the catalog FileSet { Name = "Catalog" Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = "/var/lib/bacula/bacula.sql" } } # Client (File Services) to backup Client { Name = backuphost-1-fd Address = localhost FDPort = 9102 Catalog = MyCatalog Password = "surelyyourejoking" # password for FileDaemon File Retention = 30 days # 30 days Job Retention = 6 months # six months AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired Jobs/Files } # # Second Client (File Services) to backup # You should change Name, Address, and Password before using # #Client { # Name = backuphost-12-fd # Address = localhost2 # FDPort = 9102 # Catalog = MyCatalog # Password = "i'mnotjokinganddontcallmeshirley" # password for FileDaemon 2 # File Retention = 30 days # 30 days # Job Retention = 6 months # six months # AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired Jobs/Files #} # Definition of file storage device Storage { Name = File # Do not use "localhost" here Address = localhost # N.B. Use a fully qualified name here SDPort = 9103 Password = "lalalalala" Device = FileStorage Media Type = File } Storage { Name = "SpectraLogic" Address = localhost SDPort = 9103 Password = "linkedinmakethebestpasswords" Device = Drive-1 Device = Drive-2 Media Type = LTO5 Autochanger = yes } # Generic catalog service Catalog { Name = MyCatalog # Uncomment the following line if you want the dbi driver # dbdriver = "dbi:sqlite3"; dbaddress = 127.0.0.1; dbport = dbname = "bacula"; DB Address = ""; dbuser = "bacula"; dbpassword = "bbmaster63" } # Reasonable message delivery -- send most everything to email address # and to the console Messages { Name = Standard mailcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"\(Bacula\) \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula: %t %e of %c %l\" %r" operatorcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"\(Bacula\) \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula: Intervention needed for %j\" %r" mail = root@localhost = all, !skipped operator = root@localhost = mount console = all, !skipped, !saved # # WARNING! the following will create a file that you must cycle from # time to time as it will grow indefinitely. However, it will # also keep all your messages if they scroll off the console. # append = "/var/lib/bacula/log" = all, !skipped catalog = all } # # Message delivery for daemon messages (no job). Messages { Name = Daemon mailcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"\(Bacula\) \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula daemon message\" %r" mail = root@localhost = all, !skipped console = all, !skipped, !saved append = "/var/lib/bacula/log" = all, !skipped } # Default pool definition Pool { Name = Default Pool Type = Backup Recycle = yes # Bacula can automatically recycle Volumes AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired volumes Volume Retention = 365 days # one year } # File Pool definition Pool { Name = File Pool Type = Backup Recycle = yes # Bacula can automatically recycle Volumes AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired volumes Volume Retention = 365 days # one year Maximum Volume Bytes = 50G # Limit Volume size to something reasonable Maximum Volumes = 100 # Limit number of Volumes in Pool } Pool { Name = AllTapes Pool Type = Backup Recycle = yes AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired volumes Volume Retention = 31 days # one Moth } # Scratch pool definition Pool { Name = Scratch Pool Type = Backup } # # Restricted console used by tray-monitor to get the status of the director # Console { Name = backuphost-1-mon Password = "LastFMalsostorePasswordsLikeThis" CommandACL = status, .status } bacula-sd.conf # # Default Bacula Storage Daemon Configuration file # Storage { # definition of myself Name = backuphost-1-sd SDPort = 9103 # Director's port WorkingDirectory = "/var/lib/bacula" Pid Directory = "/var/run/bacula" Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 SDAddress = 0.0.0.0 # SDAddress = 127.0.0.1 } # # List Directors who are permitted to contact Storage daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-dir Password = "passwordslinplaintext" } # # Restricted Director, used by tray-monitor to get the # status of the storage daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-mon Password = "totalinsecurityabound" Monitor = yes } Device { Name = FileStorage Media Type = File Archive Device = /srv/bacula/archive LabelMedia = yes; # lets Bacula label unlabeled media Random Access = Yes; AutomaticMount = yes; # when device opened, read it RemovableMedia = no; AlwaysOpen = no; } Autochanger { Name = SpectraLogic Device = Drive-1 Device = Drive-2 Changer Command = "/etc/bacula/scripts/mtx-changer %c %o %S %a %d" Changer Device = /dev/sg4 } Device { Name = Drive-1 Drive Index = 0 Archive Device = /dev/nst0 Changer Device = /dev/sg4 Media Type = LTO5 AutoChanger = yes RemovableMedia = yes; AutomaticMount = yes; AlwaysOpen = yes; RandomAccess = no; LabelMedia = yes } Device { Name = Drive-2 Drive Index = 1 Archive Device = /dev/nst1 Changer Device = /dev/sg4 Media Type = LTO5 AutoChanger = yes RemovableMedia = yes; AutomaticMount = yes; AlwaysOpen = yes; RandomAccess = no; LabelMedia = yes } # # Send all messages to the Director, # mount messages also are sent to the email address # Messages { Name = Standard director = backuphost-1-dir = all } bacula-fd.conf # # Default Bacula File Daemon Configuration file # # # List Directors who are permitted to contact this File daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-dir Password = "hahahahahaha" } # # Restricted Director, used by tray-monitor to get the # status of the file daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-mon Password = "hohohohohho" Monitor = yes } # # "Global" File daemon configuration specifications # FileDaemon { # this is me Name = backuphost-1-fd FDport = 9102 # where we listen for the director WorkingDirectory = /var/lib/bacula Pid Directory = /var/run/bacula Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 #FDAddress = 127.0.0.1 FDAddress = 0.0.0.0 } # Send all messages except skipped files back to Director Messages { Name = Standard director = backuphost-1-dir = all, !skipped, !restored }

    Read the article

  • Problems with with A* algorithm

    - by V_Programmer
    I'm trying to implement the A* algorithm in Java. I followed this tutorial,in particular, this pseudocode: http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/ImplementationNotes.html The problem is my code doesn't work. It goes into an infinite loop. I really don't know why this happens... I suspect that the problem are in F = G + H function implemented in Graph constructors. I suspect I am not calculate the neighbor F correclty. Here's my code: List<Graph> open; List<Graph> close; private void createRouteAStar(Unit u) { open = new ArrayList<Graph>(); close = new ArrayList<Graph>(); u.ai_route_endX = 11; u.ai_route_endY = 5; List<Graph> neigh; int index; int i; boolean finish = false; Graph current; int cost; Graph start = new Graph(u.xMap, u.yMap, 0, ManhattanDistance(u.xMap, u.yMap, u.ai_route_endX, u.ai_route_endY)); open.add(start); current = start; while(!finish) { index = findLowerF(); current = new Graph(open, index); System.out.println(current.x); System.out.println(current.y); if (current.x == u.ai_route_endX && current.y == u.ai_route_endY) { finish = true; } else { close.add(current); neigh = current.getNeighbors(); for (i = 0; i < neigh.size(); i++) { cost = current.g + ManhattanDistance(current.x, current.y, neigh.get(i).x, neigh.get(i).y); if (open.contains(neigh.get(i)) && cost < neigh.get(i).g) { open.remove(open.indexOf(neigh)); } else if (close.contains(neigh.get(i)) && cost < neigh.get(i).g) { close.remove(close.indexOf(neigh)); } else if (!open.contains(neigh.get(i)) && !close.contains(neigh.get(i))) { neigh.get(i).g = cost; neigh.get(i).f = cost + ManhattanDistance(neigh.get(i).x, neigh.get(i).y, u.ai_route_endX, u.ai_route_endY); neigh.get(i).setParent(current); open.add(neigh.get(i)); } } } } System.out.println("step"); for (i=0; i < close.size(); i++) { if (close.get(i).parent != null) { System.out.println(i); System.out.println(close.get(i).parent.x); System.out.println(close.get(i).parent.y); } } } private int findLowerF() { int i; int min = 10000; int minIndex = -1; for (i=0; i < open.size(); i++) { if (open.get(i).f < min) { min = open.get(i).f; minIndex = i; System.out.println("min"); System.out.println(min); } } return minIndex; } private int ManhattanDistance(int ax, int ay, int bx, int by) { return Math.abs(ax-bx) + Math.abs(ay-by); } And, as I've said. I suspect that the Graph class has the main problem. However I've not been able to detect and fix it. public class Graph { int x, y; int f,g,h; Graph parent; public Graph(int x, int y, int g, int h) { this.x = x; this.y = y; this.g = g; this.h = h; this.f = g + h; } public Graph(List<Graph> list, int index) { this.x = list.get(index).x; this.y = list.get(index).y; this.g = list.get(index).g; this.h = list.get(index).h; this.f = list.get(index).f; this.parent = list.get(index).parent; } public Graph(Graph gp) { this.x = gp.x; this.y = gp.y; this.g = gp.g; this.h = gp.h; this.f = gp.f; } public Graph(Graph gp, Graph parent) { this.x = gp.x; this.y = gp.y; this.g = gp.g; this.h = gp.h; this.f = g + h; this.parent = parent; } public List<Graph> getNeighbors() { List<Graph> aux = new ArrayList<Graph>(); aux.add(new Graph(x+1, y, g,h)); aux.add(new Graph(x-1, y, g,h)); aux.add(new Graph(x, y+1, g,h)); aux.add(new Graph(x, y-1, g,h)); return aux; } public void setParent(Graph g) { parent = g; } } Little Edit: Using the System.out and the Debugger I discovered that the program ALWAYS is check the same "current" graph, (15,8) which is the (u.xMap, u.yMap) position. Looks like it keeps forever in the first step.

    Read the article

  • SQLAuthority News – TechEd India – April 12-14, 2010 Bangalore – An Unforgettable Experience – An Op

