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• Free Virtual Developer Day - Oracle Fusion Development

  - by Grant Ronald

  You know, there is no reason for you or your developers not to be top notch Fusion developers.  This is my third blog in a row telling you about some sort of free training.  In this case its a whole on line conference! In this on line conference you can learn about the various components that make up the Oracle Fusion Middleware development platform including Oracle ADF, Oracle WebCenter, Business Intelligence, BPM and more!  The online conference will include seminars, hands-on lab and live chats with our technical staff including me!!  And the best bit, it doesn't cost you a single penny/cent.  Its free and available right on your desktop. You have to register to attend so click here to confirm your place.

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• Alert for Forms customers running Oracle Forms 10g

  - by Grant Ronald

  Doesn’t time fly!  While you might have been happily running your Forms 10g applications for about 5 years or so now, the end of premier support is creeping up and you need to start planning for a move to Oracle Forms 11g. The premier support end date in December 31st 2011 and this is documented in Note: 1290974.1 available from MOS. So how much of an impact is this going to be?  Maybe not as much as you think.  While Forms 11g is based on WebLogic Server (WLS),10g was based  on OC4J.  That in itself doesn’t impact Forms much.  In most case it will simply be a recompile of your Forms source files and redeploy on WLS 11g. The Forms builder is the same in 11g as in 10g although its currently not available as a separate download from the main middleware bundle.  You can also look at a WLS Basic license option which means you shouldn’t have to shell out on upgrading to a WLS Suite license option. So what’s the proof in this being a relatively straightforward upgrade?  Well, we’ve had a big uptake of Forms 11g already (which has itself been out for over 2 years).  Read about BT Expedite’s upgrade where “The upgrade of Forms from Oracle Forms 10g to Oracle Forms 11g was relatively simple and on the whole, was just a recompilation”.  Or AMEC where “This has been one of the easiest Forms conversions we’ve ever done and it was a simple recompile in all cases” So if you are on 10g (or even earlier versions) I’d strongly consider starting your planning for an upgrade to 11g now. As always, if you have any questions about this you can post on the OTN forums.

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• Oracle Forms Modernization Seminar January 2011

  - by Grant Ronald

  Are you running Oracle Forms applications in your business?  Do you want to know about the future of Oracle Forms and the options you have?  How can you modernize your Oracle Forms investment? I'll be presenting at a web seminar on the 20th January and will be discussing these points.  Details of the seminar can be found here: Iseminar.pdf Registration is available here. 

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• Reviewing Orace ADF Enterprise Application Development Made Simple Book

  - by Grant Ronald

  Although I was a technical reviewer of Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development-Made Simple (by Sten Vesterli) it is nice to get the finished article in your hands as a real tangible book. Personally, on a sun lounger with a Dan Brown book I can read 300 pages a day, but technical books are a different beast and I find it hard to get through them with the same vigour.  However, I'm up to chapter 7 in Sten's book and so far it's holding my interest.  He writes in an almost conversational tone and I really like the comparisons to "real world" concepts - like page templates being like gingerbread cookie cutters.  Personally I like to be able to compare or size up a new concept against something I already know. I'll post a full review next week but the good news is 212 pages in and I'm still reading!

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• New JDeveloper/ADF book hits the bookshelves

  - by Grant Ronald

  I've just received a nice new copy of Sten Vesterli's book Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development - Made Simple.  I was one of the technical reviewers of the book but I'm looking forward to be able to read it end-to-end in good old fashioned book format this coming week. The book bridges the gap between those existing books that describe Oracle ADF features, and real world ADF development.  So, source control, bug tracking, estimating, testing, security, packaging etc are all covered.  Of course, every project and situation is different so the book could never supply a one-size-fits-all guide, but I think its a good addition to your ADF bookshelf.  I'll hopefully post a full review in the coming weeks. Oh, and congratulations Sten,  having gone through the pain of writing my own ADF book, I take my hat off to anyone who goes through the same journey!

