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• Win 7 running slowly with low CPU usage and memory

  - by guywhoneedsahand

  I have a relatively new (under 2 yrs old) windows 7 machine. It has 9GB of RAM, and an i7 core CPU (930 @ 2.8GHz w/ 8 CPUs). After about 8 months since a clean install, I noticed my computer was running slowly. I figure it was fragmentation etc, and I did a complete wipe & clean reinstall. However, my problems are somehow persisting. The computer is running painfully slowly (but in leaps and bounds - sometimes it will work fine for 3 hrs, then suddenly freeze up just from clicking the start button). The 'freezes' happen randomly - not during any especially intensive computing. I initially thought something might be eating through my CPU and/or Memory, but Task Manager indicates that neither the CPU or Memory spike. In fact, even during serious lag, CPU usage remains at less than 5% and Memory at ~ 1.5GB. It's beyond me why a fresh install on a powerful machine is performing so poorly... and it certainly is frustrating! What could be causing the poor performance, and what can I do to fix it?

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• SMB access from XP to Windows 2008 R2

  - by Pablo

  Here's the thing... I have a very slow file copy performance from Windows XP clients to Windows 2008R2 servers. Here are the facts: Windows XP to Windows 2K3: Fast Windows XP to Windows 2K8: Very Slow Windows 7 to Windows (any): Fast Despite the fact that the obvious solution would be to upgrade to Windows 7, well, we have 900 desktops so it's not an option in the short time. I have tried everything: Disabling SMB2.0, disabling security signatures, changing the TCP Window size, disabling the W2K8 auto tuning, upgraded the drivers, etc. We eliminated the network; both the server and the client are connected to the same core switch (no hops, no routers, same VLAN). Upon monitoring the network with a packet capture utility, we see that the SMB packets being exchanged between the W2K8 and the XP machines are very small packets (256 bytes); despite the fact that the MTUs are properly set (1500) and there is no fragmentation whatsoever. In fact, those SMB packets show, on the IP datagram, that the window is 65535 or close. The same trace, made using the same application but instead of using a W2K8 share uses a Windows XP share (and that goes FAST) shows SMB packets of 4096 bytes. I can post the traces if necessary. So, why does XP-W2K8 negotiation arrange for 24-bytes SMB payload, whereas the XP-XP negotiation arranges for 4096 SMB packets? Any ideas? I am running short of those...

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• MS SQL Server slows down over time?

  - by Dave Holland

  Have any of you experienced the following, and have you found a solution: A large part of our website's back-end is MS SQL Server 2005. Every week or two weeks the site begins running slower - and I see queries taking longer and longer to complete in SQL. I have a query that I like to use: USE master select text,wait_time,blocking_session_id AS "Block", percent_complete, * from sys.dm_exec_requests CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(sql_handle) AS s2 order by start_time asc Which is fairly useful... it gives a snapshot of everything that's running right at that moment against your SQL server. What's nice is that even if your CPU is pegged at 100% for some reason and Activity Monitor is refusing to load (I'm sure some of you have been there) this query still returns and you can see what query is killing your DB. When I run this, or Activity Monitor during the times that SQL has begun to slow down I don't see any specific queries causing the issue - they are ALL running slower across the board. If I restart the MS SQL Service then everything is fine, it speeds right up - for a week or two until it happens again. Nothing that I can think of has changed, but this just started a few months ago... Ideas? --Added Please note that when this database slowdown happens it doesn't matter if we are getting 100K page views an hour (busier time of day) or 10K page views an hour (slow time) the queries all take a longer time to complete than normal. The server isn't really under stress - the CPU isn't high, the disk usage doesn't seem to be out of control... it feels like index fragmentation or something of the sort but that doesn't seem to be the case. As far as pasting results of the query I pasted above I really can't do that. The Query above lists the login of the user performing the task, the entire query, etc etc.. and I'd really not like to hand out the names of my databases, tables, columns and the logins online :)... I can tell you that the queries running at that time are normal, standard queries for our site that run all the time, nothing out of the norm.

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• Variable size encrypted container

  - by Cray

  Is there an application similar to TrueCrypt, but the one that can make variable size containers opposed to fixed-size or only-growing-to-certain-amount containers which can be made by TrueCrypt? I want this container to be able to be mounted to a drive/folder, and the size of the outer container not be much different from the total size of all the files that I put into the mounted folder, while still providing strong encryption. If to put it in other words, I want a program like truecrypt, which not only automatically grows the container if I put in new files, but also decreases it's size if some files are deleted. I know there are some issues of course, and it would not work 100% as truecrypt, because it basically works on the sector level of the disk, giving all the filesystem-control to the OS, and so when I remove a file, it might as well be left there, or there might be some fragmentation issues that would stop just truncating the volume from working, but perhaps a program can be built in some other way? Instead of providing sector-level interface, it would provide filesystem-level interface? A filesystem inside a file which would support shrinking when files are deleted?

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• undelete big files - mission impossible?

