Search Results

Search found 2475 results on 99 pages for 'dhaval dave'.

facebook twitter digg google delicious technorati stumbleupon myspace wordpress linkedin gmail igoogle windows live tumblr viadeo yahoo buzz yahoo mail yahoo bookmarks favorites email print

Page 98/99 | < Previous Page | 94 95 96 97 98 99  | Next Page >

  • SQL SERVER – Not Possible – Delete From Multiple Table – Update Multiple Table in Single Statement

    - by pinaldave
    There are two questions which I get every single day multiple times. In my gmail, I have created standard canned reply for them. Let us see the questions here. I want to delete from multiple table in a single statement how will I do it? I want to update multiple table in a single statement how will I do it? The answer is – No, You cannot and you should not. SQL Server does not support deleting or updating from two tables in a single update. If you want to delete or update two different tables – you may want to write two different delete or update statements for it. This method has many issues – from the consistency of the data to SQL syntax. Now here is the real reason for this blog post – yesterday I was asked this question again and I replied my canned answer saying it is not possible and it should not be any way implemented that day. In the response to my reply I was pointed out to my own blog post where user suggested that I had previously mentioned this is possible and with demo example. Let us go over my conversation – you may find it interesting. Let us call the user DJ. DJ: Pinal, can we delete multiple table in a single statement or with single delete statement? Pinal: No, you cannot and you should not. DJ: Oh okey, if that is the case, why do you suggest to do that? Pinal: (baffled) I am not suggesting that. I am rather suggesting that it is not possible and it should not be possible. DJ: Hmm… but in that case why did you blog about it earlier? Pinal: (What?) No, I did not. I am pretty confident. DJ: Well, I am confident as well. You did. Pinal: In that case, it is my word against your word. Isn’t it? DJ: I have proof. Do you want to see it that you suggest it is possible? Pinal: Yes, I will be delighted too. (After 10 Minutes) DJ: Here are not one but two of your blog posts which talks about it - SQL SERVER – Curious Case of Disappearing Rows – ON UPDATE CASCADE and ON DELETE CASCADE – Part 1 of 2 SQL SERVER – Curious Case of Disappearing Rows – ON UPDATE CASCADE and ON DELETE CASCADE – T-SQL Example – Part 2 of 2 Pinal: Oh! DJ: I know I was correct. Pinal: Well, oh man, I did not mean there what you mean here. DJ: I did not understand can you explain it further. Pinal: Here we go. The example in the other blog is the example of the cascading delete or cascading update. I think you may want to understand the concept of the foreign keys and cascading update/delete. The concept of cascading exists to maintain data integrity. If there primary keys get deleted the update or delete reflects on the foreign key table to maintain the key integrity and data consistency. SQL Server follows ANSI Entry SQL with regard to referential integrity between PrimaryKey and ForeignKey columns which requires the inserting, updating, and deleting of data in related tables to be restricted to values that preserve the integrity. This is all together different concept than deleting multiple values in a single statement. When I hear that someone wants to delete or update multiple table in a single statement what I assume is something very similar to following. DELETE/UPDATE Table 1 (cols) Table 2 (cols) VALUES … which is not valid statement/syntax as well it is not ASNI standards as well. I guess, after this discussion with DJ, I realize I need to do a blog post so I can add the link to this blog post in my canned answer. Well, it was a fun conversation with DJ and I hope it the message is very clear now. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Joins, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – Curious Case of Disappearing Rows – ON UPDATE CASCADE and ON DELETE CASCADE – Part 1 of 2

    - by pinaldave
    Social media has created an Always Connected World for us. Recently I enrolled myself to learn new technologies as a student. I had decided to focus on learning and decided not to stay connected on the internet while I am in the learning session. On the second day of the event after the learning was over, I noticed lots of notification from my friend on my various social media handle. He had connected with me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube as well SMS, WhatsApp on the phone, Skype messages and not to forget with a few emails. I right away called him up. The problem was very unique – let us hear the problem in his own words. “Pinal – we are in big trouble we are not able to figure out what is going on. Our product details table is continuously loosing rows. Lots of rows have disappeared since morning and we are unable to find why the rows are getting deleted. We have made sure that there is no DELETE command executed on the table as well. The matter of the fact, we have removed every single place the code which is referencing the table. We have done so many crazy things out of desperation but no luck. The rows are continuously deleted in a random pattern. Do you think we have problems with intrusion or virus?” After describing the problems he had pasted few rants about why I was not available during the day. I think it will be not smart to post those exact words here (due to many reasons). Well, my immediate reaction was to get online with him. His problem was unique to him and his team was all out to fix the issue since morning. As he said he has done quite a lot out in desperation. I started asking questions from audit, policy management and profiling the data. Very soon I realize that I think this problem was not as advanced as it looked. There was no intrusion, SQL Injection or virus issue. Well, long story short first - It was a very simple issue of foreign key created with ON UPDATE CASCADE and ON DELETE CASCADE.  CASCADE allows deletions or updates of key values to cascade through the tables defined to have foreign key relationships that can be traced back to the table on which the modification is performed. ON DELETE CASCADE specifies that if an attempt is made to delete a row with a key referenced by foreign keys in existing rows in other tables, all rows containing those foreign keys are also deleted. ON UPDATE CASCADE specifies that if an attempt is made to update a key value in a row, where the key value is referenced by foreign keys in existing rows in other tables, all of the foreign key values are also updated to the new value specified for the key. (Reference: BOL) In simple words – due to ON DELETE CASCASE whenever is specified when the data from Table A is deleted and if it is referenced in another table using foreign key it will be deleted as well. In my friend’s case, they had two tables, Products and ProductDetails. They had created foreign key referential integrity of the product id between the table. Now the as fall was up they were updating their catalogue. When they were updating the catalogue they were deleting products which are no more available. As the changes were cascading the corresponding rows were also deleted from another table. This is CORRECT. The matter of the fact, there is no error or anything and SQL Server is behaving how it should be behaving. The problem was in the understanding and inappropriate implementations of business logic.  What they needed was Product Master Table, Current Product Catalogue, and Product Order Details History tables. However, they were using only two tables and without proper understanding the relation between them was build using foreign keys. If there were only two table, they should have used soft delete which will not actually delete the record but just hide it from the original product table. This workaround could have got them saved from cascading delete issues. I will be writing a detailed post on the design implications etc in my future post as in above three lines I cannot cover every issue related to designing and it is also not the scope of the blog post. More about designing in future blog posts. Once they learn their mistake, they were happy as there was no intrusion but trust me sometime we are our own enemy and this is a great example of it. In tomorrow’s blog post we will go over their code and workarounds. Feel free to share your opinions, experiences and comments. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • SQLAuthority News – A Conversation with an Old Friend – Sri Sridharan

    - by pinaldave
    Sri Sridharan is my old friend and we often talk on GTalk. The subject varies from Life in India/USA, movies, musics, and of course SQL. We have our differences when we talk about food or movie but we always agree when we talk about SQL. Yesterday while chatting with him we talked about SQLPASS and the conversation lasted for a long time. Here is the conversation between us on GTalk. I have removed a few of the personal talks and formatted into paragraphs as GTalk often shows stuff out of formatting. Pinal: Sri, Congrats on running for the PASS BoD again. You were so close last year. What made you decide to run again this year? Sri: Thank you Pinal for your leadership in the PASS India Community and all the things you do out there. After coming so close last year, there was no doubt in my mind that I will run again. I was truly humbled by the support I got from the community. Growing up in India for over 25 years, you are brought up in a very competitive part of the world. Right from the pressure of staying in the top of the class from kindergarten to your graduation, the relentless push from your parents about studying and getting good grades (and nothing else matters), you land up essentially living in a pressure cooker. To survive that relentless pressure, you need to have a thick skin, ability to stand up for who you really are , what you want to accomplish and in the process stay true those values. I am striving for a greater cause, to make PASS an organization that can help people with their SQL Server careers, to make PASS relevant to its chapter members, to make PASS an organization that every SQL professional in the world wants to be connected with. Just because I did not get elected or appointed last year does not mean that these causes are not worth fighting. Giving up upon failing the first time is simply not in me. If I did that, what message would I send to those who voted for me? What message would I send to my kids? Pinal: As someone who has such strong roots in India, what can the Indian PASS Community expect from you? Sri: First of all, I think fostering a regional leadership is something PASS must encourage as part of its global growth plan. For PASS global being able to understand all the issues in a region of the world and make sound decisions will be a tough thing to do on a continuous basis. I expect people like you, chapter leaders, regional mentors, MVPs of the region start playing a bigger role in shaping the next generation of PASS. That is something I said in my campaign and I still stand by it. I would like to see growth in the number of chapters in India. The current count does not truly represent the full potential of that region. I was pretty thrilled to see the Bangalore SQLSaturday happen early this year. I would like to see more of SQLSaturday events, at least in the major metro cities. I know the issues in India are very different from the rest of the world. So the formula needs to be tweaked a little for it to work better in India. Once the SQLSaturday model is vetted out, maybe there could be enough justification to have SQLRally India. PASS needs to have a premier SQL event in that region. Going to USA or Europe for that matter is incredibly hard due to VISA issues etc. So this could be a case of where PASS comes closer to where the community is. Pinal: What portfolio would take on if you are elected to the PASS Board? Sri: There are some very strong folks on the PASS Board today. The President discusses the portfolios with the group and makes the final call on the portfolios. I am also a fan of having a team associated with the portfolios. In that case, one person is the primary for a portfolio but secondary on a couple of other portfolios. This way people on the board have a direct vested interest in a few portfolios. Personally, I know I would these portfolios good justice – Chapters, Global Growth and Events (SQLSat, SQLRally). I would try to see if we can get a director to focus on Volunteers.  To me that is very critical for growth in the international regions. Pinal: This is an interesting conversation with you Sri. I know you so long time but this is indeed inspiring to many. India is a big country and we appreciate your thoughts. Sri: Thank you very much for taking time to chat with me today. Cheers. There are pretty strong candidates for SQLPASS Board of Elections this year. I know all of them in person and honestly it is going to be extremely difficult to not to vote for anybody. I am indeed in a crunch right now how to pick one over another. Though the choice is difficult, I encourage you to vote for them. I am extremely confident that the new board of directors will all have the same goal – Better SQL Server Community. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Database, DBA, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • Updated Agenda for OTN Architect Day Los Angeles (Oct 25)