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• Tuning Red Gate: #2 of Many

  - by Grant Fritchey

  In the last installment, I used the SQL Monitor tool to get a snapshot view of the current state of the servers at Red Gate that are giving us trouble. That snapshot suggested some areas where I should focus some time, primarily in which queries were being called most frequently or were running the longest. But, you don't want to just run off & start tuning queries. Remember, the foundation for query tuning is the server itself. So, I want to be sure I'm not looking at some major hardware or configuration issues that I need to address first. Rather than look at the current status of the server, I'm going to look at historical data. Clicking on the Analysis tab of SQL Monitor I get a whole list of counters that I can look at. More importantly, I can look at them over a period of time. Even more importantly, I can compare past periods with current periods to see if we're looking at a progressive issue or not. There are counters here that will give me an indication of load, and there are counters here that will tell me specifics about that load. First, I want to just look at the load to understand where the pain points might be. Trying to drill down before you have detailed information is just bad planning. First thing I'm going to check is the CPU, just to see what's up there. I have two servers I'm interested in, so I'll show you both: Looking at the last 30 days for both servers, well, let's just say that the first server is about what I would expect. It has an average baseline behavior with occasional, regular, peaks. This looks like a system with a fairly steady & predictable load that probably has a nightly batch process that spikes the processor. In short, normal stuff. The points there where the CPU drops radically. that might be worth investigating further because something changed the processing on this system a lot. But the first server. It's all over the place. There's no steady CPU behavior at all. It's spike high for long periods of time. It's up, it's down. I'm really going to have to spend time looking at CPU issues on this server to try to figure out what's up. It might be other processes being shared on the server, it might be something else. Either way, I'm going to have to spend time evaluating this CPU, especially those peeks about a week ago. Looking at the Pages/sec, again, just a measure of load, I see that there are some peaks on the rg-sql02 server, but over all, it looks like a fairly standard load. Plus, the peaks are only up to 550 pages/sec. Remember, this isn't a performance measure, but just a load measurement, but from this, I don't think we're looking at major memory issues, but I may want to correlate these counters with the CPU counters. Again, the other server looks like there's stuff going on. The load is not at all consistent. In fact there was a point earlier in the year that looks pretty severe. Plus the spikes here are twice the size of the other system. We've got a lot more load going on here and I will probably need to drill down on memory usage on this server. Taking a look at the disk transfers/sec the load on both systems seems to roughly correspond to the other load indicators. Notice that drop right in the middle of the graph for rg-sql02. I wonder if the office was closed over that period or a system was down for maintenance. If I saw spikes in memory or disk that corresponded to the drip in CPU, you can assume something was using those other resources and causing a drop, but when everything goes down, it just means that the system isn't gettting used. The disk on the rg-sql01 system isn't spiking exactly the same way as the memory & cpu, so there's a good chance (chance mind you) that any performance issues might not be disk related. However, notice that huge jump at the beginning of the month. Several disks were used more than they were for the rest of the month. That's the load on the server. What about the load on SQL Server itself? Next time.

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• Why does Chrome video performance substantially degrade after waking from suspend in 10.10?

  - by Grant Heaslip

  Note: For some more details, some of which may not be true given what I've figured out, see this post. When I first boot my computer, video performance (both native H.264 HTML5 in YouTube and Vimeo, and in Flash) in Chrome is perfectly reasonable. CPU usage stays slow, everything works correctly, and the video is silky-smooth. But for whatever reason, if I suspend my computer then wake it up, video performance plummets. Full screen HTML5 video is choppy at best, and full-screen Flash video basically brings my computer to its knees (I'm talking less than a frame a second, and a 5 second lead time to leave full-screen after hitting Esc). Restarting Chrome doesn't fix this — I need to completely restart my machine before performance goes back to normal. Video performance in other applications, such as Movie Player, doesn't seem to be affected at all by the suspend cycle — it's only Chrome. I'm using a Lenovo X201, with an Intel GMA HD graphics chipset, and Intel compnents all around (I don't need any proprietary drivers). This didn't happen in 10.04, and I haven't anything that I think would have caused this to happen. It's possible that a Chrome release could have caused this, but it seems less likely than a regression between 10.04 and 10.10. Any ideas? EDIT: In response Georg's comment, logging in and out doesn't fix it. Restarting Compiz or switching to Metacity (at least by using "compiz/metacity --replace & disown" — am I doing it right?) doesn't help (actually, it seemed to help somewhat with Flash once, but I haven't been able to reproduce this). I'm not sure about GDM — when I use "sudo restart gdm" I get kicked back to the Linux shell (?), which I have no idea how to get out of. Also, I want to make very clear that this isn't just a case of Flash sucking (it does,but that's beside the point). I"m seeing the same general problem with HTML5 videos, and Flash is performing better on my Nexus One than it does on my Core i5 laptop. There's something screwy going on with Chrome and/or 10.10.

