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• Does Scrum turn active developers into passive developers?

  - by Saeed Neamati

  I'm a web developer working in a team of three developers and one designer. It's now about five months that we've implemented the agile scrum software development methodology. But I have a weird feeling I just wanted to share in this site. One important factor in human life is decision-making process. However, there is a big difference in decisions you make. Some decisions are just the outcome of an internal or external force, while other decisions are completely based on your free will, and some decisions are simply something in between. The more freedom you have in making decisions, the more self-driven your work would become. This seems to be a rule. Because we tend to shape our lives ourselves. There is a big difference between you deciding what to do, or being told what to do. Before scrum, I felt like having more freedom in making the decisions which were related to development, analysis, prioritizing implementation, etc. I had more feeling like I'm deciding what I'm doing. However, due to the scrum methodology, now many decisions simply come from the product owner. He prioritizes PBIs, he analyzes how the software should work, even sometimes how the UI and functionality should be implemented. I know that this is part of the scrum methodology, and I also know that this may result in better sales of product in future. However, I now feel like I'm always getting told to do something, instead of deciding to do something. This syndrome now has made me more passive towards the work. I tend to search less to find a better solution, approach, or technique I don't wake up in the morning expecting to get to an enjoyable work. Rather, I feel like being forced to work in order to live I have more hunger to work on my own hobby projects after work I won't push the team anymore to get to the higher technological levels I spend more time now on dinner, or tea-times and have less enthusiasm to get back to work I'm now willing more for the work to finish sooner, so that I can get home The big problem is, I see and diagnose this behavior in my colleagues too. Is it the outcome of scrum? Does scrum really makes the development team feel like they have no part in forming the overall software, thus making the passive to the project? How can I overcome this feeling?

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• TSAM 11gR1

  - by todd.little

  The Tuxedo System and Application Monitor (TSAM) 11gR1 release provides powerful new application monitoring capabilities, as well as significant improvements in ease of use. The first thing users will notice is the completely redesigned user interface in the TSAM console. Based on Oracle ADF, the console is much easier to navigate, provides a Web 2.0 style interface with dynamically updating panels, and a look and feel familiar to those that have used Oracle Enterprise Manager. Monitoring data can be viewed in both tabular and graphical form and exported to Excel for further analysis. A number of new metrics are collected and displayed in this release. Call path monitoring now displays CPU time, message size, total transport time, and client address giving even more end-to-end information about a specific Tuxedo request. As well the call path display has been completely revamped to make it much easier to see the branches of the call path. The call pattern display now provides statistics on successful vs failed calls, system and application failures, and end-to-end average elapsed time. Service monitoring now displays minimum and maximum message size, CPU usage, and client address. System server monitoring now includes monitoring the SALT gateway servers to provide detailed performance metrics about those servers. Perhaps the most significant new feature is the consolidation of alert definitions and policy management. In previous versions of TSAM, some alerts were defined and checked on the monitored systems while others were defined and checked in the console. Policy management could be performed on both the monitored node via environment variable or command, as well as from the console. Now all alert definitions and policy definitions are only made using the console. For alerts this means that regardless of where the alert is evaluated it is defined in one and only one place. Thus the plug-in alert mechanism of previous releases can now be managed using the TSAM console, making SLA alert definition much easier and cleaner. Finally there is support in TSAM for monitoring rehosted mainframe applications. The newly announced Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime for CICS and Batch can be monitored in the TSAM console using traditional mainframe views of the application such as regions. Look for a future blog entry with more details on this as well as some entries providing a glimpse of the console. TSAM gives users a single point for monitoring the performance of all of their Tuxedo applications.

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• Tellago announces SQL Server 2008 R2 BI quick adoption programs

  - by Vishal

  During the last year, we (Tellago) have been involved in various business intelligence initiatives that leverage some emerging BI techniques such as self-service BI or complex event processing (CEP). Specifically, in the last few months, we have partnered with Microsoft to deliver a series of events across the country where we present the different technologies of the SQL Server 2008 R2 BI stack such as PowerPivot, StreamInsight, Ad-Hoc Reporting and Master Data Services. As part of those events, we try to go beyond the traditional technology presentation and provide a series of best practices and lessons we have learned on real world BI projects that leverage these technologies. Now that SQL Server 2008 R2 has been released to manufacturing, we have launched a series of quick adoption programs that are designed to help customers understand how they can embrace the newest additions to Microsoft's BI stack as part of their IT initiatives. The programs are also designed to help customers understand how the new SQL Server features interact with established technologies such as SQL Server Analysis Services or SQL Server Integration Services. We try to keep these adoption programs very practical by doing a lot of prototyping and design sessions that will give our customers a practical glimpse of the capabilities of the technologies and how they can fit in their enterprise architecture roadmap. Here is our official announcement (you can blame my business partner, BI enthusiast, and Tellago's CEO Elizabeth Redding for the marketing pitch ;)): Tellago Marks Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch With Business Intelligence Quick Adoption Program Microsoft launched SQL Server 2008 R2 last week, which delivers several breakthrough business intelligence (BI) capabilities that enable organizations to:  Efficiently process, analyze and mine data Improve IT and developer efficiency Enable highly scalable and well-managed Business Intelligence on a self-service basis for business users The release offers a new feature called PowerPivot, which enables self service BI through connecting business users directly to enterprise data sources and providing improved reporting and analytics. The release also offers Master Data Management which helps enterprises centrally manage critical data assets company-wide and across diverse systems, enabling increased integrity of information over time. Finally, the release includes StreamInsight, which is a framework for implementing Complex Event Processing (CEP) applications on the Microsoft platform. With StreamInsight, IT organizations can implement the infrastructure to process a large volume of events near real time, execute continuous queries against event streams and enable real time business intelligence. As a thought leader in the Business Intelligence community, Tellago has recognized the occasion by launching a series of quick adoption programs to enable the adoption of this new BI technology stack in your enterprise. Our Quick Adoption programs are designed to help you: Brainstorm BI solution options  Architect initial infrastructure components Prototype key features of a solution As a 2-3 day program, our approach is more efficient and cost effective than a traditional Proof of Concept because it allows you to understand the new SQL Server 2008 R2 feature set  while seeing directly how you can leverage it for your business intelligence needs. If you are interested in learning more about the BI capabilities of Microsoft's Business Intelligence stack, including SQL Server 2008 R2, we can help.  As industry experts and software content advisers to Microsoft, Tellago is the place where ideas meet technology expertise.  Let us help you see for yourself the advantages that you can gain from Microsoft's  SQL Server 2008 R2. Email or call for more information - [email protected] or 847-925-2399.