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Here's the latest information on the session schedule and content for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles on October 25, 2012. Registration is open, but seating is limited. When: Thursday October 25 12, 2012 8:30am – 5:00pm Where: Sofitel Los Angeles 8555 Beverly Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90048 Agenda Time Session Title Room 8:30 am - 9:00 am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00 am - 9:15 am Welcome and Opening Comments | Bob Rhubart Beverly Ballroom 9:15 am - 10:00 am Engineered Systems: Oracle's Vision for the Future | Ralf Dossmann Oracle's Exadata and Exalogic are impressive products in their own right. But working in combination they deliver unparalleled transaction processing performance with up to a 30x increase over existing legacy systems, with the lowest cost of ownership over a 3 or 5 year basis than any other hardware. In this session you'll learn how to leverage Oracle's Engineered Systems within your enterprise to deliver record-breaking performance at the lowest TCO. Beverly Ballroom 10:00 am - 10:30 am Monitoring and Managing Applications in the Cloud | Basheer Khan Oracle offers a broad portfolio of software and hardware products and services to enable public, private and hybrid clouds to power the enterprise. However, enterprise cloud computing presents new management challenges, that need to be addressed to realize the economic benefits of cloud computing. In this session you will learn about the methods and tools you can use to proactively monitor your end-to-end Oracle Applications environment in the cloud, define service-level objectives, gain insight into your end users, and troubleshoot performance problems from a single console. Beverly Ballroom 10:30 am - 10:45 am Break 10:45 am - 11:30 am Breakout Sessions (pick one) Cloud Computing - Making IT Simple | Dr. James Baty The road to Cloud Computing is not without a few bumps. This session will help to smooth out your journey by tackling some of the potential complications. We'll examine whether standardization is a prerequisite for the Cloud. We'll look at why refactoring isn't just for application code. We'll check out deployable entities and their simplification via higher levels of abstraction. And we'll close out the session with a look at engineered systems and modular clouds. Beverly Ballroom Innovations in Grid Computing with Oracle Coherence | Ashok Aletty Learn how Oracle Coherence can increase the availability, scalability and performance of your existing applications with its advanced low-latency data-grid technologies. Also hear some interesting industry-specific use cases that customers had implemented and how Oracle is integrating Coherence into its Enterprise Java stack. Hollywood Room 11:30 am - 12:15 pm Breakout Sessions (pick one) Enterprise Strategy for Cloud Security | Dave Chappelle Security is high on the list of concerns for many organizations as they evaluate their cloud computing options. This session will examine security in the context of the various forms of cloud computing. We'll consider technical and non-technical aspects of security, and discuss several strategies for cloud computing, from both the consumer and producer perspectives. Beverly Ballroom Oracle Enterprise Manager | Perren Walker This session examines new Oracle Enterprise Manager monitoring, administration, and management features for Oracle Exalogic. It focuses on two management themes: cloud management related to virtualization and applications-to-disk management. For private cloud management, it discusses virtualization management features providing an enhanced set of application deployment capabilities enabling IaaS as well as PaaS interactions. Then from an end-to-end perspective, it covers the specific capabilities and—where applicable—best practices for machine, cloud, middleware, and application administration. Hollywood Room 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm Lunch Beverly Ballroom Lounge 1:15 pm - 2:00 pm Panel Discussion - Q&A with session speakers Beverly Ballroom 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm Breakout Sessions (pick one) Oracle Cloud Reference Architecture | Anbu Krishnaswamy Cloud initiatives are beginning to dominate enterprise IT roadmaps. Successful adoption of Cloud and the subsequent governance challenges warrant a Cloud reference architecture that is applied consistently across the enterprise. This presentation will answer the important questions: What exactly is a Cloud, why you need it, what changes it will bring to the enterprise, and what are the key capabilities of a Cloud infrastructure are - using Oracle's Cloud Reference Architecture, which is part of the IT Strategies from Oracle (ITSO) Cloud Enterprise Technology Strategy ETS). Beverly Ballroom 21st Century SOA | Jeff Davies Service Oriented Architecture has evolved from concept to reality in the last decade. The right methodology coupled with mature SOA technologies has helped customers demonstrate success in both innovation and ROI. In this session you will learn how Oracle SOA Suite's orchestration, virtualization, and governance capabilities provide the infrastructure to run mission critical business and system applications. We'll also take a special look at the convergence of SOA & BPM using Oracle's Unified technology stack. Hollywood Room 2:45 pm - 3:00 pm Break 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Roundtable Discussion Beverly Ballroom 4:00 pm - 4:15 pm Closing Comments & Readouts from Roundtables Beverly Ballroom 4:15 pm - 5:00 pm Networking / Reception Beverly Ballroom Lounge Note: Session schedule and content subject to change.

    Read the article

  • Oracle RightNow CX for Good Customer Experiences

    - by Andreea Vaduva
    Oracle RightNow CX is all about the customer experience, it’s about understanding what drives a good interaction and it’s about delivering a solution which works for our customers and by extension, their customers. One of the early guiding principles of Oracle RightNow was an 8-point strategy to providing good customer experiences. Establish a knowledge foundation Empowering the customer Empower employees Offer multi-channel choice Listen to the customer Design seamless experiences Engage proactively Measure and improve continuously The application suite provides all of the tools necessary to deliver a rewarding, repeatable and measurable relationship between business and customer. The Knowledge Authoring tool provides gap analysis, WYSIWIG editing (and includes HTML rich content for non-developers), multi-level categorisation, permission based publishing and Web self-service publishing. Oracle RightNow Customer Portal, is a complete web application framework that enables businesses to control their own end-user page branding experience, which in turn will allow customers to self-serve. The Contact Centre Experience Designer builds a combination of workspaces, agent scripting and guided assistances into a Desktop Workflow. These present an agent with the tools they need, at the time they need them, providing even the newest and least experienced advisors with consistently accurate and efficient information, whilst guiding them through the complexities of internal business processes. Oracle RightNow provides access points for customers to feedback about specific knowledge articles or about the support site in general. The system will generate ‘incidents’ based on the scoring of the comments submitted. This makes it easy to view and respond to customer feedback. It is vital, more now than ever, not to under-estimate the power of the social web – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – they have the ability to cause untold amounts of damage to businesses with a single post – witness musician Dave Carroll and his protest song on YouTube, posted in response to poor customer services from an American airline. The first day saw 150,000 views and is currently at 12,011,375. The Times reported that within 4 days of the post, the airline’s stock price fell by 10 percent, which represented a cost to shareholders of $180 million dollars. It is a universally acknowledged fact, that when customers are unhappy, they will not come back, and, generally speaking, it only takes one bad experience to lose a customer. The idea that customer loyalty can be regained by using social media channels was the subject of a 2011 Survey commissioned by RightNow and conducted by Harris Interactive. The survey discovered that 68% of customers who posted a negative review about a holiday on a social networking site received a response from the business. It further found that 33% subsequently posted a positive review and 34% removed the original negative review. Cloud Monitor provides the perfect mechanism for seeing what is being said about a business on public Facebook pages, Twitter or YouTube posts; it allows agents to respond proactively – either by creating an Oracle RightNow incident or by using the same channel as the original post. This leaves step 8 – Measuring and Improving: How does a business know whether it’s doing the right thing? How does it know if its customers are happy? How does it know if its staff are being productive? How does it know if its staff are being effective? Cue Oracle RightNow Analytics – fully integrated across the entire platform – Service, Marketing and Sales – there are in excess of 800 standard reports. If this were not enough, a large proportion of the database has been made available via the administration console, allowing users without any prior database experience to write their own reports, format them and schedule them for e-mail delivery to a distribution list. It handles the complexities of table joins, and allows for the manipulation of data with ease. Oracle RightNow believes strongly in the customer owning their solution, and to provide the best foundation for success, Oracle University can give you the RightNow knowledge and skills you need. This is a selection of the courses offered: RightNow Customer Service Administration Rel 12.02 (3 days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course familiarises users with the tasks and concepts needed to configure and maintain their system. RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration Rel 12.02 (2 days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course introduces basic CP structure and how to make changes to the look, feel and behaviour of their self-service pages RightNow Analytics Rel 12.02 (2 days) Available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand (Release 11.11 is available as In Class and Live Virtual Class) This course equips users with the skills necessary to understand data supplied by standard reports and to create custom reports RightNow Integration and Customization For Developers Rel 12.02 (5-days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course is for experienced web developers and offers an introduction to Add-In development using the Desktop Add-In Framework and introduces the core knowledge that developers need to begin integrating Oracle RightNow CX with other systems A full list of courses offered can be found on the Oracle University website. For more information and course dates please get in contact with your local Oracle University team. On top of the Service components, the suite also provides marketing tools, complex survey creation and tracking and sales functionality. I’m a fan of the application, and I think I’ve made that clear: It’s completely geared up to providing customers with support at point of need. It can be configured to meet even the most stringent of business requirements. Oracle RightNow is passionate about, and committed to, providing the best customer experience possible. Oracle RightNow CX is the application that makes it possible. About the Author: Sarah Anderson worked for RightNow for 4 years in both in both a consulting and training delivery capacity. She is now a Senior Instructor with Oracle University, delivering the following Oracle RightNow courses: RightNow Customer Service Administration RightNow Analytics RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration RightNow Marketing and Feedback

    Read the article

  • Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Let's Get Social and Interactive

    - by Christie Flanagan
    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:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} On this blog, we often write about getting social and interactive.  Usually, we’re talking about how to create a social business or how to make the customer experience more social and interactive.  Today’s topic is about getting social and interactive as well. But this time we’re talking about getting social and interactive the old fashioned way, face-to-face at Oracle OpenWorld with fellow Oracle WebCenter customers, partners and experts and the broader Oracle community.  Here are some great ways to get social at OpenWorld outside of the exhibition halls and meeting rooms: Oracle OpenWorld Welcome Reception - Sponsored by FujitsuSunday, September 30, 7:00 p.m.–8:30 p.m.Yerba Buena Gardens & Howard Street Tent You’ll definitely want to attend the Opening Ceremonies for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 on Sunday, September 30. Centered in Yerba Buena Gardens (YBG) and shimmying out to other venues, the Opening Ceremonies are not to be missed. Join other attendees for great food and drink, energizing music, networking opportunities, and more. While you’re at YBG (home of ORACLE TEAM USA’s America’s Cup Pavilion), be sure to meet the sailors who will be defending the 34th America’s Cup in 2013. Get a good look at the 161-year old Trophy itself—the oldest trophy still being contested in international sport. And at the AC72 boat display, view a model of the largest wingsail ever built. Oracle WebCenter Customer Appreciation ReceptionTuesday, October 2, 6:30 p.m.—9:30 p.m.The Palace Hotel, Rallston BallroomThose Oracle WebCenter customers who’ve RSVP’d to attend the Oracle WebCenter Customer Appreciation Reception shouldn’t miss this private cocktail reception at one of San Francisco’s finest hotels. Sponsored by Oracle WebCenter partners Fishbowl Solutions, Fujitsu, Keste, Mythics, Redstone Content Solutions, TEAM Informatics, and TekStream, this evening will provide plenty of time to interact with other WebCenter customers, partners and employees over hors d'oeuvres and cocktails. Oracle Appreciation Event – Sponsored by CSC, Fujitsu and IntelWednesday, October 3, 7:30 p.m.—1:00 a.m.Treasure Island, San Francisco On Wednesday night October 3, Treasure Island will be engineered to rock as the Oracle Appreciation Event gets revved up and attendees get rolling. As always at the Oracle Appreciation Event, there will be unlimited refreshments, fun and games, the most awesome views of San Francisco from just about anywhere, and top notch entertainment.  Past performers read like a veritable who’s who of the rock and roll elite. Join us—it's our way of saying thanks to you for supporting Oracle and our flagship conference. Complimentary shuttle service to and from Treasure Island will be provided, so all you have to worry about is having a rocking night of your own. Oracle OpenWorld Music FestivalSeptember 30-October 4, Check schedule for venues and times.Oracle presents the first annual Oracle OpenWorld Musical Festival, featuring some of today’s breakthrough musicians from around the country and the world including Macy Gray, Joss Stone, Jimmy Cliff and The Hives. It’s five nights of back-to-back performances in the heart of San Francisco. Registered Oracle conference attendees get free admission, so remember your badge when you head to a show. With limited space at some venues, these concerts are first-come, first-served. So mark your calendars and get ready for the music to begin. See you there!I hope this give you an idea of the many opportunities to socialize and interact with the Oracle community at OpenWorld, and if you’re a music lover like me, you’re in for a special treat as we debut our first annual Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival.  Check out the links below for more information on these events and the many featured performers: Reflections from the Young Prisms A Brief Soul Session with Joss Stone Mixing It Up with Blues Mix Red Meat’s Music is Rare and Well Done The English Beat’s Dave Wakeling Gets Philosophical Top Ten Reasons to Attend the Oracle Appreciation Event There’s Magic in the Air, There’ll Be Music Everywhere Looking forward to seeing you at OpenWorld!

