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  • Notes from a short presentation on NodeJs

    - by Aligned
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2014/05/30/notes-from-a-short-presentation-on-nodejs.aspxI volunteered myself to give a short 30 minute presentation at a work lunch and learn on NodeJs. With my limited experience I see using Node as a great tool for build process improvement, scaffolding with yeoman, and running tests with Karma. I haven’t looked into using as a full server or development stack. I guess I’m too stuck on IIS and Visual Studio :-). Here are my notes, that aren’t very well formatted, but I wanted to share it anyways. What is it? "Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices." Why should you be interested? another popular tool that can help you get the job done you can use the command prompt! can be run at build or release time to automate tasks What are some uses? https://www.npmjs.org/ - NuGet for Node packages http://bower.io/ - NuGet for UI JavaScript libraries (jQuery, Bootstrap, Angular, etc) http://yeoman.io/ "Our workflow is comprised of three tools for improving your productivity and satisfaction when building a web app: yo (the scaffolding tool), grunt (the build tool) and bower (for package management)." -> yeoman asks which components you want alternative - http://joakimbeng.eu01.aws.af.cm/slush-replacing-yeoman-with-gulp/ https://www.npmjs.org/package/generator-cg-angular - phantom js, less, // git is needed for bower http://git-scm.com/ run installer in Windows before you can use bower // select Run Git from the Windows Command Prompt in the installer // requires a reboot http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20069297/bower-git-not-in-the-path-error npm install -g git npm install -g yo npm install -g generator-cg-angular mkdir myapp cd myapp yo cg-angular npm install -g bower npm install -g grunt-cli yo bower grunt serve grunt test grunt build // there are many generators (generator-angular) is another one // I like the Nuget HotTowel-Angular from John Papa myself // needed IIS Node for Express -> prompt from WebMatrix Karma bat to startup Karma - see below image compression - https://www.npmjs.org/search?q=optimize+images, https://github.com/heldr/node-smushit - do it from the command line LESS compiling js and css combine and minification at build with Gulp for requireJS apps quick lightweight HTTP server - "Express" Build pipeline with Grunt or Gulp http://www.johnpapa.net/gulp-and-grunt-at-anglebrackets/ Gulp is the newer and improved over Grunt. Supposed to be easier to use, but Grunt is more established. https://github.com/johnpapa/ng-demos/tree/master/grunt-gulp https://github.com/assetgraph/assetgraph-builder Does a lot of the minimizing, combining, image optimization etc using Node. Looks interesting.... http://nodejs.org http://nodeschool.io/ http://sub.watchmecode.net/getting-started-with-nodejs-installing-and-writing-your-first-code/ https://stormpath.com/blog/build-a-killer-node-dot-js-client-for-your-rest-plus-json-api/ https://codio.com/ http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsJustASoftwareIssueEdgejsBringsNodeAndNETTogetherOnThreePlatforms.aspx run unit tests - Karma in msBuild karma-start.bat @echo off cd %~dp0\.. REM 604800 is to make sure we only update once every 7 days call npm install --cache-min 604800 -g grunt-cli call npm install --cache-min 604800 call npm install --cache-min 604800 -g karma-cli karma start UnitTests\karma.conf.js REM karma start UnitTests\karma.conf.js --single-run REM see karma-start.bat and karam.config.js REM jsHint comes from Nuget

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  • Educational, well-written FOSS projects to read, study or discuss

    - by Godot
    Before you say it: yes, this "question" has been asked other times. However, I could not fine many of such questions and not that easily, and those I found had similar results. What I'm trying to say that there are no comprehensive lists of well written Open Source projects, so I decided to set some requirements for the entries (one or possibly more): Idiomatic use of the language in which they are written The project should be lightweight. Not as in "a few kbs", as in "clean" and possibly following the UNIX philosophy, making an efficient use of resources and performing its duty and nothing more. No code bloat, most importantly. Projects like Firefox and GNOME wouldn't qualify, for example. Minimal reliance on external, non-standard libraries, with exceptions for some common FOSS libraries (curses, Xlib, OpenGL and possibly "usual suspects" like gtk+, webkit and Boost). Reliance on well-written libraries is welcome. No reliance on proprietary software - for obvious reasons (programs that rely on XNA, DirectX, Cocoa and similar, for example). Well-documented code is welcome. Include link to web interfaces to their repositories if possible. Here are some sample projects that often pop up in these threads: Operating Systems Plan 9 from Bell Labs: More or less, the official "sequel" to UNIX. Written in C by the same people who invented C! NetBSD: The most portable BSD implementation, written in C and also a good example of portable and organized code. Network and Databases Sqlite: Extremely lightweight and extremely efficient, one of the best pieces of C software I've seen. Count the lines yourself! Lighttpd: A small but pretty reliable web server written in C. Programming languages and VMs Lua: extremely lightweight multi-paradigm programming language. Written in C. Tiny C Compiler: Really tiny C compiler. Not really comparable to GCC or Clang but does its job. PyPy: A Python implementation written in Python. Pharo: OK, I admit it, I'm not really a Smalltalk expert but Pharo is a fork of Squeak and looked rather interesting. Stackless Python - An implementation of Python that doesn't rely on the C call stack - written in C (with some parts in Python) Games and 3D: Angband: One of the most accessible roguelike codebases around here, written in C. Ogre3D: Cross-platform 3D engine. Gets bloated if you don't skip the platform-specific implementation code, otherwise is a pretty solid example of good C++ OO. Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection: Title says it all. Other - dwm: Lightweight window manager. Written in C. Emulation and Reverse Engineering - Bochs: x86 emulator, written in C++ and tiny enough. - MAME: If you want to see C at one of its lowest levels, MAME is for you. May not be as clean as the other projects but it can teach you A LOT. Before you ask: I didn't mention Linux because it has become quite bloated in the last few years, Linus has also confirmed it. Nonetheless, it'd be a great educational read the same, even if for other reasons. Same for GCC. Feel free to edit or wikify my post. I hope you won't lock my question, I'm only trying to organize a little community effort for the good of all those people who want to enhance their coding skills.

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  • Why I Love the Social Management Platform I Use

    - by Mike Stiles
    Not long ago, I asked the product heads for the various components of the Oracle Social Cloud’s SRM to say what they thought was coolest about their component. And while they did a fine job, it was recently pointed out to me that no one around here uses the platform in a real-world setting more than I do, as I not only blog and podcast my brains out, I also run Oracle Social’s own social properties. Of course I’m pro-Oracle Social’s product. Duh. But if you can get around immediately writing this off as a puff piece, there are real reasons beyond my employment that the Oracle SRM works for me as a community manager. If it didn’t, I could have simply written about something else, like how people love smartphones or something genius like that. Post Grid I like seeing what I want to see. I’m difficult that way. Post grid lets me see all posts for all channels, with custom columns showing me how posts are doing. I can filter the grid by social channel, published, scheduled, draft, suggested, etc. Then there’s a pullout side panel that shows me post details, including engagement analytics. From the pullout, I can preview the post, do a quick edit, a full edit, or (my favorite) copy a post so I can edit it and schedule it for other times so I don’t have to repeat from scratch. I’m not lazy, just time conscious. The Post Creation Environment Given our post volume, I need this to be as easy as it can be. I can highlight which streams I want the post to go out on, edit for the individual streams, maintain a media library that’s easy to upload to and attach from, tag posts, insert links that auto-shorten to an orac.le shortlink, schedule with a nice calendar visual, geo-target, drop photos inline into Twitter, and review each post. Watching My Channels The Engage component of the Oracle SRM brings in and drops into a grid the activity that’s happening on all my channels. I keep this open round-the-clock. Again, I get to see only what I want; social network, stream, unread messages, engagement by how I labeled them, and date range. I can bring up a post with a click, reply, label it, retweet it, assign it, delete it, archive it, etc. So don’t bother trying to be a troll on my channels. Analytics Social publishing and engaging 24/7 would be pretty unrewarding if I couldn’t see how our audience was responding. Frankly, I get more analytics than I know what to do with (I’m a content creator, not a data analyst). But I do know what numbers I care about, and they’re available by channel, date range, and campaigns. I’m seeing fan count, sources and demographics. I’m seeing engagement, what kinds of posts are getting engagement, and top engagers. I’m seeing my reach, both organic and paid. I’m seeing how individual posts performed in terms of engagement and virality, and posting time/date insight. Have I covered all the value propositions? I’ve covered pathetically few of them. It would be impossible in blog length to give shout-outs to the vast number of features and functionalities. From organizing teams and managing permissions with Workflow to the powerful ability to monitor topics (and your competition) across the web in Listen, it’s a major, and increasingly necessary, weapon in your social marketing arsenal. The life of a Community Manager is not for everybody. So if the Oracle SRM can actually make a Community Manager’s life easier, what’s not to love? I invite you to take a look at and participate in our Oracle Social Cloud social channels! Facebook Twitter YouTube Google Plus LinkedIn Daily Podcast on iHeartRadio @mikestiles @oraclesocial Photo: freeimages.com

