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• BUILD apps that use C++ AMP

  - by Daniel Moth

  If you are a developer on the Microsoft platform, you are hopefully attending (live or virtually) the sessions of the BUILD conference, aka //build/ in Anaheim, CA. The conference sold out not long after it opened registration, and it achieved that without sharing *any* session details nor a meaningful agenda up until after the keynote today – impressive! I am speaking at BUILD and hope you'll catch my talk at 9am on Friday (the last day of the conference) at Marriott Elite 2 Ballroom. Session details follow. 802 - Taming GPU compute with C++ AMP Developers today inject parallelism into their compute-intensive applications in order to take advantage of multi-core CPU hardware. Beyond CPUs, however, compute accelerators such as general-purpose GPUs can provide orders of magnitude speed-ups for data parallel algorithms. How can you as a C++ developer fully utilize this heterogeneous hardware from your Visual Studio environment?  How can you benefit from this tremendous performance boost in your Visual C++ solutions without sacrificing developer productivity?  The answers will be presented in this session about C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism. I'll be covering a lot of the material I've been recently blogging about on my blog that you are reading, which I have also indexed over on our team blog under the title: "C++ AMP in a nutshell". Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• NuGet 1.1 Released

  - by ScottGu

  This past weekend the ASP.NET team released NuGet 1.1.  Phil Haack recently blogged a bunch of details on the enhancements it brings, as well as how to update to it if you already have NuGet 1.0 installed.  It is definitely a nice update (my favorite improvement is that it no longer blocks the UI when downloading packages). Read Phil’s blog post about the NuGet 1.1 update and how it install it here.  NuGet is Not just for Web Projects NuGet is not just for ASP.NET projects – it supports any .NET project type.  Pete Brown recently did a nice blog post where he talked about using NuGet for WPF and Silverlight Development as well.  You can read Pete’s blog post about NuGet for WPF and Silverlight here. How to Install NuGet if you Don't Already have it Installed If you don’t already have NuGet installed, you can download and install it (as well as browse the 700+ OSS packages now available with it) from the http://NuGet.org website. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• So…is it a Seek or a Scan?

  - by Paul White

  You’re probably most familiar with the terms ‘Seek’ and ‘Scan’ from the graphical plans produced by SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).  The image to the left shows the most common ones, with the three types of scan at the top, followed by four types of seek.  You might look to the SSMS tool-tip descriptions to explain the differences between them: Not hugely helpful are they?  Both mention scans and ranges (nothing about seeks) and the Index Seek description implies that it will not scan the index entirely (which isn’t necessarily true). Recall also yesterday’s post where we saw two Clustered Index Seek operations doing very different things.  The first Seek performed 63 single-row seeking operations; and the second performed a ‘Range Scan’ (more on those later in this post).  I hope you agree that those were two very different operations, and perhaps you are wondering why there aren’t different graphical plan icons for Range Scans and Seeks?  I have often wondered about that, and the first person to mention it after yesterday’s post was Erin Stellato (twitter | blog): Before we go on to make sense of all this, let’s look at another example of how SQL Server confusingly mixes the terms ‘Scan’ and ‘Seek’ in different contexts.  The diagram below shows a very simple heap table with two columns, one of which is the non-clustered Primary Key, and the other has a non-unique non-clustered index defined on it.  The right hand side of the diagram shows a simple query, it’s associated query plan, and a couple of extracts from the SSMS tool-tip and Properties windows. Notice the ‘scan direction’ entry in the Properties window snippet.  Is this a seek or a scan?  The different references to Scans and Seeks are even more pronounced in the XML plan output that the graphical plan is based on.  This fragment is what lies behind the single Index Seek icon shown above: You’ll find the same confusing references to Seeks and Scans throughout the product and its documentation. Making Sense of Seeks Let’s forget all about scans for a moment, and think purely about seeks.  Loosely speaking, a seek is the process of navigating an index B-tree to find a particular index record, most often at the leaf level.  A seek starts at the root and navigates down through the levels of the index to find the point of interest: Singleton Lookups The simplest sort of seek predicate performs this traversal to find (at most) a single record.  This is the case when we search for a single value using a unique index and an equality predicate.  It should be readily apparent that this type of search will either find one record, or none at all.  This operation is known as a singleton lookup.  Given the example table from before, the following query is an example of a singleton lookup seek: Sadly, there’s nothing in the graphical plan or XML output to show that this is a singleton lookup – you have to infer it from the fact that this is a single-value equality seek on a unique index.  The other common examples of a singleton lookup are bookmark lookups – both the RID and Key Lookup forms are singleton lookups (an RID lookup finds a single record in a heap from the unique row locator, and a Key Lookup does much the same thing on a clustered table).  If you happen to run your query with STATISTICS IO ON, you will notice that ‘Scan Count’ is always zero for a singleton lookup. Range Scans The other type of seek predicate is a ‘seek plus range scan’, which I will refer to simply as a range scan.  The seek operation makes an initial descent into the index structure to find the first leaf row that qualifies, and then performs a range scan (either backwards or forwards in the index) until it reaches the end of the scan range. The ability of a range scan to proceed in either direction comes about because index pages at the same level are connected by a doubly-linked list – each page has a pointer to the previous page (in logical key order) as well as a pointer to the following page.  The doubly-linked list is represented by the green and red dotted arrows in the index diagram presented earlier.  One subtle (but important) point is that the notion of a ‘forward’ or ‘backward’ scan applies to the logical key order defined when the index was built.  In the present case, the non-clustered primary key index was created as follows: CREATE TABLE dbo.Example ( key_col INTEGER NOT NULL, data INTEGER NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.Example key_col] PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED (key_col ASC) ) ; Notice that the primary key index specifies an ascending sort order for the single key column.  This means that a forward scan of the index will retrieve keys in ascending order, while a backward scan would retrieve keys in descending key order.  If the index had been created instead on key_col DESC, a forward scan would retrieve keys in descending order, and a backward scan would return keys in ascending order. A range scan seek predicate may have a Start condition, an End condition, or both.  Where one is missing, the scan starts (or ends) at one extreme end of the index, depending on the scan direction.  Some examples might help clarify that: the following diagram shows four queries, each of which performs a single seek against a column holding every integer from 1 to 100 inclusive.  The results from each query are shown in the blue columns, and relevant attributes from the Properties window appear on the right: Query 1 specifies that all key_col values less than 5 should be returned in ascending order.  The query plan achieves this by seeking to the start of the index leaf (there is no explicit starting value) and scanning forward until the End condition (key_col < 5) is no longer satisfied (SQL Server knows it can stop looking as soon as it finds a key_col value that isn’t less than 5 because all later index entries are guaranteed to sort higher). Query 2 asks for key_col values greater than 95, in descending order.  SQL Server returns these results by seeking to the end of the index, and scanning backwards (in descending key order) until it comes across a row that isn’t greater than 95.  Sharp-eyed readers may notice that the end-of-scan condition is shown as a Start range value.  This is a bug in the XML show plan which bubbles up to the Properties window – when a backward scan is performed, the roles of the Start and End values are reversed, but the plan does not reflect that.  Oh well. Query 3 looks for key_col values that are greater than or equal to 10, and less than 15, in ascending order.  This time, SQL Server seeks to the first index record that matches the Start condition (key_col >= 10) and then scans forward through the leaf pages until the End condition (key_col < 15) is no longer met. Query 4 performs much the same sort of operation as Query 3, but requests the output in descending order.  Again, we have to mentally reverse the Start and End conditions because of the bug, but otherwise the process is the same as always: SQL Server finds the highest-sorting record that meets the condition ‘key_col < 25’ and scans backward until ‘key_col >= 20’ is no longer true. One final point to note: seek operations always have the Ordered: True attribute.  This means that the operator always produces rows in a sorted order, either ascending or descending depending on how the index was defined, and whether the scan part of the operation is forward or backward.  You cannot rely on this sort order in your queries of course (you must always specify an ORDER BY clause if order is important) but SQL Server can make use of the sort order internally.  In the four queries above, the query optimizer was able to avoid an explicit Sort operator to honour the ORDER BY clause, for example. Multiple Seek Predicates As we saw yesterday, a single index seek plan operator can contain one or more seek predicates.  These seek predicates can either be all singleton seeks or all range scans – SQL Server does not mix them.  For example, you might expect the following query to contain two seek predicates, a singleton seek to find the single record in the unique index where key_col = 10, and a range scan to find the key_col values between 15 and 20: SELECT key_col FROM dbo.Example WHERE key_col = 10 OR key_col BETWEEN 15 AND 20 ORDER BY key_col ASC ; In fact, SQL Server transforms the singleton seek (key_col = 10) to the equivalent range scan, Start:[key_col >= 10], End:[key_col <= 10].  This allows both range scans to be evaluated by a single seek operator.  To be clear, this query results in two range scans: one from 10 to 10, and one from 15 to 20. Final Thoughts That’s it for today – tomorrow we’ll look at monitoring singleton lookups and range scans, and I’ll show you a seek on a heap table. Yes, a seek.  On a heap.  Not an index! If you would like to run the queries in this post for yourself, there’s a script below.  Thanks for reading! IF OBJECT_ID(N'dbo.Example', N'U') IS NOT NULL BEGIN DROP TABLE dbo.Example; END ; -- Test table is a heap -- Non-clustered primary key on 'key_col' CREATE TABLE dbo.Example ( key_col INTEGER NOT NULL, data INTEGER NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.Example key_col] PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED (key_col) ) ; -- Non-unique non-clustered index on the 'data' column CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX dbo.Example data] ON dbo.Example (data) ; -- Add 100 rows INSERT dbo.Example WITH (TABLOCKX) ( key_col, data ) SELECT key_col = V.number, data = V.number FROM master.dbo.spt_values AS V WHERE V.[type] = N'P' AND V.number BETWEEN 1 AND 100 ; -- ================ -- Singleton lookup -- ================ ; -- Single value equality seek in a unique index -- Scan count = 0 when STATISTIS IO is ON -- Check the XML SHOWPLAN SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col = 32 ; -- =========== -- Range Scans -- =========== ; -- Query 1 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col <= 5 ORDER BY E.key_col ASC ; -- Query 2 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col > 95 ORDER BY E.key_col DESC ; -- Query 3 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col >= 10 AND E.key_col < 15 ORDER BY E.key_col ASC ; -- Query 4 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col >= 20 AND E.key_col < 25 ORDER BY E.key_col DESC ; -- Final query (singleton + range = 2 range scans) SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col = 10 OR E.key_col BETWEEN 15 AND 20 ORDER BY E.key_col ASC ; -- === TIDY UP === DROP TABLE dbo.Example; © 2011 Paul White email: [email protected] twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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• SQL SERVER – Find First Non-Numeric Character from String