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #004

    - by pinaldave
    Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 Auto Generate Script to Delete Deprecated Fields in Current Database In early career everytime I have to drop a column, I had hard time doing it because I was scared what if that column was needed somewhere in the code. Due to this fear I never dropped any column. I just renamed the column. If the column which I renamed was needed afterwards it was very easy to rename it back again. However, it is not recommended to keep the deleted column renamed in the database. At every interval I used to drop the columns which was prefixed with specific word. This script is 6 years old but still works. Give it a look, I am open for improvements. 2007 Shrinking Truncate Log File – Log Full – Part 2 Shrinking database or mdf file is indeed bad thing and it creates lots of problems. However, once in a while there is legit requirement to shrink the log file – a very rare one. In the rare occasion shrinking or truncating the log file may be the only solution. However, one should make sure to take backup before and after the truncate or shrink as in case of a disaster they can be very useful. Remember that truncating log file will break the log chain and while restore it can create major issue. Anyway, use this feature with caution. 2008 Simple Use of Cursor to Print All Stored Procedures of Database Including Schema This is a very interesting requirement I used to face in my early career days, I needed to print all the Stored procedures of my database. Interesting enough I had written a cursor to do so. Today when I look back at this stored procedure, I believe there will be a much cleaner way to do the same task, however, I still use this SP quite often when I have to document all the stored procedures of my database. Interesting Observation about Order of Resultset without ORDER BY In industry many developers avoid using ORDER BY clause to display the result in particular order thinking that Index is enforcing the order. In this interesting example, I demonstrate that without using ORDER BY, same table and similar query can return different results. Query optimizer always returns results using any method which is optimized for performance. The learning is There is no order unless ORDER BY is used. 2009 Size of Index Table – A Puzzle to Find Index Size for Each Index on Table I asked this puzzle earlier where I asked how to find the Index size for each of the tables. The puzzle was very well received and lots of interesting answers were received. To answer this question I have written following blog posts. I suggest this weekend you try to solve this problem and see if you can come up with a better solution. If not, well here are the solutions. Solution 1 | Solution 2 | Solution 3 Understanding Table Hints with Examples Hints are options and strong suggestions specified for enforcement by the SQL Server query processor on DML statements. The hints override any execution plan the query optimizer might select for a query. The SQL Server Query optimizer is a very smart tool and it makes a better selection of execution plan. Suggesting hints to the Query Optimizer should be attempted when absolutely necessary and by experienced developers who know exactly what they are doing (or in development as a way to experiment and learn). Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY I have seen developers and DBAs using TOP very causally when they have to use the ORDER BY clause. Theoretically, there is no need of ORDER BY in the view at all. All the ordering should be done outside the view and view should just have the SELECT statement in it. It was quite common that to save this extra typing by including ordering inside of the view. At several instances developers want a complete resultset and for the same they include TOP 100 PERCENT along with ORDER BY, assuming that this will simulate the SELECT statement with ORDER BY. 2010 SQLPASS Nov 8-11, 2010-Seattle – An Alternative Look at Experience In year 2010 I attended most prestigious SQL Server event SQLPASS between Nov 8-11, 2010 at Seattle. I have only one expression for the event - Best Summit Ever. Instead of writing about my usual routine or the event, I wrote about the interesting things I did and how I felt about it! When I go back and read it, I feel that this is the best event I attended in year 2010. Change Database Access to Single User Mode Using SSMS Image says all. 2011 SQL Server 2012 has introduced new analytic functions. These functions were long awaited and I am glad that they are now here. Before when any of this function was needed, people used to write long T-SQL code to simulate these functions. But now there’s no need of doing so. Having available native function also helps performance as well readability. Function SQLAuthority MSDN CUME_DIST CUME_DIST CUME_DIST FIRST_VALUE FIRST_VALUE FIRST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LEAD LEAD LEAD LAG LAG LAG PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENT_RANK PERCENT_RANK PERCENT_RANK Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • Make @JsonTypeInfo property optional

    - by Mark Peters
    I'm using @JsonTypeInfo to instruct Jackson to look in the @class property for concrete type information. However, sometimes I don't want to have to specify @class, particularly when the subtype can be inferred given the context. What's the best way to do that? Here's an example of the JSON: { "owner": {"name":"Dave"}, "residents":[ {"@class":"jacksonquestion.Dog","breed":"Greyhound"}, {"@class":"jacksonquestion.Human","name":"Cheryl"}, {"@class":"jacksonquestion.Human","name":"Timothy"} ] } and I'm trying to deserialize them into these classes (all in jacksonquestion.*): public class Household { private Human owner; private List<Animal> residents; public Human getOwner() { return owner; } public void setOwner(Human owner) { this.owner = owner; } public List<Animal> getResidents() { return residents; } public void setResidents(List<Animal> residents) { this.residents = residents; } } public class Animal {} public class Dog extends Animal { private String breed; public String getBreed() { return breed; } public void setBreed(String breed) { this.breed = breed; } } public class Human extends Animal { private String name; public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } } using this config: @JsonTypeInfo(use = JsonTypeInfo.Id.CLASS, include = JsonTypeInfo.As.PROPERTY, property = "@class") private static class AnimalMixin { } //... ObjectMapper objectMapper = new ObjectMapper(); objectMapper.getDeserializationConfig().addMixInAnnotations(Animal.class, AnimalMixin.class); Household household = objectMapper.readValue(json, Household.class); System.out.println(household); As you can see, the owner is declared as a Human, not an Animal, so I want to be able to omit @class and have Jackson infer the type as it normally would. When I run this though, I get org.codehaus.jackson.map.JsonMappingException: Unexpected token (END_OBJECT), expected FIELD_NAME: missing property '@class' that is to contain type id (for class jacksonquestion.Human) Since "owner" doesn't specify @class. Any ideas? One initial thought I had was to use @JsonTypeInfo on the property rather than the type. However, this cannot be leveraged to annotate the element type of a list.

    Read the article

  • How do you Send More that 20 Parameters to a Stored Procedure Using ODP.Net?

    - by discwiz
    Switching from Microsofts Oracle Driver to ODP.NET version 10.2.0.100. After changing the data types to OracleDBTypes in a procedure, that worked perficetly using System.Data.OracleClient, the procedure fails if we try and pass in more that 20 parameters. The error returned is: ORA-06550: line 1, column 7: PLS-00306: wrong number or types of arguments in call to 'ADD_TARP_EVENT' ORA-06550: line 1, column 7: PL/SQL: Statement ignorede If we reduce the number of parameters to less than 20 it works. Is this a known issue? Thanks, Dave Here the code for creating the parameters: Shared Function CreateTarpEventCommand(ByVal aTarpEvent As TARPEventType) As OracleCommand Dim cmd As New OracleCommand With aTarpEvent cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_facID_C", OracleDbType.Char)).Value = .FacilityShortName cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_facName_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .FacilityLongName cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_client_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .ComputerNameTarpIsRunningOn cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_TARP_Version_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .TarpVersionNumber cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_NAS_Type_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .FacilityNASSystemType cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_Aircraft1_Callsign_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .Aircraft1Callsign If .Aircraft1Type Is Nothing Then cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_Aircraft1_Type_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .Aircraft1Type End If If .Aircraft1Category Is Nothing Then cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_Aircraft1_Cat_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .Aircraft1Category End If cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_Aircraft2_Callsign_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .Aircraft2Callsign If .Aircraft2Type Is Nothing Then cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_Aircraft2_Type_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .Aircraft2Type End If If .Aircraft2Category Is Nothing Then cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_Aircraft2_Cat_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .Aircraft2Category End If If .SensorShortName Is Nothing Then cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_Sensor_Name_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .SensorShortName End If If .TarpConfigurationName Is Nothing Then cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_TARP_Config_Name_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .TarpConfigurationName End If If .EntryCreatorID Is Nothing Then cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_Create_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .EntryCreatorID End If If .LogAction Is Nothing Then cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_Log_Action_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .LogAction End If cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_TARP_Mode_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .TarpOperatingMode cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_Min_Loss_N", OracleDbType.Decimal)).Value = .ClosestMeasureOfLoSS If .MapName Is Nothing Then cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_MAP_NAME_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .MapName End If If .TarpConfigurationFileHash Is Nothing Then cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_CONFIG_HASH_VC", OracleDbType.Varchar2)).Value = .TarpConfigurationFileHash End If Dim aDate As OracleDate = CType(.LossEventsMessages(0).LossEventTime, System.DateTime) cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_FIRST_LOSS_EVENT_DATE", OracleDbType.Date)).Value = aDate cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_FIRST_LOSS_EVENT_MS_N", OracleDbType.Int32)).Value = .LossEventsMessages(0).LossEventMilliSeconds If .ZippedMapFiles Is Nothing Then cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_Map_File_BL", OracleDbType.Blob)).Value = .ZippedMapFiles End If cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("I_TARP_Package_BL", OracleDbType.Blob)).Value = .ZippedTarpPackageWithoutMaps cmd.Parameters.Add(New OracleParameter("rs_RESULTS", OracleDbType.RefCursor)).Direction = ParameterDirection.Output End With Return cmd End Function And here is the code for executing the procedure: Dim workingDataSet As New DataSet Dim oracleConnection As New OracleConnection Dim cmd As New OracleCommand Dim oracleDataAdapter As New OracleDataAdapter Try Using oracleConnection oracleConnection.ConnectionString = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("MasterConnectionODT") cmd = HelperDB.CreateTarpEventCommand(TarpEvent) cmd.Connection = oracleConnection cmd.CommandText = "LOADER.ADD_TARP_EVENT" cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure Using oracleConnection oracleConnection.Open() Dim aTransation As OracleTransaction = oracleConnection.BeginTransaction(IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted) Try Using oracleDataAdapter oracleDataAdapter = New OracleDataAdapter(cmd) oracleDataAdapter.TableMappings.Add("Results", "rs_Max") oracleDataAdapter.Fill(workingDataSet) ....

