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• BI&EPM in Focus November 2013

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

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE IBM is Embracing Oracle Exalytics: The Velocity of Thought and Action (link) Customers Ambulance Victoria, Australia, uses analytics and modelling to serve the expanding needs of a growing population (link) Cablemás Selects Oracle to Speed Customer Data Insights (link) National Instruments Introduces New Business Intelligence Solutions—Runs Reports up to 30x Faster, and Expands Customer Insight (link) FLSmidth Ensures Precise, Transparent Financial Reporting at All Business Levels, Reduces Financial Consolidation Time by up to 40% (link) Enterprise Performance Management Partner Edgewater Ranzal Webinar Series Mitigate Your Biggest EPM Project Risk - Thursday, 21st November - Register here:  4.00 GMT Capital Planning in the Energy Industry - Tuesday, 26th November - Register here:  4.00 GMT Driving Value in the Retail Industry Using Hyperion Strategic Finance (HSF)  - Tuesday, 10th December - Register here:  7.00 GMT Dec 11, Look Smarter Selling Hyperion Profitability & Cost Management (HPCM) Webcast (link) EPM System Infrastructure Tips & Tricks Support: November EPM Patch Set Updates released Business Analytics Monthly Index - October 2013 Hyperion Smart View Assistance with OBIEE 11.1.1.7 Hyperion Disclosure Management 11.1.2.3.330 PSU 17444967 [Doc ID 1592645.1] Hyperion Financial Close Management (FCM) 11.1.2.3.100 PSU 16989110 [Doc ID 1592644.1] Business  Intelligence BI-Apps Whitepaper: Packaged Analytic Applications: Accelerating Time and Value By Wayne Eckerson (link) BI Apps Blog: A Closer Look at Oracle Price Analytics (link) Blog: Taking Your Business Scorecard Golfing (link) Blog: Practical Uses of Business Scorecards, from Company-Wide to Process Specific (link) Nov 19, Big Data at Work Series: How Delphi Harnesses Big Data to Improve Warranty Response & Customer Satisfaction (link) Rittman Mead Blog: Oracle BI Apps 11.1.1.7.1 – GoldenGate Integration Support: OBIEE Suite Bundle Patches (understand OBIEE naming convention) [Doc ID 1591422.1] Support Blog: Java update alert: Essbase Administration Services (EAS) 11.1.2.3 (link) Support Blog: OBIEE 11.1.1.7.131017 now available (link) /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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• Seven Accounting Changes for 2010

