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• Big Data – Various Learning Resources – How to Start with Big Data? – Day 20 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned how to become a Data Scientist for Big Data. In this article we will go over various learning resources related to Big Data. In this series we have covered many of the most essential details about Big Data. At the beginning of this series, I have encouraged readers to send me questions. One of the most popular questions is - “I want to learn more about Big Data. Where can I learn it?” This is indeed a great question as there are plenty of resources out to learn about Big Data and it is indeed difficult to select on one resource to learn Big Data. Hence I decided to write here a few of the very important resources which are related to Big Data. Learn from Pluralsight Pluralsight is a global leader in high-quality online training for hardcore developers.  It has fantastic Big Data Courses and I started to learn about Big Data with the help of Pluralsight. Here are few of the courses which are directly related to Big Data. Big Data: The Big Picture Big Data Analytics with Tableau NoSQL: The Big Picture Understanding NoSQL Data Analysis Fundamentals with Tableau I encourage all of you start with this video course as they are fantastic fundamentals to learn Big Data. Learn from Apache Resources at Apache are single point the most authentic learning resources. If you want to learn fundamentals and go deep about every aspect of the Big Data, I believe you must understand various concepts in Apache’s library. I am pretty impressed with the documentation and I am personally referencing it every single day when I work with Big Data. I strongly encourage all of you to bookmark following all the links for authentic big data learning. Haddop - The Apache Hadoop® project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. Ambari: A web-based tool for provisioning, managing, and monitoring Apache Hadoop clusters which include support for Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce, Hive, HCatalog, HBase, ZooKeeper, Oozie, Pig and Sqoop. Ambari also provides a dashboard for viewing cluster health such as heat maps and ability to view MapReduce, Pig and Hive applications visually along with features to diagnose their performance characteristics in a user-friendly manner. Avro: A data serialization system. Cassandra: A scalable multi-master database with no single points of failure. Chukwa: A data collection system for managing large distributed systems. HBase: A scalable, distributed database that supports structured data storage for large tables. Hive: A data warehouse infrastructure that provides data summarization and ad hoc querying. Mahout: A Scalable machine learning and data mining library. Pig: A high-level data-flow language and execution framework for parallel computation. ZooKeeper: A high-performance coordination service for distributed applications. Learn from Vendors One of the biggest issues with about learning Big Data is setting up the environment. Every Big Data vendor has different environment request and there are lots of things require to set up Big Data framework. Many of the users do not start with Big Data as they are afraid about the resources required to set up framework as well as a time commitment. Here Hortonworks have created fantastic learning environment. They have created Sandbox with everything one person needs to learn Big Data and also have provided excellent tutoring along with it. Sandbox comes with a dozen hands-on tutorial that will guide you through the basics of Hadoop as well it contains the Hortonworks Data Platform. I think Hortonworks did a fantastic job building this Sandbox and Tutorial. Though there are plenty of different Big Data Vendors I have decided to list only Hortonworks due to their unique setup. Please leave a comment if there are any other such platform to learn Big Data. I will include them over here as well. Learn from Books There are indeed few good books out there which one can refer to learn Big Data. Here are few good books which I have read. I will update the list as I will learn more. Ethics of Big Data Balancing Risk and Innovation Big Data for Dummies Head First Data Analysis: A Learner’s Guide to Big Numbers, Statistics, and Good Decisions If you search on Amazon there are millions of the books but I think above three books are a great set of books and it will give you great ideas about Big Data. Once you go through above books, you will have a clear idea about what is the next step you should follow in this series. You will be capable enough to make the right decision for yourself. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will wrap up this series of Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• EHome IR receiver and Ubuntu 13 - any one have this working?

  - by squakie

  I have a "generic" USB IR receiver I purchased off of Ebay to make my life a little easier with XBMC on my Ubuntu box. I am currently running 13.10 and have never tried nor have any knowledge of IR in Ubuntu. I know of lirc, and I know a lot of it is now included in the kernel. My understanding is that lirc in basic terms maps pulses from an remote control to functions - like keyboard or mouse clicks. It is also my understanding that I might still need a driver or something for my device. lsusb shows the device as: Bus 006 Device 003: ID 147a:e016 Formosa Industrial Computing, Inc. eHome Infrared Receiver dmesg shows the following pertaining to the device: [43635.311985] usb 6-2: USB disconnect, device number 2 [43641.344387] usb 6-2: new full-speed USB device number 3 using ohci-pci [43641.543454] usb 6-2: New USB device found, idVendor=147a, idProduct=e016 [43641.543467] usb 6-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [43641.543473] usb 6-2: Product: eHome Infrared Transceiver [43641.543478] usb 6-2: Manufacturer: Formosa21 [43641.543483] usb 6-2: SerialNumber: FM000623 [43641.555736] Registered IR keymap rc-rc6-mce [43641.555968] input: Media Center Ed. eHome Infrared Remote Transceiver (147a:e016) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.0/usb6/6-2/6-2:1.0/rc/rc2/input15 [43641.556221] rc2: Media Center Ed. eHome Infrared Remote Transceiver (147a:e016) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.0/usb6/6-2/6-2:1.0/rc/rc2 [43641.556584] input: MCE IR Keyboard/Mouse (mceusb) as /devices/virtual/input/input16 [43641.557186] rc rc2: lirc_dev: driver ir-lirc-codec (mceusb) registered at minor = 0 [43641.731965] mceusb 6-2:1.0: Registered Formosa21 eHome Infrared Transceiver with mce emulator interface version 1 [43641.731978] mceusb 6-2:1.0: 2 tx ports (0x0 cabled) and 2 rx sensors (0x0 active) (excuse the double spacing, but I had to put in extra cr/lf using "enter" or the entire thing was just one long unreadable string). When I connect the same IR receiver to a Raspberry Pi running OpenELEC/XBMC there is no flashing led unless I press a remote button, and the device works. In Ubuntu, the led is constantly blinking, and nothing happens when I press a remote key. I tried the command line program to test but it never echoes anything back to the terminal window. I believe it must need some sort of driver or something else, but I am completely in the dark on this. If it matters I also have: - Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse USB receiver - Tenda USB wireless adapter And.....I've also noticed some errors now that show in dmesg that seem to somehow related to HDMI if that makes any sense: 46721.144731] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46721.144749] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46721.444025] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46721.444061] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46721.743375] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46721.743411] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46722.043092] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46722.043118] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46722.343086] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46722.343122] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46722.642517] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46722.642574] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46722.942459] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46722.942485] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46723.242103] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46723.242129] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [46723.541877] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [46723.541923] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58366.651954] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58366.651980] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58366.951523] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58366.951549] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58367.251075] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58367.251121] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58367.550517] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58367.550563] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58367.850219] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58367.850256] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58368.150160] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58368.150185] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58368.449544] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58368.449570] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58368.749583] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58368.749629] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58369.049280] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58369.049326] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58394.706273] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58394.706300] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58394.706350] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58394.706367] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58395.003032] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58395.003058] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58395.302680] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58395.302705] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58395.602442] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58395.602477] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58395.902143] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58395.902179] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58396.201839] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58396.201875] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58396.501538] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58396.501574] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58396.801232] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58396.801268] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [58397.100583] HDMI: ELD buf size is 0, force 128 [58397.100627] HDMI: invalid ELD data byte 0 [63095.766042] systemd-hostnamed[8875]: Warning: nss-myhostname is not installed. Changing the local hostname might make it unresolveable. Please install nss-myhostname! dave@davepc:~$ EDIT: Maybe another way to look at this would be what does Ubuntu do or not do that OpenELEC does or doesn't do (on Raspberry Pi) such that it works in OpenELEC but not in Ubuntu?

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• Oracle Delivers Latest Release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Scott McNeil

  Richer Service Catalog for Database and Middleware as a Service; Enhanced Database and Middleware Management Help Drive Enterprise-Scale Private Cloud Adoption News Summary IT organizations are adopting private clouds as a stepping-stone to business-driven, self-service IT. Successful implementations hinge on the ability to efficiently deploy and manage cloud services at enterprise scale. Having a complete cloud management solution integrated with an enterprise-class technology stack is a fundamental requirement for IT. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 meets that requirement by helping businesses become more agile and responsive, while reducing cost, complexity, and risk. News Facts Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4, available today, lets organizations rapidly adopt Oracle-based, enterprise-scale private clouds. New capabilities provide advanced technology stack management, secure database administration, and enterprise service governance, enabling Oracle customers and partners to maximize database and application performance and drive innovation using self-service IT platforms. The enhancements have been driven by customers and the growing Oracle Enterprise Manager Ecosystem, comprised of more than 750 Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized partners. Oracle and its partners and customers have built over 140 plug-ins and connectors for Oracle Enterprise Manager. Watch the video highlights. Automation for Broader Cloud Services Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 allows for a rapid enterprise-wide adoption of database, middleware and infrastructure services in the private cloud, driven by an enhanced API-enabled service catalog. The release features “push button” style provisioning of complete environments such as SOA and Oracle Active Data Guard, and fast data cloning that enables rapid deployment and testing of enterprise applications. Out-of-the-box capabilities to detect data and configuration vulnerabilities provide enhanced cloud service governance along with greater operational control through a flexible and extensible showback mechanism. Enhanced Database Management A new performance warehouse enables predictive database diagnostics and trend analysis and helps identify database problems before they occur. New enterprise data-governance capabilities enhance security by helping systematically discover and protect sensitive data. Step-by-step orchestration of upgrades with the ability to rollback changes enables faster adoption of Oracle Database 12c. Expanded Fusion Middleware Management A new consolidated view of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c deployments with a guided management capability lets administrators apply best management practices to diverse middleware environments and identify performance issues quickly. A Java VM Diagnostics as a Service feature allows governed access to diagnostics data for IT workers across multiple disciplines for accelerated DevOps resolutions of defects and performance optimization. New automated provisioning for SOA lets middleware administrators perform mass SOA provisioning with ease. Superior Enterprise-Grade Management Private roles and preferred credentials have been added to Oracle Enterprise Manager to provide additional fine-grained security for organizations with complex access control requirements. A new security console provides a single point of control for managing the security of Oracle Enterprise Manager environments. Support for the latest industry standard SNMP v3 protocol, including encryption, enables more secure heterogeneous management. “Smart monitoring” adapts to observed environmental changes and adds self-management capabilities to help Oracle Enterprise Manager run at peak performance, while demanding less IT supervision. Supporting Quotes “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a strong tradition of technology breakthroughs and leadership. As a member of Oracle’s Customer Advisory Board for Oracle Enterprise Manager, we have consistently provided feedback and guidance in the areas of enterprise-scale cloud, self-diagnosability, and secure administration for the product,” said Tim Frazier, CIO, NIF and Photon Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “We intend to take advantage of the Release 4 features that support enterprise-scale availability and fine-grained security capabilities for private cloud deployments.” “IDC's most recent CloudTrack survey shows that most enterprises plan to adopt hybrid cloud architectures over the next three years,” said Mary Johnston Turner, Research Vice President, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC. “These organizations plan to deploy a wide range of workloads into cloud environments including mission critical database and middleware services that require high levels of fault tolerance and disaster recovery. Such capabilities were traditionally custom configured for each application but cloud offers the possibility to incorporate such properties within the service definition, enabling organizations to adopt cloud without compromise. With the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, Oracle is providing customers with an out-of-the-box experience for delivering highly-resilient cloud services for databases and applications.” “Since its inception, Oracle has been leading the way in innovative, scalable and high performance solutions for the enterprise. With this release of Oracle Enterprise Manager, we are extending this leadership by providing enterprise-scale capabilities for planning, delivering, and managing private clouds. We call this ‘zero-to-cloud – accelerated.’ These enhancements help our customers to expedite their adoption of cloud computing and prepares them for the next generation of self-service IT,” said Prakash Ramamurthy, senior vice president of Systems and Cloud Management at Oracle. Supporting Resources Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Video: Cerner Delivers High Performance Private Cloud Video: BIAS Achieves Outstanding Results with Private Cloud Press Release Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter Download the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Mobile app

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• Surface and the Uphill Battle to Win Over iPad Users (Namely: Me)

