Search Results

Search found 102 results on 5 pages for 'commodity'.

Page 3/5 | < Previous Page | 1 2 3 4 5  | Next Page >

  • Kent .Net/SqlServer User Group – Upcoming events

    - by Dave Ballantyne
    At the Kent user group we have two upcoming events.  Both are to be held at F-Keys Training suite http://f-keys.co.uk/ in Rochester, Kent. If you haven’t attended before please note the location here. 14-June Is your code S.O.L.I.D ? Nathan Gloyn Everybody keeps on about SOLID principles but what are they? and why should you care? This session is an introduction to SOLID and I'll aim to walk through each principle telling you about that principle and then show how a code base can be refactored using the principles to make your life easier, Come the end of the session you should have a basic understanding of the principle, why to use it and how using it can improve your code. Building composite applications with OpenRasta 3 Sebastien Lambla A wave of change is coming to Web development on .NET. Packaging technologies are bringing dependency management to .NET for the first time, streamlining development workflow and creating new possibilities for deployment and administration. The sky's the limit, and in this session we'll explore how open frameworks can help us leverage composition for the web. Register here for this event http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1643797643 05-July Tony Rogerson Achieving a throughput of 1.5Terabytes or over 92,000 8Kbyte of 100% random reads per second on kit costing less that 2.5K, and of course what to do with it! The session will focus on commodity kit and how it can be used within business to provide massive performance benefits at little cost. End to End Report Creation and Management using SQL Server Reporting Services  Chris Testa-O'NeillThis session will walk through the authoring, management and delivery of reports with a focus on the new features of Reporting Services 2008 R2. At the end of this session you will understand how to create a report in the new report designer. Be aware of the Report management options available and the delivery mechanisms that can be used to deliver reports. Register here for this event http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1643805667 Hope to see you at one or other ( or even both if you are that way inclined).

    Read the article

  • Attend MySQL Webinars This Week

    - by Bertrand Matthelié
    Interested in learning more about MySQL as embedded database? In building highly available MySQL applications with MySQL and DRBD? Join our webinars this week! All information below. Tuesday next week (November 20) we will provide an update about what's new in MySQL Enterprise Edition. We have live Q&A during the webinars so you'll get the chance to ask all your questions. Top 10 Reasons to Use MySQL as an Embedded Database Tuesday, November 13 9:00 a.m. PT Review the top 10 reasons why MySQL is technically well-suited for embedded use, as well as the related business reasons vendors choose MySQL initially, over time, and across product-lines. Register for the Webcast. MySQL High Availability with Distributed Replicated Block Device Thursday, November 15 9:00 a.m. PT Learn how to build highly available services with MySQL and distributed replicated block device (DRBD). The DRBD high-availability solution comprises a complete stack of open source software that delivers high-availability database clusters on commodity hardware, with the option of 24/7 support from Oracle. Register for the Webcast. Technology Update: What's New in MySQL Enterprise Edition Tuesday, November 20 9:00 a.m. PT Find out what's new in MySQL Enterprise Edition. Register for the Webcast.

    Read the article

  • .NET development on Macs

    - by Jeff
    I posted the “exciting” conclusion of my laptop trade-ins and issues on my personal blog. The links, in chronological order, are posted below. While those posts have all of the details about performance and software used, I wanted to comment on why I like using Macs in the first place. It started in 2006 when Apple released the first Intel-based Mac. As someone with a professional video past, I had been using Macs on and off since college (1995 graduate), so I was never terribly religious about any particular platform. I’m still not, but until recently, it was staggering how crappy PC’s were. They were all plastic, disposable, commodity crap. I could never justify buying a PowerBook because I was a Microsoft stack guy. When Apple went Intel, they removed that barrier. They also didn’t screw around with selling to the low end (though the plastic MacBooks bordered on that), so even the base machines were pretty well equipped. Every Mac I’ve had, I’ve used for three years. Other than that first one, I’ve also sold each one, for quite a bit of money. Things have changed quite a bit, mostly within the last year. I’m actually relieved, because Apple needs competition at the high end. Other manufacturers are finally understanding the importance of industrial design. For me, I’ll stick with Macs for now, because I’m invested in OS X apps like Aperture and the Mac versions of Adobe products. As a Microsoft developer, it doesn’t even matter though… with Parallels, I Cmd-Tab and I’m in Windows. So after three and a half years with a wonderful 17” MBP and upgraded SSD, it was time to get something lighter and smaller (traveling light is critical with a toddler), and I eventually ended up with a 13” MacBook Air, with the i7 and 8 gig upgrades, and I love it. At home I “dock” it to a Thunderbolt Display. A new laptop .NET development on a Retina MacBook Pro with Windows 8 Returning my MacBook Pro with Retina display .NET development on a MacBook Air with Windows 8