    - by pinaldave
    TechEd India was one of the largest Technology events in India led by Microsoft. This event was attended by more than 3,000 technology enthusiasts, making it one of the most well-organized events of the year. Though I attempted to attend almost all the technology events here, I have not seen any bigger or better event in Indian subcontinents other than this. There are 21 Technical Tracks at Tech·Ed India 2010 that span more than 745 learning opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this whole event as a speaker and a delegate, as well. TechEd India Speaker Badge and A Token of Lifetime Hotel Selection I presented three different sessions at TechEd India and was also a part of panel discussion. (The details of the sessions are given at the end of this blog post.) Due to extensive traveling, I stay away from my family occasionally. For this reason, I took my wife – Nupur and daughter Shaivi (8 months old) to the event along with me. We stayed at the same hotel where the event was organized so as to maximize my time bonding with my family and to have more time in networking with technology community, at the same time. The hotel Lalit Ashok is the largest and most luxurious venue one can find in Bangalore, located in the middle of the city. The cost of the hotel was a bit pricey, but looking at all the advantages, I had decided to ask for a booking there. Hotel Lalit Ashok Nupur Dave and Shaivi Dave Arrival Day – DAY 0 – April 11, 2010 I reached the event a day earlier, and that was one wise decision for I was able to relax a bit and go over my presentation for the next day’s course. I am a kind of person who likes to get everything ready ahead of time. I was also able to enjoy a pleasant evening with several Microsoft employees and my family friends. I even checked out the location where I would be doing presentations the next day. I was fortunate enough to meet Bijoy Singhal from Microsoft who helped me out with a few of the logistics issues that occured the day before. I was not aware of the fact that the very next day he was going to be “The Man” of the TechEd 2010 event. Vinod Kumar from Microsoft was really very kind as he talked to me regarding my subsequent session. He gave me some suggestions which were really helpful that I was able to incorporate them during my presentation. Finally, I was able to meet Abhishek Kant from Microsoft; his valuable suggestions and unlimited passion have inspired many people like me to work with the Community. Pradipta from Microsoft was also around, being extremely busy with logistics; however, in those busy times, he did find some good spare time to have a chat with me and the other Community leaders. I also met Harish Ranganathan and Sachin Rathi, both from Microsoft. It was so interesting to listen to both of them talking about SharePoint. I just have no words to express my overwhelmed spirit because of all these passionate young guys - Pradipta,Vinod, Bijoy, Harish, Sachin and Ahishek (of course!). Map of TechEd India 2010 Event Day 1 – April 12, 2010 From morning until night time, today was truly a very busy day for me. I had two presentations and one panel discussion for the day. Needless to say, I had a few meetings to attend as well. The day started with a keynote from S. Somaseger where he announced the launch of Visual Studio 2010. The keynote area was really eye-catching because of the very large, bigger-than- life uniform screen. This was truly one to show. The title music of the keynote was very interesting and it featured Bijoy Singhal as the model. It was interesting to talk to him afterwards, when we laughed at jokes together about his modeling assignment. TechEd India Keynote Opening Featuring Bijoy TechEd India 2010 Keynote – S. Somasegar Time: 11:15pm – 11:45pm Session 1: True Lies of SQL Server – SQL Myth Buster Following the excellent keynote, I had my very first session on the subject of SQL Server Myth Buster. At first, I was a bit nervous as right after the keynote, for this was my very first session and during my presentation I saw lots of Microsoft Product Team members. Well, it really went well and I had a really good discussion with attendees of the session. I felt that a well begin was half-done and my confidence was regained. Right after the session, I met a few of my Community friends and had meaningful discussions with them on many subjects. The abstract of the session is as follows: In this 30-minute demo session, I am going to briefly demonstrate few SQL Server Myths and their resolutions as I back them up with some demo. This demo presentation is a must-attend for all developers and administrators who would come to the event. This is going to be a very quick yet fun session. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch with Somasegar After the session I went to see my daughter, and then I headed right away to the lunch with S. Somasegar – the keynote speaker and senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I really thank to Abhishek who made it possible for us. Because of his efforts, all the MVPs had the opportunity to meet such a legendary person and had to talk with them on Microsoft Technology. Though Somasegar is currently holding such a high position in Microsoft, he is very polite and a real gentleman, and how I wish that everybody in industry is like him. Believe me, if you spread love and kindness, then that is what you will receive back. As soon as lunch time was over, I ran to the session hall as my second presentation was about to start. Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm Session 2: Master Data Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence is a subject which was widely talked about at TechEd. Everybody was interested in this subject, and I did not excuse myself from this great concept as well. I consider myself fortunate as I was presenting on the subject of Master Data Services at TechEd. When I had initially learned this subject, I had a bit of confusion about the usage of this tool. Later on, I decided that I would tackle about how we all developers and DBAs are not able to understand something so simple such as this, and even worst, creating confusion about the technology. During system designing, it is very important to have a reference material or master lookup tables. Well, I talked about the same subject and presented the session keeping that as my center talk. The session went very well and I received lots of interesting questions. I got many compliments for talking about this subject on the real-life scenario. I really thank Rushabh Mehta (CEO, Solid Quality Mentors India) for his supportive suggestions that helped me prepare the slide deck, as well as the subject. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: SQL Server Master Data Services will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2 and will improve Microsoft’s platform appeal. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of MDS features and highlights important usage scenarios. Master Data Services enables consistent decision-making process by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from a single master view of your business entities. Also, MDS – Master Data-hub which is a vital component, helps ensure the consistency of reporting across systems and deliver faster and more accurate results across the enterprise. We will talk about establishing the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The day was still not over for me. I had ran into several friends but we were not able keep our enthusiasm under control about all the rumors saying that SQL Server 2008 R2 was about to be launched tomorrow in the keynote. I then ran to my third and final technical event for the day- a panel discussion with the top technologies of India. Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Panel Discussion: Harness the power of Web – SEO and Technical Blogging As I have delivered two technical sessions by this time, I was a bit tired but  not less enthusiastic when I had to talk about Blog and Technology. We discussed many different topics there. I told them that the most important aspect for any blog is its content. We discussed in depth the issues with plagiarism and how to avoid it. Another topic of discussion was how we technology bloggers can create awareness in the Community about what the right kind of blogging is and what morally and technically wrong acts are. A couple of questions were raised about what type of liberty a person can have in terms of writing blogs. Well, it was generically agreed that a blog is mainly a representation of our ideas and thoughts; it should not be governed by external entities. As long as one is writing what they really want to say, but not providing incorrect information or not practicing plagiarism, a blogger should be allowed to express himself. This panel discussion was supposed to be over in an hour, but the interest of the participants was remarkable and so it was extended for 30 minutes more. Finally, we decided to bring to a close the discussion and agreed that we will continue the topic next year. TechEd India Panel Discussion on Web, Technology and SEO Surprisingly, the day was just beginning after doing all of these. By this time, I have almost met all the MVP who arrived at the event, as well as many Microsoft employees. There were lots of Community folks present, too. I decided that I would go to meet several friends from the Community and continue to communicate with me on SQLAuthority.com. I also met Abhishek Baxi and had a good talk with him regarding Win Mobile and Twitter. He also took a very quick video of me wherein I spoke in my mother’s tongue, Gujarati. It was funny that I talked in Gujarati almost all the day, but when I was talking in the interview I could not find the right Gujarati words to speak. I think we all think in English when we think about Technology, so as to address universality. After meeting them, I headed towards the Speakers’ Dinner. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Speakers Dinner The Speakers’ dinner was indeed a wonderful opportunity for all the speakers to get together and relax. We talked so many different things, from XBOX to Hindi Movies, and from SQL to Samosas. I just could not express how much fun I had. After a long evening, when I returned tmy room and met Shaivi, I just felt instantly relaxed. Kids are really gifts from God. Today was a really long but exciting day. So many things happened in just one day: Visual Studio Lanch, lunch with Somasegar, 2 technical sessions, 1 panel discussion, community leaders meeting, speakers dinner and, last but not leas,t playing with my child! A perfect day! Day 2 – April 13, 2010 Today started with a bang with the excellent keynote by Kamal Hathi who launched SQL Server 2008 R2 in India and demonstrated the power of PowerPivot to all of us. 101 Million Rows in Excel brought lots of applause from the audience. Kamal Hathi Presenting Keynote at TechEd India 2010 The day was a bit easier one for me. I had no sessions today and no events planned. I had a few meetings planned for the second day of the event. I sat in the speaker’s lounge for half a day and met many people there. I attended nearly 9 different meetings today. The subjects of the meetings were very different. Here is a list of the topics of the Community-related meetings: SQL PASS and its involvement in India and subcontinents How to start community blogging Forums and developing aptitude towards technology Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar User Groups and their developments SharePoint and SQL Business Meeting – a client meeting Business Meeting – a potential performance tuning project Business Meeting – Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) And family friends Pinal Dave at TechEd India The day passed by so quickly during this meeting. In the evening, I headed to Partners Expo with friends and checked out few of the booths. I really wanted to talk about some of the products, but due to the freebies there was so much crowd that I finally decided to just take the contact details of the partner. I will now start sending them with my queries and, hopefully, I will have my questions answered. Nupur and Shaivi had also one meeting to attend; it was with our family friend Vijay Raj. Vijay is also a person who loves Technology and loves it more than anybody. I see him growing and learning every day, but still remaining as a ‘human’. I believe that if someone acquires as much knowledge as him, that person will become either a computer or cyborg. Here, Vijay is still a kind gentleman and is able to stay as our close family friend. Shaivi was really happy to play with Uncle Vijay. Pinal Dave and Vijay Raj Renuka Prasad, a Microsoft MVP, impressed me with his passion and knowledge of SQL. Every time he gives me credit for his success, I believe that he is very humble. He has way more certifications than me and has worked many more years with SQL compared to me. He is an excellent photographer as well. Most of the photos in this blog post have been taken by him. I told him if ever he wants to do a part time job, he can do the photography very well. Pinal Dave and Renuka Prasad I also met L Srividya from Microsoft, whom I was looking forward to meet. She is a bundle of knowledge that everyone would surely learn a lot from her. I was able to get a few minutes from her and well, I felt confident. She enlightened me with SQL Server BI concepts, domain management and SQL Server security and few other interesting details. I also had a wonderful time talking about SharePoint with fellow Solid Quality Mentor Joy Rathnayake. He is very passionate about SharePoint but when you talk .NET and SQL with him, he is still overwhelmingly knowledgeable. In fact, while talking to him, I figured out that the recent training he delivered was on SQL Server 2008 R2. I told him a joke that it hurts my ego as he is more popular now in SQL training and consulting than me. I am sure all of you agree that working with good people is a gift from God. I am fortunate enough to work with the best of the best Industry experts. It was a great pleasure to hang out with my Community friends – Ahswin Kini, HimaBindu Vejella, Vasudev G, Suprotim Agrawal, Dhananjay, Vikram Pendse, Mahesh Dhola, Mahesh Mitkari,  Manu Zacharia, Shobhan, Hardik Shah, Ashish Mohta, Manan, Subodh Sohani and Sanjay Shetty (of course!) .  (Please let me know if I have met you at the event and forgot your name to list here). Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Community Leaders Dinner After lots of meetings, I headed towards the Community Leaders dinner meeting and met almost all the folks I met in morning. The discussion was almost the same but the real good thing was that we were enjoying it. The food was really good. Nupur was invited in the event, but Shaivi could not come. When Nupur tried to enter the event, she was stopped as Shaivi did not have the pass to enter the dinner. Nupur expressed that Shaivi is only 8 months old and does not eat outside food as well and could not stay by herself at this age, but the door keeper did not agree and asked that without the entry details Shaivi could not go in, but Nupur could. Nupur called me on phone and asked me to help her out. By the time, I was outside; the organizer of the event reached to the door and happily approved Shaivi to join the party. Once in the party, Shaivi had lots of fun meeting so many people. Shaivi Dave and Abhishek Kant Dean Guida (Infragistics President and CEO) and Pinal Dave (SQLAuthority.com) Day 3 – April 14, 2010 Though, it was last day, I was very much excited today as I was about to present my very favorite session. Query Optimization and Performance Tuning is my domain expertise and I make my leaving by consulting and training the same. Today’s session was on the same subject and as an additional twist, another subject about Spatial Database was presented. I was always intrigued with Spatial Database and I have enjoyed learning about it; however, I have never thought about Spatial Indexing before it was decided that I will do this session. I really thank Solid Quality Mentor Dr. Greg Low for his assistance in helping me prepare the slide deck and also review the content. Furthermore, today was really what I call my ‘learning day’ . So far I had not attended any session in TechEd and I felt a bit down for that. Everybody spends their valuable time & money to learn something new and exciting in TechEd and I had not attended a single session at the moment thinking that it was already last day of the event. I did have a plan for the day and I attended two technical sessions before my session of spatial database. I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller and there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod is syhe speaker. He did not have a single time disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL. Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance I really had a fun time attending this session. Vinod made this session very interactive. The entire audience really got into the presentation and started participating in the event. Vinod was presenting a small problem with Query Tuning, which any developer would have encountered and solved with their help in such a fashion that a developer feels he or she have already resolved it. In one question, I was the only one who was ready to answer and Vinod told me in a light tone that I am now allowed to answer it! The audience really found it very amusing. There was a huge crowd around Vinod after the session. Vinod – A master storyteller! Time: 3:45pm-4:45pm Data Recovery / consistency with CheckDB This session was much heavier than the earlier one, and I must say this is my most favorite session I EVER attended in India. In this TechEd I have only attended two sessions, but in my career, I have attended numerous technical sessions not only in India, but all over the world. This session had taken my breath away. One by one, Vinod took the different databases, and started to corrupt them in different ways. Each database has some unique ways to get corrupted. Once that was done, Vinod started to show the DBCC CEHCKDB and demonstrated how it can solve your problem. He finally fixed all the databases with this single tool. I do have a good knowledge of this subject, but let me honestly admit that I have learned a lot from this session. I enjoyed and cheered during this session along with other attendees. I had total satisfaction that, just like everyone, I took advantage of the event and learned something. I am now TECHnically EDucated. Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar After two very interactive and informative SQL Sessions from Vinod Kumar, the next turn me presenting on Spatial Database and Indexing. I got once again nervous but Vinod told me to stay natural and do my presentation. Well, once I got a huge stage with a total of four projectors and a large crowd, I felt better. Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 I kicked off this session with Michael J Swart‘s beautiful spatial image. This session was the last one for the day but, to my surprise, I had more than 200+ attendees. Slowly, the rain was starting outside and I was worried that the hall would not be full; despite this, there was not a single seat available in the first five minutes of the session. Thanks to all of you for attending my presentation. I had demonstrated the map of world (and India) and quickly explained what  Geographic and Geometry data types in Spatial Database are. This session had interesting story of Indexing and Comparison, as well as how different traditional indexes are from spatial indexing. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Due to the heavy rain during this event, the power went off for about 22 minutes (just an accident – nobodies fault). During these minutes, there were no audio, no video and no light. I continued to address the mass of 200+ people without any audio device and PowerPoint. I must thank the audience because not a single person left from the session. They all stayed in their place, some moved closure to listen to me properly. I noticed that the curiosity and eagerness to learn new things was at the peak even though it was the very last session of the TechEd. Everybody wanted get the maximum knowledge out of this whole event. I was touched by the support from audience. They listened and participated in my session even without any kinds of technology (no ppt, no mike, no AC, nothing). During these 22 minutes, I had completed my theory verbally. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 After a while, we got the projector back online and we continued with some exciting demos. Many thanks to Microsoft people who worked energetically in background to get the backup power for project up. I had a very interesting demo wherein I overlaid Bangalore and Hyderabad on the India Map and find their aerial distance between them. After finding the aerial distance, we browsed online and found that SQL Server estimates the exact aerial distance between these two cities, as compared to the factual distance. There was a huge applause from the crowd on the subject that SQL Server takes into the count of the curvature of the earth and finds the precise distances based on details. During the process of finding the distance, I demonstrated a few examples of the indexes where I expressed how one can use those indexes to find these distances and how they can improve the performance of similar query. I also demonstrated few examples wherein we were able to see in which data type the Index is most useful. We finished the demos with a few more internal stuff. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Despite all issues, I was mostly satisfied with my presentation. I think it was the best session I have ever presented at any conference. There was no help from Technology for a while, but I still got lots of appreciation at the end. When we ended the session, the applause from the audience was so loud that for a moment, the rain was not audible. I was truly moved by the dedication of the Technology enthusiasts. Pinal Dave After Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Dinner by Sponsors After the lively session during the day, there was another dinner party courtesy of one of the sponsors of TechEd. All the MVPs and several Community leaders were present at the dinner. I would like to express my gratitude to Abhishek Kant for organizing this wonderful event for us. It was a blast and really relaxing in all angles. We all stayed there for a long time and talked about our sweet and unforgettable memories of the event. Pinal Dave and Bijoy Singhal It was really one wonderful event. After writing this much, I say that I have no words to express about how much I enjoyed TechEd. However, it is true that I shared with you only 1% of the total activities I have done at the event. There were so many people I have met, yet were not mentioned here although I wanted to write their names here, too . Anyway, I have learned so many things and up until now, I am not able to get over all the fun I had in this event. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2010 The Next Days – April 15, 2010 – till today I am still not able to get my mind out of the whole experience I had at TechEd India 2010. It was like a whole Microsoft Family working together to celebrate a happy occasion. TechEd India – Truly An Unforgettable Experience! Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