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• Windows Azure Use Case: High-Performance Computing (HPC)

  - by BuckWoody

  This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx  Description: High-Performance Computing (also called Technical Computing) at its most simplistic is a layout of computer workloads where a “head node” accepts work requests, and parses them out to “worker nodes'”. This is useful in cases such as scientific simulations, drug research, MatLab work and where other large compute loads are required. It’s not the immediate-result type computing many are used to; instead, a “job” or group of work requests is sent to a cluster of computers and the worker nodes work on individual parts of the calculations and return the work to the scheduler or head node for the requestor in a batch-request fashion. This is typical to the way that many mainframe computing use-cases work. You can use commodity-based computers to create an HPC Cluster, such as the Linux application called Beowulf, and Microsoft has a server product for HPC using standard computers, called the Windows Compute Cluster that you can read more about here. The issue with HPC (from any vendor) that some organization have is the amount of compute nodes they need. Having too many results in excess infrastructure, including computers, buildings, storage, heat and so on. Having too few means that the work is slower, and takes longer to return a result to the calling application. Unless there is a consistent level of work requested, predicting the number of nodes is problematic. Implementation: Recently, Microsoft announced an internal partnership between the HPC group (Now called the Technical Computing Group) and Windows Azure. You now have two options for implementing an HPC environment using Windows. You can extend the current infrastructure you have for HPC by adding in Compute Nodes in Windows Azure, using a “Broker Node”.  You can then purchase time for adding machines, and then stop paying for them when the work is completed. This is a common pattern in groups that have a constant need for HPC, but need to “burst” that load count under certain conditions. The second option is to install only a Head Node and a Broker Node onsite, and host all Compute Nodes in Windows Azure. This is often the pattern for organizations that need HPC on a scheduled and periodic basis, such as financial analysis or actuarial table calculations. References: Blog entry on Hybrid HPC with Windows Azure: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ignitionshowcase/archive/2010/12/13/high-performance-computing-on-premise-and-in-the-windows-azure-cloud.aspx  Links for further research on HPC, includes Windows Azure information: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ncdevguy/archive/2011/02/16/handy-links-for-hpc-and-azure.aspx 

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• SQLAuthority News – SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide – A Comprehensive Whitepaper – (454 pages – 9 MB)

  - by pinaldave

  Microsoft has just released SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide. This guide is very comprehensive and covers the subject of upgrade in-depth. This is indeed a helpful detailed white paper. Even writing a summary of this white paper would take over 100 pages. This further proves that SQL Server 2012 is quite an important release from Microsoft. This white paper discusses how to upgrade from SQL Server 2008/R2 to SQL Server 2012. I love how it starts with the most interesting and basic discussion of upgrade strategies: 1) In-place upgrades, 2) Side by side upgrade, 3) One-server, and 4) Two-server. This whitepaper is not just pure theory but is also an excellent source for some tips and tricks. Here is an example of a good tip from the paper: “If you want to upgrade just one database from a legacy instance of SQL Server and not upgrade the other databases on the server, use the side-by-side upgrade method instead of the in-place method.” There are so many trivia, tips and tricks that make creating the list seems humanly impossible given a short period of time. My friend Vinod Kumar, an SQL Server expert, wrote a very interesting article on SQL Server 2012 Upgrade before. In that article, Vinod addressed the most interesting and practical questions related to upgrades. He started with the fundamentals of how to start backup before upgrade and ended with fail-safe strategies after the upgrade is over. He covered end-to-end concepts in his blog posts in simple words in extremely precise statements. A successful upgrade uses a cycle of: planning, document process, testing, refine process, testing, planning upgrade window, execution, verifying of upgrade and opening for business. If you are at Vinod’s blog post, I suggest you go all the way down and collect the gold mine of most important links. I have bookmarked the blog by blogging about it and I suggest that you bookmark it as well with the way you prefer. Vinod Kumar’s blog post on SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide is a detailed resource that’s also available online for free. Each chapter was carefully crafted and explained in detail. Here is a quick list of the chapters included in the whitepaper. Before downloading the guide, beware of its size of 9 MB and 454 pages. Here’s the list of chapters: Chapter 1: Upgrade Planning and Deployment Chapter 2: Management Tools Chapter 3: Relational Databases Chapter 4: High Availability Chapter 5: Database Security Chapter 6: Full-Text Search Chapter 7: Service Broker Chapter 8: SQL Server Express Chapter 9: SQL Server Data Tools Chapter 10: Transact-SQL Queries Chapter 11: Spatial Data Chapter 12: XML and XQuery Chapter 13: CLR Chapter 14: SQL Server Management Objects Chapter 15: Business Intelligence Tools Chapter 16: Analysis Services Chapter 17: Integration Services Chapter 18: Reporting Services Chapter 19: Data Mining Chapter 20: Other Microsoft Applications and Platforms Appendix 1: Version and Edition Upgrade Paths Appendix 2: SQL Server 2012: Upgrade Planning Checklist Download SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide [454 pages and 9 MB] Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Database, DBA, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL White Papers, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Today's Links (6/20/2011)

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Why your security sucks | Eric Knorr A conversation with InfoWorld security expert Roger Grimes reveals why the latest burst of attacks is just business as usual. JDev 11g R2 - ADF BC Dependency Diagram Feature | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovkis continues his exploration of JDeveloper 11g R2. Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear-view Mirror | Charles Newark-French "Our analysis shows that, for the first time ever, daily time spent in mobile apps surpasses desktop and mobile web consumption," says Newark-French. "This stat is even more remarkable if you consider that it took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage, driven primarily by the popularity of iOS and Android platforms." Vivek Kundra, a public servant who gets stuff done | Craig Newmark Craigslist founder Craig Newmark bids farewell to the nation's first CIO. Weblogic, QBrowser and topics | Eric Elzinga Elzinga says: "Besides using the Weblogic Console to add subscribers to our topics we can also use QBrowser to browse queues and topics on your Weblogic Server." Java EE talks at JAX Conf | Arun Gupta Arun Gupta shares links to several Java EE presentations taking place at this week's Jax Conference in San Jose, CA. Development gotchas and silver bullets | Andy Mulholland Mulholland explains why "Software development has to change to fit with new business practices!" Oracle is Proud Sponsor of Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit 2011 | Troy Kitch Oracle will have a very strong presence at this year’s Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit 2011 in Washington D.C., June 20-23. Database Web Service using Toplink DB Provider | Vishal Jain "With JDeveloper 11gR2 you can now create database based web services using JAX-WS Provider," says Jain. Sample Chapter: A Fusion Applications Technical Overview An excerpt from "Managing Oracle Fusion Applications" by Richard Bingham, published by Oracle Press, May 2011. White Paper: Oracle Optimized Solution for Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure This paper provides recommendations and best practices for optimizing virtualization infrastructures when deploying the Oracle Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure. White paper: Oracle Optimized Solution for Lifecycle Content Management Authors Donna Harland and Nick Klosk illustrate how Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite and Oracle’s Sun Storage Archive Manager work Oracle’s Sun hardware. Bay Area Coherence Special Interest Group Date: Thursday, July 21, 2011 Time: 4:30pm - 8:15pm ET - Note that Parking at 475 Sansome Closes at 8:30pm Location: Oracle Office,475 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA Google Map Speakers: Chris Akker, Solutions Engineer, F5 Paul Cleary, Application Architect, Oracle Alexey Ragozin, Independent Consultant Brian Oliver, Oracle

