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• Tablet design guide, Endeca patterns now available

  - by JuergenKress

  UX Direct, an Oracle program that offers consultants, partners, and customers the same scientifically proven and reusable user experience best practices that Oracle uses to build Oracle Applications, recently added links to a new design guide for creating tablet-based solutions for enterprise applications, and to the recently published Endeca User Interface Design Pattern Library. The tablet design guide is available from the UX Direct Home page. Tap the button under “Latest patterns & tools” for “Oracle Applications UX Tablet Guide.” It provides basic help for designers, developers, and project managers trying to approach tablet design and testing from an enterprise point of view. To hear what developers are saying about it, follow the links from this post on the User Experience Assistance blog. The newly released Endeca User Interface Design Pattern Library is also available from the UX Direct Home page and from a post on the User Experience Assistance blog. It describes principled ways to solve common user interface (UI) design problems related to search, faceted navigation, and discovery. The link between Simplified UI and Oracle UX strategy, plus content you can share on the cloud, ADf, tailoring, and more Simplified User Interface in Oracle Fusion Applications Fronts Oracle Cloud Offerings This new article on Simplified UI has just been posted on Usable Apps. Learn about the three themes - simplicity, mobility, and extensibility – that Simplified UI embodies. These same principles are guiding the development of the next generation of the Oracle user experience. Oracle's Applications User Experience Strategy: One Cloud User Experience, with Optimized UIs Where and How You Want This podcast from Misha Vaughan, Director, User Experience, is now available on the Oracle University Knowledge Center. It is available for partners and Oracle employees at this iLearning Link. Oracle Partner Builds User Experience That Hits Right Note for New Employees This new article on the Usable Apps website explores the experience of consultants at IntraSee as they implement a PeopleSoft onboarding process for Invesco, a global asset management company. The Feng Shui of Fusion This article in Oracle Scene is from Grant Ronald, Director of Product Management, on the Tools of Fusion: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF. Hands-On Workshop with Fusion Applications and ADF UX Desktop Design Patterns This post on the Voice of User Experience, or VoX, blog from Misha Vaughan describes a new kind of workshop for partners and a handful of internal Oracle sales folks on extending Oracle Fusion Applications and building custom applications with Application Development Framework (ADF) while maintaining the Oracle user experience. To learn more about the content that was delivered during this three-day workshop, visit the Usable Apps blog. Recent posts from a new blog series take a look at several of the topics discussed during the workshop. Applications User Experience Fundamentals Visual Design for any Enterprise User Interface / Art School in a Box Wireframing / Blueprinting Usable Applications Concepts. Tailoring videos This blog post from Richard Bingham, Applications Architect, on the Fusion Applications Developer Relations blog provides links to several videos that show many customization and development tasks using the Oracle Fusion Applications platform. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: UX,Architecture,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Integrating with Fusion Applications using SOAP web services and REST APIs (Part 1 of 2) by Arvind Srinivasamoorthy

  - by JuergenKress

  Fusion Applications provides several types of interfaces to facilitate integration with other applications within the enterprise and on the cloud.As one of the key integration interfaces, Fusion Applications (FA) supports SOAP services based integration, both inbound and outbound. At this point FA doesn’t provide REST API’s but it is planned for a future release. It is however possible to invoke external REST APIs from FA which we will discuss. Oracle continues to invest in improving both SOAP and REST based connectivity. The content in this blog is based on features that were available at the time of writing it. In this two part blog, I will cover the following topics briefly. Invoking FA SOAP web services from external applications Identifying the FA SOAP web service to be invoked Sample invocation from an external application Techniques to invoke FA services from an ADF application Invoking external SOAP Web Services from FA (covered in Part 2) Invoking external REST APIs from FA (covered in Part 2) I’ll touch upon some basics, so that you can quickly build a few SOAP/REST interactions with FA. If you do not already have access to an FA instance (on-premise or SaaS), you can request for a free 30 day trial of the Oracle Sales Cloud using http://cloud.oracle.com 1. Invoking FA SOAP web services from external applications There are two main types of services that FA exposes -  ADF Services - These services allow you to perform CRUD operations on Fusion business objects. For example, Sales Party Service, Opportunity Service etc. Using these services you can typically perform operations such as get, find, create, delete, update etc on FA objects.These services are typically useful for UI driven integrations such as looking up FA information from external application UIs, using third party Interfaces to create/update data in FA. They are also used in non-UI driven integration uses cases such as initial upload of business or setup data, synchronizing data with an external systems, etc. - Composite Services – These services involve more logic than CRUD and often involving human workflows, rules etc. These services perform a business function such as Get Orchestration Order Service and are used when building larger process based integrations with external systems.These services are usually asynchronous in nature and are not typically used for UI integration patterns. 1a. Identifying the FA SOAP web service to be invoked All FA web service metadata is available through an OER instance (Oracle Enterprise Repository) which is publicly available via http://fusionappsoer.oracle.com. This is the starting point for you to discover the services that you are going to work with. You do not need to own a FA account to browse the services using the above UI You can use the search area on the left to narrow down your search to what you are looking for. For example, you can choose the type as by ADF Services or Composite, you can narrow your search to a specific FA version, Product Family etc. Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: AppAdvantage,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress,Arvind Srinivasamoorthy

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• Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge: Bezzotech

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. I’ve covered all the entries we had for the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge, the winners, Dimitri and Martin, HarQen, TEAM Informatics and John Sim from Fishbowl Solutions, and today, I’m giving you bonus coverage. Friend of the ‘Lab, Bex Huff (@bex) from Bezzotech (@bezzotech), had an interesting OpenWorld. He rebounded from an allergic reaction to finish his entry, Honey Badger, only to have his other OpenWorld commitments make him unable to present his work. Still, he did a bunch of work, and I want to make sure everyone knows about the Honey Badger. If you’re wondering about the name, it’s a meme; “honey badger don’t care.” Bex tackled a common problem with social tools by adding game mechanics to create an incentive for people to keep their profiles updated. He used a Hot-or-Not style comparison app that poses expertise questions and awards a badge to the winner. Questions are based on whatever attributes the business wants to emphasize. The goal is to find the mavens in an organization, give them praise and recognition, ideally creating incentive for everyone to raise their games. In his own words: There is a real information quality problem in social networks. In last year’s keynote, Larry Elison demonstrated how to use the social network to track down resources that have the skill sets needed for specific projects. But how well would that work in real life? People usually update that information with the basic profile information, but they rarely update their profiles with latest news items, projects, customers, or skills. It’s a pain. Or, put another way, when was the last time you updated your LinkedIn profile? Enter the Honey Badger! This is a example of a comparator app that gamifies the way people keep their profiles updated, which ensures higher quality data in the social network. An administrator comes up with a series of important questions: Who is a better communicator? Who is a better Java programmer? Who is a better team player? And people would have a space in their profile to give a justification as to why they have these skills. The second part of the app is the comparator. It randomly shows two people, their names, and their justification for why they have these skills. You will click on one of them to “vote” for them, then on the next page you will see the results from the previous match, and get 2 new people to vote on. Anybody with a winning score wins a “Honey Badge” to be displayed on their profile page, which proudly states that their peers agree that this person has those skills. Once a badge is won, it will be jealously guarded. The longer your go without updating your profile, the more likely it is that you will lose your badge. This “loss aversion” is well known in psychology, and is a strong incentive for people to keep their profiles up to date. If a user sees their rank drop from 90% to 60%, they will find the time to update their justification! Unfortunately, during the hackathon we were not allowed to modify the schema to allow for additional fields such as “justification.” So this hack is limited to just the one basic question: who is the bigger Honey Badger? Here are some shots of the Honey Badger application: #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } Thanks to Bex and everyone for participating in our challenge. Despite very little time to promote this event, we had a great turnout and creative and useful entries. The amount of work required to put together these final entries was significant, especially during a conference, and the judges and all of us involved were impressed at how much work everyone was able to do. Congrats to everyone, pat yourselves on the back. Stay tuned if you’re interested in challenges like these. We’ll likely be running similar events in the not-so-distant future.

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• A Case for Oracle Fusion Middleware by Lucas Jellema

  - by JuergenKress

  An in-depth look at the interaction of people, processes, and technologies in the transition to a service-oriented architecture. Author's Note This article presents a profile of a fictitious organization, NOPERU. The story of NOPERU as told in this article is actually a collage of the events at some dozen organizations that I have been involved with over the past few years. None of these organizations sport all the characteristics of NOPERU - but all of them have gone through or are going through a similar transition as described here and all aspects of this article were taken from real life at one or usually many of these organizations. Background NOPERU (National Organization for Permits for Emissions and Resource Usage) is a public organization that continues to transform in terms of its business, organization and technology. Changing business requirements; new interaction channels; and increasing demands for more flexibility, faster throughput and lower costs drive these transformations, while technological evolution and new architecture patterns enable the change. NOPERU chose Oracle Fusion Middleware as the technology platform to implement the new architecture and required applications. This article takes a close look at NOPERU's journey from its origins in the early 1990s as a largely paper-based entity with regional databases and client-server Oracle Forms applications. Its upcoming business objectives are introduced: what is required of the organization and what the higher goals behind these requirements are. The architecture roadmap is described at a high level as well as drilled down to a service oriented design. Based on the architecture roadmap and the business requirements and NOPERU went through a technology selection to determine the technology stack with which the future would be realized in terms of IT. The article discusses that selection and details the projects subsequently planned (and executed to date). The new architecture and technology as well as the introduction of an Agile development method have had substantial consequences for the IT organization, the processes and individual staff members. The approach NOPERU has adopted with regard to the people and the organization is portrayed. Finally, the article discusses many conclusions that NOPERU has drawn that may benefit itself and other organizations. Introducing NOPERU NOPERU is a national organization charged with issuing permits for excessive emissions (i.e., carbon dioxide) and disproportionate usage of such resources as energy or water. Anyone-whether a commercial enterprise, government agency or private person--who emits or consumes more than what is considered "fair usage" requires such a permit. When someone builds an outdoor heated swimming pool, for example, or open-air terrace heating, such a permit needs to be obtained. When a company installs new, energy-intensive equipment, such as water boilers or deep freezers, it too needs to get a NOPERU permit. Government-sponsored projects at every level that involve consumption of large quantities of fresh water or production of high volumes of emissions must turn to NOPERU for a permit. Without the required license, any interested party can get a court to immediately put a stop to the disputed activity. Read the full article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Lucas Jellema,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Why you need to tag your build servers in TFS