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• I'm Seeing Red

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Hello World! My move into the world of Red Gate is more and more complete with my shiny, new, red, blog. The goal of this blog is not to compete with, or replace, my blog over at ScaryDBA. Instead, this blog is where I can share things I find about Red Gate products and services. I can talk about the things that we're doing at Red Gate. I can talk about the things I'm doing at Red Gate. In short, this is my Red Gate blog. I'm still the Scary DBA, but over here, I'm painted bright red (and no, I was promised that no pictures were taken of that process). So look for tips and suggestions about Red Gate products, methods to help you do your job better using one of our tools, and anything else I can think of or comment on that supports you and our excellent software.

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• Monitoring Your Servers

  - by Grant Fritchey

  If you are the DBA in a large scale enterprise, you’re probably already monitoring your servers for up-time and performance. But if you work for a medium-sized business, a small shop, or even a one-man operation, chances are pretty good that you’re not doing that sort of monitoring. You know that you’re supposed to be doing it, but other things, more important at-the-moment things, keep getting in the way. After all, which is more important, some monitoring or backup testing?  Backup testing, of course. Monitoring is frequently one of those things that you do when can get around to it.  Well, as you can see at the right, I have your round tuit ready to go. What if I told you that you could get monitoring on your servers for up-time, job completion, performance, all the standard stuff? And what if I told you that you wouldn’t need to install and configure another server in your environment to get it done? And what if I told you that you’d be able to set up and customize your alerts so you could know if your server was offline or a drive was full? Almost nothing for you to do, and you’ll have a full-blown monitoring process. Sounds to good to be true doesn’t it? Well, it’s coming. We’re creating an online, remote, monitoring system here at Red Gate. You’ll be able to use our SQL Monitor tool (which you can see here, monitoring SQL Server Central in real time) to keep track of your systems, but without having to set up a server and a database for storing the information collected. Instead, we’re taking advantage of services available through the internet to enable collection and storage of this information remotely, off your systems. All you have to do is install a piece of software that will communicate between our service and your servers and you’ll be off and running. It’s that easy. Before you get too excited, let me break the news that this is the near future I’m talking about. We’re setting up the program and there’s a sign-up you can use to get in on the initial tests.

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• Tuning Red Gate: #1 of Many

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Everyone runs into performance issues at some point. Same thing goes for Red Gate software. Some of our internal systems were running into some serious bottlenecks. It just so happens that we have this nice little SQL Server monitoring tool. What if I were to, oh, I don't know, use the monitoring tool to identify the bottlenecks, figure out the causes and then apply a fix (where possible) and then start the whole thing all over again? Just a crazy thought. OK, I was asked to. This is my first time looking through these servers, so here's how I'd go about using SQL Monitor to get a quick health check, sort of like checking the vitals on a patient. First time opening up our internal SQL Monitor instance and I was greeted with this: Oh my. Maybe I need to get our internal guys to read my blog. Anyway, I know that there are two servers where most of the load is. I'll drill down on the first. I'm selecting the server, not the instance, by clicking on the server name. That opens up the Global Overview page for the server. The information here much more applicable to the "oh my gosh, I have a problem now" type of monitoring. But, looking at this, I am seeing something immediately. There are four(4) drives on the system. The C:\ has an average read time of 16.9ms, more than double the others. Is that a problem? Not sure, but it's something I'll look at. It's write time is higher too. I'll keep drilling down, first, to the unclosed alerts on the server. Now things get interesting. SQL Monitor has a number of different types of alerts, some related to error states, others to service status, and then some related to performance. Guess what I'm seeing a bunch of right here: Long running queries and long job durations. If you check the dates, they're all recent, within the last 24 hours. If they had just been old, uncleared alerts, I wouldn't be that concerned. But with all these, all performance related, and all in the last 24 hours, yeah, I'm concerned. At this point, I could just start responding to the Alerts. If I click on one of the the Long-running query alerts, I'll get all kinds of cool data that can help me determine why the query ran long. But, I'm not in a reactive mode here yet. I'm still gathering data, trying to understand how the server works. I have the information that we're generating a lot of performance alerts, let's sock that away for the moment. Instead, I'm going to back up and look at the Global Overview for the SQL Instance. It shows all the databases on the server and their status. Then it shows a number of basic metrics about the SQL Server instance, again for that "what's happening now" view or things. Then, down at the bottom, there is the Top 10 expensive queries list: This is great stuff. And no, not because I can see the top queries for the last 5 minutes, but because I can adjust that out 3 days. Now I can see where some serious pain is occurring over the last few days. Databases have been blocked out to protect the guilty. That's it for the moment. I have enough knowledge of what's going on in the system that I can start to try to figure out why the system is running slowly. But, I want to look a little more at some historical data, to understand better how this server is behaving. More next time.