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  • Simple MVVM Walkthrough – Refactored

    - by Sean Feldman
    JR has put together a good introduction post into MVVM pattern. I love kick start examples that serve the purpose well. And even more than that I love examples that also can pass the real world projects check. So I took the sample code and refactored it slightly for a few aspects that a lot of developers might raise a brow. Michael has mentioned model (entity) visibility from view. I agree on that. A few other items that don’t settle are using property names as string (magical strings) and Saver class internal casting of a parameter (custom code for each Saver command). Fixing a property names usage is a straight forward exercise – leverage expressions. Something simple like this would do the initial job: class PropertyOf<T> { public static string Resolve(Expression<Func<T, object>> expression) { var member = expression.Body as MemberExpression; return member.Member.Name; } } With this, refactoring of properties names becomes an easy task, with confidence that an old property name string will not get left behind. An updated Invoice would look like this: public class Invoice : INotifyPropertyChanged { private int id; private string receiver; public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; private void OnPropertyChanged(string propertyName) { if (PropertyChanged != null) { PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } public int Id { get { return id; } set { if (id != value) { id = value; OnPropertyChanged(PropertyOf<Invoice>.Resolve(x => x.Id)); } } } public string Receiver { get { return receiver; } set { receiver = value; OnPropertyChanged(PropertyOf<Invoice>.Resolve(x => x.Receiver)); } } } For the saver, I decided to change it a little so now it becomes a “view-model agnostic” command, one that can be used for multiple commands/view-models. Updated Saver code now accepts an action at construction time and executes that action. No more black magic internal class Command : ICommand { private readonly Action executeAction; public Command(Action executeAction) { this.executeAction = executeAction; } public bool CanExecute(object parameter) { return true; } public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged; public void Execute(object parameter) { // no more black magic executeAction(); } } Change in InvoiceViewModel is instantiation of Saver command and execution action for the specific command. public ICommand SaveCommand { get { if (saveCommand == null) saveCommand = new Command(ExecuteAction); return saveCommand; } set { saveCommand = value; } } private void ExecuteAction() { DisplayMessage = string.Format("Thanks for creating invoice: {0} {1}", Invoice.Id, Invoice.Receiver); } This way internal knowledge of InvoiceViewModel remains in InvoiceViewModel and Command (ex-Saver) is view-model agnostic. Now the sample is not only a good introduction, but also has some practicality in it. My 5 cents on the subject. Sample code MvvmSimple2.zip

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  • questions about dual-boot install Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7 on same hard drive

    - by Tim
    I'd like to dual-boot install Ubuntu 10.04 on the same hard drive as Windows 7 which has already been installed. As to sources on the internet: I found a website iinet about dual-boot installation of Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7 on the same hard drive, which I think more specific than the one on Ubuntu Community without specific version of the OSes. Since I am installing Ubuntu 10.04 instead of 10.10, my question is whether their installers are same or almost same and if I can follow iinet for my dual-boot installation? Or are there better websites for information about dual-boot installtion of Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7? As to shrinking Windows partitions to make free space for Ubuntu partitions: iinet uses the partition software in Ubuntu's installer to shrink the Windows partition. But I saw in many website that the partition software in Ubuntu's installer cannot guarantee shrinking Windows 7 partitions successfully, so they recommended in general to shrink Windows partitions under Windows itself using its softwares. For example, in Ubuntu Community, it says: Some people think that the Windows partition must be resized only from within Windows Vista and Windows 7 using the shrink/resize option. ... If you use GParted Partition Editor in the Ubuntu Live CD be careful. So I was wondering which way to go in my situation? As to partition for bootloader files: In iinet, I don't see there is a partition created and dedicated to boot files (i.e. Grub files). However, I saw in many websites strongly suggesting using a boot partition for Grub files, especially for the purpose of separation and protection from installed OS files. I was wondering which way I should choose and why? As to installing bootloader Grub, in iinet, I see that to install Grub it only needs to specify the hard drive device for bootloader installation. However, in ubuntuguide(for more than 2 OSes and Ubuntu 9.04), some commands are needed to run in order to put Grub configuration files in MBR, and OS partition, for the chain-load process (where to find the files for the next stage). In Ubuntu Community, there are some related sentences which I don't quite understand how to do in practice: the only thing in your computer outside of Ubuntu that needs to be changed is a small code in the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the first hard disk. The MBR code is changed to point to the boot loader in Ubuntu. If you have a problem with changing the MBR code, you might prefer to just install the code for pointing to GRUB to the first sector of your Ubuntu partition instead. If you do that during the Ubuntu installation process, then Ubuntu won't boot until you configure some other boot manager to point to Ubuntu's boot sector. Windows Vista no longer utilizes boot.ini, ntdetect.com, and ntldr when booting. Instead, Vista stores all data for its new boot manager in a boot folder. Windows Vista ships with an command line utility called bcdedit.exe, which requires administrator credentials to use. You may want to read http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=112156 about it. Using a command line utility always has its learning curve, so a more productive and better job can be done with a free utility called EasyBCD, developed and mastered in during the times of Vista Beta already. EasyBCD is user friendly and many Vista users highly recommend EasyBCD. In what is quoted above, I was wondering how exactly I should change the MBR code to point to the bootloader in Ubuntu? if I fail to change MBR code, are the other suggested boot managers being bcdedit.exe and EasyBCD in Windows? With the three sources above, which one shall I follow? Thanks and regards