    Read the article

  • Get HDD (and NOT Volume) Serial Number on Vista Ultimate 64 bit

    - by TheAgent
    Hi all. I was once looking for getting the HDD serial number without using WMI, and I found it. The code I found and posted on StackOverFlow.com works very well on 32 bit Windows, both XP and Vista. The trouble only begins when I try to get the serail number on 64 bit OSs (Vista Ultimate 64, specifically). The code returns String.Empty, or a Space all the time. Anyone got an idea how to fix this? EDIT: I used the tools Dave Cluderay suggested, with interesting results: Here is the output from DiskId32, on Windows XP SP2 32-bit: To get all details use "diskid32 /d" Trying to read the drive IDs using physical access with admin rights Drive 0 - Primary Controller - - Master drive Drive Model Number________________: [MAXTOR STM3160215AS] Drive Serial Number_______________: [ 6RA26XK3] Drive Controller Revision Number__: [3.AAD] Controller Buffer Size on Drive___: 2097152 bytes Drive Type________________________: Fixed Drive Size________________________: 160041885696 bytes Trying to read the drive IDs using the SCSI back door Drive 4 - Tertiary Controller - - Master drive Drive Model Number________________: [MAXTOR STM3160215AS] Drive Serial Number_______________: [ 6RA26XK3] Drive Controller Revision Number__: [3.AAD] Controller Buffer Size on Drive___: 2097152 bytes Drive Type________________________: Fixed Drive Size________________________: 160041885696 bytes Trying to read the drive IDs using physical access with zero rights **** STORAGE_DEVICE_DESCRIPTOR for drive 0 **** Vendor Id = [] Product Id = [MAXTOR STM3160215AS] Product Revision = [3.AAD] Serial Number = [] **** DISK_GEOMETRY_EX for drive 0 **** Disk is fixed DiskSize = 160041885696 Trying to read the drive IDs using Smart Drive 0 - Primary Controller - - Master drive Drive Model Number________________: [MAXTOR STM3160215AS] Drive Serial Number_______________: [ 6RA26XK3] Drive Controller Revision Number__: [3.AAD] Controller Buffer Size on Drive___: 2097152 bytes Drive Type________________________: Fixed Drive Size________________________: 160041885696 bytes Hard Drive Serial Number__________: 6RA26XK3 Hard Drive Model Number___________: MAXTOR STM3160215AS And DiskId32 run on Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit: To get all details use "diskid32 /d" Trying to read the drive IDs using physical access with admin rights Trying to read the drive IDs using the SCSI back door Trying to read the drive IDs using physical access with zero rights **** STORAGE_DEVICE_DESCRIPTOR for drive 0 **** Vendor Id = [MAXTOR S] Product Id = [TM3160215AS] Product Revision = [3.AA] Serial Number = [] **** DISK_GEOMETRY_EX for drive 0 **** Disk is fixed DiskSize = 160041885696 Trying to read the drive IDs using Smart Hard Drive Serial Number__________: Hard Drive Model Number___________: Notice how much lesser the information is on Vista, and how the Serial Number is not returned. Also the other tool, EnumDisk, refers to my hard disks on Vista as "SCSI" as opposed to "ATA" on Windows XP. Any ideas? EDIT 2: I'm posting the results from EnumDisks: On Windows XP SP2 32-bit: Properties for Device 1 Device ID: IDE\DiskMAXTOR_STM3160215AS_____________________3.AAD___ Adapter Properties ------------------ Bus Type : ATA Max. Tr. Length: 0x20000 Max. Phy. Pages: 0xffffffff Alignment Mask : 0x1 Device Properties ----------------- Device Type : Direct Access Device (0x0) Removable Media : No Product ID : MAXTOR STM3160215AS Product Revision: 3.AAD Inquiry Data from Pass Through ------------------------------ Device Type: Direct Access Device (0x0) Vendor ID : MAXTOR S Product ID : TM3160215AS Product Rev: 3.AA Vendor Str : *** End of Device List

    Read the article

  • Java object to XML Elements?

    - by DaveKub
    I'm working on a webservices client app and I have it mostly working. I can retrieve and read data from the third-party webservice fine. Now I need to submit some data and I'm stuck. The classes for the objects I'm retrieving/submitting were generated from XSD files via the xjc tool. The part I'm stuck on is turning one of those objects into an XML tree to submit to the webservice. When I retrieve/send a request from/to the ws, it contains a 'payload' object. This is defined in java code as (partial listing): @XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD) @XmlType(name = "PayloadType", propOrder = { "compressed", "document", "any", "format" }) public class PayloadType { @XmlElement(name = "Compressed") protected String compressed; @XmlElement(name = "Document") protected List<String> document; @XmlAnyElement protected List<Element> any; protected String format; public List<Element> getAny() { if (any == null) { any = new ArrayList<Element>(); } return this.any; } } The only field I'm concerned with is the 'any' field which contains an XML tree. When I retrieve data from the ws, I read that field with something like this: ('root' is of org.w3c.dom.Element type and is the result of calling 'getAny().get(0)' on the payload object) NodeList nl = root.getElementsByTagName("ns1:Process"); // "ns1:Process" is an XML node to do something with if (nl != null && nl.getLength() > 0) { for (int i = 0; i < nl.getLength(); i++) { Element proc = (Element) nl.item(i); try { // do something with the 'proc' Element here... } catch (Exception ex) { // handle problems here... } } } Submitting data is where I'm stuck. How do I take a java object created from one of the classes generated from XSD and turn it into an Element object that I can add to the 'any' List of the payload object?? For instance, if I have a DailyData class and I create and populate it with data: DailyData dData = new DailyData(); dData.setID = 34; dData.setValues = "3,5,76,23"; How do I add that 'dData' object to the 'any' List of the payload object? It has to be an Element. Do I do something with a JAXBContext marshaller? I've used that to dump the 'dData' object to the screen to check the XML structure. I'm sure the answer is staring me in the face but I just can't see it! Dave

    Read the article

  • How to fire server-side methods with jQuery

    - by Nasser Hajloo
    I have a large application and I'm going to enabling short-cut key for it. I'd find 2 JQuery plug-ins (demo plug-in 1 - Demo plug-in 2) that do this for me. you can find both of them in this post in StackOverFlow My application is a completed one and I'm goining to add some functionality to it so I don't want towrite code again. So as a short-cut is just catching a key combination, I'm wonder how can I call the server methods which a short-cut key should fire? So How to use either of these plug-ins, by just calling the methods I'd written before? Actually How to fire Server methods with Jquery? You can also find a good article here, by Dave Ward Update: here is the scenario. When User press CTRL+Del the GridView1_OnDeleteCommand so I have this protected void grdDocumentRows_DeleteCommand(object source, System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataGridCommandEventArgs e) { try { DeleteRow(grdDocumentRows.DataKeys[e.Item.ItemIndex].ToString()); clearControls(); cmdSaveTrans.Text = Hajloo.Portal.Common.Constants.Accounting.Documents.InsertClickText; btnDelete.Visible = false; grdDocumentRows.EditItemIndex = -1; BindGrid(); } catch (Exception ex) { Page.AddMessage(GetLocalResourceObject("AProblemAccuredTryAgain").ToString(), MessageControl.TypeEnum.Error); } } private void BindGrid() { RefreshPage(); grdDocumentRows.DataSource = ((DataSet)Session[Hajloo.Portal.Common.Constants.Accounting.Session.AccDocument]).Tables[AccDocument.TRANSACTIONS_TABLE]; grdDocumentRows.DataBind(); } private void RefreshPage() { Creditors = (decimal)((AccDocument)Session[Hajloo.Portal.Common.Constants.Accounting.Session.AccDocument]).Tables[AccDocument.ACCDOCUMENT_TABLE].Rows[0][AccDocument.ACCDOCUMENT_CREDITORS_SUM_FIELD]; Debtors = (decimal)((AccDocument)Session[Hajloo.Portal.Common.Constants.Accounting.Session.AccDocument]).Tables[AccDocument.ACCDOCUMENT_TABLE].Rows[0][AccDocument.ACCDOCUMENT_DEBTORS_SUM_FIELD]; if ((Creditors - Debtors) != 0) labBalance.InnerText = GetLocalResourceObject("Differentiate").ToString() + "?" + (Creditors - Debtors).ToString(Hajloo.Portal.Common.Constants.Common.Documents.CF) + "?"; else labBalance.InnerText = GetLocalResourceObject("Balance").ToString(); lblSumDebit.Text = Debtors.ToString(Hajloo.Portal.Common.Constants.Common.Documents.CF); lblSumCredit.Text = Creditors.ToString(Hajloo.Portal.Common.Constants.Common.Documents.CF); if (grdDocumentRows.EditItemIndex == -1) clearControls(); } Th other scenario are the same. How to enable short-cut for these kind of code (using session , NHibernate, etc)

    Read the article

  • Can you pass by reference in Java?

    - by dbones
    Hi. Sorry if this sounds like a newbie question, but the other day a Java developer mentioned about passing a paramter by reference (by which it was ment just pass a Reference object) From a C# perspective I can pass a reference type by value or by reference, this is also true to value types I have written a noddie console application to show what i mean.. can i do this in Java? namespace ByRefByVal { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { //Creating of the object Person p1 = new Person(); p1.Name = "Dave"; PrintIfObjectIsNull(p1); //should not be null //A copy of the Reference is made and sent to the method PrintUserNameByValue(p1); PrintIfObjectIsNull(p1); //the actual reference is passed to the method PrintUserNameByRef(ref p1); //<-- I know im passing the Reference PrintIfObjectIsNull(p1); Console.ReadLine(); } private static void PrintIfObjectIsNull(Object o) { if (o == null) { Console.WriteLine("object is null"); } else { Console.WriteLine("object still references something"); } } /// <summary> /// this takes in a Reference type of Person, by value /// </summary> /// <param name="person"></param> private static void PrintUserNameByValue(Person person) { Console.WriteLine(person.Name); person = null; //<- this cannot affect the orginal reference, as it was passed in by value. } /// <summary> /// this takes in a Reference type of Person, by reference /// </summary> /// <param name="person"></param> private static void PrintUserNameByRef(ref Person person) { Console.WriteLine(person.Name); person = null; //this has access to the orginonal reference, allowing us to alter it, either make it point to a different object or to nothing. } } class Person { public string Name { get; set; } } } If it java cannot do this, then its just passing a reference type by value? (is that fair to say) Many thanks Bones

    Read the article

  • CoGetClassObject gives many First-chance exceptions in ATL project. Should I worry?

    - by Andrew
    Hello, I have written a COM object that in turn uses a thrid party ActiveX control. In my FinalConstruct() for my COM object, I instantiate the ActiveX control with the follow code: HRESULT hRes; LPCLASSFACTORY2 pClassFactory; hRes = CoInitializeEx(NULL,COINIT_APARTMENTTHREADED); bool bTest = SUCCEEDED(hRes); if (!bTest) return E_FAIL; if (SUCCEEDED(CoGetClassObject(__uuidof(SerialPortSniffer), CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER, NULL, IID_IClassFactory2, (LPVOID *)(&pClassFactory)))) { ... more set up code When I step over the line if (SUCCEEDED(CoGetClassObject(__uuidof(SerialPortSniffer), ..., I get 20+ lines in the Output window stating: First-chance exception at 0x0523f82e in SillyComDriver.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation writing location 0x00000000. I also get the lines: First-chance exception at 0x051e3f3d in SillyComDriver.exe: 0xC0000096: Privileged instruction. First-chance exception at 0x100ab9e6 in SillyComDriver.exe: 0xC000001D: Illegal Instruction. Notice these are first-chance exceptions. The program runs as expected I can access the third party methods/properties. Still, I'm left wondering why they are occurring. Perhaps my way of instantiating the ActiveX control (for which I want use of it's methods/properties and not it's GUI stuff) is incorrect? Besides the code I'm showing, I also put the line import "spsax.dll" no_namespace in the stdafx.h That's all the code necessary for my simple demo project. I noticed this problem because I had (inadvertently) set the "break on exceptions" options in my "real" project and it was breaking on this line. Once I removed it, it also works. If you're read this far thank you, and perhaps I can ask one other minor question. In my demo project, if I right click on SerialPortSniffer and "go to definition", it takes me to the file C:....\AppData\Local\Temp\spsax.tlh. Can someone explain that? Finally, in my "real" project, right clicking on SerialPortSniffer and going to difinition leads to "The symbol 'SerialPortSniffer' is not defined". It doesn't seem to affect the program though. Is there some setting I've messed up? By the way, all my code is written w/ VS2008. Thanks, Dave

    Read the article

  • Animating a pulsing UILabel?