  - by pinaldave

  It is fun when you have to deal with simple problems and there are no out of the box solution. I am sure there are many cases when we needed the first non-numeric character from the string but there is no function available to identify that right away. Here is the quick script I wrote down using PATINDEX. The function PATINDEX exists for quite a long time in SQL Server but I hardly see it being used. Well, at least I use it and I am comfortable using it. Here is a simple script which I use when I have to identify first non-numeric character. -- How to find first non numberic character USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE MyTable (ID INT, Col1 VARCHAR(100)) GO INSERT INTO MyTable (ID, Col1) SELECT 1, '1one' UNION ALL SELECT 2, '11eleven' UNION ALL SELECT 3, '2two' UNION ALL SELECT 4, '22twentytwo' UNION ALL SELECT 5, '111oneeleven' GO -- Use of PATINDEX SELECT PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%',Col1) 'Position of NonNumeric Character', SUBSTRING(Col1,PATINDEX('%[^0-9]%',Col1),1) 'NonNumeric Character', Col1 'Original Character' FROM MyTable GO DROP TABLE MyTable GO Here is the resultset: Where do I use in the real world – well there are lots of examples. In one of the future blog posts I will cover that as well. Meanwhile, do you have any better way to achieve the same. Do share it here. I will write a follow up blog post with due credit to you. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Function, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL String, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Great Blogs About Oracle Solaris 11

  - by Markus Weber

  Now that Oracle Solaris 11 has been released, why not blog about blogs. There is of course a tremendous amount of resource and information available, but valuable insights directly from people actually building the product is priceless. Here's a list of such great blogs. NOTE: If you think we missed some good ones, please let us know in the comments section !  Topic Title Author Top 11 Things My 11 favourite Solaris 11 features Darren Moffat Top 11 Things These are 11 of my favorite things! Mike Gerdts Top 11 Things 11 reason to love Solaris 11     Jim Laurent SysAdmin Resources Solaris 11 Resources for System Administrators Rick Ramsey Overview Oracle Solaris 11: The First Cloud OS Larry Wake Overview What's a "Cloud Operating System"? Harry Foxwell Overview What's New in Oracle Solaris 11 Jeff Victor Try it ! Virtually the fastest way to try Solaris 11 (and Solaris 10 zones) Dave Miner Upgrade Upgrading Solaris 11 Express b151a with support to Solaris 11 Alan Hargreaves IPS The IPS System Repository Tim Foster IPS Building a Solaris 11 repository without network connection Jim Laurent IPS IPS Self-assembly – Part 1: overlays Tim Foster IPS Self assembly – Part 2: multiple packages delivering configuration Tim Foster Security Immutable Zones on Encrypted ZFS Darren Moffat Security User home directory encryption with ZFS Darren Moffat Security Password (PAM) caching for Solaris su - "a la sudo" Darren Moffat Security Completely disabling root logins on Solaris 11 Darren Moffat Security OpenSSL Version in Solaris Darren Moffat Security Exciting Crypto Advances with the T4 processor and Oracle Solaris 11 Valerie Fenwick Performance Critical Threads Optimization Rafael Vanoni Performance SPARC T4-2 Delivers World Record SPECjvm2008 Result with Oracle Solaris 11 BestPerf Blog Performance Recent Benchmarks Using Oracle Solaris 11 BestPerf Blog Predictive Self Healing Introducing SMF Layers Sean Wilcox Predictive Self Healing Oracle Solaris 11 - New Fault Management Features Gavin Maltby Desktop What's new on the Solaris 11 Desktop? Calum Benson Desktop S11 X11: ye olde window system in today's new operating system Alan Coopersmith Desktop Accessible Oracle Solaris 11 - released! Peter Korn

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• Developing geometry-based Web Services for WebLogic | Part 1 by Ronald van Luttikhuizen

  - by JuergenKress

  In a recent project we developed Web Services that expose geographical data in their operations. This blog explains the use case for the service, gives an overview of the software architecture, and briefly discusses GML as markup language for geographical data. Part 2 of this blog provides pointers on the implementation of the service while part 3 discusses the deployment on Oracle WebLogic Server. Use Case The "BAG" (Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen) is a Dutch national database containing information on all addresses and buildings in the Netherlands, and is maintained by Dutch municipalities. For several object types the BAG also maintains the associated geographical location and shape; for example for premises and cities. Read the complete article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Ronald van Luttikhuizen,Vennester,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• A BYOD World in Mobile Enterprise Brings the Need to Adapt

  - by Webgui

  Yesterday brought a lot of news coverage that Cisco has stopped funding and planning its Cius enterprise-grade tablet.  Citing “market transitions” in which an increasing number of people b ring their own smartphones and tablets to work, Cisco General Manager OJ Winge said in a post on the company's official blog that “Cisco will no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet form factor, and no further enhancements will be made to the current Cius endpoint beyond what’s available today.”  Employees are “bringing their preferences to work” and collaboration “has to happen beyond a walled garden,” he said.The blog post also cited a recently released Cisco study which found that 95% of organizations surveyed allow employee-owned devices in some way, shape or form in the office, and, 36% of surveyed enterprises provide full support for employee-owned devices.   How is Cisco planning to move forward to adapt to this changing business environment?  Instead of focusing on tablets for enterprise customers, Cisco will instead "double down" on software that works across a variety of operating systems and smart phones and tablets, Winge said.See the post from the Cisco blog here - http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/empowering-choice-in-collaboration/ We at Gizmox recognize this need to adapt to the changing environment.  Our Enterprise Mobile solution is designed and built for that post-PC, BYOD business world.  We recognized the importance of providing a cross-platform solution that can easily target different devices and operating systems. We went with a web-based mobile application approach in order to achieve that and we decided to go with the new open web standard - HTML5.Our solution however provides both client and the server side programming and its uniqueness is that it allows those cross-platform HTML5 mobile applications while developing within Visual Studio using classic visual form based development. As a result, .NET developers can build secure, efficient, data-centric enterprise mobile application for cross platform mobile devices with their existing skills and tools.  See our new video about our EnterpriseMobile solution Enterprise applications today need to work on all devices, across different platforms and OS’s.  It’s just a fact of life.  How about you – do you bring your own device to work?  What’s your company’s BYOD policy?