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  • Big Data – Interacting with Hadoop – What is Sqoop? – What is Zookeeper? – Day 17 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the Pig and Pig Latin in Big Data Story. In this article we will understand what is Sqoop and Zookeeper in Big Data Story. There are two most important components one should learn when learning about interacting with Hadoop – Sqoop and Zookper. What is Sqoop? Most of the business stores their data in RDBMS as well as other data warehouse solutions. They need a way to move data to the Hadoop system to do various processing and return it back to RDBMS from Hadoop system. The data movement can happen in real time or at various intervals in bulk. We need a tool which can help us move this data from SQL to Hadoop and from Hadoop to SQL. Sqoop (SQL to Hadoop) is such a tool which extract data from non-Hadoop data sources and transform them into the format which Hadoop can use it and later it loads them into HDFS. Essentially it is ETL tool where it Extracts, Transform and Load from SQL to Hadoop. The best part is that it also does extract data from Hadoop and loads them to Non-SQL (or RDBMS) data stores. Essentially, Sqoop is a command line tool which does SQL to Hadoop and Hadoop to SQL. It is a command line interpreter. It creates MapReduce job behinds the scene to import data from an external database to HDFS. It is very effective and easy to learn tool for nonprogrammers. What is Zookeeper? ZooKeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. In other words Zookeeper is a replicated synchronization service with eventual consistency. In simpler words – in Hadoop cluster there are many different nodes and one node is master. Let us assume that master node fails due to any reason. In this case, the role of the master node has to be transferred to a different node. The main role of the master node is managing the writers as that task requires persistence in order of writing. In this kind of scenario Zookeeper will assign new master node and make sure that Hadoop cluster performs without any glitch. Zookeeper is the Hadoop’s method of coordinating all the elements of these distributed systems. Here are few of the tasks which Zookeepr is responsible for. Zookeeper manages the entire workflow of starting and stopping various nodes in the Hadoop’s cluster. In Hadoop cluster when any processes need certain configuration to complete the task. Zookeeper makes sure that certain node gets necessary configuration consistently. In case of the master node fails, Zookeepr can assign new master node and make sure cluster works as expected. There many other tasks Zookeeper performance when it is about Hadoop cluster and communication. Basically without the help of Zookeeper it is not possible to design any new fault tolerant distributed application. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about very important components of the Big Data Ecosystem – Big Data Analytics. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • How to ace Skype Interviews

    - by FelixWehmeyer
    Many companies these days opt to include a Skype interview in the recruitment process, as it comes close to a face-to-face interview without the time and costs involved for both the company and the candidate. In some cases during the recruitment process at Oracle you also might be asked to conduct a Skype interview. To help you get started with this, we researched some websites to give you several tips and tricks. What most of the bloggers say about this topic is collected in this article to help you prepare. It is all about Technology The bit that can make a Skype interview more complicated than a face-to-face or phone interview is the fact you are using additional technology. Always check the video and audio capabilities of your computer to make sure they work properly. Be prepared for connections to be limited during the interview. Using a webcam can also be confusing, if you do not have a lot of experience using it. Make sure you look at the camera and not the monitor to avoid the impression you are looking away. Practice If you do not feel comfortable using the camera, do a mock interview with a friend or family member before you have the actual interview. Be aware that facial impressions or reactions come across differently on a monitor, so make sure to practice how you  come across during the interview. Good lighting in the room also helps you make you look the best for the interviewer. You and your room Dress code, as in any face-to-face interview,is important to think about. Dress the same way as you would for face-to-face interviews and avoid patterns or informal clothing. Another tip,is to be aware of your surroundings. Make sure the room you use looks good on camera, making sure it is neat and tidy, also think about how the walls look behind you. Also make sure you do not get distracted during the interview by anyone or anything, as this will directly have an impact on your interview and your ability to focus and concentrate. What is in a name What goes for any account that you share during the recruitment process, either your email address or Skype name, is to make sure it comes across as professional. Try to avoid using nicknames or strange words in your accounts, stick to using a first name – last name or an abbreviation of the same. If you would like to read more about this topic, have a look at the links below which we used as inspiration for this blog article. 7 Deadly Skype Interview Sins is fun to read and to gives you some good advice to keep in mind. ·         http://www.inc.com/guides/201103/4-tips-for-conducting-a-job-interview-using-skype.html ·         http://blog.simplyhired.com/2012/05/5-tips-to-a-great-skype-interview.html ·         http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/07/11/skype.interview.tips.cb/index.html http://www.ehow.com/how_5648281_prepare-skype-interview.html

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  • Valuing "Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation"

    - by tom.spitz
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} I subscribe to the tenets put forth in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development - http://agilemanifesto.org. As Oracle's chief methodologist, that might seem a self-deprecating attitude. After all, the agile manifesto tells us that we should value "individuals and interactions" over "processes and tools." My job includes process development. I also subscribe to ideas put forth in a number of subsequent works including Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed (Boehm/Turner, Addison-Wesley) and Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (Highsmith, Addison-Wesley). Both of these books talk about finding the right balance between "agility and discipline" or between a "predictive and adaptive" project approach. So there still seems to be a place for us in creating the Oracle Unified Method (OUM) to become the "single method framework that supports the successful implementation of every Oracle product." After all, the real idea is to apply just enough ceremony and produce just enough documentation to suit the needs of the particular project that supports an enterprise in moving toward its desired future state. The thing I've been struggling with - and the thing I'd like to hear from you about right now - is the prevalence of an ongoing obsession with "documents." OUM provides a comprehensive set of guidance for an iterative and incremental approach to engineering and implementing software systems. Our intent is first to support the information technology system implementation and, as necessary, support the creation of documentation. OUM, therefore, includes a supporting set of document templates. Our guidance is to employ those templates, sparingly, as needed; not create piles of documentation that you're not gonna (sic) need. In other words, don't serve the method, make the method serve you. Yet, there seems to be a "gimme" mentality in some circles that if you give me a sample document - or better yet - a repository of samples - then I will be able to do anything cheaply and quickly. The notion is certainly appealing AND reuse can save time. Plus, documents are a lowest common denominator way of packaging reusable stuff. However, without sustained investment and management I've seen "reuse repositories" turn quickly into garbage heaps. So, I remain a skeptic. I agree that providing document examples that promote consistency is helpful. However, there may be too much emphasis on the documents themselves and not enough on creating a system that meets the evolving needs of the business. How can we shift the emphasis toward working software and away from our dependency on documents - especially on large, complex implementation projects - while still supporting the need for documentation? I'd like to hear your thoughts.

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  • SQL Saturday 27 (Portland, Oregon)

    - by BuckWoody
    I’m sitting in the Seattle airport, waiting for my flight to Silicon Valley California for the SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event. By some quirk of nature, they are asking me to Emcee the event – but that’s another post entirely.   I’m reflecting on the SQL Saturday 27 event that was just held in Portland, Oregon this last Saturday. These are not Microsoft-sponsored events – it’s truly the community at work. Think of a big user-group meeting – I mean REALLY big – held in a central location, like at a college (as ours was) or some larger, inexpensive venue like that. Everyone there is volunteering – it’s my own money and time to drive several hours to a hotel for the night, feed myself and present. It’s their own time and money for the folks that organize the event – unless a vendor or two steps in to help. It’s their own time and money for the attendees to drive a long way, spend the night and their Saturday to listen to the speakers. Why do all this?   Because everybody benefits. Every speaker learns something new, meets new people, and reaches a new audience. Every volunteer does the same. And the attendees? Well, it’s pretty obvious what they get. A 7Am to 10PM extravaganza of knowledge from every corner of the product. In fact, this year the Portland group hooked up with the CodeCamp folks and held a combined event. We had over 850 people, and I had everyone from data professionals to developers in my sessions.   So I’ll take this opportunity to do two things: to say “thank you” to all of the folks who attended, from those who spoke to those who worked and those who came to listen, and to challenge you to attend the next SQL Saturday anywhere near you. You can find the list here: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/. Don’t see anything in your area? Start one! The PASS folks have a package that will show you how. Sure, it’s a big job, but the key is to get as many people helping you as possible. Even if you have only a few dozen folks show up the first time, no worries. The first events I presented at had about 20 in the room. But not this week.   See you at the Launch Event if you’re near the San Francisco area tomorrow, and see you at the Redmond SQL Saturday and TechEd if not.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • SQL Authority News – FalafelCON 2014: 2 days with the Best Developers in the World