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I went away this past weekend and decided to bring along the Windows 8 tablet from the Build conference last year – y’know, to give Windows 8 a try in a typical scenario. I also brought our iPad 2 along since I figured my wife would want to use that. I’d love to tell you how I found using my Windows 8 tablet but I can’t – I used the iPad exclusively the entire weekend. It was during this that I realized what Microsoft needs to do to win me over as an iPad user. As you’ll see, I’m left wondering what it is that Surface is meant to compete with: iPad and other tablets, or thin laptops like the MacBook Air or Ultrabooks. Device Size I really like the size of the iPad compared with the Build tablet. It’s not as long and the thinness/weight of the device makes it feel more like you’re holding a magazine than a computer. I’m pleased that Microsoft will be matching the thinness of the iPad with Surface, but I’m suspect as to what that actually means. The iPad’s edges slant inwards where the Surface has a thicker boxish look (similar to the iPhone 4S). So while they may have the same depth at the deepest part of both devices, I bet the iPad will come off feeling thinner. However, its not lost on me the number of external port options the Surface’s design provides over the iPad (Usb, etc.). With that said, I haven’t missed having a USB slot on my iPad. I’m not a fan of lengthening the Surface screen size to almost a full inch over the iPad, mainly because… Vertical Orientation Experience Did you notice at the announce event, in the images of the devices that have been released, and in any marketing for it, that the surface is always displayed in horizontal orientation. This is a huge beef I have with my Build tablet and why I prefer the iPad. Yes the iPad can do the wide-screenish mode, but the iPad is oriented to be vertical by nature. Don’t agree? Look at the button and camera placement – both on the shorter sides of the device. Compare that with the Surface, where the orientation for the button and camera is on the longer sides. To be fair, Blackberry and the horde of Android tablets out there haven’t gotten this either – since most monitors are widescreen nowadays tablets should be too right? Wrong. Widescreen is great for certain things, but tasks such as reading is not one of them – hence why monitor companies like Dell provide stands that allow you to flip your widescreen monitor to a vertical orientation. That Microsoft has chosen a horizontal orientation by default for Windows 8 is disappointing – hopefully hardware manufacturers will be given the option of a default vertical orientation. Fast Startup Time I like that I can turn off/turn on the iPad very quickly. Even from a true “off” mode and not just sleeping, the iPad boots up very quickly. Windows RT needs to have that same quick response. If I start finding that I’m waiting for the device to boot up for more than 30 seconds that could be a show stopper. No Heat I really hate that the Build tablet has fans that kick in to cool the procs, but its basically a slate computer and I get its part of that prototype build. For Surface, it needs to be the same type of experience as the iPad – no heat! I know Surface doesn’t have fans and uses some cool new vent system or something like that, but even then – I want to sit and read a book on my Surface without having to feel any heat coming from the device, which is the experience I have with the iPad now. What About Apps?! I am definitely not the target client when it comes to app stores. On my iPad I use: Safari Kindle Reader Twitter App Settlers of Catan TSN’s App And that’s it. So really, while its nice that some version of Office might be available, I’m not planning on utilizing a Surface for creating a PowerPoint or working on a Word document – that’s what my laptop is for. I want my tablet to be for information snacking or as an e-reader and occasionally an entertainment device. Surface vs iPad or Surface vs Air? The more that I read up on Surface, the more I wonder if it won’t be a touch-enabled MacBook Air competitor more than an iPad one. Also, I really question if Microsoft gets tablets – when one of your main selling features is a built-in physical keyboard it speaks more to a traditional laptop experience than a tablet one that’s entirely reliant on touch. Still, I really love the Windows Phone interface – way more than iOS – so I’m still very optimistic that the Metro experience on the tablet will be fantastic. I just worry that Microsoft has interpreted a tablet as a computer with a removable keyboard and a touch screen, and that’s not what tablet computing is about at all.

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• Calculated Columns in Entity Framework Code First Migrations

  - by David Paquette

  I had a couple people ask me about calculated properties / columns in Entity Framework this week.  The question was, is there a way to specify a property in my C# class that is the result of some calculation involving 2 properties of the same class.  For example, in my database, I store a FirstName and a LastName column and I would like a FullName property that is computed from the FirstName and LastName columns.  My initial answer was: 1: public string FullName 2: { 3: get { return string.Format("{0} {1}", FirstName, LastName); } 4: } Of course, this works fine, but this does not give us the ability to write queries using the FullName property.  For example, this query: 1: var users = context.Users.Where(u => u.FullName.Contains("anan")); Would result in the following NotSupportedException: The specified type member 'FullName' is not supported in LINQ to Entities. Only initializers, entity members, and entity navigation properties are supported. It turns out there is a way to support this type of behavior with Entity Framework Code First Migrations by making use of Computed Columns in SQL Server.  While there is no native support for computed columns in Code First Migrations, we can manually configure our migration to use computed columns. Let’s start by defining our C# classes and DbContext: 1: public class UserProfile 2: { 3: public int Id { get; set; } 4: 5: public string FirstName { get; set; } 6: public string LastName { get; set; } 7: 8: [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Computed)] 9: public string FullName { get; private set; } 10: } 11: 12: public class UserContext : DbContext 13: { 14: public DbSet<UserProfile> Users { get; set; } 15: } The DatabaseGenerated attribute is needed on our FullName property.  This is a hint to let Entity Framework Code First know that the database will be computing this property for us. Next, we need to run 2 commands in the Package Manager Console.  First, run Enable-Migrations to enable Code First Migrations for the UserContext.  Next, run Add-Migration Initial to create an initial migration.  This will create a migration that creates the UserProfile table with 3 columns: FirstName, LastName, and FullName.  This is where we need to make a small change.  Instead of allowing Code First Migrations to create the FullName property, we will manually add that column as a computed column. 1: public partial class Initial : DbMigration 2: { 3: public override void Up() 4: { 5: CreateTable( 6: "dbo.UserProfiles", 7: c => new 8: { 9: Id = c.Int(nullable: false, identity: true), 10: FirstName = c.String(), 11: LastName = c.String(), 12: //FullName = c.String(), 13: }) 14: .PrimaryKey(t => t.Id); 15: Sql("ALTER TABLE dbo.UserProfiles ADD FullName AS FirstName + ' ' + LastName"); 16: } 17: 18: 19: public override void Down() 20: { 21: DropTable("dbo.UserProfiles"); 22: } 23: } Finally, run the Update-Database command.  Now we can query for Users using the FullName property and that query will be executed on the database server.  However, we encounter another potential problem. Since the FullName property is calculated by the database, it will get out of sync on the object side as soon as we make a change to the FirstName or LastName property.  Luckily, we can have the best of both worlds here by also adding the calculation back to the getter on the FullName property: 1: [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Computed)] 2: public string FullName 3: { 4: get { return FirstName + " " + LastName; } 5: private set 6: { 7: //Just need this here to trick EF 8: } 9: } Now we can both query for Users using the FullName property and we also won’t need to worry about the FullName property being out of sync with the FirstName and LastName properties.  When we run this code: 1: using(UserContext context = new UserContext()) 2: { 3: UserProfile userProfile = new UserProfile {FirstName = "Chanandler", LastName = "Bong"}; 4: 5: Console.WriteLine("Before saving: " + userProfile.FullName); 6: 7: context.Users.Add(userProfile); 8: context.SaveChanges(); 9:  10: Console.WriteLine("After saving: " + userProfile.FullName); 11:  12: UserProfile chanandler = context.Users.First(u => u.FullName == "Chanandler Bong"); 13: Console.WriteLine("After reading: " + chanandler.FullName); 14:  15: chanandler.FirstName = "Chandler"; 16: chanandler.LastName = "Bing"; 17:  18: Console.WriteLine("After changing: " + chanandler.FullName); 19:  20: } We get this output: It took a bit of work, but finally Chandler’s TV Guide can be delivered to the right person. The obvious downside to this implementation is that the FullName calculation is duplicated in the database and in the UserProfile class. This sample was written using Visual Studio 2012 and Entity Framework 5. Download the source code here.

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• Top Reasons You Need A User Engagement Platform

  - by Michael Snow

  Guest post by: Amit Sircar, Senior Sales Consultant, Oracle Deliver complex enterprise functionality through a simple intuitive and unified User Interface (UI) The modern enterprise contains a wide range of applications that are used to manage the business and drive competitive advantages. Organizations respond by creating a complex structure that results in a functional and management grouping of users. Each of these groups of users requires access to multiple applications and information sources in order to perform their job functions. This leads to the lack of a unified view of enterprise information, inconsistent user interfaces and disjointed security. To be effective, portals must be designed from the end-user perspective, enabling the user to accomplish as many tasks as possible while visiting the fewest number of portals. This requires rethinking the way that portals are built, moving from a functional business unit perspective to a user-focused, process-oriented point of view. Oracle WebCenter provides the Common User Experience Architecture that allows organizations to seamlessly present a unified view of enterprise information tailored to a particular user’s role and preferences. This architecture provides the best practices, design patterns and delivery mechanism for myriad services, applications, and data sources.  In order to serve as a primary system of access, Oracle WebCenter also provides access to unstructured content and to other users via integrated search, service-oriented artifacts, content management, and collaboration tools. Provide a modern and engaging experience without modifying the core business application Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, forums or social media sites are having a profound impact in the public internet.  These technologies can be leveraged by enterprises to add significant value to the business. Organizations need to integrate these technologies directly into their business applications while continuing to meet their security and governance needs. To deliver richer connections and become a more agile and intelligent business, WebCenter provides an enterprise portal platform that contains pre-integrated, standards-based Enterprise 2.0 services. These Enterprise 2.0 services can be easily accessed, integrated and utilized by users. By giving users the ability to use and integrate Enterprise 2.0 services such as tags, links, wikis, activities, blogs or social networking directly with their portals and applications, they are empowered to make richer connections, optimize their productivity, and ultimately increase the value of their applications. Foster a collaborative experience The organizational workplace has undergone a major change in the last decade. With increasing globalization and a distributed workforce, project teams may be physically separated by large distances. Online collaboration technologies are becoming a critical resource to enable virtual teams to share information and work together effectively. Oracle WebCenter delivers dynamic business communities with rich Services to empower teams to quickly and efficiently manage their information, applications, projects, and people without requiring IT assistance. It brings together the latest technology around Enterprise 2.0 and social computing, communities, personal productivity, and ad-hoc team interactions without any development effort. It enables the sharing and collaboration on team content, focusing an organization’s valuable resources on solving business problems, tapping into new ideas, and reducing time-to-market. Mobile Support The traditional workplace dynamics that required employees to access their work applications from their desktops have undergone a fundamental shift. Employees were used to primarily working from company offices and utilized an IT-issued computer for performing their job functions. With the introduction of flexible work hours and the growth of remote workers, more and more employees need the ability to remain productive even when they do not have access to a computer via the use of tablets and smartphones.  In addition, customers and citizens have come to expect 24x7 access to resources and websites from wherever they are located. Tablets and smartphones have empowered everyone to quickly access services they need anytime and from any place.  WebCenter provides out of the box capabilities to deliver the mobile experience in a seamless manner. Seeded device profiles and toolkits within WebCenter can be used to render the same web pages into multiple target devices such iPads, iPhones and android devices. Web designers can preview the portal using the built in simulator, make necessary updates and then deploy their UI design for the targeted device. Conclusion The competitive economy and resource constraints facing organizations today require them to find ways to make their applications, portals and Web sites more agile and intelligent and their knowledge workers more productive no matter where they are located. Organizations need to provide faster access to relevant information and resources, enhance existing applications and business processes with rich Enterprise 2.0 services, and seamlessly deliver content to mobile platforms. Oracle WebCenter successfully meets these challenges by providing the modern user experience platform for the enterprise and the Web.