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• BI&EPM in Focus June 2013

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Analyst Report from Ovum: BI bites into a bigger slice of Oracle’s Red Stack Customers INC Research Ensures 24/7 Enterprise Application Availability and Supports Rapid Expansion in Asia with Managed Cloud Services – Hyperion Planning, PeopleSoft, E-Business Suite, SOA Suite PL Developments Improves Quality and Demand Planning Accuracy, Streamlines Compliance as It Moves into Manufacturing – Hyperion Planning, OBIEE, E-Business Suite Release 12.1, Agile, Demantra Kiabi Provides Store Managers with Monthly Earnings Statements in Four Business Days to Support Continued Retail Growth – Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Reporting, Hyperion Smart View for Office Speedy Cash Improves Global Financial Budgeting and Forecasting to Support Continued Company Growth - Hyperion Planning, Essbase, Hyperion Smart View for Office, Hyperion Financial Management Grupo Sports World Automates and Reduces Budget Consolidation Time by 33% for 30 Fitness Centers – Hyperion Planning Jupiter Shop Channel Automates Budgeting Processes, Enhances Visibility of Project Investments to Support Strategic Decision-Making – Hyperion Planning GENBAND Saves US$1.25 Million Annually with Automated Global Trade Management, Gains Compliance Assurance – Hyperion Financial Management, E-Business Suite Aldar Properties Consolidates and Simplifies Group Planning and Reporting for Business and Finance Structures with Integrated ERP and Business Intelligence – Hyperion Planning, Essbase, Data Integrator, OBIEE, E-Business Suite, SUN Link to Complete Archive Enterprise Performance Management Hyperion EPM 11.1.2.3 Webcast Tutorials EPM Blog: Three Technologies CFOs Need to Know About The CFO as Catalyst for Change - Part 1 The CFO as Catalyst for Change - Part 2 Actions Speak Louder in Scorecards Unlocking Business Potential with Enterprise Performance Management Business Intelligence Oracle Database 12c is launched Analysis: How to Take Big Data Advantage of Oracle Database 12c by Data-informed.com Normal 0 false false false EN-GB 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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• Gawker Passwords

  - by Nick Harrison

  There has been much news about the hack of the Gawker web sites. There has even been an analysis of the common passwords found. This list is embarrassing in many ways. The most common password was "123456". The second most common password was "password". Much has also been written providing advice on how to create good passwords. This article provides some interesting advice, none of which should be taken. Anyone reading my blog, probably already knows the importance of strong passwords, so I am not going to reiterate the reasons here. My target audience is more the folks defining password complexity requirements. A user cannot come up with a strong password, if we have complexity requirements that don't make sense. With that in mind, here are a few guidelines:  Long Passwords Insist on long passwords. In some cases, you may need to change to allow a long password. I have seen many places that cap passwords at 8 characters. Passwords need to be at least 8 characters minimal. Consider how much stronger the passwords would be if you double the length. Passwords that are 15-20 characters will be that much harder to crack. There is no need to have limit passwords to 8 characters. Don't Require Special Characters Many complexity rules will require that your password include a capital letter, a lower case letter, a number, and one of the "special" characters, the shits above the number keys. The problem with such rules is that the resulting passwords are harder to remember. It also means that you will have a smaller set of characters in the resulting passwords. If you must include one of the 9 digits and one of the 9 "special" characters, then you have dramatically reduced the character set that will make up the final password. Two characters will be one of 10 possible values instead of one of 70. Two additional characters will be one of 26 possible characters instead of a 70 character potential character set. If you limit passwords to 8 characters, you are left with only 7 characters having the full set of 70 potential values. With these character restrictions in place, there are 1.6 x1012 possible passwords. Without these special character restrictions, but allowing numbers and special characters, you get a total of 5.76x1014 possible passwords. Even if you only allowed upper and lower case characters, you will still have 2.18X1014 passwords. You can do the math any number of ways, requiring special characters will always weaken passwords. Now imagine the number of passwords when you require more than 8 characters.  If you are responsible for defining complexity rules, I urge you to take these guidelines into account. What other guidelines do you follow?

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• Scrum and Team Consolidation

  - by John K. Hines

  I’m still working my way through one of the more painful team consolidations of my career.  One thing that’s made it hard was my assumption that the use of Agile methods and Scrum would make everything easy.  Take three teams, make all work visible, track it, and presto: An efficient, functioning software development team. What I’ve come to realize is that the primary benefit of Scrum is that Scrum brings teams closer to their customers.  Frequent meetings, short iterations, and phased deployments are all meant to keep the customer in the loop.  It’s true that as teams become proficient with Scrum they tend to become more efficient.  But I don’t think it’s true that Scrum automatically helps people work together. Instead, Scrum can point out when teams aren’t good at working together.   And it really illustrates when teams, especially teams in sustaining mode, are reacting to their customers instead of innovating with them.  At the moment we’ve inherited a huge backlog of tools, processes, and personalities.  It’s up to us to sort them all out.  Unfortunately, after 7 &frac12; months we’re still sorting. What I’d recommend for any blended team is to look at your current product lifecycles and work on a single lifecycle for all work.  If you can’t objectively come up with one process, that’s a good indication that the new team might not be a good fit for being a single unit (which happens all the time in bigger companies).  Go ahead & self-organize into sub-teams.  Then repeat the process. If you can come up with a single process, tackle each piece and standardize all of them.  Do this as soon as possible, as it can be uncomfortable.  Standardize your requirements gathering and tracking, your exploration and technical analysis, your project planning, development standards, validation and sustaining processes.  Standardize all of it.  Make this your top priority, get it out of the way, and get back to work. Lastly, managers of blended teams should realize what I’m suggesting is a disruptive process.  But you’ve just reorganized the team is already disrupted.   Don’t pull the bandage off slowly and force the team through a prolonged transition phase, lowering their productivity over the long term.  You can role model leadership to your team and drive a true consolidation.  Destroy roadblocks, reassure those on your team who are afraid of change, and push forward to create something efficient and beautiful.  Then use Scrum to reengage your customers in a way that they’ll love. Technorati tags: Scrum Scrum Process