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  At SSW we use gated check-in for all of our projects. The benefits are based on the number of developers you have working on your project. Lets say you have 30 developers and each developer breaks the build once per month. That could mean that you have a broken build every day! Gated check-ins help, but they have a down side that manifests as queued builds and moaning developers. The way to combat this is to have more build servers, but with that comes complexity. Inevitably you will need to install components that you would expect to be installed on target computers, but how do you keep track of which build servers have which bits? What about a geographically diverse team? If you have a centrally controlled infrastructure you might have build servers in multiple regions and you don’t want teams in Sydney copying files from Beijing and vice a versa on a regular basis. So, what is the answer. Its Tags. You can add a set of Tags to your agents and then set which tags to look for in the build definition. Figure: Open up your Build Controller Manager Select “Build | Manage Build Controllers…” to get a list of all of your controllers and he build agents that are associated with them. Figure: the list of build agents and their controllers Each of these Agents might be subtly different. For example only one of these agents has FTP software installed. This software is required for only one of the many builds we have set up. My ethos for build servers is to keep them as clean as possible and not to install anything that is not absolutely necessary. For me that means anything that does not add a *.target file is suspect, and should really be under version control and called via the command line from there. So, some of the things you may install are: Silverlight 4 SDK Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio 2008 WIX etc You should not install things that will not end up on the target users computer. For a website that means something different to a client than to a server, but I am sure you get the idea. One thing you can do to make things easier is to create a tag for each of the things that you install. that way developers can find the things they need. We may change to using a more generic tagging structure (Like “Web Application” or “WinForms Application”) if this gets too unwieldy, but for now the list of tags is limited. Figure: Tags associated with one of our build agents Once you have your Build Agents all tagged up ALL your builds will start to fail This is because the default setting for a build is to look for an Agent that exactly matches the tags for the build, and we have not added any yet. The quick way to fix this is to change the “Tag Comparison Operator” from “ExactMatch” to “MatchAtLease” to get your build immediately working. Figure: Tag Comparison Operator changes to MatchAtLeast to get builds to run. The next thing to do is look for specific tags. You just select from the list of available tags and the controller will make sure you get to a build agent that uses them. Figure: I want Silverlight, VS2010 and WIX, but do not care about Location. And there you go, you can now have build agents for different purposes and regions within the same environment. You can also use name filtering, so if you have a good Agent naming convention you can filter by that for regions. For example, your Agents might be “SYDVMAPTFSBP01” and “SYDVMAPTFSBP02” so a name filter of “SYD*” would target all of the Sydney build agents. Figure: Agent names can be used for filtering as well This flexibility will allow you to build better software by reducing the likelihood of not having a certain dependency on the target machines. Figure: Setting the name filter based on server location  Used in combination there is a lot of power here to coordinate tens of build servers for multiple projects across multiple regions so your developers get the most out of your environment. Technorati Tags: ALM,TFBS,TFS 2010,TFS Admin

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• top Tweets SOA Partner Community &ndash; June 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity Simone Geib Contact me directly for ideas how to improve http://bit.ly/advancedsoasuite and additional posts, presentations, white papers, #soasuite SOA CommunitySOA Community Newsletter May 2012 https://soacommunity.wordpress.com /2012/05/28/soa-community-newsletter-may-2012/ #soacommunity Simone Geib #soasuite advanced OTN page has become too cluttered. Broke it into separate pages to start with. http://bit.ly/advancedsoasuite SOA CommunitySOA Management with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c and Business Transaction Management 12c Demo https://soacommunity.wordpress.com /2012/05/21/soa-management-with-enterprise-manager-cloud-control-12c-and-business-transaction-management-12c-demo/ #soacommunity OracleBlogs June Webcast: SOA Gateway Implementation and Troubleshooting (2 sessions) http://ow.ly/1kbRFA OTNArchBeatEvery cloud needs an SOA lining: analyst | @JoeMcKendrick http://zd.net/KTgMHk ServiceTechSymposium New session just posted to calendar: "NoSQL for Data Services, Data Virtualization & Big Data" by Guido Schmutz, Trivadis AG ://ow.ly/bjjOe OTNArchBeat?Every cloud needs an SOA lining: analyst | @JoeMcKendrick http://zd.net/KTgMHk Debra Lilley looks good - real proof people are using the apps ! RT @fteter:Very cool Fusion Applications Help site: http://bit.ly/L3nvOR #FusionApps OTNArchBeat How to Set JVM Parameters in Oracle SOA 11G | Francis Ip http://bit.ly/JBDYPj demed"rapid proliferation of cloud computing will drive convergence of SOA and cloud paradigms" http://ovum.com/2012/05/18/soa-paves-the-way-for-cloud/ SOA Community Sending out invitations to our advanced Fusion Middleware Summer Camps! Want to learn more register for the community http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa SOA Community Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012 - HAPPY NEW YEAR! https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/ 2012/05/31/middleware-oracle-excellence-awards-2012 happy-new-year/ #soacommunity #opn #opnaward #specialization #oracle Simone Geib #oraclesoa performance tuning resources. All in one: docs, blogs, WPs, ppts: http://bit.ly/soa_resources OracleBlogs Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012 - HAPPY NEW YEAR! http://ow.ly/1k9ri0 ServiceTechSymposiumNew session just posted to Symposium calendar: "Service Modeling & BPM Business Value Patterns" by Jürgen Kress, Oracle http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/ agenda2012.php #service_modeling_and_bpm _business_value_patterns SOA Community Happy New Year #soacommunity thanks for the business! Time for a drink ;-) http://pic.twitter.com/zkK08KWB Jan van ZoggelUsing execute-sql() function for Name-Value pair lookups in Oracle Service Bus http://wp.me/p1H430-jZ SOA Community Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012&ndash;HAPPY NEW YEAR! http://wp.me/p10C8u-q4 orclateamsoa A-Team Blog #ateam: BPM 11g Deployment & Instance Migration - I have seen a number of request lately asking how to http://ow.ly/1jZ0h8 OTNArchBeat Who should ‘own’ the Enterprise Architecture? | Michael Glas http://bit.ly/K0ge0Q Oracle UPK & Tutor TOMORROW! (June 23rd) - UPK Professional Webinar at Noon ET: Discover why user adoption is a key factor for the http://bit.ly/LjZjdx Sabine Leitner Finance Event im Design-Hotel beim Barbeque: 21. Juni FRA mit Kunden SV Informatik, Schufa, LBBW http://bit.ly/JtwE3v #Oracle @itevent OracleEnterpriseMgr SOA Management with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c and Business Transaction Management 12c Demo http://ow.ly/b3WP1 #em12c ServiceTechSymposium New session just posted to Symposium calendar: "Elastic SOA in the Cloud" by Steve Millidge, C2B2 Consulting http://www.servicetechsymposium.com /agenda2012.php #elastic_soa_in_the_cloud OTNArchBeat Securing Heterogeneous Systems Using Oracle Web Services Manager by @rluttikhuizen & Jens Peters http://bit.ly/KjShFi Oracleteamsoa A-Team Blog #ateam: How to Set JVM Parameters in Oracle SOA 11G http://ow.ly/1k2cnl SOA Community Oracle Service Registry in an automated (Maven) SOA/BPM build http://redstack.wordpress.com /2012/05/22/using-oracle-service-registry-in-an-automated-maven-soabpm-build/ #soacommunity #redstack #soa #osr #opn SOA CommunityHigh demand for advanced Fusion Middleware Summer Camps! Want to learn more register for the #soacommunity http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa OracleBlogs? How to Set JVM Parameters in Oracle SOA 11G http://ow.ly/1k1UTv SOA Community top Tweets SOA Partner Community &ndash; May 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pP ServiceTechSymposium New session just posted to Symposium calendar: "SOA Governance at EDP: A Global Energy Company" by Manuel Rosa, Link http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/ agenda2012.php #soa_governance_at_edp For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: soacommunity,twitter,Oracle,SOA Community,Jürgen Kress,OPN,SOA,BPM

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• Announcing Oracle Knowledge 8.5: Even Superheroes Need Upgrades