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• Unit Testing TSQL

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I went through a period of time where I spent a lot of effort figuring out how to set up unit tests for TSQL. It wasn't easy. There are a few tools out there that help, but mostly it involves lots of programming. well, not as much as before. Thanks to the latest Down Tools Week at Red Gate a new utility has been built and released into the wild, SQL Test. Like a lot of the new tools coming out of Red Gate these days, this one is directly integrated into SSMS, which means you're working where you're comfortable and where you already have lots of tools at your disposal. After the install, when you launch SSMS and get connected, you're prompted to install the tSQLt example database. Go for it. It's a quick way to see how the tool works. I'd suggest using it. It' gives you a quick leg up. The concepts are pretty straight forward. There are a series of CLR commands that you use to configure a test and the test assertions. In between you're calling TSQL, either calls to your structure, queries, or stored procedures. They already have the one things that I always found wanting in database tests, a way to compare tables of results. I also like the ability to create a dummy copy of tables for the tests. It lets you control structures and behaviors so that the tests are more focused. One of the issues I always ran into with the other testing tools is that setting up the tests might require potentially destructive changes to the structure of the database (dropping FKs, etc.) which added lots of time and effort to setting up the tests, making testing more difficult, and therefor, less useful. Functionally, this is pretty similar to the Visual Studio tests and TSQLUnit tests that I used to use. The primary improvement over the Visual Studio tests is that I'm working in SSMS instead of Visual Studio. The primary improvement over TSQLUnit is the SQL Test interface it self. A lot of the functionality is the same, but having a sweet little tool to manage & run the tests from makes a huge difference. Oh, and don't worry. You can still run these tests directly from TSQL too, so automation has not gone away. I'm still thinking about how I'd use this in a dev environment where I also had source control to fret. That might be another blog post right there. I'm just getting started with SQL Test, so this is the first of several blog posts & videos. Watch this space. Try the tool.

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• DOAG 2011

  - by Grant Ronald

  This week is the German Oracle User Group (DOAG) one of the largest Oracle User Groups in Europe.  We have a strong representation from Oracle's Product Management Team.  I kick of things with Dummies Guide to ADF on Tuesday 10am Frank Nimphius explains Task Flows in 60 minutes Duncan Mills give an insight into Real World Performance Tuning for ADF. Susan Duncan explains the Amazing World of Application Lifecycle Management and Duncan Mills finished the day with ADF Mobile Development There is also a load of interesting sessions on Forms, Apex and ADF from customers, partners and Oracle employees from Oracle Germany.  Looking to be a great conference.

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• What is the Endeca MDEX Engine?

  - by Grant Schofield

  Today I would like to draw your attention to a really helpful article by Rittmanmead taking a deeper look under the covers at the Endeca MDEX engine; how it works, what's so different about it, and why that matters to customers. This will in particular be useful for the technical audience. The other articles in the Endeca Week series are equally useful for a wider audience. http://www.rittmanmead.com/2012/02/oracle-endeca-week-what-is-the-endeca-mdex-engine/

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• Enabling unattended-upgrades from a shell script

  - by Grant Watson

  I have a shell script to automatically configure new Ubuntu virtual machines for my purposes. I would like this script to install and enable unattended-upgrades, but I cannot figure out how to do so without user interaction. The usual way to enable upgrades is dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades, but of course that is interactive. The noninteractive front end avoids asking any questions at all, and the text front end seems bound and determined to do its I/O with the tty and not with stdin/stdout.