    - by fuzzygoat
    I am trying to animate the color the the text on a UILabel to pulse from: [Black] to [White] to [Black] and repeat. - (void)timerFlash:(NSTimer *)timer { [[self navTitle] setTextColor:[[UIColor whiteColor] colorWithAlphaComponent:0.0]]; [UIView animateWithDuration:1 delay:0 options:UIViewAnimationOptionAllowUserInteraction animations:^{[[self navTitle] setTextColor:[[UIColor whiteColor] colorWithAlphaComponent:1.0]];} completion:nil]; } . [self setFadeTimer:[NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:1 target:self selector:@selector(timerFlash:) userInfo:nil repeats:YES]]; Firstly I am not sure of my method, my plan (as you can see above) was to set up a animation block and call it using a repeating NSTimer until canceled. My second problem (as you can see above) is that I am animating from black (alpha 0) to white (alpha 1) but I don't know how to animate back to black again so the animation loops seamlessly Essentially what I want is the text color to pulse on a UILabel until the user presses a button to continue. EDIT_001: I was getting into trouble because you can't animate [UILabel setColor:] you can however animated [UILabel setAlpha:] so I am going to give that a go. EDIT_002: - (void)timerFlash:(NSTimer *)timer { [[self navTitle] setAlpha:0.5]; [UIView animateWithDuration:2 delay:0 options:UIViewAnimationOptionAllowUserInteraction animations:^{[[self navTitle] setAlpha:0.9];} completion:nil]; } This works (BTW: I do want it to stop which is why I hooked it up to a NSTimer so I can cancel that) the only thing is that this animates from midGray to nearWhite and then pops back. Does anyone know how I would animate back from nearWhite to midGray so I get a nice smooth cycle? EDIT_003: (Solution) The code suggested by dave DeLong (see below) does indeed work when modified to use the CALayer opacity style attribute: UILabel *navTitle; @property(nonatomic, retain) UILabel *navTitle; . // ADD ANIMATION CABasicAnimation *anim = [CABasicAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"opacity"]; [anim setTimingFunction:[CAMediaTimingFunction functionWithName:kCAMediaTimingFunctionEaseInEaseOut]]; [anim setFromValue:[NSNumber numberWithFloat:0.5]]; [anim setToValue:[NSNumber numberWithFloat:1.0]]; [anim setAutoreverses:YES]; [anim setDuration:0.5]; [[[self navTitle] layer] addAnimation:anim forKey:@"flash"]; . // REMOVE ANIMATION [[[self navTitle] layer] removeAnimationForKey:@"flash__"];

    Read the article

  • App losing db connection

    - by DaveKub
    I'm having a weird issue with an old Delphi app losing it's database connection. Actually, I think it's losing something else that then makes the connection either drop or be unusable. The app is written in Delphi 6 and uses the Direct Oracle Access component (v4.0.7.1) to connect to an Oracle 9i database. The app runs as a service and periodically queries the db using a TOracleQuery object (qryAlarmList). The method that is called to do this looks like this: procedure TdmMain.RefreshAlarmList; begin try qryAlarmList.Execute; except on E: Exception do begin FStatus := ssError; EventLog.LogError(-1, 'TdmMain.RefreshAlarmList', 'Message: ' + E.Message); end; end; end; It had been running fine for years, until a couple of Perl scripts were added to this machine. These scripts run every 15 minutes and look for datafiles to import into the db, and then they do a some calculations and a bunch of reads/writes to/from the db. For some reason, when they are processing large amounts of data, and then the Delphi app tries to query the db, the Delphi app throws an exception at the "qryAlarmList.Execute" line in the above code listing. The exception is always: Access violation at address 00000000. read of address 00000000 HOW can something that the Perl scripts are doing cause this?? There are other Perl scripts on this machine that load data using the same modules and method calls and we didn't have problems. To make it even weirder, there are two other apps that will also suddenly lose their ability to talk to the database at the same time as the Perl stuff is running. Neither of those apps run on this machine, but both are Delphi 6 apps that use the same DOA component to connect to the same database. We have other apps that connect to the same db, written in Java or C# and they don't seem to have any problems. I've tried adding code before the '.Execute' method is called to: check the session's connection (session.CheckConnection(true); always comes back as 'ccOK'). see whether I can access a field of the qryAlarmList object to see if maybe it's become null; can access it fine. check the state of the qryAlarmList; always says it's qsIdle. Does anyone have any suggestions of something to try? This is driving me nuts! Dave

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – Developer Training Resources and Summary Roundup

    - by pinaldave
    It is always pleasure for any author when other renowned authors in the industry write about you. Earlier I wrote a five part blog series on Developer Training and I have received a phenomenal response to the series. I have received plenty of comments, questions and feedback. I thought it would be nice to sum up the whole series as well answer a few of the questions received. Quick Recap Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 In this part we discussed the importance of training in the real world. The most important and valuable resource any company is its employee. Employees who have been well-trained will be better at their jobs and produce a better product.  An employee who is well trained obviously knows more about their job and all the technical aspects. I have a very high opinion about training employees and it is the most important task. Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 In this part we discussed the most crucial components of training. Often employees are expecting the company to pay for their training and the company expresses no interest in training the employee. Quite often training expenses are the real issue for both the employee and employer. There are companies that pay for 100% of the expenses and there are employees who opt for training on their own expense during their personal time. Training is often looked at as vacation by employee and employers and we need to change this mind-set. One of the ways is to report back the learning to your manager and implement newly learned knowledge in day-to-day work. Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 This part was the most difficult to write as I tried to address a few difficult questions and answers. Training is such a sensitive issue that many developers when not receiving chance for training think about leaving the organization. The manager often feels pressure to accommodate every single employee for training even though his training budget is limited. It is indeed the responsibility of the developer to get maximum advantage from the training. Training immediately helps organizations but stays as a part of an employee’s knowledge forever. Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 In this part I tried to explore a few methods and options for training. The generic feedback I received on this blog post was short and I should have explored each of the subject of the training in details. I believe there are two big buckets of training 1) Instructor Lead Training and 2) Self Lead Training. The common element between both the methods is “learning material”. Learning material can be of any format – videos, books, paper notes or just a plain black board. Instructor-led training is a very effective mode but not possible every single time. During the course of the developer’s career, one has to learn lots of new technology and it is almost impossible to have a quality trainer available on that subject at that time. Books are most effective and proven methods, however, it always helps if someone explains the concepts of the book with a demonstration. In recent times I have started to believe in online trainings which leads to a hybrid experience. Online trainings take the best part of the books and the best part of the instructor-led training and gives effective training in a matter of hours. Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 In this part, I shared what I was continuously thinking about developer training. There is no better teacher than oneself. There is no better motivation than a personal desire to learn new technology. Honestly there is nothing more personal learning. That “change is the only constant” and “adapt & overcome” are the essential lessons of life. One cannot stop the learning and resist the change. In the IT industry “ego of knowing all” and the “resistance to change” are the most challenging issues. Once someone overcomes them, life is much easier. I believe that proper and appropriate high quality training can help to address the burning issues. Opinion of Friends I invited a few of my friends to express their opinion about developer training and here are their opinions. I am listing them here in the order of the blog post publishing date. Nakul Vachhrajani - Developer Trainings-Importance, Benefits, Tips and follow-up Nakul’s sums of many of the concepts which are complementary to my blog posts. Nakul addresses the burning question of developer training with different angles. I am personally very impressed by his following statement - “Being skilled does not mean having just a stack of certifications, but it also means having an understanding about the internals of the products that you are working on – and using that knowledge to improve the efficiency & productivity at the workplace in turn resulting in better products, better consulting abilities and a happier self.” Nakul also suggests the online training options of Pluralsight. Vinod Kumar - Training–a necessity or bonus Vinod Kumar comes up with excellent follow up on developer training. Vinod is known for his inspirational writing about SQL Server. Vinod starts with a story of a student who is extremely eager to learn the wisdom of life from a monk but the monk does not accept him as a disciple for a long time. The conversation between student and monk is indeed an essence of all learning. We all want to learn quickly and be successful but the most important thing in life is to have the right attitude towards learning and more so towards life. The blog post end with a very important thought about how to avoid the famous excuse – “I don’t have enough time.” Ritesh Shah - Training – useful or useless? Ritesh brings up very important concept related to training. Ritesh in his meticulous style explains why training is an important and lifelong process. Training must not stop at any age but should continue forever. The moment training stops, progress stops along with. Paras Doshi - Professional Development Resource Paras is known for his to–the-point writing, and has summarized the five part series very precisely. He read the five part series and created a digest summary of the blog post. If you are in a rush and have no time to read my five series – I suggest you read his blog post. Training Resources I am often asked what the best resources for learning new technology are. This is the most difficult question EVER. There are plenty of good training resources available. When it is about training our needs are different, our preference of learning is different and we all have an opinion. Additionally, we all are located in different geographic locations worldwide and there is no way one solution will fit all. However, let me list a few of the training resources which I have built so far and you can consume them if you find it relevant to your need. SQL Server Books SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers SQL Wait Stats SQL Programming Joes 2 Pros SQL Server Video Tutorials SQL Server Questions and Answers SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics SQL Server Performance: Introduction to Query Tuning SQL in Sixty Seconds Series of Sixty Seconds Learning Video on YouTube Trust me worldwide web is very big and there are plenty of high quality learning materials available worldwide – trainer-led as well online. I suggest you explore various options and make the best choice for yourself. Remember, training is your personal journey and it should never stop. Are you ready? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services - The Word is But a Stage (T-SQL Tuesday #006)

