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  • amazon ec2-medium apache requests per second terrible

    - by TheDayIsDone
    EDITED -- test running from localhost now to rule out network... i have a c1.medium using EBS. when i do an apache benchmark and i'm just printing a "hello" for the test from localhost - no database hits, it's very slow. i can repeat this test many times with the same results. any thoughts? thanks in advance. ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://localhost/home/test/ Benchmarking localhost (be patient) Completed 100 requests Completed 200 requests Completed 300 requests Completed 400 requests Completed 500 requests Completed 600 requests Completed 700 requests Completed 800 requests Completed 900 requests Completed 1000 requests Finished 1000 requests Server Software: Apache/2.2.23 Server Hostname: localhost Server Port: 80 Document Path: /home/test/ Document Length: 5 bytes Concurrency Level: 100 Time taken for tests: 25.300 seconds Complete requests: 1000 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 816000 bytes HTML transferred: 5000 bytes Requests per second: 39.53 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 2530.037 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 25.300 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 31.50 [Kbytes/sec] received Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 0 7 21.0 0 73 Processing: 81 2489 665.7 2500 4057 Waiting: 80 2443 654.0 2445 4057 Total: 85 2496 653.5 2500 4057 Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 2500 66% 2651 75% 2842 80% 2932 90% 3301 95% 3506 98% 3762 99% 3838 100% 4057 (longest request)

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  • Faster caching method

    - by pataroulis
    I have a service that provides HTML code which at some point it is not updated anymore. The code is always generated dynamically from a database with 10 million entries so each HTML code page rendering searches there for say 60 or 70 of those entries and then renders the page. So, for those expired pages, I want to use a caching system which will be VERY simple (like just enter a record with the rendered HTML and (if I need) remove it). I tried to do it file-based but the search for the existence of a file and then passing it through php to actually render it , seems like too much for what I want to do. I was thinking of doing it on mysql with a table with MEDIUMBLOBs (each page is around 100k). It would hold about 150000 such records (for now, at least). My question is: Would it be faster to let mysql do the lookup of the file and the passing to php or is the file-based approach faster? The lookup code for the file based version looks like this: $page = @file_get_contents(getCacheFilename($pageId)); if($page!=NULL) { echo $page; } else { renderAndCachePage($pageId); } which does one lookup whether it finds the file or not. The mysql table would just have an ID (the page id) and the blob entry. The disk of the system is a simple SATA raid 1 , the mysql daemon can grab up to 2.5GB of memory (i have a proxy running too, eating the rest of the 16GB of the machine. ) In general the disk is quite busy already. My not using PEAR cache, is because I think (please feel free to correct me on this) it adds overhead I do not need because the page rendering code is called about 2M times per day and I wouldn't want to go through the whole code each time (and yes, I have eaccelerator to cache the code too). Any pointer to what direction I should go, would be greatly welcome. Thanks!

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  • Mail server DNS failed to resolved by Mac clients

    - by Concordus Applications
    We have two internal DNS servers. One is located on a linux server box and the other is the router's DNS management. We set the linux box as primary DNS via DHCP and the router as secondary. We have a few Mac clients that are accessing our internal mail server (hostnamed "mail" internally). When using IMAP or SMTP against the mail server internally, the mac boxes will sometimes fail to locate the server. If I use NSLOOKUP I can see that "mail" is pointed to the correct IP address and is being resolved via the correct DNS server, but if I ping "mail" it fails. ~ (bash)$ nslookup mail Server: 254.254.254.206 Address: 254.254.254.206#53 Name: mail.example.com Address: 254.254.254.205 Note: I replaced our actual internal IP address with 254.254.254.* If I wait a few minutes (3-5 minutes), somehow it resolves itself and sends successfully. This happens multiple times a day. The /etc/hosts file on the mac boxes is the default config. ## # Host Database # # localhost is used to configure the loopback interface # when the system is booting. Do not change this entry. ## 127.0.0.1 localhost 255.255.255.255 broadcasthost ::1 localhost fe80::1%lo0 localhost Is there something about Mac clients I should know to prevent this failed DNS resolution? Client boxes are: OSX 10.7.4, 8GB RAM, i5 MacBooks Server is: Ubuntu 12.04 Server

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  • Building a small server farm

    - by RayQuang
    Hi, I am planning to set up a Tech startup company that will provide web application solutions. Eventually we hope to diversify into different areas such as possibly social media or other services. For now we plan on running a high demand (from 1000 to 10,000 users in the first year) website running the application. This includes a MySQL database backend, email, and development servers. My question is then, what type of server arrangement will work best, that is ti say should i have a small cluster of ultra high power machines (E.G. Top of the range Xeons, with 12GB RAM) or will it be better to have more less powerful servers load balanced? Should I go for 1 - 2 u servers rack mounted ot would it be beter for it just to be tower servers for maintainability? Finally I would also like to know what kind of Internet and router i would need, I currently have 10mbit down and barely 1 mbit up, but soon our area will have a fiber optic connection with international speeds of up to 25 mbit / sec. Thanks in advance, RayQuang UPDATE: sorry I forgot to mention it, the platform that I will be using is PHP with the APC code cache, Probably running Debian.

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  • Very high Magento/Apache memory usage even without visitors (are we fooled by our hosting company?)

    - by MrDobalina
    I am no server guy and we have issues with our speed so I come here asking for advise. We have a VPS with 2 cores and 2gb of RAM at a Magento specialized hosting company. Over the course of the last weeks our site speed has gotten worse, even though our store is new, has less than 1000 SKUs and not even 100 visitos a day. At magespeedtest.com we only get 1.87 trans/sec @ 2.11 secs each with a mere 5 concurrent users. Our magento log files are clean, we have no huge database tables or anything like that. When we take a look at our server real time stats, we see that the memory usage jumped up from about 34% to 71% and now 82% in just a few days in idle, with no visitors on the site. Our hosting company said that we do not need to worry about that as it`s maybe related to mysql which creates buffers (which are maybe not even actually being used) and what is important is CPU and swap - stats are ok here. They also said that the low benchmark scores are caused by bad extensions or template modifications on our side. We are not sure if we can trust that statement as we only have 4 plugins installed (all from aheadworks and amasty which are known to be one of the best magento extension developers). Our template modifications are purely html and css, no modifications to the php code. Our pagespeed is ranked with 93/100 in firebug and Magento is properly configured, so the problem really just gets obvious when there are a handful of users on the site at the same time. Can anyone confirm our hosting`s statement about memory usage and where can I start looking for a solution?

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  • what is best multi-server configuration with OpenVPN

    - by sebut
    We have a number of Database severs running MongoDB on Debian plus a number of Application servers also on Debian. The db servers hold replicating db clusters, so they need to talk to each other. Application servers need to talk to all db servers (for reasons of fault tolerance). The servers are potentially spread across multiple hosting centers, so we need secure channels between all servers. The number of servers is bound to grow, so we need a VPN solution that's easy to maintain and expand. This is why I feel that SSH that we use for testing might not be up to the task and OpenVPN seems the way to go. I have ruled out TAP, since I understand that this would mean all traffic going to all the servers - perhaps this is a misunderstanding and TAP acts more like a switch? With TUN devices I imagine that all DB servers would live in their own separate subnet, they would also need a client configured to be able to connect to each of their peers. The application servers could live in a common subnet range with a client config only. Does this sound like a reasonable setup? Strangely, on the web I did not find anything about multi-server with OpenVPN. Thanks for all insights and ideas!

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  • Allow more websocket connections

    - by Switz
    I want to load balance my node.js (DerbyJS to be specific) application on a basic Linode (512MB ram). It can probably take more than one process running at once. The querys/database does not concern me as I'm not doing anything intensive. The problem at the moment is that it can only handle up to ~40 websocket connections at once. I would love if I could get that number in the few hundred+ range. I anticipate a lot of traffic on launch due to the fact that it's a highly niche community with an engaged audience, but after it should be fine with just ~20-40 connections at once, which it handles perfectly as of now. I don't mind spending a bit of money for a week or two worth of running, but I also don't want to switch production environments. How can I test the process to see how many instances I am able to run on the box? Will increasing the number of processes increase the amount of websockets I can handle, or is that a limitation of the server's network? I have an old Macbook Pro running Linux sitting next to me that has 2GB ram and a 2.8 Dual Core Processor. Could I use this to handle some of the extra load? I could probably load balance with nginx to its IP. I'm on a FiOS home network. If you have any suggestions, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks

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  • Discover intended Foreign Keys from JOINS in scripts

    - by Jason
    I'm inheriting a database that has 400 tables and only 150 foreign key constraints registered. Knowing what I do about the application and looking at the table columns, it's easy to say that there ought to be a lot more. I'm afraid that the current application software will break if I started adding the missing FKs because the developers have probably come to rely on this "freedom", but step one in fixing the problem is to come up with the list of missing FKs so we can evaluate them as a team. To make matters worse, the referencing columns don't share a naming convention. The relationships ARE coded informally into the hundreds of ad-hoc queries and stored procedures, so my hope is to parse these files programmatically looking for JOINS between actual tables (but not table variables, etc). Challenges I foresee in this approach are: newlines, optional aliases and table hints, alias resolution. Any better ideas? (Besides quitting) Are there any pre-built tools that can solve this? I don't think regex can handle this. Do you disagree? SQL Parsers? I tried using Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser.Parser but all that is exposed is the lexer - can't get an AST out of it - all that stuff is internal.

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  • Hourly SQL Server 2005 Slowness (Possibly caused by SYSTEM)

    - by Zorlack
    We're trying to diagnose the cause of slowness on our Database server. We're running the latest rev SQL Server 2005 on Windows 2008x64. The behavior that we're seeing is this: We see the SYSTEM process spike one of the CPUs for about 2 minutes, during this time SQL server slows down by a factor of 10. The slowness lasts until SYSTEM is done, then in an hour everything starts again. During these slowdowns disk writes don't spike, paging doesn't spike, the only noticeable precursor we see is that SYSTEM maxes out one of the sixteen (HT)CPUs. Note that this doesn't happen at the top of the hour, it just happens once an hour, and it shifts a bit depending on the length of the incident. At the moment this is causing intermittent slowdowns, but when the server is really busy it can cause Worker Thread starvation. The server is a Dual Quad Dell R710 with 96GB of RAM and RAID10 data/log disks. Has anyone experienced this kind of problem? Does anyone know where we should look? Edit: SQL Server Version is 9.0.4035

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  • oracle access on vmware fusion

    - by gaudi_br
    Hello, I'm running snow leopard and I'm doing some development that requires some network knowledge. I've installed vmware fusion 3.0 and I've set up a virtual machine with windows 2003 server. I need to mimic the exact configuration of another server in the network, so I really need to run the versions I'll be mentioning here. Besides, I set up two network configurations on the VM: one NAT config (so that I can have internet access) and one host-only config (because I need to use another server's mac adress and my local area network might have a problem with it) From the installation of windows 2003, I then installed oracle 10.2.0.1. During the installation I received a warning about the primary ip-address of the system being dhcp assigned, but I ignored it (maybe it was a mistake)... Now, from experience, unless the DHCP assigned address changes, I should be able to access the guest system's database from the host system, so I went to safari and tried to access the oracle em. As it turns out, because my computer is on a company network, the company's DNS doesn't know about the virtual machine, unless of course I switch to a bridged network config. However, I don't want to do that because I don't to mix up the domains. So I guess the question is, how can I define my own dns or router, or whatever it is that I need to define so that whenever I try the guest system's ip address form the host, it will use the vmnet1 or vmnet8 interface define by vmware and bypass the dns configuration of my local area network. I'd also like to know what to do incase I want to change ip addresses on the guest machine without having oracle go haywire (I've noticed a few folders on the structure which are specific for the very first IP Address)... Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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  • Deploying Memcached as 32bit or 64bit?