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• Book Review: Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide

  - by Grant Ronald

  Packt Publishing asked me to review Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide by Vinod Krishnan, so on a couple of long flights I managed to get through the book in a couple of sittings. One point to make clear before I go into the review.  Having authored "The Quick Start Guide to Fusion Development: JDeveloper and Oracle ADF", I've written a book which covers the same topic/beginner level.  I also think that its worth stating up front that I applaud anyone who has gone  through the effort of writing a technical book. So well done Vinod.  But on to the review: The book itself is a good break down of topic areas.  Vinod starts with a quick tour around the IDE, which is an important step given all the work you do will be through the IDE.  The book then goes through the general path that I tend to always teach: a quick overview demo, ADF BC, validation, binding, UI, task flows and then the various "add on" topics like security, MDS and advanced topics.  So it covers the right topics in, IMO, the right order.  I also think the writing style flows nicely as well - Its a relatively easy book to read, it doesn't get too formal and the "Have a go hero" hands on sections will be useful for many. That said, I did pick out a number of styles/themes to the writing that I found went against the idea of a beginners guide.  For example, in writing my book, I tried to carefully avoid talking about topics not yet covered or not yet relevant at that point in someone's learning.  So, if I was a new ADF developer reading this book, did I really need to know about ADFBindingFilter and DataBindings.cpx file on page 58 - I've only just learned how to do a drag and drop simple application so showing me XML configuration files relevant to JSF/ADF lifecycle is probably going to scare me off! I found this in a couple of places, for example, the security chapter starts on page 219 but by page 222 (and most of the preceding pages are hands-on steps) we're diving into the web.xml, weblogic.xml, adf-config.xml, jsp-config.xml and jazn-data.xml.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't know this, but I feel you have to get people on a strong grounding of the concepts before showing them implementation files.  If having just learned what ADF Security is will "The initialization parameter remove.anonymous.role is set to false for the JpsFilter filter as this filter is the first filter defined in the file" really going to help me? The other theme I found which I felt didn't work was that a couple of the chapters descended into a reference guide.  For example page 159 onwards basically lists UI components and their properties.  And page 87 onwards list the attributes of ADF BC in pretty much the same way as the on line help or developer guide, and I've a personal aversion to any sort of help that says pretty much what the attribute name is e.g. "Precision Rule: this option is used to set a strict precision rule", or "Property Set: this is the property set that has to be applied to the attribute". Hmmm, I think I could have worked that out myself, what I would want to know in a beginners guide are what are these for, what might I use them for...and if I don't need to use them to create an emp/dept example them maybe it’s better to leave them out. All that said, would the book help me - yes it would.  It’s obvious that Vinod knows ADF and his style is relatively easy going and the book covers all that it has to, but I think the book could have done a better job in the educational side of guiding beginners.

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• Oracle ADF PMs are UKOUG Conference 2012

  - by Grant Ronald

  Next week we'll have a (what is a collection of PM's called, flock? gaggle?) of ADF Product Managers attending the UKOUG conference in Birmingham.  Myself, Frank Nimphius, Chris Muir, Susan Duncan, Frederic Desbiens and Duncan Mills will all be attending.  We'll be covering a range of sessions and if you have any questions you'd like to ask about Oracle tools development, technical questions, migration, Forms to ADF, futures, mobile, anything!, then come up and say hi.

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• Which TLD would be suited to a personal site?

  - by Grant Palin

  I'm planning what is essentially a "business card" website for myself, and have been looking at domains. My primary site (a .com) is for my blog and portfolio and the like, but I want a separate site for basic information, contact, networks, and the like. In this light, there are a few TLDs that seem to be suitable: .info, .me, and .name. I'd appreciate remarks on the differences between these options, and suggestion on which would be suitable for my need.