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• IBM Keynote: (hardware,software)–>{IBM.java.patterns}

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  On Sunday evening, September 30, 2012, Jason McGee, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect Cloud Computing, along with John Duimovich IBM Distinguished Engineer and Java CTO, gave an information- and idea-rich keynote that left Java developers with much to ponder.Their focus was on the challenges to make Java more efficient and productive given the hardware and software environments of 2012. “One idea that is very interesting is the idea of multi-tenancy,” said McGee, “and how we can move up the spectrum. In traditional systems, we ran applications on dedicated middleware, operating systems and hardware. A lot of customers still run that way. Now people introduce hardware virtualization and share the hardware. That is good but there is a lot more we can do. We can share middleware and the application itself.” McGee challenged developers to better enable the Java language to function in these higher density models. He spoke about the need to describe patterns that help us grasp the full environment that an application needs, whether it’s a web or full enterprise application. Developers need to understand the resources that an application interacts with in a way that is simple and straightforward. The task is to then automate that deployment so that the complexity of infrastructure can be by-passed and developers can live in a simpler world where the cloud can automatically configure the needed environment. McGee argued that the key, something IBM has been working on, is to use a simpler pattern that allows a cloud-based architecture to embrace the entire infrastructure required for an application and make it highly available, scalable and able to recover from failure. The cloud-based architecture would automate the complexity of setting up and managing the infrastructure. IBM has been trying to realize this vision for customers so they can describe their Java application environment simply and allow the cloud to automate the deployment and management of applications. “The point,” explained McGee, “is to package the executable used to describe applications, to drop it into a shared system and let that system provide some intelligence about how to deploy and manage those applications.”John Duimovich on Improvements in JavaMcGee then brought onstage IBM’s Distinguished Engineer and CTO for Java, John Duimovich, who showed the audience ways to deploy Java applications more efficiently.Duimovich explained that, “When you run lots of copies of Java in the cloud or any hypervisor virtualized system, there are a lot of duplications of code and jar files. IBM has a facility called ‘shared classes’ where we put shared code, read only artefacts in a cache that is sharable across hypervisors.” By putting JIT code in ahead of time, he explained that the application server will use 20% less memory and operate 30% faster.  He described another example of how the JVM allows for the maximum amount of sharing that manages the tenants and file sockets and memory use through throttling and control. Duimovich touched on the “thin is in” model and IBM’s Liberty Profile and lightweight runtime for the cloud, which allows for greater efficiency in interacting with the cloud.Duimovich discussed the confusion Java developers experience when, for example, the hypervisor tells them that that they have 8 and then 4 and then 16 cores. “Because hypervisors are virtualized, they can change based on resource needs across the hypervisor layer. You may have 10 instances of an operation system and you may need to reallocate memory, " explained Duimovich.  He showed how to resize LPARs, reallocate CPUs and migrate applications as needed. He explained how application servers can resize thread pools and better use resources based on information from the hypervisors.Java Challenges in Hardware and SoftwareMcGee ended the keynote with a summary of upcoming hardware and software challenges for the Java platform. He noted that one reason developers love Java is it allows them to ignore differences in hardware. He stated that the most important things happening in hardware were in network and storage – in developments such as the speed of SSD, the exploitation of high-speed, low-latency networking, and recent developments such as storage-class memory, and non-volatile main memory. “So we are challenged to maintain the benefits of Java and the abstraction it provides from hardware while still exploiting the new innovations in hardware,” said McGee.McGee discussed transactional messaging applications where developers send messages transactionally persist a message to storage, something traditionally done by backing messages on spinning disks, something mostly outdated. “Now,” he pointed out, “we would use SSD and store it in Flash and get 70,000 messages a second. If we stored it using a PCI express-based flash memory device, it is still Flash but put on a PCI express bus on a card closer to the CPU. This way I get 300,000 messages a second and 25% improvement in latency.” McGee’s central point was that hardware has a huge impact on the performance and scalability of applications. New technologies are enabling developers to build classes of Java applications previously unheard of. “We need to be able to balance these things in Java – we need to maintain the abstraction but also be able to exploit the evolution of hardware technology,” said McGee. According to McGee, IBM's current focus is on systems wherein hardware and software are shipped together in what are called Expert Integrated Systems – systems that are pre-optimized, and pre-integrated together. McGee closed IBM’s engaging and thought-provoking keynote by pointing out that the use of Java in complex applications is increasingly being augmented by a host of other languages with strong communities around them – JavaScript, JRuby, Scala, Python and so forth. Java developers now must understand the strengths and weaknesses of such newcomers as applications increasingly involve a complex interconnection of languages.

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• Using Hadooop (HDInsight) with Microsoft - Two (OK, Three) Options

  - by BuckWoody

  Microsoft has many tools for “Big Data”. In fact, you need many tools – there’s no product called “Big Data Solution” in a shrink-wrapped box – if you find one, you probably shouldn’t buy it. It’s tempting to want a single tool that handles everything in a problem domain, but with large, complex data, that isn’t a reality. You’ll mix and match several systems, open and closed source, to solve a given problem. But there are tools that help with handling data at large, complex scales. Normally the best way to do this is to break up the data into parts, and then put the calculation engines for that chunk of data right on the node where the data is stored. These systems are in a family called “Distributed File and Compute”. Microsoft has a couple of these, including the High Performance Computing edition of Windows Server. Recently we partnered with Hortonworks to bring the Apache Foundation’s release of Hadoop to Windows. And as it turns out, there are actually two (technically three) ways you can use it. (There’s a more detailed set of information here: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technologies/business-intelligence/big-data.aspx, I’ll cover the options at a general level below)  First Option: Windows Azure HDInsight Service  Your first option is that you can simply log on to a Hadoop control node and begin to run Pig or Hive statements against data that you have stored in Windows Azure. There’s nothing to set up (although you can configure things where needed), and you can send the commands, get the output of the job(s), and stop using the service when you are done – and repeat the process later if you wish. (There are also connectors to run jobs from Microsoft Excel, but that’s another post)   This option is useful when you have a periodic burst of work for a Hadoop workload, or the data collection has been happening into Windows Azure storage anyway. That might be from a web application, the logs from a web application, telemetrics (remote sensor input), and other modes of constant collection.   You can read more about this option here:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/10/24/getting-started-with-windows-azure-hdinsight-service.aspx Second Option: Microsoft HDInsight Server Your second option is to use the Hadoop Distribution for on-premises Windows called Microsoft HDInsight Server. You set up the Name Node(s), Job Tracker(s), and Data Node(s), among other components, and you have control over the entire ecostructure.   This option is useful if you want to  have complete control over the system, leave it running all the time, or you have a huge quantity of data that you have to bulk-load constantly – something that isn’t going to be practical with a network transfer or disk-mailing scheme. You can read more about this option here: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technologies/business-intelligence/big-data.aspx Third Option (unsupported): Installation on Windows Azure Virtual Machines  Although unsupported, you could simply use a Windows Azure Virtual Machine (we support both Windows and Linux servers) and install Hadoop yourself – it’s open-source, so there’s nothing preventing you from doing that.   Aside from being unsupported, there are other issues you’ll run into with this approach – primarily involving performance and the amount of configuration you’ll need to do to access the data nodes properly. But for a single-node installation (where all components run on one system) such as learning, demos, training and the like, this isn’t a bad option. Did I mention that’s unsupported? :) You can learn more about Windows Azure Virtual Machines here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/virtual-machines/ And more about Hadoop and the installation/configuration (on Linux) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Hadoop And more about the HDInsight installation here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appid=HDINSIGHT-PREVIEW Choosing the right option Since you have two or three routes you can go, the best thing to do is evaluate the need you have, and place the workload where it makes the most sense.  My suggestion is to install the HDInsight Server locally on a test system, and play around with it. Read up on the best ways to use Hadoop for a given workload, understand the parts, write a little Pig and Hive, and get your feet wet. Then sign up for a test account on HDInsight Service, and see how that leverages what you know. If you're a true tinkerer, go ahead and try the VM route as well. Oh - there’s another great reference on the Windows Azure HDInsight that just came out, here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2012/11/16/hadoop-on-azure-introduction.aspx  

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Enterprise LOBs

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Enterprises are more and more dependent on their specialized internal Line of Business (LOB) applications than ever before. Naturally, the more software they leverage on-premises, the more infrastructure they need manage. It’s frequently the case that our customers simply can’t scale up their hardware purchases and operational staff as fast as internal demand for software requires. The result is that getting new or enhanced applications in the hands of business users becomes slower and more expensive every day. Being able to quickly deliver applications in a rapidly changing business environment while maintaining high standards of corporate security is a challenge that can be met right now by moving enterprise LOBs out into the cloud and leveraging Azure’s Access Control services. In fact, we’re seeing many of our customers (both large and small) see huge benefits from moving their web based business applications such as corporate help desks, expense tracking, travel portals, timesheets, and more to Windows Azure. Drivers Cost Reduction Time to market Security Solution Here’s a sketch of how many Windows Azure Enterprise LOBs are being architected and deployed: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the application. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Many Java based applications are also being deployed to Windows Azure with a little more effort. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control – this service is necessary to establish federated identity between the cloud hosted application and an enterprise’s corporate network. It works in conjunction with a secure token service (STS) that is hosted on-premises to establish the corporate user’s identity and credentials. The source code for an on-premises STS is provided in the Windows Azure training kit and merely needs to be customized for the corporate environment and published on a publicly accessible corporate web site. Once set up, corporate users see a near seamless single sign-on experience. Reporting – businesses live and die by their reports and SQL Azure Reporting, based on SQL Server Reporting 2008 R2, can serve up reports with tables, charts, maps, gauges, and more. These reports can be accessed from the Windows Azure Portal, through a web browser, or directly from applications. Service Bus (optional) – if deep integration with other applications and systems is needed, the service bus is the answer. It enables secure service layer communication between applications hosted behind firewalls in on-premises or partner datacenters and applications hosted inside Windows Azure. The Service Bus provides the ability to securely expose just the information and services that are necessary to create a simpler, more secure architecture than opening up a full blown VPN. Data Sync (optional) – in cases where the data stored in the cloud needs to be shared internally, establishing a secure one-way or two-way data-sync connection between the on-premises and off-premises databases is a perfect option. It can be very granular, allowing us to specify exactly what tables and columns to synchronize, setup filters to sync only a subset of rows, set the conflict resolution policy for two-way sync, and specify how frequently data should be synchronized Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• Oracle WebCenter at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

  - by Brian Dirking

  We had a great week at the E20 Conference, presenting in four sessions – Andy MacMillan gave a session titled Today’s Successful Enterprises are Social Enterprises and was on a panel that Tony Byrne moderated; Christian Finn spoke on a panel on Unified Communications Unified Communications + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds?, Mark Bennett spoke on a panel on The Evolution of Talent Management. The key areas of focus this year were sentiment analysis, adoption and community building, the benefits of failure, and social’s role in process applications. Sentiment analysis. This was focused not on external audiences but more on employee sentiment. Tim Young showed his internal "NikoNiko" project, where employees use smilies to report their current mood. The result was a dashboard that showed the company mood by department. Since the goal is to improve productivity, people can see which departments are running into issues and try and address them. A company might otherwise wait until the end of the quarter financials to find out that there was a problem and product didn’t ship. This is a way to identify issues immediately. Tim is great – he had the crowd laughing as soon as he hit the stage, with his proposed hastag for his session: by making it 138 characters long, people couldn’t say much behind his back. And as I tweeted during his session, I loved his comment that complexity diffuses energy - it sounds like something Sun Tzu would say. Another example of employee sentiment analysis was CubeVibe. Founder and CEO Aaron Aycock, in his 3 minute pitch or die session talked about how engaged employees perform better. It was too bad he got gonged, he was just picking up speed, but CubeVibe did win the vote – congratulations to them. Internal adoption, community building, and involvement. On this topic I spoke to Terri Griffith, and she said there is some good work going on at University of Indiana regarding this, and hinted that she might be blogging about it in the near future. This area holds lots of interest for me. Amongst our customers, - CPAC stands out as an organization that has successfully built a community. So, I wonder - what are the building blocks? A strong leader? A common or unifying purpose? A certain level of engagement? I imagine someone has created an equation that says “for a community to grow at 30% per month, there must be an engagement level x to the square root of y, where x equals current community size, and y equals the expected growth rate, and the result is how many engagements the average user must contribute to maintain that growth.” Does anyone have a framework like that? The net result of everyone’s experience is that there is nothing to do but start early and fail often. Kevin Jones made this the focus of his keynote. He talked about the types of failure and what they mean. And he showed his famous kids at work video: Kevin’s blog also has this post: Social Business Failure #8: Workflow Integration. This is something that we’ve been working on at Oracle. Since so much of business is based in enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM (and since Oracle offers e-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, as well as Fusion Applications), it makes sense that the social capabilities of Oracle WebCenter is built right into these applications. There are two types of social collaboration – ad-hoc, and exception handling. When you are in a business process and encounter an exception, you immediately look for 1) the document that tells you how to handle it, or 2) the person who can tell you how to handle it. With WebCenter built into these processes, people either search their content management system, or engage in expertise location and conversation. The great thing is, THEY DON’T HAVE TO LEAVE THE APPLICATION TO DO IT. Oracle has built the social capabilities right into the applications and business processes. I don’t think enough folks were able to see that at the event, but I expect that over the next six months folks will become very aware of it. WebCenter also provides the ability to have ad-hoc collaboration, search, and expertise location that folks need when they are innovating or collaborating. We demonstrated Oracle Social Network. It’s built on our Oracle WebCenter product to provide social collaboration inside and outside of your company. When we showed it to people, there were a number of areas that they commented on that were different from the other products being shown at the conference: Screenshots from within the product Many authors working on documents simultaneously Flagging people for follow up Direct ability to call out to people Ability to see presence not just if someone is online, but which conversation they are actively in Great stuff, the conference was full of smart people that that we enjoy spending time with. We’ll keep up in the meantime, but we look forward to seeing you in Boston.