    - by rlotun
    I'm curious about how people deploy memcached on 64 bit machines. Do you compile a 64bit (standard) memcached binary and run that, or do people compile it in 32bit mode and run N instances (where N = machine_RAM / 4GB)? Consider a recommended deployment of Redis (from the Redis FAQ): Redis uses a lot more memory when compiled for 64 bit target, especially if the dataset is composed of many small keys and values. Such a database will, for instance, consume 50 MB of RAM when compiled for the 32 bit target, and 80 MB for 64 bit! That's a big difference. You can run 32 bit Redis binaries in a 64 bit Linux and Mac OS X system without problems. For OS X just use make 32bit. For Linux instead, make sure you have libc6-dev-i386 installed, then use make 32bit if you are using the latest Git version. Instead for Redis <= 1.2.2 you have to edit the Makefile and replace "-arch i386" with "-m32". If your application is already able to perform application-level sharding, it is very advisable to run N instances of Redis 32bit against a big 64 bit Redis box (with more than 4GB of RAM) instead than a single 64 bit instance, as this is much more memory efficient. Would not the same recommendation also apply to a memcached cluster?

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  • Do I need to install mssql before I can use mssql.so with php on unix?

    - by lock
    I didn't install any MSSQL instance on my localhost that runs windows. I just used the xampp package and uncommented the modules used for mssql. The mssql server resides on another Windows Server so I believe I only needed a simple connector module. I hoped that it would be the same for Unix. But whenever I open my site on the unix production server, (i use codeigniter btw) the logs tell me it stops script execution after Database Driver Class Initialized. I am not really familiar on installing apache and friends on unix and I wasn't responsible on how the server was set-up. But it turns out that there is no mssql.so found on the php modules directory so i tried to google for one. While the forums are telling me to just compile the script, I couldn't just do that simply as I have no write access to the server and plus it seems upon installation of php, phpize didn't get installed with it too. Hope someone can shed light to me regarding this. I think its just easier if I can get a mssql.so for PHP 4.4.4

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  • Can't get a display albums function to work... php [closed]

    - by Zhenia
    need your help with the code, please. I am trying to display an album from the database, but i just get some strange signs having no idea why... the signs are Albums Help me out if you know how to solve this problem. how can i maKe the code to display name of the album and amount of images in it? i am sure all is fine with the db. this is the function: function get_albums() { $albums = array(); // not always have got to put brackets $albums_query = "SELECT albums.album_id, albums.timestamp, albums.name, LEFT(albums.description, 50) as description, COUNT(images.image_id) as image_count FROM albums LEFT JOIN images ON albums.album_id = images.album_id WHERE albums.user_id = '{$_SESSION['user_id']}' GROUP BY albums.album_id"; $res = mysql_query($albums_query) or die(mysql_error().'<br>'.$albums_query); while($albums_row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)){ $albums = array ( 'id' => $albums_row['album_id'], 'timestamp'=> $albums_row['timestamp'], 'name' => $albums_row['name'], 'description' => $albums_row['description'], 'count' =>$albums_row['image_count'] ); } return $albums; } and the other half of the code: <?php $albums = get_albums(); if(empty($albums)) { echo'<p>You don\'t have any albums</p>'; }else{ foreach($albums as $album){ echo'<p><a href="view_album.php?album_id=',$album['id'],'">',$album['name'],'</a>(',$album['count'],'images)<br /></p>'; } } ?>

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  • SQL Server Configuration timeouts - and a workaround [SSIS]

    - by jamiet
    Ever since I started writing SSIS packages back in 2004 I have opted to store configurations in .dtsConfig (.i.e. XML) files rather than in a SQL Server table (aka SQL Server Configurations) however recently I inherited some packages that used SQL Server Configurations and thus had to immerse myself in their murky little world. To all the people that have ever gone onto the SSIS forum and asked questions about ambiguous behaviour of SQL Server Configurations I now say this... I feel your pain! The biggest problem I have had was in dealing with the change to the order in which configurations get applied that came about in SSIS 2008. Those changes are detailed on MSDN at SSIS Package Configurations however the pertinent bits are: As the utility loads and runs the package, events occur in the following order: The dtexec utility loads the package. The utility applies the configurations that were specified in the package at design time and in the order that is specified in the package. (The one exception to this is the Parent Package Variables configurations. The utility applies these configurations only once and later in the process.) The utility then applies any options that you specified on the command line. The utility then reloads the configurations that were specified in the package at design time and in the order specified in the package. (Again, the exception to this rule is the Parent Package Variables configurations). The utility uses any command-line options that were specified to reload the configurations. Therefore, different values might be reloaded from a different location. The utility applies the Parent Package Variable configurations. The utility runs the package. To understand how these steps differ from SSIS 2005 I recommend reading Doug Laudenschlager’s blog post Understand how SSIS package configurations are applied. The very nature of SQL Server Configurations means that the Connection String for the database holding the configuration values needs to be supplied from the command-line. Typically then the call to execute your package resembles this: dtexec /FILE Package.dtsx /SET "\Package.Connections[SSISConfigurations].Properties[ConnectionString]";"\"Data Source=SomeServer;Initial Catalog=SomeDB;Integrated Security=SSPI;\"", The problem then is that, as per the steps above, the package will (1) attempt to apply all configurations using the Connection String stored in the package for the "SSISConfigurations" Connection Manager before then (2) applying the Connection String from the command-line and then (3) apply the same configurations all over again. In the packages that I inherited that first attempt to apply the configurations would timeout (not unexpected); I had 8 SQL Server Configurations in the package and thus the package was waiting for 2 minutes until all the Configurations timed out (i.e. 15seconds per Configuration) - in a package that only executes for ~8seconds when it gets to do its actual work a delay of 2minutes was simply unacceptable. We had three options in how to deal with this: Get rid of the use of SQL Server configurations and use .dtsConfig files instead Edit the packages when they get deployed Change the timeout on the "SSISConfigurations" Connection Manager #1 was my preferred choice but, for reasons I explain below*, wasn't an option in this particular instance. #2 was discounted out of hand because it negates the point of using Configurations in the first place. This left us with #3 - change the timeout on the Connection Manager. This is done by going into the properties of the Connection Manager, opening the "All" tab and changing the Connect Timeout property to some suitable value (in the screenshot below I chose 2 seconds). This change meant that the attempts to apply the SQL Server configurations timed out in 16 seconds rather than two minutes; clearly this isn't an optimum solution but its certainly better than it was. So there you have it - if you are having problems with SQL Server configuration timeouts within SSIS try changing the timeout of the Connection Manager. Better still - don't bother using SQL Server Configuration in the first place. Even better - install RC0 of SQL Server 2012 to start leveraging SSIS parameters and leave the nasty old world of configurations behind you. @Jamiet * Basically, we are leveraging a SSIS execution/logging framework in which the client had invested a lot of resources and SQL Server Configurations are an integral part of that.

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  • Oracle Customer Reference Forum – Apex IT – Oracle Sales Cloud

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Apex IT, an Oracle Platinum Partner, wins Nucleus Research's ROI Award with a 724% return. Learn how you can improve your ROI with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud. We are pleased to invite you to a discussion with Apex IT on industry trends, why sales automation is important, the decision making process for choosing Oracle Sales Cloud, and benefits achieved since going live. Apex IT works with clients large and small, assisting them at all stages in the process: organizing ideas and developing strategies, selecting the most appropriate package, implementing it for best results, and keeping systems optimized with long-term support. Please plan to register at least three hours prior to the event taking place in order to participate and get the dial-in information associated in due time. Speakers: Bryan Hinz, Vice President of Business Development, Apex IT (Speaker) Chris Haven, Senior Director Product Management, Oracle (Moderator) Organization Profile: Since 1997, Apex IT has helped public sector, corporate and higher education clients use technology to streamline their processes and increase productivity and profitability. Based on products and best practices from Oracle our experts provide a full range of enterprise solutions including CX/CRM and related applications that support marketing, sales, and service; HR and HR Helpdesk; and Business Intelligence. Our project approach is results-driven and our attitude is people-focused. Industry: Professional Services Products/Services: Oracle Sales Cloud Organization Website: http://apexit.com/ Event Description: In this informal reference call, you will have the opportunity to hear Apex IT discuss industry trends, why sales automation is important, the decision making process for choosing Oracle Sales Cloud, and benefits achieved since going live. The call will open with a brief overview, followed by discussion, and an open question and answer session. Please allow one hour for the call. Why Oracle: Apex IT needed a mobile-enabled sales force automation tool that could promote account collaboration and integrate with Microsoft Outlook. Oracle Sales Cloud met these needs and Apex IT’s requirements for: Improved collaborative selling Improved quality of customer engagement and information Improved business development Improved pipeline management Please plan to register at least three hours prior to the event taking place in order to participate and get the dial-in information associated in due time. After you register your information will be forwarded through an Approval Process. Once your registration request has been validated against the invitation database, you will receive an email confirmation with your registration details as long as there is availability. Please be advised that Apex IT will revise the registrants list and may dismiss registrations as they see fit. Note: To access more information at the corporate site you would need an Oracle.com account. If you do not already have an account, getting one is easy and free. Click on the link and you will be prompted to create an account. After you have created your account, you will be automatically returned to the full page description of this event. Register Now! /* 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;}

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  • SSAS processing error: Client unable to establish connection; 08001; Encryption not supported on the client.; 08001

    - by Kevin Shyr
    After getting the cube to successfully deploy and process on Friday, I was baffled on Monday that the newly added dimension caused the cube processing to break.  I then followed the first instinct, discarded all my changes to reverted back to the version on Friday, and had no luck.  The error message (attached below) did not help as I was looking for some kind of SQL service error.  After examining the windows server log and the SQL server log, I just couldn't see anything wrong with it.After swearing for some time, and with the help of going off and working on something else for a while.  I came back to the solution and looked at the data source.  Even though I know I have never changed the provider (the default setup gave me SQL native client), I decided to change it and give OLE DB a try.This simple change allows my cube to process successfully again.  While I don't understand why the same settings that worked last week doesn't work this week, I don't have all the information to say with certainty that nothing has changed in the environment (firewall changes, server updates, etc.).SSAS processing error:<Batch >  <Parallel>    <Process xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:ddl2="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine/2" xmlns:ddl2_2="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine/2/2" xmlns:ddl100_100="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2008/engine/100/100" xmlns:ddl200="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2010/engine/200" xmlns:ddl200_200="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2010/engine/200/200">      <Object>        <DatabaseID>DWH Sales Facts</DatabaseID>        <CubeID>DWH Sales Facts</CubeID>      </Object>      <Type>ProcessFull</Type>      <WriteBackTableCreation>UseExisting</WriteBackTableCreation>    </Process>  </Parallel></Batch>                Processing Dimension 'Date' completed.                                Errors and Warnings from Response                OLE DB error: OLE DB or ODBC error: A network-related or instance-specific error has occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. Server is not found or not accessible. Check if instance name is correct and if SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. For more information see SQL Server Books Online.; 08001; Client unable to establish connection; 08001; Encryption not supported on the client.; 08001.                Errors in the high-level relational engine. A connection could not be made to the data source with the DataSourceID of 'DWH Sales Facts', Name of 'DWH Sales Facts'.                Errors in the OLAP storage engine: An error occurred while the dimension, with the ID of 'Currency', Name of 'Currency' was being processed.                Errors in the OLAP storage engine: An error occurred while the 'Currency Dim ID' attribute of the 'Currency' dimension from the 'DWH Sales Facts' database was being processed.                Internal error: The operation terminated unsuccessfully.                Server: The operation has been cancelled.