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  It’s no secret that we like Iron Man here at Oracle. We've certainly got stuff in common: one of the world’s largest technology companies and one of the world’s strongest technology-driven superheroes. If you've seen the recent Iron Man movies, you might have even noticed some of our servers sitting in Tony Stark’s lab. Heck, our CEO made a cameo appearance in one of the movies. Yeah, we’re fans. Especially as Iron Man is a regular guy with some amazing technology – like us. But Like all great things even Superheroes need upgrades, whether it’s their suit, their car or their spacestation. Oracle certainly has its share of advanced technology.  For example, Oracle acquired InQuira in 2011 after years of watching the company advance the science of Knowledge Management.  And it was some extremely super technology.  At that time, Forrester’s Kate Leggett wrote about it in ‘Standalone Knowledge Management Is Dead With Oracle's Announcement To Acquire InQuira’ saying ‘Knowledge, accessible via web self-service or agent UIs, is a critical customer service component for industries fielding repetitive questions about policies, procedures, products, and solutions.’  One short sentence that amounts to a very tall order.  Since the acquisition our KM scientists have been hard at work in their labs. Today Oracle announced its first major knowledge management release since its acquisition of InQuira: Oracle Knowledge 8.5. We’ve put a massively-upgraded supersuit on our KM solution because we still have bad guys to fight. And we are very proud to say that we went way beyond our original plans. So what, exactly, did we do in Oracle Knowledge 8.5? We did what any high-tech super-scientist would do. We made Oracle Knowledge smarter, stronger and faster. First, we gave Oracle Knowledge a stronger heart: Certified on Oracle technologies, including Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Huge scaling and performance improvements. Then we gave it a better reach: Improved iConnect functionality that delivers contextualized knowledge directly into CRM applications. Better content acquisition support across disparate sources. Enhanced Language Support including Natural Language search support for 16 Languages. Enhanced Keyword Search for 23 authoring languages, as well as enhanced out-of-the-box industry ontologies covering 14 languages. And finally we made Oracle Knowledge ridiculously smarter: Improved Natural Language Search and a new Contextual Answer Delivery that understands the true intent of each inquiry to deliver the best possible answers. AnswerFlow for Guided Navigation & Answer Delivery, a new application for guided troubleshooting and answer delivery. Knowledge Analytics standardized on Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Knowledge Analytics Dashboards optimized search and content creation through targeted, actionable insights. A new three-level language model "Global - Language - Locale" that provides an improved search experience for organizations with a global footprint. We believe that Oracle Knowledge 8.5 is the most sophisticated KM solution in existence today and we’ve worked very hard to help it fulfill the promise of KM: empowering customers and employees with deep insights wherever they need them. We hope you agree it’s a suit worth wearing. We are continuing to invest in Knowledge Management as it continues to be especially relevant today with the enterprise push for peer collaboration, crowd-sourced wisdom, agile innovation, social interaction channels, applied real-time analytics, and personalization. In fact, we believe that Knowledge Management is a critical part of the Customer Experience portfolio for success. From empowering employee’s, to empowering customers, to gaining the insights from interactions across all channels, businesses today cannot efficiently scale their efforts, strengthen their customer relationships or achieve their growth goals without a solid Knowledge Management foundation to build from. And like every good superhero saga, we’re not even close to being finished. Next we are taking Oracle Knowledge into the Cloud. Yes, we’re thinking what you’re thinking: ROCKET BOOTS! Stay tuned for the next adventure… By Nav Chakravarti, Vice-President, Product Management, CRM Knowledge and previously the CTO of InQuira, a knowledge management company acquired by Oracle in 2011

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• T-SQL Tuesday - the swag

  - by Rob Farley

  This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Kendal van Dyke (@SQLDBA), and is on the topic of swag. He asks about the best SQL Server swag that we’ve ever received from a conference. I can’t say I ever focus on getting the swag at conferences, as I see some people doing. I know there are plenty of people that get around all the sponsors as soon as they’ve arrived, collecting whatever goodies they can, sometimes as token gifts for those at home, sometimes as giveaways for the user groups they attend. I remember a few years ago at my first PASS Summit, the SQLCAT team gave me a large pile of leftover SQL Server swag to give away to my user group – piles of branded things to stop your phone sliding off your car dashboard, and other things. The user group members thought it was great, and over the course of a few months, happily cleared me out of it all. I tend to consider swag to be something that you haven’t earned except by being at a conference, and there was no winning associated with it, it was simply a giveaway item at a sponsor booth. That means I don’t include the HP Mini laptop that was given away at TechEd Australia a few years ago to every attendee, or the SQL Server bag and Camelbak bottle that I was given as a thank-you for writing a guest blog post (which I use as my regular laptop bag and water bottle for work). I don’t even include the copy of Midtown Madness that I got as a door prize at my vey first TechEd event in 1999 (that was a really good game, and even meant that when I went to Chicago last year, I felt a strange familiarity about the place). I don’t want to include shirts in the mix either. I was given a nice SQL Server shirt about five years ago TechEd Australia. It’s a business shirt (buttons, cuffs, pocket on the chest), black with the SQL Server logo on it. It was such a nice shirt that I commented about it to the Product Marketing Manager for Australia (Christine, at the time), who unexpectedly arranged for me to get another one. That was certainly an improvement on the tent I was given at one of the MVP conference I attended. So when I consider these ‘rules’, two pieces of swag come to mind, and I think both were at PASS Summits (although I can’t be sure). One was a hand-warmer from HP, one of the “crystallisation-type” ones, which proved extremely popular when I got home, until one day when it didn’t survive being recharged – not overly SQL related, but still it was good swag. The other was an umbrella, from expressor, which was from the PASS Summit in 2010, my first PASS Summit. I remember it well – Blythe Morrow (now Gietz) (@blythemorrow) was working the booth, having stopped working for PASS some time before, but she’d been on my list of people to meet, as I’d had plenty of contact with her while she’d worked at PASS, my being a chapter leader and general volunteer. There had been an expressor dinner on one of the first evenings, which I’d been asked to be at, which is when I’d met lots of SQL people in person for the first time, including Ted Krueger (@onpnt), Jessica Moss (@jessicamoss) and Blythe. Anyway, at some point the next day I swung by their booth to say hello and thank them for the dinner, and Blythe says “Oh, we have the best swag – here!” and handed me an umbrella. And she was right. It’s excellent. @rob_farley

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• Announcing Oracle Knowledge 8.5: Even Superheroes Need Upgrades

  - by Chris Warner

  It’s no secret that we like Iron Man here at Oracle. We've certainly got stuff in common: one of the world’s largest technology companies and one of the world’s strongest technology-driven superheroes. If you've seen the recent Iron Man movies, you might have even noticed some of our servers sitting in Tony Stark’s lab. Heck, our CEO made a cameo appearance in one of the movies. Yeah, we’re fans. Especially as Iron Man is a regular guy with some amazing technology – like us. But Like all great things even Superheroes need upgrades, whether it’s their suit, their car or their spacestation. Oracle certainly has its share of advanced technology.  For example, Oracle acquired InQuira in 2011 after years of watching the company advance the science of Knowledge Management.  And it was some extremely super technology.  At that time, Forrester’s Kate Leggett wrote about it in ‘Standalone Knowledge Management Is Dead With Oracle's Announcement To Acquire InQuira’ saying ‘Knowledge, accessible via web self-service or agent UIs, is a critical customer service component for industries fielding repetitive questions about policies, procedures, products, and solutions.’  One short sentence that amounts to a very tall order.  Since the acquisition our KM scientists have been hard at work in their labs. Today Oracle announced its first major knowledge management release since its acquisition of InQuira: Oracle Knowledge 8.5. We’ve put a massively-upgraded supersuit on our KM solution because we still have bad guys to fight. And we are very proud to say that we went way beyond our original plans. So what, exactly, did we do in Oracle Knowledge 8.5? We did what any high-tech super-scientist would do. We made Oracle Knowledge smarter, stronger and faster. First, we gave Oracle Knowledge a stronger heart: Certified on Oracle technologies, including Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Huge scaling and performance improvements. Then we gave it a better reach: Improved iConnect functionality that delivers contextualized knowledge directly into CRM applications. Better content acquisition support across disparate sources. Enhanced Language Support including Natural Language search support for 16 Languages. Enhanced Keyword Search for 23 authoring languages, as well as enhanced out-of-the-box industry ontologies covering 14 languages. And finally we made Oracle Knowledge ridiculously smarter: Improved Natural Language Search and a new Contextual Answer Delivery that understands the true intent of each inquiry to deliver the best possible answers. AnswerFlow for Guided Navigation & Answer Delivery, a new application for guided troubleshooting and answer delivery. Knowledge Analytics standardized on Oracle’s Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Knowledge Analytics Dashboards optimized search and content creation through targeted, actionable insights. A new three-level language model "Global - Language - Locale" that provides an improved search experience for organizations with a global footprint. We believe that Oracle Knowledge 8.5 is the most sophisticated KM solution in existence today and we’ve worked very hard to help it fulfill the promise of KM: empowering customers and employees with deep insights wherever they need them. We hope you agree it’s a suit worth wearing. We are continuing to invest in Knowledge Management as it continues to be especially relevant today with the enterprise push for peer collaboration, crowd-sourced wisdom, agile innovation, social interaction channels, applied real-time analytics, and personalization. In fact, we believe that Knowledge Management is a critical part of the Customer Experience portfolio for success. From empowering employee’s, to empowering customers, to gaining the insights from interactions across all channels, businesses today cannot efficiently scale their efforts, strengthen their customer relationships or achieve their growth goals without a solid Knowledge Management foundation to build from. And like every good superhero saga, we’re not even close to being finished. Next we are taking Oracle Knowledge into the Cloud. Yes, we’re thinking what you’re thinking: ROCKET BOOTS! Stay tuned for the next adventure… By Nav Chakravarti, Vice-President, Product Management, CRM Knowledge and previously the CTO of InQuira, a knowledge management company acquired by Oracle in 2011. 