  - by johnrembo

  Hi, I've accidentaly deleted outlook.pst (6.7GB) file, while there was only 400MB free space left on primary NTFS partition (winxp). I've tried several recovery tools to get this file back. "Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro" found 0 pst files (complete scan mode), while "Recover My Files" in sector scan mode found 5 pst's, but 4 of them of sizes from 3 to 28 KB, while the 5th one - 1Gb. I've managed to succesfuly recover 1Gb pst file, which was 1 year old copy (the one used after the latest windows reinstall). Now, I'm frustrated and confused Why 1 year old file was succesfuly recovered if there were only 400MB left on primary partition? Where's 6.7GB file gone? I did some reading (i.e. here), and it seems that there's almost no probability to retrieve the file I'm looking for, but wait - none of recovery tools i've used found zero-sized pst file, moreover - if due to fragmentation a file might be corrupted - we could use scanpst.exe to fix some errors and survive with 10 or 100 emails missing - whatever. Could you please recommend some more sophisticated recovery tools for this particular task? Appretiate your help - thanks in advance

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• Does btrfs balance also defragment files?

  - by pauldoo

  When I run btrfs filesystem balance, does this implicitly defragment files? I could imagine that balance simply reallocates each file extent separately, preserving the existing fragmentation. There is an FAQ entry, 'What does "balance" do?', which is unclear on this point: btrfs filesystem balance is an operation which simply takes all of the data and metadata on the filesystem, and re-writes it in a different place on the disks, passing it through the allocator algorithm on the way. It was originally designed for multi-device filesystems, to spread data more evenly across the devices (i.e. to "balance" their usage). This is particularly useful when adding new devices to a nearly-full filesystem. Due to the way that balance works, it also has some useful side-effects: If there is a lot of allocated but unused data or metadata chunks, a balance may reclaim some of that allocated space. This is the main reason for running a balance on a single-device filesystem. On a filesystem with damaged replication (e.g. a RAID-1 FS with a dead and removed disk), it will force the FS to rebuild the missing copy of the data on one of the currently active devices, restoring the RAID-1 capability of the filesystem.

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• What is the "in-the-wire" size of a ethernet frame? 1518 or 1542?

  - by chrisapotek

  According to the table here, it says that MTU = 1500 bytes and that the payload part is 1500 - 42 bytes or 1458 bytes (<- this is actually wrong!). Now on top of that you have to add IPv4 and UDP headers, which are 28 bytes (20 IP + 8 UDP). That leaves my maximum possible application message to as 1430 bytes! But by looking for this number in the Internet I see 1472 instead. Am I doing this calculation wrong here? All I want to find out is the maximum application message I can send over the wire without the risk of fragmentation. It is definitely not 1500 because that includes the frame headers. Can someone help? The confusion is the the PAYLOAD can actually be as large as 1500 bytes and that's the MTU. So now what is the size in-the-wire for a payload of 1500? From that table it can be as big as 1542 bytes. So the maximum app messages I can send is 1472 (1500 - 20 (ip) - 8 (udp)) for a maximum in the wire size of 1542. It amazes me how things can get so complicated when they are actually simple. And I have not clue how someone came up with the number 1518 if the table says 1542.

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• In APC+PHP, how much RAM is too much? Is it okay to set apc.shm_size to many GB?

  - by Jeremy Clarke

  On our server we have a LOT of RAM for our traffic levels (16GB). The HTTP processes regularly eat up all CPU and need to be restarted without even getting close to using swap memory, so I'm looking for ways to spend RAM to ease the load on Apache (and/or help the seperate MySQL server which may be breaking Apache). I have many WordPress installs on the HTTPD instance so APC sometimes uses as much as 900MB of ram (according to the apc.php charts). Just in case I have apc.shm_size set to 1600MB which is more than it needs but not more than I can spare. This means there is usually lots of extra RAM available to APC but also very little turnover and fragmentation is never more than 1%. Is this dangerous? Should I be slimming down APC to less than 1GB just on principle? Should I be expecting some turnover within APC in the name of bringing it's overall footprint down? Having so much memory devoted to APC means that in top/htop every single httpd process shows ~1.9GB in the VIRT memory column. Obviously this is shared memory and not used per-process, but could it be hurting our server? NOTE: The problem with the server remains unclear but the effect is that about 60 times a day all 8 CPU's fill up to 100% and everything stops working until Monit sees that Apache is broken and restarts it (Monin also saves the MySQL server). I'm not sure if APC is even part of the problem but I'm trying to optimize everything just in case.

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• Gigabit network limited to 25MB/s by CPU. How to make it faster?

  - by netvope

  I have a Acer Aspire R1600-U910H with a nForce gigabit network adapter. The maximum TCP throughput of it is about 25MB/s, and apparently it is limited by the single core Intel Atom 230; when the maximum throughput is reached, the CPU usage is about 50%-60%, which corresponds to full utilization considering this is a Hyper-threading enabled CPU. The same problem occurs on both Windows XP and on Ubuntu 8.04. On Windows, I have installed the latest nForce chipset driver, disabled power saving features, and enabled checksum offload. On Linux, the default driver has checksum offload enabled. There is no Linux driver available on Nvidia's website. ethtool -k eth0 shows that checksum offload is enabled: Offload parameters for eth0: rx-checksumming: on tx-checksumming: on scatter-gather: on tcp segmentation offload: on udp fragmentation offload: off generic segmentation offload: off The following is the output of powertop when the network is idle: Wakeups-from-idle per second : 61.9 interval: 10.0s no ACPI power usage estimate available Top causes for wakeups: 90.9% (101.3) <interrupt> : eth0 4.5% ( 5.0) iftop : schedule_timeout (process_timeout) 1.8% ( 2.0) <kernel core> : clocksource_register (clocksource_watchdog) 0.9% ( 1.0) dhcdbd : schedule_timeout (process_timeout) 0.5% ( 0.6) <kernel core> : neigh_table_init_no_netlink (neigh_periodic_timer) And when the maximum throughput of about 25MB/s is reached: Wakeups-from-idle per second : 11175.5 interval: 10.0s no ACPI power usage estimate available Top causes for wakeups: 99.9% (22097.4) <interrupt> : eth0 0.0% ( 5.0) iftop : schedule_timeout (process_timeout) 0.0% ( 2.0) <kernel core> : clocksource_register (clocksource_watchdog) 0.0% ( 1.0) dhcdbd : schedule_timeout (process_timeout) 0.0% ( 0.6) <kernel core> : neigh_table_init_no_netlink (neigh_periodic_timer) Notice the 20000 interrupts per second. Could this be the cause for the high CPU usage and low throughput? If so, how can I improve the situation? The other computers in the network can usually transfer at 50+MB/s without problems. And a minor question: How can I find out what is the driver in use for eth0?