    Read the article

  • SQLAuthority News – TechEd India – April 12-14, 2010 Bangalore – An Unforgettable Experience – An Op

    - by pinaldave
    TechEd India was one of the largest Technology events in India led by Microsoft. This event was attended by more than 3,000 technology enthusiasts, making it one of the most well-organized events of the year. Though I attempted to attend almost all the technology events here, I have not seen any bigger or better event in Indian subcontinents other than this. There are 21 Technical Tracks at Tech·Ed India 2010 that span more than 745 learning opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this whole event as a speaker and a delegate, as well. TechEd India Speaker Badge and A Token of Lifetime Hotel Selection I presented three different sessions at TechEd India and was also a part of panel discussion. (The details of the sessions are given at the end of this blog post.) Due to extensive traveling, I stay away from my family occasionally. For this reason, I took my wife – Nupur and daughter Shaivi (8 months old) to the event along with me. We stayed at the same hotel where the event was organized so as to maximize my time bonding with my family and to have more time in networking with technology community, at the same time. The hotel Lalit Ashok is the largest and most luxurious venue one can find in Bangalore, located in the middle of the city. The cost of the hotel was a bit pricey, but looking at all the advantages, I had decided to ask for a booking there. Hotel Lalit Ashok Nupur Dave and Shaivi Dave Arrival Day – DAY 0 – April 11, 2010 I reached the event a day earlier, and that was one wise decision for I was able to relax a bit and go over my presentation for the next day’s course. I am a kind of person who likes to get everything ready ahead of time. I was also able to enjoy a pleasant evening with several Microsoft employees and my family friends. I even checked out the location where I would be doing presentations the next day. I was fortunate enough to meet Bijoy Singhal from Microsoft who helped me out with a few of the logistics issues that occured the day before. I was not aware of the fact that the very next day he was going to be “The Man” of the TechEd 2010 event. Vinod Kumar from Microsoft was really very kind as he talked to me regarding my subsequent session. He gave me some suggestions which were really helpful that I was able to incorporate them during my presentation. Finally, I was able to meet Abhishek Kant from Microsoft; his valuable suggestions and unlimited passion have inspired many people like me to work with the Community. Pradipta from Microsoft was also around, being extremely busy with logistics; however, in those busy times, he did find some good spare time to have a chat with me and the other Community leaders. I also met Harish Ranganathan and Sachin Rathi, both from Microsoft. It was so interesting to listen to both of them talking about SharePoint. I just have no words to express my overwhelmed spirit because of all these passionate young guys - Pradipta,Vinod, Bijoy, Harish, Sachin and Ahishek (of course!). Map of TechEd India 2010 Event Day 1 – April 12, 2010 From morning until night time, today was truly a very busy day for me. I had two presentations and one panel discussion for the day. Needless to say, I had a few meetings to attend as well. The day started with a keynote from S. Somaseger where he announced the launch of Visual Studio 2010. The keynote area was really eye-catching because of the very large, bigger-than- life uniform screen. This was truly one to show. The title music of the keynote was very interesting and it featured Bijoy Singhal as the model. It was interesting to talk to him afterwards, when we laughed at jokes together about his modeling assignment. TechEd India Keynote Opening Featuring Bijoy TechEd India 2010 Keynote – S. Somasegar Time: 11:15pm – 11:45pm Session 1: True Lies of SQL Server – SQL Myth Buster Following the excellent keynote, I had my very first session on the subject of SQL Server Myth Buster. At first, I was a bit nervous as right after the keynote, for this was my very first session and during my presentation I saw lots of Microsoft Product Team members. Well, it really went well and I had a really good discussion with attendees of the session. I felt that a well begin was half-done and my confidence was regained. Right after the session, I met a few of my Community friends and had meaningful discussions with them on many subjects. The abstract of the session is as follows: In this 30-minute demo session, I am going to briefly demonstrate few SQL Server Myths and their resolutions as I back them up with some demo. This demo presentation is a must-attend for all developers and administrators who would come to the event. This is going to be a very quick yet fun session. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch with Somasegar After the session I went to see my daughter, and then I headed right away to the lunch with S. Somasegar – the keynote speaker and senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I really thank to Abhishek who made it possible for us. Because of his efforts, all the MVPs had the opportunity to meet such a legendary person and had to talk with them on Microsoft Technology. Though Somasegar is currently holding such a high position in Microsoft, he is very polite and a real gentleman, and how I wish that everybody in industry is like him. Believe me, if you spread love and kindness, then that is what you will receive back. As soon as lunch time was over, I ran to the session hall as my second presentation was about to start. Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm Session 2: Master Data Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence is a subject which was widely talked about at TechEd. Everybody was interested in this subject, and I did not excuse myself from this great concept as well. I consider myself fortunate as I was presenting on the subject of Master Data Services at TechEd. When I had initially learned this subject, I had a bit of confusion about the usage of this tool. Later on, I decided that I would tackle about how we all developers and DBAs are not able to understand something so simple such as this, and even worst, creating confusion about the technology. During system designing, it is very important to have a reference material or master lookup tables. Well, I talked about the same subject and presented the session keeping that as my center talk. The session went very well and I received lots of interesting questions. I got many compliments for talking about this subject on the real-life scenario. I really thank Rushabh Mehta (CEO, Solid Quality Mentors India) for his supportive suggestions that helped me prepare the slide deck, as well as the subject. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: SQL Server Master Data Services will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2 and will improve Microsoft’s platform appeal. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of MDS features and highlights important usage scenarios. Master Data Services enables consistent decision-making process by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from a single master view of your business entities. Also, MDS – Master Data-hub which is a vital component, helps ensure the consistency of reporting across systems and deliver faster and more accurate results across the enterprise. We will talk about establishing the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The day was still not over for me. I had ran into several friends but we were not able keep our enthusiasm under control about all the rumors saying that SQL Server 2008 R2 was about to be launched tomorrow in the keynote. I then ran to my third and final technical event for the day- a panel discussion with the top technologies of India. Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Panel Discussion: Harness the power of Web – SEO and Technical Blogging As I have delivered two technical sessions by this time, I was a bit tired but  not less enthusiastic when I had to talk about Blog and Technology. We discussed many different topics there. I told them that the most important aspect for any blog is its content. We discussed in depth the issues with plagiarism and how to avoid it. Another topic of discussion was how we technology bloggers can create awareness in the Community about what the right kind of blogging is and what morally and technically wrong acts are. A couple of questions were raised about what type of liberty a person can have in terms of writing blogs. Well, it was generically agreed that a blog is mainly a representation of our ideas and thoughts; it should not be governed by external entities. As long as one is writing what they really want to say, but not providing incorrect information or not practicing plagiarism, a blogger should be allowed to express himself. This panel discussion was supposed to be over in an hour, but the interest of the participants was remarkable and so it was extended for 30 minutes more. Finally, we decided to bring to a close the discussion and agreed that we will continue the topic next year. TechEd India Panel Discussion on Web, Technology and SEO Surprisingly, the day was just beginning after doing all of these. By this time, I have almost met all the MVP who arrived at the event, as well as many Microsoft employees. There were lots of Community folks present, too. I decided that I would go to meet several friends from the Community and continue to communicate with me on SQLAuthority.com. I also met Abhishek Baxi and had a good talk with him regarding Win Mobile and Twitter. He also took a very quick video of me wherein I spoke in my mother’s tongue, Gujarati. It was funny that I talked in Gujarati almost all the day, but when I was talking in the interview I could not find the right Gujarati words to speak. I think we all think in English when we think about Technology, so as to address universality. After meeting them, I headed towards the Speakers’ Dinner. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Speakers Dinner The Speakers’ dinner was indeed a wonderful opportunity for all the speakers to get together and relax. We talked so many different things, from XBOX to Hindi Movies, and from SQL to Samosas. I just could not express how much fun I had. After a long evening, when I returned tmy room and met Shaivi, I just felt instantly relaxed. Kids are really gifts from God. Today was a really long but exciting day. So many things happened in just one day: Visual Studio Lanch, lunch with Somasegar, 2 technical sessions, 1 panel discussion, community leaders meeting, speakers dinner and, last but not leas,t playing with my child! A perfect day! Day 2 – April 13, 2010 Today started with a bang with the excellent keynote by Kamal Hathi who launched SQL Server 2008 R2 in India and demonstrated the power of PowerPivot to all of us. 101 Million Rows in Excel brought lots of applause from the audience. Kamal Hathi Presenting Keynote at TechEd India 2010 The day was a bit easier one for me. I had no sessions today and no events planned. I had a few meetings planned for the second day of the event. I sat in the speaker’s lounge for half a day and met many people there. I attended nearly 9 different meetings today. The subjects of the meetings were very different. Here is a list of the topics of the Community-related meetings: SQL PASS and its involvement in India and subcontinents How to start community blogging Forums and developing aptitude towards technology Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar User Groups and their developments SharePoint and SQL Business Meeting – a client meeting Business Meeting – a potential performance tuning project Business Meeting – Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) And family friends Pinal Dave at TechEd India The day passed by so quickly during this meeting. In the evening, I headed to Partners Expo with friends and checked out few of the booths. I really wanted to talk about some of the products, but due to the freebies there was so much crowd that I finally decided to just take the contact details of the partner. I will now start sending them with my queries and, hopefully, I will have my questions answered. Nupur and Shaivi had also one meeting to attend; it was with our family friend Vijay Raj. Vijay is also a person who loves Technology and loves it more than anybody. I see him growing and learning every day, but still remaining as a ‘human’. I believe that if someone acquires as much knowledge as him, that person will become either a computer or cyborg. Here, Vijay is still a kind gentleman and is able to stay as our close family friend. Shaivi was really happy to play with Uncle Vijay. Pinal Dave and Vijay Raj Renuka Prasad, a Microsoft MVP, impressed me with his passion and knowledge of SQL. Every time he gives me credit for his success, I believe that he is very humble. He has way more certifications than me and has worked many more years with SQL compared to me. He is an excellent photographer as well. Most of the photos in this blog post have been taken by him. I told him if ever he wants to do a part time job, he can do the photography very well. Pinal Dave and Renuka Prasad I also met L Srividya from Microsoft, whom I was looking forward to meet. She is a bundle of knowledge that everyone would surely learn a lot from her. I was able to get a few minutes from her and well, I felt confident. She enlightened me with SQL Server BI concepts, domain management and SQL Server security and few other interesting details. I also had a wonderful time talking about SharePoint with fellow Solid Quality Mentor Joy Rathnayake. He is very passionate about SharePoint but when you talk .NET and SQL with him, he is still overwhelmingly knowledgeable. In fact, while talking to him, I figured out that the recent training he delivered was on SQL Server 2008 R2. I told him a joke that it hurts my ego as he is more popular now in SQL training and consulting than me. I am sure all of you agree that working with good people is a gift from God. I am fortunate enough to work with the best of the best Industry experts. It was a great pleasure to hang out with my Community friends – Ahswin Kini, HimaBindu Vejella, Vasudev G, Suprotim Agrawal, Dhananjay, Vikram Pendse, Mahesh Dhola, Mahesh Mitkari,  Manu Zacharia, Shobhan, Hardik Shah, Ashish Mohta, Manan, Subodh Sohani and Sanjay Shetty (of course!) .  (Please let me know if I have met you at the event and forgot your name to list here). Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Community Leaders Dinner After lots of meetings, I headed towards the Community Leaders dinner meeting and met almost all the folks I met in morning. The discussion was almost the same but the real good thing was that we were enjoying it. The food was really good. Nupur was invited in the event, but Shaivi could not come. When Nupur tried to enter the event, she was stopped as Shaivi did not have the pass to enter the dinner. Nupur expressed that Shaivi is only 8 months old and does not eat outside food as well and could not stay by herself at this age, but the door keeper did not agree and asked that without the entry details Shaivi could not go in, but Nupur could. Nupur called me on phone and asked me to help her out. By the time, I was outside; the organizer of the event reached to the door and happily approved Shaivi to join the party. Once in the party, Shaivi had lots of fun meeting so many people. Shaivi Dave and Abhishek Kant Dean Guida (Infragistics President and CEO) and Pinal Dave (SQLAuthority.com) Day 3 – April 14, 2010 Though, it was last day, I was very much excited today as I was about to present my very favorite session. Query Optimization and Performance Tuning is my domain expertise and I make my leaving by consulting and training the same. Today’s session was on the same subject and as an additional twist, another subject about Spatial Database was presented. I was always intrigued with Spatial Database and I have enjoyed learning about it; however, I have never thought about Spatial Indexing before it was decided that I will do this session. I really thank Solid Quality Mentor Dr. Greg Low for his assistance in helping me prepare the slide deck and also review the content. Furthermore, today was really what I call my ‘learning day’ . So far I had not attended any session in TechEd and I felt a bit down for that. Everybody spends their valuable time & money to learn something new and exciting in TechEd and I had not attended a single session at the moment thinking that it was already last day of the event. I did have a plan for the day and I attended two technical sessions before my session of spatial database. I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller and there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod is syhe speaker. He did not have a single time disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL. Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance I really had a fun time attending this session. Vinod made this session very interactive. The entire audience really got into the presentation and started participating in the event. Vinod was presenting a small problem with Query Tuning, which any developer would have encountered and solved with their help in such a fashion that a developer feels he or she have already resolved it. In one question, I was the only one who was ready to answer and Vinod told me in a light tone that I am now allowed to answer it! The audience really found it very amusing. There was a huge crowd around Vinod after the session. Vinod – A master storyteller! Time: 3:45pm-4:45pm Data Recovery / consistency with CheckDB This session was much heavier than the earlier one, and I must say this is my most favorite session I EVER attended in India. In this TechEd I have only attended two sessions, but in my career, I have attended numerous technical sessions not only in India, but all over the world. This session had taken my breath away. One by one, Vinod took the different databases, and started to corrupt them in different ways. Each database has some unique ways to get corrupted. Once that was done, Vinod started to show the DBCC CEHCKDB and demonstrated how it can solve your problem. He finally fixed all the databases with this single tool. I do have a good knowledge of this subject, but let me honestly admit that I have learned a lot from this session. I enjoyed and cheered during this session along with other attendees. I had total satisfaction that, just like everyone, I took advantage of the event and learned something. I am now TECHnically EDucated. Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar After two very interactive and informative SQL Sessions from Vinod Kumar, the next turn me presenting on Spatial Database and Indexing. I got once again nervous but Vinod told me to stay natural and do my presentation. Well, once I got a huge stage with a total of four projectors and a large crowd, I felt better. Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 I kicked off this session with Michael J Swart‘s beautiful spatial image. This session was the last one for the day but, to my surprise, I had more than 200+ attendees. Slowly, the rain was starting outside and I was worried that the hall would not be full; despite this, there was not a single seat available in the first five minutes of the session. Thanks to all of you for attending my presentation. I had demonstrated the map of world (and India) and quickly explained what  Geographic and Geometry data types in Spatial Database are. This session had interesting story of Indexing and Comparison, as well as how different traditional indexes are from spatial indexing. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Due to the heavy rain during this event, the power went off for about 22 minutes (just an accident – nobodies fault). During these minutes, there were no audio, no video and no light. I continued to address the mass of 200+ people without any audio device and PowerPoint. I must thank the audience because not a single person left from the session. They all stayed in their place, some moved closure to listen to me properly. I noticed that the curiosity and eagerness to learn new things was at the peak even though it was the very last session of the TechEd. Everybody wanted get the maximum knowledge out of this whole event. I was touched by the support from audience. They listened and participated in my session even without any kinds of technology (no ppt, no mike, no AC, nothing). During these 22 minutes, I had completed my theory verbally. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 After a while, we got the projector back online and we continued with some exciting demos. Many thanks to Microsoft people who worked energetically in background to get the backup power for project up. I had a very interesting demo wherein I overlaid Bangalore and Hyderabad on the India Map and find their aerial distance between them. After finding the aerial distance, we browsed online and found that SQL Server estimates the exact aerial distance between these two cities, as compared to the factual distance. There was a huge applause from the crowd on the subject that SQL Server takes into the count of the curvature of the earth and finds the precise distances based on details. During the process of finding the distance, I demonstrated a few examples of the indexes where I expressed how one can use those indexes to find these distances and how they can improve the performance of similar query. I also demonstrated few examples wherein we were able to see in which data type the Index is most useful. We finished the demos with a few more internal stuff. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Despite all issues, I was mostly satisfied with my presentation. I think it was the best session I have ever presented at any conference. There was no help from Technology for a while, but I still got lots of appreciation at the end. When we ended the session, the applause from the audience was so loud that for a moment, the rain was not audible. I was truly moved by the dedication of the Technology enthusiasts. Pinal Dave After Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Dinner by Sponsors After the lively session during the day, there was another dinner party courtesy of one of the sponsors of TechEd. All the MVPs and several Community leaders were present at the dinner. I would like to express my gratitude to Abhishek Kant for organizing this wonderful event for us. It was a blast and really relaxing in all angles. We all stayed there for a long time and talked about our sweet and unforgettable memories of the event. Pinal Dave and Bijoy Singhal It was really one wonderful event. After writing this much, I say that I have no words to express about how much I enjoyed TechEd. However, it is true that I shared with you only 1% of the total activities I have done at the event. There were so many people I have met, yet were not mentioned here although I wanted to write their names here, too . Anyway, I have learned so many things and up until now, I am not able to get over all the fun I had in this event. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2010 The Next Days – April 15, 2010 – till today I am still not able to get my mind out of the whole experience I had at TechEd India 2010. It was like a whole Microsoft Family working together to celebrate a happy occasion. TechEd India – Truly An Unforgettable Experience! Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