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• July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 24 (sys.dm_db_index_operational_stats)

  - by Tamarick Hill

  The sys.dm_db_index_operational_stats Dynamic Management Function returns information about the IO, locking, and access methods for the indexes that you currently have on your SQL Server Instance. This function takes four input parameters which are (1) database_id, (2) object_id, (3) index_id, and (4) partition_number. Let’s have a look at the results from this function against our AdventureWorks2012 database. This function returns a ton of columns, so not only will I not attempt to describe each of the columns, I wont even attempt to display all of them here. My query below will give you a subset of the columns returned from this function. SELECT database_id, object_id, index_id, partition_number, leaf_insert_count, leaf_delete_count, leaf_update_count, leaf_ghost_count, nonleaf_insert_count, nonleaf_delete_count, nonleaf_update_count, range_scan_count, forwarded_fetch_count, row_lock_count, row_lock_wait_count, page_lock_count, page_lock_wait_count, Index_lock_promotion_attempt_count, index_lock_promotion_count, page_compression_attempt_count, page_compression_success_count FROM sys.dm_db_index_operational_stats(db_id('AdventureWorks2012'), NULL, NULL, NULL) The first four columns in the result set represent the values that we passed in as our input parameters. If you use NULL’s as I did, then you will see results for every index on your system. I specified a database_id so my result set only shows those records pertaining to my AdventureWorks2012 database. The next columns in the result set provide you with information on how may inserts, deletes, or updates that have taken place on your leaf and nonleaf index levels. The nonleaf levels would refer to the intermediate and root index levels. In the middle of these you see a leaf_ghost_count column, which represents the number of records that have been logically deleted and marked as “ghosted”  and are waiting on the background ghost cleanup process to physically remove them. The range_scan_count column represents the number of range or table scans that have been performed against an index. The forwarded_fetch_count column represents the number of rows that were returned from a forwarding row pointer. The row_lock_count and row_lock_wait_count represent the number of row locks that have been requested for an index and the number of times SQL has had to wait on a row lock respectively. The page_lock_count and page_lock_wait_count represent the number of page locks that have been requested for an index and the number of times SQL has had to wait on a page lock respectively. The index_lock_promotion_attempt_count represents the number of times the database engine has attempted to promote a lock to the index level. The index_lock_promotion_count column displays how many times that index lock promotion was successful. Lastly the page_compression_attempt_count and page_compression_success_count represents how many times a page was attempted to be compressed and how many times the attempt was successful. As you can see there is a ton of information returned from this DMV. The DMV we reviewed on yesterday (sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats) provided you with good information on when and how indexes have been used, but this DMF takes an even deeper dive into these statistics. If you are interested in performing a very detailed analysis on the operational stats of your indexes, this is not only a good place to start, but more than likely the best place. For more information on this Dynamic Management Function, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174281.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

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• Using SQL Source Control and Vault Professional Part 4

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  Two weeks ago I upgraded our installation of Fortress to the latest version, which is now named Vault Professional.  This is the version of Vault (i.e. Vault Standard 5.1 / Vault Professional 5.1) that will be officially supported with Red-Gate SQL Source Control 2.1.  While the folks at Red-Gate did a fantastic job of working with me to get SQL Source Control to work with the older Fortress version, we weren’t going to just sit on that.  There are a couple of things that Vault Professional cleaned up for us, such as improved integration with Visual Studio 2010, so it was a win all around. Shortly after that upgrade, I received notice from Red-Gate that they had a new Early Access version of SQL Source Control available that included the ability to source control static data.  The idea here is that you probably have a few fairly static lookup tables in your system, and those data values are similar in concept to source code, and should be versioned in your source control management system also.  I agree with this, but please be wise…somebody out there is bound to try to use this feature as their disaster recovery for their entire database, and that is NOT the purpose.  First off, you should never have your PROD (or LIVE, whatever you call it) system attached to source control.  Source Control is for development, not for PROD systems.  Second, use the features that are intended for this purpose, such as BACKUP and RESTORE. Laying that tangent aside, it is great that now you can include these critical values in your repository and make them part of a deployment process.  As you would guess, SQL Source Control uses SQL Data Compare to create the data change scripts just like it uses SQL Compare to create the schema change scripts.  Once again, they did a very good job with the integration to their other products.  At this point we are really starting to see some good payback on our investment in the full SQL Developer Bundle.  Those products were worth the investment back when we only used them sporadically for troubleshooting and DBA analysis, but now with SQL Source Control, they are becoming everyday-use products for the development team. I like this software (SQL Source Control) so much that I am about to break my own rules and distribute it to my team to use even though it is still in beta.  This is the first time that I have approved the use of any beta software in a production scenario (actively building our next versions of internal software) but I predict that the usability and productivity gain of using SQL Source Control over manual scripting is worth the risk.  Of course, I have also put this beta software through its paces pretty well to be comfortable with it, and Red-Gate has proven their responsiveness to issues that came up in my early beta testing, and so I am willing to bet on their continued support.  Likewise, SourceGear, the maker of Vault Professional, has proven itself to me as well, and so the combination of SQL Source Control with Vault Professional is the new standard for my development team.

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• More details on America's Cup use of Oracle Data Mining

  - by charlie.berger

  BMW Oracle Racing's America's Cup: A Victory for Database Technology BMW Oracle Racing's victory in the 33rd America's Cup yacht race in February showcased the crew's extraordinary sailing expertise. But to hear them talk, the real stars weren't actually human. "The story of this race is in the technology," says Ian Burns, design coordinator for BMW Oracle Racing. Gathering and Mining Sailing DataFrom the drag-resistant hull to its 23-story wing sail, the BMW Oracle USA trimaran is a technological marvel. But to learn to sail it well, the crew needed to review enormous amounts of reliable data every time they took the boat for a test run. Burns and his team collected performance data from 250 sensors throughout the trimaran at the rate of 10 times per second. An hour of sailing alone generates 90 million data points.BMW Oracle Racing turned to Oracle Data Mining in Oracle Database 11g to extract maximum value from the data. Burns and his team reviewed and shared raw data with crew members daily using a Web application built in Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX). "Someone would say, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could look at some new combination of numbers?' We could quickly build an Oracle Application Express application and share the information during the same meeting," says Burns. Analyzing Wind and Other Environmental ConditionsBurns then streamed the data to the Oracle Austin Data Center, where a dedicated team tackled deeper analysis. Because the data was collected in an Oracle Database, the Data Center team could dive straight into the analytics problems without having to do any extract, transform, and load processes or data conversion. And the many advanced data mining algorithms in Oracle Data Mining allowed the analytics team to build vital performance analytics. For example, the technology team could remove masking elements such as environmental conditions to give accurate data on the best mast rotation for certain wind conditions. Without the data mining, Burns says the boat wouldn't have run as fast. "The design of the boat was important, but once you've got it designed, the whole race is down to how the guys can use it," he says. "With Oracle database technology we could compare the incremental improvements in our performance from the first day of sailing to the very last day. With data mining we could check data against the things we saw, and we could find things that weren't otherwise easily observable and findable."