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• Extreme Optimization – Numerical Algorithm Support

  - by JoshReuben

  Function Delegates Many calculations involve the repeated evaluation of one or more user-supplied functions eg Numerical integration. The EO MathLib provides delegate types for common function signatures and the FunctionFactory class can generate new delegates from existing ones. RealFunction delegate - takes one Double parameter – can encapsulate most of the static methods of the System.Math class, as well as the classes in the Extreme.Mathematics.SpecialFunctions namespace: var sin = new RealFunction(Math.Sin); var result = sin(1); BivariateRealFunction delegate - takes two Double parameters: var atan2 = new BivariateRealFunction (Math.Atan2); var result = atan2(1, 2); TrivariateRealFunction delegate – represents a function takes three Double arguments ParameterizedRealFunction delegate - represents a function taking one Integer and one Double argument that returns a real number. The Pow method implements such a function, but the arguments need order re-arrangement: static double Power(int exponent, double x) { return ElementaryFunctions.Pow(x, exponent); } ... var power = new ParameterizedRealFunction(Power); var result = power(6, 3.2); A ComplexFunction delegate - represents a function that takes an Extreme.Mathematics.DoubleComplex argument and also returns a complex number. MultivariateRealFunction delegate - represents a function that takes an Extreme.Mathematics.LinearAlgebra.Vector argument and returns a real number. MultivariateVectorFunction delegate - represents a function that takes a Vector argument and returns a Vector. FastMultivariateVectorFunction delegate - represents a function that takes an input Vector argument and an output Matrix argument – avoiding object construction  The FunctionFactory class RealFromBivariateRealFunction and RealFromParameterizedRealFunction helper methods - transform BivariateRealFunction or a ParameterizedRealFunction into a RealFunction delegate by fixing one of the arguments, and treating this as a new function of a single argument. var tenthPower = FunctionFactory.RealFromParameterizedRealFunction(power, 10); var result = tenthPower(x); Note: There is no direct way to do this programmatically in C# - in F# you have partial value functions where you supply a subset of the arguments (as a travelling closure) that the function expects. When you omit arguments, F# generates a new function that holds onto/remembers the arguments you passed in and "waits" for the other parameters to be supplied. let sumVals x y = x + y     let sumX = sumVals 10     // Note: no 2nd param supplied.     // sumX is a new function generated from partially applied sumVals.     // ie "sumX is a partial application of sumVals." let sum = sumX 20     // Invokes sumX, passing in expected int (parameter y from original)  val sumVals : int -> int -> int val sumX : (int -> int) val sum : int = 30 RealFunctionsToVectorFunction and RealFunctionsToFastVectorFunction helper methods - combines an array of delegates returning a real number or a vector into vector or matrix functions. The resulting vector function returns a vector whose components are the function values of the delegates in the array. var funcVector = FunctionFactory.RealFunctionsToVectorFunction(     new MultivariateRealFunction(myFunc1),     new MultivariateRealFunction(myFunc2));  The IterativeAlgorithm<T> abstract base class Iterative algorithms are common in numerical computing - a method is executed repeatedly until a certain condition is reached, approximating the result of a calculation with increasing accuracy until a certain threshold is reached. If the desired accuracy is achieved, the algorithm is said to converge. This base class is derived by many classes in the Extreme.Mathematics.EquationSolvers and Extreme.Mathematics.Optimization namespaces, as well as the ManagedIterativeAlgorithm class which contains a driver method that manages the iteration process.  The ConvergenceTest abstract base class This class is used to specify algorithm Termination , convergence and results - calculates an estimate for the error, and signals termination of the algorithm when the error is below a specified tolerance. Termination Criteria - specify the success condition as the difference between some quantity and its actual value is within a certain tolerance – 2 ways: absolute error - difference between the result and the actual value. relative error is the difference between the result and the actual value relative to the size of the result. Tolerance property - specify trade-off between accuracy and execution time. The lower the tolerance, the longer it will take for the algorithm to obtain a result within that tolerance. Most algorithms in the EO NumLib have a default value of MachineConstants.SqrtEpsilon - gives slightly less than 8 digits of accuracy. ConvergenceCriterion property - specify under what condition the algorithm is assumed to converge. Using the ConvergenceCriterion enum: WithinAbsoluteTolerance / WithinRelativeTolerance / WithinAnyTolerance / NumberOfIterations Active property - selectively ignore certain convergence tests Error property - returns the estimated error after a run MaxIterations / MaxEvaluations properties - Other Termination Criteria - If the algorithm cannot achieve the desired accuracy, the algorithm still has to end – according to an absolute boundary. Status property - indicates how the algorithm terminated - the AlgorithmStatus enum values:NoResult / Busy / Converged (ended normally - The desired accuracy has been achieved) / IterationLimitExceeded / EvaluationLimitExceeded / RoundOffError / BadFunction / Divergent / ConvergedToFalseSolution. After the iteration terminates, the Status should be inspected to verify that the algorithm terminated normally. Alternatively, you can set the ThrowExceptionOnFailure to true. Result property - returns the result of the algorithm. This property contains the best available estimate, even if the desired accuracy was not obtained. IterationsNeeded / EvaluationsNeeded properties - returns the number of iterations required to obtain the result, number of function evaluations.  Concrete Types of Convergence Test classes SimpleConvergenceTest class - test if a value is close to zero or very small compared to another value. VectorConvergenceTest class - test convergence of vectors. This class has two additional properties. The Norm property specifies which norm is to be used when calculating the size of the vector - the VectorConvergenceNorm enum values: EuclidianNorm / Maximum / SumOfAbsoluteValues. The ErrorMeasure property specifies how the error is to be measured – VectorConvergenceErrorMeasure enum values: Norm / Componentwise ConvergenceTestCollection class - represent a combination of tests. The Quantifier property is a ConvergenceTestQuantifier enum that specifies how the tests in the collection are to be combined: Any / All  The AlgorithmHelper Class inherits from IterativeAlgorithm<T> and exposes two methods for convergence testing. IsValueWithinTolerance<T> method - determines whether a value is close to another value to within an algorithm's requested tolerance. IsIntervalWithinTolerance<T> method - determines whether an interval is within an algorithm's requested tolerance.

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Software as a Service (SaaS)

  - by Clint Edmonson

  The cloud was tailor built for aspiring companies to create innovative internet based applications and solutions. Whether you’re a garage startup with very little capital or a Fortune 1000 company, the ability to quickly setup, deliver, and iterate on new products is key to capturing market and mind share. And if you can capture that share and go viral, having resiliency and infinite scale at your finger tips is great peace of mind. Drivers Cost avoidance Time to market Scalability Solution Here’s a sketch of how a basic Software as a Service solution might be built out: Ingredients Web Role – this hosts the core web application. Each web role will host an instance of the software and as the user base grows, additional roles can be spun up to meet demand. Access Control – this service is essential to managing user identity. It’s backed by a full blown implementation of Active Directory and allows the definition and management of users, groups, and roles. A pre-built ASP.NET membership provider is included in the training kit to leverage this capability but it’s also flexible enough to be combined with external Identity providers including Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. The provider model provides extensibility to hook into other industry specific identity providers as well. Databases – nearly every modern SaaS application is backed by a relational database for its core operational data. If the solution is sold to organizations, there’s a good chance multi-tenancy will be needed. An emerging best practice for SaaS applications is to stand up separate SQL Azure database instances for each tenant’s proprietary data to ensure isolation from other tenants. Worker Role – this is the best place to handle autonomous background processing such as data aggregation, billing through external services, and other specialized tasks that can be performed asynchronously. Placing these tasks in a worker role frees the web roles to focus completely on user interaction and data input and provides finer grained control over the system’s scalability and throughput. Caching (optional) – as a web site traffic grows caching can be leveraged to keep frequently used read-only, user specific, and application resource data in a high-speed distributed in-memory for faster response times and ultimately higher scalability without spinning up more web and worker roles. It includes a token based security model that works alongside the Access Control service. Blobs (optional) – depending on the nature of the software, users may be creating or uploading large volumes of heterogeneous data such as documents or rich media. Blob storage provides a scalable, resilient way to store terabytes of user data. The storage facilities can also integrate with the Access Control service to ensure users’ data is delivered securely. Training & Examples These links point to online Windows Azure training labs and examples where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. Developing Applications for the Cloud, 2nd Edition (eBook) This book demonstrates how you can create from scratch a multi-tenant, Software as a Service (SaaS) application to run in the cloud using the latest versions of the Windows Azure Platform and tools. The book is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services that run on or interact with the cloud. Fabrikam Shipping (SaaS reference application) This is a full end to end sample scenario which demonstrates how to use the Windows Azure platform for exposing an application as a service. We developed this demo just as you would: we had an existing on-premises sample, Fabrikam Shipping, and we wanted to see what it would take to transform it in a full subscription based solution. The demo you find here is the result of that investigation See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including more links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• Database-as-a-Service on Exadata Cloud