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• Hello Operator, My Switch Is Bored

  - by Paul White

  This is a post for T-SQL Tuesday #43 hosted by my good friend Rob Farley. The topic this month is Plan Operators. I haven’t taken part in T-SQL Tuesday before, but I do like to write about execution plans, so this seemed like a good time to start. This post is in two parts. The first part is primarily an excuse to use a pretty bad play on words in the title of this blog post (if you’re too young to know what a telephone operator or a switchboard is, I hate you). The second part of the post looks at an invisible query plan operator (so to speak). 1. My Switch Is Bored Allow me to present the rare and interesting execution plan operator, Switch: Books Online has this to say about Switch: Following that description, I had a go at producing a Fast Forward Cursor plan that used the TOP operator, but had no luck. That may be due to my lack of skill with cursors, I’m not too sure. The only application of Switch in SQL Server 2012 that I am familiar with requires a local partitioned view: CREATE TABLE dbo.T1 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 00 AND 24)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T2 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 25 AND 49)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T3 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 50 AND 74)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T4 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 75 AND 99)); GO CREATE VIEW V1 AS SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T1 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T2 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T3 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T4; Not only that, but it needs an updatable local partitioned view. We’ll need some primary keys to meet that requirement: ALTER TABLE dbo.T1 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T1 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T2 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T2 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T3 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T3 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T4 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T4 PRIMARY KEY (c1); We also need an INSERT statement that references the view. Even more specifically, to see a Switch operator, we need to perform a single-row insert (multi-row inserts use a different plan shape): INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1); And now…the execution plan: The Constant Scan manufactures a single row with no columns. The Compute Scalar works out which partition of the view the new value should go in. The Assert checks that the computed partition number is not null (if it is, an error is returned). The Nested Loops Join executes exactly once, with the partition id as an outer reference (correlated parameter). The Switch operator checks the value of the parameter and executes the corresponding input only. If the partition id is 0, the uppermost Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T1. If the partition id is 1, the next lower Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T2…and so on. In case you were wondering, here’s a query and execution plan for a multi-row insert to the view: INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1), (2); Yuck! An Eager Table Spool and four Filters! I prefer the Switch plan. My guess is that almost all the old strategies that used a Switch operator have been replaced over time, using things like a regular Concatenation Union All combined with Start-Up Filters on its inputs. Other new (relative to the Switch operator) features like table partitioning have specific execution plan support that doesn’t need the Switch operator either. This feels like a bit of a shame, but perhaps it is just nostalgia on my part, it’s hard to know. Please do let me know if you encounter a query that can still use the Switch operator in 2012 – it must be very bored if this is the only possible modern usage! 2. Invisible Plan Operators The second part of this post uses an example based on a question Dave Ballantyne asked using the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer plan upload facility. If you haven’t tried that yet, make sure you’re on the latest version of the (free) Plan Explorer software, and then click the Post to SQLPerformance.com button. That will create a site question with the query plan attached (which can be anonymized if the plan contains sensitive information). Aaron Bertrand and I keep a close eye on questions there, so if you have ever wanted to ask a query plan question of either of us, that’s a good way to do it. The problem The issue I want to talk about revolves around a query issued against a calendar table. The script below creates a simplified version and adds 100 years of per-day information to it: USE tempdb; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Calendar ( dt date NOT NULL, isWeekday bit NOT NULL, theYear smallint NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT PK__dbo_Calendar_dt PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (dt) ); GO -- Monday is the first day of the week for me SET DATEFIRST 1;   -- Add 100 years of data INSERT dbo.Calendar WITH (TABLOCKX) (dt, isWeekday, theYear) SELECT CA.dt, isWeekday = CASE WHEN DATEPART(WEEKDAY, CA.dt) IN (6, 7) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END, theYear = YEAR(CA.dt) FROM Sandpit.dbo.Numbers AS N CROSS APPLY ( VALUES (DATEADD(DAY, N.n - 1, CONVERT(date, '01 Jan 2000', 113))) ) AS CA (dt) WHERE N.n BETWEEN 1 AND 36525; The following query counts the number of weekend days in 2013: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; It returns the correct result (104) using the following execution plan: The query optimizer has managed to estimate the number of rows returned from the table exactly, based purely on the default statistics created separately on the two columns referenced in the query’s WHERE clause. (Well, almost exactly, the unrounded estimate is 104.289 rows.) There is already an invisible operator in this query plan – a Filter operator used to apply the WHERE clause predicates. We can see it by re-running the query with the enormously useful (but undocumented) trace flag 9130 enabled: Now we can see the full picture. The whole table is scanned, returning all 36,525 rows, before the Filter narrows that down to just the 104 we want. Without the trace flag, the Filter is incorporated in the Clustered Index Scan as a residual predicate. It is a little bit more efficient than using a separate operator, but residual predicates are still something you will want to avoid where possible. The estimates are still spot on though: Anyway, looking to improve the performance of this query, Dave added the following filtered index to the Calendar table: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear) WHERE isWeekday = 0; The original query now produces a much more efficient plan: Unfortunately, the estimated number of rows produced by the seek is now wrong (365 instead of 104): What’s going on? The estimate was spot on before we added the index! Explanation You might want to grab a coffee for this bit. Using another trace flag or two (8606 and 8612) we can see that the cardinality estimates were exactly right initially: The highlighted information shows the initial cardinality estimates for the base table (36,525 rows), the result of applying the two relational selects in our WHERE clause (104 rows), and after performing the COUNT_BIG(*) group by aggregate (1 row). All of these are correct, but that was before cost-based optimization got involved :) Cost-based optimization When cost-based optimization starts up, the logical tree above is copied into a structure (the ‘memo’) that has one group per logical operation (roughly speaking). The logical read of the base table (LogOp_Get) ends up in group 7; the two predicates (LogOp_Select) end up in group 8 (with the details of the selections in subgroups 0-6). These two groups still have the correct cardinalities as trace flag 8608 output (initial memo contents) shows: During cost-based optimization, a rule called SelToIdxStrategy runs on group 8. It’s job is to match logical selections to indexable expressions (SARGs). It successfully matches the selections (theYear = 2013, is Weekday = 0) to the filtered index, and writes a new alternative into the memo structure. The new alternative is entered into group 8 as option 1 (option 0 was the original LogOp_Select): The new alternative is to do nothing (PhyOp_NOP = no operation), but to instead follow the new logical instructions listed below the NOP. The LogOp_GetIdx (full read of an index) goes into group 21, and the LogOp_SelectIdx (selection on an index) is placed in group 22, operating on the result of group 21. The definition of the comparison ‘the Year = 2013’ (ScaOp_Comp downwards) was already present in the memo starting at group 2, so no new memo groups are created for that. New Cardinality Estimates The new memo groups require two new cardinality estimates to be derived. First, LogOp_Idx (full read of the index) gets a predicted cardinality of 10,436. This number comes from the filtered index statistics: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH STAT_HEADER; The second new cardinality derivation is for the LogOp_SelectIdx applying the predicate (theYear = 2013). To get a number for this, the cardinality estimator uses statistics for the column ‘theYear’, producing an estimate of 365 rows (there are 365 days in 2013!): DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, theYear) WITH HISTOGRAM; This is where the mistake happens. Cardinality estimation should have used the filtered index statistics here, to get an estimate of 104 rows: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH HISTOGRAM; Unfortunately, the logic has lost sight of the link between the read of the filtered index (LogOp_GetIdx) in group 22, and the selection on that index (LogOp_SelectIdx) that it is deriving a cardinality estimate for, in group 21. The correct cardinality estimate (104 rows) is still present in the memo, attached to group 8, but that group now has a PhyOp_NOP implementation. Skipping over the rest of cost-based optimization (in a belated attempt at brevity) we can see the optimizer’s final output using trace flag 8607: This output shows the (incorrect, but understandable) 365 row estimate for the index range operation, and the correct 104 estimate still attached to its PhyOp_NOP. This tree still has to go through a few post-optimizer rewrites and ‘copy out’ from the memo structure into a tree suitable for the execution engine. One step in this process removes PhyOp_NOP, discarding its 104-row cardinality estimate as it does so. To finish this section on a more positive note, consider what happens if we add an OVER clause to the query aggregate. This isn’t intended to be a ‘fix’ of any sort, I just want to show you that the 104 estimate can survive and be used if later cardinality estimation needs it: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) OVER () FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; The estimated execution plan is: Note the 365 estimate at the Index Seek, but the 104 lives again at the Segment! We can imagine the lost predicate ‘isWeekday = 0’ as sitting between the seek and the segment in an invisible Filter operator that drops the estimate from 365 to 104. Even though the NOP group is removed after optimization (so we don’t see it in the execution plan) bear in mind that all cost-based choices were made with the 104-row memo group present, so although things look a bit odd, it shouldn’t affect the optimizer’s plan selection. I should also mention that we can work around the estimation issue by including the index’s filtering columns in the index key: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear, isWeekday) WHERE isWeekday = 0 WITH (DROP_EXISTING = ON); There are some downsides to doing this, including that changes to the isWeekday column may now require Halloween Protection, but that is unlikely to be a big problem for a static calendar table ;)  With the updated index in place, the original query produces an execution plan with the correct cardinality estimation showing at the Index Seek: That’s all for today, remember to let me know about any Switch plans you come across on a modern instance of SQL Server! Finally, here are some other posts of mine that cover other plan operators: Segment and Sequence Project Common Subexpression Spools Why Plan Operators Run Backwards Row Goals and the Top Operator Hash Match Flow Distinct Top N Sort Index Spools and Page Splits Singleton and Range Seeks Bitmaps Hash Join Performance Compute Scalar © 2013 Paul White – All Rights Reserved Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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• Big Data – Learning Basics of Big Data in 21 Days – Bookmark