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• Is there an objective way to measure slowness of PC/WINDOWS?

  - by ekms

  We've a lot of users that usually complain about that his PC is "slow". (we use win XP). We usually check startup programs, virus, fragmentation, disk health and common problems that causes slowness (Symantec AV drops disk to 1mb/s , or a seagate HD firmware error in certain models), but in those cases the slowness is pretty evident. In other hand, the most common is the user complaining about his pc but for us looks OK, even in 6 years old desktops. People sometimes even complains about his new quad core desktops speed!!! So, we are asking if there's a way to OBJECTIVELY check that a computer didn't dropped its performance, compared with similar ones o previous measures, specially for work use (I don't think that 3dmark benchmark o similar may help). The only thing that I found that was useful is HDTune, but it only check hard disk performance. Basically, what we want is something that enable us to say to our users "see? your PC is as slow as was three years ago! stop complaining! Is all in your head!"

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• Recover file from NTFS after it was formatted twice

  - by Phil

  I'm running Linux Mint and have a 2TB drive that I formatted as NTFS. I copied ~120GB of files from another computer to the 2TB drive, removing the files from the other computer as I did so. When they were all on the 2TB drive, I zipped them up as file "Gold.tar.gz". Then I reformatted the 2TB drive as ext3 in a moment of absolute stupidity. I formatted the 2TB back to NTFS, but of course everything is gone. Here is what I have tried: TestDisk -- won't find any lost partitions or undelete files, just the current empty one PhotoRec -- seems to only find some broken text files and misidentify their extensions. It never finds the 100's of avi files I had (before the 120GB copy, I already had 750GB on the drive full of avi files) or anything else that would show me it's working properly. Using dd I recovered the first 512MB of the drive and went hunting through it. I found all of the file as MFT entries, including the file "Gold.tar.gz" in a 2048 byte MFT record. I'm looking now for some way of either (1) telling PhotoRec to look at that record, or (2) analyze the MFT record myself and discover the sectors holding the data; I can piece it all together using dd and join the binary output if it's fragmented. One last thing - from the moment I got this drive a few days ago to the incident, there were only file copies made to it and no deletes. I formatted as NTFS, then copied thousands of files, then made a tar.gz, then reformatted to ext3, then reformatted to NTFS again. I'm hoping that the size of the drive and fact that there was no file modification/deleting happening makes for minimal file fragmentation.

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• SQL SERVER – SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File in SQL Server 2008

  - by pinaldave

  Note: Please read the complete post before taking any actions. This blog post would discuss SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File. The script mentioned in the email received from reader contains the following questionable code: “Hi Pinal, If you could remember, I and my manager met you at TechEd in Bangalore. We just upgraded to SQL Server 2008. One of our jobs failed as it was using the following code. The error was: Msg 155, Level 15, State 1, Line 1 ‘TRUNCATE_ONLY’ is not a recognized BACKUP option. The code was: DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDBLog, 1) BACKUP LOG TestDB WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDBLog, 1) GO I have modified that code to subsequent code and it works fine. But, are there other suggestions you have at the moment? USE [master] GO ALTER DATABASE [TestDb] SET RECOVERY SIMPLE WITH NO_WAIT DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDbLog, 1) ALTER DATABASE [TestDb] SET RECOVERY FULL WITH NO_WAIT GO Configuration of our server and system is as follows: [Removed not relevant data]“ An email like this that suddenly pops out in early morning is alarming email. Because I am a dead, busy mind, so I had only one min to reply. I wrote down quickly the following note. (As I said, it was a single-minute email so it is not completely accurate). Here is that quick email shared with all of you. “Hi Mr. DBA [removed the name] Thanks for your email. I suggest you stop this practice. There are many issues included here, but I would list two major issues: 1) From the setting database to simple recovery, shrinking the file and once again setting in full recovery, you are in fact losing your valuable log data and will be not able to restore point in time. Not only that, you will also not able to use subsequent log files. 2) Shrinking file or database adds fragmentation. There are a lot of things you can do. First, start taking proper log backup using following command instead of truncating them and losing them frequently. BACKUP LOG [TestDb] TO  DISK = N'C:\Backup\TestDb.bak' GO Remove the code of SHRINKING the file. If you are taking proper log backups, your log file usually (again usually, special cases are excluded) do not grow very big. There are so many things to add here, but you can call me on my [phone number]. Before you call me, I suggest for accuracy you read Paul Randel‘s two posts here and here and Brent Ozar‘s Post here. Kind Regards, Pinal Dave” I guess this post is very much clear to you. Please leave your comments here. As mentioned, this is a very huge subject; I have just touched a tip of the ice-berg and have tried to point to authentic knowledge. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Data Storage, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• OSI Model