  - by Gagan Chawla

  Note – Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c DBaaS is platform agnostic and is designed to work on Exadata/non-Exadata, physical/virtual, Oracle/non Oracle platforms and it’s not a mandatory requirement to use Exadata as the base platform. Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is an important trend these days and the top business drivers motivating customers towards private database cloud model include constant pressure to reduce IT Costs and Complexity, and also to be able to improve Agility and Quality of Service. The first step many enterprises take in their journey towards cloud computing is to move to a consolidated and standardized environment and Exadata being already a proven best-in-class popular consolidation platform, we are seeing now more and more customers starting to evolve from Exadata based platform into an agile self service driven private database cloud using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. Together Exadata Database Machine and Enterprise Manager 12c provides industry’s most comprehensive and integrated solution to transform from a typical silo’ed environment into enterprise class database cloud with self service, rapid elasticity and pay-per-use capabilities.   In today’s post, I’ll list down the important steps to enable DBaaS on Exadata using Enterprise Manager 12c. These steps are chalked down based on a recent DBaaS implementation from a real customer engagement - Project Planning - First step involves defining the scope of implementation, mapping functional requirements and objectives to use cases, defining high availability, network, security requirements, and delivering the project plan. In a Cloud project you plan around technology, business and processes all together so ensure you engage your actual end users and stakeholders early on in the project right from the scoping and planning stage. Setup your EM 12c Cloud Control Site – Once the project plan approval and sign off from stakeholders is achieved, refer to EM 12c Install guide and these are some important tips to follow during the site setup phase - Review the new EM 12c Sizing paper before you get started with install Cloud, Chargeback and Trending, Exadata plug ins should be selected to deploy during install Refer to EM 12c Administrator’s guide for High Availability, Security, Network/Firewall best practices and options Your management and managed infrastructure should not be combined i.e. EM 12c repository should not be hosted on same Exadata where target Database Cloud is to be setup Setup Roles and Users – Cloud Administrator (EM_CLOUD_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service Administrator (EM_SSA_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service User (EM_SSA_USER) are the important roles required for cloud lifecycle management. Roles and users are managed by Super Administrator via Setup menu –> Security option. For Self Service/SSA users custom role(s) based on EM_SSA_USER should be created and EM_USER, PUBLIC roles should be revoked during SSA user account creation. Configure Software Library – Cloud Administrator logs in and in this step configures software library via Enterprise menu –> provisioning and patching option and the storage location is OMS shared filesystem. Software Library is the centralized repository that stores all software entities and is often termed as ‘local store’. Setup Self Update – Self Update is one of the most innovative and cool new features in EM 12c framework. Self update can be accessed via Setup -> Extensibility option by Super Administrator and is the unified delivery mechanism to get all new and updated entities (Agent software, plug ins, connectors, gold images, provisioning bundles etc) in EM 12c. Deploy Agents on all Compute nodes, and discover Exadata targets – Refer to Exadata discovery cookbook for detailed walkthrough to ensure successful discovery of Exadata targets. Configure Privilege Delegation Settings – This step involves deployment of privilege setting template on all the nodes by Super Administrator via Setup menu -> Security option with the option to define whether to use sudo or powerbroker for all provisioning and patching operations. Provision Grid Infrastructure with RAC Database on Compute Nodes – Software is provisioned in this step via a provisioning profile using EM 12c database provisioning. In case of Exadata, Grid Infrastructure and RAC Database software is already deployed on compute nodes via OneCommand from Oracle, so SSA Administrator just needs to discover Oracle Homes and Listener as EM targets. Databases will be created as and when users request for databases from cloud. Customize Create Database Deployment Procedure – the actual database creation steps are "templatized" in this step by Self Service Administrator and the newly saved deployment procedure will be used during service template creation in next step. This is an important step and make sure you have locked all the required variables marked as locked as ‘Y’ in this table. Setup Self Service Portal – This step involves setting up of zones, user quotas, service templates, chargeback plan. The SSA portal is setup by Self Service Administrator via Setup menu -> Cloud -> Database option and following guided workflow. Refer to DBaaS cookbook for details. You also have an option to customize SSA login page via steps documented in EM 12c Cloud Administrator’s guide Final Checks – Define and document process guidelines for SSA users and administrators. Get your SSA users trained on Self Service Portal features and overall DBaaS model and SSA administrators should be familiar with Self Service Portal setup pieces, EM 12c database lifecycle management capabilities and overall EM 12c monitoring framework. GO LIVE – Announce rollout of Database-as-a-Service to your SSA users. Users can login to the Self Service Portal and request/monitor/view their databases in Exadata based database cloud. Congratulations! You just delivered a successful database cloud implementation project! In future posts, we will cover these additional useful topics around database cloud – DBaaS Implementation tips and tricks – right from setup to self service to managing the cloud lifecycle ‘How to’ enable real production databases copies in DBaaS with rapid provisioning in database cloud Case study of a customer who recently achieved success with their transformational journey from traditional silo’ed environment on to Exadata based database cloud using Enterprise Manager 12c. More Information – Podcast on Database as a Service using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Installation and Administration guide, Cloud Administration guide DBaaS Cookbook Exadata Discovery Cookbook Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Set Up the Cloud Self-Service Portal Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Use the Cloud Self-Service Portal Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• Financial Management: Why Move to the Cloud?

  - by Kathryn Perry

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

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• Physics System ignores collision in some rare cases

  - by Gajoo

  I've been developing a simple physics engine for my game. since the game physics is very simple I've decided to increase accuracy a little bit. Instead of formal integration methods like fourier or RK4, I'm directly computing the results after delta time "dt". based on the very first laws of physics : dx = 0.5 * a * dt^2 + v0 * dt dv = a * dt where a is acceleration and v0 is object's previous velocity. Also to handle collisions I've used a method which is somehow different from those I've seen so far. I'm detecting all the collision in the given time frame, stepping the world forward to the nearest collision, resolving it and again check for possible collisions. As I said the world consist of very simple objects, so I'm not loosing any performance due to multiple collision checking. First I'm checking if the ball collides with any walls around it (which is working perfectly) and then I'm checking if it collides with the edges of the walls (yellow points in the picture). the algorithm seems to work without any problem except some rare cases, in which the collision with points are ignored. I've tested everything and all the variables seem to be what they should but after leaving the system work for a minute or two the system the ball passes through one of those points. Here is collision portion of my code, hopefully one of you guys can give me a hint where to look for a potential bug! void PhysicalWorld::checkForPointCollision(Vec2 acceleration, PhysicsComponent& ball, Vec2& collisionNormal, float& collisionTime, Vec2 target) { // this function checks if there will be any collision between a circle and a point // ball contains informations about the circle (it's current velocity, position and radius) // collisionNormal is an output variable // collisionTime is also an output varialbe // target is the point I want to check for collisions Vec2 V = ball.mVelocity; Vec2 A = acceleration; Vec2 P = ball.mPosition - target; float wallWidth = mMap->getWallWidth() / (mMap->getWallWidth() + mMap->getHallWidth()) / 2; float r = ball.mRadius / (mMap->getWallWidth() + mMap->getHallWidth()); // r is ball radius scaled to match actual rendered object. if (A.any()) // todo : I need to first correctly solve the collisions in case there is no acceleration return; if (V.any()) // if object is not moving there will be no collisions! { float D = P.x * V.y - P.y * V.x; float Delta = r*r*V.length2() - D*D; if(Delta < eps) return; Delta = sqrt(Delta); float sgnvy = V.y > 0 ? 1: (V.y < 0?-1:0); Vec2 c1(( D*V.y+sgnvy*V.x*Delta) / V.length2(), (-D*V.x+fabs(V.y)*Delta) / V.length2()); Vec2 c2(( D*V.y-sgnvy*V.x*Delta) / V.length2(), (-D*V.x-fabs(V.y)*Delta) / V.length2()); float t1 = (c1.x - P.x) / V.x; float t2 = (c2.x - P.x) / V.x; if(t1 > eps && t1 <= collisionTime) { collisionTime = t1; collisionNormal = c1; } if(t2 > eps && t2 <= collisionTime) { collisionTime = t2; collisionNormal = c2; } } } // this function should step the world forward by dt. it doesn't check for collision of any two balls (components) // it just checks if there is a collision between the current component and 4 points forming a rectangle around it. void PhysicalWorld::step(float dt) { for (unsigned i=0;i<mObjects.size();i++) { PhysicsComponent &current = *mObjects[i]; Vec2 acceleration = current.mForces * current.mInvMass; float rt=dt; // stores how much more the world should advance while(rt > eps) { float collisionTime = rt; Vec2 collisionNormal = Vec2(0,0); float halfWallWidth = mMap->getWallWidth() / (mMap->getWallWidth() + mMap->getHallWidth()) / 2; // we check if there is any collision with any of those 4 points around the ball // if there is a collision both collisionNormal and collisionTime variables will change // after these functions collisionTime will be exactly the value of nearest collision (if any) // and if there was, collisionNormal will report in which direction the ball should return. checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2(floor(current.mPosition.x) + halfWallWidth,floor(current.mPosition.y) + halfWallWidth)); checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2(floor(current.mPosition.x) + halfWallWidth, ceil(current.mPosition.y) - halfWallWidth)); checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2( ceil(current.mPosition.x) - halfWallWidth,floor(current.mPosition.y) + halfWallWidth)); checkForPointCollision(acceleration,current,collisionNormal,collisionTime,Vec2( ceil(current.mPosition.x) - halfWallWidth, ceil(current.mPosition.y) - halfWallWidth)); // either if there is a collision or if there is not we step the forward since we are sure there will be no collision before collisionTime current.mPosition += collisionTime * (collisionTime * acceleration * 0.5 + current.mVelocity); current.mVelocity += collisionTime * acceleration; // if the ball collided with anything collisionNormal should be at least none zero in one of it's axis if (collisionNormal.any()) { collisionNormal *= Dot(collisionNormal, current.mVelocity) / collisionNormal.length2(); current.mVelocity -= 2 * collisionNormal; // simply reverse velocity along collision normal direction } rt -= collisionTime; } // reset all forces for current object so it'll be ready for later game event current.mForces.zero(); } }

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• JavaOne 2012 Sunday Strategy Keynote

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  At the Sunday Strategy Keynote, held at the Masonic Auditorium, Hasan Rizvi, EVP, Middleware and Java Development, stated that the theme for this year's JavaOne is: “Make the future Java”-- meaning that Java continues in its role as the most popular, complete, productive, secure, and innovative development platform. But it also means, he qualified, the process by which we make the future Java -- an open, transparent, collaborative, and community-driven evolution. "Many of you have bet your businesses and your careers on Java, and we have bet our business on Java," he said.Rizvi detailed the three factors they consider critical to the success of Java--technology innovation, community participation, and Oracle's leadership/stewardship. He offered a scorecard in these three realms over the past year--with OS X and Linux ARM support on Java SE, open sourcing of JavaFX by the end of the year, the release of Java Embedded Suite 7.0 middleware platform, and multiple releases on the Java EE side. The JCP process continues, with new JSR activity, and JUGs show a 25% increase in participation since last year. Oracle, meanwhile, continues its commitment to both technology and community development/outreach--with four regional JavaOne conferences last year in various part of the world, as well as the release of Java Magazine, with over 120,000 current subscribers. Georges Saab, VP Development, Java SE, next reviewed features of Java SE 7--the first major revision to the platform under Oracle's stewardship, which has included near-monthly update releases offering hundreds of fixes, performance enhancements, and new features. Saab indicated that developers, ISVs, and hosting providers have all been rapid adopters of the platform. He also noted that Oracle's entire Fusion middleware stack is supported on SE 7. The supported platforms for SE 7 has also increased--from Windows, Linux, and Solaris, to OS X, Linux ARM, and the emerging ARM micro-server market. "In the last year, we've added as many new platforms for Java, as were added in the previous decade," said Saab.Saab also explored the upcoming JDK 8 release--including Project Lambda, Project Nashorn (a modern implementation of JavaScript running on the JVM), and others. He noted that Nashorn functionality had already been used internally in NetBeans 7.3, and announced that they were planning to contribute the implementation to OpenJDK. Nandini Ramani, VP Development, Java Client, ME and Card, discussed the latest news pertaining to JavaFX 2.0--releases on Windows, OS X, and Linux, release of the FX Scene Builder tool, the JavaFX WebView component in NetBeans 7.3, and an OpenJFX project in OpenJDK. Nandini announced, as of Sunday, the availability for download of JavaFX on Linux ARM (developer preview), as well as Scene Builder on Linux. She noted that for next year's JDK 8 release, JavaFX will offer 3D, as well as third-party component integration. Avinder Brar, Senior Software Engineer, Navis, and Dierk König, Canoo Fellow, next took the stage and demonstrated all that JavaFX offers, with a feature-rich, animation-rich, real-time cargo management application that employs Canoo's just open-sourced Dolphin technology.Saab also explored Java SE 9 and beyond--Jigsaw modularity, Penrose Project for interoperability with OSGi, improved multi-tenancy for Java in the cloud, and Project Sumatra. Phil Rogers, HSA Foundation President and AMD Corporate Fellow, explored heterogeneous computing platforms that combine the CPU and the parallel processor of the GPU into a single piece of silicon and shared memory—a hardware technology driven by such advanced functionalities as HD video, face recognition, and cloud workloads. Project Sumatra is an OpenJDK project targeted at bringing Java to such heterogeneous platforms--with hardware and software experts working together to modify the JVM for these advanced applications and platforms.Ramani next discussed the latest with Java in the embedded space--"the Internet of things" and M2M--declaring this to be "the next IT revolution," with Java as the ideal technology for the ecosystem. Last week, Oracle released Java ME Embedded 3.2 (for micro-contollers and low-power devices), and Java Embedded Suite 7.0 (a middleware stack based on Java SE 7). Axel Hansmann, VP Strategy and Marketing, Cinterion, explored his company's use of Java in M2M, and their new release of EHS5, the world's smallest 3G-capable M2M module, running Java ME Embedded. Hansmaan explained that Java offers them the ability to create a "simple to use, scalable, coherent, end-to-end layer" for such diverse edge devices.Marc Brule, Chief Financial Office, Royal Canadian Mint, also explored the fascinating use-case of JavaCard in his country's MintChip e-cash technology--deployable on smartphones, USB device, computer, tablet, or cloud. In parting, Ramani encouraged developers to download the latest releases of Java Embedded, and try them out.Cameron Purdy, VP, Fusion Middleware Development and Java EE, summarized the latest developments and announcements in the Enterprise space--greater developer productivity in Java EE6 (with more on the way in EE 7), portability between platforms, vendors, and even cloud-to-cloud portability. The earliest version of the Java EE 7 SDK is now available for download--in GlassFish 4--with WebSocket support, better JSON support, and more. The final release is scheduled for April of 2013. Nicole Otto, Senior Director, Consumer Digital Technology, Nike, explored her company's Java technology driven enterprise ecosystem for all things sports, including the NikeFuel accelerometer wrist band. Looking beyond Java EE 7, Purdy mentioned NoSQL database functionality for EE 8, the concurrency utilities (possibly in EE 7), some of the Avatar projects in EE 7, some in EE 8, multi-tenancy for the cloud, supporting SaaS applications, and more.Rizvi ended by introducing Dr. Robert Ballard, oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer in Residence--part of Oracle's philanthropic relationship with the National Geographic Society to fund K-12 education around ocean science and conservation. Ballard is best known for having discovered the wreckage of the Titanic. He offered a fascinating video and overview of the cutting edge technology used in such deep-sea explorations, noting that in his early days, high-bandwidth exploration meant that you’d go down in a submarine and "stick your face up against the window." Now, it's a remotely operated, technology telepresence--"I think of my Hercules vehicle as my equivalent of a Na'vi. When I go beneath the sea, I actually send my spirit." Using high bandwidth satellite links, such amazing explorations can now occur via smartphone, laptop, or whatever platform. Ballard’s team regularly offers live feeds and programming out to schools and the world, spanning 188 countries--with embedding educators as part of the expeditions. It's technology at its finest, inspiring the next-generation of scientists and explorers!