  - by Pinal Dave

  Earlier this month I had a great time to write Bascis of Big Data series. This series received great response and lots of good comments I have received, I am going to follow up this basics series with further in-depth series in near future. Here is the consolidated blog post where you can find all the 21 days blog posts together. Bookmark this page for future reference. Big Data – Beginning Big Data – Day 1 of 21 Big Data – What is Big Data – 3 Vs of Big Data – Volume, Velocity and Variety – Day 2 of 21 Big Data – Evolution of Big Data – Day 3 of 21 Big Data – Basics of Big Data Architecture – Day 4 of 21 Big Data – Buzz Words: What is NoSQL – Day 5 of 21 Big Data – Buzz Words: What is Hadoop – Day 6 of 21 Big Data – Buzz Words: What is MapReduce – Day 7 of 21 Big Data – Buzz Words: What is HDFS – Day 8 of 21 Big Data – Buzz Words: Importance of Relational Database in Big Data World – Day 9 of 21 Big Data – Buzz Words: What is NewSQL – Day 10 of 21 Big Data – Role of Cloud Computing in Big Data – Day 11 of 21 Big Data – Operational Databases Supporting Big Data – RDBMS and NoSQL – Day 12 of 21 Big Data – Operational Databases Supporting Big Data – Key-Value Pair Databases and Document Databases – Day 13 of 21 Big Data – Operational Databases Supporting Big Data – Columnar, Graph and Spatial Database – Day 14 of 21 Big Data – Data Mining with Hive – What is Hive? – What is HiveQL (HQL)? – Day 15 of 21 Big Data – Interacting with Hadoop – What is PIG? – What is PIG Latin? – Day 16 of 21 Big Data – Interacting with Hadoop – What is Sqoop? – What is Zookeeper? – Day 17 of 21 Big Data – Basics of Big Data Analytics – Day 18 of 21 Big Data – How to become a Data Scientist and Learn Data Science? – Day 19 of 21 Big Data – Various Learning Resources – How to Start with Big Data? – Day 20 of 21 Big Data – Final Wrap and What Next – Day 21 of 21 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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• SQL SERVER- Differences Between Left Join and Left Outer Join

  - by pinaldave

  There are a few questions that I had decided not to discuss on this blog because I think they are very simple and many of us know it. Many times, I even receive not-so positive notes from several readers when I am writing something simple. However, assuming that we know all and beginners should know everything is not the right attitude. Since day 1, I have been keeping a small journal regarding questions that I receive in this blog. There are around 200+ questions I receive every day through emails, comments and occasional phone calls. Yesterday, I received a comment with the following question: What are the differences between Left Join and Left Outer Join? Click here to read original comment. This question has triggered the threshold of receiving the same question repeatedly. Here is the answer: There is absolutely no difference between LEFT JOIN and LEFT OUTER JOIN. The same is true for RIGHT JOIN and RIGHT OUTER JOIN. When you use LEFT JOIN keyword in SQL Server, it means LEFT OUTER JOIN only. I have already written in-depth visual diagram discussing the JOINs. I encourage all of you to read the article for further understanding of the JOINs: Read Introduction to JOINs – Basic of JOINs Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Joins, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Podcast Show Notes: The Red Room Interview &ndash; Part 2

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Room bloggers Sean Boiling, Richard Ward, and Mervin Chaing bring their in-the-trenches perspective to the conversation once again in this week’s edition of the OTN ArchBeat Podcast. Listen. (Missed last week? No problemo: Listen to Part 1) In this segment the conversation turns to SOA governance and balancing the need for reuse against the need for speed.  It’s no mystery that many people react to the term “SOA Governance” in much the same way as they would to the sound of Darth Vader’s respirator. But Mervin explains how a simple change in terminology can go a long way toward lowering blood pressure. Those interested in connecting with Sean, Richard, or Mervin can do so via the links listed below: Sean Boiling - Sales Consulting Manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware LinkedIn | Twitter | Blog Richard Ward - SOA Channel Development Manager at Oracle LinkedIn | Blog Mervin Chiang - Consulting Principal at Leonardo Consulting LinkedIn | Twitter | Blog And you’ll find the complete list of the Red Room SOA Best Practice Posts in last week’s show notes. The third and final segment of the Red Room series runs next week.  I have enough material from the original interview for a fourth program,  but it’ll have to wait. Also, as mentioned last week, the podcast name change is now complete, from Arch2Arch, to ArchBeat. As WPBH-TV9 weatherman Phil Connors says, “Anything different is good.”   Technorati Tags: archbeat,podcast. arch2arch,soa,soa governance,oracle,otn Flickr Tags: archbeat,podcast. arch2arch,soa,soa governance,oracle,otn

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• Podcast Show Notes: Fear and Loathing in SOA

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The latest program (#47) in the Arch2Arch podcast series is the first of three segments from another virtual mini-meet-up with architects from the OTN community, recorded on March 9, 2010. In keeping with the meet-up format, I sent an invitation to my list of past participants in Arch2Arch panel discussions. The following people showed up to take seats at the virtual table and drive the conversation: Hajo Normann is a SOA architect and consultant at EDS in Frankfurt Blog | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix | Oracle ACE Profile | Books  Jeff Davies is a Senior Product Manager at Oracle, and is the primary author of The Definitive Guide to SOA: Oracle Service Bus Homepage | Blog | LinkedIn | Oracle Mix Pat Shepherd is an enterprise architect with the Oracle Enterprise Solutions Group. Oracle Mix | LinkedIn | Blog This first segment focuses on a discussion of the persistent fear of SOA the panelists have observed among many developers and architects. Listen to Part 1 The discussion continues in next week’s segment with a look at the misinformation and misunderstanding behind the fear of SOA, and a discussion of possible solutions. So stay tuned: RSS   del.icio.us Tags: oracle,otn,arch2arch,podcast,soa,service-oriented architecture,enterprise architecture Technorati Tags: oracle,otn,arch2arch,podcast,soa,service-oriented architecture,enterprise architecture

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• New Year's Resolutions and Keeping in Touch in 2011

  - by Brian Dayton

  The run-up to Oracle OpenWorld 2010 San Francisco--and the launch of Fusion Applications--was a busy time for many of us working on the applications business at Oracle. The great news was that the Oracle Applications general sessions, sessions, demogrounds and other programs were very well attended and well received. Unfortunately, for this blog, the work wasn't done there. Yes, there haven't been many additional blog entries since the previous one, which one industry analyst told us "That's a good post!" That being said, our New Year's Resolution is to blog more frequently about what's been keeping us busy since Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco. A quick summary: - A 4-part webcast series covering major elements of Oracle's Applications strategy - Oracle OpenWorld Brazil - Oracle OpenWorld China - A stellar fiscal Q2 for Oracle and our applications business - Engagement with many Oracle Fusion Applications Early Adopter customers (more on this in the coming year) Objectives for the Coming Year Looking forward at 2011 there are many ways in which we hope to continue making connections with our valued customers and partners, sharing information about where Oracle Applications are headed, and answering questions about how to manage your Oracle Applications roadmap. Things to look for in 2011: - Stay connected with Oracle Applications on a daily basis via our Facebook page. You don't have to be a member of Facebook---but if you are and "like" the page you'll have daily insights and updates delivered to your account http://www.facebook.com/OracleApps - Coming soon, an Oracle Applications strategy update World Tour---a global program that takes key updates and information to cities around the globe - Save the date: On February 3rd, Oracle will be hosting a global, online conference for Oracle Applications customers, partners and interested parties Happy New Year and look for us in 2011.