    Read the article

  • Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6?

    - by Ricardo Ferreira
    In this post, I will cover some technical differences between Oracle WebLogic 12c and JBoss EAP 6, which was released a couple days ago from Red Hat. This article claims to help you in the evaluation of key points that you should consider when choosing for an Java EE application server. In the following sections, I will present to you some important aspects that most customers ask us when they are seriously evaluating for an middleware infrastructure, specially if you are considering JBoss for some reason. I would suggest that you keep the following question in mind while you are reading the points: "Why should I choose JBoss instead of WebLogic?" 1) Multi Datacenter Deployment and Clustering - D/R ("Disaster & Recovery") architecture support is embedded on the WebLogic Server 12c product. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct D/R support included, Red Hat relies on third-part tools with higher prices. When you consider a middleware solution to host your business critical application, you should worry with every architectural aspect that are related with the solution. Fail-over support is one little aspect of a truly reliable solution. If you do not worry about D/R, your solution will not be reliable. Having said that, with Red Hat and JBoss EAP 6, you have this extra cost that will increase considerably the total cost of ownership of the solution. As we commonly hear from analysts, open-source are not so cheaper when you start seeing the big picture. - WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced LAN clustering, detection of death servers and have a common alert framework. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has limited LAN clustering support with no server death detection. They do not generate any alerts when servers goes down (only if you buy JBoss ON which is a separated technology, but until now does not support JBoss EAP 6) and manual intervention are required when servers goes down. In most cases, admin people must rely on "kill -9", "tail -f someFile.log" and "ps ax | grep java" commands to manage failures and clustering anomalies. - WebLogic Server 12c supports the concept of Node Manager, which is a separated process that runs on the physical | virtual servers that allows extend the administration of the cluster to WebLogic managed servers that are often distributed across multiple machines and geographic locations. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no equivalent technology. Whole server instances must be managed individually. - WebLogic Server 12c Node Manager supports Coherence to boost performance when managing servers. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no similar technology. There is no way to coordinate JBoss and infiniband instances provided by JBoss using high throughput and low latency protocols like InfiniBand. The Node Manager feature also allows another very important feature that JBoss EAP lacks: secure the administration. When using WebLogic Node Manager, all the administration tasks are sent to the managed servers in a secure tunel protected by a certificate, which means that the transport layer that separates the WebLogic administration console from the managed servers are secured by SSL. - WebLogic Server 12c are now integrated with OTD ("Oracle Traffic Director") which is a web server technology derived from the former Sun iPlanet Web Server. This software complements the web server support offered by OHS ("Oracle HTTP Server"). Using OTD, WebLogic instances are load-balanced by a high powerful software that knows how to handle SDP ("Socket Direct Protocol") over InfiniBand, which boost performance when used with engineered systems technologies like Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand only offers support to Apache Web Server with custom modules created to deal with JBoss clusters, but only across standard TCP/IP networks.  2) Application and Runtime Diagnostics - WebLogic Server 12c have diagnostics capabilities embedded on the server called WLDF ("WebLogic Diagnostic Framework") so there is no need to rely on third-part tools. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no diagnostics capabilities. Their only diagnostics tool is the log generated by the application server. Admin people are encouraged to analyse thousands of log lines to find out what is going on. - WebLogic Server 12c complement WLDF with JRockit MC ("Mission Control"), which provides to administrators and developers a complete insight about the JVM performance, behavior and possible bottlenecks. WebLogic Server 12c also have an classloader analysis tool embedded, and even a log analyzer tool that enables administrators and developers to view logs of multiple servers at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand relies on third-part tools to do something similar. Again, only log searching are offered to find out whats going on. - WebLogic Server 12c offers end-to-end traceability and monitoring available through Oracle EM ("Enterprise Manager"), including monitoring of business transactions that flows through web servers, ESBs, application servers and database servers, all of this with high deep JVM analysis and diagnostics. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand, even using JBoss ON ("Operations Network"), which is a separated technology, does not support those features. Red Hat relies on third-part tools to provide direct Oracle database traceability across JVMs. One of those tools are Oracle EM for non-Oracle middleware that manage JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere and IIS transparently. - WebLogic Server 12c with their JRockit support offers a tool called JRockit Flight Recorder, which can give developers a complete visibility of a certain period of application production monitoring with zero extra overhead. This automatic recording allows you to deep analyse threads latency, memory leaks, thread contention, resource utilization, stack overflow damages and GC ("Garbage Collection") cycles, to observe in real time stop-the-world phenomenons, generational, reference count and parallel collects and mutator threads analysis. JBoss EAP 6 don't even dream to support something similar, even because they don't have their own JVM. 3) Application Server Administration - WebLogic Server 12c offers a complete administration console complemented with scripting and macro-like recording capabilities. A single WebLogic console can managed up to hundreds of WebLogic servers belonging to the same domain. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited console and provides a XML centric administration. JBoss, after ten years, started the development of a rudimentary centralized administration that still leave a lot of administration tasks aside, so admin people and developers must touch scripts and XML configuration files for most advanced and even simple administration tasks. This lead applications to error prone and risky deployments. Even using JBoss ON, JBoss EAP are not able to offer decent administration features for admin people which must be high skilled in JBoss internal architecture and its managing capabilities. - Oracle EM is available to manage multiple domains, databases, application servers, operating systems and virtualization, with a complete end-to-end visibility. JBoss ON does not provide management capabilities across the complete architecture, only basic monitoring. Even deployment must be done aside JBoss ON which does no integrate well with others softwares than JBoss. Until now, JBoss ON does not supports JBoss EAP 6, so even their minimal support for JBoss are not available for JBoss EAP 6 leaving customers uncovered and subject to high skilled JBoss admin people. - WebLogic Server 12c has the same administration model whatever is the topology selected by the customer. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand differentiates between two operational models: standalone-mode and domain-mode, that are not consistent with each other. Depending on the mode used, the administration skill is different. - WebLogic Server 12c has no point-of-failures processes, and it does not need to define any specialized server. Domain model in WebLogic is available for years (at least ten years or more) and is production proven. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand needs special processes to garantee JBoss integrity, the PC ("Process-Controller") and the HC ("Host-Controller"). Different from WebLogic, the domain model in JBoss is quite new (one year at tops) of maturity, and need to mature considerably until start doing things like WebLogic domain model does. - WebLogic Server 12c supports parallel deployment model which enables some artifacts being deployed at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have any similar feature. Every deployment are done atomically in the containers. This means that if you have a huge EAR (an EAR of 120 MB of size for instance) and deploy onto JBoss EAP 6, this EAR will take some minutes in order to starting accept thread requests. The same EAR deployed onto WebLogic Server 12c will reduce the deployment time at least in 2X compared to JBoss. 4) Support and Upgrades - WebLogic Server 12c has patch management available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no patch management available, each JBoss EAP instance should be patched manually. To achieve such feature, you need to buy a separated technology called JBoss ON ("Operations Network") that manage this type of stuff. But until now, JBoss ON does not support JBoss EAP 6 so, in practice, JBoss EAP 6 does not have this feature. - WebLogic Server 12c supports previuous WebLogic domains without any reconfiguration since its kernel is robust and mature since its creation in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a proven lack of supportability between JBoss AS 4, 5, 6 and 7. Different kernels and messaging engines were implemented in JBoss stack in the last five years reveling their incapacity to create a well architected and proven middleware technology. - WebLogic Server 12c has patch prescription based on customer configuration. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such capability. People need to create ticket supports and have their installations revised by Red Hat support guys to gain some patch prescription from them. - Oracle WebLogic Server independent of the version has 8 years of support of new patches and has lifetime release of existing patches beyond that. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand provides patches for a specific application server version up to 5 years after the release date. JBoss EAP 4 and previous versions had only 4 years. A good question that Red Hat will argue to answer is: "what happens when you find issues after year 5"?  5) RAC ("Real Application Clusters") Support - WebLogic Server 12c ships with a specific JDBC driver to leverage Oracle RAC clustering capabilities (Fast-Application-Notification, Transaction Affinity, Fast-Connection-Failover, etc). Oracle JDBC thin driver are also available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand ships only the standard Oracle JDBC thin driver. Load balancing with Oracle RAC are not supported. Manual intervention in case of planned or unplanned RAC downtime are necessary. In JBoss EAP 6, situation does not reestablish automatically after downtime. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called Active GridLink for Oracle RAC which provides up to 3X performance on OLTP applications. This seamless integration between WebLogic and Oracle database enable more value added to critical business applications leveraging their investments in Oracle database technology and Oracle middleware. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no performance gains at all, even when admin people implement some kind of connection-pooling tuning. - WebLogic Server 12c also supports transaction and web session affinity to the Oracle RAC, which provides aditional gains of performance. This is particularly interesting if you are creating a reliable solution that are distributed not only in an LAN cluster, but into a different data center. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. 6) Standards and Technology Support - WebLogic Server 12c is fully Java EE 6 compatible and production ready since december of 2011. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand became fully compatible with Java EE 6 only in the community version after three months, and production ready only in a few days considering that this article was written in June of 2012. Red Hat says that they are the masters of innovation and technology proliferation, but compared with Oracle and even other proprietary vendors like IBM, they historically speaking are lazy to deliver the most newest technologies and standards adherence. - Oracle is the steward of Java, driving innovation into the platform from commercial and open-source vendors. Red Hat on the other hand does not have its own JVM and relies on third-part JVMs to complete their application server offer. 95% of Red Hat customers are using Oracle HotSpot as JVM, which means that without Oracle involvement, their support are limited exclusively to the application server layer and we all know that most problems are happens in the JVM layer. - WebLogic Server 12c supports natively JDK 7, which empower developers to explore the maximum of the Java platform productivity when writing code. This feature differentiate WebLogic from others application servers (except GlassFish that are also managed by Oracle) because the usage of JDK 7 introduce such remarkable productivity features like the "try-with-resources" enhancement, catching multiple exceptions with one try block, Strings in the switch statements, JVM improvements in terms of JDBC, I/O, networking, security, concurrency and of course, the most important feature of Java 7: native support for multiple non-Java languages. More features regarding JDK 7 can be found here. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not support JDK 7 officially, they comment in their community version that "Java SE 7 can be used with JBoss 7" which does not gives you any guarantees of enterprise support for JDK 7. - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports integration with Spring framework allowing Spring applications to use WebLogic special transaction manager, exposing bean interfaces to WebLogic MBeans to take advantage of all WebLogic monitoring and administration advantages. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no special integration with Spring. In fact, Red Hat offers a suspicious package called "JBoss Web Platform" that in theory supports Spring, but in practice this package does not offers any special integration. It is just a facility for Red Hat customers to have support from both JBoss and Spring technology using the same customer support. 7) Lightweight Development - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle GlassFish are completely integrated and can share applications without any modifications. Starting with the 12c version, WebLogic now understands natively GlassFish deployment descriptors and specific configurations in order to offer you a truly and reliable migration path from a community Java EE application server to a enterprise middleware product like WebLogic. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no support to natively reuse an existing (or still in development) application from JBoss AS community server. Users of JBoss suffer of critical issues during deployment time that includes: changing the libraries and dependencies of the application, patching the DTD or XSD deployment descriptors, refactoring of the application layers due classloading issues and anomalies, rebuilding of persistence, business and web layers due issues with "usage of the certified version of an certain dependency" or "frameworks that Red Hat potentially does not recommend" etc. If you have the culture or enterprise IT directive of developing Java EE applications using community middleware to in a certain future, transition to enterprise (supported by a vendor) middleware, Oracle WebLogic plus Oracle GlassFish offers you a more sustainable solution. - WebLogic Server 12c has a very light ZIP distribution (less than 165 MB). JBoss EAP 6 ZIP size is around 130 MB, together with JBoss ON you have more 100 MB resulting in a higher download footprint. This is particularly interesting if you plan to use automated setup of application server instances (for example, to rapidly setup a development or staging environment) using Maven or Hudson. - WebLogic Server 12c has a complete integration with Maven allowing developers to setup WebLogic domains with few commands. Tasks like downloading WebLogic, installation, domain creation, data sources deployment are completely integrated. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited offer integration with those tools.  - WebLogic Server 12c has a startup mode called WLX that turns-off EJB, JMS and JCA containers leaving enabled only the web container with Java EE 6 web profile. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such feature, you need to disable manually the containers that you do not want to use. - WebLogic Server 12c supports fastswap, which enables you to change classes without redeployment. This is particularly interesting if you are developing patches for the application that is already deployed and you do not want to redeploy the entire application. This is the same behavior that most application servers offers to JSP pages, but with WebLogic Server 12c, you have the same feature for Java classes in general. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. Even JBoss EAP 5 does not support this until now. 8) JMS and Messaging - WebLogic Server 12c has a proven and high scalable JMS implementation since its initial release in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a still immature technology called HornetQ, which was introduced in JBoss EAP 5 replacing everything that was implemented in the previous versions. Red Hat loves to introduce new technologies across JBoss versions, playing around with customers and their investments. And when they are asked about why they have changed the implementation and caused such a mess, their answer is always: "the previous implementation was inadequate and not aligned with the community strategy so we are creating a new a improved one". This Red Hat practice leads to uncomfortable investments that in a near future (sometimes less than a year) will be affected in someway. - WebLogic Server 12c has troubleshooting and monitoring features included on the WebLogic console and WLDF. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct monitoring on the console, activity is reflected only on the logs, no debug logs available in case of JMS issues. - WebLogic Server 12c has extremely good performance and scalability. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a JMS storage mechanism relying on Oracle database or MySQL. This means that if an issue in production happens and Red Hat affirms that an performance issue is happening due to database problems, they will not support you on the performance issue. They will orient you to call Oracle instead. - WebLogic Server 12c supports messaging enterprise features like SAF ("Store and Forward"), Distributed Queues/Topics and Foreign JMS providers support that leverage JMS implementations without compromise developer code making things completely transparent. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand do not even dream to support such features. 9) Caching and Grid - Coherence, which is the leading and most mature data grid technology from Oracle, is available since early 2000 and was integrated with WebLogic in 2009. Coherence and WebLogic clusters can be both managed from WebLogic administrative console. Even Node Manager supports Coherence. JBoss on the other hand discontinued JBoss Cache, which was their caching implementation just like they did with the messaging implementation (JBossMQ) which was a issue for long term customers. JBoss EAP 6 ships InfiniSpan version 1.0 which is immature and lack a proven record of successful cases and reliability. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called ActiveCache which uses Coherence to, without any code changes, replicate HTTP sessions from both WebLogic and other application servers like JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, GlassFish and even Microsoft IIS. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does have such support and even when they do in the future, they probably will support only their own application server. - Coherence can be used to manage both L1 and L2 cache levels, providing support to Oracle TopLink and others JPA compliant implementations, even Hibernate. JBoss EAP 6 and Infinispan on the other hand supports only Hibernate. And most important of all: Infinispan does not have any successful case of L1 or L2 caching level support using Hibernate, which lead us to reflect about its viability. 10) Performance - WebLogic Server 12c is certified with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and can run unchanged applications at this engineered system. This approach can benefit customers from Exalogic optimization's of both kernel and JVM layers to boost performance in terms of 10X for web, OLTP, JMS and grid applications. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no investment on engineered systems: customers do not have the choice to deploy on a Java ultra fast system if their project becomes relevant and performance issues are detected. - WebLogic Server 12c maintains a performance gain across each new release: starting on WebLogic 5.1, the overall performance gain has been close to 4X, which close to a 20% gain release by release. JBoss on the other hand does not provide SPECJAppServer or SPECJEnterprise performance benchmarks. Their so called "performance gains" remains hidden in their customer environments, which lead us to think if it is true or not since we will never get access to those environments. - WebLogic Server 12c has industry performance benchmarks with submissions across platforms and configurations leading SPECJ. Oracle WebLogic leads SPECJAppServer performance in multiple categories, fitting all customer topologies like: dual-node, single-node, multi-node and multi-node with RAC. JBoss... again, does not provide any SPECJAppServer performance benchmarks. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called work manager which allows your application to embrace new performance levels based on critical resource utilization of the CPUs usage. Work managers prioritizes work and allocates threads based on an execution model that takes into account administrator-defined parameters and actual run-time performance and throughput. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no compared feature and probably they never will. Not supporting such feature like work managers, JBoss EAP 6 forces admin people and specially developers to uncover performance gains in a intrusive way, rewriting the code and doing performance refactorings. 11) Professional Services Support - WebLogic Server 12c and any other technology sold by Oracle give customers the possibility of hire OCS ("Oracle Consulting Services") to manage critical scenarios, deployment assistance of new applications, high skilled consultancy of architecture, best practices and people allocation together with customer teams. All OCS services are available without any restrictions, having the customer bought software from Oracle or just starting their implementation before any acquisition. JBoss EAP 6 or Red Hat to be more specifically, only offers professional services if you buy subscriptions from them. If you are developing a new critical application for your business and need the help of Red Hat for a serious issue or architecture decision, they will probably say: "OK... I can help you but after you buy subscriptions from me". Red Hat also does not allows their professional services consultants to manage environments that uses community based software. They will probably force you to first buy a subscription, download their "enterprise" version and them, optionally hire their consultants. - Oracle provides you our university to educate your team into our technologies, including of course specialized trainings of WebLogic application server. At any time and location, you can hire Oracle to train your team so you get trustful knowledge according to your specific needs. Certifications for the products are also available if your technical people desire to differentiate themselves as professionals. Red Hat on the other hand have a limited pool of resources to train your team in their technologies. Basically they are selling training and certification for RHEL ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux") but if you demand more specialized training in JBoss middleware, they will probably connect you to some "certified" partner localized training since they are apparently discontinuing their education center, at least here in Brazil. They were not able to reproduce their success with RHEL education to their middleware division since they need first sell the subscriptions to after gives you specialized training. And again, they only offer you specialized training based on their enterprise version (EAP in the case of JBoss) which means that the courses will be a quite outdated. There are reports of developers that took official training's from Red Hat at this year (2012) and in a certain JBoss advanced course, Red Hat supposedly covered JBossMQ as the messaging subsystem, and even the printed material provided was based on JBossMQ since the training was created for JBoss EAP 4.3. 12) Encouraging Transparency without Ulterior Motives - WebLogic Server 12c like any other software from Oracle can be downloaded any time from anywhere, you should only possess an OTN ("Oracle Technology Network") credential and you can download any enterprise software how many times you want. And is not some kind of "trial" version. It is the official binaries that will be running for ever in your data center. Oracle does not encourages the usage of "specific versions" of our software. The binaries you buy from Oracle are the same binaries anyone in the world could download and use for testing and personal education. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand are not available for download unless you buy a subscription and get access to the Red Hat enterprise repositories. If you need to test, learn or just start creating your application using Red Hat's middleware software, you should download it from the community website. You are not allowed to download the enterprise version that, according to Red Hat are more secure, reliable and robust. But no one of us want to start the development of a software with an unsecured, unreliable and not scalable middleware right? So what you do? You are "invited" by Red Hat to buy subscriptions from them to get access to the "cool" version of the software. - WebLogic Server 12c prices are publicly available in the Oracle website. If you want to know right now how much WebLogic will cost to your organization, just click here and get access to our price list. In the case of WebLogic, check out the "US Oracle Technology Commercial Price List". Oracle also encourages you to get in touch with a sales representative to discuss discounts that would make possible the investment into our technology. But you are not required to do this, only if you are interested in buying our technology or maybe you want to discuss some discount scenarios. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have its cost publicly available in Red Hat's website or in any other media, at least is not so easy to get such information. The only link you will possibly find in their website is a "Contact a Sales Representative" link. This is not a very good relationship between an customer and an vendor. This is not an example of transparency, mainly when the software are sold as open. In this situations, customers expects to see the software prices publicly available, so they can have the chance to decide, based on the existing features of the software, if the cost is fair or not. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic is the most mature, secure, reliable and scalable Java EE application server of the market, and have a proven record of success around the globe to prove it's majority. Don't lose the chance to discover today how WebLogic could fit your needs and sustain your global IT middleware strategy, no matter if your strategy are completely based on the Cloud or not.