  - by Theresa Hickman

  I read a very interesting article called Seven Accounting Changes That Will Affect Your 2010 Annual Report from SmartPros that nicely summarized how 2010 annual financial statements will be impacted.  Here’s a Reader’s Digest version of the changes: 1.  Changes to revenue recognition if you sell bundled products with multiple deliverables: Old Rule: You needed to objectively establish the “fair value” of each bundled item. So if you sold a dishwasher plus installation and could not establish the fair value of the installation, you might have to delay recognizing revenue of the dishwasher days or weeks later until it was installed. New Rule (ASU 2009-13): “Objective” proof of each service or good is no longer required; you can simply estimate the selling price of the installation and warranty. So the dishwasher vendor can recognize the dishwasher revenue immediately at the point of sale without waiting a few weeks for the installation. Then they can recognize the estimated value of the installation after it is complete. 2.  Changes to revenue recognition for devices with embedded software: Old Rule: Hardware devices with embedded software, such as the iPhone, had to follow stringent software revrec rules. This forced Apple to recognize iPhone revenues over two years, the period of time that software updates were provided. New Rule (ASU 2009-14): Software revrec rules no longer apply to these devices with embedded software; these devices can now follow ASU 2009-13. This allows vendors, such as Apple, to recognize revenue sooner. 3.  Fair value disclosures: Companies (both public and private) now need to spend extra time gathering, summarizing, and disclosing information about items measured at fair value, such as significant transfers in and out of Level 1(quoted market price), Level 2 (valuation based on observable markets), and Level 3 (valuations based on internal information). 4.  Consolidation of variable interest entities (a.k.a special purpose entities): Consolidation rules for variable interest entities now require a qualitative, not quantitative, analysis to determine the primary beneficiary. Instead of simply looking at the percentage of voting interests, the primary beneficiary could have less than the majority interests as long as it has the power to direct the activities and absorb any losses.  5.  XBRL: Starting in June 2011, all U.S. public companies are required to file financial statements to the SEC using XBRL. Note: Oracle supports XBRL reporting. 6.  Non-GAAP financial disclosures: Companies that report non-GAAP measures of performance, such as EBITDA in SEC filings, have more flexibility.  The new interpretations can be found here: http://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/guidance/nongaapinterp.htm.  7.  Loss contingencies disclosures: Companies should expect additional scrutiny of their loss disclosures, such as those from litigation losses, in their annual financial statements. The SEC wants more disclosures about loss contingencies sooner instead of after the cases are settled.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 10-24-2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Play Oracle Vanquisher Here's a little respite from whatever it is you normally spend your time on. Oracle Vanquisher is an online diversion that makes a game of data center optimization. According to the description: "Armed with a cool Oracle vacuum pack suit and a strategic IT roadmap, you will thwart threats and optimize your data center to increase your company’s stock price and boost your company's position." Mainly you avoid electric shock and killer birds. The current high score belongs to someone identified as "TEN." My score? Never mind. Book: DevOps for Developers | The Java Source The subject of DevOps has come up in a couple of recent OTN ArchBeat Podcasts, so it's somewhat serendipitous that Tori Weildt's recent blog post offers an overview of Java Champion Michael Hutterman's new book, DevOps for Developers, now available from Apress. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) : Context is everything… | The ORACLE-BASE Blog BOYD is a factor in the evolution of IT, but in what context? "The real IT work in companies is still being done on PCs," says Oracle ACE Director Tim Hall. "Yes, you can use a cloud service on your phone, but look around the office and you will see those cloud services are actually being used by people on PCs." Oracle in the Cloud: Oracle EBusiness Suite sizing | Tom Laszewski Cloud expert Tom Laszewski shares several technical resources that will be helpful for sizing of Oracle EBusiness Suite. Setting Up, Configuring, and Using an Oracle WebLogic Server Cluster Author and expert Yuli Vasiliev shows you how take advantage of multiple Oracle WebLogic Server instances grouped into a cluster to maximize scalability and availability. Webcast: Reduce Costs with Oracle's Database Storage Management Watch this! Join Oracle experts Kevin Jernigan and Margaret Hamburger for an interactive webcast in which you'll learn how Oracle's Database Storage Management can reduce storage costs and management complexity while improving query performance to meet service-level agreements and compliance requirements. Event Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2012 Event Time: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET Thought for the Day "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves." — Alan Kay Source: softwarequotes.com

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• What to answer to a customer who asks which one of two equivalent technologies must be used?

  - by MainMa

  As a freelancer, I am often asked by my customers what they must choose between similar elements, neither of which being better than another. Examples: “Do I need my e-commerce website be in PHP or ASP.NET?” “Do I need to host this ordinary web service in Cloud or use an ordinary hosting service?” “Which one is better for my new website: MySQL or Oracle?” etc. There is maybe at most 1% of cases where the choice is relevant, and there is a real, objective reason to use one over another, based on the precise metrics and studies. In all other cases, it doesn't matter at all. It is totally, completely irrelevant, either because there are no implications¹, or because those implications are too small to be taken in account², or, finally, because it's impossible to predict those implications³. If you know one thing and not another one, the answer to those questions is easy: “You can either write the application in C# or Java, both being probably equivalent in your case. Note that I'm a C# developer, so if you choose Java, I would not be able to work on your project and you would need to find another freelancer.” When you know both technologies, you can't answer that. In this case, how to explain to the customer that the question he asks is subject to flamewar and has no real consequences on his project? In other words, how to explain that you've chosen to use one technology rather than an equivalent one for the reasons related to human resources, without giving the impression to be unprofessional or to not care about the project? ¹ Example: Is MySQL better (worse?), performance-wise, compared to Oracle, for a personal website which will be accessed by, oh, let's be optimistic, two people per day? ² Example: for a given project, I was asked to asset if Windows Azure hosting would be cheaper than the hosting of the same application on a well-known ASP.NET hosting provider. The cost revealed to be exactly the same. ³ Example: your customer have an idea of a future application (the idea itself being extremely vague). There is no business plan, no requirements, nothing at all. Just an idea. You are asked if Java is better than C# for this app. What do you answer?