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• Part 1 - Load Testing In The Cloud

  - by Tarun Arora

  Azure is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the marriage of Azure and TFS! Introduction Recently a client I worked for had 2 major business critical applications being delivered, with very little time budgeted for Performance testing, we immediately hit a bottleneck when the performance testing phase started, the in house infrastructure team could not support the hardware requirements in the short notice. It was suggested that the performance testing be performed on one of the QA environments which was a fraction of the production environment. This didn’t seem right, the team decided to turn to the cloud. The team took advantage of the elasticity offered by Azure, starting with a single test agent which was provisioned and ready for use with in 30 minutes the team scaled up to 17 test agents to perform a very comprehensive performance testing cycle. Issues were identified and resolved but the highlight was that the cost of running the ‘test rig’ proved to be less than if hosted on premise by the infrastructure team. Thank you for taking the time out to read this blog post, in the series of posts, I’ll try and cover the start to end of everything you need to know to use Azure to build your Test Rig in the cloud. But Why Azure? I have my own Data Centre… If the environment is provisioned in your own datacentre, - No matter what level of service agreement you may have with your infrastructure team there will be down time when the environment is patched - How fast can you scale up or down the environments (keeping the enterprise processes in mind) Administration, Cost, Flexibility and Scalability are the areas you would want to think around when taking the decision between your own Data Centre and Azure! How is Microsoft's Public Cloud Offering different from Amazon’s Public Cloud Offering? Microsoft's offering of the Cloud is a hybrid of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which distinguishes Microsoft's offering from other providers such as Amazon (Amazon only offers IaaS). PaaS – Platform as a Service IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service Fills the needs of those who want to build and run custom applications as services. Similar to traditional hosting, where a business will use the hosted environment as a logical extension of the on-premises datacentre. A service provider offers a pre-configured, virtualized application server environment to which applications can be deployed by the development staff. Since the service providers manage the hardware (patching, upgrades and so forth), as well as application server uptime, the involvement of IT pros is minimized. On-demand scalability combined with hardware and application server management relieves developers from infrastructure concerns and allows them to focus on building applications. The servers (physical and virtual) are rented on an as-needed basis, and the IT professionals who manage the infrastructure have full control of the software configuration. This kind of flexibility increases the complexity of the IT environment, as customer IT professionals need to maintain the servers as though they are on-premises. The maintenance activities may include patching and upgrades of the OS and the application server, load balancing, failover clustering of database servers, backup and restoration, and any other activities that mitigate the risks of hardware and software failures.   The biggest advantage with PaaS is that you do not have to worry about maintaining the environment, you can focus all your time in solving the business problems with your solution rather than worrying about maintaining the environment. If you decide to use a VM Role on Azure, you are asking for IaaS, more on this later. A nice blog post here on the difference between Saas, PaaS and IaaS. Now that we are convinced why we should be turning to the cloud and why in specific Azure, let’s discuss about the Test Rig. The Load Test Rig – Topology Now the moment of truth, Of course a big part of getting value from cloud computing is identifying the most adequate workloads to take to the cloud, so I’ve decided to try to make a Load Testing rig where the Agents are running on Windows Azure.   I’ll talk you through the above Topology, - User: User kick starts the load test run from the developer workstation on premise. This passes the request to the Test Controller. - Test Controller: The Test Controller is on premise connected to the same domain as the developer workstation. As soon as the Test Controller receives the request it makes use of the Windows Azure Connect service to orchestrate the test responsibilities to all the Test Agents. The Windows Azure Connect endpoint software must be active on all Azure instances and on the Controller machine as well. This allows IP connectivity between them and, given that the firewall is properly configured, allows the Controller to send work loads to the agents. In parallel, the Controller will collect the performance data from the agents, using the traditional WMI mechanisms. - Test Agents: The Test Agents are on the Windows Azure Public Cloud, as soon as the test controller issues instructions to the test agents, the test agents start executing the load tests. The HTTP requests are issued against the web server on premise, the results are captured by the test agents. And finally the results are passed over to the controller. - Servers: The Web Server and DB Server are hosted on premise in the datacentre, this is usually the case with business critical applications, you probably want to manage them your self. Recap and What’s next? So, in the introduction in the series of blog posts on Load Testing in the cloud I highlighted why creating a test rig in the cloud is a good idea, what advantages does Windows Azure offer and the Test Rig topology that I will be using. I would also like to mention that i stumbled upon this [Video] on Azure in a nutshell, great watch if you are new to Windows Azure. In the next post I intend to start setting up the Load Test Environment and discuss pricing with respect to test agent machine types that will be used in the test rig. Hope you enjoyed this post, If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to add to this blog post. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora.  See you in Part II.   Share this post : CodeProject

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• AppHarbor - Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET? Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET. The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire community. From that we formed a partnership with some folks at Microsoft to make v2 into something that would meet wider adoption across the community, which people now call NuGet. So now we have the concept of package management. What comes next? Heroku Instant deployments and instant scaling. Stupid simple API. This is Heroku. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you think of how fast you can go from an idea to having someone else tinker with it, you can start to see its power. In literally seconds you can be looking at your rails application deployed and online. Then when you are ready to scale, you can do that. This is power. Some may call this “cloud-computing” or PaaS (Platform as a Service). I first ran into Heroku back in July when I met Nick of RubyGems.org. At the time there was no alternative in the .NET-o-sphere. I don’t count Windows Azure, mostly because it is not simple and I don’t believe there is a free version. Heroku itself would not lend itself well to .NET due to the nature of platforms and each language’s specific needs (solution stack).  So I tucked the idea in the back of my head and moved on. AppHarbor Enters The Scene I’m not sure when I first heard about AppHarbor as a possible .NET version of Heroku. It may have been in November, but I didn’t actually try it until January. I was instantly hooked. AppHarbor is awesome! It still has a ways to go to be considered Heroku for .NET, but it already has a growing community. I created a video series (at the bottom of this post) that really highlights how fast you can get a product onto the web and really shows the power and simplicity of AppHarbor. Deploying is as simple as a git/hg push to appharbor. From there they build your code, run any unit tests you have and deploy it if everything succeeds. The screen on the right shows a simple and elegant UI to getting things done. The folks at AppHarbor graciously gave me a limited number of invites to hand out. If you are itching to try AppHarbor then navigate to: https://appharbor.com/account/new?inviteCode=ferventcoder  After playing with it, send feedback if you want more features. Go vote up two features I want that will make it more like Heroku. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with AppHarbor and have not received any funds or favors from anyone at AppHarbor. I just think it is awesome and I want others to know about it. From Zero To Deployed in 15 Minutes (Or Less) Now I have a challenge for you. I created a video series showing how fast I could go from nothing to a deployed application. It could have been from Zero to Deployed in Less than 5 minutes, but I wanted to show you the tools a little more and give you an opportunity to beat my time. And that’s the challenge. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The video series is below (at least one of the videos has to be watched on YouTube). The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize. Ground rules: .NET Application with a valid database connection Start from Zero Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST. Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th) From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 1 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 2 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 3

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• Session Report - Java on the Raspberry Pi

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  On mid-day Wednesday, the always colorful Oracle Evangelist Simon Ritter demonstrated Java on the Raspberry Pi at his session, “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?”. The Raspberry Pi consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there is a single feature that makes the Raspberry Pi significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things really makes it stand out. First, it's $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. You do have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM (Advanced RISC Machine and Acorn RISC Machine) processor is noteworthy, because it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick. When you add in the enormous community support, it offers a great platform for teaching everyone about computing.”Some 200 enthusiastic attendees were present at the session which had the feel of Simon Ritter sharing a fun toy with friends. The main point of the session was to show what Oracle was doing to support Java on the Raspberry Pi in a way that is entertaining and fun. Ritter pointed out that, in addition to being great for teaching, it’s an excellent introduction to the ARM architecture, and runs well with Java and will get better once it has official hard float support. The possibilities are vast.Ritter explained that the Raspberry Pi Project started in 2006 with the goal of devising a computer to inspire children; it drew inspiration from the BBC Micro literacy project of 1981 that produced a series of microcomputers created by the Acorn Computer company. It was officially launched on February 29, 2012, with a first production of 10,000 boards. There were 100,000 pre-orders in one day; currently about 4,000 boards are produced a day. Ritter described the specification as follows:* CPU: ARM 11 core running at 700MHz Broadcom SoC package Can now be overclocked to 1GHz (without breaking the warranty!) * Memory: 256Mb* I/O: HDMI and composite video 2 x USB ports (Model B only) Ethernet (Model B only) Header pins for GPIO, UART, SPI and I2C He took attendees through a brief history of ARM Architecture:* Acorn BBC Micro (6502 based) Not powerful enough for Acorn’s plans for a business computer * Berkeley RISC Project UNIX kernel only used 30% of instruction set of Motorola 68000 More registers, less instructions (Register windows) One chip architecture to come from this was… SPARC * Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) 32-bit data, 26-bit address space, 27 registers First machine was Acorn Archimedes * Spin off from Acorn, Advanced RISC MachinesNext he presented its features:* 32-bit RISC Architecture–  ARM accounts for 75% of embedded 32-bit CPUs today– 6.1 Billion chips sold last year (zero manufactured by ARM)* Abstract architecture and microprocessor core designs– Raspberry Pi is ARM11 using ARMv6 instruction set* Low power consumption– Good for mobile devices– Raspberry Pi can be powered from 700mA 5V only PSU– Raspberry Pi does not require heatsink or fanHe described the current ARM Technology:* ARMv6– ARM 11, ARM Cortex-M* ARMv7– ARM Cortex-A, ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-R* ARMv8 (Announced)– Will support 64-bit data and addressingHe next gave the Java Specifics for ARM: Floating point operations* Despite being an ARMv6 processor it does include an FPU– FPU only became standard as of ARMv7* FPU (Hard Float, or HF) is much faster than a software library* Linux distros and Oracle JVM for ARM assume no HF on ARMv6– Need special build of both– Raspbian distro build now available– Oracle JVM is in the works, release date TBDNot So RISCPerformance Improvements* DSP Enhancements* Jazelle* Thumb / Thumb2 / ThumbEE* Floating Point (VFP)* NEON* Security Enhancements (TrustZone)He spent a few minutes going over the challenges of using Java on the Raspberry Pi and covered:* Sound* Vision * Serial (TTL UART)* USB* GPIOTo implement sound with Java he pointed out:* Sound drivers are now included in new distros* Java Sound API– Remember to add audio to user’s groups– Some bits work, others not so much* Playing (the right format) WAV file works* Using MIDI hangs trying to open a synthesizer* FreeTTS text-to-speech– Should work once sound works properlyHe turned to JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi:* Currently internal builds only– Will be released as technology preview soon* Work involves optimal implementation of Prism graphics engine– X11?* Once the JavaFX implementation is completed there will be little of concern to developers-- It’s just Java (WORA). He explained the basis of the Serial Port:* UART provides TTL level signals (3.3V)* RS-232 uses 12V signals* Use MAX3232 chip to convert* Use this for access to serial consoleHe summarized his key points. The Raspberry Pi is a very cool (and cheap) computer that is great for teaching, a great introduction to ARM that works very well with Java and will work better in the future. The opportunities are limitless. For further info, check out, Raspberry Pi User Guide by Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree. From there, Ritter tried out several fun demos, some of which worked better than others, but all of which were greeted with considerable enthusiasm and support and good humor (even when he ran into some glitches).  All in all, this was a fun and lively session.