    Read the article

  • MapReduce

    - by kaleidoscope
    MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of  intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper. Programs written in this functional style are automatically parallelized and executed on a large cluster of commodity machines. The run-time system takes care of the details of partitioning the input data,  scheduling the program's execution across a set of machines, handling machine failures, and managing the required inter-machine communication. This allows programmers without any experience with parallel and distributed systems to easily utilize the resources of a large distributed system. Example: A process to count the appearances of each different word in a set of documents void map(String name, String document):   // name: document name   // document: document contents   for each word w in document:     EmitIntermediate(w, 1); void reduce(String word, Iterator partialCounts):   // word: a word   // partialCounts: a list of aggregated partial counts   int result = 0;   for each pc in partialCounts:     result += ParseInt(pc);   Emit(result); Here, each document is split in words, and each word is counted initially with a "1" value by the Map function, using the word as the result key. The framework puts together all the pairs with the same key and feeds them to the same call to Reduce, thus this function just needs to sum all of its input values to find the total appearances of that word.   Sarang, K

    Read the article

  • How to go from Mainframe to the Cloud?

    - by Ruma Sanyal
    Running applications on IBM mainframes is expensive, complex, and hinders IT responsiveness. The high costs from frequent forced upgrades, long integration cycles, and complex operations infrastructures can only be alleviated by migrating away from a mainframe environment.  Further, data centers are planning for cloud enablement pinned on principles of operating at significantly lower cost, very low upfront investment, operating on commodity hardware and open, standards based systems, and decoupling of hardware, infrastructure software, and business applications. These operating principles are in direct contrast with the principles of operating businesses on mainframes. By utilizing technologies such as Oracle Tuxedo, Oracle Coherence, and Oracle GoldenGate, businesses are able to quickly and safely migrate away from their IBM mainframe environments. Further, running Oracle Tuxedo and Oracle Coherence on Oracle Exalogic, the first and only integrated cloud machine on the market, Oracle customers can not only run their applications on standards-based open systems, significantly cutting their time to market and costs, they can start their journey of cloud enabling their mainframe applications. Oracle Tuxedo re-hosting tools and techniques can provide automated migration coverage for more than 95% of mainframe application assets, at a fraction of the cost Oracle GoldenGate can migrate data from mainframe systems to open systems, eliminating risks associated with the data migration Oracle Coherence hosts transactional data in memory providing mainframe-like data performance and linear scalability Running Oracle software on top of Oracle Exalogic empowers customers to start their journey of cloud enabling their mainframe applications Join us in a series of events across the globe where you you'll learn how you can build your enterprise cloud and add tremendous value to your business. In addition, meet with Oracle experts and your peers to discuss best practices and see how successful organizations are lowering total cost of ownership and achieving rapid returns by moving to the cloud. Register for the Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum event in a city new you!

    Read the article

  • Two Upcoming Server Virtualization Webcasts

    - by Chris Kawalek
    We have a couple of interesting server virtualization webcasts coming up that you might be interested in. Have a look:  Webcast 1: October 23rd, 9 am PST Virtualized Infrastructure Simplified with Oracle VM and NetApp Storage and Data Management Solutions Point-and-Click Interface Deploys Virtualized Data Infrastructure in Minutes  Provisioning and deploying a virtual data infrastructure can be costly, time-consuming, and prone to error. Oracle VM and NetApp joint solutions, however, give you a single point-and-click interface to deploy your virtualized data infrastructure seamlessly in minutes. Join us in this live webcast to learn more from product experts and view a product demo. Register (for free!) here.  Webcast 2: November 7th, 9 am PST Report Shows Oracle VM Up to 10x Faster than VMware vSphere 5 in Time to Deployment Time is your IT department’s greatest commodity. So when a new report reveals that your IT staff can deploy Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) up to 10 times faster than a traditional install performed with VMware vSphere 5, it’s newsworthy. Join us in this live webcast to learn how you can realize your time savings. Register (for free!) here. 

    Read the article

  • Looking to create website that can have custom GUI and database per user

    - by riley3131
    I have developed an MS Access database for a company to track data in regards to production of a certain commodity. It has many many tables, forms, reports, etc. These were all done as the user requested, and resemble the users previously used system, mostly printed worksheets and excel workbooks. This has created a central location for all information and has allowed the company to compare data in a new way. I am now looking to do this for other companies, but would like to switch it to a web application. Here is my question. What is the best way to create unique solutions for individual companies that can have around 100 users each? I would love to create one site that would serve all parties, but that would ruin the customizable nature of what I am developing. I love the ability to create reports, excel sheets, pdf, graphs, etc with access, but am tired of relying on my customers software, servers, etc. I have some experience with WAMP, but I am far better at VBA. I was okay at PHP, and was getting a grasp on JavaScript a few years back. I am also trying to decide whether to go with WAMP or LAMP, if web is the best choice. Also, should I try set up one site for all users that after log-in goes to company specific pages, or individual sites for each company? Should I host or use a service?