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• A little gem from MPN&ndash;FREE online course on Architectural Guidance for Migrating Applications to Windows Azure Platform

  - by Eric Nelson

  I know a lot of technical people who work in partners (ISVs, System Integrators etc). I know that virtually none of them would think of going to the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) learning portal to find some deep and high quality technical content. Instead they would head to MSDN, Channel 9, msdev.com etc. I am one of those people :-) Hence imagine my surprise when i stumbled upon this little gem Architectural Guidance for Migrating Applications to Windows Azure Platform (your company and hence your live id need to be a member of MPN – which is free to join). This is first class stuff – and represents about 4 hours which is really 8 if you stop and ponder :) Course Structure The course is divided into eight modules.  Each module explores a different factor that needs to be considered as part of the migration process. Module 1:  Introduction:  This section provides an introduction to the training course, highlighting the values of the Windows Azure Platform for developers. Module 2:  Dynamic Environment: This section goes into detail about the dynamic environment of the Windows Azure Platform. This session will explain the difference between current development states and the Windows Azure Platform environment, detail the functions of roles, and highlight development considerations to be aware of when working with the Windows Azure Platform. Module 3:  Local State: This session details the local state of the Windows Azure Platform. This section details the different types of storage within the Windows Azure Platform (Blobs, Tables, Queues, and SQL Azure). The training will provide technical guidance on local storage usage, how to write to blobs, how to effectively use table storage, and other authorization methods. Module 4:  Latency and Timeouts: This session goes into detail explaining the considerations surrounding latency, timeouts and how to assess an IT portfolio. Module 5:  Transactions and Bandwidth: This session details the performance metrics surrounding transactions and bandwidth in the Windows Azure Platform environment. This session will detail the transactions and bandwidth costs involved with the Windows Azure Platform and mitigation techniques that can be used to properly manage those costs. Module 6:  Authentication and Authorization: This session details authentication and authorization protocols within the Windows Azure Platform. This session will detail information around web methods of authorization, web identification, Access Control Benefits, and a walkthrough of the Windows Identify Foundation. Module 7:  Data Sensitivity: This session details data considerations that users and developers will experience when placing data into the cloud. This section of the training highlights these concerns, and details the strategies that developers can take to increase the security of their data in the cloud. Module 8:  Summary Provides an overall review of the course.

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• Use Expressions with LINQ to Entities

  - by EltonStoneman

  [Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] Recently I've been putting together a generic approach for paging the response from a WCF service. Paging changes the service signature, so it's not as simple as adding a behavior to an existing service in config, but the complexity of the paging is isolated in a generic base class. We're using the Entity Framework talking to SQL Server, so when we ask for a page using LINQ's .Take() method we get a nice efficient SQL query for just the rows we want, with minimal impact on SQL Server and network traffic. We use the maximum ID of the record returned as a high-water mark (rather than using .Skip() to go to the next record), so the approach caters for records being deleted between page requests. In the paged response we include a HasMorePages indicator, computed by comparing the max ID in the page of results to the max ID for the whole resultset - if the latter is bigger, then there are more pages. In some quick performance testing, the paged version of the service performed much more slowly than the unpaged version, which was unexpected. We narrowed it down to the code which gets the max ID for the full resultset - instead of building an efficient MAX() SQL query, EF was returning the whole resultset and then computing the max ID in the service layer. It's easy to reproduce - take this AdventureWorks query:             var context = new AdventureWorksEntities();             var query = from od in context.SalesOrderDetail                         where od.ModifiedDate >= modified                          && od.SalesOrderDetailID.CompareTo(id) > 0                         orderby od.SalesOrderDetailID                         select od;   We can find the maximum SalesOrderDetailID like this:             var maxIdEfficiently = query.Max(od => od.SalesOrderDetailID);   which produces our efficient MAX() SQL query. If we're doing this generically and we already have the ID function in a Func:             Func<SalesOrderDetail, int> idFunc = od => od.SalesOrderDetailID;             var maxIdInefficiently = query.Max(idFunc);   This fetches all the results from the query and then runs the Max() function in code. If you look at the difference in Reflector, the first call passes an Expression to the Max(), while the second call passes a Func. So it's an easy fix - wrap the Func in an Expression:             Expression<Func<SalesOrderDetail, int>> idExpression = od => od.SalesOrderDetailID;             var maxIdEfficientlyAgain = query.Max(idExpression);   - and we're back to running an efficient MAX() statement. Evidently the EF provider can dissect an Expression and build its equivalent in SQL, but it can't do that with Funcs.