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• Oracle VM Templates for EBS 12.1.3 for Exalogic Now Available

  - by Elke Phelps (Oracle Development)

  Oracle VM Templates for Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 for x86 Exalogic Platform (64 bit) are now available on the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud.  The templates contain all the required elements to create an Oracle E-Business Suite R12 demonstration system on an Exalogic server. You can use these templates to quickly build an EBS 12.1.3 demonstration environment, bypassing the operating system and the software install (via the EBS Rapid Install).   The Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 (64 bit) template for the Exalogic platform is a Oracle Virtual Server Guest template that contains a complete Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 Database Tier and Application Tier Installation.  For additional details, please refer to the following My Oracle Support Note: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 Database Tier and Application Tier Template for Oracle Exalogic Platform (Note 1499132.1) The Oracle E-Business Suite system is installed on top of Oracle Linux Version 5 update 6. The templates have been optimized for performance, including OS kernel settings and E-Business Suite configuration settings tuned specifically for the Exalogic platform.  The configuration delivered with this template for a mid-tier running on Exalogic will support hundreds of concurrent users.  Please refer to Section 2: Performance Analysis in My Oracle Support Note 1499132.1 for additional details.   Additional Information The Oracle E-Business Suite VM templates for the Exalogic platform contain the following software versions: Operating System: Oracle Linux Version 5 Update 6 Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 (Database Tier) Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 (Application Tier) The following considerations were made when the Oracle E-Business Suite VM template for the Exalogic platform were designed: Templates use the hardware-virtualized architecture, supporting hardware with virtualization feature. Database Tier Template is configured to use the following configuration: 16 GB RAM 4 VCPUs 250 GB of Disk space for application installation Application Tier Template is configured to use the following configuration: 16 GB RAM 4 VCPUs 50 GB of Disk space for application installation References Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 Database Tier and Application Tier Template for Oracle Exalogic Platform (Note 1499132.1) Related Articles Part 1: E-Business Suite 12.1.1 Templates for Oracle VM Now Available Part 2: Using Oracle VM with Oracle E-Business Suite Virtualization Kit Part 3: On Clouds and Virtualization in EBS Environments (OpenWorld 2009 Recap) Part 4: Deploying E-Business Suite on Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud Part 5: Live Migration of EBS Services Using Oracle VM Support Policies for Virtualization Technologies and Oracle E-Business Suite Virtualization and the E-Business Suite, Redux Virtualization and E-Business Suite

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• TechEd 2012: Day 3 &ndash; Morning TFS

  - by Tim Murphy

  My morning sessions for day three were dominated by Team Foundation Server.  This has been a hot topic for our clients lately, so this topic really stuck a chord. The speaker for the first session was from Boeing.  It was nice to hear how how a company mixes both agile and waterfall project management.   The approaches that he presented were very pragmatic.  For their needs reporting is the crucial part of their decision to use TFS.  This was interesting since this is probably the last aspect that most shops would think about. The challenge of getting users to adopt TFS was brought up by the audience.  As with the other discussion point he took a very level headed stance.  The approach he was prescribing was to eat the elephant a bite at a time instead of all at once.  If you try to convert you entire shop at once the culture shock will most likely kill the effort. Another key point he reminded us of is that you need to make sure that standards and compliance are taken into account when you setup TFS.  If you don’t implement a tool and processes around it that comply with the standards bodies that govern your business you are in for a world of hurt. Ultimately the reason they chose TFS was because it was the first tool that incorporated all the ALM features that they needed. Reduced licensing cost because of all the different tools they would need to buy to complete the same tasks.  They got to this point by doing an industry evaluation.  Although TFS came out on top he said that it still has a big gap is in the Java area.  Of course in this market there are vendors helping to close that gap. The second session was on how continuous feedback in agile is a new focus in VS2012.  The problems they intended to address included cycle time and average time to repair, root cause analysis. The speakers fired features at us as if they were firing a machine gun.  I will just say that I am looking forward to digging into the product after seeing this presentation.  Beyond that I will simply list some of the key features that caught my attention. Feature – Ability to link documents into tasks as artifacts Web access portal PowerPoint storyboards Exploratory testing Request feedback (allows users to record notes, screen shots and video/audio) See you after the second half. del.icio.us Tags: TechEd,TechEd 2012,TFS,Team Foundation Server

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• EPM 11.1.2 - R&A DATABASE CONNECTIONS DISAPPEAR FROM THE "DATABASE CONNECTION MANAGER

  - by Powder

  When accessing the database connection panel through Reporting and Analysis all previously entered database connection do not appear. This is due to a bug in the Windows SMB2 protocol. To work around this bug you have to disable the protocol. On Windows 2008 the protocol is automatically enabled. This needs to be done on both the servers and the clients. Note that “server” is the server which hosts RAF repository service and RM1 folder, “client” – server which hosts replicated Repository service that accesses repository files via network i.e. \\<server_host>\RM1  In order to disable SMB 2.0 on the server side, follow these steps:  1. Run "regedit" on Windows Server 2008 based computer.  2. Expand and locate the sub tree as follows.  HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters  3. Add a new REG_DWORD key with the name of "Smb2" (without quotation mark)  Value name: Smb2  Value type: REG_DWORD  0 = disabled  1 = enabled 4. Set the value to 0 to disable SMB 2.0, or set it to 1 to re-enable SMB 2.0.  5. Reboot the server.  To disable SMB 2.0 for Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 systems that are the “client” systems run the following commands:  sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/nsi  sc config mrxsmb20 start= disabled  Note there's an extra " " (space) after the "=" sign.  To enable back SMB 2.0 for Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 systems that  are the “client” systems run the following commands: sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/mrxsmb20/nsi  sc config mrxsmb20 start= auto  Again, note there's an extra " " (space) after the "=" sign. 