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• WPF Login Verification Using Active Directory

  - by psheriff

  Back in October of 2009 I created a WPF login screen (Figure 1) that just showed how to create the layout for a login screen. That one sample is probably the most downloaded sample we have. So in this blog post, I thought I would update that screen and also hook it up to show how to authenticate your user against Active Directory. Figure 1: Original WPF Login Screen I have updated not only the code behind for this login screen, but also the look and feel as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: An Updated WPF Login Screen The UI To create the UI for this login screen you can refer to my October of 2009 blog post to see how to create the borderless window. You can then look at the sample code to see how I created the linear gradient brush for the background. There are just a few differences in this screen compared to the old version. First, I changed the key image and instead of using words for the Cancel and Login buttons, I used some icons. Secondly I added a text box to hold the Domain name that you wish to authenticate against. This text box is automatically filled in if you are connected to a network. In the Window_Loaded event procedure of the winLogin window you can retrieve the user’s domain name from the Environment.UserDomainName property. For example: txtDomain.Text = Environment.UserDomainName The ADHelper Class Instead of coding the call to authenticate the user directly in the login screen I created an ADHelper class. This will make it easier if you want to add additional AD calls in the future. The ADHelper class contains just one method at this time called AuthenticateUser. This method authenticates a user name and password against the specified domain. The login screen will gather the credentials from the user such as their user name and password, and also the domain name to authenticate against. To use this ADHelper class you will need to add a reference to the System.DirectoryServices.dll in .NET. The AuthenticateUser Method In order to authenticate a user against your Active Directory you will need to supply a valid LDAP path string to the constructor of the DirectoryEntry class. The LDAP path string will be in the format LDAP://DomainName. You will also pass in the user name and password to the constructor of the DirectoryEntry class as well. With a DirectoryEntry object populated with this LDAP path string, the user name and password you will now pass this object to the constructor of a DirectorySearcher object. You then perform the FindOne method on the DirectorySearcher object. If the DirectorySearcher object returns a SearchResult then the credentials supplied are valid. If the credentials are not valid on the Active Directory then an exception is thrown. C#public bool AuthenticateUser(string domainName, string userName,  string password){  bool ret = false;   try  {    DirectoryEntry de = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" + domainName,                                           userName, password);    DirectorySearcher dsearch = new DirectorySearcher(de);    SearchResult results = null;     results = dsearch.FindOne();     ret = true;  }  catch  {    ret = false;  }   return ret;} Visual Basic Public Function AuthenticateUser(ByVal domainName As String, _ ByVal userName As String, ByVal password As String) As Boolean  Dim ret As Boolean = False   Try    Dim de As New DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" & domainName, _                                 userName, password)    Dim dsearch As New DirectorySearcher(de)    Dim results As SearchResult = Nothing     results = dsearch.FindOne()     ret = True  Catch    ret = False  End Try   Return retEnd Function In the Click event procedure under the Login button you will find the following code that will validate the credentials that the user types into the login window. C#private void btnLogin_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e){  ADHelper ad = new ADHelper();   if(ad.AuthenticateUser(txtDomain.Text,         txtUserName.Text, txtPassword.Password))    DialogResult = true;  else    MessageBox.Show("Unable to Authenticate Using the                      Supplied Credentials");} Visual BasicPrivate Sub btnLogin_Click(ByVal sender As Object, _ ByVal e As RoutedEventArgs)  Dim ad As New ADHelper()   If ad.AuthenticateUser(txtDomain.Text, txtUserName.Text, _                         txtPassword.Password) Then    DialogResult = True  Else    MessageBox.Show("Unable to Authenticate Using the                      Supplied Credentials")  End IfEnd Sub Displaying the Login Screen At some point when your application launches, you will need to display your login screen modally. Below is the code that you would call to display the login form (named winLogin in my sample application). This code is called from the main application form, and thus the owner of the login screen is set to “this”. You then call the ShowDialog method on the login screen to have this form displayed modally. After the user clicks on one of the two buttons you need to check to see what the DialogResult property was set to. The DialogResult property is a nullable type and thus you first need to check to see if the value has been set. C# private void DisplayLoginScreen(){  winLogin win = new winLogin();   win.Owner = this;  win.ShowDialog();  if (win.DialogResult.HasValue && win.DialogResult.Value)    MessageBox.Show("User Logged In");  else    this.Close();} Visual Basic Private Sub DisplayLoginScreen()  Dim win As New winLogin()   win.Owner = Me  win.ShowDialog()  If win.DialogResult.HasValue And win.DialogResult.Value Then    MessageBox.Show("User Logged In")  Else    Me.Close()  End IfEnd Sub Summary Creating a nice looking login screen is fairly simple to do in WPF. Using the Active Directory services from a WPF application should make your desktop programming task easier as you do not need to create your own user authentication system. I hope this article gave you some ideas on how to create a login screen in WPF. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code for this blog entry at my website: http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Click on Tips & Tricks, then select 'WPF Login Verification Using Active Directory' from the drop down list. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

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• SQL SERVER – A Puzzle – Fun with SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012 – Guess the Next Value

  - by pinaldave

  Yesterday my friend Vinod Kumar wrote excellent blog post on SQL Server 2012: Using SEQUENCE. I personally enjoyed reading the content on this subject. While I was reading the blog post, I thought of very simple new puzzle. Let us see if we can try to solve it and learn a bit more about Sequence. Here is the script, which I executed. USE TempDB GO -- Create sequence CREATE SEQUENCE dbo.SequenceID AS BIGINT START WITH 3 INCREMENT BY 1 MINVALUE 1 MAXVALUE 5 CYCLE NO CACHE; GO -- Following will return 3 SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Following will return 4 SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Following will return 5 SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Following will return which number SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Clean up DROP SEQUENCE dbo.SequenceID; GO Above script gave me following resultset. 3 is the starting value and 5 is the maximum value. Once Sequence reaches to maximum value what happens? and WHY? Bonus question: If you use UNION between 2 SELECT statement which uses UNION, it also throws an error. What is the reason behind it? Can you attempt to answer this question without running this code in SQL Server 2012. I am very confident that irrespective of SQL Server version you are running you will have great learning. I will follow up of the answer in comments below. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – Determine if SSRS 2012 is Installed on your SQL Server

  - by Pinal Dave

  This example is from the Beginning SSRS by Kathi Kellenberger. Supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site. Determine if SSRS 2012 is Installed on your SQL Server You may already have SSRS, or you may need to install it. Before doing any installation it makes sense to know where you are now. If you happened to install SQL Server with all features, you have the tools you need. There are two tools you need: SQL Server Data Tools and Reporting Services installed in Native Mode. To find out if SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is installed, click the Start button, go to All Programs, and expand SQL Server 2012. Look for SQL Server Data Tools   Now, let’s check to see if SQL Server Reporting Services is installed. Click the Start > All Programs > SQL Server 2012 > Configuration Tools > SQL > Server Configuration Manager   Once Configuration Manager is running, select SQL Server Services. Look for SQL Server Reporting Services in the list of services installed. If you have both SQL Server Reporting Services service and SQL Server Developer tools installed, you will not have to install them again. You may have SQL Server installed, but are missing the Data Tools or the SSRS service or both. In tomorrow blog post we will go over how to install based on where you are now.   Tomorrow’s Post Tomorrow’s blog post will show how to install and configure SSRS. If you want to learn SSRS in easy to simple words – I strongly recommend you to get Beginning SSRS book from Joes 2 Pros. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Reporting Services, SSRS