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• Improve Playback Using Enhancements in Windows Media Player 12

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you looking for ways to improve the playback of your media in Windows Media Player 12? We’ll show you how to do that by using the enhancements in WMP 12. If you are in Library mode, you’ll need to click the icon at the lower right to switch to Now Playing mode. Right-click anywhere in Media Player while in Now Playing mode, select Enhancements, and select any of the available options.   You can switch between the individual enhancements by clicking the right and left buttons at the top left.   Crossfading and Auto Volume Leveling The Auto Volume Leveling setting is just a simple toggle on and off. If your MP3 or WMA files have volume leveling information values.   You can automatically add volume leveling information values to all files you add to your library by switching to Library view, going to Tools > Options, and selecting Add volume leveling information values for new files on the Library tab. Click OK when finished.   Crossfading will gradually decrease the volume of the song that is ending (fade out) and increase volume of the song that is beginning. Click Turn on Crossfading and then click and drag the slider left or right change the amount of overlap between tracks. Graphic Equalizer The graphic equalizer is toggled on and off by clicking Turn on / Turn off at the top left. You can select pre-defined equalizer settings by music genre by clicking the Default list. The radio buttons on the left allow you to move the sliders individually, in a loose group or a tight group. You can always return to the default settings by clicking Reset. Play Speed Settings Choose a pre-defined settings by clicking Slow, Normal, or Fast. Uncheck the Snap slider to common speeds the move the slider right and left to your desired speed. If nothing else, these settings provide a little fun and amusement. Quiet Mode Quiet mode will level out any sharp volume highs and lows within a single track. Simply toggle the setting on or off and select whether you prefer Medium difference or Little difference by selecting one of the radio buttons. SRS WOW effects SRS WOW effects enhance low-frequency and stereo sound performance. Click Turn on to enable the TruBass and WOW Effect sliders. You can also optimize for your speaker type. Click to switch between Regular, Large, and Headphones. Video Settings Video Settings allow you to adjust the Hue, Brightness, Saturation, and Contrast.   You can also adjust the zoom settings by clicking Select video zoom settings.   Dolby Digital Settings Choose between Normal, Night, and Theater settings to adjust the audio for Dolby Digital content. This setting will only effect media with Dolby Digital sound. Looking for more ways to improve your media experience in WMP 12? Check out how to update metadata and cover art and how to share media with other Windows 7 computers on your home network. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesInstall and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu LinuxHow To Rip a Music CD in Windows 7 Media CenterStream Media from Windows 7 to XP with VLC Media PlayerInstalling Windows Media Player Plugin for Firefox TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools Track Daily Goals With 42Goals Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor

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• Wireless Network Found, can't connect, repeated requests for authentication

  - by Herm Holland

  After trawling through the internet, on forums, support websites, and through dozens upon dozens of answered questions on this site, I've not found a solution to what seems like a fairly regular problem... I cannot connect to a wireless network, and am continually asked for the network password. I have tried countless suggested solutions on the different locations I've already referred to. None of them have worked. Details of my experience are as follows: I have just recently installed Ubuntu 12.04.1 (32-bit). Ubuntu installed on my system seemingly fine, and I even formatted my hard drive during the process. It's as if it were a new desktop computer. During the installation I was asked to connect to a Wireless Network. I have a USB Wireless Card connected which I have used to connect desktop PC's, laptops, and a Wii to the internet from approximately the same area of the house (thus the same distance from the Wireless Router). I chose my network, entered the correct password for it (I double checked; it's definitely the right password) and proceeded with the installation. Several times before the installation was complete, I was asked to authenticate the connection, and this seemed to do nothing each time. On the repeated screens the password was already entered in the appropriate box. When Ubuntu booted up the first thing I was faced with (other than something about Language settings, or something) was another request for authentication. Again, the password was already there, so I clicked connect. It did not connect. Instead, I was once again faced with repeated requests every few minutes. I went onto my laptop, which is connected to this network, checked the details of the network, and entered them manually into my Ubuntu PC (including the IPv4 and IPv6 information) but this didn't work either, so I set it back to finding the settings automatically. Note, also, that the "Connect automatically" and "Available to all users" boxes are checked, and have been unchecked & rechecked countless times. I have also tried having my User account connect automatically, and to need a password entered at the welcome screen. Whilst I've been writing this, it has gone through a spat of connecting successfully to the network for less than a minute, before coming offline again, only to repeat the process. But it has now returned to prompting me for a password every couple of minutes. This computer has already run on the Fedora OS, and had no trouble connecting to, and maintaining a connection. I also have a laptop running Windows 7 less than a metre away from this desktop PC, which is connected and has no trouble maintaining a connection at 50%-100% strength (fluctuating). Therefore: - I know it's not the wireless card - I know it's not the PC itself - I know it's not the access point - I know it's not the location of my PC or wireless card - It is solely because of Ubuntu Everything else has worked fine, but the moment Ubuntu was introduced into the equation, it has gone completely wrong. Honestly; I prefer Ubuntu as an OS to Fedora, but if I can't solve the problem it'll be straight back to Fedora that I'll have to go. Can anyone help me at all?

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• Big Data – How to become a Data Scientist and Learn Data Science? – Day 19 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the analytics in Big Data Story. In this article we will understand how to become a Data Scientist for Big Data Story. Data Scientist is a new buzz word, everyone seems to be wanting to become Data Scientist. Let us go over a few key topics related to Data Scientist in this blog post. First of all we will understand what is a Data Scientist. In the new world of Big Data, I see pretty much everyone wants to become Data Scientist and there are lots of people I have already met who claims that they are Data Scientist. When I ask what is their role, I have got a wide variety of answers. What is Data Scientist? Data scientists are the experts who understand various aspects of the business and know how to strategies data to achieve the business goals. They should have a solid foundation of various data algorithms, modeling and statistics methodology. What do Data Scientists do? Data scientists understand the data very well. They just go beyond the regular data algorithms and builds interesting trends from available data. They innovate and resurrect the entire new meaning from the existing data. They are artists in disguise of computer analyst. They look at the data traditionally as well as explore various new ways to look at the data. Data Scientists do not wait to build their solutions from existing data. They think creatively, they think before the data has entered into the system. Data Scientists are visionary experts who understands the business needs and plan ahead of the time, this tremendously help to build solutions at rapid speed. Besides being data expert, the major quality of Data Scientists is “curiosity”. They always wonder about what more they can get from their existing data and how to get maximum out of future incoming data. Data Scientists do wonders with the data, which goes beyond the job descriptions of Data Analysist or Business Analysist. Skills Required for Data Scientists Here are few of the skills a Data Scientist must have. Expert level skills with statistical tools like SAS, Excel, R etc. Understanding Mathematical Models Hands-on with Visualization Tools like Tableau, PowerPivots, D3. j’s etc. Analytical skills to understand business needs Communication skills On the technology front any Data Scientists should know underlying technologies like (Hadoop, Cloudera) as well as their entire ecosystem (programming language, analysis and visualization tools etc.) . Remember that for becoming a successful Data Scientist one require have par excellent skills, just having a degree in a relevant education field will not suffice. Final Note Data Scientists is indeed very exciting job profile. As per research there are not enough Data Scientists in the world to handle the current data explosion. In near future Data is going to expand exponentially, and the need of the Data Scientists will increase along with it. It is indeed the job one should focus if you like data and science of statistics. Courtesy: emc Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about various Big Data Learning resources. 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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• Lost in Translation – Common Mistakes Interpreting Patterns – Mark Simpson, Griffiths-Waite @ SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  ORACLE PROMOTIONAL DISCOUNT FOR EXCLUSIVE ORACLE DISCOUNT, ENTER PROMO CODE: DJMXZ370 For details please visit the registration page International SOA, Cloud + Service Technology Symposium is a yearly event that features the top experts and authors from around the world, providing a series of keynotes, talks, demonstrations, and panels, as well as training and certification workshops - all dedicated to empowering IT professionals to realize modern service technologies and practices in the real world. Click here for a two-page printable conference overview (PDF). Speaker: Mark Simpson, Griffiths-Waite Mark has been specialising in Oracle technology for 13 years, the last 10 of these with Griffiths Waite. Mark leads our SOA technology practice (covering SOA, Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture). He is a much sought after presenter on the Oracle and SOA conference circuits, and a respected authority on these technologies. Mark has advised a host of UK leading organisations on the deployment of BPM / SOA solutions. Working closely with Oracle US Product Development Mark has contributed to Oracle's SOA Methodology and Oracle's SOA Maturity Model. Lost in Translation – Common Mistakes Interpreting Patterns Learn how small misinterpretations of high-level design patterns can have large and costly project ramifications. Good SOA design benefits from the use of a reference architecture and standardised design patterns. However both of these concepts give an abstracted view of the intended solution, which needs to be interpreted to become realised. A reference implementation is important to demonstrate how key design guidelines can be implemented in the toolset of choice, but the main success factor is how these are used through the build and post live phases of the project. This session will introduce practical design patterns with supporting implementation examples that, if used correctly, will give long term benefit. We will highlight implementations where misinterpretations or misalignment from pattern aims have led to issues post implementation. The session will add depth to the pattern discussions you are already having enabling confidence in proceeding to the next level of realisation whilst considering how they may be implemented within your solution and chosen toolset. September 25, 2012 - 13:55 KEYNOTES & SPEAKERS More than 80 international subject matter experts will be speaking at the Symposium. Below are confirmed keynotes and speakers so far. Over 50% of the agenda has not yet been finalized. Many more speakers to come. View the partial program calendars on the Conference Agenda page. CONFERENCE THEMES & TRACKS Cloud Computing Architecture & Patterns New SOA & Service-Orientation Practices & Models Emerging Service Technology Innovation Service Modeling & Analysis Techniques Service Infrastructure & Virtualization Cloud-based Enterprise Architecture Business Planning for Cloud Computing Projects Real World Case Studies Semantic Web Technologies (with & without the Cloud) Governance Frameworks for SOA and/or Cloud Computing Projects Service Engineering & Service Programming Techniques Interactive Services & the Human Factor New REST & Web Services Tools & Techniques Oracle Specialized SOA & BPM Partners Oracle Specialized partners have proven their skills by certifications and customer references. To find a local Specialized partner please visit http://solutions.oracle.com SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Mark Simpson,Griffiths Waite,SOA Patterns,SOA Symposium,Thomas Erl,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• High Jinks, Hi Jacks, Exceptional DBA Awards and PASS