    - by smisner
    Host Michael Coles (blog|twitter) has selected LOB data as the topic for this month's T-SQL Tuesday, so I'll take this opportunity to post an overview of reporting with spatial data types. As part of my work with SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services, I've been exploring the use of spatial data types in the new map data region. You can create a map using any of the following data sources: Map Gallery - a set of Shapefiles for the United States only that ships with Reporting Services ESRI Shapefile - a .shp file conforming to the Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI) shapefile spatial data format SQL Server spatial data - a query that includes SQLGeography or SQLGeometry data types Rob Farley (blog|twitter) points out today in his T-SQL Tuesday post that using the SQL geography field is a preferable alternative to ESRI shapefiles for storing spatial data in SQL Server. So how do you get spatial data? If you don't already have a GIS application in-house, you can find a variety of sources. Here are a few to get you started: US Census Bureau Website, http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/ Global Administrative Areas Spatial Database, http://biogeo.berkeley.edu/gadm/ Digital Chart of the World Data Server, http://www.maproom.psu.edu/dcw/ In a recent post by Pinal Dave (blog|twitter), you can find a link to free shapefiles for download and a tutorial for using Shape2SQL, a free tool to convert shapefiles into SQL Server data. In my post today, I'll show you how to use combine spatial data that describes boundaries with spatial data in AdventureWorks2008R2 that identifies stores locations to embed a map in a report. Preparing the spatial data First, I downloaded Shapefile data for the administrative boundaries in France and unzipped the data to a local folder. Then I used Shape2SQL to upload the data into a SQL Server database called Spatial. I'm not sure of the reason why, but I had to uncheck the option to create a spatial index to upload the data. Otherwise, the upload appeared to run successfully, but no table appeared in my database. The zip file that I downloaded contained three files, but I didn't know what was in them until I used Shape2SQL to upload the data into tables. Then I found that FRA_adm0 contains spatial data for the country of France, FRA_adm1 contains spatial data for each region, and FRA_adm2 contains spatial data for each department (a subdivision of region). Next I prepared my SQL query containing sales data for fictional stores selling Adventure Works products in France. The Person.Address table in the AdventureWorks2008R2 database (which you can download from Codeplex) contains a SpatialLocation column which I joined - along with several other tables - to the Sales.Customer and Sales.Store tables. I'll be able to superimpose this data on a map to see where these stores are located. I included the SQL script for this query (as well as the spatial data for France) in the downloadable project that I created for this post. Step 1: Using the Map Wizard to Create a Map of France You can build a map without using the wizard, but I find it's rather useful in this case. Whether you use Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or Report Builder 3.0, the map wizard is the same. I used BIDS so that I could create a project that includes all the files related to this post. To get started, I added an empty report template to the project and named it France Stores. Then I opened the Toolbox window and dragged the Map item to the report body which starts the wizard. Here are the steps to perform to create a map of France: On the Choose a source of spatial data page of the wizard, select SQL Server spatial query, and click Next. On the Choose a dataset with SQL Server spatial data page, select Add a new dataset with SQL Server spatial data. On the Choose a connection to a SQL Server spatial data source page, select New. In the Data Source Properties dialog box, on the General page, add a connecton string like this (changing your server name if necessary): Data Source=(local);Initial Catalog=Spatial Click OK and then click Next. On the Design a query page, add a query for the country shape, like this: select * from fra_adm1 Click Next. The map wizard reads the spatial data and renders it for you on the Choose spatial data and map view options page, as shown below. You have the option to add a Bing Maps layer which shows surrounding countries. Depending on the type of Bing Maps layer that you choose to add (from Road, Aerial, or Hybrid) and the zoom percentage you select, you can view city names and roads and various boundaries. To keep from cluttering my map, I'm going to omit the Bing Maps layer in this example, but I do recommend that you experiment with this feature. It's a nice integration feature. Use the + or - button to rexize the map as needed. (I used the + button to increase the size of the map until its edges were just inside the boundaries of the visible map area (which is called the viewport). You can eliminate the color scale and distance scale boxes that appear in the map area later. Select the Embed map data in this report for faster rendering. The spatial data won't be changing, so there's no need to leave it in the database. However, it does increase the size of the RDL. Click Next. On the Choose map visualization page, select Basic Map. We'll add data for visualization later. For now, we have just the outline of France to serve as the foundation layer for our map. Click Next, and then click Finish. Now click the color scale box in the lower left corner of the map, and press the Delete key to remove it. Then repeat to remove the distance scale box in the lower right corner of the map. Step 2: Add a Map Layer to an Existing Map The map data region allows you to add multiple layers. Each layer is associated with a different data set. Thus far, we have the spatial data that defines the regional boundaries in the first map layer. Now I'll add in another layer for the store locations by following these steps: If the Map Layers windows is not visible, click the report body, and then click twice anywhere on the map data region to display it. Click on the New Layer Wizard button in the Map layers window. And then we start over again with the process by choosing a spatial data source. Select SQL Server spatial query, and click Next. Select Add a new dataset with SQL Server spatial data, and click Next. Click New, add a connection string to the AdventureWorks2008R2 database, and click Next. Add a query with spatial data (like the one I included in the downloadable project), and click Next. The location data now appears as another layer on top of the regional map created earlier. Use the + button to resize the map again to fill as much of the viewport as possible without cutting off edges of the map. You might need to drag the map within the viewport to center it properly. Select Embed map data in this report, and click Next. On the Choose map visualization page, select Basic Marker Map, and click Next. On the Choose color theme and data visualization page, in the Marker drop-down list, change the marker to diamond. There's no particular reason for a diamond; I think it stands out a little better than a circle on this map. Clear the Single color map checkbox as another way to distinguish the markers from the map. You can of course create an analytical map instead, which would change the size and/or color of the markers according to criteria that you specify, such as sales volume of each store, but I'll save that exploration for another post on another day. Click Finish and then click Preview to see the rendered report. Et voilà...c'est fini. Yes, it's a very simple map at this point, but there are many other things you can do to enhance the map. I'll create a series of posts to explore the possibilities. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

    Read the article

  • SQLAuthority News – Pluralsight Course Review – Practices for Software Startups – Part 1 of 2

    - by pinaldave
    This is first part of the two part series of Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. The course is written by Stephen Forte (Blog | Twitter). Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik, a leading vendor of developer and team productivity tools. Stephen is also a Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Professional, PMP, and also speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development.  Stephen is also a board member of the Scrum Alliance. Startups – Everybodies Dream Start-up companies are an important topic right now – everyone wants to start their own business.  It is also important to remember that all companies were a start up at one point – from your corner store to the giants like Microsoft and Apple.  Research proves that not every start-up succeeds, in fact, most will fail before their first year.  There are many reasons for this, and this could be due to the fact that there are many stages to a start-up company, and stumbling at any of these stages can lead to failure.  It is important to understand what makes a start-up company succeed at all its hurdles to become successful.  It is even important to define success.  For most start-ups this would mean becoming their own independently functioning company or to be bought out for a hefty profit by a larger company.  The idea of making a hefty profit by living your dream is extremely important, and you can even think of start-ups as the new craze.  That’s why studying them is so important – they are very popular, but things have changed a lot since their inception. Starting the Startups Beginning a start-up company used to be difficult, but now facilities and information is widely available, and it is much easier.  But that means it is much easier to fail, also.  Previously to start your own company, everything was planned and organized, resources were ensured and backed up before beginning; even the idea of starting your own business was a big thing.  Now anybody can do it, and the steps are simple and outlines everywhere – you can get online software and easily outsource , cloud source, or crowdsource a lot of your material.  But without the type of planning previously required, things can often go badly. New Products – New Ideas – New World There are so many fantastic new products, but they don’t reach success all the time.  I find start-up companies very interesting, and whenever I meet someone who is interested in the subject or already starting their own company, I always ask what they are doing, their plans, goals, market, etc.  I am sorry to say that in most cases, they cannot answer my questions.  It is true that many fantastic ideas fail because of bad decisions.  These bad decisions were not made intentionally, but people were simply unaware of what they should be doing.  This will always lead to failure.  But I am happy to say that all these issues can be gone because Pluralsight is now offering a course all about start-ups by Stephen Forte.  Stephen is a start up leader.  He has successfully started many companies and most are still going strong, or have gone on to even bigger and better things. Beginning Course on Startup I have always thought start-ups are a fascinating subject, and decided to take his course, but it is three hours long.  This would be hard to fit into my busy work day all at once, so I decided to do half of his course before my daughter wakes up, and the other half after she goes to sleep.  The course is divided into six modules, so this would be easy to do.  I began the first chapter early in the morning, at 5 am.  Stephen jumped right into the middle of the subject in the very first module – designing your business plan.  The first question you will have to answer to yourself, to others, and to investors is: What is your product and when will we be able to see it?  So a very important concept is a “minimal viable product.”  This means setting goals for yourself and your product.  We all have large dreams, but your minimal viable product doesn’t have to be your final vision at the very first.  For example: Apple is a giant company, but it is still evolving.  Steve Jobs didn’t envision the iPhone 6 at the very beginning.  He had to start at the first iPhone and do his market research, and the idea evolved into the technology you see now.  So for yourself, you should decide a beginning and stop point.  Do your market research.  Determine who you want to reach, what audience you want for your product.  You can have a great idea that simply will not work in the market, do need, bottlenecks, lack of resources, or competition.  There is a lot of research that needs to be done before you even write a business plan, and Stephen covers it in the very first chapter. The Team – Unique Key to Success After jumping right into the subject in the very first module, I wondered what Stephen could have in store for me for the rest of the course.  Chapter number two is building a team.  Having a team is important regardless of what your startup is.  You can be a true visionary with endless ideas and energy, but one person can still not do everything.  It is important to decide from the very beginning if you will have cofounders, team leaders, and how many employees you’ll need.  Even more important, you’ll need to decide what kind of team you want – what personalities, skills, and type of energy you want each of your employees to bring.  Do you want to have an A+ team with a B- idea, or do you have a B- idea that needs an A+ team to sell it?  Stephen asks all the hard questions!  I was especially impressed by his insight on developing.  You have to decide if you need developers, how many, and what their skills should be. I found this insight extremely useful for everyday usage, not just for start-up companies.  I would apply this kind of information in management at any position.  An amazing team will build an amazing product – and that doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up company or a small team working for a much larger business. Customer Development – The Ultimate Obective Chapter three was about customer development. According to Stephen, there are four different steps to develop a customer base.  The first question to ask yourself is if you are envisioning a large customer base buying a few products each, or a small, dedicated base that buys a lot of your product – quantity vs. Quality.  He also discusses how to earn, retain, and get more customers.  He also says that each customer should be placed in a different role – some will be like investors, who regularly spend with you and invest their money in your business.  It is then your job to take that investment and turn it into a better product in the future.  You need to deal with their money properly – think of it is as theirs as investors, not yours as profit.  At the end of this module I felt that only Stephen could provide this kind of insight, and then he listed all the resources he took his information from.  I have never seen a group of people so passionate about their customers. It was indeed a long day for me. In tomorrow’s part 2 we will discuss rest of the three module and also will see a quick video of the Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • SQLAuthority News – Memories at Anniversary of SQL Wait Stats Book

    - by pinaldave
    SQL Wait Stats About a year ago, I had very proud moment. I had published my second book SQL Server Wait Stats with me as a primary author. It has been a long journey since then. The book got great response and it was widely accepted in the community. It was first of its kind of book written specifically on Wait Stats and Performance. The book was based on my earlier month long series written on the same subject SQL Server Wait Stats. Today, on the anniversary of the book, lots of things come to my mind let me share a few here. Idea behind Blog Series A very common question I often receive is why I wrote a 30 day series on Wait Stats. There were two reasons for it. 1) I have been working with SQL Server for a long time and have troubleshoot more than hundreds of SQL Server which are related to performance tuning. It was a great experience and it taught me a lot of new things. I always documented my experience. After a while I found that I was able to completely rely on my own notes when I was troubleshooting any servers. It is right then I decided to document my experience for the community. 2) While working with wait stats there were a few things, which I thought I knew it well as they were working. However, there was always a fear in the back of mind that what happens if what I believed was incorrect and I was on the wrong path all the time. There was only one way to get it validated. Put it out in front community with my understanding and request further help to improve my understanding. It worked, it worked beautifully. I received plenty of conversations, emails and comments. I refined my content based on various conversations and make it more relevant and near accurate. I guess above two are the major reasons for beginning my journey on writing Wait Stats blog series. Idea behind Book After writing a blog series there was a good amount of request I keep on receiving that I should convert it to eBook or proper book as reading blog posts is great but it goes not give a comprehensive understanding of the subject. The very common feedback from users who were beginning the subject that they will prefer to read it in a structured method. After hearing the feedback for more than 4 months, I decided to write a book based on the blog posts. When I envisioned book, I wanted to make sure this book addresses the wait stats concepts from the fundamentals and fill the gaps of blogs I wrote earlier. Rick Morelan and Joes 2 Pros Team I must acknowledge my co-author Rick Morelan for his unconditional support in writing this book. I had already authored one book before I published this book. The experience to write the book was out of the world. Writing blog posts are much much easier than writing books. The efforts it takes to write a book is 100 times more even though the content is ready. I could have not done it myself if there was not tremendous support of my co-author and editor’s team. We spend days and days researching and discussing various concepts covered in the book. When we were in doubt we reached out to experts as well did a practical reproduction of the scenarios to validate the concepts and claims. After continuous 3 months of hard work we were able to get this book out in the community. September 1st – the lucky day Well, we had to select any day to publish the books. When book was completed in August last week we felt very glad. We all had worked hard and having a sample draft book in hand was feeling like having a newborn baby in our hand. Every time my books are published I feel the same joy which I had when my daughter was born. The feeling of holding a new book in hand is the (almost) same feeling as holding newborn baby. I am excited. For me September 1st has been the luckiest day in mind life. My daughter Shaivi was born on September 1st. Since then every September first has been excellent day and have taken me to the next step in life. I believe anything and everything I do on September 1st it is turning out to be successful and blessed. Rick and I had finished a book in the last week of August. We sent it to the publisher (printer) and asked him to take the book live as soon as possible. We did not decide on any date as we wanted the book to get out as fast as it can. Interesting enough, the publisher/printer selected September 1st for publishing the book. He published the book on 1st September and I knew it at the same time that this book will go next level. Book Model – The Most Beautiful Girl We were done with book. We had no budget left for marketing. Rick and I had a long conversation regarding how to spread the words for the book so it can reach to many people. While we were talking about marketing Rick come up with the idea that we should hire a most beautiful girl around who acknowledge our book and genuinely care for book. It was a difficult task and Rick asked me to find a more beautiful girl. I am a father and the most beautiful girl for me my daughter. This was not a difficult task for me. Rick had given me task to find the most beautiful girl and I just could not think of anyone else than my own daughter. I still do not know what Rick thought about this idea but I had already made up my mind. You can see the detailed blog post here. The Fun Experiments Book Signing Event We had lots of fun moments along this book. We have given away more books to people for free than we have sold them actually. We had done book signing events, contests, and just plain give away when we found people can be benefited from this book. There was never an intention to make money and get rich. We just wanted that more and more people know about this new concept and learn from it. Today when I look back to the earnings there is nothing much we have earned if you talk about dollars. However the best reward which we have received is the satisfaction and love of community. The amount of emails, conversations we have so far received for this book is over thousands. We had fun writing this book, it was indeed a very satisfying journey. I have earned lots of friends while learning and exploring. Availability The book is one year old but still very relevant when it is about performance tuning. It is available at various online book stores. If you have read the book, do let me know what you think of it. Amazon | Kindle | Flipkart | Indiaplaza Reference:  Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority, SQLAuthority Book Review, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • SQLAuthority News – Pluralsight Course Review – Practices for Software Startups – Part 2 of 2