    - by Pinal Dave
    I love presenting at various forums on various technologies. I am extremely excited that I got invited to speak at Falafel Conference 2014 in San Francisco. I will present two technology sessions on SQL Server. If you are into web development or if you just want to attend a conference with the best of the industry speakers, this may be the right conference for you. What set apart this conference from other conference is technology presented as well as speakers. Usually one has to attend very expensive and high scale event when they have to hear good speakers. At this conference, you will find quite a many industry legends are available to present on the bleeding edge technology. Here are few of the reasons why I believe you should attend this conference: Choose from four tracks covering Web, Mobile development and testing, Sitefinity, and Automated Testing, or attend sessions from all four! Learn from the best developers and testers in the business in an intimate setting. Surround yourself with your peers and the opportunity to network Learn about the latest platforms and technologies including Kendo UI, AngularJS, ASP.NET MVC, WebAPI, and more! Here are the details for the sessions which I am going to present at Falafel Conference. Secrets of SQL Server: Database Worst Practices Abstract: Chances are you have heard, or even uttered, this expression. This demo-oriented session will show many examples where database professionals were dumbfounded by their own mistakes, and could even bring back memories of your own early DBA days. The goal of this session is to expose the small details that can be dangerous to the production environment and SQL Server as a whole, as well as talk about worst practices and how to avoid them. Shedding light on some of these perils and the tricks to avoid them may even save your current job. After attending this session, Developers will only need 60 seconds to improve performance of their database server in their SharePoint implementation. We will have a quiz during the session to keep the conversation alive. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Additionally, all attendees of the session will have access to learning material presented in the session. The Unsung Hero Abstract: Slow Running Queries are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame the SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, however the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how Indexes has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Server, and Indexing tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Register Now! I have learned from the Falafel Team that they are running out of tickets and soon they will close the registration.  For next 10 days the price for the registration is only USD 149. Trust me, you can’t get such a world class training and networking opportunity at such a low price. Click to Register Here! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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  • Good DBAs Do Baselines

    - by Louis Davidson
    One morning, you wake up and feel funny. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something isn’t quite right. What now? Unless you happen to be a hypochondriac, you likely drag yourself out of bed, get on with the day and gather more “evidence”. You check your symptoms over the next few days; do you feel the same, better, worse? If better, then great, it was some temporal issue, perhaps caused by an allergic reaction to some suspiciously spicy chicken. If the same or worse then you go to the doctor for some health advice, but armed with some data to share, and having ruled out certain possible causes that are fixed with a bit of rest and perhaps an antacid. Whether you realize it or not, in comparing how you feel one day to the next, you have taken baseline measurements. In much the same way, a DBA uses baselines to gauge the gauge health of their database servers. Of course, while SQL Server is very willing to share data regarding its health and activities, it has almost no idea of the difference between good and bad. Over time, experienced DBAs develop “mental” baselines with which they can gauge the health of their servers almost as easily as their own body. They accumulate knowledge of the daily, natural state of each part of their database system, and so know instinctively when one of their databases “feels funny”. Equally, they know when an “issue” is just a passing tremor. They see their SQL Server with all of its four CPU cores running close 100% and don’t panic anymore. Why? It’s 5PM and every day the same thing occurs when the end-of-day reports, which are very CPU intensive, are running. Equally, they know when they need to respond in earnest when it is the first time they have heard about an issue, even if it has been happening every day. Nevertheless, no DBA can retain mental baselines for every characteristic of their systems, so we need to collect physical baselines too. In my experience, surprisingly few DBAs do this very well. Part of the problem is that SQL Server provides a lot of instrumentation. If you look, you will find an almost overwhelming amount of data regarding user activity on your SQL Server instances, and use and abuse of the available CPU, I/O and memory. It seems like a huge task even to work out which data you need to collect, let alone start collecting it on a regular basis, managing its storage over time, and performing detailed comparative analysis. However, without baselines, though, it is very difficult to pinpoint what ails a server, just by looking at a single snapshot of the data, or to spot retrospectively what caused the problem by examining aggregated data for the server, collected over many months. It isn’t as hard as you think to get started. You’ve probably already established some troubleshooting queries of the type SELECT Value FROM SomeSystemTableOrView. Capturing a set of baseline values for such a query can be as easy as changing it as follows: INSERT into BaseLine.SomeSystemTable (value, captureTime) SELECT Value, SYSDATETIME() FROM SomeSystemTableOrView; Of course, there are monitoring tools that will collect and manage this baseline data for you, automatically, and allow you to perform comparison of metrics over different periods. However, to get yourself started and to prove to yourself (or perhaps the person who writes the checks for tools) the value of baselines, stick something similar to the above query into an agent job, running every hour or so, and you are on your way with no excuses! Then, the next time you investigate a slow server, and see x open transactions, y users logged in, and z rows added per hour in the Orders table, compare to your baselines and see immediately what, if anything, has changed!

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  • Backup SQL Database Federation

    - by Herve Roggero
    One of the amazing features of Windows Azure SQL Database is the ability to create federations in order to scale your cloud databases. However until now, there were very few options available to backup federated databases. In this post I will show you how Enzo Cloud Backup can help you backup, and restore your federated database easily. You can restore federated databases in SQL Database, or even on SQL Server (as regular databases). Generally speaking, you will need to perform the following steps to backup and restore the federations of a SQL Database: Backup the federation root Backup the federation members Restore the federation root Restore the federation members These actions can be automated using: the built-in scheduler of Enzo Cloud Backup, the command-line utilities, or the .NET Cloud Backup API provided, giving you complete control on how you want to perform your backup and restore operations. Backing up federations Let’s look at the tool to backup federations. You can explore your existing federations by using the Enzo Cloud Backup application as shown below. As you can see, the federation root and the various federations available are shown in separate tabs for convenience. You would first need to backup the federation root (unless you intend to restore the federation member on a local SQL Server database and you don’t need what’s in the federation root). The steps are similar than those to backup a federation member, so let’s proceed to backing up a federation member. You can click on a specific federation member to view the database details by clicking at the tab that contains your federation member. You can see the size currently consumed and a summary of its content at the bottom of the screen. If you right-click on a specific range, you can choose to backup the federation member. This brings up a window with the details of the federation member already filled out for you, including the value of the member that is used to select the federation member. Notice that the list of Federations includes “Federation Root”, which is what you need to select to backup the federation root (you can also do that directly from the root database tab).  Once you provide at least one backup destination, you can begin the backup operation.  From this window, you can also schedule this operation as a job and perform this operation entirely in the cloud. You can also “filter” the connection, so that only the specific member value is backed up (this will backup all the global tables, and only the records for which the distribution value is the one specified). You can repeat this operation for every federation member in your federation. Restoring Federations Once backed up, you can restore your federations easily. Select the backup device using the tool, then select Restore. The following window will appear. From here you can create a new root database. You can also view the backup properties, showing you exactly which federations will be created. Under the Federations tab, you can select how the federations will be created. I chose to recreate the federations and let the tool perform all the SPLIT operations necessary to recreate the same number of federation members. Other options include to create the first federation member only, or not to create the federation members at all. Once the root database has been restored and the federation members have been created, you can restore the federation members you previously backed up. The screen below shows you how to restore a backup of a federation member into a specific federation member (the details of the federation member are provided to make it easier to identify). Conclusion This post gave you an overview on how to backup and restore federation roots and federation members. The backup operations can be setup once, then scheduled daily.