  - by Rodney

  The countdown to PASS has counted down.  The day after tomorrow I will board a plane, like many others, on my way for the 4th year in a row to SQL PASS Summit.  The anticipation has been excruciating but luckily I have this little thing called a day job as a DBA that has kept me busy and not thinking too much about the event. Well that is not exactly true since my beautiful wife works for PASS so we get to talk about SQL from the time we wake up until late in the evening. I would not have it any other way and I feel very fortunate to be a part of this great event and to have been chosen as the Exceptional DBA Award judge also for the 4th year in a row.  This year, I will have been again tasked with presenting the award to the winner, Mr. Jeff Moden and it will be a true honor to meet him in person as I have read many of his articles on SSC and have attended his session at PASS previously.  The speech is all ready but one item remains, which will be a surprise to all who attend the party on Tuesday night in Seattle (see links below).  Let's face it, Exceptional DBAs everywhere work very hard protecting our data stores, tuning queries, mentoring, saving money, installing clusters, etc and once in a while there is time to be exceptionally non-professional and have a bit of fun. Once incident that happened this year that falls under the High Jinks category was when my network admin asked if I could Telnet into a SQL instance and see if I could make the connection through the firewall that he had just configured. I was able to establish a connection on port 1433 and it occurred to me that it would be very interesting if I could actually run T-SQL queries via a Telnet session much like you might do with an SMTP server. With that thought, I proceeded to demonstrate this could be possible by convincing my senior DBA Shawn McGehee that I was able to do so. At first he did not believe me. It shook his world view.  It was inconceivable.  What I had done, behind the scenes, of course, was to copy and rename SQLCMD.exe to Telnet.exe and used it to connect and run a simple, "Select * from sys.databases" on the SQL instance. I think if it had been anyone other than Shawn I could have extended this ruse indefinitely but he caught on within 30 seconds. It was a fun thirty seconds though. On the High Jacks side of the house, which is really merged to be SQL HACKS, I finally, after several years of struggling with how to connect to an untrusted domain like in a DMZ with a windows account in SSMS, I stumbled upon a solution that does away with the requirement to use SQL Authentication.  While "Runas" is a great command to use to run an application with a higher privileged account, I had not previously been able to figure out how to connect to the remote domain with SSMS and "Runsas". It never connected and caused a login failure every time for the remote windows domain account. Then I ran across an option for "Runas",   "/netonly".  This option postpones the login until a connection is made and only then passes the remote login you supply when you first launch SSMS with the "Runas" command. So a typical shortcut would look like: "C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /netonly /user:remotedomain.com\rodlandrum "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\Ssms.exe" You will want to make sure the passwords are synced between the two domains, your local domain and the remote domain, otherwise you may have account lockout issues, but I have found in weeks of testing this is a stable solution. Now it is time to get ready to head for Seattle. Please, if you see me (@SQLBeat) or my wife (@Karlakay22) please run up and high five me (wait..High Jinks.High Jacks.High Fives.Need to change the title) or give me a big bear hug if you are strong enough to lift me off the ground. And if you do actually do that, I will think you are awesome and will not embarrass you by crying out for help or complaining of a broken back or sciatic nerve damage. And now the links to others who have all of the details. First, for the MVP Deep Dives 2, of which, like John, I was lucky enough to be able to participate in this year. http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/johnm/archive/2011/09/29/103577.aspx And the details of the SSC party where the Exceptional DBA of 2011, Jeff Moden, will be awarded. http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/rebecca_amos/archive/2011/10/05/103661.aspx   Cheers! Rodney

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• How to Save Hundreds or Thousands of Dollars on Cell Phone Service

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Cell phone contracts are bad. You get a seemingly cheap phone up front, but you more than pay for the cost of the phone over two years. Prepaid phone plans are surging in North America for a reason. Prepaid phone plans will be cheaper and more flexible than traditional contracts with big carriers for many people. However much you use your phone, there’s a good chance you can save money with a prepaid service. No More Contracts Here’s how cell phone service typically works in North America: You get a subsidized phone for “free”, $99, or $199. You sign up for a two-year contract and more than pay back the cost of that phone over the length of the contract. This is similar to leasing something or purchasing it on a credit card and paying it back over two years — you spend less up front, but you’re paying more in the long run. But this isn’t the only option. You could opt for a cheaper prepaid service that doesn’t lock you into a contract. If you don’t use your phone much, you could just pay for what you use and avoid the hefty cell phone bills. If you use your phone a lot, you could get a cheaper plan, too. Now, this certainly isn’t for everyone. If you want the latest iPhone or Galaxy smartphone every two years and require a 4G data connection, prepaid services may not be for you. On the other hand, if you don’t need the latest phone, you can save money here. You can also save a huge amount of money if you don’t use your phone much. Phone Options When you choose your prepaid or contract-free service, you’ll often be able to purchase a phone from them. You’ll generally be able to find dirt-cheap dumbphones and the cheapest, slowest Android phones for not very much money. If you are able to buy a top-of-the-line smartphone, you’ll have to pay the full, unsubsidized price. That’s $649 for either an iPhone 5S or Samsung Galaxy S4. Whatever phones the service provider offers, you could always buy a phone elsewhere — for example, you could buy an unsubsidized iPhone direct from Apple and then take it to your cell phone service of choice. Most services will allow you to get a SIM card and pop it into your existing phone rather than purchasing a phone. If you can get a hand-me-down smartphone, you can often save quite a bit of money. For example, you may have a family member upgrading from an iPhone 4S to an iPhone 5S. You could take their phone to a prepaid carrier and have a nicer phone on a cheap cell phone plan. If you brought an old smartphone to a big carrier like AT&T or Verizon, they wouldn’t give you a discount on your monthly plan. You’d have to pay the same amount of money every month as if you had gotten a subsidized phone. Google’s Nexus phones are also great options for people looking to buy smartphones and pay up-front. Google’s Nexus 4 offered a modern, almost top-of-the-line Android smartphone experience at $299 or $349 when it came out last year. Google will soon be releasing the Nexus 5 and it’s expected to be priced at $349. That’s certainly a lot more than a cheap phone, but it’s a fairly high-end smartphone at almost half the price of an iPhone 5S or Galaxy S4. Nexus phones can be purchased online from Google’s Play Store. Service Options When choosing a service, you need to consider what you actually use. If you’re someone who only uses your phone rarely, you can get plans that will allow you to pay as little as a few dollars per month. If you’re someone who’s usually in range of Wi-Fi, you may not need much data at all. If you want a plan with unlimited talk, texting, and data usage, you can get it for much cheaper than you’d pay on a major carrier like AT&T. The options here range from pay-as-you-go plans, like the ones offered by T-Mobile, which allow you to put a certain amount of money in and only drain that balance when you actually use minutes, texts, or data. If you only make a few calls and send a few texts per month, you’d only pay a few bucks. On the other end, Walmart’s Straight Talk service is a popular option that offers unlimited talk, texting, and data at $45 per month. Which service is right for you depends on a lot of things, including your usage and what each network’s coverage is like in your area. You’ll want to do some research of your own before choosing a service. Prepaid services also offer you even more flexibility after you choose one. If you’re not happy or a better deal comes along, you can switch — you’re not locked into your service for two years and you won’t pay an early termination fee. Image Credit: Intel Free Press on Flickr, Jon Fingas on Flickr, John Karakatsanis on Flickr, kendalkinggroup on Flickr     

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• Join our Marketing Intelligence Team in Dublin!

  - by jessica.ebbelaar

  Do you want to work with the brightest minds in the industry? Want to be part of a global team that’s changing the way the world does business? Then Oracle is the place for YOU. Join now as a Marketing Intelligence Representative. You will have the opportunity to develop within the role through working alongside the Business Development, Sales and Marketing teams within Oracle. The Marketing Intelligence Group is viewed as a true talent pool for the Business Development and Sales Teams. Oracle offers a structured training programme for Marketing Intelligence Representatives and Business Development Consultants including our approved sales certified training methodology along with regular product training. Miriam started her career as a Marketing Intelligence Representative six years ago, and shares what she has learned and how her career is progressing. My Career Path at Oracle: June 2005 – October 2005: Profiler in the Marketing Intelligence Team November 2005 - October 2006: Team Leader for MIT November 2006 - February 2008: Business Development Consultant Iberia March 2008 - December 2010: Lead Management Specialist Currently: Sales Program Manager for Iberia & Benelux What did you learn from your role in the Market Intelligence Team Being a Profiler helped me to understand how an organisation works, from the beginning to the end. It is like being in University but being paid! The three key things I learnt in this role are: Knowledge of customers: You are on the phone with over 70 customers daily. Not only does this give you an overview of the IT infrastructure of the customers companies but also how to manage their questions and rejections. Essentially you are learning how to convert their pain and complaints into business opportunities. Knowledge of Oracle: As a Profiler you get an excellent overview of how Oracle works internally, from Marketing to Sales, without forgetting the Operations Team. Knowledge about yourself: As a Profiler I learnt how to work outside of my comfort zone, there is a new challenge almost every day but Oracle are there to support you every step of the way. Oracle really invests in developing the MIT Team and as a Profiler you can expect product and sales training on a monthly basis. How did you progress from MIT to Business Development Group (BDG)? I made sure that my manager knew from the very beginning that I was keen to progress at Oracle and I was set very clear objectives to help me reach my goal.  My manager was very supportive and ensured I received all the training I needed. After I became a Team Leader of Profiling, I moved to an Iberia BDG position. How you feel your experience in MI has helped you in your current role? I truly believe that the MI position gives you a great overview of Oracle and this has really helped me in my current position.  I am the Sales Program Manager for IBERIA & Benelux and in my campaigns I need to target the right companies and the right job specs.  My time in the Market Intelligence team really helped me to understand how to focus and target my campaigns so I know I don’t miss any business opportunities! How would you sum up your Oracle experience? Oracle is a big organisation with big opportunities. With the right skills and with the great training programs that Oracle offer, the only limit is you! If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact [email protected] You can find all our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com. Tags van Technorati: Marketing Intelligence,Benelux,Iberia,Profiler,Business Development,Sales Representatives,BDG,Business Development Group,opportunities,Oracle