  - by kaleidoscope

  The Open System Interconnection Reference Model (OSI Reference Model or OSI Model) is an abstract description for layered communications and computer network protocol design. In its most basic form, it divides network architecture into seven layers which, from top to bottom, are the Application, Presentation, Session, Transport, Network, Data Link, and Physical Layers. It is therefore often referred to as the OSI Seven Layer Model. A layer is a collection of conceptually similar functions that provide services to the layer above it and receives service from the layer below it. Description of OSI layers: Layer 1: Physical Layer ·         Defines the electrical and physical specifications for devices. In particular, it defines the relationship between a device and a physical medium. ·         Establishment and termination of a connection to a communications medium. ·         Participation in the process whereby the communication resources are effectively shared among multiple users. ·         Modulation or conversion between the representation of digital data in user equipment and the corresponding signals transmitted over a communications channel. Layer 2: Data Link Layer ·         Provides the functional and procedural means to transfer data between network entities. ·         Detect and possibly correct errors that may occur in the Physical Layer. The error check is performed using Frame Check Sequence (FCS). ·         Addresses is then sought to see if it needs to process the rest of the frame itself or whether to pass it on to another host. ·         The Layer is divided into two sub layers: The Media Access Control (MAC) layer and the Logical Link Control (LLC) layer. ·         MAC sub layer controls how a computer on the network gains access to the data and permission to transmit it. ·         LLC layer controls frame synchronization, flow control and error checking.   Layer 3: Network Layer ·         Provides the functional and procedural means of transferring variable length data sequences from a source to a destination via one or more networks. ·         Performs network routing functions, and might also perform fragmentation and reassembly, and report delivery errors. ·         Network Layer Routers operate at this layer—sending data throughout the extended network and making the Internet possible.   Layer 4: Transport Layer ·         Provides transparent transfer of data between end users, providing reliable data transfer services to the upper layers. ·         Controls the reliability of a given link through flow control, segmentation/de-segmentation, and error control. ·         Transport Layer can keep track of the segments and retransmit those that fail. Layer 5: Session Layer ·         Controls the dialogues (connections) between computers. ·         Establishes, manages and terminates the connections between the local and remote application. ·         Provides for full-duplex, half-duplex, or simplex operation, and establishes checkpointing, adjournment, termination, and restart procedures. ·         Implemented explicitly in application environments that use remote procedure calls. Layer 6: Presentation Layer ·         Establishes a context between Application Layer entities, in which the higher-layer entities can use different syntax and semantics, as long as the presentation service understands both and the mapping between them. The presentation service data units are then encapsulated into Session Protocol data units, and moved down the stack. ·         Provides independence from differences in data representation (e.g., encryption) by translating from application to network format, and vice versa. The presentation layer works to transform data into the form that the application layer can accept. This layer formats and encrypts data to be sent across a network, providing freedom from compatibility problems. It is sometimes called the syntax layer. Layer 7: Application Layer ·         This layer interacts with software applications that implement a communicating component. ·         Identifies communication partners, determines resource availability, and synchronizes communication. o       When identifying communication partners, the application layer determines the identity and availability of communication partners for an application with data to transmit. o       When determining resource availability, the application layer must decide whether sufficient network or the requested communication exists. o       In synchronizing communication, all communication between applications requires cooperation that is managed by the application layer. Technorati Tags: Kunal,OSI,Networking

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• July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 22 (sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats)

  - by Tamarick Hill

  The sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats Dynamic Management Function is used to return information about the fragmentation levels, page counts, depth, number of levels, record counts, etc. about the indexes on your database instance. One row is returned for each level in a given index, which we will discuss more later. The function takes a total of 5 input parameters which are (1) database_id, (2) object_id, (3) index_id, (4) partition_number, and (5) the mode of the scan level that you would like to run. Let’s use this function with our AdventureWorks2012 database to better illustrate the information it provides. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(db_id('AdventureWorks2012'), NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL) As you can see from the result set, there is a lot of beneficial information returned from this DMF. The first couple of columns in the result set (database_id, object_id, index_id, partition_number, index_type_desc, alloc_unit_type_desc) are either self-explanatory or have been explained in our previous blog sessions so I will not go into detail about these at this time. The next column in the result set is the index_depth which represents how deep the index goes. For example, If we have a large index that contains 1 root page, 3 intermediate levels, and 1 leaf level, our index depth would be 5. The next column is the index_level which refers to what level (of the depth) a particular row is referring to. Next is probably one of the most beneficial columns in this result set, which is the avg_fragmentation_in_percent. This column shows you how fragmented a particular level of an index may be. Many people use this column within their index maintenance jobs to dynamically determine whether they should do REORG’s or full REBUILD’s of a given index. The fragment count represents the number of fragments in a leaf level while the avg_fragment_size_in_pages represents the number of pages in a fragment. The page_count column tells you how many pages are in a particular index level. From my result set above, you see the the remaining columns all have NULL values. This is because I did not specify a ‘mode’ in my query and as a result it used the ‘LIMITED’ mode by default. The LIMITED mode is meant to be lightweight so it does collect information for every column in the result set. I will re-run my query again using the ‘DETAILED’ mode and you will see we now have results for these rows. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(db_id('AdventureWorks2012'), NULL, NULL, NULL, ‘DETAILED’)   From the remaining columns, you see we get even more detailed information such as how many records are in a particular index level (record_count). We have a column for ghost_record_count which represents the number of records that have been marked for deletion, but have not physically been removed by the background ghost cleanup process. We later see information on the MIN, MAX, and AVG record size in bytes. The forwarded_record_count column refers to records that have been updated and now no longer fit within the row on the page anymore and thus have to be moved. A forwarded record is left in the original location with a pointer to the new location. The last column in the result set is the compressed_page_count column which tells you how many pages in your index have been compressed. This is a very powerful DMF that returns good information about the current indexes in your system. However, based on the mode you select, it could be a very resource intensive function so be careful with how you use it. For more information on this Dynamic Management Function, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188917.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

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• Is there a low carbon future for the retail industry?