    - by pinaldave
    This is the second part of the two part series of Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Please read the first part of this series over here. The course is written by Stephen Forte (Blog | Twitter). Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik. Personal Learning Schedule After these three sessions it was 6:30 am and time to do my own blog.  But for the rest of the day, I kept thinking about the course, and wanted to go back and finish.  I was wishing that I had woken up at 3 am so I could finish all at one go.  All day long I was digesting what I had learned.  At 10 pm, after my daughter had gone to bed, I sighed on again.  I was not disappointed by the long wait.  As I mentioned before, Stephen has started four to six companies, and all of them are very successful today. Here is the video I promised yesterday – it discusses the importance of Right Sizing Your Startup. The Heartbeat of Startup – Technology Stephen has combined all technology knowledge into one 30 minute session.  He discussed  how to start your project, how to deal with opinions, and how to deal with multiple ideas – every start up has multiple directions it can go. He spent a lot of time emphasized deciding which direction to go and how to decide which will be the best for you.  He called it a continuous development cycle. One of the biggest hazards for a start-up company is one person deciding the direction the company will go, until down the road another team member announces that there is a glitch in their part of the work and that everyone will have to start over.  Even though a team of two or five people can move quickly, often the decision has gone too long and cannot be easily fixed.   Stephen used an example from his own life:  he was biased for one type of technology, and his teammate for another.  In the end they opted for his teammate’s  choice , and in the end it was a good decision, even though he was unfamiliar with that particular program.  He argues that technology should not be a barrier to progress, that you cannot rely on your experience only.  This really spoke to me because I am a big fan of SQL, but I know there is more out there, and I should be more open to it.  I give my thanks to Stephen, I learned something in this module besides startups. Money, Success and Epic Win! The longest, but most interesting, the module was funding your start-up.  You need to fund the start-up right at the very beginning, if not done right you will run into trouble.  The good news is that a few years ago start-ups required a lot more money – think millions of dollars – but now start-ups can get off the ground for thousands.  Stephen used an example of a company that years ago would have needed a million dollars, but today could be started for $600.  It is true that things have changed, but you still need money.  For $600 you can start small and add dynamically, as needed.  But the truth is that if you have $600, $6000, or $6 million, it will be spent.  Don’t think of it as trying to save money, think of it as investing in your future.   You will need money, and you will need to (quickly) decide what you do with the money: shares, stakeholders, investing in a team, hiring a CEO.  This is so important because once you have money and start the company, the company IS your money.  It is your biggest currency – having a percentage of ownership in the company.  Investors will want percentages as repayment for their investment, and they will want a say in the business as well.  You will have to decide how far you will dilute your shares, and how the company will be divided, if at all.  If you don’t plan in advance, you will find that after gaining three or four investors, suddenly you are the minority owner in your own dream.  You need to understand funding carefully.  This single module is worth all the money you would have spent on the whole course alone.  I encourage everyone to listen to this single module even if they don’t watch any of the others.     Press End to Start the Game – Exists! The final module is exit strategies.  You did all this work, dealt with all political and legal issues.  What are you going to get out of it? The answer is simple: money.  Maybe you want your company to be bought out, for you talent to bring you a profit.  You can sell the company to someone and still head it.  Many options are available.  You could sell and still work as an employee but no longer own the company.  There are many exit strategies.  This is where all your hard work comes into play.  It is important not to feel fooled at any step.  There are so many good ideas that end up in the garbage because of poor planning, so that if you find yourself successful, you don’t want to blow it at this step!  The exit is important.  I thought that this aspect of the course was completely unique, and I loved Stephen’s point of view.  I was lost deep in thought after this module ended.  I actually took two hours worth of notes on this section alone – and it was only a three hour course.  I am planning on attending this course one more time next week, just to catch up on all the small bits of wisdom I’m sure I missed. Thank you Stephen for bringing your real world experience with us!  I recommend that everyone attends this course, even if they don’t want to begin their own start-up company. It was indeed a long day for me. Do not forget to read part 1 of this story and attend course Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • Oracle at Gartner IAM Summit Next Week

    - by Tanu Sood
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Heading to Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit next week? As you know, one of the premier conferences for identity management specialists and security experts, the Gartner IAM Conference this year is in Las Vegas, Nevada from December 3 – 5. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} As you pack your bags and plan your itinerary, do note that Oracle executives including Amit Jasuja, Senior Vice President, Security and Identity Management and Dave Profozich, Group Vice President along with product management and implementation experts would be in attendance. You are invited to meet with the Oracle team and mingle with our customers. We recommend you bookmark the following times and activities: Breakfast Keynote: Trends in Identity Management Tuesday, December 4, 2012 7:30 a.m. – 8:00 a.m., Octavius 16 Amit Jasuja, SVP, Security and Identity Management, Oracle Ranjan Jain, Enterprise Architect, Cisco Don’t miss the opportunity to hear from Amit Jasuja, SVP, Security and Identity Management as he discusses how mobile and social behavior are changing how organizations function, manage their workforce, and interact with their customers. Learn how these new trends are shaping the innovations in Oracle Identity Management solutions. And get a customer’s take on the new trends and their impact on the organization. Visit the Oracle Booth Mingle with peers, customers, product and implementation experts at the Oracle booth. While there, catch live demonstrations of the very latest best-in-class technologies and learn how Oracle Identity Management solutions are enabling the Social, Mobile and Cloud (SoMoClo) environments. And arm yourself with industry resources from our Virtual Collateral Rack. And don’t forget to enter for a chance to win a JAWBONE JAMBOX Wireless Speaker System while at our booth. So, see you there? Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit December 3 -5, 2012 Caesars Palace 3570 Las Vegas Blvd South Las Vegas, NV 89109

    Read the article

  • XNA Notes 010

    - by George Clingerman
    With GDC 2011 wrapping up there were a LOT of great interviews and posts with and about XNA and XBLIG and some of our more notorious developers. Definitely worth spending many, many hours watching, listening and reading all those. Very inspiring! Also, don’t forget to get signed up for Dream Build Play! And just as an early warning reminder do NOT, I repeat do NOT wait to submit your game the last day. There are major issues submitting the last day every year and you do not want all your hard work to be hanging on whether your entry actually went through in that last day. Plan on submitting a few days if not a week before. I’m serious, you’ll thank yourself later! Now on to what’s happening in the XNA community! Time Critical XNA News: PAX East Meet Up (really wish I was going!) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71921/439262.aspx Want to stay panicked about the countdown to Dream Build Play? Mike McLaughlin shares his DBP countdown clock http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/44454458960252928 XNA Team: Nick Gravelyn Only needs less than 600 new users in his unique marketing plan for Pixel Man 2 http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ And hares his ad revenue numbers with his XNA WP7 games http://theoneswiththelight.com/2011/my-results-with-ad-revenue-for-wp7-games/ XNA MVPs: Andy “The ZMan” Dunn posts his 15,000th App Hub forum post and shares a few thoughts on the MVP summit http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/77625.aspx Chris Williams shares his thoughts on the MVP summit http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/03/07/144229.aspx XNA Developers: Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best games Wraps up GDC http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/gdc-2011-wrapped.html And shares the wonderful screenshots from Serious Sam. (I’m so jealous people at PAX East willl be playing a demo of this game!) http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/serious-sam-double-d.html James Silva of Ska Studios announces http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/09/vampire-smile-at-hotel-sierra/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/08/vengeance-begins-april-6th/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/04/good-morning-gato-52/ Michael McLaughlin writes an extremely useful set of tips for XNA WP7 developers http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/03/10/tips-for-xna-wp7-developers.aspx Robert Boyd “the one man XBLIG improving machine” posts his 9 tips for marketing an Xbox LIVE Indie Gam http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110309/7183/9_Tips_for_XBLIG_Marketing.php http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/77534/470586.aspx#470586 And shares his day by day experience at GDC this year http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7118/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_1.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7123/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_2.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110303/7129/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_3.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7133/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_4.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7160/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_5.php Phillipe Da Silva releases new IGF Pong Sample preview http://www.vimeo.com/20904070 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Gamergeddon posts XBox Indie Game Roundup for March 6th http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/03/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-march-6th/ Dealspwn interviews FortressCraft developer Projector Games http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-minecraft-clones-venting-haters-part-1/ http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-part-2-trials-tribulations-indie-development/ Writings of Mass Destruction continues the Xbox LIVE Indie Game a day campaign, here’s his take on FishCraft (be sure to check out his other posts!) http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/2011/03/05/day-116-fishcraft/ Tom Ogburn shares his GDC notes on the XBLIG panel jotted quickly while attending the panel http://twitter.com/#!/TOgburn/status/44454191028125696 http://www.starlitskygames.com/blogs/site_news/archive/2011/03/06/802.aspx Dave Voyles of Armless Octopus has crazy good coverage on XNA and Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers at GDC 2011. Interviews and articles all extremely well done! http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/06/gdc-2011-successful-indie-developers-share-insight-on-microsofts-self-publishing-service/ There’s honestly so many posts and interviews you should just hit his front page and scroll down through all of the latest ones. http://www.armlessoctopus.com/ GameMarx Episode 12 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/27/ep-12-march-4-2011.aspx B.U.T.T.O.N now on Steam! http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/03/button_party_game_now_on_steam.php German Xbox Dashboard gets review program from GamePro http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/07/gamepo-indie-review-show-debuts-on-german-xbox-dashboard/ XboxIndies.com (one of the best XNA sites out there at this point!) continues to add review sites to it’s main review feed. (And don’t forget to play with that awesome XBLIG pivot control!) http://xboxindies.com/ Kris Steele of FunInfused Games shares early footage of his game World of Chalk http://twitter.com/#!/kriswd40/status/45007114371989504 Raymond Matthews of Darkstarmatryx reviews FunInfused Games Abduction Action http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=264 TheVideoGamerRob reviews Zombie Football Carnage http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/xblig-review-zombie-football-carnage/ XBLIG Square Off Making the Jump to WP7 http://www.wp7connect.com/2011/03/08/xblig-square-off-will-make-the-jump-to-windows-phone/ Mommy’s Best Games making the news round with their Serious Sam announcement http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/09/serious-sam-gets-serious-indie-cred-with-new-indie-series/ Most quoted and linked XBLIG article of the week with the least amount of actual facts and reporting. Shared only because it makes me sad that this is the best coverage we get. (Hey reporters, there’s LOT and LOTS of XBLIG and XNA experts you can contact if you need to check up on facts or wonder why on questions like, Why can’t XBLIGs have Nazis? There’s actually a real answer for that..) http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/06/xblig-facts-nazi-killing-a-no-no-revenue-a-yes-yes/ XNA Development: Mort8088 has been in an XNA tutorial writing frenzy releasing 4 XNA 4.0 entry level tutorials this week! http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-0-intro/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-1-fonts/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-2-sprites/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-3-input-from-keyboard/ Interesting discussion on what it means to be a community (you do have to sign up to be a member of the XNA UK forums to read it...) http://twitter.com/#!/XNAUK/status/44705269254594560 Slyprid continues his incredible pace on Transmute and shares screens of his new Animation Builder http://twitter.com/#!/slyprid/status/45169271847911424 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/blog/ Philippe Da Silva wants to know who is using IGF for their games. If it’s you, drop him a note letting him know! http://twitter.com/#!/philippedasilva/status/44325893719588864 New Sunburn Video Tutorials released http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/03/07/new-documentation-video-tutorials.aspx Loading and rendering animated collada models using XNA 4.0 http://bunkernetz.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/loading-and-rendering-animated-collada-models-using-xna-4-0/ XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 6 Accelerometer Input http://buzzgamesnews.blogspot.com/2011/03/xna-for-silverlight-developers-part-6.html