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• SQLAuthority News – Stay Connected and Social Media

  - by pinaldave

  I think I have finally gotten back my faith in social media. If you are following my blog I am sure you are aware of my views on social media – SQLAuthority News – Social Media Confusion – Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and Me. I was not happy about how social media was evolving. Whenever I go to Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, I noticed the same updates everywhere. I just thought I was wasting my time doing the same thing everywhere. I strongly believe that there is no dictator on internet. Nobody has authority over others, everybody can express their ideas as long as it is not violating others privacy and it is not morally wrong. I have decided that instead of trying to improve the world, I should change myself and adjust my needs. Here are few things I have done to relieve my social media confusion. Twitter I un-followed people who were taking up my time with too many updates. I un-followed people who hardly updated at all. I did not follow anybody else’s list, as I have no control over who other people follow. I follow not only serious SQL people but some fun stuff as well. I removed all my friends who were on Facebook and repeating the same updates on Twitter. I engage with them on Facebook. I followed people who are very conversational on Twitter. I let anybody follow me. I update all my blog posts through at least five tweets online. I decided to re-tweet at least five of my favorite tweets of the day, this way I force myself to remain active in the community. Follow me on Twitter! LinkedIn I updated my career and professional info on LinkedIn. I keep my LinkedIn profile updated with my latest jobs and career news. I let anybody connect with me on LinkedIn. I specify my email address in my profile, keeping it easy for those who want to add me. I read all the profile related updates of my connections – it is very valuable to know who is where and what changes are happening. I do not add my personal tweets or comments in LinkedIn profile. I just keep it professional. Link with me at LinkedIn Facebook I use Facebook only for personal friends. I visit all of my friends at regular intervals and make sure that they are really my friends. I often remove my friends from my Twitter list who are sending duplicate updates. I upload my family photos as well as family updates on Facebook, making sure that only my approved friends are able to read my updates. I keep my Facebook very personal and I often chat with my friends on Facebook chat. I am no longer confused about social media and I think I am using it appropriately. As I said, one cannot decide for others how to use social media, you can only decide for yourself. I have finally found my peace with social media. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Visual Studio Extensions

  - by Scott Dorman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman/archive/2013/10/18/visual-studio-extensions.aspxAs a product, Visual Studio has been around for a long time. In fact, it’s been 18 years since the first Visual Studio product was launched. In that time, there have been some major changes but perhaps the most important (or at least influential) changes for the course of the product have been in the last few years. While we can argue over what was and wasn’t an important change or what has and hasn’t changed, I want to talk about what I think is the single most important change Microsoft has made to Visual Studio. Specifically, I’m referring to the Visual Studio Gallery (first introduced in Visual Studio 2010) and the ability for third-parties to easily write extensions which can add new functionality to Visual Studio or even change existing functionality. I know Visual Studio had this ability before the Gallery existed, but it was expensive (both from a financial and development resource) perspective for a company or individual to write such an extension. The Visual Studio Gallery changed all of that. As of today, there are over 4000 items in the Gallery. Microsoft itself has over 100 items in the Gallery and more are added all of the time. Why is this such an important feature? Simply put, it allows third-parties (companies such as JetBrains, Telerik, Red Gate, Devart, and DevExpress, just to name a few) to provide enhanced developer productivity experiences directly within the product by providing new functionality or changing existing functionality. However, there is an even more important function that it serves. It also allows Microsoft to do the same. By providing extensions which add new functionality or change existing functionality, Microsoft is not only able to rapidly innovate on new features and changes but to also get those changes into the hands of developers world-wide for feedback. The end result is that these extensions become very robust and often end up becoming part of a later product release. An excellent example of this is the new CodeLens feature of Visual Studio 2013. This is, perhaps, the single most important developer productivity enhancement released in the last decade and already has huge potential. As you can see, out of the box CodeLens supports showing you information about references, unit tests and TFS history.   Fortunately, CodeLens is also accessible to Visual Studio extensions, and Microsoft DevLabs has already written such an extension to show code “health.” This extension shows different code metrics to help make sure your code is maintainable. At this point, you may have already asked yourself, “With over 4000 extensions, how do I find ones that are good?” That’s a really good question. Fortunately, the Visual Studio Gallery has a ratings system in place, which definitely helps but that’s still a lot of extensions to look through. To that end, here is my personal list of favorite extensions. This is something I started back when Visual Studio 2010 was first released, but so much has changed since then that I thought it would be good to provide an updated list for Visual Studio 2013. These are extensions that I have installed and use on a regular basis as a developer that I find indispensible. This list is in no particular order. NuGet Package Manager for Visual Studio 2013 Microsoft CodeLens Code Health Indicator Visual Studio Spell Checker Indent Guides Web Essentials 2013 VSCommands for Visual Studio 2013 Productivity Power Tools (right now this is only for Visual Studio 2012, but it should be updated to support Visual Studio 2013.) Everyone has their own set of favorites, so mine is probably not going to match yours. If there is an extension that you really like, feel free to leave me a comment!

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• The JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  At the JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote, held at the Masonic Auditorium, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group, stated that they were going to do things a bit differently--"rather than 20 minutes of SE, and 20 minutes of FX, and 20 minutes of EE, we're going to mix it up a little," he said. "For much of it, we're going to be showing a single application, to show off some of the great work that's been done in the last year, and how Java can scale well--from the cloud all the way down to some very small embedded devices, and how JavaFX scales right along with it."Richard Bair and Jasper Potts from the JavaFX team demonstrated a JavaOne schedule builder application with impressive navigation, animation, pop-overs, and transitions. They noted that the application runs seamlessly on either Windows or Macs, running Java 7. They then ran the same application on an Ubuntu Linux machine--"it just works," said Blair.The JavaFX duo next put the recently released JavaFX Scene Builder through its paces -- dragging and dropping various image assets to build the application's UI, then fine tuning a CSS file for the finished look and feel. Among many other new features, in the past six months, JavaFX has released support for H.264 and HTTP live streaming, "so you can get all the real media playing inside your JavaFX application," said Bair. And in their developer preview builds of JavaFX 8, they've now split the rendering thread from the UI thread, to better take advantage of multi-core architectures.Next, Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect, explored language and library features planned for Java SE 8, including Lambda expressions and better parallel libraries. These feature changes both simplify code and free-up libraries to more effectively use parallelism. "It's currently still a lot of work to convert an application from serial to parallel," noted Goetz.Reinhold had previously boasted of Java scaling down to "small embedded devices," so Blair and Potts next ran their schedule builder application on a small embedded PandaBoard system with an OMAP4 chip set. Connected to a touch screen, the embedded board ran the same JavaFX application previously seen on the desktop systems, but now running on Java SE Embedded. (The systems can be seen and tried at four of the nearby JavaOne hotels.) Bob Vandette, Java Embedded Architect, then displayed a $25 Rasberry Pi ARM-based system running Java SE Embedded, noting the even greater need for the platform independence of Java in such highly varied embedded processor spaces. Reinhold and Vandetta discussed Project Jigsaw, the planned modularization of the Java SE platform, and its deferral from the Java 8 release to Java 9. Reinhold demonstrated the promise of Jigsaw by running a modularized demo version of the earlier schedule builder application on the resource constrained Rasberry Pi system--although the demo gods were not smiling down, and the application ultimately crashed.Reinhold urged developers to become involved in the Java 8 development process--getting the weekly builds, trying out their current code, and trying out the new features:http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/spechttp://jdk8.java.netFrom there, Arun Gupta explored Java EE. The primary themes of Java EE 7, Gupta stated, will be greater productivity, and HTML 5 functionality (WebSocket, JSON, and HTML 5 forms). Part of the planned productivity increase of the release will come from a reduction in writing boilerplate code--through the widespread use of dependency injection in the platform, along with default data sources and default connection factories. Gupta noted the inclusion of JAX-RS in the web profile, the changes and improvements found in JMS 2.0, as well as enhancements to Java EE 7 in terms of JPA 2.1 and EJB 3.2. GlassFish 4 is the reference implementation of Java EE 7, and currently includes WebSocket, JSON, JAX-RS 2.0, JMS 2.0, and more. The final release is targeted for Q2, 2013. Looking forward to Java EE 8, Gupta explored how the platform will provide multi-tenancy for applications, modularity based on Jigsaw, and cloud architecture. Meanwhile, Project Avatar is the group's incubator project for designing an end-to-end framework for building HTML 5 applications. Santiago Pericas-Geertsen joined Gupta to demonstrate their "Angry Bids" auction/live-bid/chat application using many of the enhancements of Java EE 7, along with an Avatar HTML 5 infrastructure, and running on the GlassFish reference implementation.Finally, Gupta covered Project Easel, an advanced tooling capability in NetBeans for HTML5. John Ceccarelli, NetBeans Engineering Director, joined Gupta to demonstrate creating an HTML 5 project from within NetBeans--formatting the project for both desktop and smartphone implementations. Ceccarelli noted that NetBeans 7.3 beta will be released later this week, and will include support for creating such HTML 5 project types. Gupta directed conference attendees to: http://glassfish.org/javaone2012 for everything about Java EE and GlassFish at JavaOne 2012.