    Read the article

  • How do you measure latency in low-latency environments?

    - by Ajaxx
    Here's the setup... Your system is receiving a stream of data that contains discrete messages (usually between 32-128 bytes per message). As part of your processing pipeline, each message passes through two physically separate applications which exchange the data using a low-latency approach (such as messaging over UDP) or RDMA and finally to a client via the same mechanism. Assuming you can inject yourself at any level, including wire protocol analysis, what tools and/or techniques would you use to measure the latency of your system. As part of this, I'm assuming that every message that is delivered to the system results in a corresponding (though not equivalent) message being pushed through the system and delivered to the client. The only tool that I've seen on the market like this is TS-Associates TipOff. I'm sure that with the right access you could probably measure the same information using a wire analysis tool (ala wireshark) and the right dissectors, but is this the right approach or are there any commodity solutions that I can use?

    Read the article

  • OpenGL: Textured Primitives + High Framerate

    - by James D
    Short version: What's the best practice going forward for efficiently rendering large numbers of independent texture-mapped, lighted 2D/3D primitives (circles, rects, etc.) in OpenGL? For example: a typical particle system using billboarded quads/triangles, point sprites, or whatever other technique, with blending. Because after reading this thread on the messiness of OpenGL versioning/deprecation I'm starting to have my doubts. My specific question is not the ABCs of displaying primitives in OpenGL, but rather how to do so efficiently in post-deprecation (or pre-deprecation) OpenGL, in a way that's going to be compatible with a wide range of commodity hardware and in a way that's not going to break or itself get deprecated, five years down the line. Thanks!

    Read the article

  • how to aggregate this data in R

    - by stevejb
    Hello, I have a data frame in R with the following structure. > testData date exch.code comm.code oi 1 1997-12-30 CBT 1 468710 2 1997-12-23 CBT 1 457165 3 1997-12-19 CBT 1 461520 4 1997-12-16 CBT 1 444190 5 1997-12-09 CBT 1 446190 6 1997-12-02 CBT 1 443085 .... 77827 2004-10-26 NYME 967 10038 77828 2004-10-19 NYME 967 9910 77829 2004-10-12 NYME 967 10195 77830 2004-09-28 NYME 967 9970 77831 2004-08-31 NYME 967 9155 77832 2004-08-24 NYME 967 8655 What I want to do is produce a table the shows for a given date and commodity the total oi across every exchange code. So, the rows would be made up of unique(testData$date) and the columns would be unique(testData$comm.code) and each cell would be the total oi over all exch.codes on a given day. Thanks,

    Read the article

  • Which parallel sorting algorithm has the best average case performance?

    - by Craig P. Motlin
    Sorting takes O(n log n) in the serial case. If we have O(n) processors we would hope for a linear speedup. O(log n) parallel algorithms exist but they have a very high constant. They also aren't applicable on commodity hardware which doesn't have anywhere near O(n) processors. With p processors, reasonable algorithms should take O(n/p log n/p) time. In the serial case, quick sort has the best runtime complexity on average. A parallel quick sort algorithm is easy to implement (see here and here). However it doesn't perform well since the very first step is to partition the whole collection on a single core. I have found information on many parallel sort algorithms but so far I have not seen anything pointing to a clear winner. I'm looking to sort lists of 1 million to 100 million elements in a JVM language running on 8 to 32 cores.