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• SQL SERVER – FIX: ERROR Msg 5169, Level 16: FILEGROWTH cannot be greater than MAXSIZE for file

  - by pinaldave

  I am writing this blog post right after I resolve this error for one of the system. Recently one of the my friend who is expert in infrastructure as well private cloud was working on SQL Server installation. Please note he is seriously expert in what he does but he has never worked SQL Server before and have absolutely no experience with its installation. He was modifying database file and keep on getting following error. As soon as he saw me he asked me where is the maxfile size setting so he can change. Let us quickly re-create the scenario he was facing. Error Message: Msg 5169, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 FILEGROWTH cannot be greater than MAXSIZE for file ‘NewDB’. Creating Scenario: CREATE DATABASE [NewDB] ON PRIMARY (NAME = N'NewDB', FILENAME = N'D:\NewDB.mdf' , SIZE = 4096KB, FILEGROWTH = 1024KB, MAXSIZE = 4096KB) LOG ON (NAME = N'NewDB_log', FILENAME = N'D:\NewDB_log.ldf', SIZE = 1024KB, FILEGROWTH = 10%) GO Now let us see what exact command was creating error for him. USE [master] GO ALTER DATABASE [NewDB] MODIFY FILE ( NAME = N'NewDB', FILEGROWTH = 1024MB ) GO Workaround / Fix / Solution: The reason for the error is very simple. He was trying to modify the filegrowth to much higher value than the maximum file size specified for the database. There are two way we can fix it. Method 1: Reduces the filegrowth to lower value than maxsize of file USE [master] GO ALTER DATABASE [NewDB] MODIFY FILE ( NAME = N'NewDB', FILEGROWTH = 1024KB ) GO Method 2: Increase maxsize of file so it is greater than new filegrowth USE [master] GO ALTER DATABASE [NewDB] MODIFY FILE ( NAME = N'NewDB', FILEGROWTH = 1024MB, MAXSIZE = 4096MB) GO I think this blog post will help everybody who is facing similar issues. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Error Messages, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – A Funny Cartoon on Index

  - by pinaldave

  Performance Tuning has been my favorite subject and I have done it for many years now. Today I will list one of the most common conversation about Index I have heard in my life. Every single time, I am at consultation for performance tuning I hear following conversation among various team members. I want to ask you, does this kind of conversation happens in your organization? Any way, If you think Index solves all of your performance problem I think it is not true. There are many other reason one has to consider along with Indexes. For example I consider following various topic one need to understand for performance tuning. ?Logical Query Processing ?Efficient Join Techniques ?Query Tuning Considerations ?Avoiding Common Performance Tuning Issues Statistics and Best Practices ?TempDB Tuning ?Hardware Planning ?Understanding Query Processor ?Using SQL Server 2005 and 2008 Updated Feature Sets ?CPU, Memory, I/O Bottleneck Index Tuning (of course) ?Many more… Well, I have written this blog thinking I will keep this blog post a bit easy and not load up. I will in future discuss about other performance tuning concepts. Let me know what do you think about the cartoon I made. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Humor, SQL Index, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• How I Work: A Cloud Developer's Workstation

  - by BuckWoody

  I've written here a little about how I work during the day, including things like using a stand-up desk (still doing that, by the way). Inspired by a Twitter conversation yesterday, I thought I might explain how I set up my computing environment. First, a couple of important points. I work in Cloud Computing, specifically (but not limited to) Windows Azure. Windows Azure has features to run a Virtual Machine (IaaS), run code without having to control a Virtual Machine (PaaS) and use databases, video streaming, Hadoop and more (a kind of SaaS for tech pros). As such, my designs run the gamut of on-premises, VM's in the Cloud, and software that I write for a platform. I focus on data primarily, meaning that I design a lot of systems that use an RDBMS (like SQL Server or Windows Azure Databases) or a NoSQL approach (MongoDB on Azure or large-scale Key-Value Pairs in Table storage) and even Hadoop and R, and also Cloud Numerics in F#. All that being said, those things inform my choices below. Hardware I have a Lenovo X220 tablet/laptop which I really like a great deal - it's a light, tough, extremely fast system. When I travel, that's the system I take. It has 8GB of RAM, and an SSD drive. I sometimes use that to develop or work at a client's site, on the road, or in the living room when I'm not in my home office. My main system is a GateWay DX430017 - I've maxed it out on RAM, and I have two 1TB drives in it. It's not only my workstation for work; I leave it on all the time and it streams our videos, music and books. I have about 3400 e-books, and I've just started using Calibre to stream the library. I run Windows 8 on it so I can set up Hyper-V images, since Windows Azure allows me to move regular Hyper-V disks back and forth to the Cloud. That's where all my "servers" are, when I have to use an IaaS approach. The reason I use a desktop-style system rather than a laptop only approach is that a good part of my job is setting up architectures to solve really big, complex problems. That means I have to simulate entire networks on-premises, along with the Hybrid Cloud approach I use a lot. I need a lot of disk space and memory for that, and I use two huge monitors on my stand-up desk. I could probably use 10 monitors if I had the room for them. Also, since it's our home system as well, I leave it on all the time and it doesn't travel.   Software For the software for my systems, it's important to keep in mind that I not only write code, but I design databases, teach, present, and create Linux and other environments. Windows 8 - While the jury is out for me on the new interface, the context-sensitive search, integrated everything, and speed is just hands-down the right choice. I've evaluated a server OS, Linux, even an Apple, but I just am not as efficient on those as I am with Windows 8. Visual Studio Ultimate - I develop primarily in .NET (C# and F# mostly) and I use the Team Foundation Server in the cloud, and I'm asked to do everything from UI to Services, so I need everything. Windows Azure SDK, Windows Azure Training Kit - I need the first to set up my Azure PaaS coding, and the second has all the info I need for PaaS, IaaS and SaaS. This is primarily how I get paid. :) SQL Server Developer Edition - While I might install Oracle, MySQL and Postgres on my VM's, the "outside" environment is SQL Server for an RDBMS. I install the Developer Edition because it has the same features as Enterprise Edition, and comes with all the client tools and documentation. Microsoft Office -  Even if I didn't work here, this is what I would use. I've just grown too accustomed to doing business this way to change, so my advice is always "use what works", and this does. The parts I use are: OneNote (and a Math Add-in) - I do almost everything - and I mean everything in OneNote. I can code, do high-end math, present, design, collaborate and more. All my notebooks are on my Skydrive. I can use them from any system, anywhere. If you take the time to learn this program, you'll be hooked. Excel with PowerPivot - Don't make that face. Excel is the world's database, and every Data Scientist I know - even the ones where I teach at the University of Washington - know it, use it, and love it.  Outlook - Primary communications, CRM and contact tool. I have all of my social media hooked up to it, so when I get an e-mail from you, I see everything, see all the history we've had on e-mail, find you on a map and more. Lync - I was fine with LiveMeeting, although it has it's moments. For me, the Lync client is tres-awesome. I use this throughout my day, present on it, stay in contact with colleagues and the folks on the dev team (who wish I didn't have it) and more.  PowerPoint - Once again, don't make that face. Whenever I see someone complaining about PowerPoint, I have 100% of the time found they don't know how to use it. If you suck at presenting or creating content, don't blame PowerPoint. Works great on my machine. :) Zoomit - Magnifier - On Windows 7 (and 8 as well) there's a built-in magnifier, but I install Zoomit out of habit. It enlarges the screen. If you don't use one of these tools (or their equivalent on some other OS) then you're presenting/teaching wrong, and you should stop presenting/teaching until you get them and learn how to show people what you can see on your tiny, tiny monitor. :) Cygwin - Unix for Windows. OK, that's not true, but it's mostly that. I grew up on mainframes and Unix (IBM and HP, thank you) and I can't imagine life without  sed, awk, grep, vim, and bash. I also tend to take a lot of the "Science" and "Development" and "Database" packages in it as well. PuTTY - Speaking of Unix, when I need to connect to my Linux VM's in Windows Azure, I want to do it securely. This is the tool for that. Notepad++ - Somewhere between torturing myself in vim and luxuriating in OneNote is Notepad++. Everyone has a favorite text editor; this one is mine. Too many features to name, and it's free. Browsers - I install Chrome, Firefox and of course IE. I know it's in vogue to rant on IE, but I tend to think for myself a great deal, and I've had few (none) problems with it. The others I have for the haterz that make sites that won't run in IE. Visio - I've used a lot of design packages, but none have the extreme meta-data edit capabilities of Visio. I don't use this all the time - it can be rather heavy, but what it does it does really well. I also present this way when I'm not using PowerPoint. Yup, I just bring up Visio and diagram away as I'm chatting with clients. Depending on what we're covering, this can be the right tool for that. Tweetdeck - The AIR one, not that new disaster they came out with. I live on social media, since you, dear readers, are my cube-mates. When I get tired of you all, I close Tweetdeck. When I need help or someone needs help from me, or if I want to see a picture of a cat while I'm coding, I bring it up. It's up most all day and night. Windows Media Player - I listen to Trance or Classical when I code, and I find music managers overbearing and extra. I just use what comes in the box, and it works great for me. R - F# and Cloud Numerics now allows me to load in R libraries (yay!) and I use this for statistical work on big data loads. Microsoft Math - One of the most amazing, free, rich, amazing, awesome, amazing calculators out there. I get the 64-bit version for quick math conversions, plots and formula-checks. Python - I know, right? Who knew that the scientific community loved Python so much. But they do. I use 2.7; not as much runs with 3+. I also use IronPython in Visual Studio, or I edit in Notepad++ Camstudio recorder - Windows PSR - In much of my training, and all of my teaching at the UW, I need to show a process on a screen. Camstudio records screen and voice, and it's free. If I need to make static training, I use the Windows PSR tool that's built right in. It's ostensibly for problem duplication, but I use it to record for training.   OK - your turn. Post a link to your blog entry below, and tell me how you set your system up.  