  - by user801960

  Recently Oracle published a report in conjunction with The Future Laboratory and a global panel of experts to highlight the issue of energy use in modern industry and the serious need to reduce carbon emissions radically by 2050.  Emissions must be cut by 80-95% below the levels in 1990 – but what can the retail industry do to keep up with this? There are three key aspects to the retail industry where carbon emissions can be cut:  manufacturing, transport and IT.  Manufacturing Naturally, manufacturing is going to be a big area where businesses across all industries will be forced to make considerable savings in carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution.  Many retailers of all sizes will use third party factories and will have little control over specific environmental impacts from the factory, but retailers can reduce environmental impact at the factories by managing orders more efficiently – better planning for stock requirements means economies of scale both in terms of finance and the environment. The John Lewis Partnership has made detailed commitments to reducing manufacturing and packaging waste on both its own-brand products and products it sources from third party suppliers. It aims to divert 95 percent of its operational waste from landfill by 2013, which is a huge logistics challenge.  The John Lewis Partnership’s website provides a large amount of information on its responsibilities towards the environment. Transport Similarly to manufacturing, tightening up on logistical planning for stock distribution will make savings on carbon emissions from haulage.  More accurate supply and demand analysis will mean less stock re-allocation after initial distribution, and better warehouse management will mean more efficient stock distribution.  UK grocery retailer Morrisons has introduced double-decked trailers to its haulage fleet and adjusted distribution logistics accordingly to reduce the number of kilometers travelled by the fleet.  Morrisons measures route planning efficiency in terms of cases moved per kilometre and has, over the last two years, increased the number of cases per kilometre by 12.7%.  See Morrisons Corporate Responsibility report for more information. IT IT infrastructure is often initially overlooked by businesses when considering environmental efficiency.  Datacentres and web servers often need to run 24/7 to handle both consumer orders and internal logistics, and this both requires a lot of energy and puts out a lot of heat.  Many businesses are lowering environmental impact by reducing IT system fragmentation in their offices, while an increasing number of businesses are outsourcing their datacenters to cloud-based services.  Using centralised datacenters reduces the power usage at smaller offices, while using cloud based services means the datacenters can be based in a more environmentally friendly location.  For example, Facebook is opening a massive datacentre in Sweden – close to the Arctic Circle – to reduce the need for artificial cooling methods.  In addition, moving to a cloud-based solution makes IT services more easily scaleable, reducing redundant IT systems that would still use energy.  In store, the UK’s Carbon Trust reports that on average, lighting accounts for 25% of a retailer’s electricity costs, and for grocery retailers, up to 50% of their electricity bill comes from refrigeration units.  On a smaller scale, retailers can invest in greener technologies in store and in their offices.  The report concludes that widely shared objectives of energy security, reduced emissions and continued economic growth are dependent on the development of a smart grid capable of delivering energy efficiency and demand response, as well as integrating renewable and variable sources of energy. The report is available to download from http://emeapressoffice.oracle.com/imagelibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetailsID=1766I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the report.   

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• SQLUG Events - London/Edinburgh/Cardiff/Reading - Masterclass, NoSQL, TSQL Gotcha's, Replication, BI

  - by tonyrogerson

  We have acquired two additional tickets to attend the SQL Server Master Class with Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp next Thurs (17th June), for a chance to win these coveted tickets email us ([email protected]) before 9pm this Sunday with the subject "MasterClass" - people previously entered need not worry - your still in with a chance. The winners will be announced Monday morning.As ever plenty going on physically, we've got dates for a stack of events in Manchester and Leeds, I'm looking at Birmingham if anybody has ideas? We are growing our online community with the Cuppa Corner section, to participate online remember to use the #sqlfaq twitter tag; for those wanting to get more involved in presenting and fancy trying it out we are always after people to do 1 - 5 minute SQL nuggets or Cuppa Corners (short presentations) at any of these User Group events - just email us [email protected] removing from this email list? Then just reply with remove please on the subject line.Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal Master Class - Thurs, 17th June - LondonREGISTER NOW AND GET A SECOND REGISTRATION FREE*The top things YOU need to know about managing SQL Server - in one place, on one day - presented by two of the best SQL Server industry trainers!This one-day MasterClass will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based solution. In the case where a company has no dedicated DBA, IT managers sometimes struggle to keep the data tier performing well and the data available. This can be especially troublesome when the development team is unfamiliar with the affect application design choices have on database performance.The Microsoft SQL Server MasterClass 2010 is presented by Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp, two of the most experienced and respected people in the SQL Server world. Together they have over 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server in the field, and on the SQL Server product team itself. This is a unique opportunity to hear them present at a UK event which will:>> Debunk many of the ingrained misconceptions around SQL Server's behaviour >> Show you disaster recovery techniques critical to preserving your company's life-blood - the data >> Explain how a common application design pattern can wreak havoc in the database >> Walk through the top-10 points to follow around operations and maintenance for a well-performing and available data tier! Where: Radisson Edwardian Heathrow Hotel, LondonWhen: Thursday 17th June 2010*REGISTER TODAY AT www.regonline.co.uk/kimtrippsql on the registration form simply quote discount code: BOGOF for both yourself and your colleague and you will save 50% off each registration – that’s a 249 GBP saving! This offer is limited, book early to avoid disappointment.Wed, 23 JunREADINGEvening Meeting, More info and registerIntroduction to NoSQL (Not Only SQL) - Gavin Payne; T-SQL Gotcha's and how to avoid them - Ashwani Roy; Introduction to Recency Frequency - Tony Rogerson; Reporting Services - Tim LeungThu, 24 JunCARDIFFEvening Meeting, More info and registerAlex Whittles of Purple Frog Systems talks about Data warehouse design case studies, Other BI related session TBC Mon, 28 JunEDINBURGHEvening Meeting, More info and registerReplication (Components, Adminstration, Performance and Troubleshooting) - Neil Hambly Server Upgrades (Notes and Best practice from the field) - Satya Jayanty Wed, 14 JulLONDONEvening Meeting, More info and registerMeeting is being sponsored by DBSophic (http://www.dbsophic.com/download), database optimisation software. Physical Join Operators in SQL Server - Ami LevinWorkload Tuning - Ami LevinSQL Server and Disk IO (File Groups/Files, SSD's, Fusion-IO, In-RAM DB's, Fragmentation) - Tony RogersonComplex Event Processing - Allan MitchellMany thanks,Tony Rogerson, SQL Server MVPUK SQL Server User Grouphttp://sqlserverfaq.com"