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  • Service Discovery in WCF 4.0 &ndash; Part 1

    - by Shaun
    When designing a service oriented architecture (SOA) system, there will be a lot of services with many service contracts, endpoints and behaviors. Besides the client calling the service, in a large distributed system a service may invoke other services. In this case, one service might need to know the endpoints it invokes. This might not be a problem in a small system. But when you have more than 10 services this might be a problem. For example in my current product, there are around 10 services, such as the user authentication service, UI integration service, location service, license service, device monitor service, event monitor service, schedule job service, accounting service, player management service, etc..   Benefit of Discovery Service Since almost all my services need to invoke at least one other service. This would be a difficult task to make sure all services endpoints are configured correctly in every service. And furthermore, it would be a nightmare when a service changed its endpoint at runtime. Hence, we need a discovery service to remove the dependency (configuration dependency). A discovery service plays as a service dictionary which stores the relationship between the contracts and the endpoints for every service. By using the discovery service, when service X wants to invoke service Y, it just need to ask the discovery service where is service Y, then the discovery service will return all proper endpoints of service Y, then service X can use the endpoint to send the request to service Y. And when some services changed their endpoint address, all need to do is to update its records in the discovery service then all others will know its new endpoint. In WCF 4.0 Discovery it supports both managed proxy discovery mode and ad-hoc discovery mode. In ad-hoc mode there is no standalone discovery service. When a client wanted to invoke a service, it will broadcast an message (normally in UDP protocol) to the entire network with the service match criteria. All services which enabled the discovery behavior will receive this message and only those matched services will send their endpoint back to the client. The managed proxy discovery service works as I described above. In this post I will only cover the managed proxy mode, where there’s a discovery service. For more information about the ad-hoc mode please refer to the MSDN.   Service Announcement and Probe The main functionality of discovery service should be return the proper endpoint addresses back to the service who is looking for. In most cases the consume service (as a client) will send the contract which it wanted to request to the discovery service. And then the discovery service will find the endpoint and respond. Sometimes the contract and endpoint are not enough. It also contains versioning, extensions attributes. This post I will only cover the case includes contract and endpoint. When a client (or sometimes a service who need to invoke another service) need to connect to a target service, it will firstly request the discovery service through the “Probe” method with the criteria. Basically the criteria contains the contract type name of the target service. Then the discovery service will search its endpoint repository by the criteria. The repository might be a database, a distributed cache or a flat XML file. If it matches, the discovery service will grab the endpoint information (it’s called discovery endpoint metadata in WCF) and send back. And this is called “Probe”. Finally the client received the discovery endpoint metadata and will use the endpoint to connect to the target service. Besides the probe, discovery service should take the responsible to know there is a new service available when it goes online, as well as stopped when it goes offline. This feature is named “Announcement”. When a service started and stopped, it will announce to the discovery service. So the basic functionality of a discovery service should includes: 1, An endpoint which receive the service online message, and add the service endpoint information in the discovery repository. 2, An endpoint which receive the service offline message, and remove the service endpoint information from the discovery repository. 3, An endpoint which receive the client probe message, and return the matches service endpoints, and return the discovery endpoint metadata. WCF 4.0 discovery service just covers all these features in it's infrastructure classes.   Discovery Service in WCF 4.0 WCF 4.0 introduced a new assembly named System.ServiceModel.Discovery which has all necessary classes and interfaces to build a WS-Discovery compliant discovery service. It supports ad-hoc and managed proxy modes. For the case mentioned in this post, what we need to build is a standalone discovery service, which is the managed proxy discovery service mode. To build a managed discovery service in WCF 4.0 just create a new class inherits from the abstract class System.ServiceModel.Discovery.DiscoveryProxy. This class implemented and abstracted the procedures of service announcement and probe. And it exposes 8 abstract methods where we can implement our own endpoint register, unregister and find logic. These 8 methods are asynchronized, which means all invokes to the discovery service are asynchronously, for better service capability and performance. 1, OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement, OnEndOnlineAnnouncement: Invoked when a service sent the online announcement message. We need to add the endpoint information to the repository in this method. 2, OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement, OnEndOfflineAnnouncement: Invoked when a service sent the offline announcement message. We need to remove the endpoint information from the repository in this method. 3, OnBeginFind, OnEndFind: Invoked when a client sent the probe message that want to find the service endpoint information. We need to look for the proper endpoints by matching the client’s criteria through the repository in this method. 4, OnBeginResolve, OnEndResolve: Invoked then a client sent the resolve message. Different from the find method, when using resolve method the discovery service will return the exactly one service endpoint metadata to the client. In our example we will NOT implement this method.   Let’s create our own discovery service, inherit the base System.ServiceModel.Discovery.DiscoveryProxy. We also need to specify the service behavior in this class. Since the build-in discovery service host class only support the singleton mode, we must set its instance context mode to single. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.ServiceModel.Discovery; 6: using System.ServiceModel; 7:  8: namespace Phare.Service 9: { 10: [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)] 11: public class ManagedProxyDiscoveryService : DiscoveryProxy 12: { 13: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginFind(FindRequestContext findRequestContext, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 14: { 15: throw new NotImplementedException(); 16: } 17:  18: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 19: { 20: throw new NotImplementedException(); 21: } 22:  23: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 24: { 25: throw new NotImplementedException(); 26: } 27:  28: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginResolve(ResolveCriteria resolveCriteria, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 29: { 30: throw new NotImplementedException(); 31: } 32:  33: protected override void OnEndFind(IAsyncResult result) 34: { 35: throw new NotImplementedException(); 36: } 37:  38: protected override void OnEndOfflineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 39: { 40: throw new NotImplementedException(); 41: } 42:  43: protected override void OnEndOnlineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 44: { 45: throw new NotImplementedException(); 46: } 47:  48: protected override EndpointDiscoveryMetadata OnEndResolve(IAsyncResult result) 49: { 50: throw new NotImplementedException(); 51: } 52: } 53: } Then let’s implement the online, offline and find methods one by one. WCF discovery service gives us full flexibility to implement the endpoint add, remove and find logic. For the demo purpose we will use an internal dictionary to store the services’ endpoint metadata. In the next post we will see how to serialize and store these information in database. Define a concurrent dictionary inside the service class since our it will be used in the multiple threads scenario. 1: [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)] 2: public class ManagedProxyDiscoveryService : DiscoveryProxy 3: { 4: private ConcurrentDictionary<EndpointAddress, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata> _services; 5:  6: public ManagedProxyDiscoveryService() 7: { 8: _services = new ConcurrentDictionary<EndpointAddress, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata>(); 9: } 10: } Then we can simply implement the logic of service online and offline. 1: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 2: { 3: _services.AddOrUpdate(endpointDiscoveryMetadata.Address, endpointDiscoveryMetadata, (key, value) => endpointDiscoveryMetadata); 4: return new OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult(callback, state); 5: } 6:  7: protected override void OnEndOnlineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 8: { 9: OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult.End(result); 10: } 11:  12: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 13: { 14: EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpoint = null; 15: _services.TryRemove(endpointDiscoveryMetadata.Address, out endpoint); 16: return new OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult(callback, state); 17: } 18:  19: protected override void OnEndOfflineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 20: { 21: OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult.End(result); 22: } Regards the find method, the parameter FindRequestContext.Criteria has a method named IsMatch, which can be use for us to evaluate which service metadata is satisfied with the criteria. So the implementation of find method would be like this. 1: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginFind(FindRequestContext findRequestContext, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 2: { 3: _services.Where(s => findRequestContext.Criteria.IsMatch(s.Value)) 4: .Select(s => s.Value) 5: .All(meta => 6: { 7: findRequestContext.AddMatchingEndpoint(meta); 8: return true; 9: }); 10: return new OnFindAsyncResult(callback, state); 11: } 12:  13: protected override void OnEndFind(IAsyncResult result) 14: { 15: OnFindAsyncResult.End(result); 16: } As you can see, we checked all endpoints metadata in repository by invoking the IsMatch method. Then add all proper endpoints metadata into the parameter. Finally since all these methods are asynchronized we need some AsyncResult classes as well. Below are the base class and the inherited classes used in previous methods. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.Threading; 6:  7: namespace Phare.Service 8: { 9: abstract internal class AsyncResult : IAsyncResult 10: { 11: AsyncCallback callback; 12: bool completedSynchronously; 13: bool endCalled; 14: Exception exception; 15: bool isCompleted; 16: ManualResetEvent manualResetEvent; 17: object state; 18: object thisLock; 19:  20: protected AsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 21: { 22: this.callback = callback; 23: this.state = state; 24: this.thisLock = new object(); 25: } 26:  27: public object AsyncState 28: { 29: get 30: { 31: return state; 32: } 33: } 34:  35: public WaitHandle AsyncWaitHandle 36: { 37: get 38: { 39: if (manualResetEvent != null) 40: { 41: return manualResetEvent; 42: } 43: lock (ThisLock) 44: { 45: if (manualResetEvent == null) 46: { 47: manualResetEvent = new ManualResetEvent(isCompleted); 48: } 49: } 50: return manualResetEvent; 51: } 52: } 53:  54: public bool CompletedSynchronously 55: { 56: get 57: { 58: return completedSynchronously; 59: } 60: } 61:  62: public bool IsCompleted 63: { 64: get 65: { 66: return isCompleted; 67: } 68: } 69:  70: object ThisLock 71: { 72: get 73: { 74: return this.thisLock; 75: } 76: } 77:  78: protected static TAsyncResult End<TAsyncResult>(IAsyncResult result) 79: where TAsyncResult : AsyncResult 80: { 81: if (result == null) 82: { 83: throw new ArgumentNullException("result"); 84: } 85:  86: TAsyncResult asyncResult = result as TAsyncResult; 87:  88: if (asyncResult == null) 89: { 90: throw new ArgumentException("Invalid async result.", "result"); 91: } 92:  93: if (asyncResult.endCalled) 94: { 95: throw new InvalidOperationException("Async object already ended."); 96: } 97:  98: asyncResult.endCalled = true; 99:  100: if (!asyncResult.isCompleted) 101: { 102: asyncResult.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); 103: } 104:  105: if (asyncResult.manualResetEvent != null) 106: { 107: asyncResult.manualResetEvent.Close(); 108: } 109:  110: if (asyncResult.exception != null) 111: { 112: throw asyncResult.exception; 113: } 114:  115: return asyncResult; 116: } 117:  118: protected void Complete(bool completedSynchronously) 119: { 120: if (isCompleted) 121: { 122: throw new InvalidOperationException("This async result is already completed."); 123: } 124:  125: this.completedSynchronously = completedSynchronously; 126:  127: if (completedSynchronously) 128: { 129: this.isCompleted = true; 130: } 131: else 132: { 133: lock (ThisLock) 134: { 135: this.isCompleted = true; 136: if (this.manualResetEvent != null) 137: { 138: this.manualResetEvent.Set(); 139: } 140: } 141: } 142:  143: if (callback != null) 144: { 145: callback(this); 146: } 147: } 148:  149: protected void Complete(bool completedSynchronously, Exception exception) 150: { 151: this.exception = exception; 152: Complete(completedSynchronously); 153: } 154: } 155: } 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.ServiceModel.Discovery; 6: using Phare.Service; 7:  8: namespace Phare.Service 9: { 10: internal sealed class OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult : AsyncResult 11: { 12: public OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 13: : base(callback, state) 14: { 15: this.Complete(true); 16: } 17:  18: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 19: { 20: AsyncResult.End<OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult>(result); 21: } 22:  23: } 24:  25: sealed class OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult : AsyncResult 26: { 27: public OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 28: : base(callback, state) 29: { 30: this.Complete(true); 31: } 32:  33: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 34: { 35: AsyncResult.End<OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult>(result); 36: } 37: } 38:  39: sealed class OnFindAsyncResult : AsyncResult 40: { 41: public OnFindAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 42: : base(callback, state) 43: { 44: this.Complete(true); 45: } 46:  47: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 48: { 49: AsyncResult.End<OnFindAsyncResult>(result); 50: } 51: } 52:  53: sealed class OnResolveAsyncResult : AsyncResult 54: { 55: EndpointDiscoveryMetadata matchingEndpoint; 56:  57: public OnResolveAsyncResult(EndpointDiscoveryMetadata matchingEndpoint, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 58: : base(callback, state) 59: { 60: this.matchingEndpoint = matchingEndpoint; 61: this.Complete(true); 62: } 63:  64: public static EndpointDiscoveryMetadata End(IAsyncResult result) 65: { 66: OnResolveAsyncResult thisPtr = AsyncResult.End<OnResolveAsyncResult>(result); 67: return thisPtr.matchingEndpoint; 68: } 69: } 70: } Now we have finished the discovery service. The next step is to host it. The discovery service is a standard WCF service. So we can use ServiceHost on a console application, windows service, or in IIS as usual. The following code is how to host the discovery service we had just created in a console application. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: using (var host = new ServiceHost(new ManagedProxyDiscoveryService())) 4: { 5: host.Opened += (sender, e) => 6: { 7: host.Description.Endpoints.All((ep) => 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine(ep.ListenUri); 10: return true; 11: }); 12: }; 13:  14: try 15: { 16: // retrieve the announcement, probe endpoint and binding from configuration 17: var announcementEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["announcementEndpointAddress"]); 18: var probeEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["probeEndpointAddress"]); 19: var binding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 20: var announcementEndpoint = new AnnouncementEndpoint(binding, announcementEndpointAddress); 21: var probeEndpoint = new DiscoveryEndpoint(binding, probeEndpointAddress); 22: probeEndpoint.IsSystemEndpoint = false; 23: // append the service endpoint for announcement and probe 24: host.AddServiceEndpoint(announcementEndpoint); 25: host.AddServiceEndpoint(probeEndpoint); 26:  27: host.Open(); 28:  29: Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit."); 30: Console.ReadKey(); 31: } 32: catch (Exception ex) 33: { 34: Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString()); 35: } 36: } 37:  38: Console.WriteLine("Done."); 39: Console.ReadKey(); 40: } What we need to notice is that, the discovery service needs two endpoints for announcement and probe. In this example I just retrieve them from the configuration file. I also specified the binding of these two endpoints in configuration file as well. 1: <?xml version="1.0"?> 2: <configuration> 3: <startup> 4: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> 5: </startup> 6: <appSettings> 7: <add key="announcementEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10010/announcement"/> 8: <add key="probeEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10011/probe"/> 9: <add key="bindingType" value="System.ServiceModel.NetTcpBinding, System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/> 10: </appSettings> 11: </configuration> And this is the console screen when I ran my discovery service. As you can see there are two endpoints listening for announcement message and probe message.   Discoverable Service and Client Next, let’s create a WCF service that is discoverable, which means it can be found by the discovery service. To do so, we need to let the service send the online announcement message to the discovery service, as well as offline message before it shutdown. Just create a simple service which can make the incoming string to upper. The service contract and implementation would be like this. 1: [ServiceContract] 2: public interface IStringService 3: { 4: [OperationContract] 5: string ToUpper(string content); 6: } 1: public class StringService : IStringService 2: { 3: public string ToUpper(string content) 4: { 5: return content.ToUpper(); 6: } 7: } Then host this service in the console application. In order to make the discovery service easy to be tested the service address will be changed each time it’s started. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var baseAddress = new Uri(string.Format("net.tcp://localhost:11001/stringservice/{0}/", Guid.NewGuid().ToString())); 4:  5: using (var host = new ServiceHost(typeof(StringService), baseAddress)) 6: { 7: host.Opened += (sender, e) => 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine("Service opened at {0}", host.Description.Endpoints.First().ListenUri); 10: }; 11:  12: host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IStringService), new NetTcpBinding(), string.Empty); 13:  14: host.Open(); 15:  16: Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit."); 17: Console.ReadKey(); 18: } 19: } Currently this service is NOT discoverable. We need to add a special service behavior so that it could send the online and offline message to the discovery service announcement endpoint when the host is opened and closed. WCF 4.0 introduced a service behavior named ServiceDiscoveryBehavior. When we specified the announcement endpoint address and appended it to the service behaviors this service will be discoverable. 1: var announcementAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["announcementEndpointAddress"]); 2: var announcementBinding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 3: var announcementEndpoint = new AnnouncementEndpoint(announcementBinding, announcementAddress); 4: var discoveryBehavior = new ServiceDiscoveryBehavior(); 5: discoveryBehavior.AnnouncementEndpoints.Add(announcementEndpoint); 6: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(discoveryBehavior); The ServiceDiscoveryBehavior utilizes the service extension and channel dispatcher to implement the online and offline announcement logic. In short, it injected the channel open and close procedure and send the online and offline message to the announcement endpoint.   On client side, when we have the discovery service, a client can invoke a service without knowing its endpoint. WCF discovery assembly provides a class named DiscoveryClient, which can be used to find the proper service endpoint by passing the criteria. In the code below I initialized the DiscoveryClient, specified the discovery service probe endpoint address. Then I created the find criteria by specifying the service contract I wanted to use and invoke the Find method. This will send the probe message to the discovery service and it will find the endpoints back to me. The discovery service will return all endpoints that matches the find criteria, which means in the result of the find method there might be more than one endpoints. In this example I just returned the first matched one back. In the next post I will show how to extend our discovery service to make it work like a service load balancer. 1: static EndpointAddress FindServiceEndpoint() 2: { 3: var probeEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["probeEndpointAddress"]); 4: var probeBinding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 5: var discoveryEndpoint = new DiscoveryEndpoint(probeBinding, probeEndpointAddress); 6:  7: EndpointAddress address = null; 8: FindResponse result = null; 9: using (var discoveryClient = new DiscoveryClient(discoveryEndpoint)) 10: { 11: result = discoveryClient.Find(new FindCriteria(typeof(IStringService))); 12: } 13:  14: if (result != null && result.Endpoints.Any()) 15: { 16: var endpointMetadata = result.Endpoints.First(); 17: address = endpointMetadata.Address; 18: } 19: return address; 20: } Once we probed the discovery service we will receive the endpoint. So in the client code we can created the channel factory from the endpoint and binding, and invoke to the service. When creating the client side channel factory we need to make sure that the client side binding should be the same as the service side. WCF discovery service can be used to find the endpoint for a service contract, but the binding is NOT included. This is because the binding was not in the WS-Discovery specification. In the next post I will demonstrate how to add the binding information into the discovery service. At that moment the client don’t need to create the binding by itself. Instead it will use the binding received from the discovery service. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: Console.WriteLine("Say something..."); 4: var content = Console.ReadLine(); 5: while (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(content)) 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine("Finding the service endpoint..."); 8: var address = FindServiceEndpoint(); 9: if (address == null) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("There is no endpoint matches the criteria."); 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("Found the endpoint {0}", address.Uri); 16:  17: var factory = new ChannelFactory<IStringService>(new NetTcpBinding(), address); 18: factory.Opened += (sender, e) => 19: { 20: Console.WriteLine("Connecting to {0}.", factory.Endpoint.ListenUri); 21: }; 22: var proxy = factory.CreateChannel(); 23: using (proxy as IDisposable) 24: { 25: Console.WriteLine("ToUpper: {0} => {1}", content, proxy.ToUpper(content)); 26: } 27: } 28:  29: Console.WriteLine("Say something..."); 30: content = Console.ReadLine(); 31: } 32: } Similarly, the discovery service probe endpoint and binding were defined in the configuration file. 1: <?xml version="1.0"?> 2: <configuration> 3: <startup> 4: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> 5: </startup> 6: <appSettings> 7: <add key="announcementEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10010/announcement"/> 8: <add key="probeEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10011/probe"/> 9: <add key="bindingType" value="System.ServiceModel.NetTcpBinding, System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/> 10: </appSettings> 11: </configuration> OK, now let’s have a test. Firstly start the discovery service, and then start our discoverable service. When it started it will announced to the discovery service and registered its endpoint into the repository, which is the local dictionary. And then start the client and type something. As you can see the client asked the discovery service for the endpoint and then establish the connection to the discoverable service. And more interesting, do NOT close the client console but terminate the discoverable service but press the enter key. This will make the service send the offline message to the discovery service. Then start the discoverable service again. Since we made it use a different address each time it started, currently it should be hosted on another address. If we enter something in the client we could see that it asked the discovery service and retrieve the new endpoint, and connect the the service.   Summary In this post I discussed the benefit of using the discovery service and the procedures of service announcement and probe. I also demonstrated how to leverage the WCF Discovery feature in WCF 4.0 to build a simple managed discovery service. For test purpose, in this example I used the in memory dictionary as the discovery endpoint metadata repository. And when finding I also just return the first matched endpoint back. I also hard coded the bindings between the discoverable service and the client. In next post I will show you how to solve the problem mentioned above, as well as some additional feature for production usage. You can download the code here.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • A basic T4 template for generating Model Metadata in ASP.NET MVC2