    Read the article

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

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

    Read the article

  • ACORD LOMA 2010: Building Insurance Companies in the Clouds

    - by [email protected]
    Chuck Johnston, vice president of global strategy and alliances for Oracle Insurance, participated in a featured speaking session at ACORD LOMA 2010. He provides an update on his discussions with insurers at the show and after his presentation. Every year I always make a point of walking the show floor at the ACORD LOMA technology conference to visit with colleagues and competitors, and try to get a feel for which way the industry will move over the next 12 months. Insurers are looking for substance in cloud (computing), trying to mix business with pleasure (monetizing social networks), and expect differentiation through commodity (Software as a Service). The disconnect at this show is that most vendors are still struggling with creating a clear path from Facebook to customer intimacy, SaaS to core cost savings and clouds to ubiquitous presence. Vendors need to find new ways to help insurers find the real value in these potentially disruptive technologies by understanding the changes coming to the insurance business and how these new technologies impact the new insurance business. Oracle's approach to understanding the evolving insurance industry comes from a discussion with our customers in our Insurance CIO Council, where one of our customers suggested we buy an insurance company to really understand our customers. We have decided to do the next best thing and build our own model of an insurance company, Alamere Insurance, that uses the latest technologies to transform its own business. Alamere will never issue an actual policy, but it does give us a framework to consider the impacts of changes in the insurance landscape and how Oracle technology meets the challenge or needs to evolve to help our customers be successful. In preparing for my talk at the conference using Alamere as my organizing theme, I found myself reading actuarial memoranda on CSO table changes and articles on underwriting theory that really made me think about my customer's problems first and foremost, and then how Oracle technology can provide answers. As much as I prefer techno-thrillers and sci-fi novels to actuarial papers for plane reading, I got very excited about the idea of putting myself back in the customer shoes I haven't worn in a decade, and really looking at how Oracle can power the Adaptive Insurance Enterprise. Talking to customers and industry people after the session, the idea of Alamere seemed to excite people and I got a lot of suggestions as to what lines of business we should model and where we should focus first on technology uptake. One customer said to a colleague that Oracle's attempt to "share their pain" was unique among vendors. More about Alamere, and the Adaptive Insurance Enterprise next time. Chuck Johnston is vice president of global strategy and alliances for Oracle Insurance.

    Read the article

  • One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

    - by Bob Rhubart
    One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

    Read the article

  • One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

    - by Bob Rhubart
    One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

    Read the article

  • Will Online Learning Save Higher Education (and does it need saving)?

    - by user739873
    A lot (an awful lot) of education industry rag real estate has been devoted to the topics of online learning, MOOC’s, Udacity, edX, etc., etc. and to the uninitiated you’d think that the education equivalent of the cure for cancer had been discovered. There are certainly skeptics (whose voice is usually swiftly trampled upon by the masses) who feel we could over steer and damage or destroy something vital to teaching and learning (i.e. the classroom experience and direct interaction with human beings known as instructors), but for the most part prevailing opinion seems to be that online learning will take over the world and that higher education will never be the same. Now I’m sure that since you all know I work for a technology company you think I’m going to come down hard on the side of online learning proselytizers. Yes, I do believe that this revolution can and will provide access to massive numbers of individuals that either couldn’t afford (from a fiscal or time perspective) a traditional education, and that in some cases the online modality will actually be an improvement over certain traditional forms (such as courses taught by an adjunct or teaching assistant that has no business being a teacher). But I think several things need immediate attention or we’re likely to get so caught up in the delivery that we miss some of the real issues (and opportunities) around online learning. First and foremost, we’ve got to give some thought to how traditional information systems are going to accommodate thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of individual students each taking courses from many, many different “deliverers” with an expectation that successful completion of these courses will result in credit at many or most institutions. There’s also a huge opportunity to refine the delivery platform (no, LMS is not a commodity when you are talking about online delivery being your sole mode of operation) as well as the course itself by mining all kinds of data from the interactions that the students have with the material each time they take it. Social data analytics tools will be key in achieving this goal. What about accreditation (badging or competencies vs. traditional degrees)? And again, will the information systems in place today adapt to changes in this area fast enough? The type of scale that this shift in learning could drive has the potential to abruptly overwhelm just about every system in place today in higher education. I would like to (with a not so gentle reminder) refer you back to a blog entry I wrote when I first stepped into my current role at Oracle in which I talked about how higher ed needs an “Oracle” more than at any other time in it’s evolution (despite the somewhat mercantilist reputation it has in some circles). There just aren’t that many organizations that can deliver the kinds of solutions “at scale” that this brave new world of online education will demand. The future may be closer than we think. Cole

    Read the article

  • external drive enclosure -> software RAID 5?

    - by memilanuk
    Hello all, I have two older PCs on my LAN posing as 'servers'... one running FreeNAS off a USB stick using three 500GB hdds in a ZFS RAID-Z pool serving as storage for the LAN and one running Debian Lenny with an 80GB drive used as a general purpose 'tinker' box that I can ssh into, etc. Problem is that the SMART report for one of those 500GB drives in the FreeNAS box is showing some pre-failure attributes, and the whole array is a little small anyways. Rather than simply replace one 500GB drive with another 500GB drive, and have no backup of the file server, I'd like to upgrade all the drives to 2TB ones - but I have no where to store that much data in the mean while. As such, I started looking at getting a 4-bay external drive enclosure with an eSATA card for the Debian box, with the hopes of creating a RAID5 + LVM setup using those drives and backing the data up to that external drive enclosure. After the backup is done, replace the drives in the FreeNAS box and rebuild the array there and mirror the data back. Then, I'd have both the primary storage (on the FreeNAS box) and a backup (which I don't have currently) using the external drive enclosure on the Debian box. My big question is... most of these external drive boxes seem to claim support for JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, etc. - should I presume that is simply fake RAID like many commodity mobos have, and not really usable in Linux? In that case, with all the drives hanging off the one eSATA connection, will Linux (specifically Debian Squeeze, as I plan on upgrading that box here shortly) see all four drives, or just the first one? Will I be able to configure them in a RAID5 array as desired? Thanks, Monte