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• Migrating Forms to Java or ADF, the truth and no FUD

  - by Grant Ronald

  The question about migrating Forms to Java (or ADF or APEX) comes up time and time again.  I wanted to pull some core information together in a single blog post to address this question. The first question I always ask is "WHY" - Forms may still be a viable option for you so "if it ain't broke don't fix it".  Bottom line is whatever anyone tells you, its going to be a considerable effort and cost to migrate from Forms to something else so the business is going to want to know WHY you spend all those hard earned dollars switching from something that might have been serving you quite adequately. Second point, if you are going to switch, I would encourage you NOT to look at building a Forms clone.  So many times I see people trying to build an ADF application and EXACTLY mimic the Forms model - ADF is NOT a Forms clone.  You should be building to the sweet spot of your target technology, not your 20 year old client/server technology.  This is also the chance for the business to embrace change, so maybe look at new processes, channels and technology options that weren't available when you first developed your Forms applications. To help you understand what is involved, I've put together a number of resources. Thinking about migration of Forms to Java, ADF or APEX, read this to prepare yourself Oracle Forms to ADF: When, Why and How - this gives you an overview of our vision, directly from Oracle Product Management Redeveloping a Forms Application with Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF.  This is a conference session from myself and Lynn Munsinger on how ADF can be used in a Forms migration/rewrite As someone who manages both Forms and ADF Product Management teams, I've a foot in either camp and am happy to see you use either tool.  However, I want you to be able to make an informed decision.  My hope is that there information sources will help you do that.

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• Restoring Databases

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I like the way Mike Walsh phrased it: You're Only As Good as Your Ability To Restore. Ain't it the truth. You may be taking backups, incrementals, and log backups of your databases. You may have DBCC in place, and all that fun stuff. But if you haven't restored the database, what do you have? You don't know. The trick is, restoring databases takes up a heck of a lot of space on your servers. To test all your productions backups, you'd need a system with as much space as production. unless.. Ever heard of SQL Virtual Restore? Check it out. With this, you answer Mike's questions and validate your backups without having to have twice the amount of space. That's a win, and we all know, winning is better than losing.

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• How likely are IE9 jumplists to be useful?

  - by Grant Palin

  Having installed the Internet Explorer 9 release, I've experimented with the jumplists feature available in Windows 7 - drag a site tab down to the taskbar to create a jumplist. Works for Facebook and Twitter, anyway. I have my suspicions about the utility of this feature - it's a neat and possibly useful feature, yet is limited to the combination of IE9 and Windows 7, plus sites implementing the appropriate code. Given the relatively small audience at this point, is there any value in adding code to support this feature? And would it likely be more useful for a web application (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) than a typical website?

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• django & postgres linux hosting (with SSH access) recommendations

  - by Justin Grant

  We're looking for a good place to host our custom Django app (a fork of OSQA) and its postgresql backend. Requirements include: Linux Python 2.6 or (ideally) Python 2.7 Django 1.2 Postgres 8.4 or later DB backup/restore handled by the hoster, not us OS & dev-platform-stack patching/maintenance handled by the hoster, not us SSH access (so we can pull source code from GitHub, so we can install python eggs, etc.) ability to set up cron jobs (e.g. to send out dail email updates) ability to send up to 10K emails/day good performance (not ganged up with a zillion other sites on one CPU, not starved for RAM) FTP or SCP access to web logs dedicated public IP SSL support Costs under $1000/month for a relatively small site (<5M pageviews/month) Good customer service We already have a prototype site running on EC2 on top of a Bitnami DjangoStack. The problem is that we have to patch the OS, patch postgres, etc. We'd really prefer a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, like Heroku offers for Rails apps, where all we need to worry about is deploying our code instead of worrying about system software patching and maintenance. Google App Engine is closest to what we're looking for, but they don't offer relational DB access (not yet at least). Anyone have a recommendation?

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• Which Presentation Would You Like to See at the OUG Ireland?

  - by Grant Ronald

  A novel idea, and one I think one worth trialling, is the OUG Ireland are allowing the public to vote on which presentation I will give at the conference in March.  So, rather than the a paper selection committee choosing,  the OUG community can choose.I know that Oracle tried this at Oracle World over the last couple of year and I think its good to get some community input.If you are a member of the OUG you can vote here.