    - by rajbk
    I have been learning about T4 templates recently by looking at the awesome ADO.NET POCO entity generator. By using the POCO entity generator template as a base, I created a T4 template which generates metadata classes for a given Entity Data Model. This speeds coding by reducing the amount of typing required when creating view specific model and its metadata. To use this template, Download the template provided at the bottom. Set two values in the template file. The first one should point to the EDM you wish to generate metadata for. The second is used to suffix the namespace and classes that get generated. string inputFile = @"Northwind.edmx"; string suffix = "AutoMetadata"; Add the template to your MVC 2 Visual Studio 2010 project. Once you add it, a number of classes will get added to your project based on the number of entities you have.    One of these classes is shown below. Note that the DisplayName, Required and StringLength attributes have been added by the t4 template. //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // <auto-generated> // This code was generated from a template. // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // </auto-generated> //------------------------------------------------------------------------------   using System; using System.ComponentModel; using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;   namespace NorthwindSales.ModelsAutoMetadata { public partial class CustomerAutoMetadata { [DisplayName("Customer ID")] [Required] [StringLength(5)] public string CustomerID { get; set; } [DisplayName("Company Name")] [Required] [StringLength(40)] public string CompanyName { get; set; } [DisplayName("Contact Name")] [StringLength(30)] public string ContactName { get; set; } [DisplayName("Contact Title")] [StringLength(30)] public string ContactTitle { get; set; } [DisplayName("Address")] [StringLength(60)] public string Address { get; set; } [DisplayName("City")] [StringLength(15)] public string City { get; set; } [DisplayName("Region")] [StringLength(15)] public string Region { get; set; } [DisplayName("Postal Code")] [StringLength(10)] public string PostalCode { get; set; } [DisplayName("Country")] [StringLength(15)] public string Country { get; set; } [DisplayName("Phone")] [StringLength(24)] public string Phone { get; set; } [DisplayName("Fax")] [StringLength(24)] public string Fax { get; set; } } } The gen’d class can be used from your project by creating a partial class with the entity name and setting the MetadataType attribute.namespace MyProject.Models{ [MetadataType(typeof(CustomerAutoMetadata))] public partial class Customer { }} You can also copy the code in the metadata class generated and create your own ViewModel class. Note that the template is super basic  and does not take into account complex properties. I have tested it with the Northwind database. This is a work in progress. Feel free to modify the template to suite your requirements. Standard disclaimer follows: Use At Your Own Risk, Works on my machine running VS 2010 RTM/ASP.NET MVC 2 AutoMetaData.zip Mr. Incredible: Of course I have a secret identity. I don't know a single superhero who doesn't. Who wants the pressure of being super all the time?