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  • Handling Configuration Changes in Windows Azure Applications

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    While finalizing StarterSTS 1.5, I had a closer look at lifetime and configuration management in Windows Azure. (this is no new information – just some bits and pieces compiled at one single place – plus a bit of reality check) When dealing with lifetime management (and especially configuration changes), there are two mechanisms in Windows Azure – a RoleEntryPoint derived class and a couple of events on the RoleEnvironment class. You can find good documentation about RoleEntryPoint here. The RoleEnvironment class features two events that deal with configuration changes – Changing and Changed. Whenever a configuration change gets pushed out by the fabric controller (either changes in the settings section or the instance count of a role) the Changing event gets fired. The event handler receives an instance of the RoleEnvironmentChangingEventArgs type. This contains a collection of type RoleEnvironmentChange. This in turn is a base class for two other classes that detail the two types of possible configuration changes I mentioned above: RoleEnvironmentConfigurationSettingsChange (configuration settings) and RoleEnvironmentTopologyChange (instance count). The two respective classes contain information about which configuration setting and which role has been changed. Furthermore the Changing event can trigger a role recycle (aka reboot) by setting EventArgs.Cancel to true. So your typical job in the Changing event handler is to figure if your application can handle these configuration changes at runtime, or if you rather want a clean restart. Prior to the SDK 1.3 VS Templates – the following code was generated to reboot if any configuration settings have changed: private void RoleEnvironmentChanging(object sender, RoleEnvironmentChangingEventArgs e) {     // If a configuration setting is changing     if (e.Changes.Any(change => change is RoleEnvironmentConfigurationSettingChange))     {         // Set e.Cancel to true to restart this role instance         e.Cancel = true;     } } This is a little drastic as a default since most applications will work just fine with changed configuration – maybe that’s the reason this code has gone away in the 1.3 SDK templates (more). The Changed event gets fired after the configuration changes have been applied. Again the changes will get passed in just like in the Changing event. But from this point on RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue() will return the new values. You can still decide to recycle if some change was so drastic that you need a restart. You can use RoleEnvironment.RequestRecycle() for that (more). As a rule of thumb: When you always use GetConfigurationSettingValue to read from configuration (and there is no bigger state involved) – you typically don’t need to recycle. In the case of StarterSTS, I had to abstract away the physical configuration system and read the actual configuration (either from web.config or the Azure service configuration) at startup. I then cache the configuration settings in memory. This means I indeed need to take action when configuration changes – so in my case I simply clear the cache, and the new config values get read on the next access to my internal configuration object. No downtime – nice! Gotcha A very natural place to hook up the RoleEnvironment lifetime events is the RoleEntryPoint derived class. But with the move to the full IIS model in 1.3 – the RoleEntryPoint methods get executed in a different AppDomain (even in a different process) – see here.. You might no be able to call into your application code to e.g. clear a cache. Keep that in mind! In this case you need to handle these events from e.g. global.asax.

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-06-29

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Backward-compatible vs. forward-compatible: a tale of two clouds | William Vambenepe "There is the Cloud that provides value by requiring as few changes as possible. And there is the Cloud that provides value by raising the abstraction and operation level," says William Vambenepe. "The backward-compatible Cloud versus the forward-compatible Cloud." Vambenepe was a panelist on the recent ArchBeat podcast Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds. Andrejus Baranovskis's Blog: ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization) Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis investigates "how you can customize a standard BPM Task Flow through MDS Seeded customization." Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Music Festival If, after a day spent in sessions at Oracle Openworld, you want nothing more than to head back to your hotel for a quiet evening spent responding to email, please ignore the rest of this message. Because every night from Sept 30 to Oct 4 the streets of San Francisco will pulsate with music from a vast array of bands representing more musical styles than a single human brain an comprehend. It's the first ever Oracle Music Festival, baby, 7:00pm to 1:00am every night. Are those emails that important...? Resource Kit: Oracle Exadata - includes demos, videos, product datasheets, and technical white papers. This free resource kit includes several customer case study videos, two 3D product demos, several product datasheets, and three technical architecture white papers. Registration is required for the who don't already have a free Oracle.com membership account. Some execs contemplate making 'Bring Your Own Device' mandatory | ZDNet "Companies and agencies are recognizing that individual employees are doing a better job of handling and managing their devices than their harried and overworked IT departments – who need to focus on bigger priorities, such as analytics and cloud," says ZDNet SOA blogger Joe McKendrick. Podcast Show Notes: Public, Private, and Hybrid Clouds All three parts of this discussion are now available. Featuring a panel of leading Oracle cloud computing experts, including Dr. James Baty, Mark T. Nelson, Ajay Srivastava, and William Vambenepe, the discussion covers an overview of the various flavors of cloud computing, the importance of standards, Why cloud computing is a paradigm shift—and why it isn't, and advice on what architects need to know to take advantage of the cloud. And for those who prefer reading to listening, a complete transcript is also available. Amazon AMIs and Oracle VM templates (Cloud Migrations) Cloud migration expert Tom Laszewski shares an objective comparison of these two resources. IOUC : Blogs : Read the latest news on the global user group community - June 2012! The June 2012 edition of "Are You a Member Yet?"—the quarterly newsletter about Oracle user group communities around the world. Webcast: Introducing Identity Management 11g R2 - July 19 Date: Thursday, July 19, 2012 Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET Please join Oracle and customer executives for the launch of Oracle Identity Management 11g R2, the breakthrough technology that dramatically expands the reach of identity management to cloud and mobile environments. Thought for the Day "The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build." — Bjarne Stroustrup Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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  • Why are you doing this? [closed]

    - by NIcholas Lawson
    I am working on a story that I am going to be querying to several magazines in my hometown about this work that is being done by the AXR group. This is a group of people who have networked online and are working on developing a higher level syntax structure than CSS and HTML currently offer. I am covering this is as a story because I see potential in this as a human interest story in cosmopolitan society. I have been asked by the group to pose this question to you and would appreciate any and all comments you would have on the following ... To AXR: So when does the internet become finished? At what point does a computer scientist say to himself ... my job here is finished ... the internet is complete? When is the internet ready to be more about the display of content than the uploading of new websites or computer tech? You are embarking on upon a sixty year project every day you work with this internet, what drives you? Why are you spending your hard earned hours working on the code to this computer? I spend thirty hours a week online because I love the writing and I know what would make the internet better ... ease of use ... i know it is difficult to program but I see some very elegant solutions online ... in this early inception phase of your programming development for this HSS prototype ... I would like to know why I do not see you programmers asking questions such as ... What would make the end user's life the easiest when using this code? I know you can solve the problem but an evolution forward would be simple, not simple to a computer scientist but simple to use for a career janitor ... if you could solve the problem of alleviating the stress at using a the computer you could get better content out of the computer ... right now the main problem is that the best content is in the hands of the people least likely to use the computer and the more simple you make the computer to use ... the better the content collection will be in the long run ... That is not what I want to talk about though ... why are you writing code when you could be writing stories? I know the computer is worthless without content so I build content, I know the book is worthless without the combinations of words in them, i know the television is worthless without the television news anchor or the actor, what I want to know from you folks in a very journalistic sense is why are you even bothering to bother to write code for a machine that has only made our lives i would dare say less interesting. why are you feeding the beast your time when you could be writing stories or being an actor or musician or auto mechanic ... why code? why this machine? what do you love about it? what do you hate about it? what do you wonder about it? I want to know so that starting out I know how to further shape my questions with axr ... i want the full story ... i want the real answers ... and i want to know why you are doing this, it would make for great writing if you could elucidate on this point.