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• My Doors - Why Standards Matter to Business

  - by [email protected]

  By Brian Dayton on April 8, 2010 9:27 PM "Standards save money." "Standards accelerate projects." "Standards make better solutions." What do these statements mean to you? You buy technology solutions like Oracle Applications but you're a business person--trying to close the quarter, get performance reviews processed, negotiate a new sourcing contract, etc. When "standards" come up in presentations and discussions do you: - Nod your head politely - Tune out and check your smart phone - Turn to your IT counterpart and say "Bob's all over this standards thing, right Bob?" Here's why standards matter. My wife wants new external doors downstairs, ones that would get more light into the rooms. Am I OK with that? "Uhh, sure...it's a little dark in the kitchen." - 24 hours ago - wife calls to tell me that she's going to the hardware store and may look at doors - 20 hours ago - wife pulls into driveway, informs me that two doors are in the back of her station wagon, ready for me to carry - 19 hours ago - I re-discovered the fact that it's not fun to carry a solid wood door by myself - 5 hours ago - Local handyman, who was at our house anyway, tells me that the doors we bought will likely cost 2-3x the material cost in installation time and labor...the doors are standard but our doorways aren't We could have done more research. I could be more handy. Sure. But the fact is, my 1951 house wasn't built with me in mind. They built what worked and called it a day. The same holds true with a lot of business applications. They were designed and architected for one-time use with one use-case in mind. Today's business climate is different. If you're going to use your processes and technology to differentiate your business you should have at least a working knowledge of: - How standards can benefit your business - Your IT organization's philosophy around standards - Your vendor's track-record around standards...and watch for those who pay lip-service to standards but don't follow through The rallying cry in most IT organizations today is "learn more about the business, drop the acronyms." I'm not advocating that you go out and learn how to code in Java. But I do believe it will help your business and your decision-making process if you meet IT ½...even ¼ of the way there. Epilogue: The door project has been put on hold and yours truly has to return the doors to the hardware store tomorrow.

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• BIDS Helper 1.6 Beta Release (now with SQL 2012 support!)

  - by Darren Gosbell

  The beta for BIDS Helper 1.6 was just released. We have not updated the version notification just yet as we would like to get some feedback on people's experiences with the SQL 2012 version. So if you are using SQL 2012, go grab it and let us know how you go (you can post a comment on this blog post or on the BIDS Helper site itself). This is the first release that supports SQL 2012 and consequently also the first release that runs in Visual Studio 2010. A big thanks to Greg Galloway for doing the bulk of the work on this release. Please note that if you are doing an xcopy deploy that you will need to unblock the files you download or you will get a cryptic error message. This appears to be caused by a security update to either Visual Studio or the .Net framework – the xcopy deploy instructions have been updated to show you how to do this. Below are the notes from the release page. ====== This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2). Since it is marked as a beta release, we are looking for bug reports in the next few months as you use BIDS Helper on real projects. In addition to getting all existing BIDS Helper functionality working appropriately in SQL Server 2012 (SSDT), the following features are new... Analysis Services Tabular Smart Diff Tabular Actions Editor Tabular HideMemberIf Tabular Pre-Build Fixes and Updates The Unused Datasets feature for Reporting Services now accounts for new features in Reporting Services 2008 R2 like Lookups and new features in Reporting Services 2012. SSIS: emit an informational message when a variable has an expression defined and EvaluateAsExpression = False SSAS: roles reports points to wrong server SSIS - Variable Copy / Move broken in v1.5 "Unused DataSets Report" not showing up in Context menu on VS2005 if Solution Folders used SSAS Tabular: Create a UI for managing actions SSAS Tabular: Smart Diff improvements for new schema and Tabular models SSIS: Copy/Move Variable Erroring due to custom Control Flow item Icon SSIS Performance Visualization Index out of range fixing bugs in AggManager when aggregation design IDs don't match names The exe downloads are a self extracting installer, the zip downloads allow for an xcopy deploy. Make sure to note the updated xcopy deploy instructions for SQL Server 2012.