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  • Red Gate Coder interviews: Alex Davies

    - by Michael Williamson
    Alex Davies has been a software engineer at Red Gate since graduating from university, and is currently busy working on .NET Demon. We talked about tackling parallel programming with his actors framework, a scientific approach to debugging, and how JavaScript is going to affect the programming languages we use in years to come. So, if we start at the start, how did you get started in programming? When I was seven or eight, I was given a BBC Micro for Christmas. I had asked for a Game Boy, but my dad thought it would be better to give me a proper computer. For a year or so, I only played games on it, but then I found the user guide for writing programs in it. I gradually started doing more stuff on it and found it fun. I liked creating. As I went into senior school I continued to write stuff on there, trying to write games that weren’t very good. I got a real computer when I was fourteen and found ways to write BASIC on it. Visual Basic to start with, and then something more interesting than that. How did you learn to program? Was there someone helping you out? Absolutely not! I learnt out of a book, or by experimenting. I remember the first time I found a loop, I was like “Oh my God! I don’t have to write out the same line over and over and over again any more. It’s amazing!” When did you think this might be something that you actually wanted to do as a career? For a long time, I thought it wasn’t something that you would do as a career, because it was too much fun to be a career. I thought I’d do chemistry at university and some kind of career based on chemical engineering. And then I went to a careers fair at school when I was seventeen or eighteen, and it just didn’t interest me whatsoever. I thought “I could be a programmer, and there’s loads of money there, and I’m good at it, and it’s fun”, but also that I shouldn’t spoil my hobby. Now I don’t really program in my spare time any more, which is a bit of a shame, but I program all the rest of the time, so I can live with it. Do you think you learnt much about programming at university? Yes, definitely! I went into university knowing how to make computers do anything I wanted them to do. However, I didn’t have the language to talk about algorithms, so the algorithms course in my first year was massively important. Learning other language paradigms like functional programming was really good for breadth of understanding. Functional programming influences normal programming through design rather than actually using it all the time. I draw inspiration from it to write imperative programs which I think is actually becoming really fashionable now, but I’ve been doing it for ages. I did it first! There were also some courses on really odd programming languages, a bit of Prolog, a little bit of C. Having a little bit of each of those is something that I would have never done on my own, so it was important. And then there are knowledge-based courses which are about not programming itself but things that have been programmed like TCP. Those are really important for examples for how to approach things. Did you do any internships while you were at university? Yeah, I spent both of my summers at the same company. I thought I could code well before I went there. Looking back at the crap that I produced, it was only surpassed in its crappiness by all of the other code already in that company. I’m so much better at writing nice code now than I used to be back then. Was there just not a culture of looking after your code? There was, they just didn’t hire people for their abilities in that area. They hired people for raw IQ. The first indicator of it going wrong was that they didn’t have any computer scientists, which is a bit odd in a programming company. But even beyond that they didn’t have people who learnt architecture from anyone else. Most of them had started straight out of university, so never really had experience or mentors to learn from. There wasn’t the experience to draw from to teach each other. In the second half of my second internship, I was being given tasks like looking at new technologies and teaching people stuff. Interns shouldn’t be teaching people how to do their jobs! All interns are going to have little nuggets of things that you don’t know about, but they shouldn’t consistently be the ones who know the most. It’s not a good environment to learn. I was going to ask how you found working with people who were more experienced than you… When I reached Red Gate, I found some people who were more experienced programmers than me, and that was difficult. I’ve been coding since I was tiny. At university there were people who were cleverer than me, but there weren’t very many who were more experienced programmers than me. During my internship, I didn’t find anyone who I classed as being a noticeably more experienced programmer than me. So, it was a shock to the system to have valid criticisms rather than just formatting criticisms. However, Red Gate’s not so big on the actual code review, at least it wasn’t when I started. We did an entire product release and then somebody looked over all of the UI of that product which I’d written and say what they didn’t like. By that point, it was way too late and I’d disagree with them. Do you think the lack of code reviews was a bad thing? I think if there’s going to be any oversight of new people, then it should be continuous rather than chunky. For me I don’t mind too much, I could go out and get oversight if I wanted it, and in those situations I felt comfortable without it. If I was managing the new person, then maybe I’d be keener on oversight and then the right way to do it is continuously and in very, very small chunks. Have you had any significant projects you’ve worked on outside of a job? When I was a teenager I wrote all sorts of stuff. I used to write games, I derived how to do isomorphic projections myself once. I didn’t know what the word was so I couldn’t Google for it, so I worked it out myself. It was horrifically complicated. But it sort of tailed off when I started at university, and is now basically zero. If I do side-projects now, they tend to be work-related side projects like my actors framework, NAct, which I started in a down tools week. Could you explain a little more about NAct? It is a little C# framework for writing parallel code more easily. Parallel programming is difficult when you need to write to shared data. Sometimes parallel programming is easy because you don’t need to write to shared data. When you do need to access shared data, you could just have your threads pile in and do their work, but then you would screw up the data because the threads would trample on each other’s toes. You could lock, but locks are really dangerous if you’re using more than one of them. You get interactions like deadlocks, and that’s just nasty. Actors instead allows you to say this piece of data belongs to this thread of execution, and nobody else can read it. If you want to read it, then ask that thread of execution for a piece of it by sending a message, and it will send the data back by a message. And that avoids deadlocks as long as you follow some obvious rules about not making your actors sit around waiting for other actors to do something. There are lots of ways to write actors, NAct allows you to do it as if it was method calls on other objects, which means you get all the strong type-safety that C# programmers like. Do you think that this is suitable for the majority of parallel programming, or do you think it’s only suitable for specific cases? It’s suitable for most difficult parallel programming. If you’ve just got a hundred web requests which are all independent of each other, then I wouldn’t bother because it’s easier to just spin them up in separate threads and they can proceed independently of each other. But where you’ve got difficult parallel programming, where you’ve got multiple threads accessing multiple bits of data in multiple ways at different times, then actors is at least as good as all other ways, and is, I reckon, easier to think about. When you’re using actors, you presumably still have to write your code in a different way from you would otherwise using single-threaded code. You can’t use actors with any methods that have return types, because you’re not allowed to call into another actor and wait for it. If you want to get a piece of data out of another actor, then you’ve got to use tasks so that you can use “async” and “await” to await asynchronously for it. But other than that, you can still stick things in classes so it’s not too different really. Rather than having thousands of objects with mutable state, you can use component-orientated design, where there are only a few mutable classes which each have a small number of instances. Then there can be thousands of immutable objects. If you tend to do that anyway, then actors isn’t much of a jump. If I’ve already built my system without any parallelism, how hard is it to add actors to exploit all eight cores on my desktop? Usually pretty easy. If you can identify even one boundary where things look like messages and you have components where some objects live on one side and these other objects live on the other side, then you can have a granddaddy object on one side be an actor and it will parallelise as it goes across that boundary. Not too difficult. If we do get 1000-core desktop PCs, do you think actors will scale up? It’s hard. There are always in the order of twenty to fifty actors in my whole program because I tend to write each component as actors, and I tend to have one instance of each component. So this won’t scale to a thousand cores. What you can do is write data structures out of actors. I use dictionaries all over the place, and if you need a dictionary that is going to be accessed concurrently, then you could build one of those out of actors in no time. You can use queuing to marshal requests between different slices of the dictionary which are living on different threads. So it’s like a distributed hash table but all of the chunks of it are on the same machine. That means that each of these thousand processors has cached one small piece of the dictionary. I reckon it wouldn’t be too big a leap to start doing proper parallelism. Do you think it helps if actors get baked into the language, similarly to Erlang? Erlang is excellent in that it has thread-local garbage collection. C# doesn’t, so there’s a limit to how well C# actors can possibly scale because there’s a single garbage collected heap shared between all of them. When you do a global garbage collection, you’ve got to stop all of the actors, which is seriously expensive, whereas in Erlang garbage collections happen per-actor, so they’re insanely cheap. However, Erlang deviated from all the sensible language design that people have used recently and has just come up with crazy stuff. You can definitely retrofit thread-local garbage collection to .NET, and then it’s quite well-suited to support actors, even if it’s not baked into the language. Speaking of language design, do you have a favourite programming language? I’ll choose a language which I’ve never written before. I like the idea of Scala. It sounds like C#, only with some of the niggles gone. I enjoy writing static types. It means you don’t have to writing tests so much. When you say it doesn’t have some of the niggles? C# doesn’t allow the use of a property as a method group. It doesn’t have Scala case classes, or sum types, where you can do a switch statement and the compiler checks that you’ve checked all the cases, which is really useful in functional-style programming. Pattern-matching, in other words. That’s actually the major niggle. C# is pretty good, and I’m quite happy with C#. And what about going even further with the type system to remove the need for tests to something like Haskell? Or is that a step too far? I’m quite a pragmatist, I don’t think I could deal with trying to write big systems in languages with too few other users, especially when learning how to structure things. I just don’t know anyone who can teach me, and the Internet won’t teach me. That’s the main reason I wouldn’t use it. If I turned up at a company that writes big systems in Haskell, I would have no objection to that, but I wouldn’t instigate it. What about things in C#? For instance, there’s contracts in C#, so you can try to statically verify a bit more about your code. Do you think that’s useful, or just not worthwhile? I’ve not really tried it. My hunch is that it needs to be built into the language and be quite mathematical for it to work in real life, and that doesn’t seem to have ended up true for C# contracts. I don’t think anyone who’s tried them thinks they’re any good. I might be wrong. On a slightly different note, how do you like to debug code? I think I’m quite an odd debugger. I use guesswork extremely rarely, especially if something seems quite difficult to debug. I’ve been bitten spending hours and hours on guesswork and not being scientific about debugging in the past, so now I’m scientific to a fault. What I want is to see the bug happening in the debugger, to step through the bug happening. To watch the program going from a valid state to an invalid state. When there’s a bug and I can’t work out why it’s happening, I try to find some piece of evidence which places the bug in one section of the code. From that experiment, I binary chop on the possible causes of the bug. I suppose that means binary chopping on places in the code, or binary chopping on a stage through a processing cycle. Basically, I’m very stupid about how I debug. I won’t make any guesses, I won’t use any intuition, I will only identify the experiment that’s going to binary chop most effectively and repeat rather than trying to guess anything. I suppose it’s quite top-down. Is most of the time then spent in the debugger? Absolutely, if at all possible I will never debug using print statements or logs. I don’t really hold much stock in outputting logs. If there’s any bug which can be reproduced locally, I’d rather do it in the debugger than outputting logs. And with SmartAssembly error reporting, there’s not a lot that can’t be either observed in an error report and just fixed, or reproduced locally. And in those other situations, maybe I’ll use logs. But I hate using logs. You stare at the log, trying to guess what’s going on, and that’s exactly what I don’t like doing. You have to just look at it and see does this look right or wrong. We’ve covered how you get to grip with bugs. How do you get to grips with an entire codebase? I watch it in the debugger. I find little bugs and then try to fix them, and mostly do it by watching them in the debugger and gradually getting an understanding of how the code works using my process of binary chopping. I have to do a lot of reading and watching code to choose where my slicing-in-half experiment is going to be. The last time I did it was SmartAssembly. The old code was a complete mess, but at least it did things top to bottom. There wasn’t too much of some of the big abstractions where flow of control goes all over the place, into a base class and back again. Code’s really hard to understand when that happens. So I like to choose a little bug and try to fix it, and choose a bigger bug and try to fix it. Definitely learn by doing. I want to always have an aim so that I get a little achievement after every few hours of debugging. Once I’ve learnt the codebase I might be able to fix all the bugs in an hour, but I’d rather be using them as an aim while I’m learning the codebase. If I was a maintainer of a codebase, what should I do to make it as easy as possible for you to understand? Keep distinct concepts in different places. And name your stuff so that it’s obvious which concepts live there. You shouldn’t have some variable that gets set miles up the top of somewhere, and then is read miles down to choose some later behaviour. I’m talking from a very much SmartAssembly point of view because the old SmartAssembly codebase had tons and tons of these things, where it would read some property of the code and then deal with it later. Just thousands of variables in scope. Loads of things to think about. If you can keep concepts separate, then it aids me in my process of fixing bugs one at a time, because each bug is going to more or less be understandable in the one place where it is. And what about tests? Do you think they help at all? I’ve never had the opportunity to learn a codebase which has had tests, I don’t know what it’s like! What about when you’re actually developing? How useful do you find tests in finding bugs or regressions? Finding regressions, absolutely. Running bits of code that would be quite hard to run otherwise, definitely. It doesn’t happen very often that a test finds a bug in the first place. I don’t really buy nebulous promises like tests being a good way to think about the spec of the code. My thinking goes something like “This code works at the moment, great, ship it! Ah, there’s a way that this code doesn’t work. Okay, write a test, demonstrate that it doesn’t work, fix it, use the test to demonstrate that it’s now fixed, and keep the test for future regressions.” The most valuable tests are for bugs that have actually happened at some point, because bugs that have actually happened at some point, despite the fact that you think you’ve fixed them, are way more likely to appear again than new bugs are. Does that mean that when you write your code the first time, there are no tests? Often. The chance of there being a bug in a new feature is relatively unaffected by whether I’ve written a test for that new feature because I’m not good enough at writing tests to think of bugs that I would have written into the code. So not writing regression tests for all of your code hasn’t affected you too badly? There are different kinds of features. Some of them just always work, and are just not flaky, they just continue working whatever you throw at them. Maybe because the type-checker is particularly effective around them. Writing tests for those features which just tend to always work is a waste of time. And because it’s a waste of time I’ll tend to wait until a feature has demonstrated its flakiness by having bugs in it before I start trying to test it. You can get a feel for whether it’s going to be flaky code as you’re writing it. I try to write it to make it not flaky, but there are some things that are just inherently flaky. And very occasionally, I’ll think “this is going to be flaky” as I’m writing, and then maybe do a test, but not most of the time. How do you think your programming style has changed over time? I’ve got clearer about what the right way of doing things is. I used to flip-flop a lot between different ideas. Five years ago I came up with some really good ideas and some really terrible ideas. All of them seemed great when I thought of them, but they were quite diverse ideas, whereas now I have a smaller set of reliable ideas that are actually good for structuring code. So my code is probably more similar to itself than it used to be back in the day, when I was trying stuff out. I’ve got more disciplined about encapsulation, I think. There are operational things like I use actors more now than I used to, and that forces me to use immutability more than I used to. The first code that I wrote in Red Gate was the memory profiler UI, and that was an actor, I just didn’t know the name of it at the time. I don’t really use object-orientation. By object-orientation, I mean having n objects of the same type which are mutable. I want a constant number of objects that are mutable, and they should be different types. I stick stuff in dictionaries and then have one thing that owns the dictionary and puts stuff in and out of it. That’s definitely a pattern that I’ve seen recently. I think maybe I’m doing functional programming. Possibly. It’s plausible. If you had to summarise the essence of programming in a pithy sentence, how would you do it? Programming is the form of art that, without losing any of the beauty of architecture or fine art, allows you to produce things that people love and you make money from. So you think it’s an art rather than a science? It’s a little bit of engineering, a smidgeon of maths, but it’s not science. Like architecture, programming is on that boundary between art and engineering. If you want to do it really nicely, it’s mostly art. You can get away with doing architecture and programming entirely by having a good engineering mind, but you’re not going to produce anything nice. You’re not going to have joy doing it if you’re an engineering mind. Architects who are just engineering minds are not going to enjoy their job. I suppose engineering is the foundation on which you build the art. Exactly. How do you think programming is going to change over the next ten years? There will be an unfortunate shift towards dynamically-typed languages, because of JavaScript. JavaScript has an unfair advantage. JavaScript’s unfair advantage will cause more people to be exposed to dynamically-typed languages, which means other dynamically-typed languages crop up and the best features go into dynamically-typed languages. Then people conflate the good features with the fact that it’s dynamically-typed, and more investment goes into dynamically-typed languages. They end up better, so people use them. What about the idea of compiling other languages, possibly statically-typed, to JavaScript? It’s a reasonable idea. I would like to do it, but I don’t think enough people in the world are going to do it to make it pick up. The hordes of beginners are the lifeblood of a language community. They are what makes there be good tools and what makes there be vibrant community websites. And any particular thing which is the same as JavaScript only with extra stuff added to it, although it might be technically great, is not going to have the hordes of beginners. JavaScript is always to be quickest and easiest way for a beginner to start programming in the browser. And dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners. Compilers are pretty scary and beginners don’t write big code. And having your errors come up in the same place, whether they’re statically checkable errors or not, is quite nice for a beginner. If someone asked me to teach them some programming, I’d teach them JavaScript. If dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners, when do you think the benefits of static typing start to kick in? The value of having a statically typed program is in the tools that rely on the static types to produce a smooth IDE experience rather than actually telling me my compile errors. And only once you’re experienced enough a programmer that having a really smooth IDE experience makes a blind bit of difference, does static typing make a blind bit of difference. So it’s not really about size of codebase. If I go and write up a tiny program, I’m still going to get value out of writing it in C# using ReSharper because I’m experienced with C# and ReSharper enough to be able to write code five times faster if I have that help. Any other visions of the future? Nobody’s going to use actors. Because everyone’s going to be running on single-core VMs connected over network-ready protocols like JSON over HTTP. So, parallelism within one operating system is going to die. But until then, you should use actors. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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  • How to install SharePoint Server 2013 Preview