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  • Fun with Python

    - by dotneteer
    I am taking a class on Coursera recently. My formal education is in physics. Although I have been working as a developer for over 18 years and have learnt a lot of programming on the job, I still would like to gain some systematic knowledge in computer science. Coursera courses taught by Standard professors provided me a wonderful chance. The three languages recommended for assignments are Java, C and Python. I am fluent in Java and have done some projects using C++/MFC/ATL in the past, but I would like to try something different this time. I first started with pure C. Soon I discover that I have to write a lot of code outside the question that I try to solve because the very limited C standard library. For example, to read a list of values from a file, I have to read characters by characters until I hit a delimiter. If I need a list that can grow, I have to create a data structure myself, something that I have taking for granted in .Net or Java. Out of frustration, I switched to Python. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Python is very easy to learn. The tutorial on the official Python site has the exactly the right pace for me, someone with experience in another programming. After a couple of hours on the tutorial and a few more minutes of toying with IDEL, I was in business. I like the “battery supplied” philosophy that gives everything that I need out of box. For someone from C# or Java background, curly braces are replaced by colon(:) and tab spaces. Although I tend to miss colon from time to time, I found that the idea of tab space is actually very nice once I get use to them. I also like to feature of multiple assignment and multiple return parameters. When I need to return a by-product, I just add it to the list of returns. When would use Python? I would use Python if I need to computer anything quick. The language is very easy to use. Python has a good collection of libraries (packages). The REPL of the interpreter allows me test ideas quickly before committing them into script. Lots of computer science work have been ported from Lisp to Python. Some universities are even teaching SICP in Python. When wouldn’t I use Python? I mostly would not use it in a managed environment, such as Ironpython or Jython. Both .Net and Java already have a rich library so one has to make a choice which library to use. If we use the managed runtime library, the code will tie to the particular runtime and thus not portable. If we use the Python library, then we will face the relatively long start-up time. For this reason, I would not recommend to use Ironpython for WP7 development. The only situation that I see merit with managed Python is in a server application where I can preload Python so that the start-up time is not a concern. Using Python as a managed glue language is an over-kill most of the time. A managed Scheme could be a better glue language as it is small enough to start-up very fast.

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  • Oracle ties social, CRM, analytics products to customer experience

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    Oracle will embark on a new product strategy that centers on customer experience management, an approach driven by the company’s many recent acquisitions.  The new approach, announced by the company Monday night, will be seen in an expansive suite that features familiar Oracle products -- such as its Fusion CRM platform -- and offerings the company recently gained through acquisitions, including FatWire, RightNow and Vitrue. Billed as Oracle Customer Experience (CX), the suite enables businesses to respond to a market centered on the customer experience, said Anthony Lye, the company’s senior vice president of CRM. Companies “are very aware their products are commoditizing,” Lye said in an interview last week, referring to how the Web and social media channels have empowered customers. Customer experiences start and mature outside of CRM, and applications today need to reflect that shift, Lye said. Businesses thus need to step away from a pure CRM model, he said. Oracle claims CX will improve customer experience management by connecting businesses with customers across Web sites and social channels. Companies can create a single, real-time view of the customer and use predictive analytics of interactions to strengthen the customer experience, Oracle said. “Companies have to connect with their customers wherever, whenever and however they want,” Lye said. “They have to know and understand their customer.” Lye promoted Oracle CX as a suite that will work across channels to complement the company’s applications. A new strategy has been “cooking” for years now, but the acquisitions Oracle has made over the past two years made the time right for a “unique collaboration,” Lye said. CX includes basic Oracle CRM solutions such as Siebel and the new Fusion Apps. It also includes the company’s MDM products, Enterprise Data Quality, Customer Hub and Product Hub. And the suite is rounded out by the services that Oracle recently bought, transactions that created or enhanced the company’s presence in social, marketing, e-commerce and customer service. For instance, FatWire provides tools for marketing. ATG focuses on e-commerce. And RightNow specializes in customer service. Two recent acquisitions -- Collective Intellect and Vitrue -- gave Oracle a seat at the social table. Collective Intellect is a social intelligence program, and Vitrue is a social marketing and engagement platform. Those acquisitions have yet to be finalized. Oracle hopes to eventually integrate the two social offerings, as well as most of the other services, into the CX suite. CX can integrate on Oracle’s standard middleware, and can give users a lower TCO by leveraging it as a single stack on premise or as a cloud solution. Lye deferred questions about the pricing of CX, and instead pitched Oracle’s ability to offer multiple customer experience solutions in one suite. Businesses have struggled with the complexity of infrastructure and modern services that communicate with customers, Lye said. “They’ve struggled to pull all these things together. We’ve done that,” he said. Stephen Powers, a research director at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said it’s not surprising for Oracle to offer the CX suite and a related customer experience strategy.  “They’ve got CRM, ATG, FatWire. Clearly, it’s been the strategy for them,” he said. But the challenge for Oracle, and for any other vendor that has gone on an “acquisition spree,” is to connect its many products, Powers said. “The portfolio has to be more than the parts. They’ve got to realize the efficiencies and value of having these pieces to tie them together,” he said. “The proof is in the pudding. Adobe has done a nice job in its space with the products they’ve got. Now, Oracle has got to show it has something.” Albert McKeon (SearchCRM) Published: 25 Jun 2012 : http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/news/2240158644/Oracle-ties-social-CRM-analytics-products-to-customer-experience

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  • Merging Social Accounts: What We Learned This Weekend

    - by Mike Stiles
    Guest Post by Erika BrookesWe learned that it’s not always as easy as you think it’s going to be. While it’s widely accepted that merging multiple owned Facebook Pages that are duplicating communities and putting out the same type of content is a best practice, actually pulling it off without rattling fans is a trickier proposition. Facebook is nice and clear about how to merge Facebook Pages. Although content is not carried over, Likes from the pages you’re merging are. So you can imagine the surprise when such fans start seeing posts in their News Feed from a page they don’t believe they ever Liked. One community member accurately likened it to having your bank come under another bank’s brand name. The Facebook Page changes to the new brand, just like your debit card, emails, signs and other communication. This weekend we did our merge. The Facebook communities of Vitrue, Involver and Collective Intellect were pulled into one community, Oracle Social. Could we have handled it better? Oh yeah. Our intent was to make sure, to the fullest extent possible, that the fans of the Vitrue, Involver, and Collective Intellect brand pages were well-informed about the pending page merges in ADVANCE of the merge. While many were aware that Oracle acquired the three companies, many were not. We learned from fan feedback that we should have sent notifications MUCH earlier to make the brand Page merge crystal clear and to answer any questions. That was our bad, our responsibility and we apologize for Oracle Social showing up in your News Feed if you were not aware that it was a result of your fandom of Vitrue, Involver or Collective Intellect. It was our job to make you aware well in advance. Some felt they had never Liked the fan Pages of Vitrue, Involver or Collective Intellect, so they were understandably upset (some cultures may call it “fit to be tied”) when they found themselves fans of Oracle Social. One thing to consider is that since 2009, brands and developers have used and enjoyed free Involver tab apps like Twitter, RSS and YouTube (1.2 million of which are currently active), which included an opt-in Liking the Involver Page. Often, when Liking happens in a manner outside of the traditional clicking of a Like button on a brand Page, it’s easy to forget a Page was indeed Liked. Lastly, a few felt that their Like of the Page had been “bought.” It was not. No fans or Likes were separately purchased. Yes, the companies and the social properties of Vitrue, Involver and Collective Intellect were acquired by Oracle. Those brands are now being coordinated into the larger Oracle brand. In social media, that means those brands are being integrated into the Oracle Social community. So what now? We apologize and apply lessons learned. We learned that you not only have to communicate thoroughly and clearly, but you have to communicate well in advance of any actionable items that will affect fans. We’re more than willing to walk straight to the woodshed when we deserve it. Going forward, the social team here is dedicated to facilitating content, discussion and sharing around social for marketers, agencies, IT stakeholders and social staffs, including community managers. We anticipate Oracle Social being the premier gathering place for true social innovators as we move into social’s exciting next phase of development. Inevitably, some will still feel they are fans of the Page in error. While we hate to see you go, you may unlike the Page if it’s not relevant or useful to you. Let’s continue to contribute, participate, foster our desire to learn, and move forward together positively and constructively - both for current fans of the community and the many fans to come.