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• Analysing SQLBits Feedback

  - by jamiet

  Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal and public data and session feedback lends itself very well to tracking because it is quantitative rather than qualitative; by that I mean attendees are invited to provide marks out of ten rather than (or, in the case of SQLBits, as well as) written comments. The SQLBits feedback is also useful because they use a consistent format – the same questions are asked each time – this means it is particularly easy to to track whether the scores that people give are trending up or down. I suspect that somewhere the SQLBits organisers have a big Analysis Services cube (ok, perhaps its an Excel pivot table) that allows them to analyse these scores per conference, speaker, track etc.… and there’s no reason that we as session speakers cannot do the same thing. To that end I have started to store my feedback in an Excel spreadsheet of my own which in the interests of transparency is available for public viewing (only a web browser required) on SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Misc/Personal%20SQLBits%20Session%20Feedback.xlsx. I have used a pivot table to aggregate all that feedback and here is a screenshot: I am hereby making a public plea to the SQLBits organisers (on the off-chance that they are reading) to please continue to keep the feedback format consistent in the future and I encourage them to publish all of the feedback in an anonymised form. I would also encourage anyone doing conference speaking to track their conference feedback in the same way that I am doing so that you get an insight into whether or not you are improving over time. It is not difficult to setup and maintaining it as you do more sessions takes very little effort. Storing feedback data like this leads me to wider thoughts about well-known conventions and data format standardisation. Let’s imagine a utopia where there were a standard set of questions for capturing session feedback that were leveraged at every conference regardless of subject matter, location or culture; that would give rise to immense cross-conference and cross-discipline analysis – the data analyst in me goes giddy at the thought of it. It is scenarios like this that drive my interest both in data formats such as iCalendar, microformats and RDF, and in emerging movements such as the semantic web and linked data, all things which I have written about in the past. I don’t know whether we will ever reach the stage where every piece of data has structured, descriptive metadata associated with it but I live in hope. @Jamiet

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• S11 launched

  - by unixman

  Now that Oracle Solaris 11 is out, its time to do 2 things -- 1) Its time to see what's in it, what's new and why its important, and then assess why it might make sense to begin evaluating it for your needs and 2) Its time to acknowledge, give thanks to and congratulate all the R&D personnel, architects, engineers, designers and testers who've put in so much effort and energy into helping make Solaris 11 (and SunOS 5.11) what it has become -- starting way back circa 2004 and, more importantly, culminating in the recent years and months -- staying focused on the execution, unwavering in the face of various challenges. For #1 above, here are a few good things to get going with - Watch the product launch replay - Visit the Solaris 11 Spotlight section on oracle.com - Get comfortable through introductory videos and detailed "how-to" guides (ex: how to create and publish IPS packages), white papers on the new default root file system, ZFS, and reap the benefits brought on by the fundamental shift in easing the administration experience - Look at the next level of software lifecycle management that is enabled by technologies such as Automated Installer and Image Packaging System -- that dramatically address patch management-related challenges - Understand how we continue to innovate in areas of service intelligence, reliability and availability - Start to evaluate enhancements in virtualization capabilities -- whether influenced by the need to consolidate or motivated by the need to have increased service mobility across physical systems, leveraging hardware-level abstractions - Gain more control over your network-centric services through enhancements in network resource management, observability and I/O performance - Look beyond your existing infrastructure with confidence that you can re-host and transition to newer systems with the use of Solaris 10 zones running on top of Solaris 11 - Relish in the fact that you can do all this, get your data to be secure and encrypted and more, on both, SPARC and x86-based systems. - Stay informed by keeping an eye on relevant blogs, which we've begun turning up recently. - Go through a hands-on lab - Sign up to take a class or just opt to watch various videos to begin to raise your comfort level with these technologies For #2 above -- There are many ways to do that. One way is to just say "thanks" with an email, a post, or a simple card,  similar to this one seen at a Barnes and Noble store recently.  The front of the card is followed by what's inside... and as the saying goes, now more then ever "it's what's inside that counts" And here's the inside of the card: So, what are you waiting for ? Go download and try it out, and please let us know what you think of it!