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• ORA-4031 Troubleshooting

  - by [email protected]

    QUICKLINK: Note 396940.1 Troubleshooting and Diagnosing ORA-4031 Error Note 1087773.1 : ORA-4031 Diagnostics Tools [Video]   Have you observed an ORA-04031 error reported in your alert log? An ORA-4031 error is raised when memory is unavailable for use or reuse in the System Global Area (SGA).  The error message will indicate the memory pool getting errors and high level information about what kind of allocation failed and how much memory was unavailable.  The challenge with ORA-4031 analysis is that the error and associated trace is for a "victim" of the problem.   The failing code ran into the memory limitation, but in almost all cases it was not part of the root problem.    Looking for the best way to diagnose? When an ORA-4031 error occurs, a trace file is raised and noted in the alert log if the process experiencing the error is a background process.   User processes may experience errors without reports in the alert log or traces generated.   The V$SHARED_POOL_RESERVED view will show reports of misses for memory over the life of the database. Diagnostics scripts are available in Note 430473.1 to help in analysis of the problem.  There is also a training video on using and interpreting the script data Note 1087773.1. 11g DiagnosabilityStarting with Oracle Database 11g Release 1, the Diagnosability infrastructure was introduced which places traces and core files into a location controlled by the DIAGNOSTIC_DEST initialization parameter when an incident, such as an ORA-4031 occurs. For earlier versions, the trace file will be written to either USER_DUMP_DEST (if the error was caught in a user process) or BACKGROUND_DUMP_DEST (if the error was caught in a background process like PMON or SMON). The trace file contains vital information about what led to the error condition.  Note 443529.1 11g Quick Steps to Package and Send Critical Error Diagnostic Information to Support[Video]Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM)Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM) works with My Oracle Support to enable proactive support capability that helps you organize, collect and manage your Oracle configurations.Oracle Configuration Manager Quick Start GuideNote 548815.1: My Oracle Support Configuration Management FAQ Note 250434.1: BULLETIN: Learn More About My Oracle Support Configuration Manager    Common Causes/Solutions The ORA-4031 can occur for many different reasons.  Some possible causes are: SGA components too small for workload Auto-tuning issues Fragmentation due to application design Bug/leaks in memory allocationsFor more on the 4031 and how this affects the SGA, see Note 396940.1 Troubleshooting and Diagnosing ORA-4031 Error Because of the multiple potential causes, it is important to gather enough diagnostics so that an appropriate solution can be identified.  However, most commonly the cause is associated with configuration tuning.   Ensuring that MEMORY_TARGET or SGA_TARGET are large enough to accommodate workload can get around many scenarios.  The default trace associated with the error provides very high level information about the memory problem and the "victim" that ran into the issue.   The data in the default trace is not going to point to the root cause of the problem. When migrating from 9i to 10g and higher, it is necessary to increase the size of the Shared Pool due to changes in the basic design of the shared memory area. Note 270935.1 Shared pool sizing in 10gNOTE: Diagnostics on the errors should be investigated as close to the time of the error(s) as possible.  If you must restart a database, it is not feasible to diagnose the problem until the database has matured and/or started seeing the problems again. Note 801787.1 Common Cause for ORA-4031 in 10gR2, Excess "KGH: NO ACCESS" Memory Allocation ***For reference to the content in this blog, refer to Note.1088239.1 Master Note for Diagnosing ORA-4031 

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• Is Cloud Security Holding Back Social SaaS?