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• Microsoft Forcing Dev/Partners Hands on Win 8 Through Certification

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I remember 2.5 years ago when Microsoft dropped a bomb on the Microsoft Partner community: all Gold competencies would require .NET 4 based premiere certifications (MCPD). Problem was, this gave a window of about 6 months for partners to update their employees’ certifications. At the place I was working, I put together an aggressive plan and we were able to attain the certs needed. Microsoft is always open that the certification requirements will change as the industry changes. .NET 1.0 certifications are useless here in 2012, and rightfully so they’ve been retired for a long time now. But now we’re seeing a new tactic by Microsoft – shifting gears away from certifications that speak to what industry needs and more to the Windows 8 agenda. Consider that currently the premiere development certification is the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer, which comes in three flavours – Web, Windows, and Azure. All require WCF and Data Access exams, as well as one that deals with the associated base technologies (ASP.NET, WinForms/WPF, Azure), and one that ties all three together in a solution-based exam. For Microsoft-based organizations, these skills aren’t just valid but necessary in building Microsoft applications. But the MCPD is being replaced with our old friend Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD). So far, Microsoft has only released two types of MCSD – Web and Windows Store Apps. Windows Store Apps?! In a push to move developers to create WinRT-based applications, desktop development is now considered a second-class citizen in the eyes of Redmond. Also interesting are the language options for the exams: HTML5 and C#. Sorry VB folks, its time to embrace curly braces whether they be JavaScript or C#. Consider too the skills being assessed for the Windows Store Apps: Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using HTML5 Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using C# *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcsd-windows-store-apps.aspx Nov 21/2012 If you look at the skills being tested in each exam, you’ll find that skills like WCF and Data Access are downplayed compared to things like integrating Charms, facilitating Search, programming for the microphone and camera – all very Windows 8 focussed items. Where this becomes maddening is that Microsoft is still pushing Windows 7 with enterprise clients. According to a ZDNet article, Microsoft wants to see Windows 7 on 70% of enterprise desktops by mid 2013. Assuming they somehow meet that (its a pretty lofty goal), there’s years of traditional desktop-based development that will still be required at some level. For those thinking they’ll just write and stick with the MCPD certification, note that most exams that go towards that certification will be retired at the end of July 2013! (Read the small print). And while details haven’t been finalized, its a safe bet that MCPD certifications eventually won’t count towards Gold-level competencies in the Microsoft Partner program. What this means for Microsoft Partners and Developers is that certification for desktop development is going to be limited to Windows Store Apps unless Microsoft re-introduces a traditional desktop (WPF) based MCSD cert. Web Application Development – It’s Not All Bad There’s big changes on the web side of certification, but I actually see these changes as being for the good! Check out the new exam requirements for MCSD – Web Applications: Get your MCSD: Web Applications certification *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-mcsd-web-applications.aspx Nov 21, 2012 We now *start* with HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3! Now I’m sure that these will be slanted towards web development in IE, and I can hear designers everywhere bemoaning the CSS/IE combination. Still, I applaud Microsoft for adopting HTML5 as the go-to web technology and requiring certified developers to prove they have skills in the basics of web dev. The fact that the second exam clearly states “MVC Web Applications” shows that Web Forms is truly legacy and deprecated. That’s not to say there aren’t those out there that are still supporting or (for whatever reason) doing new dev with Web Forms, but this move by Microsoft is telling the community they better get on the MVC bandwagon if they want to stay current. Fantastic! And of course Azure needs to be here as well, and this is where the Microsoft agenda fits in. It’s no secret that there’s been a huge push in getting developers on to Azure. I don’t see this as being a bad thing either, as cloud computing (whether Azure, private, or 3rd party) is a necessary skill for developers to have here in 2012. The cynic in me realizes that the HTML5/JavaScript/CSS push wouldn’t be as prominent though if not for the Windows 8 Store App play, where HTML5 is a first class citizen (and an available language for the MCSD Windows Store App cert). In this case, the desktop developers loss is the web developers gain. Get Ready for Changes In addition to the changes in certifications, the Microsoft Partner competencies are going through changes as well. Web and Software Development are being merged into a single competency, meaning that licenses you would have received from having both as Gold are reduced. Other competencies are either being removed or changed, as are the exam requirements. In the same way that we’re seeing faster release cycles from Microsoft, so too will we see the Microsoft Partner Program and MS Certifications evolve faster than ever before. Many of us got caught in the last wave of changes, but this time we can see the wave coming – and it looks pretty big!

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• Educause Top-Ten IT Issues - the most change in a decade or more

  - by user739873

  The Education IT Issue Panel has released the 2012 top-ten issues facing higher education IT leadership, and instead of the customary reshuffling of the same deck, the issues reflect much of the tumult and dynamism facing higher education generally.  I find it interesting (and encouraging) that at the top of this year's list is "Updating IT Professionals' Skills and Roles to Accommodate Emerging Technologies and Changing IT Management and Service Delivery Models."  This reflects, in my view, the realization that higher education IT must change in order to fully realize the potential for transforming the institution, and therefore it's people must learn new skills, understand and accept new ways of solving problems, and not be tied down by past practices or institutional inertia. What follows in the remaining 9 top issues all speak, in some form or fashion, to the need for dramatic change, but not just in the areas of "funding IT" (code for cost containment or reduction), but rather the need to increase effectiveness and efficiency of the institution through the use of technology—leveraging the wave of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to the institution's advantage, rather than viewing it as a threat and a problem to be contained. Although it's #10 of 10, IT Governance (and establishment and implementation of the governance model throughout the institution) is key to effectively acting upon many of the preceding issues in this year's list.  In the majority of cases, technology exists to meet the needs and requirements to effectively address many of the challenges outlined in top-ten issues list. Which brings me to my next point. Although I try not to sound too much like an Oracle commercial in these (all too infrequent) blog posts, I can't help but point out how much confluence there is between several of the top issues this year and what my colleagues and I have been evangelizing for some time. Starting from the bottom of the list up: 1) I'm gratified that research and the IT challenges it presents has made the cut.  Big Data (or Large Data as it's phased in the report) is rapidly going to overwhelm much of what exists today even at our most prepared and well-equipped research universities.  Combine large data with the significantly more stringent requirements around data preservation, archiving, sharing, curation, etc. coming from granting agencies like NSF, and you have the brewing storm that could result in a lot of "one-off" solutions to a problem that could very well be addressed collectively and "at scale."   2) Transformative effects of IT – while I see more and more examples of this, there is still much more that can be achieved. My experience tells me that culture (as the report indicates or at least poses the question) gets in the way more than technology not being up to task.  We spend too much time on "context" and not "core," and get lost in the weeds on the journey to truly transforming the institution with technology. 3) Analytics as a key element in improving various institutional outcomes.  In our work around Student Success, we see predictive "academic" analytics as essential to getting in front of the Student Success issue, regardless of how an institution or collections of institutions defines success.  Analytics must be part of the fabric of the key academic enterprise applications, not a bolt-on.  We will spend a significant amount of time on this topic during our semi-annual Education Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington, D.C. later this month. 4) Cloud strategy for the broad range of applications in the academic enterprise.  Some of the recent work by Casey Green at the Campus Computing Survey would seem to indicate that there is movement in this area but mostly in what has been termed "below the campus" application areas such as collaboration tools, recruiting, and alumni relations.  It's time to get serious about sourcing elements of mature applications like student information systems, HR, Finance, etc. leveraging a model other than traditional on-campus custom. I've only selected a few areas of the list to highlight, but the unifying theme here (and this is where I run the risk of sounding like an Oracle commercial) is that these lofty goals cry out for partners that can bring economies of scale to bear on the problems married with a deep understanding of the nuances unique to higher education.  In a recent piece in Educause Review on Student Information Systems, the author points out that "best of breed is back". Unfortunately I am compelled to point out that best of breed is a large part of the reason we have made as little progress as we have as an industry in advancing some of the causes outlined above.  Don't confuse "integrated" and "full stack" for vendor lock-in.  The best-of-breed market forces that Ron points to ensure that solutions have to be "integratable" or they don't survive in the marketplace. However, by leveraging the efficiencies afforded by adopting solutions that are pre-integrated (and possibly metered out as a service) allows us to shed unnecessary costs – as difficult as these decisions are to make and to drive throughout the organization. Cole

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• Pace Layering Comes Alive

  - by Tanu Sood

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick hosts the IT Leaders Editorial on a monthly basis. By now, readers of this column are quite familiar with Oracle AppAdvantage, a unified framework of middleware technologies, infrastructure and applications utilizing a pace layered approach to enterprise systems platforms. 1. Standardize and Consolidate core Enterprise Applications by removing invasive customizations, costly workarounds and the complexity that multiple instances creates. 2. Move business specific processes and applications to the Differentiate Layer, thus creating greater business agility with process extensions and best of breed applications managed by cross- application process orchestration. 3. The Innovate Layer contains all the business capabilities required for engagement, collaboration and intuitive decision making. This is the layer where innovation will occur, as people engage one another in a secure yet open and informed way. 4. Simplify IT by minimizing complexity, improving performance and lowering cost with secure, reliable and managed systems across the entire Enterprise. But what hasn’t been discussed is the pace layered architecture that Oracle AppAdvantage adopts. What is it, what are its origins and why is it relevant to enterprise scale applications and technologies? It’s actually a fascinating tale that spans the past 20 years and a basic understanding of it provides a wonderful context to what is evolving as the future of enterprise systems platforms. It all begins in 1994 with a book by noted architect Stewart Brand, of ’Whole Earth Catalog’ fame. In his 1994 book How Buildings Learn, Brand popularized the term ‘Shearing Layers’, arguing that any building is actually a hierarchy of pieces, each of which inherently changes at different rates. In 1997 he produced a 6 part BBC Series adapted from the book, in which Part 6 focuses on Shearing Layers. In this segment Brand begins to introduce the concept of ‘pace’. Brand further refined this idea in his subsequent book, The Clock of the Long Now, which began to link the concept of Shearing Layers to computing and introduced the term ‘pace layering’, where he proposes that: “An imperative emerges: an adaptive [system] has to allow slippage between the differently-paced systems … otherwise the slow systems block the flow of the quick ones and the quick ones tear up the slow ones with their constant change. Embedding the systems together may look efficient at first but over time it is the opposite and destructive as well.” In 2000, IBM architects Ian Simmonds and David Ing published a paper entitled A Shearing Layers Approach to Information Systems Development, which applied the concept of Shearing Layers to systems design and development. It argued that at the time systems were still too rigid; that they constrained organizations by their inability to adapt to changes. The findings in the Conclusions section are particularly striking: “Our starting motivation was that enterprises need to become more adaptive, and that an aspect of doing that is having adaptable computer systems. The challenge is then to optimize information systems development for change (high maintenance) rather than stability (low maintenance). Our response is to make it explicit within software engineering the notion of shearing layers, and explore it as the principle that systems should be built to be adaptable in response to the qualitatively different rates of change to which they will be subjected. This allows us to separate functions that should legitimately change relatively slowly and at significant cost from that which should be changeable often, quickly and cheaply.” The problem at the time of course was that this vision of adaptable systems was simply not possible within the confines of 1st generation ERP, which were conceived, designed and developed for standardization and compliance. It wasn’t until the maturity of open, standards based integration, and the middleware innovation that followed, that pace layering became an achievable goal. And Oracle is leading the way. Oracle’s AppAdvantage framework makes pace layering come alive by taking a strategic vision 20 years in the making and transforming it to a reality. It allows enterprises to retain and even optimize their existing ERP systems, while wrapping around those ERP systems three layers of capabilities that inherently adapt as needed, at a pace that’s optimal for the enterprise.