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• PASS Summit for SQL Starters

  - by Davide Mauri

  I’ve received a buch of emails from PASS Summit “First Timers” that are also somehow new to SQL Server (for “somehow” I mean people with less than 6 month experience but with some basic knowledge of SQL Server engine) or are catching up from SQL Server 2000. The common question regards the session one should not miss to have a broad view of the entire SQL Server platform have some insight into some specific areas of SQL Server Given that I’m on (semi-)vacantion and that I have more free time (not true, I have to prepare slides & demos for several conferences, PASS Summit  - Building the Agile Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2012 - and PASS 24H - Agile Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2012 - among them…but let’s pretend it to be true), I’ve decided to make a post to answer to this common questions. Of course this is my personal point of view and given the fact that the number and quality of session that will be delivered at PASS Summit is so high that is very difficoult to make a choice, fell free to jump into the discussion and leave your feedback or – even better – answer with another post. I’m sure it will be very helpful to all the SQL Server beginners out there. I’ve imposed to myself to choose 6 session at maximum for each Track. Why 6? Because it’s the maximum number of session you can follow in one day, and given that all the session will be on the Summit DVD, they are the answer to the following question: “If I have one day to spend in training, which session I should watch?”. Of course a Summit is not like a Course so a lot of very basics concept of well-established technologies won’t be found here. Analysis Services, Integration Services, MDX are not part of the Summit this time (at least for the basic part of them). Enough with that, let’s start with the session list ideal to have a good Overview of all the SQL Server Platform: Geospatial Data Types in SQL Server 2012 Inside Unstructured Data: SQL Server 2012 FileTable and Semantic Search XQuery and XML in SQL Server: Common Problems and Best Practice Solutions Microsoft's Big Play for Big Data Dashboards: When to Choose Which MSBI Tool Microsoft BI End-User Tools 360° for what concern Database Development, I recommend the following sessions Understanding Transaction Isolation Levels What to Look for in Execution Plans Improve Query Performance by Fixing Bad Parameter Sniffing A Window into Your Data: Using SQL Window Functions Practical Uses and Optimization of New T-SQL Features in SQL Server 2012 Taking MERGE Beyond the Basics For Business Intelligence Information Delivery Analyzing SSAS Data with Excel Building Compelling Power View Reports Managed Self-Service BI PowerPivot 101  SharePoint for Business Intelligence The Best Microsoft BI Tools You've Never Heard Of and for Business Intelligence Architecture & Development BI Power Hour Building a Tabular Model Database Enterprise Information Management: Bringing Together SSIS, DQS, and MDS SSIS Design Patterns Storing Columnstore Indexes Hadoop and Its Ecosystem Components in Action Beside the listed sessions, First Timers should also take a look the the page PASS set up for them: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2012/Connect/FirstTimers.aspx See you at PASS Summit!

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• I didn't mean to become a database developer, but now I am. Should I stop or try to get better?

  - by pretlow majette

  20 years ago I couldn't afford even a cheap POS program when I opened my first surf shop in the Virgin Islands. I bought a copy of Paradox (remember that?) in 1990 and spent months in a back room scratching out a POS application. Over many iterations, including a switch to Access (2000)/SQL Server (2003), I built a POS and backoffice solution that runs four stores with multiple cash registers, a warehouse and office. Until recently, all my stores were connected to the same LAN (in a small shopping center) and performance wasn't an issue. Now that we've opened a location in the States that's changed. Connecting to my local server via the internet has slowed that locations application to a crawl. This is partly due to the slow and crappy dsl service we have in the Virgin Islands, and partly due to my less-than-professional code and sql. With other far-away stores in the works, I need a better solution. I like my application. My staff knows it well, and I'm not inclined to take on the expense of a proper commercial solution. So where does that leave me? I should probably host my sql online to sidestep the slow dsl here. I think I can handle cleaning up my SQL querries to speed that up a bit. What about Access? My version seems so old, but I don't like the newer versions with the 'ribbon'. There are so many options... Should I be learning Visual Studio with an eye on moving completely to the web? Will my VBA skills help me at all there? I don't have the luxury of a year at the keyboard to figure it out anymore. What about dotnetnuke, sharepoint, or lightswitch? They all seem like possibilities, but even understanding their capabilities is daunting. I'm pretty deep into it, but maybe I should bail and hire a consultant or programmer. That sounds expensive tho, and there's no guarantee there either... Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Or, if anybody is interested in buying a small chain of surf shops...