    Read the article

  • Java Cloud Service Integration to REST Service

    - by Jani Rautiainen
    Service (JCS) provides a platform to develop and deploy business applications in the cloud. In Fusion Applications Cloud deployments customers do not have the option to deploy custom applications developed with JDeveloper to ensure the integrity and supportability of the hosted application service. Instead the custom applications can be deployed to the JCS and integrated to the Fusion Application Cloud instance. This series of articles will go through the features of JCS, provide end-to-end examples on how to develop and deploy applications on JCS and how to integrate them with the Fusion Applications instance. In this article a custom application integrating with REST service will be implemented. We will use REST services provided by Taleo as an example; however the same approach will work with any REST service. In this example the data from the REST service is used to populate a dynamic table. Pre-requisites Access to Cloud instance In order to deploy the application access to a JCS instance is needed, a free trial JCS instance can be obtained from Oracle Cloud site. To register you will need a credit card even if the credit card will not be charged. To register simply click "Try it" and choose the "Java" option. The confirmation email will contain the connection details. See this video for example of the registration.Once the request is processed you will be assigned 2 service instances; Java and Database. Applications deployed to the JCS must use Oracle Database Cloud Service as their underlying database. So when JCS instance is created a database instance is associated with it using a JDBC data source.The cloud services can be monitored and managed through the web UI. For details refer to Getting Started with Oracle Cloud. JDeveloper JDeveloper contains Cloud specific features related to e.g. connection and deployment. To use these features download the JDeveloper from JDeveloper download site by clicking the "Download JDeveloper 11.1.1.7.1 for ADF deployment on Oracle Cloud" link, this version of JDeveloper will have the JCS integration features that will be used in this article. For versions that do not include the Cloud integration features the Oracle Java Cloud Service SDK or the JCS Java Console can be used for deployment. For details on installing and configuring the JDeveloper refer to the installation guideFor details on SDK refer to Using the Command-Line Interface to Monitor Oracle Java Cloud Service and Using the Command-Line Interface to Manage Oracle Java Cloud Service. Access to a local database The database associated with the JCS instance cannot be connected to with JDBC.  Since creating ADFbc business component requires a JDBC connection we will need access to a local database. 3rd party libraries This example will use some 3rd party libraries for implementing the REST service call and processing the input / output content. Other libraries may also be used, however these are tested to work. Jersey 1.x Jersey library will be used as a client to make the call to the REST service. JCS documentation for supported specifications states: Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) 1.1 So Jersey 1.x will be used. Download the single-JAR Jersey bundle; in this example Jersey 1.18 JAR bundle is used. Json-simple Jjson-simple library will be used to process the json objects. Download the  JAR file; in this example json-simple-1.1.1.jar is used. Accessing data in Taleo Before implementing the application it is beneficial to familiarize oneself with the data in Taleo. Easiest way to do this is by using a RESTClient on your browser. Once added to the browser you can access the UI: The client can be used to call the REST services to test the URLs and data before adding them into the application. First derive the base URL for the service this can be done with: Method: GET URL: https://tbe.taleo.net/MANAGER/dispatcher/api/v1/serviceUrl/<company name> The response will contain the base URL to be used for the service calls for the company. Next obtain authentication token with: Method: POST URL: https://ch.tbe.taleo.net/CH07/ats/api/v1/login?orgCode=<company>&userName=<user name>&password=<password> The response includes an authentication token that can be used for few hours to authenticate with the service: {   "response": {     "authToken": "webapi26419680747505890557"   },   "status": {     "detail": {},     "success": true   } } To authenticate the service calls navigate to "Headers -> Custom Header": And add a new request header with: Name: Cookie Value: authToken=webapi26419680747505890557 Once authentication token is defined the tool can be used to invoke REST services; for example: Method: GET URL: https://ch.tbe.taleo.net/CH07/ats/api/v1/object/candidate/search.xml?status=16 This data will be used on the application to be created. For details on the Taleo REST services refer to the Taleo Business Edition REST API Guide. Create Application First Fusion Web Application is created and configured. Start JDeveloper and click "New Application": Application Name: JcsRestDemo Application Package Prefix: oracle.apps.jcs.test Application Template: Fusion Web Application (ADF) Configure Local Cloud Connection Follow the steps documented in the "Java Cloud Service ADF Web Application" article to configure a local database connection needed to create the ADFbc objects. Configure Libraries Add the 3rd party libraries into the class path. Create the following directory and copy the jar files into it: <JDEV_USER_HOME>/JcsRestDemo/lib  Select the "Model" project, navigate "Application -> Project Properties -> Libraries and Classpath -> Add JAR / Directory" and add the 2 3rd party libraries: Accessing Data from Taleo To access data from Taleo using the REST service the 3rd party libraries will be used. 2 Java classes are implemented, one representing the Candidate object and another for accessing the Taleo repository Candidate Candidate object is a POJO object used to represent the candidate data obtained from the Taleo repository. The data obtained will be used to populate the ADFbc object used to display the data on the UI. The candidate object contains simply the variables we obtain using the REST services and the getters / setters for them: Navigate "New -> General -> Java -> Java Class", enter "Candidate" as the name and create it in the package "oracle.apps.jcs.test.model".  Copy / paste the following as the content: import oracle.jbo.domain.Number; public class Candidate { private Number candId; private String firstName; private String lastName; public Candidate() { super(); } public Candidate(Number candId, String firstName, String lastName) { super(); this.candId = candId; this.firstName = firstName; this.lastName = lastName; } public void setCandId(Number candId) { this.candId = candId; } public Number getCandId() { return candId; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } public String getLastName() { return lastName; } } Taleo Repository Taleo repository class will interact with the Taleo REST services. The logic will query data from Taleo and populate Candidate objects with the data. The Candidate object will then be used to populate the ADFbc object used to display data on the UI. Navigate "New -> General -> Java -> Java Class", enter "TaleoRepository" as the name and create it in the package "oracle.apps.jcs.test.model".  Copy / paste the following as the content (for details of the implementation refer to the documentation in the code): import com.sun.jersey.api.client.Client; import com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientResponse; import com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource; import com.sun.jersey.core.util.MultivaluedMapImpl; import java.io.StringReader; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.List; import java.util.Map; import javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType; import javax.ws.rs.core.MultivaluedMap; import oracle.jbo.domain.Number; import org.json.simple.JSONArray; import org.json.simple.JSONObject; import org.json.simple.parser.JSONParser; /** * This class interacts with the Taleo REST services */ public class TaleoRepository { /** * Connection information needed to access the Taleo services */ String _company = null; String _userName = null; String _password = null; /** * Jersey client used to access the REST services */ Client _client = null; /** * Parser for processing the JSON objects used as * input / output for the services */ JSONParser _parser = null; /** * The base url for constructing the REST URLs. This is obtained * from Taleo with a service call */ String _baseUrl = null; /** * Authentication token obtained from Taleo using a service call. * The token can be used to authenticate on subsequent * service calls. The token will expire in 4 hours */ String _authToken = null; /** * Static url that can be used to obtain the url used to construct * service calls for a given company */ private static String _taleoUrl = "https://tbe.taleo.net/MANAGER/dispatcher/api/v1/serviceUrl/"; /** * Default constructor for the repository * Authentication details are passed as parameters and used to generate * authentication token. Note that each service call will * generate its own token. This is done to avoid dealing with the expiry * of the token. Also only 20 tokens are allowed per user simultaneously. * So instead for each call there is login / logout. * * @param company the company for which the service calls are made * @param userName the user name to authenticate with * @param password the password to authenticate with. */ public TaleoRepository(String company, String userName, String password) { super(); _company = company; _userName = userName; _password = password; _client = Client.create(); _parser = new JSONParser(); _baseUrl = getBaseUrl(); } /** * This obtains the base url for a company to be used * to construct the urls for service calls * @return base url for the service calls */ private String getBaseUrl() { String result = null; if (null != _baseUrl) { result = _baseUrl; } else { try { String company = _company; WebResource resource = _client.resource(_taleoUrl + company); ClientResponse response = resource.type(MediaType.APPLICATION_FORM_URLENCODED_TYPE).get(ClientResponse.class); String entity = response.getEntity(String.class); JSONObject jsonObject = (JSONObject)_parser.parse(new StringReader(entity)); JSONObject jsonResponse = (JSONObject)jsonObject.get("response"); result = (String)jsonResponse.get("URL"); } catch (Exception ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } } return result; } /** * Generates authentication token, that can be used to authenticate on * subsequent service calls. Note that each service call will * generate its own token. This is done to avoid dealing with the expiry * of the token. Also only 20 tokens are allowed per user simultaneously. * So instead for each call there is login / logout. * @return authentication token that can be used to authenticate on * subsequent service calls */ private String login() { String result = null; try { MultivaluedMap<String, String> formData = new MultivaluedMapImpl(); formData.add("orgCode", _company); formData.add("userName", _userName); formData.add("password", _password); WebResource resource = _client.resource(_baseUrl + "login"); ClientResponse response = resource.type(MediaType.APPLICATION_FORM_URLENCODED_TYPE).post(ClientResponse.class, formData); String entity = response.getEntity(String.class); JSONObject jsonObject = (JSONObject)_parser.parse(new StringReader(entity)); JSONObject jsonResponse = (JSONObject)jsonObject.get("response"); result = (String)jsonResponse.get("authToken"); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new RuntimeException("Unable to login ", ex); } if (null == result) throw new RuntimeException("Unable to login "); return result; } /** * Releases a authentication token. Each call to login must be followed * by call to logout after the processing is done. This is required as * the tokens are limited to 20 per user and if not released the tokens * will only expire after 4 hours. * @param authToken */ private void logout(String authToken) { WebResource resource = _client.resource(_baseUrl + "logout"); resource.header("cookie", "authToken=" + authToken).post(ClientResponse.class); } /** * This method is used to obtain a list of candidates using a REST * service call. At this example the query is hard coded to query * based on status. The url constructed to access the service is: * <_baseUrl>/object/candidate/search.xml?status=16 * @return List of candidates obtained with the service call */ public List<Candidate> getCandidates() { List<Candidate> result = new ArrayList<Candidate>(); try { // First login, note that in finally block we must have logout _authToken = "authToken=" + login(); /** * Construct the URL, the resulting url will be: * <_baseUrl>/object/candidate/search.xml?status=16 */ MultivaluedMap<String, String> formData = new MultivaluedMapImpl(); formData.add("status", "16"); JSONArray searchResults = (JSONArray)getTaleoResource("object/candidate/search", "searchResults", formData); /** * Process the results, the resulting JSON object is something like * this (simplified for readability): * * { * "response": * { * "searchResults": * [ * { * "candidate": * { * "candId": 211, * "firstName": "Mary", * "lastName": "Stochi", * logic here will find the candidate object(s), obtain the desired * data from them, construct a Candidate object based on the data * and add it to the results. */ for (Object object : searchResults) { JSONObject temp = (JSONObject)object; JSONObject candidate = (JSONObject)findObject(temp, "candidate"); Long candIdTemp = (Long)candidate.get("candId"); Number candId = (null == candIdTemp ? null : new Number(candIdTemp)); String firstName = (String)candidate.get("firstName"); String lastName = (String)candidate.get("lastName"); result.add(new Candidate(candId, firstName, lastName)); } } catch (Exception ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } finally { if (null != _authToken) logout(_authToken); } return result; } /** * Convenience method to construct url for the service call, invoke the * service and obtain a resource from the response * @param path the path for the service to be invoked. This is combined * with the base url to construct a url for the service * @param resource the key for the object in the response that will be * obtained * @param parameters any parameters used for the service call. The call * is slightly different depending whether parameters exist or not. * @return the resource from the response for the service call */ private Object getTaleoResource(String path, String resource, MultivaluedMap<String, String> parameters) { Object result = null; try { WebResource webResource = _client.resource(_baseUrl + path); ClientResponse response = null; if (null == parameters) response = webResource.header("cookie", _authToken).get(ClientResponse.class); else response = webResource.queryParams(parameters).header("cookie", _authToken).get(ClientResponse.class); String entity = response.getEntity(String.class); JSONObject jsonObject = (JSONObject)_parser.parse(new StringReader(entity)); result = findObject(jsonObject, resource); } catch (Exception ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } return result; } /** * Convenience method to recursively find a object with an key * traversing down from a given root object. This will traverse a * JSONObject / JSONArray recursively to find a matching key, if found * the object with the key is returned. * @param root root object which contains the key searched for * @param key the key for the object to search for * @return the object matching the key */ private Object findObject(Object root, String key) { Object result = null; if (root instanceof JSONObject) { JSONObject rootJSON = (JSONObject)root; if (rootJSON.containsKey(key)) { result = rootJSON.get(key); } else { Iterator children = rootJSON.entrySet().iterator(); while (children.hasNext()) { Map.Entry entry = (Map.Entry)children.next(); Object child = entry.getValue(); if (child instanceof JSONObject || child instanceof JSONArray) { result = findObject(child, key); if (null != result) break; } } } } else if (root instanceof JSONArray) { JSONArray rootJSON = (JSONArray)root; for (Object child : rootJSON) { if (child instanceof JSONObject || child instanceof JSONArray) { result = findObject(child, key); if (null != result) break; } } } return result; } }   Creating Business Objects While JCS application can be created without a local database, the local database is required when using ADFbc objects even if database objects are not referred. For this example we will create a "Transient" view object that will be programmatically populated based the data obtained from Taleo REST services. Creating ADFbc objects Choose the "Model" project and navigate "New -> Business Tier : ADF Business Components : View Object". On the "Initialize Business Components Project" choose the local database connection created in previous step. On Step 1 enter "JcsRestDemoVO" on the "Name" and choose "Rows populated programmatically, not based on query": On step 2 create the following attributes: CandId Type: Number Updatable: Always Key Attribute: checked Name Type: String Updatable: Always On steps 3 and 4 accept defaults and click "Next".  On step 5 check the "Application Module" checkbox and enter "JcsRestDemoAM" as the name: Click "Finish" to generate the objects. Populating the VO To display the data on the UI the "transient VO" is populated programmatically based on the data obtained from the Taleo REST services. Open the "JcsRestDemoVOImpl.java". Copy / paste the following as the content (for details of the implementation refer to the documentation in the code): import java.sql.ResultSet; import java.util.List; import java.util.ListIterator; import oracle.jbo.server.ViewObjectImpl; import oracle.jbo.server.ViewRowImpl; import oracle.jbo.server.ViewRowSetImpl; // --------------------------------------------------------------------- // --- File generated by Oracle ADF Business Components Design Time. // --- Tue Feb 18 09:40:25 PST 2014 // --- Custom code may be added to this class. // --- Warning: Do not modify method signatures of generated methods. // --------------------------------------------------------------------- public class JcsRestDemoVOImpl extends ViewObjectImpl { /** * This is the default constructor (do not remove). */ public JcsRestDemoVOImpl() { } @Override public void executeQuery() { /** * For some reason we need to reset everything, otherwise * 2nd entry to the UI screen may fail with * "java.util.NoSuchElementException" in createRowFromResultSet * call to "candidates.next()". I am not sure why this is happening * as the Iterator is new and "hasNext" is true at the point * of the execution. My theory is that since the iterator object is * exactly the same the VO cache somehow reuses the iterator including * the pointer that has already exhausted the iterable elements on the * previous run. Working around the issue * here by cleaning out everything on the VO every time before query * is executed on the VO. */ getViewDef().setQuery(null); getViewDef().setSelectClause(null); setQuery(null); this.reset(); this.clearCache(); super.executeQuery(); } /** * executeQueryForCollection - overridden for custom java data source support. */ protected void executeQueryForCollection(Object qc, Object[] params, int noUserParams) { /** * Integrate with the Taleo REST services using TaleoRepository class. * A list of candidates matching a hard coded query is obtained. */ TaleoRepository repository = new TaleoRepository(<company>, <username>, <password>); List<Candidate> candidates = repository.getCandidates(); /** * Store iterator for the candidates as user data on the collection. * This will be used in createRowFromResultSet to create rows based on * the custom iterator. */ ListIterator<Candidate> candidatescIterator = candidates.listIterator(); setUserDataForCollection(qc, candidatescIterator); super.executeQueryForCollection(qc, params, noUserParams); } /** * hasNextForCollection - overridden for custom java data source support. */ protected boolean hasNextForCollection(Object qc) { boolean result = false; /** * Determines whether there are candidates for which to create a row */ ListIterator<Candidate> candidates = (ListIterator<Candidate>)getUserDataForCollection(qc); result = candidates.hasNext(); /** * If all candidates to be created indicate that processing is done */ if (!result) { setFetchCompleteForCollection(qc, true); } return result; } /** * createRowFromResultSet - overridden for custom java data source support. */ protected ViewRowImpl createRowFromResultSet(Object qc, ResultSet resultSet) { /** * Obtain the next candidate from the collection and create a row * for it. */ ListIterator<Candidate> candidates = (ListIterator<Candidate>)getUserDataForCollection(qc); ViewRowImpl row = createNewRowForCollection(qc); try { Candidate candidate = candidates.next(); row.setAttribute("CandId", candidate.getCandId()); row.setAttribute("Name", candidate.getFirstName() + " " + candidate.getLastName()); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } return row; } /** * getQueryHitCount - overridden for custom java data source support. */ public long getQueryHitCount(ViewRowSetImpl viewRowSet) { /** * For this example this is not implemented rather we always return 0. */ return 0; } } Creating UI Choose the "ViewController" project and navigate "New -> Web Tier : JSF : JSF Page". On the "Create JSF Page" enter "JcsRestDemo" as name and ensure that the "Create as XML document (*.jspx)" is checked.  Open "JcsRestDemo.jspx" and navigate to "Data Controls -> JcsRestDemoAMDataControl -> JcsRestDemoVO1" and drag & drop the VO to the "<af:form> " as a "ADF Read-only Table": Accept the defaults in "Edit Table Columns". To execute the query navigate to to "Data Controls -> JcsRestDemoAMDataControl -> JcsRestDemoVO1 -> Operations -> Execute" and drag & drop the operation to the "<af:form> " as a "Button": Deploying to JCS Follow the same steps as documented in previous article"Java Cloud Service ADF Web Application". Once deployed the application can be accessed with URL: https://java-[identity domain].java.[data center].oraclecloudapps.com/JcsRestDemo-ViewController-context-root/faces/JcsRestDemo.jspx The UI displays a list of candidates obtained from the Taleo REST Services: Summary In this article we learned how to integrate with REST services using Jersey library in JCS. In future articles various other integration techniques will be covered.