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – Step by Step Guide to Beginning Data Quality Services in SQL Server 2012 – Introduction to DQS

    - by pinaldave
    Data Quality Services is a very important concept of SQL Server. I have recently started to explore the same and I am really learning some good concepts. Here are two very important blog posts which one should go over before continuing this blog post. Installing Data Quality Services (DQS) on SQL Server 2012 Connecting Error to Data Quality Services (DQS) on SQL Server 2012 This article is introduction to Data Quality Services for beginners. We will be using an Excel file Click on the image to enlarge the it. In the first article we learned to install DQS. In this article we will see how we can learn about building Knowledge Base and using it to help us identify the quality of the data as well help correct the bad quality of the data. Here are the two very important steps we will be learning in this tutorial. Building a New Knowledge Base  Creating a New Data Quality Project Let us start the building the Knowledge Base. Click on New Knowledge Base. In our project we will be using the Excel as a knowledge base. Here is the Excel which we will be using. There are two columns. One is Colors and another is Shade. They are independent columns and not related to each other. The point which I am trying to show is that in Column A there are unique data and in Column B there are duplicate records. Clicking on New Knowledge Base will bring up the following screen. Enter the name of the new knowledge base. Clicking NEXT will bring up following screen where it will allow to select the EXCE file and it will also let users select the source column. I have selected Colors and Shade both as a source column. Creating a domain is very important. Here you can create a unique domain or domain which is compositely build from Colors and Shade. As this is the first example, I will create unique domain – for Colors I will create domain Colors and for Shade I will create domain Shade. Here is the screen which will demonstrate how the screen will look after creating domains. Clicking NEXT it will bring you to following screen where you can do the data discovery. Clicking on the START will start the processing of the source data provided. Pre-processed data will show various information related to the source data. In our case it shows that Colors column have unique data whereas Shade have non-unique data and unique data rows are only two. In the next screen you can actually add more rows as well see the frequency of the data as the values are listed unique. Clicking next will publish the knowledge base which is just created. Now the knowledge base is created. We will try to take any random data and attempt to do DQS implementation over it. I am using another excel sheet here for simplicity purpose. In reality you can easily use SQL Server table for the same. Click on New Data Quality Project to see start DQS Project. In the next screen it will ask which knowledge base to use. We will be using our Colors knowledge base which we have recently created. In the Colors knowledge base we had two columns – 1) Colors and 2) Shade. In our case we will be using both of the mappings here. User can select one or multiple column mapping over here. Now the most important phase of the complete project. Click on Start and it will make the cleaning process and shows various results. In our case there were two columns to be processed and it completed the task with necessary information. It demonstrated that in Colors columns it has not corrected any value by itself but in Shade value there is a suggestion it has. We can train the DQS to correct values but let us keep that subject for future blog posts. Now click next and keep the domain Colors selected left side. It will demonstrate that there are two incorrect columns which it needs to be corrected. Here is the place where once corrected value will be auto-corrected in future. I manually corrected the value here and clicked on Approve radio buttons. As soon as I click on Approve buttons the rows will be disappeared from this tab and will move to Corrected Tab. If I had rejected tab it would have moved the rows to Invalid tab as well. In this screen you can see how the corrected 2 rows are demonstrated. You can click on Correct tab and see previously validated 6 rows which passed the DQS process. Now let us click on the Shade domain on the left side of the screen. This domain shows very interesting details as there DQS system guessed the correct answer as Dark with the confidence level of 77%. It is quite a high confidence level and manual observation also demonstrate that Dark is the correct answer. I clicked on Approve and the row moved to corrected tab. On the next screen DQS shows the summary of all the activities. It also demonstrates how the correction of the quality of the data was performed. The user can explore their data to a SQL Server Table, CSV file or Excel. The user also has an option to either explore data and all the associated cleansing info or data only. I will select Data only for demonstration purpose. Clicking explore will generate the files. Let us open the generated file. It will look as following and it looks pretty complete and corrected. Well, we have successfully completed DQS Process. The process is indeed very easy. I suggest you try this out yourself and you will find it very easy to learn. In future we will go over advanced concepts. Are you using this feature on your production server? If yes, would you please leave a comment with your environment and business need. It will be indeed interesting to see where it is implemented. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Data Quality Services, DQS

    Read the article

  • Brighton Rocks: UA Europe 2011

    - by ultan o'broin
    User Assistance Europe 2011 was held in Brighton, UK. Having seen Quadrophenia a dozen times, I just had to go along (OK, I wanted to talk about messages in enterprise applications). Sadly, it rained a lot, though that was still eminently more tolerable than being stuck home in Dublin during Bloomsday. So, here are my somewhat selective highlights and observations from the conference, massively skewed towards my own interests, as usual. Enjoyed Leah Guren's (Cow TC) great start ‘keynote’ on the Cultural Dimensions of Software Help Usage. Starting out by revisiting Hofstede's and Hall's work on culture (how many times I have done this for Multilingual magazine?) and then Neilsen’s findings on age as an indicator of performance, Leah showed how it is the expertise of the user that user assistance (UA) needs to be designed for (especially for high-end users), with some considerations made for age, while the gender and culture of users are not major factors. Help also needs to be contextual and concise, embedded close to the action. That users are saying things like “If I want help on Office, I go to Google ” isn't all that profound at this stage, but it is always worth reiterating how search can be optimized to return better results for users. Interestingly, regardless of user education level, the issue of information quality--hinging on the lynchpin of terminology reflecting that of the user--is critical. Major takeaway for me there. Matthew Ellison’s sessions on embedded help and demos were also impressive. Embedded help that is concise and contextual is definitely a powerful UX enabler, and I’m pleased to say that in Oracle Fusion Applications we have embraced the concept fully. Matthew also mentioned in his session about successful software demos that the principle of modality with demos is a must. Look no further than Oracle User Productivity Kit demos See It!, Try It!, Know It, and Do It! modes, for example. I also found some key takeaways in the presentation by Marie-Louise Flacke on notes and warnings. Here, legal considerations seemed to take precedence over providing any real information to users. I was delighted when Marie-Louise called out the Oracle JDeveloper documentation as an exemplar of how to use notes and instructions instead of trying to scare the bejaysus out of people and not providing them with any real information they’d find useful instead. My own session on designing messages for enterprise applications was well attended. Knowing your user profiles (remember user expertise is the king maker for UA so write for each audience involved), how users really work, the required application business and UI rules, what your application technology supports, and how messages integrate with the enterprise help desk and support policies and you will go much further than relying solely on the guideline of "writing messages in plain language". And, remember the value in warnings and confirmation messages too, and how you can use them smartly. I hope y’all got something from my presentation and from my answers to questions afterwards. Ellis Pratt stole the show with his presentation on applying game theory to software UA, using plenty of colorful, relevant examples (check out the Atlassian and DropBox approaches, for example), and striking just the right balance between theory and practice. Completely agree that the approach to take here is not to make UA itself a game, but to invoke UA as part of a bigger game dynamic (time-to-task completion, personal and communal goals, personal achievement and status, and so on). Sure there are gotchas and limitations to gamification, and we need to do more research. However, we'll hear a lot more about this subject in coming years, particularly in the enterprise space. I hope. I also heard good things about the different sessions about DITA usage (including one by Sonja Fuga that clearly opens the door for major innovation in the community content space using WordPress), the progressive disclosure of information (Cerys Willoughby), an overview of controlled language (or "information quality", as I like to position it) solutions and rationale by Dave Gash, and others. I also spent time chatting with Mike Hamilton of MadCap Software, who showed me a cool demo of their Flare product, and the Lingo translation solution. I liked the idea of their licensing model for workers-on-the-go; that’s smart UX-awareness in itself. Also chatted with Julian Murfitt of Mekon about uptake of DITA in the enterprise space. In all, it's worth attending UA Europe. I was surprised, however, not to see conference topics about mobile UA, community conversation and content, and search in its own right. These are unstoppable forces now, and the latter is pretty central to providing assistance now to all but the most irredentist of hard-copy fetishists or advanced technical or functional users working away on the back end of applications and systems. Only saw one iPad too (says the guy who carries three laptops). Tweeting during the conference was pretty much nonexistent during the event, so no community energy there. Perhaps all this can be addressed next year. I would love to see the next UA Europe event come to Dublin (despite Bloomsday, it's not a bad place place, really) now that hotels are so cheap and all. So, what is my overall impression of the state of user assistance in Europe? Clearly, there are still many people in the industry who feel there is something broken with the traditional forms of user assistance (particularly printed doc) and something needs to be done about it. I would suggest they move on and try and embrace change, instead. Many others see new possibilities, offered by UX and technology, as well as the reality of online user behavior in an increasingly connected world and that is encouraging. Such thought leaders need to be listened to. As Ellis Pratt says in his great book, Trends in Technical Communication - Rethinking Help: “To stay relevant means taking a new perspective on the role (of technical writer), and delivering “products” over and above the traditional manual and online Help file... there are a number of new trends in this field - some complementary, some conflicting. Whatever trends emerge as the norm, it’s likely the status quo will change.” It already has, IMO. I hear similar debates in the professional translation world about the onset of translation crowd sourcing (the Facebook model) and machine translation (trust me, that battle is over). Neither of these initiatives has put anyone out of a job and probably won't, though the nature of the work might change. If anything, such innovations have increased the overall need for professional translators as user expectations rise, new audiences emerge, and organizations need to collate and curate user-generated content, combining it with their own. Perhaps user assistance professionals can learn from other professions and grow accordingly.

    Read the article

facebook twitter digg google delicious technorati stumbleupon myspace wordpress linkedin gmail igoogle windows live tumblr viadeo yahoo buzz yahoo mail yahoo bookmarks favorites email print

< Previous Page | 94 95 96 97 98 99  | Next Page >