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• What are the options for hosting a small Plone site? [closed]

  - by Tina Russell

  Possible Duplicate: How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? I’ve developed a portfolio website for myself using Plone 4, and I’m looking for someplace to host it. Most Plone hosting services seem to focus on large, corporate deployments, but I need something that I can afford on a very limited budget and fits a small, single-admin website. My understanding is that my basic options are thus: I can go with a hosting service that specifically provides Plone. I know of WebFaction, but what others exist? Also, I’d have two stipulations for a Plone hosting service: (a) It needs to use Plone 4, for which I’ve developed my site, and (b) it needs to allow me SSH access to a home directory (including the Plone configuration), so that I may use my custom development eggs and such. I could use a VPS hosting service. What are my options here? Again, I need something cheap and scaled to my level. I could use Amazon EC2 or a similar service (please tell me of any) and pay by the tiniest unit of data. I’m a little scared of this because I have no idea how to do a cost-benefit analysis between this and a regular VPS host. The advantage of this approach would be that I only pay for what I use, making it very scalable, but I don’t know how the overall cost would compare to any VPS host under similar circumstances. What factors enter into the cost of Amazon EC2? What can I expect to pay under either option for regular traffic for a new website? Which one is more desirable for when a rush of visitors drive up my bandwidth bill? One last note: I know Plone isn’t common for websites for individuals, but please don’t try to talk me out of it here; that’s a completely different subject. For now, assume I’m sticking with Plone for good. Also, I have seen the Plone hosting services list on Plone.org—it’s twenty pages long, and the first page was nothing but professional Plone consulting services that sometimes offer hosting for business clients. So, that wasn’t much help. Thank you!

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• Entity Framework 4.0: Optimal and horrible SQL

  - by DigiMortal

  Lately I had Entity Framework 4.0 session where I introduced new features of Entity Framework. During session I found out with audience how Entity Framework 4.0 can generate optimized SQL. After session I also showed guys one horrible example about how awful SQL can be generated by Entity Framework. In this posting I will cover both examples. Optimal SQL Before going to code take a look at following model. There is class called Event and I will use this class in my query. Here is the LINQ To Entities query that uses small anonymous type. var query = from e in _context.Events             select new { Id = e.Id, Title = e.Title }; Debug.WriteLine(((ObjectQuery)query).ToTraceString()); Running this code gives us the following SQL. SELECT      [Extent1].[event_id] AS [event_id],      [Extent1].[title] AS [title]  FROM [dbo].[events] AS [Extent1] This is really small – no additional fields in SELECT clause. Nice, isn’t it? Horrible SQL Ayende Rahien blog shows us darker side of Entiry Framework 4.0 queries. You can find comparison betwenn NHibernate, LINQ To SQL and LINQ To Entities from posting What happens behind the scenes: NHibernate, Linq to SQL, Entity Framework scenario analysis. In this posting I will show you the resulting query and let you think how much better it can be done. Well, it is not something we want to see running in our servers. I hope that EF team improves generated SQL to acceptable level before Visual Studio 2010 is released. There is also morale of this example: you should always check out the queries that O/R-mapper generates. Behind the curtains it may silently generate queries that perform badly and in this case you need to optimize you data querying strategy. Conclusion Entity Framework 4.0 is new product with a lot of new features and it is clear that not everything is 100% super in its first release. But it still great step forward and I hope that on 12.04.2010 we have new promising O/R-mapper available to use in our projects. If you want to read more about Entity Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 then please feel free to follow this link to list of my Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 postings.

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• NYC Silverlight FireStarter - June 5th 2010 at the NYC Microsoft Office

  - by Sam Abraham

  On Saturday June 5th, 2010, I spent my Saturday morning at the NYC Silverlight FireStarter. Presenting was Peter Laudati from Microsoft and Jason Beres, Matt Van Horn and Todd Snyder from Infragistics. I watched the Simulcast for the morning sessions as I was tied up with some work, but ended up finally making it to the Microsoft Office and had the opportunity to attend the last hour of the event in person.   For me, the quality of the Simulcast was as good as in-person attendance so far as sound/video quality and the interaction with speakers. In the background was a screen with tweets from remote attendees asking questions or commenting on the presentations. Presenters did periodically stop to answer the tweeted questions as well as questions from attendees. Only thing I missed was getting my hands on some of that swag that was (literally) flying in the air at the event floor.   Upon my arrival at the Microsoft Office Location in NYC, I spoke with Rachel Appel and Peter Laudati asking for permission to take a few photos to record the outstanding effort that took place in putting this event together. Both agreed and I started with putting my photography skills to work.   You can always gauge the quality of an event with the number of its attendees who opt to stay till the last minute as well as the level of interaction of the audience with the speaker. With most of the FireStarter attendees remaining till the very end of the talk, and with the many questions that were asked, one can simply judge the event as a success as per my aforementioned criteria.   Evaluation forms were passed around and Peter strongly encouraged the audience to openly speak their mind as they record their comments. I didn't get to submit my evaluation as I was busy recording the event in photos, so here it goes: I believe that lots of hard work was put into making this event a reality. Quality of speakers, topics and level of Geekiness at the event was outstanding.  Overall, aside from a minor issue with Lunch delivery time, this event was of high quality and I am very sure everyone's evaluation will be in line with my analysis of it being a great success. Below are a few photos of the event.   --Sam Abraham Site Director - West Palm Beach .Net User Group www.Fladotnet.com     NYC Silverlight FireStarter Speakers - From Left to right: Peter Laudati, Todd Snyder, Matt Van Horn & Jason Beres   As jason wasn't quiet visible in the above photo, a closeup was taken (It was Jason's birthday and he had to leave a bit early, so the Infagisticts team thought outside the box...)     Full Room - That was at the last hour of the event   Another view of full room   Discussions during the break   End-of-event Raffle

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• IDC Analyst Report Touts Oracle–Accenture Strategic Initiative