    Read the article

  • Private staff network within public network

    - by pianohacker
    I'm the sysadmin at a small public library. Since I got here a few years ago, I've been trying to set up the network in a secure and simple way. Security is a little tricky; the staff and patron networks need to be separated, for security reasons. Even if I further isolated the public wireless, I'd still rather not trust the security of our public computers. However, the two networks also need to communicate; even if I set up enough VMs so they didn't share any servers, they need to use the same two printers at the very least. Currently, I'm solving this with some jerry-rigged commodity equipment. The patron network, linked together by switches, has a Windows server connected to it for DNS and DHCP and a DSL modem for a gateway. Also on the patron network is the WAN side of a Linksys router. This router is the "top" of the staff network, and has the same Windows server connected on a different port, providing DNS and DHCP, and another, faster DSL modem (separate connections are very useful, especially as we heavily depend on some cloud-hosted software). tl;dr: We have a public network, and a NATed staff network within it. My question is; is this really the best way to do this? The right equipment would likely make my job easier, but anything with more than four ports and even rudimentary management quickly becomes a heavy hit on our budget. (My original question was about an ungodly frustrating DHCP routing issue, but I thought I'd ask whether my network was broken rather than asking about the DHCP problem and being told my network was broken.)

    Read the article

  • Why am I seeing Zero errors in non-ECC RAM?

    - by Alexander Shcheblikin
    According to sources, memory errors are a very probable event: Some say the probability of a DRAM error is 95% in just 3 days of operation of a computer with just 4 GB of RAM, others say 32% of servers experience at least one error in a month with 8% of DIMMs being at fault. Contrary to those horrors, in my more than 10 years of personal computers use I have seen exactly none of the memory errors. I admit I never paid special attention to the subject. However, I have ventured multi-hour memtest86 runs couple of times and never seen an error either. Some of the factors that IMO should aggravate the memory problems: I build my computers out of the most "bulk commodity" parts: mainstream budget motherboards and the next to cheapest memory. also I usually max out the technology available, e.g. in the times of 32 bit OS'es I used 4 GB of RAM and with the current desktop CPUs and the newer 64 bit OS'es I use 32 GB of RAM. memory usage is moderately heavy with lots of virtual machines up running small and big tasks 24/7/365. But nevertheless, no memory-related problems ever found! How's that?

    Read the article

  • Distributed storage and computing

    - by Tim van Elteren
    Dear Serverfault community, After researching a number of distributed file systems for deployment in a production environment with the main purpose of performing both batch and real-time distributed computing I've identified the following list as potential candidates, mainly on maturity, license and support: Ceph Lustre GlusterFS HDFS FhGFS MooseFS XtreemFS The key properties that our system should exhibit: an open source, liberally licensed, yet production ready, e.g. a mature, reliable, community and commercially supported solution; ability to run on commodity hardware, preferably be designed for it; provide high availability of the data with the most focus on reads; high scalability, so operation over multiple data centres, possibly on a global scale; removal of single points of failure with the use of replication and distribution of (meta-)data, e.g. provide fault-tolerance. The sensitivity points that were identified, and resulted in the following questions, are: transparency to the processing layer / application with respect to data locality, e.g. know where data is physically located on a server level, mainly for resource allocation and fast processing, high performance, how can this be accomplished? Do you from experience know what solutions provide this transparency and to what extent? posix compliance, or conformance, is mentioned on the wiki pages of most of the above listed solutions. The question here mainly is, how relevant is support for the posix standard? Hadoop for example isn't posix compliant by design, what are the pro's and con's? what about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous opeartion of a distributed file system. Though a synchronous distributed file system has the preference because of reliability it also imposes certain limitations with respect to scalability. What would be, from your expertise, the way to go on this? I'm looking forward to your replies. Thanks in advance! :) With kind regards, Tim van Elteren

    Read the article

  • What hardware would I need (approx) to run ESXi server?