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• SQL SERVER – Renaming Index – Index Naming Conventions

  - by pinaldave

  If you are regular reader of this blog, you must be aware of that there are two kinds of blog posts 1) I share what I learn recently 2) I share what I learn and request your participation. Today’s blog post is where I need your opinion to make this blog post a good reference for future. Background Story Recently I came across system where users have changed the name of the few of the table to match their new standard naming convention. The name of the table should be self explanatory and they should have explain their purpose without either opening it or reading documentations. Well, not every time this is possible but again this should be the goal of any database modeler. Well, I no way encourage the name of the tables to be too long like ‘ContainsDetailsofNewInvoices’. May be the name of the table should be ‘Invoices’ and table should contain a column with New/Processed bit filed to indicate if the invoice is processed or not (if necessary). Coming back to original story, the database had several tables of which the name were changed. Story Continues… To continue the story let me take simple example. There was a table with the name  ’ReceivedInvoices’, it was changed to new name as ‘TblInvoices’. As per their new naming standard they had to prefix every talbe with the words ‘Tbl’ and prefix every view with the letters ‘Vw’. Personally I do not see any need of the prefix but again, that issue is not here to discuss.  Now after changing the name of the table they faced very interesting situation. They had few indexes on the table which had name of the table. Let us take an example. Old Name of Table: ReceivedInvoice Old Name of Index: Index_ReceivedInvoice1 Here is the new names New Name of Table: TblInvoices New Name of Index: ??? Well, their dilemma was what should be the new naming convention of the Indexes. Here is a quick proposal of the Index naming convention. Do let me know your opinion. If Index is Primary Clustered Index: PK_TableName If Index is  Non-clustered Index: IX_TableName_ColumnName1_ColumnName2… If Index is Unique Non-clustered Index: UX_TableName_ColumnName1_ColumnName2… If Index is Columnstore Non-clustered Index: CL_TableName Here ColumnName is the column on which index is created. As there can be only one Primary Key Index and Columnstore Index per table, they do not require ColumnName in the name of the index. The purpose of this new naming convention is to increase readability. When any user come across this index, without opening their properties or definition, user can will know the details of the index. T-SQL script to Rename Indexes Here is quick T-SQL script to rename Indexes EXEC sp_rename N'SchemaName.TableName.IndexName', N'New_IndexName', N'INDEX'; GO Your Contribute Please Well, the organization has already defined above four guidelines, personally I follow very similar guidelines too. I have seen many variations like adding prefixes CL for Clustered Index and NCL for Non-clustered Index. I have often seen many not using UX prefix for Unique Index but rather use generic IX prefix only. Now do you think if they have missed anything in the coding standard. Is NCI and CI prefixed required to additionally describe the index names. I have once received suggestion to even add fill factor in the index name – which I do not recommend at all. What do you think should be ideal name of the index, so it explains all the most important properties? Additionally, you are welcome to vote if you believe changing the name of index is just waste of time and energy.  Note: The purpose of the blog post is to encourage all to participate with their ideas. I will write follow up blog posts in future compiling all the suggestions. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• How To Customize Wallpaper in Windows 7 Starter Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  If you have the Starter Edition of Windows 7 installed on your netbook you may be sick of looking at the default wallpaper. With Starter Background Changer you can access other customization options with ease. Before There is not a lot that you can say about the singular default wallpaper included with the Starter Edition…it just kind of sits there all boring like. Installing Starter Background Changer Since the installer part of the program is in French we have the entire set of install windows shown here with the appropriate buttons highlighted to get you through the whole process without any problems. Using Starter Background Changer Once the installation process has finished you will simply see a quiet screen with no desktop icons or Start Menu entries visible. Now if you are wondering at this point “Did the program finish installing or did it install at all?” the answer is yes. Right click on your desktop and you will notice a new entry on the Context Menu…the same one that is included in the other editions but not Starter. Time to have some fun… The Personalization Window will open maximized but we have reduced it here for our screenshots. You have four regular categories to choose from in the lower part of the window: Wallpaper, Colors, Sounds, & Screensavers. The first category that we chose for our example was Wallpaper. As you can see here the main display area (My Collection) has no wallpapers showing at the moment. You can use the drop-down menu to access your My Pictures Folder or browse for a different location. Notice that you can choose how the image fills the screen and set up a timed wallpaper slideshow at the bottom. Any picture (or pictures) selected will be added to the My Collection display for easy access the next time you open the window. Once you choose a picture click on Validate the modification to set the wallpaper for your desktop and return to the main window. When you return to the main window you will see a preview for your selection. At this point you can simply close the window or make further adjustments in the other categories. Starter Background Changer provides easy one-stop access to other customization areas. We started off with Colors… Followed by Sounds… And finally Screensavers. Before you do close the main window you can take a quick look at the Options if desired. We did set Optimization of the images to High on our system. Quick and easy wallpaper satisfaction. We did pin the Program Window to our Taskbar…nice if you prefer this method as opposed to the Desktop Context Menu. Conclusion If you have been longing for a way to change the wallpaper in Windows 7 Starter Edition then you will definitely want to give this program a try. Goodbye boring default wallpaper! For more wonderful ways to customize your Windows 7 Started Edition be sure to read our article here. Links Download Starter Background Changer Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Awesome Desktop Wallpapers: The Windows 7 EditionWindows 7 Welcome Screen Taking Forever? Here’s the Fix (Maybe)Desktop Fun: Starship Theme WallpapersDesktop Fun: Starscape Theme WallpapersDesktop Fun: Fantasy Theme Wallpapers TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

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• SPARC T4-4 Delivers World Record Performance on Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 Benchmark

  - by Brian

  Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server delivered world record performance with subsecond response time on the Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 benchmark using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle Solaris 11. The SPARC T4-4 server achieved throughput of 430,000 cube-queries/hour with an average response time of 0.85 seconds and the median response time of 0.43 seconds. This was achieved by using only 60% of the available CPU resources leaving plenty of headroom for future growth. The SPARC T4-4 server operated on an Oracle OLAP cube with a 4 billion row fact table of sales data containing 4 dimensions. This represents as many as 90 quintillion aggregate rows (90 followed by 18 zeros). Performance Landscape Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 Benchmark 4 Billion Fact Table Rows System Queries/hour Users* Response Time (sec) Average Median SPARC T4-4 430,000 7,300 0.85 0.43 * Users - the supported number of users with a given think time of 60 seconds Configuration Summary and Results Hardware Configuration: SPARC T4-4 server with 4 x SPARC T4 processors, 3.0 GHz 1 TB memory Data Storage 1 x Sun Fire X4275 (using COMSTAR) 2 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (each with 80 FMODs) Redo Storage 1 x Sun Fire X4275 (using COMSTAR with 8 HDD) Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.3) with Oracle OLAP option Benchmark Description The Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 benchmark is a workload designed to demonstrate and stress the Oracle OLAP product's core features of fast query, fast update, and rich calculations on a multi-dimensional model to support enhanced Data Warehousing. The bulk of the benchmark entails running a number of concurrent users, each issuing typical multidimensional queries against an Oracle OLAP cube consisting of a number of years of sales data with fully pre-computed aggregations. The cube has four dimensions: time, product, customer, and channel. Each query user issues approximately 150 different queries. One query chain may ask for total sales in a particular region (e.g South America) for a particular time period (e.g. Q4 of 2010) followed by additional queries which drill down into sales for individual countries (e.g. Chile, Peru, etc.) with further queries drilling down into individual stores, etc. Another query chain may ask for yearly comparisons of total sales for some product category (e.g. major household appliances) and then issue further queries drilling down into particular products (e.g. refrigerators, stoves. etc.), particular regions, particular customers, etc. Results from version 2 of the benchmark are not comparable with version 1. The primary difference is the type of queries along with the query mix. Key Points and Best Practices Since typical BI users are often likely to issue similar queries, with different constants in the where clauses, setting the init.ora prameter "cursor_sharing" to "force" will provide for additional query throughput and a larger number of potential users. Except for this setting, together with making full use of available memory, out of the box performance for the OLAP Perf workload should provide results similar to what is reported here. For a given number of query users with zero think time, the main measured metrics are the average query response time, the median query response time, and the query throughput. A derived metric is the maximum number of users the system can support achieving the measured response time assuming some non-zero think time. The calculation of the maximum number of users follows from the well-known response-time law N = (rt + tt) * tp where rt is the average response time, tt is the think time and tp is the measured throughput. Setting tt to 60 seconds, rt to 0.85 seconds and tp to 119.44 queries/sec (430,000 queries/hour), the above formula shows that the T4-4 server will support 7,300 concurrent users with a think time of 60 seconds and an average response time of 0.85 seconds. For more information see chapter 3 from the book "Quantitative System Performance" cited below. -- See Also Quantitative System Performance Computer System Analysis Using Queueing Network Models Edward D. Lazowska, John Zahorjan, G. Scott Graham, Kenneth C. Sevcik external local Oracle Database 11g – Oracle OLAP oracle.com OTN SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 11/2/2012.