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• Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity Patterns

  - by Rajesh Raheja

  Do you have a requirement to convert an Opportunity in Salesforce.com to an Order/Quote in Oracle E-Business Suite? Or maybe you want the creation of an Oracle RightNow Incident to trigger an on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite Service Request creation for RMA and Field Scheduling? If so, read on. In a previous blog post, I discussed integrating TO cloud applications, however the use cases above are the reverse i.e. receiving data FROM cloud applications (SaaS) TO on-premise applications/databases that sit behind a firewall. Oracle SOA Suite is assumed to be on-premise with with Oracle Service Bus as the mediation and virtualization layer. The main considerations for the patterns are are security i.e. shielding enterprise resources; and scalability i.e. minimizing firewall latency. Let me use an analogy to help visualize the patterns: the on-premise system is your home - with your most valuable possessions - and the SaaS app is your favorite on-line store which regularly ships (inbound calls) various types of parcels/items (message types/service operations). You need the items at home (on-premise) but want to safe guard against misguided elements of society (internet threats) who may masquerade as postal workers and vandalize property (denial of service?). Let's look at the patterns. Pattern: Pull from Cloud The on-premise system polls from the SaaS apps and picks up the message instead of having it delivered. This may be done using Oracle RightNow Object Query Language or SOAP APIs. This is particularly suited for certain integration approaches wherein messages are trickling in, can be centralized and batched e.g. retrieving event notifications on an hourly schedule from the Oracle Messaging Service. To compare this pattern with the home analogy, you are avoiding any deliveries to your home and instead go to the post office/UPS/Fedex store to pick up your parcel. Every time. Pros: On-premise assets not exposed to the Internet, firewall issues avoided by only initiating outbound connections Cons: Polling mechanisms may affect performance, may not satisfy near real-time requirements Pattern: Open Firewall Ports The on-premise system exposes the web services that needs to be invoked by the cloud application. This requires opening up firewall ports, routing calls to the appropriate internal services behind the firewall. Fusion Applications uses this pattern, and auto-provisions the services on the various virtual hosts to secure the topology. This works well for service integration, but may not suffice for large volume data integration. Using the home analogy, you have now decided to receive parcels instead of going to the post office every time. A door mail slot cut out allows the postman can drop small parcels, but there is still concern about cutting new holes for larger packages. Pros: optimal pattern for near real-time needs, simpler administration once the service is provisioned Cons: Needs firewall ports to be opened up for new services, may not suffice for batch integration requiring direct database access Pattern: Virtual Private Networking The on-premise network is "extended" to the cloud (or an intermediary on-demand / managed service offering) using Virtual Private Networking (VPN) so that messages are delivered to the on-premise system in a trusted channel. Using the home analogy, you entrust a set of keys with a neighbor or property manager who receives the packages, and then drops it inside your home. Pros: Individual firewall ports don't need to be opened, more suited for high scalability needs, can support large volume data integration, easier management of one connection vs a multitude of open ports Cons: VPN setup, specific hardware support, requires cloud provider to support virtual private computing Pattern: Reverse Proxy / API Gateway The on-premise system uses a reverse proxy "API gateway" software on the DMZ to receive messages. The reverse proxy can be implemented using various mechanisms e.g. Oracle API Gateway provides firewall and proxy services along with comprehensive security, auditing, throttling benefits. If a firewall already exists, then Oracle Service Bus or Oracle HTTP Server virtual hosts can provide reverse proxy implementations on the DMZ. Custom built implementations are also possible if specific functionality (such as message store-n-forward) is needed. In the home analogy, this pattern sits in between cutting mail slots and handing over keys. Instead, you install (and maintain) a mailbox in your home premises outside your door. The post office delivers the parcels in your mailbox, from where you can securely retrieve it. Pros: Very secure, very flexible Cons: Introduces a new software component, needs DMZ deployment and management Pattern: On-Premise Agent (Tunneling) A light weight "agent" software sits behind the firewall and initiates the communication with the cloud, thereby avoiding firewall issues. It then maintains a bi-directional connection either with pull or push based approaches using (or abusing, depending on your viewpoint) the HTTP protocol. Programming protocols such as Comet, WebSockets, HTTP CONNECT, HTTP SSH Tunneling etc. are possible implementation options. In the home analogy, a resident receives the parcel from the postal worker by opening the door, however you still take precautions with chain locks and package inspections. Pros: Light weight software, IT doesn't need to setup anything Cons: May bypass critical firewall checks e.g. virus scans, separate software download, proliferation of non-IT managed software Conclusion The patterns above are some of the most commonly encountered ones for cloud to on-premise integration. Selecting the right pattern for your project involves looking at your scalability needs, security restrictions, sync vs asynchronous implementation, near real-time vs batch expectations, cloud provider capabilities, budget, and more. In some cases, the basic "Pull from Cloud" may be acceptable, whereas in others, an extensive VPN topology may be well justified. For more details on the Oracle cloud integration strategy, download this white paper.

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• Cloud to On-Premise Connectivity Patterns

  - by Rajesh Raheja

  Do you have a requirement to convert an Opportunity in Salesforce.com to an Order/Quote in Oracle E-Business Suite? Or maybe you want the creation of an Oracle RightNow Incident to trigger an on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite Service Request creation for RMA and Field Scheduling? If so, read on. In a previous blog post, I discussed integrating TO cloud applications, however the use cases above are the reverse i.e. receiving data FROM cloud applications (SaaS) TO on-premise applications/databases that sit behind a firewall. Oracle SOA Suite is assumed to be on-premise with with Oracle Service Bus as the mediation and virtualization layer. The main considerations for the patterns are are security i.e. shielding enterprise resources; and scalability i.e. minimizing firewall latency. Let me use an analogy to help visualize the patterns: the on-premise system is your home - with your most valuable possessions - and the SaaS app is your favorite on-line store which regularly ships (inbound calls) various types of parcels/items (message types/service operations). You need the items at home (on-premise) but want to safe guard against misguided elements of society (internet threats) who may masquerade as postal workers and vandalize property (denial of service?). Let's look at the patterns. Pattern: Pull from Cloud The on-premise system polls from the SaaS apps and picks up the message instead of having it delivered. This may be done using Oracle RightNow Object Query Language or SOAP APIs. This is particularly suited for certain integration approaches wherein messages are trickling in, can be centralized and batched e.g. retrieving event notifications on an hourly schedule from the Oracle Messaging Service. To compare this pattern with the home analogy, you are avoiding any deliveries to your home and instead go to the post office/UPS/Fedex store to pick up your parcel. Every time. Pros: On-premise assets not exposed to the Internet, firewall issues avoided by only initiating outbound connections Cons: Polling mechanisms may affect performance, may not satisfy near real-time requirements Pattern: Open Firewall Ports The on-premise system exposes the web services that needs to be invoked by the cloud application. This requires opening up firewall ports, routing calls to the appropriate internal services behind the firewall. Fusion Applications uses this pattern, and auto-provisions the services on the various virtual hosts to secure the topology. This works well for service integration, but may not suffice for large volume data integration. Using the home analogy, you have now decided to receive parcels instead of going to the post office every time. A door mail slot cut out allows the postman can drop small parcels, but there is still concern about cutting new holes for larger packages. Pros: optimal pattern for near real-time needs, simpler administration once the service is provisioned Cons: Needs firewall ports to be opened up for new services, may not suffice for batch integration requiring direct database access Pattern: Virtual Private Networking The on-premise network is "extended" to the cloud (or an intermediary on-demand / managed service offering) using Virtual Private Networking (VPN) so that messages are delivered to the on-premise system in a trusted channel. Using the home analogy, you entrust a set of keys with a neighbor or property manager who receives the packages, and then drops it inside your home. Pros: Individual firewall ports don't need to be opened, more suited for high scalability needs, can support large volume data integration, easier management of one connection vs a multitude of open ports Cons: VPN setup, specific hardware support, requires cloud provider to support virtual private computing Pattern: Reverse Proxy / API Gateway The on-premise system uses a reverse proxy "API gateway" software on the DMZ to receive messages. The reverse proxy can be implemented using various mechanisms e.g. Oracle API Gateway provides firewall and proxy services along with comprehensive security, auditing, throttling benefits. If a firewall already exists, then Oracle Service Bus or Oracle HTTP Server virtual hosts can provide reverse proxy implementations on the DMZ. Custom built implementations are also possible if specific functionality (such as message store-n-forward) is needed. In the home analogy, this pattern sits in between cutting mail slots and handing over keys. Instead, you install (and maintain) a mailbox in your home premises outside your door. The post office delivers the parcels in your mailbox, from where you can securely retrieve it. Pros: Very secure, very flexible Cons: Introduces a new software component, needs DMZ deployment and management Pattern: On-Premise Agent (Tunneling) A light weight "agent" software sits behind the firewall and initiates the communication with the cloud, thereby avoiding firewall issues. It then maintains a bi-directional connection either with pull or push based approaches using (or abusing, depending on your viewpoint) the HTTP protocol. Programming protocols such as Comet, WebSockets, HTTP CONNECT, HTTP SSH Tunneling etc. are possible implementation options. In the home analogy, a resident receives the parcel from the postal worker by opening the door, however you still take precautions with chain locks and package inspections. Pros: Light weight software, IT doesn't need to setup anything Cons: May bypass critical firewall checks e.g. virus scans, separate software download, proliferation of non-IT managed software Conclusion The patterns above are some of the most commonly encountered ones for cloud to on-premise integration. Selecting the right pattern for your project involves looking at your scalability needs, security restrictions, sync vs asynchronous implementation, near real-time vs batch expectations, cloud provider capabilities, budget, and more. In some cases, the basic "Pull from Cloud" may be acceptable, whereas in others, an extensive VPN topology may be well justified. For more details on the Oracle cloud integration strategy, download this white paper.

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• Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In

  - by yaldahhakim

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In Eggs, flour, milk, and sugar. The magic happens when you mix these ingredients together. The same goes for the hottest technologies fast changing how IT impacts our organizations today: cloud, social, mobile, and big data. By themselves they’re pretty good; combining them with a great recipe is what unlocks real transformation power. Choosing the right cloud can be very similar to choosing the right cake. First consider comparing the core ingredients that go into baking a cake and the core design principles in building a cloud-based application. For instance, if flour is the base ingredient of a cake, then rich functionality that spans complete business processes is the base of an enterprise-grade cloud. Cloud computing is more than just consuming an "application as service", and having someone else manage it for you. Rather, the value of cloud is about making your business more agile in the marketplace, and shortening the time it takes to deliver and adopt new innovation. It’s also about improving not only the efficiency at which we communicate but the actual quality of the information shared as well. Data from different systems, like ingredients in a cake, must also be blended together effectively and evaluated through a consolidated lens. When this doesn’t happen, for instance when data in your sales cloud doesn't seamlessly connect with your order management and other “back office” applications, the speed and quality of information can decrease drastically. It’s like mixing ingredients in a strainer with a straw – you just can’t bring it all together without losing something. Mixing ingredients is similar to bringing clouds together, and co-existing cloud applications with traditional on premise applications. This is where a shared services  platform built on open standards and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is critical. It’s essentially a cloud recipe that calls for not only great ingredients, but also ingredients you can get locally or most likely already have in your kitchen (or IT shop.) Open standards is the best way to deliver a cost effective, durable application integration strategy – regardless of where your apps are deployed. It’s also the best way to build your own cloud applications, or extend the ones you consume from a third party. Just like using standard ingredients and tools you already have in your kitchen, a standards based cloud enables your IT resources to ensure a cloud works easily with other systems. Your IT staff can also make changes using tools they are already familiar with. Or even more ideal, enable business users to actually tailor their experience without having to call upon IT for help at all. This frees IT resources to focus more on developing new innovative services for the organization vs. run and maintain. Carrying the cake analogy forward, you need to add all the ingredients in before you bake it. The same is true with a modern cloud. To harness the full power of cloud, you can’t leave out some of the most important ingredients and just layer them on top later. This is what a lot of our niche competitors have done when it comes to social, mobile, big data and analytics, and other key technologies impacting the way we do business. The transformational power of these technology trends comes from having a strategy from the get-go that combines them into a winning recipe, and delivers them in a unified way. In looking at ways Oracle’s cloud is different from other clouds – not only is breadth of functionality rich across functional pillars like CRM, HCM, ERP, etc. but it embeds social, mobile, and rich intelligence capabilities where they make the most sense across business processes. This strategy enables the Oracle Cloud to uniquely deliver on all three of these dimensions to help our customers unlock the full power of these transformational technologies.

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