    - by mr.b
    Hi, I am considering to purchase off-the-shelf commodity hardware in order to build server that will host virtual machines using ESXi server. Intended purpose for this server is NOT mission critical tasks. It will have to run perhaps 20-50 Windows XP/Vista/7 virtual machines (in total, but closer to 20 figure). Each guest would have to have 1-2 GB of ram, and probably two-three times more disk space than guest OS needs with clean install and all updates applied (that would be around 6-8 GB for XP, and i believe closer to 10-15 for win7). Those guests will act as a test ground for a new product that is network management software, thus guests will idle most of their time once initially loaded, but if I give them some task to complete, they should be able to perform reasonably well. Now, from what I have learned... CPU is usually not much of an issue (6 cores would do it), memory should not be lacking, but doesn't have to be sum of all guests, because of overcommitment... That leads me to IO, which is, as it seems, the bottleneck. Since I have very little experience with ESXi (and ESX, too) server, I'd like to ask: How much memory could I save by overcommitment, and how does it affect performance? Is 6-core cpu enough to run above described system? Would it be possible to run entire server off two (or even one) SSD drives (to host system virtual disks, with few additional HDDs (2-3) in RAID 0 to be used as secondary storage? I read somewhere that ESXi allows having something like "master image", essentially virtual machine that is "deployed" many times, so that disk space can be saved by having only differences stored by specific guests, instead of copying around whole virtual disks. Is this true, and how can this help me? Are there any other things I need to take into consideration when building this off-the-shelf solution? I should probably mention here that I'm fully aware of issues like SPOF regarding power supply, raid 0, etc, but since it's only a testing ground and not a production system, it's not so important for me. Thanks, B.

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – Weekend Project – Experimenting with ACID Transactions, SQL Compliant, Elastically Scalable Database

    - by pinaldave
    Database technology is huge and big world. I like to explore always beyond what I know and share the learning. Weekend is the best time when I sit around download random software on my machine which I like to call as a lab machine (it is a pretty old laptop, hardly a quality as lab machine) and experiment it. There are so many free betas available for download that it’s hard to keep track and even harder to find the time to play with very many of them.  This blog is about one you shouldn’t miss if you are interested in the learning various relational databases. NuoDB just released their Beta 7.  I had already downloaded their Beta 6 and yesterday did the same for 7.   My impression is that they are onto something very very interesting.  In fact, it might be something really promising in terms of database elasticity, scale and operational cost reduction. The folks at NuoDB say they are working on the world’s first “emergent” database which they tout as a brand new transitional database that is intended to dramatically change what’s possible with OLTP.  It is SQL compliant, guarantees ACID transactions, yet scales elastically on heterogeneous and decentralized cloud-based resources. Interesting note for sure, making me explore more. Based on what I’ve seen so far, they are solving the architectural challenge that exists between elastic, cloud-based compute infrastructures designed to scale out in response to workload requirements versus the traditional relational database management system’s architecture of central control. Here’s my experience with the NuoDB Beta 6 so far: First they pretty much threw away all the features you’d associate with existing RDBMS architectures except the SQL and ACID transactions which they were smart to keep.  It looks like they have incorporated a number of the big ideas from various algorithms, systems and techniques to achieve maximum DB scalability. From a user’s perspective, the NuoDB Beta software behaves like any other traditional SQL database and seems to offer all the benefits users have come to expect from standards-based SQL solutions. One of the interesting feature is that one can run a transactional node and a storage node on my Windows laptop as well on other platforms – indeed interesting for sure. It’s quite amazing to see a database elastically scale across machine boundaries. So, one of the basic NuoDB concepts is that as you need to scale out, you can easily use more inexpensive hardware when/where you need it.  This is unlike what we have traditionally done to scale a database for an application – we replace the hardware with something more powerful (faster CPU and Disks). This is where I started to feel like NuoDB is on to something that has the potential to elastically scale on commodity hardware while reducing operational expense for a big OLTP database to a degree we’ve never seen before. NuoDB is able to fully leverage the cloud in an asynchronous and highly decentralized manner – while providing both SQL compliance and ACID transactions. Basically what NuoDB is doing is so new that it is all hard to believe until you’ve experienced it in action.  I will keep you up to date as I test the NuoDB Beta 7 but if you are developing a web-scale application or have an on-premise app you are thinking of moving to the cloud, testing this beta is worth your time. If you do try it, let me know what you think.  Before I say anything more, I am going to do more experiments and more test on this product and compare it with other existing similar products. For me it was a weekend worth spent on learning something new. I encourage you to download Beta 7 version and share your opinions here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • My Take on Hadoop World 2011