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• Calling Oracle Developers in Portugal - Fusion and ADF sessions

  - by Grant Ronald

  I'll be demonstrating the Oracle Fusion development experience and delivering an Oracle ADF Masterclass in Portugal on the 12th and 13th of April 2012.  This will be an opportunity to find out how Oracle develops their Fusion applications and an overview of the framework which is at the heard of Oracle's future: Oracle ADF. I'll also be part of a Q&A panel, so any questions on Forms/ADF, this is your chance!

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• Why do game engines convert models to triangles compared to keeping it as four side polygon

  - by Grant

  I've worked using maya for animation and more film orientated projects however I am also focusing on my studies on video game development (eventually want to be either programmer or some sort of TD with programming and 3D skills). Anyways, I was talking with one of my professor and we couldn't figure out why all game engines (that I know of) convert to triangles. Anyone happen to know why game engines convert to triangles compared to leaving the models as four sided polygons? Also what are the pros and cons (if any) of doing this? Thanks in advance.

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• SQLIO Writes

  - by Grant Fritchey

  SQLIO is a fantastic utility for testing the abilities of the disks in your system. It has a very unfortunate name though, since it's not really a SQL Server testing utility at all. It really is a disk utility. They ought to call it DiskIO because they'd get more people using I think. Anyway, branding is not the point of this blog post. Writes are the point of this blog post. SQLIO works by slamming your disk. It performs as mean reads as it can or it performs as many writes as it can depending on how you've configured your tests. There are much smarter people than me who will get into all the various types of tests you should run. I'd suggest reading a bit of what Jonathan Kehayias (blog|twitter) has to say or wade into Denny Cherry's (blog|twitter) work. They're going to do a better job than I can describing all the benefits and mechanisms around using this excellent piece of software. My concerns are very focused. I needed to set up a series of tests to see how well our product SQL Storage Compress worked. I wanted to know the effects it would have on a system, the disk for sure, but also memory and CPU. How to stress the system? SQLIO of course. But when I set it up and ran it, following the documentation that comes with it, I was seeing better than 99% compression on the files. Don't get me wrong. Our product is magnificent, wonderful, all things great and beautiful, gets you coffee in the morning and is made mostly from bacon. But 99% compression. No, it's not that good. So what's up? Well, it's the configuration. The default mechanism is to load up a file, something large that will overwhelm your disk cache. You're instructed to load the file with a character 0x0. I never got a computer science degree. I went to film school. Because of this, I didn't memorize ASCII tables so when I saw this, I thought it was zero's or something. Nope. It's NULL. That's right, you're making a very large file, but you're filling it with NULL values. That's actually ok when all you're testing is the disk sub-system. But, when you want to test a compression and decompression, that can be an issue. I got around this fairly quickly. Instead of generating a file filled with NULL values, I just copied a database file for my tests. And to test it with SQL Storage Compress, I used a database file that had already been run through compression (about 40% compression on that file if you're interested). Now the reads were taken care of. I am seeing very realistic performance from decompressing the information for reads through SQLIO. But what about writes? Well, the issue is, what does SQLIO write? I don't have access to the code. But I do have access to the results. I did two different tests, just to be sure of what I was seeing. First test, use the .DAT file as described in the documentation. I opened the .DAT file after I was done with SQLIO, using WordPad. Guess what? It's a giant file full of air. SQLIO writes NULL values. What does that do to compression? I did the test again on a copy of an uncompressed database file. Then I ran the original and the SQLIO modified copy through ZIP to see what happened. I got better than 99% compression out of the SQLIO modified file (original file of 624,896kb went to 275,871kb compressed, after SQLIO it went to 608kb compressed). So, what does SQLIO write? It writes air. If you're trying to test it with compression or maybe some other type of file storage mechanism like dedupe, you need to know this because your tests really won't be valid. Should I find some other mechanism for testing? Yeah, if all I'm interested in is establishing performance to my own satisfaction, yes. But, I want to be able to compare my results with other people's results and we all need to be using the same tool in order for that to happen. SQLIO is the common mechanism that most people I know use to establish disk performance behavior. It'd be better if we could get SQLIO to do writes in some other fashion. Oh, and before I go, I get to brag a bit. Measuring IOPS, SQL Storage Compress outperforms my disk alone by about 30%.

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