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• Configuring trace file size and number in WebCenter Content 11g

  - by Kyle Hatlestad

  Lately I've been doing a lot of debugging using the System Output tracing in WebCenter Content 11g.  This is built-in tracing in the content server which provides a great level of detail on what's happening under the hood.  You can access the settings as well as a view of the tracing by going to Administration -> System Audit Information.  From here, you can select the tracing sections to include.  Some of my personal favorites are searchquery,  systemdatabase, userstorage, and indexer.  Usually I'm trying to find out some information regarding a search, database query, or user information.  Besides debugging, it's also very helpful for performance tuning. One of the nice tricks with the tracing is it honors the wildcard (*) character.  So you can put in 'schema*' and gather all of the schema related tracing.  And you can notice if you select 'all' and update, it changes to just a *.   To view the tracing in real-time, you simply go to the 'View Server Output' page and the latest tracing information will be at the bottom. This works well if you're looking at something pretty discrete and the system isn't getting much activity.  But if you've got a lot of tracing going on, it would be better to go after the trace log file itself.  By default, the log files can be found in the <content server instance directory>/data/trace directory. You'll see it named 'idccs_<managed server name>_current.log.  You may also find previous trace logs that have rolled over.  In this case they will identified by a date/time stamp in the name.  By default, the server will rotate the logs after they reach 1MB in size.  And it will keep the most recent 10 logs before they roll off and get deleted.  If your server is in a cluster, then the trace file should be configured to be local to the node per the recommended configuration settings. If you're doing some extensive tracing and need to capture all of the information, there are a couple of configuration flags you can set to control the logs. #Change log size to 10MB and number of logs to 20FileSizeLimit=10485760FileCountLimit=20 This is set by going to Admin Server -> General Configuration and entering them in the Additional Configuration Variables: section.  Restart the server and it should take on the new logging settings. 

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• What will be the better way for data retrieval on application that needs to handle limited amount of data.?

  - by Milanix

  This is not really a coding question since, I am not adding any code in here. Since, adding my code snippets itself would make this question really long. Instead, I am pretty interested in knowing a better ways for data retrieval on application that needs to handle limited amount of data which isn't updated regularly. Let's take this example: I am writing an application which gets a schedule as an XML from server. I have written a logic in order to parse XML version and update database only if the version is newer than the local version. Although the update is checked automatically/manually on daily basis based on user preference, the actual version update happens only once per few months or so. Since, this is done by some other authority which doesn't provide API but, rather inform publicly on their changes. The actual XML contains a "(n number of groups)(days in a week) (n number of schedule)" . The group is usually 6 and the number of schedule is usually 2. So basically there would usually be only around 100 strings. Now although I have used SQLite at the moment. I want to know how to make update on database. Should I show progress dialog that the application is updating and exit the app when it's done? Since, my updates are infrequent i don't think this will really harm user experience but, is there any better ways to do it? Because I don't want update to be made when user is searching which is done using database. This will cause an database already open exception. Atleast I have faced this problem before. Is it better to rather parse XML every time when user wants to view certain things or to use SQLite? Since, I make lots of use of adapter in my app to create lists, will that degrade the performance? It would really be a great help if anyone can give me better overview about it. Or may be counter argument against each. Many thanks!