    - by Jean-Pierre Dijcks
    I’m sure some of you have read pieces about Hadoop World and I did see some headlines which were somewhat, shall we say, interesting? I thought the keynote by Larry Feinsmith of JP Morgan Chase & Co was one of the highlights of the conference for me. The reason was very simple, he addressed some real use cases outside of internet and ad platforms. The following are my notes, since the keynote was recorded I presume you can go and look at Hadoopworld.com at some point… On the use cases that were mentioned: ETL – how can I do complex data transformation at scale Doing Basel III liquidity analysis Private banking – transaction filtering to feed [relational] data marts Common Data Platform – a place to keep data that is (or will be) valuable some day, to someone, somewhere 360 Degree view of customers – become pro-active and look at events across lines of business. For example make sure the mortgage folks know about direct deposits being stopped into an account and ensure the bank is pro-active to service the customer Treasury and Security – Global Payment Hub [I think this is really consolidation of data to cross reference activity across business and geographies] Data Mining Bypass data engineering [I interpret this as running a lot of a large data set rather than on samples] Fraud prevention – work on event triggers, say a number of failed log-ins to the website. When they occur grab web logs, firewall logs and rules and start to figure out who is trying to log in. Is this me, who forget his password, or is it someone in some other country trying to guess passwords Trade quality analysis – do a batch analysis or all trades done and run them through an analysis or comparison pipeline One of the key requests – if you can say it like that – was for vendors and entrepreneurs to make sure that new tools work with existing tools. JPMC has a large footprint of BI Tools and Big Data reporting and tools should work with those tools, rather than be separate. Security and Entitlement – how to protect data within a large cluster from unwanted snooping was another topic that came up. I thought his Elephant ears graph was interesting (couldn’t actually read the points on it, but the concept certainly made some sense) and it was interesting – when asked to show hands – how the audience did not (!) think that RDBMS and Hadoop technology would overlap completely within a few years. Another interesting session was the session from Disney discussing how Disney is building a DaaS (Data as a Service) platform and how Hadoop processing capabilities are mixed with Database technologies. I thought this one of the best sessions I have seen in a long time. It discussed real use case, where problems existed, how they were solved and how Disney planned some of it. The planning focused on three things/phases: Determine the Strategy – Design a platform and evangelize this within the organization Focus on the people – Hire key people, grow and train the staff (and do not overload what you have with new things on top of their day-to-day job), leverage a partner with experience Work on Execution of the strategy – Implement the platform Hadoop next to the other technologies and work toward the DaaS platform This kind of fitted with some of the Linked-In comments, best summarized in “Think Platform – Think Hadoop”. In other words [my interpretation], step back and engineer a platform (like DaaS in the Disney example), then layer the rest of the solutions on top of this platform. One general observation, I got the impression that we have knowledge gaps left and right. On the one hand are people looking for more information and details on the Hadoop tools and languages. On the other I got the impression that the capabilities of today’s relational databases are underestimated. Mostly in terms of data volumes and parallel processing capabilities or things like commodity hardware scale-out models. All in all I liked this conference, it was great to chat with a wide range of people on Oracle big data, on big data, on use cases and all sorts of other stuff. Just hope they get a set of bigger rooms next time… and yes, I hope I’m going to be back next year!

    Read the article

  • Unleash the Power of Cryptography on SPARC T4

    - by B.Koch
    by Rob Ludeman Oracle’s SPARC T4 systems are architected to deliver enhanced value for customer via the inclusion of many integrated features.  One of the best examples of this approach is demonstrated in the on-chip cryptographic support that delivers wire speed encryption capabilities without any impact to application performance.  The Evolution of SPARC Encryption SPARC T-Series systems have a long history of providing this capability, dating back to the release of the first T2000 systems that featured support for on-chip RSA encryption directly in the UltraSPARC T1 processor.  Successive generations have built on this approach by support for additional encryption ciphers that are tightly coupled with the Oracle Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 encryption framework.  While earlier versions of this technology were implemented using co-processors, the SPARC T4 was redesigned with new crypto instructions to eliminate some of the performance overhead associated with the former approach, resulting in much higher performance for encrypted workloads. The Superiority of the SPARC T4 Approach to Crypto As companies continue to engage in more and more e-commerce, the need to provide greater degrees of security for these transactions is more critical than ever before.  Traditional methods of securing data in transit by applications have a number of drawbacks that are addressed by the SPARC T4 cryptographic approach. 1. Performance degradation – cryptography is highly compute intensive and therefore, there is a significant cost when using other architectures without embedded crypto functionality.  This performance penalty impacts the entire system, slowing down performance of web servers (SSL), for example, and potentially bogging down the speed of other business applications.  The SPARC T4 processor enables customers to deliver high levels of security to internal and external customers while not incurring an impact to overall SLAs in their IT environment. 2. Added cost – one of the methods to avoid performance degradation is the addition of add-in cryptographic accelerator cards or external offload engines in other systems.  While these solutions provide a brute force mechanism to avoid the problem of slower system performance, it usually comes at an added cost.  Customers looking to encrypt datacenter traffic without the overhead and expenditure of extra hardware can rely on SPARC T4 systems to deliver the performance necessary without the need to purchase other hardware or add-on cards. 3. Higher complexity – the addition of cryptographic cards or leveraging load balancers to perform encryption tasks results in added complexity from a management standpoint.  With SPARC T4, encryption keys and the framework built into Solaris 10 and 11 means that administrators generally don’t need to spend extra cycles determining how to perform cryptographic functions.  In fact, many of the instructions are built-in and require no user intervention to be utilized.  For example, For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, SPARC T4 crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "t4 engine."  For a deeper technical dive into the new instructions included in SPARC T4, consult Dan Anderson’s blog. Conclusion In summary, SPARC T4 systems offer customers much more value for applications than just increased performance. The integration of key virtualization technologies, embedded encryption, and a true Enterprise Operating System, Oracle Solaris, provides direct business benefits that supersedes the commodity approach to data center computing.   SPARC T4 removes the roadblocks to secure computing by offering integrated crypto accelerators that can save IT organizations in operating cost while delivering higher levels of performance and meeting objectives around compliance. For more on the SPARC T4 family of products, go to here.