  - by Mike Stiles

  The true promise of social data co-mingling with enterprise data to influence and inform social marketing (all marketing really) lives in cloud computing. The cloud brings processing power, services, speed and cost savings the likes of which few organizations could ever put into action on their own. So why wouldn’t anyone jump into SaaS (Software as a Service) with both feet? Cloud security. Being concerned about security is proper and healthy. That just means you’re a responsible operator. Whether it’s protecting your customers’ data or trying to stay off the radar of regulatory agencies, you have plenty of reasons to make sure you’re as protected from hacking, theft and loss as you can possibly be. But you also have plenty of reasons to not let security concerns freeze you in your tracks, preventing you from innovating, moving the socially-enabled enterprise forward, and keeping up with competitors who may not be as skittish regarding SaaS technology adoption. Over half of organizations are transferring sensitive or confidential data to the cloud, an increase of 10% over last year. With the roles and responsibilities of CMO’s, CIO’s and other C’s changing, the first thing you should probably determine is who should take point on analyzing cloud software options, providers, and policies. An oft-quoted Ponemon Institute study found 36% of businesses don’t have a cloud security policy at all. So that’s as good a place to start as any. What applications and data are you comfortable housing in the cloud? Do you have a classification system for data that clearly spells out where data types can go and how they can be used? Who, both internally and at the cloud provider, will function as admins? What are the different levels of admin clearance? Will your security policies and procedures sync up with those of your cloud provider? The key is verifiable trust. Trust in cloud security is actually going up. 1/3 of organizations polled say it’s the cloud provider who should be responsible for data protection. And when you look specifically at SaaS providers, that expectation goes up to 60%. 57% “strongly agree” or “agree” there’s more confidence in cloud providers’ ability to protect data. In fact, some businesses bypass the “verifiable” part of verifiable trust. Just over half have no idea what their cloud provider does to protect data. And yet, according to the “Private Cloud Vision vs. Reality” InformationWeek Report, 82% of organizations say security/data privacy are one of the main reasons they’re still holding the public cloud at arm’s length. That’s going to be a tough position to maintain, because just as social is rapidly changing the face of marketing, big data is rapidly changing the face of enterprise IT. Netflix, who’s particularly big on the benefits of the cloud, says, "We're systematically disassembling the corporate IT components." An enterprise can never realize the full power of big data, nor get the full potential value out of it, if it’s unwilling to enable the integrations and dataset connections necessary in the cloud. Because integration is called for to reduce fragmentation, a standardized platform makes a lot of sense. With multiple components crafted to work together, you’re maximizing scalability, optimization, cost effectiveness, and yes security and identity management benefits. You can see how the incentive is there for cloud companies to develop and add ever-improving security features, making cloud computing an eventual far safer bet than traditional IT. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng

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• Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise – Part 2

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 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:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President, Oracle  On September 13, 2012, I sat down with Altimeter Analyst Jeremiah Owyang to talk about how enterprise businesses are approaching the management of both their social media strategies and internal structures. There’s no longer any question as to whether companies are adopting social full throttle. That’s exactly the way it should be, because it’s a top online behavior across all age groups. For your consumers, it’s an ingrained, normal form of communication. And beyond connecting with friends, social users are reaching out for information and service from brands. Jeremiah tells us 29% of Twitter followers follow a brand and 58% of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand. Even on the B2B side, people act on reviews and recommendations. Just as in the early 90’s we saw companies move from static to dynamic web sites, businesses of all sizes are moving from just establishing a social presence to determining effective and efficient ways to use it. I like to say we’re in the 2nd or 3rd inning of a 9-inning game. Corporate social started out as a Facebook page, it’s multiple channels servicing customers wherever they are. Social is also moving from merely moderating to analyzing so that the signal can be separated from the noise, so that impactful influencers can be separated from other users. Organizationally, social started with the marketers. Now we’re getting into social selling, commerce, service, HR, recruiting, and collaboration. That’s Oracle’s concept of enterprise social relationship management, a framework to extend social across the entire organization real-time in as holistic a way as possible. Social requires more corporate coordination than ever before. One of my favorite statistics is that the average corporation at enterprise has 178 social accounts, according to Altimeter. Not all of them active, not all of them necessary, but 178 of them. That kind of fragmentation creates risk, so the smarter companies will look for solutions (as opposed to tools) that can organize, scale and defragment, as well as quickly integrate other networks and technologies that will come along. Our conversation goes deep into the various corporate social structures we’re seeing, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. There are also a couple of great examples of how known brands used an integrated, holistic approach to achieve stated social goals. What’s especially exciting to me is the Oracle SRM framework for the enterprise provides companywide integration into one seamless system. This is not a dream. This is going to have substantial business impact in the next several years.

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• Are eCommerce platforms worth it for large scale systems?

  - by codeflunky

  My company and I are building a new system for a relatively large client. We are going to be replacing their entire system, which includes some eCommerce aspects to it among many other things. It is not a typical public shopping site, and there are many things about the system (both back end and front end) that are quite different. Some of the people I work for are convinced that we should be using a third party product to implement the eCommerce pieces (shopping cart, catalog management). Their opinion is that it is a solved problem, and we shouldn't have to reinvent it. Given that direction, I have reviewed around ten different .NET based eCommerce platforms, and I struggle to imagine how we will be able to smoothly integrate any of them without a lot of friction. They are so all-encompassing that I feel like they are probably better suited for implementing simple shopping sites rather than larger systems that happen to have some eCommerce aspects to them. We have a really nice architecture planned for everything else (Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC, etc.), and my gut is telling me that trying to introduce a third party platform will cause unnecessary fragmentation and difficulty. I would love to hear some opinions from people who have been there. Have you used a third party platform for eCommerce? Was it a typical shopping site or something different? Did you feel it was a help or a hinderance? Thanks.