  - by kristin.jellison

  Hi there, partners! Oracle Engineered Systems have been getting some love lately, and we want to share it with you! The market intelligence and advisory firm IDC recently released a report lauding Oracle and Accenture’s strategic initiative to route the performance and flexibility of Oracle Engineered Systems to clients. The report, "Oracle and Accenture Strategic Alliance Places Big Bet on Engineered Systems,” by Steve White, reflects a largely positive analysis of the relationship. White notes that the alliance is “one of the largest in the industry.” Under the relationship, Accenture has incorporated Oracle Engineered Systems—including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle SuperCluster, and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine—into its leading datacenter transformation consulting services. Together, the two companies have also created bespoke platforms, such as the Accenture Foundation Platform for Oracle, which helps clients accelerate deployments on Oracle Fusion Middleware, running Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Oracle Engineered Systems deliver a single, engineered platform—including server to storage and networking. This makes it easier and cheaper for Accenture clients around the world to prepare their datacenters for managing, processing and analyzing the massive amounts of data they (rightly) anticipate seeing in the next decade. The new solutions can help reduce the effort and cost to migrate any vendor database to an Oracle Engineered Systems platform, which can lower the cost of ownership by up to 50 percent. For its part, Accenture has built a team of 300 consultants to implement and increase the flexibility and stability of client datacenters. This move further expands one of the fastest-growing full-service Oracle Enterprise solutions. Over 52,000 Accenture consultants are qualified to implement, upgrade and outsource the Oracle product suite. Accenture is a Diamond-level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). For Oracle Partners, this update should give you at least two things to walk away with. First, this initiative is showing signs of success. As Marty Cole, group chief executive for Accenture’s Technology growth platform, put it, “We are seeing an increasing number of clients recognizing the value of consolidating their databases and taking advantage of the cost and performance benefits delivered by these solutions.” The pipeline is there—and not just for Accenture. Use this example to show your clients that investments in Oracle Engineered Systems are on the rise. Second, recognize that Oracle Engineered Systems represent one of the biggest platforms for growth that Oracle has to offer partners. As part of the agreement, Accenture is able to provide: Platform Readiness Assessments Platform Implementation App Rationalization Database Rationalization Managed Services These are all enablement opportunities you can offer customers under Oracle’s partner programs —to continue building the value of their investments, and the value of your relationship with Oracle. Take a read through the IDC report. To learn more about the partnership, see this press release. Happy selling! The OPN Communications Team

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• What Is Nuclear Meltdown?

  - by Gopinath

  Japan was first hit by a massive earth quake, then a ruthless tsunami washed away thousands of homes and now they fear the worst – meltdown of nuclear power stations in the quake hit year. Nuclear meltdowns are horrifying – remember the Chernobyl incident in Russia? The Chernobyl reactor meltdown released 400 times more radio active material than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The effects of nuclear meltdowns are beyond imagination of a common man, thousands of people loose their lives and many more lakhs of people suffer with radiation related diseases for many years. Nuclear Meltdowns are dangerous, but how do they happen? What causes a nuclear meltdown? In simple terms – Nuclear meltdown is an accident that happens due to severe overheating of a nuclear reactor and results in release of nuclear radiation into the environment.  How A Nuclear Meltdown Happens? According to Wikipedia A meltdown occurs when a severe failure of a nuclear power plant system prevents proper cooling of the reactor core, to the extent that the nuclear fuel assemblies overheat and melt. A meltdown is considered very serious because of the potential that radioactive materials could be released into the environment. The fuel assemblies in a reactor core can melt if heat is not removed. A nuclear reactor does not have to remain critical for a core damage incident to occur, because decay heat continues to heat the reactor fuel assemblies after the reactor has shut down, though this heat decreases with time. A core damage accident is caused by the loss of sufficient cooling for the nuclear fuel within the reactor core. The reason may be one of several factors, including a loss of pressure control accident, a loss of coolant accident (LOCA), an uncontrolled power excursion or, in some types, a fire within the reactor core. Failures in control systems may cause a series of events resulting in loss of cooling. Contemporary safety principles of defense in depth, ensure that multiple layers of safety systems are always present to make such accidents unlikely. Video – What Causes Nuclear Meltdown AlJazeera news has a good analysis on feared nuclear meltdown of Japan’s nuclear plants and also an animation on what causes Nuclear Meltdown. cc image credit: flickr/jtjdt This article titled,What Is Nuclear Meltdown?, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Brendan Gregg's "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud"

  - by user12608550

  Long ago, the prerequisite UNIX performance book was Adrian Cockcroft's 1994 classic, Sun Performance and Tuning: Sparc & Solaris, later updated in 1998 as Java and the Internet. As Solaris evolved to include the invaluable DTrace observability features, new essential performance references have been published, such as Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris (2006)  by McDougal, Mauro, and Gregg, and DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD (2011), also by Mauro and Gregg. Much has occurred in Solaris Land since those books appeared, notably Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010 and the demise of the OpenSolaris community. But operating system technologies have continued to improve markedly in recent years, driven by stunning advances in multicore processor architecture, virtualization, and the massive scalability requirements of cloud computing. A new performance reference was needed, and I eagerly waited for something that thoroughly covered modern, distributed computing performance issues from the ground up. Well, there's a new classic now, authored yet again by Brendan Gregg, former Solaris kernel engineer at Sun and now Lead Performance Engineer at Joyent. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud is a modern, very comprehensive guide to general system performance principles and practices, as well as a highly detailed reference for specific UNIX and Linux observability tools used to examine and diagnose operating system behaviour.  It provides thorough definitions of terms, explains performance diagnostic Best Practices and "Worst Practices" (called "anti-methods"), and covers key observability tools including DTrace, SystemTap, and all the traditional UNIX utilities like vmstat, ps, iostat, and many others. The book focuses on operating system performance principles and expands on these with respect to Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS are cited), and to Solaris and its derivatives [1]; it is not directed at any one OS so it is extremely useful as a broad performance reference. The author goes beyond the intricacies of performance analysis and shows how to interpret and visualize statistical information gathered from the observability tools.  It's often difficult to extract understanding from voluminous rows of text output, and techniques are provided to assist with summarizing, visualizing, and interpreting the performance data. Gregg includes myriad useful references from the system performance literature, including a "Who's Who" of contributors to this great body of diagnostic tools and methods. This outstanding book should be required reading for UNIX and Linux system administrators as well as anyone charged with diagnosing OS performance issues.  Moreover, the book can easily serve as a textbook for a graduate level course in operating systems [2]. [1] Solaris 11, of course, and Joyent's SmartOS (developed from OpenSolaris) [2] Gregg has taught system performance seminars for many years; I have also taught such courses...this book would be perfect for the OS component of an advanced CS curriculum.

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• ETPM Environment Health Monitoring Tools