    Read the article

  • How to use a list of values in Excel as filter in a query

    - by Luca Zavarella
    It often happens that a customer provides us with a list of items for which to extract certain information. Imagine, for example, that our clients wish to have the header information of the sales orders only for certain orders. Most likely he will give us a list of items in a column in Excel, or, less probably, a simple text file with the identification code:     As long as the given values ??are at best a dozen, it costs us nothing to copy and paste those values ??in our SSMS and place them in a WHERE clause, using the IN operator, making sure to include the quotes in the case of alphanumeric elements (the database sample is AdventureWorks2008R2): SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS SOH WHERE SOH.SalesOrderNumber IN ( 'SO43667' ,'SO43709' ,'SO43726' ,'SO43746' ,'SO43782' ,'SO43796') Clearly, the need to add commas and quotes becomes an hassle when dealing with hundreds of items (which of course has happened to us!). It’d be comfortable to do a simple copy and paste, leaving the items as they are pasted, and make sure the query works fine. We can have this commodity via a User Defined Function, that returns items in a table. Simply we’ll provide the function with an input string parameter containing the pasted items. I give you directly the T-SQL code, where comments are there to clarify what was written: CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[SplitCRLFList] (@List VARCHAR(MAX)) RETURNS @ParsedList TABLE ( --< Set the item length as your needs Item VARCHAR(255) ) AS BEGIN DECLARE --< Set the item length as your needs @Item VARCHAR(255) ,@Pos BIGINT --< Trim TABs due to indentations SET @List = REPLACE(@List, CHAR(9), '') --< Trim leading and trailing spaces, then add a CR\LF at the end of the list SET @List = LTRIM(RTRIM(@List)) + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) --< Set the position at the first CR/LF in the list SET @Pos = CHARINDEX(CHAR(13) + CHAR(10), @List, 1) --< If exist other chars other than CR/LFs in the list then... IF REPLACE(@List, CHAR(13) + CHAR(10), '') <> '' BEGIN --< Loop while CR/LFs are over (not found = CHARINDEX returns 0) WHILE @Pos > 0 BEGIN --< Get the heading list chars from the first char to the first CR/LF and trim spaces SET @Item = LTRIM(RTRIM(LEFT(@List, @Pos - 1))) --< If the so calulated item is not empty... IF @Item <> '' BEGIN --< ...insert it in the @ParsedList temporary table INSERT INTO @ParsedList (Item) VALUES (@Item) --(CAST(@Item AS int)) --< Use the appropriate conversion if needed END --< Remove the first item from the list... SET @List = RIGHT(@List, LEN(@List) - @Pos - 1) --< ...and set the position to the next CR/LF SET @Pos = CHARINDEX(CHAR(13) + CHAR(10), @List, 1) --< Repeat this block while the upon loop condition is verified END END RETURN END At this point, having created the UDF, our query is transformed trivially in: SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS SOH WHERE SOH.SalesOrderNumber IN ( SELECT Item FROM SplitCRLFList('SO43667 SO43709 SO43726 SO43746 SO43782 SO43796') AS SCL) Convenient, isn’t it? You can find the script DBA_SplitCRLFList.sql here. Bye!!

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 1 2 3 4 5  | Next Page >