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• An Unusual UpdatePanel

  - by João Angelo

  The code you are about to see was mostly to prove a point, to myself, and probably has limited applicability. Nonetheless, in the remote possibility this is useful to someone here it goes… So this is a control that acts like a normal UpdatePanel where all child controls are registered as postback triggers except for a single control specified by the TriggerControlID property. You could basically achieve the same thing by registering all controls as postback triggers in the regular UpdatePanel. However with this, that process is performed automatically. Finally, here is the code: public sealed class SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel : WebControl, INamingContainer { public string TriggerControlID { get; set; } [TemplateInstance(TemplateInstance.Single)] [PersistenceMode(PersistenceMode.InnerProperty)] public ITemplate ContentTemplate { get; set; } public override ControlCollection Controls { get { this.EnsureChildControls(); return base.Controls; } } protected override void CreateChildControls() { if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(this.TriggerControlID)) throw new InvalidOperationException( "The TriggerControlId property must be set."); this.Controls.Clear(); var updatePanel = new UpdatePanel() { ID = string.Concat(this.ID, "InnerUpdatePanel"), ChildrenAsTriggers = false, UpdateMode = UpdatePanelUpdateMode.Conditional, ContentTemplate = this.ContentTemplate }; updatePanel.Triggers.Add(new SingleControlAsyncUpdatePanelTrigger { ControlID = this.TriggerControlID }); this.Controls.Add(updatePanel); } } internal sealed class SingleControlAsyncUpdatePanelTrigger : UpdatePanelControlTrigger { private Control target; private ScriptManager scriptManager; public Control Target { get { if (this.target == null) { this.target = this.FindTargetControl(true); } return this.target; } } public ScriptManager ScriptManager { get { if (this.scriptManager == null) { var page = base.Owner.Page; if (page != null) { this.scriptManager = ScriptManager.GetCurrent(page); } } return this.scriptManager; } } protected override bool HasTriggered() { string asyncPostBackSourceElementID = this.ScriptManager.AsyncPostBackSourceElementID; if (asyncPostBackSourceElementID == this.Target.UniqueID) return true; return asyncPostBackSourceElementID.StartsWith( string.Concat(this.target.UniqueID, "$"), StringComparison.Ordinal); } protected override void Initialize() { base.Initialize(); foreach (Control control in FlattenControlHierarchy(this.Owner.Controls)) { if (control == this.Target) continue; bool isApplicableControl = false; isApplicableControl |= control is INamingContainer; isApplicableControl |= control is IPostBackDataHandler; isApplicableControl |= control is IPostBackEventHandler; if (isApplicableControl) { this.ScriptManager.RegisterPostBackControl(control); } } } private static IEnumerable<Control> FlattenControlHierarchy( ControlCollection collection) { foreach (Control control in collection) { yield return control; if (control.Controls.Count > 0) { foreach (Control child in FlattenControlHierarchy(control.Controls)) { yield return child; } } } } } You can use it like this, meaning that only the B2 button will trigger an async postback: <cc:SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel ID="Test" runat="server" TriggerControlID="B2"> <ContentTemplate> <asp:Button ID="B1" Text="B1" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Button ID="B2" Text="B2" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Button ID="B3" Text="B3" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Label ID="LInner" Text="LInner" runat="server" /> </ContentTemplate> </cc:SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel>

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• Review&ndash;Build Android and iOS apps in Visual Studio with Nomad

  - by Bill Osuch

  Nomad is a Visual Studio extension that allows you build apps for both Android and iOS platforms in Visual Studio using HTML5. There is no need to switch between .Net, Java and Objective-C to target different platforms - write your code once in HTML5 and build for all common mobile platforms and tablets. You have access to the native hardware functions (such as camera and GPS) through the PhoneGap library, UI libraries such as jQuery mobile allow you to create an impressive UI with minimal work. Nomad is still in an early access beta stage, so the documentation is a bit sparse. In fact, the only documentation is a simple series of steps on how to install the plug-in, set up a project, build and deploy it. You're going to want to be a least a little familiar with the PhoneGap library and jQuery mobile to really tap into the power of this. The sample project included with the download shows you just how simple it is to create projects in Visual Studio. The sample solution comes with an index.html file containing the HTML5 code, the Cordova (PhoneGap) library, jQuery libraries, and a JQuery style sheet: The html file is pretty straightforward. If you haven't experimented with JQuery mobile before, some of the attributes (such as data-role) might be new to you, but some quick Googling will fill in everything you need to know. The first part of the file builds a simple (but attractive) list with some links in it: The second part of the file is where things get interesting and it taps into the PhoneGap library. For instance, it gets the geolocation position by calling position.coords.latitude and position.coords.longitude: ...and then displays it in a simple span: Building is pretty simple, at least for Android (I'm not an iOS developer so I didn't look at that feature) - just configure the display name, version number, and package ID. There's no need to specify Android version; Nomad supports 2.2 and later. Enter these bits of information, click the new "Build for Android" button (not the regular Visual Studio Build link...) and you get a dialog box saying that your code is being built by their cloud build service (so no building while away from a WiFi signal apparently). After a couple minutes you wind up with a .apk file that can be copied over to your device. Applications built with Nomad for Android currently use a temporary certificate, so you can test the app on your devices but you cannot publish them in the Google Play Store (yet). And I love the "success" dialog box: Since Nomad is still in Beta, no pricing plans have been announced yet, so I'll be curious to see if this becomes a cost-effective solution to mobile app development. If it is, I may even be tempted to spring for the $99 iOS membership fee! In the meantime, I plan to work on porting some of my apps over to it and seeing how they work. My only quibble at this time is the lack of a centralized documentation location - I'd like to at least see which (if any) features of JQuery and PhoneGap are limited or not supported. Also, some notes on targeting different Android screen sizes would be nice, but it's relatively easy to find jQuery examples out on the InterWebs. Oh well, trial and error! You can download the Nomad extension for Visual Studio by going to their web site: www.vsnomad.com. Technorati Tags: Android, Nomad

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• The Arab HEUG is now a reality, and other random thoughts

  - by user9147039

  I just returned from Doha, Qatar where the first of its kind HEUG (Higher Education User Group) meeting for institutions in the Middle East and North Africa was held at Qatar University and jointly hosted by Damman University from Saudi Arabia. Over 80 delegates attended including representation from education institutions in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Qatar. There are many other regional HEUG organizations in place (in Australia/New Zealand, APAC, EMEA, as well as smaller regional HEUG’s in the Netherlands, South Africa, and in regions of the US), but it was truly an accomplishment to see this Middle East/North Africa group organize and launch their chapter with a meeting of this quality. To be known as the Arab HEUG going forward, I am excited about the prospects for sharing between the institutions and for the growth of Oracle solutions in the region. In particular the hosts for the event (Qatar University) did a masterful job with logistics and organization, and the quality of the event was a testament to their capabilities. Among the more interesting and enlightening presentations I attended were one from Dammam University on the lessons learned from their implementation of Campus Solutions and transition off of Banner, as well as the use by Qatar University E-business Suite for grants management (both pre-and post-award). The most notable fact coming from this latter presentation was the fit (89%) of e-Business Suite Grants to the university’s requirements. In a few weeks time we will be convening the 5th meeting of the Oracle Education & Research Industry Strategy Council in Redwood Shores (5th since my advent into my current role). The main topics of discussion will be around our Higher Education Applications Strategy for the future (including cloud approaches to ERP (HCM, Finance, and Student Information Systems), how some cases studies on the benefits of leveraging delivered functionality and extensibility in the software (versus customization). On the second day of the event we will turn our attention to Oracle in Research and also budgeting and planning in higher education. Both of these sessions will include significant participation from council members in the form of panel discussions. Our EVP’s for Systems (John Fowler) and for Global Cloud Services and North America application sales (Joanne Olson) will join us for the discussion. I recently read a couple of articles that were surprising to me. The first was from Inside Higher Ed on October 15 entitled, “As colleges prepare for major software upgrades, Kuali tries to woo them from corporate vendors.” It continues to disappointment that after all this time we are still debating whether it is better to build enterprise software through open or community source initiatives when fully functional, flexible, supported, and widely adopted options exist in the marketplace. Over a decade or more ago when these solutions were relatively immature and there was a great deal of turnover in the market I could appreciate the initiatives like Kuali. But let’s not kid ourselves – the real objective of this movement is to counter a perceived predatory commercial software industry. Again, when commercial solutions are deployed as written without significant customization, and standard business processes are adopted, the cost of these solutions (relative to the value delivered) is quite low, and certain much lower than the massive investment (and risk) in in-house developers to support a bespoke community source system. In this era of cost pressures in education and the need to refocus resources on teaching, learning, and research, I believe it’s bordering on irresponsible to continue to pursue open-source ERP. Many of the adopter’s total costs are staggering and have little to show for their efforts and expended resources. The second article was recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education and was entitled “’Big Data’ Is Bunk, Obama Campaign’s Tech Guru Tells University Leaders.” This one was so outrageous I almost don’t want to legitimize it by referencing it here. In the article the writer relays statements made by Harper Reed, President Obama’s former CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, that big data solutions in education have no relevance and are akin to snake oil. He goes on to state that while he’s a fan of data-driven decision making in education, most of the necessary analysis can be accomplished in Excel spreadsheets. Yeah… right. This is exactly what ails education (higher education in particular). Dozens of shadow and siloed systems running on spreadsheets with limited-to-no enterprise wide initiatives to harness the data-rich environment that is a higher ed institution and transform the data into useable information. I’ll grant Mr. Reed that “Big Data” is overused and hackneyed, but imperatives like improving student success in higher education are classic big data problems that data-mining and predictive analytics can address. Further, higher ed need to be producing a massive amount more data scientists and analysts than are currently in the pipeline, to further this discipline and application of these tools to many many other problems across multiple industries.

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