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  • UPOS RFIDScanner data format

    - by Robert Snyder
    A lot of work that I do currently is based in the OPOS/UPOS world. My company has a device that can read 13.56Mhz tags (RFID), Smart Cards, and Mag Stripe cards. Up until somewhat recently I have only been working with RFID for a very specific scenario. That was to read UltraLight C and Desfire cards. These cards were all setup very specifically so that I could take the data read from those cards and force it into a MSR track2 format. The past couple of weeks, however, I have been working on reading RFID credit cards (since I have a Visa card I've been using mine), and Smart Card credit cards. (The visa card I have has both) In learning how to communicate with SmartCard and reading ISO7816 and EMVCO documents I became a little more familiar with how info is stored. But now I have a question regarding UPOS. The RFID data on my Visa is stored (and read) very similar to how the data is stored and read from the Smart Card on my Visa. Cool. Well in the UPOS spec for SmartCardRW the ReadData method returns a byte array. That's cool, I can just return all that data and then parse it as my heart desires. The RFID though has a LinkedList of Tags. Well this makes sense in terms of my Visa card (reminds me of a question I have in regards to SmartCard, but that is for another question) but what about ULC and Desfire, or for that matter any Mifare card. Pages, Files, Purses don't exactly fit the Tag profile. For instance lets just say I read pages 4-12 on my ULC card. Each page I read is 4 bytes long. Does this mean I have 9 tags in my LinkedList? Is my Tag id the page number? Or then how does that translate to Desfire? I open application 123456 and read file 1 and file 2, Do I have 2 tags? and if so what is my tag id? At least with my Visa I think that I have to use the Tag id (ex 5F24 for my expiration date) and value of {0x15, 0x10, 0x31} Part of me says yes..that makes sense. Another part of me says, "well if that is the case then why doesn't SmartCardRW have Tags?" So that is my question. How do I format my data from those different types of media? or is that the job of my Control Object (the application)? Is so how does it know? The only protocols I have are: // Summary: // Enumerates the available predefined RFID tag protocols the device supports. [Flags] public enum RFIDProtocols { EpcClass0 = 1, RFIDSdt0Plus = 2, EpcClass1 = 4, EpcClass1Gen2 = 8, EpcClass2 = 16, Iso14443A = 4096, Iso14443B = 8192, Iso15693 = 12288, Iso180006B = 16384, Other = 16777216, All = 1073741824, } If I use that well all of my cards that I have are all Iso14443A. I use the ATQA and the SAK to know what type of card I really have. There is no RFID property that lets me specify that. So I'm lost.

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  • Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

    - by aspiringgeek
    Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

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  • The inevitable Hello World post!

    - by brendonpage
    Greetings to anyone reading this! This is my first of hopefully many posts. I would like to use this post to introduce myself and to let you know what to expect from this blog in future. Okay so a bit about myself. In case you missed the name of this blog, my name is Brendon Page! I am a Software Developer from South Africa and work for a small company who’s main focus is producing software for the kitchen cupboard industry, although from time to time we do produce custom solutions for other industries. I work in a small team of 3, including myself, and am fortunate enough to work from home! I have been involved in IT since 1996, which is when I got my first PC, and started working as a junior programmer in 2003. Outside of work I enjoy playing squash, PC Games and of course LANing with my friends. If I get any free time between all of that I will usually dedicate some of it to a personal project, these are mainly prototypes for an idea I have had or for something that could be useful at work. I was in 2 minds on whether to include a photo of myself. The reason for this was because while I was looking for a suitable photo to use, it dawned on me how much time I dedicate to pulling funny faces in photos! I also realized how little I shave, which I blame completely on working form home. So after much debate here I am, funny face, beard and all!   Now that you know a bit about me lets move onto what expect from this blog. I work predominantly with Microsoft technologies so most if not all of my posts will be related to something Microsoft. Since most of my job entails Software Development you can expect a lot of posts which will deal with the .NET Framework. I am currently working on a large Silverlight project, so my first few posts will be targeted at in that direction. I will be striving to make the content of my posts as useful as possible from both an explanation and code perspective, I aim to include a working solution for every post, which I will put up on my skydrive for download. Here is what I have planned for my next few posts: Where did my session variables go?  Here I will take you through the lessons I learnt the hard way about the ASP.NET session. I am not going to go into to much depth in this post, as there is already a lot of information available on it. I mainly want to cover it in an effort to keep the scope creep of my posts to a minimum, some the solutions I upload will use it and I would like to have a post that I can reference to explain why I am doing something a certain way. Uploading files through SIlverlight Again there is a lot of existing information on this topic, so I wont be going into to much depth, but I will be using the solution from this as a base for my next post. Generating and Displaying DeepZoom images dynamically in Silverlight Well the title pretty much speaks for it’s self on this one. As I mentioned I will be building off the solution that I create in my ‘Uploading files through Silverlight’ post. Securing DeepZoom images using a custom implementation of the MultiScaleTileSource In this post I will look at the privacy issue surrounding the default usage of DeepZoom images in Silverlight and how to overcome it. This makes the use of DeepZoom in privacy conscious applications more viable. Thanks to anyone who actually read this post! I look forward to producing more which will hopefully be helpful to you.

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  • Utility to Script SQL Server Configuration

    - by Bill Graziano
    I wrote a small utility to script some key SQL Server configuration information. I had two goals for this utility: Assist with disaster recovery preparation Identify configuration changes I’ve released the application as open source through CodePlex. You can download it from CodePlex at the Script SQL Server Configuration project page. The application is a .NET 2.0 console application that uses SMO. It writes its output to a directory that you specify.  Disaster Planning ScriptSqlConfig generates scripts for logins, jobs and linked servers.  It writes the properties and configuration from the instance to text files. The scripts are designed so they can be run against a DR server in the case of a disaster. The properties and configuration will need to be manually compared. Each job is scripted to its own file. Each linked server is scripted to its own file. The linked servers don’t include the password if you use a SQL Server account to connect to the linked server. You’ll need to store those somewhere secure. All the logins are scripted to a single file. This file includes windows logins, SQL Server logins and any server role membership.  The SQL Server logins are scripted with the correct SID and hashed passwords. This means that when you create the login it will automatically match up to the users in the database and have the correct password. This is the only script that I programmatically generate rather than using SMO. The SQL Server configuration and properties are scripted to text files. These will need to be manually reviewed in the event of a disaster. Or you could DIFF them with the configuration on the new server. Configuration Changes These scripts and files are all designed to be checked into a version control system.  The scripts themselves don’t include any date specific information. In my environments I run this every night and check in the changes. I call the application once for each server and script each server to its own directory.  The process will delete any existing files before writing new ones. This solved the problem I had where the scripts for deleted jobs and linked servers would continue to show up.  To see any changes I just need to query the version control system to show many any changes to the files. Database Scripting Utilities that script database objects are plentiful.  CodePlex has at least a dozen of them including one I wrote years ago. The code is so easy to write it’s hard not to include that functionality. This functionality wasn’t high on my list because it’s included in a database backup.  Unless you specify the /nodb option, the utility will script out many user database objects. It will script one object per file. It will script tables, stored procedures, user-defined data types, views, triggers, table types and user-defined functions. I know there are more I need to add but haven’t gotten around it yet. If there’s something you need, please log an issue and get it added. Since it scripts one object per file these really aren’t appropriate to recreate an empty database. They are really good for checking into source control every night and then seeing what changed. I know everyone tells me all their database objects are in source control but a little extra insurance never hurts. Conclusion I hope this utility will help a few of you out there. My goal is to have it script all server objects that aren’t contained in user databases. This should help with configuration changes and especially disaster recovery.