    - by ybbest
    The Office 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 Preview is announced yesterday and as a SharePoint Developer, I am really excited to learn all the new features and capabilities. Today I will show you how to install the preview. 1. Create a service account called SP2013Install and give this account Dbcreator and SecurityAdmin in SQL Server 2012 2. You need to run the following script to set the ‘maxdegree of parellism’ setting to the required value of 1 in SQL Server 2012(using sysadmin privilege) before configure the SharePoint Farm. Otherwise , you might get the error ‘This SQL Server Instance does not have the required maxdegree of parellism setting of 1’ sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1; GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE; GO sp_configure 'max degree of parallelism', 1; GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE; GO 3. Download the SharePoint preview from here and I am going to install it on Windows Server 2008R2 with SQL2012. 4. Click the Install software prerequisites, this works fine with the internet connection. (However, if you do not have internet connection, it is a bit tricky to install window azure AppFabric as it has to be installed using the prerequisite installer. Your computer might reboot a few times in the process.) 5.After the prerequisites are installed `completely, you can then install the Preview. Click the Install SharePoint Server and Enter the Product key you get from the Preview download page. 6. Accept the License terms and Click Next. 7. Leave the default path for the file location. 8. You can now start the installation process 9. After binary files are installed, you then can configure your farm using the farm configuration wizard. 10.Specify the Database server and the install account 11. Specify SharePoint farm passphrase. 12 Specify the port number , you should choose your own favorite port number. 13. Choose Create a New Server Farm and click next. 14. Double-check with the settings and click Next to Configure the farm install. 15. Finally, your farm is configured successfully and you now are able to go to your Central Admin site http://sp2010:6666/ 16. You should configure the services manually or automate using PowerShell (If you like to understand why,you can read the blog post here) ,however I will use the wizard to configure automatically here  as  this is a test machine. After the configuration is complete, you now be able to see your SharePoint Site. 17.To start the evaluate the Preview , you need to install Visual Studio 2012 RC , Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012,SharePoint 2013 Designer Preview , Office 2013 Preview. References: Download SharePoint2013 Server 2013 Download Microsoft Visio Professional 2013 Preview Install SharePoint 2013 Preview Hardware and software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Preview SharePoint 2013 IT Pro and Developer training materials released Plan for SharePoint 2013 Preview Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 SharePoint 2013 Preview Office365 for the SharePoint 2013 preview SharePoint Designer 2013 Download: Microsoft Office 2013 Preview Language Pack Try Office

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  • Developer Training – Importance and Significance – Part 1

    - by pinaldave
    Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Can anyone remember their final day of schooling?  This is probably a silly question because – of course you can!  Many people mark this as the most exciting, happiest day of their life.  It marks the end of testing, the end of following rules set by teachers, and the beginning of finally being able to earn money and work in your chosen field. Beginning in Real World However, many former-students will be disappointed to find out that once they become employees, learning is not over.  Many companies are discovering the importance and benefits to training their employees.  You can breathe a sigh of relief, though, because much for this kind of training there are not usually tests! We often think that we go to school for our younger years so that we do all our learning all at once, and then for the rest of our lives we use that knowledge.  But in so many cases, but especially for developers, the opposite is true.  It takes many years of schools to learn the basics of a field, and then our careers are spent learning to become experts. For this, and so many other reasons, training is very important.  Example one: developer training leads to better employees.  A company is only as good as the people it employs, and one way to ensure that you have employed the right candidate is through training.  Training can take a regular “stone” and polish it into a “diamond.”  Employees who have been well-trained will be better at their jobs and produce a better product. Most Expensive Resource Did you know that one of the most expensive operating costs for any company is not buying goods, or advertising, but its employees – especially having to hire new employees.  Bringing in new people, getting them up to speed, and providing them with perks to attract them to a company is a huge cost for companies.  So employee retention – keep the employees you already have, and keeping them happy – is incredibly important from a business aspect.  And research shows that a well-trained employee is a happy employee.  They feel more confident in their job, happier with their position, and more cared-about – and therefore less likely to leave in search of a better job.  Employee training leads to better retention. Good Moral On the subject of keeping employees happy in order to keep them at a company, the complement to that research shows that happier employees are more efficient and overall better at their jobs.  You don’t have to be a scientist to figure out why this is true.  An employee who feel that his company cares about him and his educational future will work harder for the company.  He or she will put in that extra hour during the busy season that makes all the difference in the end.  Good morale is good for the company. If good morale is better for the company, you know that it goes hand-in-hand with something even better – better efficiency.  An employee who is well trained obviously knows more about their job and all the technical aspects.  That means when a problem crops up – and they inevitably do – this employee will be well-equipped to deal with that problem with fewer problems, and no need to go searching for help from higher up.  When employees are well trained, companies run more smoothly. A Better Product Of course, all of these “pros” for employee training are leading up to the one thing that companies truly care about – a better product.  We have shown that employees who have been trained to be competitive in the market are happier at the company, they are more efficient, and their morale is better.  The overall result is that the company’s product – whether it is a database, piece of equipment, or even a physical good – is better.  And a better product will always be more competitive on the market. 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

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  • MySQL Syslog Audit Plugin