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• SQL SERVER – DMV to Identify Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 3

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is the third part of the series Incremental Statistics. Here is the index of the complete series. What is Incremental Statistics? – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1 Simple Example of Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 2 DMV to Identify Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 3 In earlier two parts we have seen what is incremental statistics and its simple example. In this blog post we will be discussing about DMV, which will list all the statistics which are enabled for Incremental Updates. SELECT  OBJECT_NAME(sys.stats.OBJECT_ID) AS TableName, sys.columns.name AS ColumnName, sys.stats.name AS StatisticsName FROM   sys.stats INNER JOIN sys.stats_columns ON sys.stats.OBJECT_ID = sys.stats_columns.OBJECT_ID AND sys.stats.stats_id = sys.stats_columns.stats_id INNER JOIN sys.columns ON sys.stats.OBJECT_ID = sys.columns.OBJECT_ID AND sys.stats_columns.column_id = sys.columns.column_id WHERE   sys.stats.is_incremental = 1 If you run above script in the example displayed, in part 1 and part 2 you will get resultset as following. When you execute the above script, it will list all the statistics in your database which are enabled for Incremental Update. The script is very simple and effective. If you have any further improved script, I request you to post in the comment section and I will post that on blog with due credit. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Statistics, Statistics

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• Understanding Process Scheduling in Oracle Solaris

  - by rickramsey

  The process scheduler in the Oracle Solaris kernel allocates CPU resources to processes. By default, the scheduler tries to give every process relatively equal access to the available CPUs. However, you might want to specify that certain processes be given more resources than others. That's where classes come in. A process class defines a scheduling policy for a set of processes. These three resources will help you understand and manage it process classes: Blog: Overview of Process Scheduling Classes in the Oracle Solaris Kernel by Brian Bream Timesharing, interactive, fair-share scheduler, fixed priority, system, and real time. What are these? Scheduling classes in the Solaris kernel. Brian Bream describes them and how the kernel manages them through context switching. Blog: Process Scheduling at the Thread Level by Brian Bream The Fair Share Scheduler allows you to dispatch processes not just to a particular CPU, but to CPU threads. Brian Bream explains how to use and provides examples. Docs: Overview of the Fair Share Scheduler by Oracle Solaris Documentation Team This official Oracle Solaris documentation set provides the nitty-gritty details for setting up classes and managing your processes. Covers: Introduction to the Scheduler CPU Share Definition CPU Shares and Process State CPU Share Versus Utilization CPU Share Examples FSS Configuration FSS and Processor Sets Combining FSS With Other Scheduling Classes Setting the Scheduling Class for the System Scheduling Class on a System with Zones Installed Commands Used With FSS -Rick Follow me on: Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Personal Twitter | YouTube | The Great Peruvian Novel

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• Oracle Access Manager 11g - useful links

  - by Dmitry Nefedkin

  The main idea of this post is to collect in a single place the links to the most useful resources for everybody who are interested in Oracle Access Manager 11g.   If you have something valuable to add to this list - just let me know. Official documentation (Oracle Fusion Middleware 11.1.1.5): Administrator's Guide for Oracle Access Manager with Oracle Security Token Service - main guide for the  OAM 11g  administrator/consultant; Integration Guide for Oracle Access Manager - if you're in charge for setting up OAM integration with OIM, OAAM or OIF - that's a guide for you. Also has a chapter on WNA integration; Developer's Guide for Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Security Token Service - learn how to use Java Access JDK and develop custom authentication plugins; Oracle Fusion Middleware High Availability Guide, paragraph 8.8 Oracle Access Manager High Availability - set up HA for your OAM installation; Oracle Fusion Middleware Enterprise Deployment Guide for Oracle Identity Management - learn the best practices of the real-world enterprise deployments.   Useful Oracle Support documents (go to support.oracle.com to retrieve the contents of the documents): OAM Bundle Patch Release History [ID 736372.1] Install and Configure Advisor: Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW) Identity Access Management (OAM, OIM) 11g [ID 340.1] Procedure to Upgrade OAM 11.1.1.3.0 to OAM 11.1.1.5.0 [ID 1318524.1] OAM 11g: How to Enable Oracle Access Manager 11g Server Trace / Debug Logging [ID 1298296.1] OAM 11g: How To Create and Configure Policies For Application Resources Without Using OAM Console UI [ID 1393918.1] How To Configure X509 Authentication On Oracle Access Manager (OAM) 11g [ID 1368211.1] OAM 11g WNA Step by Step Setup Guide [ID 1416860.1]   Blogs: Oracle Access Manager Academy from the Fusion Security Blog OAM Product management blog Oracle IDM blog Books:  Oracle Identity and Access Manager 11g for Administrators

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• Enterprise Architecture IS (should not be) Arbitrary

  - by pat.shepherd

  I took a look at a blog entry today by Jordan Braunstein where he comments on another blog entry titled “Yes, “Enterprise Architecture is Relative BUT it is not Arbitrary.”  The blog makes some good points such as the following: Lock 10 architects in 10 separate rooms; provide them all an identical copy of the same business, technical, process, and system requirements; have them design an architecture under the same rules and perspectives; and I guarantee your result will be 10 different architectures of varying degrees. SOA Today: Enterprise Architecture IS Arbitrary Agreed, …to a degree….but less so if all 10 truly followed one of the widely accepted EA frameworks. My thinking is that EA frameworks all focus on getting the business goals/vision locked down first as the primary drivers for decisions made lower down the architecture stack.  Many people I talk to, know about frameworks such as TOGAF, FEA, etc. but seldom apply the tenants to the architecture at hand.  We all seem to want to get right into the Visio diagrams and boxes and arrows and connecting protocols and implementation details and lions and tigers and bears (Oh, my!) too early. If done properly the Business, Application and Information architectures are nailed down BEFORE any technological direction (SOA or otherwise) is set.  Those 3 layers and Governance (people and processes), IMHO, are layers that should not vary much as they have everything to do with understanding the business -- from which technological conclusions can later be drawn. I really like what he went on to say later in the post about the fact that architecture attempts to remove the amount of variance between the 10 different architect’s work.  That is the real heart of what EA is about; REMOVING THE ARBRITRARITY.