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  • Book Review (Book 12) - 20 Master Plots

    - by BuckWoody
    This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for a year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for May 2012 was:20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias. This is my final book review - at least for this year. I'll explain what I've learned in this book in particular, and in the last twelve months in general. Why I chose this book: Stories and themes are part of software, presenting, and working in teams. This book claims there are only 20 plots, ever. I wanted to find out. What I learned: Probably my most favorite read of the year. Deceptively small, amazingly insightful. The premise is that there are only a few "base" themes, and that once you learn them you can put together an interesting set of stories on most any topic. Yes, the author admits that this number has been different throughout history - some have said 50, others 14, and still others claim only one or two basic plots. This doesn't change the fact that you can build very complex stories from a simple set of circumstances and characters. Be warned - if you read this book it takes away much of the wonder from almost every movie or book you'll read from here on! I loved it. My favorite part is that the author gives you exercises to build stories, right from the start. I've actually used these as the start of a meeting to foster creativity. Amazing stuff. One of my favorite sections of the book deals with plot and story. Plot: The king died, and the queen died. Story: The king died, and the queen died of heartbreak. Add one or two words, and you have the essence of storytelling. A highly recommended read, for all folks of all ages. You'll like it, your spouse will like it, and your kids will like it. I learned to be a better storyteller, and it helped me understand that plots and stories are not just things in books - they are a direct reflection of human nature. That makes me a better manager of myself and others.   And this is the last of the reviews - at least for this year. I probably won't post many more book reviews here, but I will keep up the practice. As a reminder, the goal was to select 12 books that will help you reach your career goals. They don't have to be technical, or even apply directly to your job - but they do need to be books that you mindfully select as getting you closer to what you want to be. Each month, jot down what you learned from the work. And see if it doesn't in fact get you closer to your goals. These readings helped me - I got a promotion this year, and I attribute at least some of that to the things I learned.

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  • Process Power to the People that Create Engagement

    - by Michael Snow
    Organizations often speak about their engagement problems as if the problem is the people they are trying to engage - employees,  partners, customers and citizens.  The reality of most engagement problems is that the processes put in place to engage are impersonal, inflexible, unintuitive, and often completely ignorant of the population they are trying to serve. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Delight? How appropriate during this short week of the US Independence Day Holiday that we're focusing on People, Process and Engagement. As we celebrate this holiday in the US and the historic independence we gained (sorry Brits!) - it's interesting to think back to 1776 to the creation of that pivotal document, the Declaration of Independence. What tremendous pressure to create an engaging document and founding experience they must have felt. "On June 11, 1776, in anticipation of the impending vote for independence from Great Britain, the Continental Congress appointed five men — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston — to write a declaration that would make clear to people everywhere why this break from Great Britain was both necessary and inevitable. The committee then appointed Jefferson to draft a statement. Jefferson produced a "fair copy" of his draft declaration, which became the basic text of his "original Rough draught." The text was first submitted to Adams, then Franklin, and finally to the other two members of the committee. Before the committee submitted the declaration to Congress on June 28, they made forty-seven emendations to the document. During the ensuing congressional debates of July 1-4, 1776, Congress adopted thirty-nine further revisions to the committee draft. (http://www.constitution.org) If anything was an attempt for engaging the hearts and minds of the 13 Colonies at the time, this document certainly succeeded in its mission. ...Their tools at the time were pen and ink and parchment. Although the final document would later be typeset with lead type for a printing press to distribute to the colonies, all of the original drafts were hand written. And today's enterprise complains about using "Review and Track Changes" at times.  Can you imagine the manual revision control process? or lack thereof?  Collaborative process? Time delays? Would  implementing a better process have helped our founding fathers collaborate better? Declaration of Independence rough draft below. One of many during the creation process. Great comparison across multiple versions of the document here. (from http://www.ushistory.org/): While you may not be creating a new independent nation, getting your employees to engage is crucial to your success as a company in today's world. Oracle WebCenter provides the tools that power engagement. Employees that have better tools for communication, collaboration and getting their job done are more engaged employees. Better engaged employees create more engaged customers and partners. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 -"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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  • PASS Summit 2013 Review

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    As a long-standing member of PASS who lives in the greater Seattle area and has attended about nine of these Summits, let me start out by saying how GREAT it was to go to Charlotte, North Carolina this year.  Many of the new folks that I met at the Summit this year, upon hearing that I was from Seattle, commented that I must have been disappointed to have to travel to the Summit this year after 5 years in a row in Seattle.  Well, nothing could be further from the truth.  I cheered loudly when I first heard that the 2013 Summit would be outside Seattle.  I have many fond memories of trips to Orlando, Florida and Grapevine, Texas for past Summits (missed out on Denver, unfortunately).  And there is a funny dynamic that takes place when the conference is local.  If you do as I have done the last several years and saved my company money by not getting a hotel, but rather just commuting from home, then both family and coworkers tend to act like you’re just on a normal schedule.  For example, I have a young family, and my wife and kids really wanted to still see me come home “after work”, but there are a whole lot of after-hours activities, social events, and great food to be enjoyed at the Summit each year.  Even more so if you really capitalize on the opportunities to meet face-to-face with people you either met at previous summits or have spoken to or heard of, from Twitter, blogs, and forums.  Then there is also the lovely commuting in Seattle traffic from neighboring cities rather than the convenience of just walking across the street from your hotel.  So I’m just saying, there are really nice aspects of having the conference 2500 miles away. Beyond that, the training was fantastic as usual.  The SQL Server community has many outstanding presenters and experts with deep knowledge of the tools who are extremely willing to share all of that with anyone who wants to listen.  The opening video with PASS President Bill Graziano in a NASCAR race turned dream sequence was very well done, and the keynotes, as usual, were great.  This year I was particularly impressed with how well attended were the Professional Development sessions.  Not too many years ago, those were very sparsely attended, but this year, the two that I attended were standing-room only, and these were not tiny rooms.  I would say this is a testament to both the maturity of the attendees realizing how important these topics are to career success, as well as to the ever-increasing skills of the presenters and the program committee for selecting speakers and topics that resonated with people.  If, as is usually the case, you were not able to get to every session that you wanted to because there were just too darn many good ones, I encourage you to get the recordings. Overall, it was a great time as these events always are.  It was wonderful to see old friends and make new ones, and the people of Charlotte did an awesome job hosting the event and letting their hospitality shine (extra kudos to SQLSentry for all they did with the shuttle, maps, and other event sponsorships).  We’re back in Seattle next year (it is a release year, after all) but I would say that with the success of this year’s event, I strongly encourage the Board and PASS HQ to firmly reestablish the location rotation schedule.  I’ll even go so far as to suggest standardizing on an alternating Seattle – Charlotte schedule, or something like that. If you missed the Summit this year, start saving now, and register early, so you can join us!

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