    - by jonathonc
    This post shows the construction process of the Syslog Audit plugin that was presented at MySQL Connect 2012. It is based on an environment that has the appropriate development tools enabled including gcc,g++ and cmake. It also assumes you have downloaded the MySQL source code (5.5.16 or higher) and have compiled and installed the system into the /usr/local/mysql directory ready for use.  The information provided below is designed to show the different components that make up a plugin, and specifically an audit type plugin, and how it comes together to be used within the MySQL service. The MySQL Reference Manual contains information regarding the plugin API and how it can be used, so please refer there for more detailed information. The code in this post is designed to give the simplest information necessary, so handling every return code, managing race conditions etc is not part of this example code. Let's start by looking at the most basic implementation of our plugin code as seen below: /*    Copyright (c) 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.    Author:  Jonathon Coombes    Licence: GPL    Description: An auditing plugin that logs to syslog and                 can adjust the loglevel via the system variables. */ #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <mysql/plugin_audit.h> #include <syslog.h> There is a commented header detailing copyright/licencing and meta-data information and then the include headers. The two important include statements for our plugin are the syslog.h plugin, which gives us the structures for syslog, and the plugin_audit.h include which has details regarding the audit specific plugin api. Note that we do not need to include the general plugin header plugin.h, as this is done within the plugin_audit.h file already. To implement our plugin within the current implementation we need to add it into our source code and compile. > cd /usr/local/src/mysql-5.5.28/plugin > mkdir audit_syslog > cd audit_syslog A simple CMakeLists.txt file is created to manage the plugin compilation: MYSQL_ADD_PLUGIN(audit_syslog audit_syslog.cc MODULE_ONLY) Run the cmake  command at the top level of the source and then you can compile the plugin using the 'make' command. This results in a compiled audit_syslog.so library, but currently it is not much use to MySQL as there is no level of api defined to communicate with the MySQL service. Now we need to define the general plugin structure that enables MySQL to recognise the library as a plugin and be able to install/uninstall it and have it show up in the system. The structure is defined in the plugin.h file in the MySQL source code.  /*   Plugin library descriptor */ mysql_declare_plugin(audit_syslog) {   MYSQL_AUDIT_PLUGIN,           /* plugin type                    */   &audit_syslog_descriptor,     /* descriptor handle               */   "audit_syslog",               /* plugin name                     */   "Author Name",                /* author                          */   "Simple Syslog Audit",        /* description                     */   PLUGIN_LICENSE_GPL,           /* licence                         */   audit_syslog_init,            /* init function     */   audit_syslog_deinit,          /* deinit function */   0x0001,                       /* plugin version                  */   NULL,                         /* status variables        */   NULL,                         /* system variables                */   NULL,                         /* no reserves                     */   0,                            /* no flags                        */ } mysql_declare_plugin_end; The general plugin descriptor above is standard for all plugin types in MySQL. The plugin type is defined along with the init/deinit functions and interface methods into the system for sharing information, and various other metadata information. The descriptors have an internally recognised version number so that plugins can be matched against the api on the running server. The other details are usually related to the type-specific methods and structures to implement the plugin. Each plugin has a type-specific descriptor as well which details how the plugin is implemented for the specific purpose of that plugin type. /*   Plugin type-specific descriptor */ static struct st_mysql_audit audit_syslog_descriptor= {   MYSQL_AUDIT_INTERFACE_VERSION,                        /* interface version    */   NULL,                                                 /* release_thd function */   audit_syslog_notify,                                  /* notify function      */   { (unsigned long) MYSQL_AUDIT_GENERAL_CLASSMASK |                     MYSQL_AUDIT_CONNECTION_CLASSMASK }  /* class mask           */ }; In this particular case, the release_thd function has not been defined as it is not required. The important method for auditing is the notify function which is activated when an event occurs on the system. The notify function is designed to activate on an event and the implementation will determine how it is handled. For the audit_syslog plugin, the use of the syslog feature sends all events to the syslog for recording. The class mask allows us to determine what type of events are being seen by the notify function. There are currently two major types of event: 1. General Events: This includes general logging, errors, status and result type events. This is the main one for tracking the queries and operations on the database. 2. Connection Events: This group is based around user logins. It monitors connections and disconnections, but also if somebody changes user while connected. With most audit plugins, the principle behind the plugin is to track changes to the system over time and counters can be an important part of this process. The next step is to define and initialise the counters that are used to track the events in the service. There are 3 counters defined in total for our plugin - the # of general events, the # of connection events and the total number of events.  static volatile int total_number_of_calls; /* Count MYSQL_AUDIT_GENERAL_CLASS event instances */ static volatile int number_of_calls_general; /* Count MYSQL_AUDIT_CONNECTION_CLASS event instances */ static volatile int number_of_calls_connection; The init and deinit functions for the plugin are there to be called when the plugin is activated and when it is terminated. These offer the best option to initialise the counters for our plugin: /*  Initialize the plugin at server start or plugin installation. */ static int audit_syslog_init(void *arg __attribute__((unused))) {     openlog("mysql_audit:",LOG_PID|LOG_PERROR|LOG_CONS,LOG_USER);     total_number_of_calls= 0;     number_of_calls_general= 0;     number_of_calls_connection= 0;     return(0); } The init function does a call to openlog to initialise the syslog functionality. The parameters are the service to log under ("mysql_audit" in this case), the syslog flags and the facility for the logging. Then each of the counters are initialised to zero and a success is returned. If the init function is not defined, it will return success by default. /*  Terminate the plugin at server shutdown or plugin deinstallation. */ static int audit_syslog_deinit(void *arg __attribute__((unused))) {     closelog();     return(0); } The deinit function will simply close our syslog connection and return success. Note that the syslog functionality is part of the glibc libraries and does not require any external factors.  The function names are what we define in the general plugin structure, so these have to match otherwise there will be errors. The next step is to implement the event notifier function that was defined in the type specific descriptor (audit_syslog_descriptor) which is audit_syslog_notify. /* Event notifier function */ static void audit_syslog_notify(MYSQL_THD thd __attribute__((unused)), unsigned int event_class, const void *event) { total_number_of_calls++; if (event_class == MYSQL_AUDIT_GENERAL_CLASS) { const struct mysql_event_general *event_general= (const struct mysql_event_general *) event; number_of_calls_general++; syslog(audit_loglevel,"%lu: User: %s Command: %s Query: %s\n", event_general->general_thread_id, event_general->general_user, event_general->general_command, event_general->general_query ); } else if (event_class == MYSQL_AUDIT_CONNECTION_CLASS) { const struct mysql_event_connection *event_connection= (const struct mysql_event_connection *) event; number_of_calls_connection++; syslog(audit_loglevel,"%lu: User: %s@%s[%s] Event: %d Status: %d\n", event_connection->thread_id, event_connection->user, event_connection->host, event_connection->ip, event_connection->event_subclass, event_connection->status ); } }   In the case of an event, the notifier function is called. The first step is to increment the total number of events that have occurred in our database.The event argument is then cast into the appropriate event structure depending on the class type, of general event or connection event. The event type counters are incremented and details are sent via the syslog() function out to the system log. There are going to be different line formats and information returned since the general events have different data compared to the connection events, even though some of the details overlap, for example, user, thread id, host etc. On compiling the code now, there should be no errors and the resulting audit_syslog.so can be loaded into the server and ready to use. Log into the server and type: mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN audit_syslog SONAME 'audit_syslog.so'; This will install the plugin and will start updating the syslog immediately. Note that the audit plugin attaches to the immediate thread and cannot be uninstalled while that thread is active. This means that you cannot run the UNISTALL command until you log into a different connection (thread) on the server. Once the plugin is loaded, the system log will show output such as the following: Oct  8 15:33:21 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost []  Command: (null)  Query: INSTALL PLUGIN audit_syslog SONAME 'audit_syslog.so' Oct  8 15:33:21 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost []  Command: Query  Query: INSTALL PLUGIN audit_syslog SONAME 'audit_syslog.so' Oct  8 15:33:40 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost []  Command: (null)  Query: show tables Oct  8 15:33:40 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost []  Command: Query  Query: show tables Oct  8 15:33:43 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost []  Command: (null)  Query: select * from t1 Oct  8 15:33:43 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost []  Command: Query  Query: select * from t1 It appears that two of each event is being shown, but in actuality, these are two separate event types - the result event and the status event. This could be refined further by changing the audit_syslog_notify function to handle the different event sub-types in a different manner.  So far, it seems that the logging is working with events showing up in the syslog output. The issue now is that the counters created earlier to track the number of events by type are not accessible when the plugin is being run. Instead there needs to be a way to expose the plugin specific information to the service and vice versa. This could be done via the information_schema plugin api, but for something as simple as counters, the obvious choice is the system status variables. This is done using the standard structure and the declaration: /*  Plugin status variables for SHOW STATUS */ static struct st_mysql_show_var audit_syslog_status[]= {   { "Audit_syslog_total_calls",     (char *) &total_number_of_calls,     SHOW_INT },   { "Audit_syslog_general_events",     (char *) &number_of_calls_general,     SHOW_INT },   { "Audit_syslog_connection_events",     (char *) &number_of_calls_connection,     SHOW_INT },   { 0, 0, SHOW_INT } };   The structure is simply the name that will be displaying in the mysql service, the address of the associated variables, and the data type being used for the counter. It is finished with a blank structure to show that there are no more variables. Remember that status variables may have the same name for variables from other plugin, so it is considered appropriate to add the plugin name at the start of the status variable name to avoid confusion. Looking at the status variables in the mysql client shows something like the following: mysql> show global status like "audit%"; +--------------------------------+-------+ | Variable_name                  | Value | +--------------------------------+-------+ | Audit_syslog_connection_events | 1     | | Audit_syslog_general_events    | 2     | | Audit_syslog_total_calls       | 3     | +--------------------------------+-------+ 3 rows in set (0.00 sec) The final connectivity piece for the plugin is to allow the interactive change of the logging level between the plugin and the system. This requires the ability to send changes via the mysql service through to the plugin. This is done using the system variables interface and defining a single variable to keep track of the active logging level for the facility. /* Plugin system variables for SHOW VARIABLES */ static MYSQL_SYSVAR_STR(loglevel, audit_loglevel,                         PLUGIN_VAR_RQCMDARG,                         "User can specify the log level for auditing",                         audit_loglevel_check, audit_loglevel_update, "LOG_NOTICE"); static struct st_mysql_sys_var* audit_syslog_sysvars[] = {     MYSQL_SYSVAR(loglevel),     NULL }; So now the system variable 'loglevel' is defined for the plugin and associated to the global variable 'audit_loglevel'. The check or validation function is defined to make sure that no garbage values are attempted in the update of the variable. The update function is used to save the new value to the variable. Note that the audit_syslog_sysvars structure is defined in the general plugin descriptor to associate the link between the plugin and the system and how much they interact. Next comes the implementation of the validation function and the update function for the system variable. It is worth noting that if you have a simple numeric such as integers for the variable types, the validate function is often not required as MySQL will handle the automatic check and validation of simple types. /* longest valid value */ #define MAX_LOGLEVEL_SIZE 100 /* hold the valid values */ static const char *possible_modes[]= { "LOG_ERROR", "LOG_WARNING", "LOG_NOTICE", NULL };  static int audit_loglevel_check(     THD*                        thd,    /*!< in: thread handle */     struct st_mysql_sys_var*    var,    /*!< in: pointer to system                                         variable */     void*                       save,   /*!< out: immediate result                                         for update function */     struct st_mysql_value*      value)  /*!< in: incoming string */ {     char buff[MAX_LOGLEVEL_SIZE];     const char *str;     const char **found;     int length;     length= sizeof(buff);     if (!(str= value->val_str(value, buff, &length)))         return 1;     /*         We need to return a pointer to a locally allocated value in "save".         Here we pick to search for the supplied value in an global array of         constant strings and return a pointer to one of them.         The other possiblity is to use the thd_alloc() function to allocate         a thread local buffer instead of the global constants.     */     for (found= possible_modes; *found; found++)     {         if (!strcmp(*found, str))         {             *(const char**)save= *found;             return 0;         }     }     return 1; } The validation function is simply to take the value being passed in via the SET GLOBAL VARIABLE command and check if it is one of the pre-defined values allowed  in our possible_values array. If it is found to be valid, then the value is assigned to the save variable ready for passing through to the update function. static void audit_loglevel_update(     THD*                        thd,        /*!< in: thread handle */     struct st_mysql_sys_var*    var,        /*!< in: system variable                                             being altered */     void*                       var_ptr,    /*!< out: pointer to                                             dynamic variable */     const void*                 save)       /*!< in: pointer to                                             temporary storage */ {     /* assign the new value so that the server can read it */     *(char **) var_ptr= *(char **) save;     /* assign the new value to the internal variable */     audit_loglevel= *(char **) save; } Since all the validation has been done already, the update function is quite simple for this plugin. The first part is to update the system variable pointer so that the server can read the value. The second part is to update our own global plugin variable for tracking the value. Notice that the save variable is passed in as a void type to allow handling of various data types, so it must be cast to the appropriate data type when assigning it to the variables. Looking at how the latest changes affect the usage of the plugin and the interaction within the server shows: mysql> show global variables like "audit%"; +-----------------------+------------+ | Variable_name         | Value      | +-----------------------+------------+ | audit_syslog_loglevel | LOG_NOTICE | +-----------------------+------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) mysql> set global audit_syslog_loglevel="LOG_ERROR"; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec) mysql> show global status like "audit%"; +--------------------------------+-------+ | Variable_name                  | Value | +--------------------------------+-------+ | Audit_syslog_connection_events | 1     | | Audit_syslog_general_events    | 11    | | Audit_syslog_total_calls       | 12    | +--------------------------------+-------+ 3 rows in set (0.00 sec) mysql> show global variables like "audit%"; +-----------------------+-----------+ | Variable_name         | Value     | +-----------------------+-----------+ | audit_syslog_loglevel | LOG_ERROR | +-----------------------+-----------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)   So now we have a plugin that will audit the events on the system and log the details to the system log. It allows for interaction to see the number of different events within the server details and provides a mechanism to change the logging level interactively via the standard system methods of the SET command. A more complex auditing plugin may have more detailed code, but each of the above areas is what will be involved and simply expanded on to add more functionality. With the above skeleton code, it is now possible to create your own audit plugins to implement your own auditing requirements. If, however, you are not of the coding persuasion, then you could always consider the option of the MySQL Enterprise Audit plugin that is available to purchase.