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• SQL SERVER – Changing Default Installation Path for SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier I wrote a blog post about SQL SERVER – Move Database Files MDF and LDF to Another Location and in the blog post we discussed how we can change the location of the MDF and LDF files after database is already created. I had mentioned that we will discuss how to change the default location of the database. This way we do not have to change the location of the database after it is created at different locations. The ideal scenario would be to specify this default location of the database files when SQL Server Installation was performed. If you have already installed SQL Server there is an easy way to solve this problem. This will not impact any database created before the change, it will only affect the default location of the database created after the change. To change the default location of the SQL Server Installation follow the steps mentioned below: Go to Right Click on Servers >> Click on Properties >> Go to the Database Settings screen You can change the default location of the database files. All the future database created after the setting is changed will go to this new location. You can also do the same with T-SQL and here is the T-SQL code to do the same. USE [master] GO EXEC xp_instance_regwrite N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE', N'Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\MSSQLServer', N'DefaultData', REG_SZ, N'F:\DATA' GO EXEC xp_instance_regwrite N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE', N'Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\MSSQLServer', N'DefaultLog', REG_SZ, N'F:\DATA' GO What are the best practices do you follow with regards to default file location for your database? I am interested to know them. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• A WPF Image Button

  - by psheriff

  Instead of a normal button with words, sometimes you want a button that is just graphical. Yes, you can put an Image control in the Content of a normal Button control, but you still have the button outline, and trying to change the style can be rather difficult. Instead I like creating a user control that simulates a button, but just accepts an image. Figure 1 shows an example of three of these custom user controls to represent minimize, maximize and close buttons for a borderless window. Notice the highlighted image button has a gray rectangle around it. You will learn how to highlight using the VisualStateManager in this blog post.Figure 1: Creating a custom user control for things like image buttons gives you complete control over the look and feel.I would suggest you read my previous blog post on creating a custom Button user control as that is a good primer for what I am going to expand upon in this blog post. You can find this blog post at http://weblogs.asp.net/psheriff/archive/2012/08/10/create-your-own-wpf-button-user-controls.aspx.The User ControlThe XAML for this image button user control contains just a few controls, plus a Visual State Manager. The basic outline of the user control is shown below:<Border Grid.Row="0"        Name="borMain"        Style="{StaticResource pdsaButtonImageBorderStyle}"        MouseEnter="borMain_MouseEnter"        MouseLeave="borMain_MouseLeave"        MouseLeftButtonDown="borMain_MouseLeftButtonDown">  <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>  ... MORE XAML HERE ...  </VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>  <Image Style="{StaticResource pdsaButtonImageImageStyle}"         Visibility="{Binding Path=Visibility}"         Source="{Binding Path=ImageUri}"         ToolTip="{Binding Path=ToolTip}" /></Border>There is a Border control named borMain and a single Image control in this user control. That is all that is needed to display the buttons shown in Figure 1. The definition for this user control is in a DLL named PDSA.WPF. The Style definitions for both the Border and the Image controls are contained in a resource dictionary names PDSAButtonStyles.xaml. Using a resource dictionary allows you to create a few different resource dictionaries, each with a different theme for the buttons.The Visual State ManagerTo display the highlight around the button as your mouse moves over the control, you will need to add a Visual State Manager group. Two different states are needed; MouseEnter and MouseLeave. In the MouseEnter you create a ColorAnimation to modify the BorderBrush color of the Border control. You specify the color to animate as “DarkGray”. You set the duration to less than a second. The TargetName of this storyboard is the name of the Border control “borMain” and since we are specifying a single color, you need to set the TargetProperty to “BorderBrush.Color”. You do not need any storyboard for the MouseLeave state. Leaving this VisualState empty tells the Visual State Manager to put everything back the way it was before the MouseEnter event.<VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>  <VisualStateGroup Name="MouseStates">    <VisualState Name="MouseEnter">      <Storyboard>        <ColorAnimation             To="DarkGray"            Duration="0:0:00.1"            Storyboard.TargetName="borMain"            Storyboard.TargetProperty="BorderBrush.Color" />      </Storyboard>    </VisualState>    <VisualState Name="MouseLeave" />  </VisualStateGroup></VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>Writing the Mouse EventsTo trigger the Visual State Manager to run its storyboard in response to the specified event, you need to respond to the MouseEnter event on the Border control. In the code behind for this event call the GoToElementState() method of the VisualStateManager class exposed by the user control. To this method you will pass in the target element (“borMain”) and the state (“MouseEnter”). The VisualStateManager will then run the storyboard contained within the defined state in the XAML.private void borMain_MouseEnter(object sender,  MouseEventArgs e){  VisualStateManager.GoToElementState(borMain,    "MouseEnter", true);}You also need to respond to the MouseLeave event. In this event you call the VisualStateManager as well, but specify “MouseLeave” as the state to go to.private void borMain_MouseLeave(object sender, MouseEventArgs e){  VisualStateManager.GoToElementState(borMain,     "MouseLeave", true);}The Resource DictionaryBelow is the definition of the PDSAButtonStyles.xaml resource dictionary file contained in the PDSA.WPF DLL. This dictionary can be used as the default look and feel for any image button control you add to a window. <ResourceDictionary  ... >  <!-- ************************* -->  <!-- ** Image Button Styles ** -->  <!-- ************************* -->  <!-- Image/Text Button Border -->  <Style TargetType="Border"         x:Key="pdsaButtonImageBorderStyle">    <Setter Property="Margin"            Value="4" />    <Setter Property="Padding"            Value="2" />    <Setter Property="BorderBrush"            Value="Transparent" />    <Setter Property="BorderThickness"            Value="1" />    <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment"            Value="Top" />    <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment"            Value="Left" />    <Setter Property="Background"            Value="Transparent" />  </Style>  <!-- Image Button -->  <Style TargetType="Image"         x:Key="pdsaButtonImageImageStyle">    <Setter Property="Width"            Value="40" />    <Setter Property="Margin"            Value="6" />    <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment"            Value="Top" />    <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment"            Value="Left" />  </Style></ResourceDictionary>Using the Button ControlOnce you make a reference to the PDSA.WPF DLL from your WPF application you will see the “PDSAucButtonImage” control appear in your Toolbox. Drag and drop the button onto a Window or User Control in your application. I have not referenced the PDSAButtonStyles.xaml file within the control itself so you do need to add a reference to this resource dictionary somewhere in your application such as in the App.xaml.<Application.Resources>  <ResourceDictionary>    <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>      <ResourceDictionary         Source="/PDSA.WPF;component/PDSAButtonStyles.xaml" />    </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>  </ResourceDictionary></Application.Resources>This will give your buttons a default look and feel unless you override that dictionary on a specific Window or User Control or on an individual button. After you have given a global style to your application and you drag your image button onto a window, the following will appear in your XAML window.<my:PDSAucButtonImage ... />There will be some other attributes set on the above XAML, but you simply need to set the x:Name, the ToolTip and ImageUri properties. You will also want to respond to the Click event procedure in order to associate an action with clicking on this button. In the sample code you download for this blog post you will find the declaration of the Minimize button to be the following:<my:PDSAucButtonImage       x:Name="btnMinimize"       Click="btnMinimize_Click"       ToolTip="Minimize Application"       ImageUri="/PDSA.WPF;component/Images/Minus.png" />The ImageUri property is a dependency property in the PDSAucButtonImage user control. The x:Name and the ToolTip we get for free. You have to create the Click event procedure yourself. This is also created in the PDSAucButtonImage user control as follows:private void borMain_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender,  MouseButtonEventArgs e){  RaiseClick(e);}public delegate void ClickEventHandler(object sender,  RoutedEventArgs e);public event ClickEventHandler Click;protected void RaiseClick(RoutedEventArgs e){  if (null != Click)    Click(this, e);}Since a Border control does not have a Click event you will create one by using the MouseLeftButtonDown on the border to fire an event you create called “Click”.SummaryCreating your own image button control can be done in a variety of ways. In this blog post I showed you how to create a custom user control and simulate a button using a Border and Image control. With just a little bit of code to respond to the MouseLeftButtonDown event on the border you can raise your own Click event. Dependency properties, such as ImageUri, allow you to set attributes on your custom user control. Feel free to expand on this button by adding additional dependency properties, change the resource dictionary, and even the animation to make this button look and act like you want.NOTE: You can download the sample code for this article by visiting my website at http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Select “Tips & Tricks”, then select “A WPF Image  Button” from the drop down list.

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