  - by Paula Speranza-Hadley

  This post is to provide some useful information about the tools typically used by Oracle ETPM implementations for performance tuning and analysis.   This includes tools to monitor and gather performance information and statistics on the Database, Application Server, and Client (browser).  Enterprise Monitoring Tools Oracle Enterprise Manager - OEM Grid Control comes with a comprehensive set of performance and health metrics that allow monitoring of key components in your environment such as applications, application servers, databases, as well as the back-end components on which they rely, such as hosts, operating systems and storage. Tools for the Database Oracle Diagnostics Pack Automatic Workload Repository (AWR)  - this tool gets statistics from memory abut the Time Model or DB Time, Wait Events, Active Session History and High Load SWL queries Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) - This self-diagnostic software is built into the database.  It examines and analyzes data captured in AWR to dertermine possible performance issues.  It locates the root cause of the issue, provides recommendations for correcting the issues and qualifies the expected benefit. Oracle Database Tuning Pack SQL Tuning Advisor - This enables you to submit one or more SQL statements as input and receive output in the form of specific advice or recommendations on how to tune statements.  The recommendation relates to collection of statistics on objects, creation on new indexes and restructuring of SQL statements. SQL Access Advisor - This enables you to optimize data access paths of SQL queries by recommending a proper set of materialized views, indexes and partitions for a given SQL workload. Tools for the Application Server Weblogic Console - is a web-based, user interface used to configure and control a set of WebLogic servers or clusters (i.e. a "domain").  In any logical group of WebLogic servers there must exist one admin server, which hosts the WebLogic Admin console application and manages the associated configuratoin files. WebLogic Administrators will use the Administration Console for a number of tasks, including: Starting and stopping WebLogic servers or entire clusters. Configuring server parameters, security, database connections and deployed applications. Viewing server status, health and metrics. Yourkit for Profiling - helps analyze synchronization issues, including: Which threads were calling wait(), and for how long Which threads were blocked on attempt to acquire a monitor held by another thread (synchronized methods/blocks), and for how long Tools for the Client Fiddler - allows you to inspect traffic logs, debug and set breakpoints. Firebug – allows you to inspect and edit HTML, monitor network activity and debug JavaScript

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• Leveraging Social Networks for Retail

  - by David Dorf

  For retailers, social media is all about B2C2C. That is, Business to Consumer to Consumer, or more specifically, retailer to influencer to consumer. Traditional marketing targeted mass media, trying to expose the message to as many people as possible. While effective, this approach has never been very efficient, with high costs for relatively low penetration. Then it was thought that marketers should focus their efforts on a relative few super-influencers that would then sway the masses. History shows a few successes with this approach but lacked any consistency or predictability. After all, if super-influencers were easy to find, most campaigns would easily go viral. Alas, research shows that most wide-spread trends were the result of several fortunate events, including some luck. So do people exert influence over each other when it comes to purchase decisions? Of course they do, all the time. But that influence is usually limited to a small set of friends and specific specialization. For instance, although I have 165 friends on Facebook, I am only able to influence my close friends and family on PC purchases, and I have no sway at all for fashion purchases. People trust my knowledge on technology, but nobody asks my advice on shoes. How then should retailers leverage social networks in order to reinforce brand image and push promotions? Two obvious ways are Like and Share. Online advertisements or wall-postings receive more clicks when the viewer sees that friends have "liked" the posting. That's our modern-day version of word-of-mouth advertising. Statistics show that endorsements from friends make it more likely a person will engage. If my friends and I liked it, then I might also "share" (or "retweet" in the case of Twitter) it with other friends. In that case the retailer has paid for X showings of the advertisement, but sharing has pushed it to an additional Y people at no cost. And further, the implicit endorsement by the sharer makes it more likely the recipient will engage. So a good first step is to find people active in social networks that will Like and Share in order to exert influence. Its still tough to go viral, but doubling engagement is still a big step in the right direction. More complex social graph analysis would be a second step, but I'll leave that topic for another day. If you're interested in the academic side of social dynamics, I suggest reading Duncan Watts' work.

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• The Dispose Pattern (and FxCop warnings)

  - by Scott Dorman

  [This is actually a response to Bill’s blog post, but since it isn’t possible to leave this as a comment on his blog it’s a post here.] There are many different ways to implement the Dispose pattern correctly. Some are (in my opinion) better than others. In Bill’s blog post he presents a particular pattern, which is an excerpt from his book (Effective C#). The issue centers around the fact that a reader took the code sample presented in the book and ran FxCop (Code Analysis) on it, which generated a warning: “Ensure that base.Dispose() is always called.” The “lesson learned” that Bill presents is that “tools are there to help us, not control us.” While I completely agree with the belief that tools are there to help us, I think it’s important to understand why FxCop is raising this particular warning. The code presented in Bill’s book looks like: // Have its own disposed flag.private bool disposed = false;protected override void Dispose(bool isDisposing){ // Don't dispose more than once. if (disposed) return; if (isDisposing) { // TODO: free managed resources here. } // TODO: free unmanaged resources here. // Let the base class free its resources. // Base class is responsible for calling // GC.SuppressFinalize( ) base.Dispose(isDisposing); // Set derived class disposed flag: disposed = true;} This code does follow all of the guidelines for implementing the Dispose pattern. In this case, it’s presumably part of a larger example showing how to implement the pattern as part of a base class. The reason FxCop is warning you about this code is the first if statement in the Dispose method, which will cause the method to exit if disposed is true. The problem here is that there is the possibility that if the disposed flag is true, the call to base.Dispose() will never be executed. As Bill points out, it is possible for some other code elsewhere in the class to set this flag. He states that this is an “unlikely occurrence.” While that is probably true, it can be a potentially dangerous assumption to make and is one that can be easily corrected. By changing the code slightly you can remove this assumption and correct the FxCop violation. private bool disposed = false;protected override void Dispose(bool disposing){ if (!disposed) { if (disposing) { // Dispose managed resources. } // Dispose unmanaged resources. disposed = true; } base.Dispose(disposing);} Using this implementation allows the call to base.Dispose() to always occur, which ensures that the the disposal chain is always properly followed. Technorati Tags: .NET,C#,Dispose Pattern

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• Five things SSIS should drop

  - by jamiet

  There’s a current SQL Server meme going round entitled Five things SQL Server should drop and, whilst no-one tagged me to write anything, I couldn’t resist doing the same for SQL Server Integration Services. So, without further ado, here are five things that I think should be dropped from SSIS.Data source connectionsSeriously, does anyone use these? I know why they’re there. Someone sat in a meeting back in the early part of the last decade and said “Ooo, Reporting Services and Analysis Services have these things called Data Sources. If we used them in Integration Services then we’d have a really cool integration story.” Errr….no.Web Service TaskDitto. If you want to do anything useful against anything but the simplest of SOAP web services steer well clear of this peculiar SSIS additionActiveX Script TaskAnother task that I suspect has never seen the light of day in a SSIS package. It was billed as a way of running upgraded DTS2000 ActiveX scripts in SSIS – sounds good except for one thing. Anytime one of those scripts would try to talk to the DTS object model (which they all do – otherwise what’s the point) then they will error out. This one has always been a real head scratcher.Slow Changing Dimension wizardI suspect I may get some push back on this one but I’m mentioning it anyway. Some people like the SCD wizard; I am not one of those people! Everything that the SCD component does can easily be reproduced using other components and from a performance point of view its much more beneficial to use those alternatives.Multifile Connection ManagerImagining buying a house that came with a set of keys that didn’t open any of the doors. Sounds ridiculous right? How about a SSIS Connection Manager that doesn’t get used by any of the tasks or components. Ah, that’ll be the Multifile Connection Manager then!Comments are of course welcome. Diatribes are assumed :)@Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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