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  • T-SQL Improvements And Data Types in ms sql 2008

    - by Aamir Hasan
     Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is a new version released in the first half of 2008 introducing new properties and capabilities to SQL Server product family. All these new and enhanced capabilities can be defined as the classic words like secure, reliable, scalable and manageable. SQL Server 2008 is secure. It is reliable. SQL2008 is scalable and is more manageable when compared to previous releases. Now we will have a look at the features that are making MS SQL Server 2008 more secure, more reliable, more scalable, etc. in details.Microsoft SQL Server 2008 provides T-SQL enhancements that improve performance and reliability. Itzik discusses composable DML, the ability to declare and initialize variables in the same statement, compound assignment operators, and more reliable object dependency information. Table-Valued ParametersInserts into structures with 1-N cardinality problematicOne order -> N order line items"N" is variable and can be largeDon't want to force a new order for every 20 line itemsOne database round-trip / line item slows things downNo ARRAY data type in SQL ServerXML composition/decomposition used as an alternativeTable-valued parameters solve this problemTable-Valued ParametersSQL Server has table variablesDECLARE @t TABLE (id int);SQL Server 2008 adds strongly typed table variablesCREATE TYPE mytab AS TABLE (id int);DECLARE @t mytab;Parameters must use strongly typed table variables Table Variables are Input OnlyDeclare and initialize TABLE variable  DECLARE @t mytab;  INSERT @t VALUES (1), (2), (3);  EXEC myproc @t;Procedure must declare variable READONLY  CREATE PROCEDURE usetable (    @t mytab READONLY ...)  AS    INSERT INTO lineitems SELECT * FROM @t;    UPDATE @t SET... -- no!T-SQL Syntax EnhancementsSingle statement declare and initialize  DECLARE @iint = 4;Compound Assignment Operators  SET @i += 1;Row constructors  DECLARE @t TABLE (id int, name varchar(20));  INSERT INTO @t VALUES    (1, 'Fred'), (2, 'Jim'), (3, 'Sue');Grouping SetsGrouping Sets allow multiple GROUP BY clauses in a single SQL statementMultiple, arbitrary, sets of subtotalsSingle read pass for performanceNested subtotals provide ever better performanceGrouping Sets are an ANSI-standardCOMPUTE BY is deprecatedGROUPING SETS, ROLLUP, CUBESQL Server 2008 - ANSI-syntax ROLLUP and CUBEPre-2008 non-ANSI syntax is deprecatedWITH ROLLUP produces n+1 different groupings of datawhere n is the number of columns in GROUP BYWITH CUBE produces 2^n different groupingswhere n is the number of columns in GROUP BYGROUPING SETS provide a "halfway measure"Just the number of different groupings you needGrouping Sets are visible in query planGROUPING_ID and GROUPINGGrouping Sets can produce non-homogeneous setsGrouping set includes NULL values for group membersNeed to distinguish by grouping and NULL valuesGROUPING (column expression) returns 0 or 1Is this a group based on column expr. or NULL value?GROUPING_ID (a,b,c) is a bitmaskGROUPING_ID bits are set based on column expressions a, b, and cMERGE StatementMultiple set operations in a single SQL statementUses multiple sets as inputMERGE target USING source ON ...Operations can be INSERT, UPDATE, DELETEOperations based onWHEN MATCHEDWHEN NOT MATCHED [BY TARGET] WHEN NOT MATCHED [BY SOURCE]More on MERGEMERGE statement can reference a $action columnUsed when MERGE used with OUTPUT clauseMultiple WHEN clauses possible For MATCHED and NOT MATCHED BY SOURCEOnly one WHEN clause for NOT MATCHED BY TARGETMERGE can be used with any table sourceA MERGE statement causes triggers to be fired onceRows affected includes total rows affected by all clausesMERGE PerformanceMERGE statement is transactionalNo explicit transaction requiredOne Pass Through TablesAt most a full outer joinMatching rows = when matchedLeft-outer join rows = when not matched by targetRight-outer join rows = when not matched by sourceMERGE and DeterminismUPDATE using a JOIN is non-deterministicIf more than one row in source matches ON clause, either/any row can be used for the UPDATEMERGE is deterministicIf more than one row in source matches ON clause, its an errorKeeping Track of DependenciesNew dependency views replace sp_dependsViews are kept in sync as changes occursys.dm_sql_referenced_entitiesLists all named entities that an object referencesExample: which objects does this stored procedure use?sys.dm_sql_referencing_entities 

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  • Logging connection strings

    If you some of the dynamic features of SSIS such as package configurations or property expressions then sometimes trying to work out were your connections are pointing can be a bit confusing. You will work out in the end but it can be useful to explicitly log this information so that when things go wrong you can just review the logs. You may wish to develop this idea further and encapsulate such logging into a custom task, but for now lets keep it simple and use the Script Task. The Script Task code below will raise an Information event showing the name and connection string for a connection. Imports System Imports Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime Public Class ScriptMain Public Sub Main() Dim fireAgain As Boolean ' Get the connection string, we need to know the name of the connection Dim connectionName As String = "My OLE-DB Connection" Dim connectionString As String = Dts.Connections(connectionName).ConnectionString ' Format the message and log it via an information event Dim message As String = String.Format("Connection ""{0}"" has a connection string of ""{1}"".", _ connectionName, connectionString) Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Information", message, Nothing, 0, fireAgain) Dts.TaskResult = Dts.Results.Success End Sub End Class Building on that example it is probably more flexible to log all connections in a package as shown in the next example. Imports System Imports Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime Public Class ScriptMain Public Sub Main() Dim fireAgain As Boolean ' Loop through all connections in the package For Each connection As ConnectionManager In Dts.Connections ' Get the connection string and log it via an information event Dim message As String = String.Format("Connection ""{0}"" has a connection string of ""{1}"".", _ connection.Name, connection.ConnectionString) Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Information", message, Nothing, 0, fireAgain) Next Dts.TaskResult = Dts.Results.Success End Sub End Class By using the Information event it makes it readily available in the designer, for example the Visual Studio Output window (Ctrl+Alt+O) or the package designer Execution Results tab, and also allows you to readily control the logging by choosing which events to log in the normal way. Now before somebody starts commenting that this is a security risk, I would like to highlight good practice for building connection managers. Firstly the Password property, or any other similar sensitive property is always defined as write-only, and secondly the connection string property only uses the public properties to assemble the connection string value when requested. In other words the connection string will never contain the password. I have seen a couple of cases where this is not true, but that was just bad development by third-parties, you won’t find anything like that in the box from Microsoft.   Whilst writing this code it made me wish that there was a custom log entry that you could just turn on that did this for you, but alas connection managers do not even seem to support custom events. It did however remind me of a very useful event that is often overlooked and fits rather well alongside connection string logging, the Execute SQL Task’s custom ExecuteSQLExecutingQuery event. To quote the help reference Custom Messages for Logging - Provides information about the execution phases of the SQL statement. Log entries are written when the task acquires connection to the database, when the task starts to prepare the SQL statement, and after the execution of the SQL statement is completed. The log entry for the prepare phase includes the SQL statement that the task uses. It is the last part that is so useful, how often have you used an expression to derive a SQL statement and you want to log that to make sure the correct SQL is being returned? You need to turn it one, by default no custom log events are captured, but I’ll refer you to a walkthrough on setting up the logging for ExecuteSQLExecutingQuery by Jamie.

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  • Text Expansion Awareness for UX Designers: Points to Consider

    - by ultan o'broin
    Awareness of translated text expansion dynamics is important for enterprise applications UX designers (I am assuming all source text for translation is in English, though apps development can takes place in other natural languages too). This consideration goes beyond the standard 'character multiplication' rule and must take into account the avoidance of other layout tricks that a designer might be tempted to try. Follow these guidelines. For general text expansion, remember the simple rule that the shorter the word is in the English, the longer it will need to be in English. See the examples provided by Richard Ishida of the W3C and you'll get the idea. So, forget the 30 percent or one inch minimum expansion rule of the old Forms days. Unfortunately remembering convoluted text expansion rules, based as a percentage of the US English character count can be tough going. Try these: Up to 10 characters: 100 to 200% 11 to 20 characters: 80 to 100% 21 to 30 characters: 60 to 80% 31 to 50 characters: 40 to 60% 51 to 70 characters: 31 to 40% Over 70 characters: 30% (Source: IBM) So it might be easier to remember a rule that if your English text is less than 20 characters then allow it to double in length (200 percent), and then after that assume an increase by half the length of the text (50%). (Bear in mind that ADF can apply truncation rules on some components in English too). (If your text is stored in a database, developers must make sure the table column widths can accommodate the expansion of your text when translated based on byte size for the translated character and not numbers of characters. Use Unicode. One character does not equal one byte in the multilingual enterprise apps world.) Rely on a graceful transformation of translated text. Let all pages to resize dynamically so the text wraps and flow naturally. ADF pages supports this already. Think websites. Don't hard-code alignments. Use Start and End properties on components and not Left or Right. Don't force alignments of components on the page by using texts of a certain length as spacers. Use proper label positioning and anchoring in ADF components or other technologies. Remember that an increase in text length means an increase in vertical space too when pages are resized. So don't hard-code vertical heights for any text areas. Don't be tempted to manually create text or printed reports this way either. They cannot be translated successfully, and are very difficult to maintain in English. Use XML, HTML, RTF and so on. Check out what Oracle BI Publisher offers. Don't force wrapping by using tricks such as /n or /t characters or HTML BR tags or forced page breaks. Once the text is translated the alignment will be destroyed. The position of the breaking character or tag would need to be moved anyway, or even removed. When creating tables, then use table components. Don't use manually created tables that reply on word length to maintain column and row alignment. For example, don't use codeblock elements in HTML; use the proper table elements instead. Once translated, the alignment of manually formatted tabular data is destroyed. Finally, if there is a space restriction, then don't use made-up acronyms, abbreviations or some form of daft text speak to save space. Besides being incomprehensible in English, they may need full translations of the shortened words, even if they can be figured out. Use approved or industry standard acronyms according to the UX style rules, not as a space-saving device. Restricted Real Estate on Mobile Devices On mobile devices real estate is limited. Using shortened text is fine once it is comprehensible. Users in the mobile space prefer brevity too, as they are on the go, performing three-minute tasks, with no time to read lengthy texts. Using fragments and lightning up on unnecessary articles and getting straight to the point with imperative forms of verbs makes sense both on real estate and user experience grounds.

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