    Read the article

  • Part 2&ndash;Load Testing In The Cloud

    - by Tarun Arora
    Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 we discussed the advantages of creating a Test Rig in the cloud, the Azure edge and the Test Rig Topology we want to get to. In Part 2, Let’s start by understanding the components of Azure we’ll be making use of followed by manually putting them together to create the test rig, so… let’s get down dirty start setting up the Test Rig.  What Components of Azure will I be using for building the Test Rig in the Cloud? To run the Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Compute and to enable communication between Test Controller and Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect.  Azure Connect The Test Controller is on premise and the Test Agents are in the cloud (How will they talk?). To enable communication between the two, we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect. With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IPsec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. With this you can now join Windows Azure role instances to your domain, so that you can use your existing methods for domain authentication, name resolution, or other domain-wide maintenance actions. For more details refer to an overview of Windows Azure connect. A very useful video explaining everything you wanted to know about Windows Azure connect.  Azure Compute Windows Azure compute provides developers a platform to host and manage applications in Microsoft’s data centres across the globe. A Windows Azure application is built from one or more components called ‘roles.’ Roles come in three different types: Web role, Worker role, and Virtual Machine (VM) role, we’ll be using the Worker role to set up the Test Agents. A very nice blog post discussing the difference between the 3 role types. Developers are free to use the .NET framework or other software that runs on Windows with the Worker role or Web role. Developers can also create applications using languages such as PHP and Java. More on Windows Azure Compute. Each Windows Azure compute instance represents a virtual server... Virtual Machine Size CPU Cores Memory Cost Per Hour Extra Small Shared 768 MB $0.04 Small 1 1.75 GB $0.12 Medium 2 3.50 GB $0.24 Large 4 7.00 GB $0.48 Extra Large 8 14.00 GB $0.96   You might want to review the Windows Azure Pricing FAQ. Let’s Get Started building the Test Rig… Configuration Machine Role Comments VM – 1 Domain Controller for Playpit.com On Premise VM – 2 TFS, Test Controller On Premise VM – 3 Test Agent Cloud   In this blog post I would assume that you have the domain, Team Foundation Server and Test Controller Installed and set up already. If not, please refer to the TFS 2010 Installation Guide and this walkthrough on MSDN to set up your Test Controller. You can also download a preconfigured TFS 2010 VM from Brian Keller's blog, Brian also has some great hands on Labs on TFS 2010 that you may want to explore. I. Lets start building VM – 3: The Test Agent Download the Windows Azure SDK and Tools Open Visual Studio and create a new Windows Azure Project using the Cloud Template                   Choose the Worker Role for reasons explained in the earlier post         The WorkerRole.cs implements the Run() and OnStart() methods, no code changes required. You should be able to compile the project and run it in the compute emulator (The compute emulator should have been installed as part of the Windows Azure Toolkit) on your local machine.                   We will only be making changes to WindowsAzureProject, open ServiceDefinition.csdef. Ensure that the vmsize is small (remember the cost chart above). Import the “Connect” module. I am importing the Connect module because I need to join the Worker role VM to the Playpit domain. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect"/> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg and note that settings with key ‘Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.%%%%’ have been added to the configuration file. This is because you decided to import the connect module. See the config below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>             Let’s go step by step and understand all the highlighted parameters and where you can find the values for them.       osFamily – By default this is set to 1 (Windows Server 2008 SP2). Change this to 2 if you want the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. The Advantage of using osFamily = “2” is that you get Powershell 2.0 rather than Powershell 1.0. In Powershell 2.0 you could simply use “powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted ./myscript.ps1” and it will work while in Powershell 1.0 you will have to change the registry key by including the following in your command file “reg add HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell /v ExecutionPolicy /d Unrestricted /f” before you can execute any power shell. The other reason you might want to move to os2 is if you wanted IIS 7.5.       Activation Token – To enable communication between the on premise machine and the Windows Azure Worker role VM both need to have the same token. Log on to Windows Azure Management Portal, click on Connect, click on Get Activation Token, this should give you the activation token, copy the activation token to the clipboard and paste it in the configuration file. Note – Later in the blog I’ll be showing you how to install connect on the on premise machine.                       EnableDomainJoin – Set the value to true, ofcourse we want to join the on windows azure worker role VM to the domain.       DomainFQDN, DomainControllerFQDN, DomainAccountName, DomainPassword, DomainOU, Administrators – This information is specific to your domain. I have extracted this information from the ‘service manager’ and ‘Active Directory Users and Computers’. Also, i created a new Domain-OU namely ‘CloudInstances’ so all my cloud instances joined to my domain show up here, this is optional. You can encrypt the DomainPassword – refer to the instructions here. Or hold fire, I’ll be covering that when i come to certificates and encryption in the coming section.       Now once you have filled all this information up, the configuration file should look something like below, <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Next we will be enabling the Remote Desktop module in to the ServiceDefinition.csdef, we could make changes manually or allow a beautiful wizard to help us make changes. I prefer the second option. So right click on the Windows Azure project and choose Publish       Now once you get the publish wizard, if you haven’t already you would be asked to import your Windows Azure subscription, this is simply the Msdn subscription activation key xml. Once you have done click Next to go to the Settings page and check ‘Enable Remote Desktop for all roles’.       As soon as you do that you get another pop up asking you the details for the user that you would be logging in with (make sure you enter a reasonable expiry date, you do not want the user account to expire today). Notice the more information tag at the bottom, click that to get access to the certificate section. See screen shot below.       From the drop down select the option to create a new certificate        In the pop up window enter the friendly name for your certificate. In my case I entered ‘WAC – Test Rig’ and click ok. This will create a new certificate for you. Click on the view button to see the certificate details. Do you see the Thumbprint, this is the value that will go in the config file (very important). Now click on the Copy to File button to copy the certificate, we will need to import the certificate to the windows Azure Management portal later. So, make sure you save it a safe location.                                Click Finish and enter details of the user you would like to create with permissions for remote desktop access, once you have entered the details on the ‘Remote desktop configuration’ screen click on Ok. From the Publish Windows Azure Wizard screen press Cancel. Cancel because we don’t want to publish the role just yet and Yes because we want to save all the changes in the config file.       Now if you go to the ServiceDefinition.csdef file you will see that the RemoteAccess and RemoteForwarder roles have been imported for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Now go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg file and you see a whole bunch for setting “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.%%%” values added for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.Enabled" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountUsername" value="Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountEncryptedPassword" value="MIIBnQYJKoZIhvcNAQcDoIIBjjCCAYoCAQAxggFOMIIBSgIBADAyMB4xHDAaBgNVBAMME1dpbmRvd 3MgQXp1cmUgVG9vbHMCEGa+B46voeO5T305N7TSG9QwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQAEggEABg4ol5Xol66Ip6QKLbAPWdmD4ae ADZ7aKj6fg4D+ATr0DXBllZHG5Umwf+84Sj2nsPeCyrg3ZDQuxrfhSbdnJwuChKV6ukXdGjX0hlowJu/4dfH4jTJC7sBWS AKaEFU7CxvqYEAL1Hf9VPL5fW6HZVmq1z+qmm4ecGKSTOJ20Fptb463wcXgR8CWGa+1w9xqJ7UmmfGeGeCHQ4QGW0IDSBU6ccg vzF2ug8/FY60K1vrWaCYOhKkxD3YBs8U9X/kOB0yQm2Git0d5tFlIPCBT2AC57bgsAYncXfHvPesI0qs7VZyghk8LVa9g5IqaM Cp6cQ7rmY/dLsKBMkDcdBHuCTAzBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwFAYIKoZIhvcNAwcECDRVifSXbA43gBApNrp40L1VTVZ1iGag+3O1" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountExpiration" value="2012-11-27T23:59:59.0000000+00:00" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteForwarder.Enabled" value="true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <Certificates> <Certificate name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.PasswordEncryption" thumbprint="AA23016CF0BDFC344400B5B82706B608B92E4217" thumbprintAlgorithm="sha1" /> </Certificates> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>          Okay let’s look at them one at a time,       Enabled - Yes, we would like to enable Remote Access.       AccountUserName – This is the user name you entered while you were on the publish windows azure role screen, as detailed above.       AccountEncrytedPassword – Try and decode that, the certificate is used to encrypt the password you specified for the user account. Remember earlier i said, either use the instructions or wait and i’ll be showing you encryption, now the user account i am using for rdp has the same password as my domain password, so i can simply copy the value of the AccountEncryptedPassword to the DomainPassword as well.       AccountExpiration – This is the expiration as you specified in the wizard earlier, make sure your account does not expire today.       Remote Forwarder – Check out the documentation, below is how I understand it, -- One role in an application that implements a remote desktop connection must import the RemoteForwarder module. The two modules work together to enable the remote desktop connections to role instances. -- If you have multiple roles defined in the service model, it does not matter which role you add the RemoteForwarder module to, but you must add it to only one of the role definitions.       Certificate – Remember the certificate thumbprint from the wizard, the on premise machine and windows azure role machine that need to speak to each other must have the same thumbprint. More on that when we install Windows Azure connect Endpoints on the on premise machine. As i said earlier, in this blog post, I’ll be showing you the manual process so i won’t be scripting any star up tasks to install the test agent or register the test agent with the TFS Server. I’ll be showing you all this cool stuff in the next blog post, that’s because it’s important to understand the manual side of it, it becomes easier for you to troubleshoot in case something fails. Having said that, the changes we have made are sufficient to spin up the Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent VM, have it connected with the play.pit.com domain and have remote access enabled on it. Before we deploy the Test Agent VM we need to set up Windows Azure Connect on the TFS Server. II. Windows Azure Connect: Setting up Connect on VM – 2 i.e. TFS & Test Controller Glad you made it so far, now to enable communication between the on premise TFS/Test Controller and Azure-ed Test Agent we need to enable communication. We have set up the Azure connect module in the Test Agent configuration, now the connect end points need to be enabled on the on premise machines, let’s have a look at how we can do this. Log on to VM – 2 running the TFS Server and Test Controller Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network Click on Virtual Network, if you already have a subscription you should see the below screen shot, if not, you would be asked to complete the subscription first        Click on Install Local Endpoints from the top left on the panel and you get a url appended with a token id in it, remember the token i showed you earlier, in theory the token you get here should match the token you added to the Test Agent config file.        Copy the url to the clip board and paste it in IE explorer (important, the installation at present only works out of IE and you need to have cookies enabled in order to complete the installation). As stated in the pop up, you can NOT download and run the software later, you need to run it as is, since it contains a token. Once the installation completes you should see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray.                         Right click the Azure Connect icon, choose Diagnostics and refer to this link for diagnostic detail terminology. NOTE – Unfortunately I could not see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray, a bit of binging with Google revealed that the azure connect icon is only shown when the ‘Windows Azure Connect Endpoint’ Service is started. So go to services.msc and make sure that the service is started, if not start it, unfortunately again, the service did not start for me on a manual start and i realised that one of the dependant services was disabled, you can look at the service dependencies and start them and then start windows azure connect. Bottom line, you need to start Windows Azure connect service before you can proceed. Please refer here on MSDN for more on Troubleshooting Windows Azure connect. (Follow the next step as well)   Now go back to the Windows Azure Management Portal and from Groups and Roles create a new group, lets call it ‘Test Rig’. Make sure you add the VM – 2 (the TFS Server VM where you just installed the endpoint).       Now if you go back to the Azure Connect icon in the system tray and click ‘Refresh Policy’ you will notice that the disconnected status of the icon should change to ready for connection. III. Importing Certificate in to Windows Azure Management Portal But before that you need to import the certificate you created in Step I in to the Windows Azure Management Portal. Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on ‘Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN’ and then ‘Management Certificates’ followed by Add Certificates as shown in the screen shot below        Browse to the location where you saved the certificate earlier, remember… Refer to Step I in case you forgot.        Now you should be able to see the imported certificate here, make sure the thumbprint of the certificate matches the one you inserted in the config files        IV. Publish Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent Having completed I, II and III, you are ready to publish the Test Agent VM – 3 to the cloud. Go to Visual Studio and right click the Windows Azure project and select Publish. Verify the infomration in the wizard, from the advanced settings tab, you can also enabled capture of intellitrace or profiling information.         Click Next and Click Publish! From the view menu bar select the Windows Azure Activity Log window.       Now you should be able to see the deployment progress in real time.             In the Windows Azure Management Portal, you should also be able to see the progress of creation of a new Worker Role.       Once the deployment is complete you should be able to RDP (go to run prompt type mstsc and in the pop up the machine name) in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM from the Playpit network using the domain admin user account. In case you are unable to log in to the Test Agent using the domain admin user account it means the process of joining the Test Agent to the domain has failed! But the good news is, because you imported the connect module, you can connect to the Test Agent machine using Windows Azure Management Portal and troubleshoot the reason for failure, you will be able to log in with the user name and password you specified in the config file for the keys ‘RemoteAccess.AccountUsername, RemoteAccess.EncryptedPassword (just that enter the password unencrypted)’, fix it or manually join the machine to the domain. Once you have managed to Join the Test Agent VM to the Domain move to the next step.      So, log in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM with the Playpit Domain Administrator and verify that you can log in, the machine is connected to the domain and the connect service is successfully running. If yes, give your self a pat on the back, you are 80% mission accomplished!         Go to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network, click on Groups and Roles and click on Test Rig, click Edit Group, the edit the Test Rig group you created earlier. In the Connect to section, click on Add to select the worker role you have just deployed. Also, check the ‘Allow connections between endpoints in the group’ with this you will enable to communication between test controller and test agents and test agents/test agents. Click Save.      Now, you are ready to deploy the Test Agent software on the Worker Role Test Agent VM and configure it to work with the Test Controller. V. Configuring VM – 3: Installing Test Agent and Associating Test Agent to Controller Log in to the Worker Role Test Agent VM that you have just successfully deployed, make sure you log in with the domain administrator account. Download the All Agents software from MSDN, ‘en_visual_studio_agents_2010_x86_x64_dvd_509679.iso’, extract the iso and navigate to where you have extracted the iso. In my case, i have extracted the iso to “C:\Resources\Temp\VsAgentSetup”. Open the Test Agent folder and double click on setup.exe. Once you have installed the Test Agent you should reach the configuration window. If you face any issues installing TFS Test Agent on the VM, refer to the walkthrough on MSDN.       Once you have successfully installed the Test Agent software you will need to configure the test agent. Right click the test agent configuration tool and run as a different user. i.e. an Administrator. This is really to run the configuration wizard with elevated privileges (you might have UAC block something's otherwise).        In the run options, you can select ‘service’ you do not need to run the agent as interactive un less you are running coded UI tests. I have specified the domain administrator to connect to the TFS Test Controller. In real life, i would never do that, i would create a separate test user service account for this purpose. But for the blog post, we are using the most powerful user so that any policies or restrictions don’t block you.        Click the Apply Settings button and you should be all green! If not, the summary usually gives helpful error messages that you can resolve and proceed. As per my experience, you may run in to either a permission or a firewall blocking communication issue.        And now the moment of truth! Go to VM –2 open up Visual Studio and from the Test Menu select Manage Test Controller       Mission Accomplished! You should be able to see the Test Agent that you have just configured here,         VI. Creating and Running Load Tests on your brand new Azure-ed Test Rig I have various blog posts on Performance Testing with Visual Studio Ultimate, you can follow the links and videos below, Blog Posts: - Part 1 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 2 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 3 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Videos: - Test Tools Configuration & Settings in Visual Studio - Why & How to Record Web Performance Tests in Visual Studio Ultimate - Goal Driven Load Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate Now that you have created your load tests, there is one last change you need to make before you can run the tests on your Azure Test Rig, create a new Test settings file, and change the Test Execution method to ‘Remote Execution’ and select the test controller you have configured the Worker Role Test Agent against in our case VM – 2 So, go on, fire off a test run and see the results of the test being executed on the Azur-ed Test Rig. Review and What’s next? A quick recap of the benefits of running the Test Rig in the cloud and what i will be covering in the next blog post AND I would love to hear your feedback! Advantages Utilizing the power of Azure compute to run a heavy virtual user load. Benefiting from the Azure flexibility, destroy Test Agents when not in use, takes < 25 minutes to spin up a new Test Agent. Most important test Network Latency, (network latency and speed of connection are two different things – usually network latency is very hard to test), by placing the Test Agents in Microsoft Data centres around the globe, one can actually test the lag in transferring the bytes not because of a slow connection but because the page has been requested from the other side of the globe. Next Steps The process of spinning up the Test Agents in windows Azure is not 100% automated. I am working on the Worker process and power shell scripts to make the role deployment, unattended install of test agent software and registration of the test agent to the test controller automated. In the next blog post I will show you how to make the complete process unattended and automated. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Hope you enjoyed this post, I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. See you in Part III.   Share this post : CodeProject

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 67 68 69 70 71 72  | Next Page >