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• SQL Server slow in production environment

  - by Lieven Cardoen

  I have a weird problem in a customer's production environment. I can't give any details on the infrastructure, except that SQL server runs on a virtual server. The data, log and filestream file are on another storage server (data and filestream together and log on a separate server). In our local Test environment, there's one particular query that executes with these durations: first we clear the cache 300ms (First time it takes longer, but from then on it's cached.) 20ms 15ms 17ms In the customer's production environment, the SQL Server is more powerful, these are the durations (I didn't have the rights to clear the cache. Will try this tomorrow). 2500ms 2600ms 2400ms The servers in the customer's production environment are more powerful but they do have virtual servers (we don't). What could be the cause... Not enough memory? Fragmentation? Physical storage? How would you tackle this performance problem? EDIT: Some people have asked me if the data set is equal and it is. I restored their database on our environment. It's true that this was the first thing I looked at. (@Everyone: I added the edit because it will be the first thing that many will think off).

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• Multiple sendto() using UDP socket

  - by ereOn

  Hi, I have a network software which uses UDP to communicate with other instances of the same program. For different reasons, I must use UDP here. I recently had problems sending huge ammounts of data over UDP and had to implement a fragmentation system to split my messages into small data chunks. So far, it worked well but I now encounter an issue when I have to send a lot of data chunks. I have the following algorithm: Split message into small data chunks (around 1500 bytes) Iterate over the data chunks list and for each, send it using sendto() However, when I send a lot of data chunks, the receiver only gets the first 6 messages. Sometimes it misses the sixth and receives the seventh. It depends. Anyway, sendto() always indicates success. This always happen when I test my software over a loopback interface (127.0.0.1) but never over my LAN network. If I add something like std::cout << "test" << std::endl; between the sendto() then every frame is received. I am aware that UDP allows packet loss and that my frames might be loss for a lot of reasons and I suppose it has to do with the rate I am sending the data chunks at. What would be the right approach here ? Implementing some acknowledgement mechanism (just like TCP) seems overkill. Adding some arbitrary waiting time between the sendto() is ugly and will probably decrease performance. Increasing (if possible) the receiver UDP internal buffer ? I don't even know if this is possible. Something else ? I really need your advices here. Thank very much.

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• Debugging SQL Server Slowness: Same Database, Different Servers

  - by Craig Walker

  For a while now we've been having anecdotal slowness on our newly-minted (VMWare-based) SQL Server 2005 database servers. Recently the problem has come to a head and I've started looking for the root cause of the issue. Here's the weird part: on the stored procedure that I'm using as a performance test case, I get a 30x difference in the execution speed depending on which DB server I run it on. This is using the same database (mdf) and log (ldf) files, detached, copied, and reattached from the slow server to the fast one. This doesn't appear to be a (virtualized) hardware issue: he slow server has 4x the CPU capacity and 2x the memory as the fast one. As best as I can tell, the problem lies in the environment/configuration of the servers (either operating system or SQL Server installation). However, I've checked a bunch of variables (SQL Server config options, running services, disk fragmentation) and found nothing that has made a difference in testing. What things should I be looking at? What tools can I use to investigate why this is happening?

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• How to improve performance of non-scalar aggregations on denormalized tables

  - by The Lazy DBA

  Suppose we have a denormalized table with about 80 columns, and grows at the rate of ~10 million rows (about 5GB) per month. We currently have 3 1/2 years of data (~400M rows, ~200GB). We create a clustered index to best suit retrieving data from the table on the following columns that serve as our primary key... [FileDate] ASC, [Region] ASC, [KeyValue1] ASC, [KeyValue2] ASC ... because when we query the table, we always have the entire primary key. So these queries always result in clustered index seeks and are therefore very fast, and fragmentation is kept to a minimum. However, we do have a situation where we want to get the most recent FileDate for every Region, typically for reports, i.e. SELECT [Region] , MAX([FileDate]) AS [FileDate] FROM HugeTable GROUP BY [Region] The "best" solution I can come up to this is to create a non-clustered index on Region. Although it means an additional insert on the table during loads, the hit isn't minimal (we load 4 times per day, so fewer than 100,000 additional index inserts per load). Since the table is also partitioned by FileDate, results to our query come back quickly enough (200ms or so), and that result set is cached until the next load. However I'm guessing that someone with more data warehousing experience might have a solution that's more optimal, as this, for some reason, doesn't "feel right".

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• Boost::Mutex & Malloc

  - by M. Tibbits

  Hi all, I'm trying to use a faster memory allocator in C++. I can't use Hoard due to licensing / cost. I was using NEDMalloc in a single threaded setting and got excellent performance, but I'm wondering if I should switch to something else -- as I understand things, NEDMalloc is just a replacement for C-based malloc() & free(), not the C++-based new & delete operators (which I use extensively). The problem is that I now need to be thread-safe, so I'm trying to malloc an object which is reference counted (to prevent excess copying), but which also contains a mutex pointer. That way, if you're about to delete the last copy, you first need to lock the pointer, then free the object, and lastly unlock & free the mutex. However, using malloc to create a boost::mutex appears impossible because I can't initialize the private object as calling the constructor directly ist verboten. So I'm left with this odd situation, where I'm using new to allocate the lock and nedmalloc to allocate everything else. But when I allocate a large amount of memory, I run into allocation errors (which disappear when I switch to malloc instead of nedmalloc ~ but the performance is terrible). My guess is that this is due to fragmentation in the memory and an inability of nedmalloc and new to place nice side by side. There has to be a better solution. What would you suggest?

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