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• How can I optimize Apache to use 1GB of RAM on my website? [closed]

  - by Markon

  My VPS plan gives me 1GB of RAM burstable to 2GB. Of course I cannot use 2 GB, nor 1 GB, everyday, so I'm planning to optimize the performance of my webserver. The average of hits-per-hour is about 8'000-10'000. This means about 2 connections-per-second. Max hits-per-hour reached until now is about 60'000. That means about 16 connections-per-second. Unluckily my current apache configuration uses too much memory (when there are not connected clients - usually during the night - it uses about 1GB) so I've tried to customize the apache installation to fit to my needs. I'm using Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.18, with apache2-mpm-worker, since I've read it requires less memory, and fcgid ( + PHP). This is my /etc/apache2/apache2.conf: Timeout 45 KeepAlive on MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 KeepAliveTimeout 10 <IfModule mpm_worker_module> StartServer 2 MinSpareThreads 25 MaxSpareThreads 75 MaxClients 100 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 </IfModule> This is the output of ps aux: www-data 9547 0.0 0.3 423828 7268 ? Sl 20:09 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start root 17714 0.0 0.1 76496 3712 ? Ss Feb05 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start www-data 17716 0.0 0.0 75560 2048 ? S Feb05 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start www-data 17746 0.0 0.1 76228 2384 ? S Feb05 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start www-data 20126 0.0 0.3 424852 7588 ? Sl 19:24 0:02 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start www-data 24260 0.0 0.3 424852 7580 ? Sl 19:42 0:01 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start while this is ps aux for php5: www-data 7461 2.9 2.2 142172 47048 ? S 19:39 1:39 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 23845 1.3 1.7 135744 35948 ? S 20:17 0:15 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 23900 2.0 1.7 136692 36760 ? S 20:17 0:22 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 27907 2.0 2.0 142272 43432 ? S 20:00 0:43 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 27909 2.5 1.9 138092 40036 ? S 20:00 0:53 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 27993 2.4 2.2 142336 47192 ? S 20:01 0:50 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 27999 1.8 1.4 135932 31100 ? S 20:01 0:38 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 28230 2.6 1.9 143436 39956 ? S 20:01 0:54 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 30708 3.1 2.2 142508 46528 ? S 19:44 1:38 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 As you can see it use a lot of memory. How can I reduce it to fit to just 1GB of RAM? PS: I also think about the switch to nginx, if Apache can't fit to my needs...

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• How to perform Cross Join with Linq

  - by berthin

  Cross join consists to perform a Cartesian product of two sets or sequences. The following example shows a simple Cartesian product of the sets A and B: A (a1, a2) B (b1, b2) => C (a1 b1,            a1 b2,            a2 b1,            a2, b2 ) is the Cartesian product's result. Linq to Sql allows using Cross join operations. Cross join is not equijoin, means that no predicate expression of equality in the Join clause of the query. To define a cross join query, you can use multiple from clauses. Note that there's no explicit operator for the cross join. In the following example, the query must join a sequence of Product with a sequence of Pricing Rules: 1: //Fill the data source 2: var products = new List<Product> 3: { 4: new Product{ProductID="P01",ProductName="Amaryl"}, 5: new Product {ProductID="P02", ProductName="acetaminophen"} 6: }; 7:  8: var pricingRules = new List<PricingRule> 9: { 10: new PricingRule {RuleID="R_1", RuleType="Free goods"}, 11: new PricingRule {RuleID="R_2", RuleType="Discount"}, 12: new PricingRule {RuleID="R_3", RuleType="Discount"} 13: }; 14: 15: //cross join query 16: var crossJoin = from p in products 17: from r in pricingRules 18: select new { ProductID = p.ProductID, RuleID = r.RuleID };   Below the definition of the two entities using in the above example.   1: public class Product 2: { 3: public string ProductID { get; set; } 4: public string ProductName { get; set; } 5: } 1: public class PricingRule 2: { 3: public string RuleID { get; set; } 4: public string RuleType { get; set; } 5: }   Doing this: 1: foreach (var result in crossJoin) 2: { 3: Console.WriteLine("({0} , {1})", result.ProductID, result.RuleID); 4: }   The output should be similar on this:   ( P01   -    R_1 )   ( P01   -    R_2 )   ( P01   -    R_3 )   ( P02   -    R_1 )   ( P02   -    R_2 )   ( P02   -    R_3) Conclusion Cross join operation is useful when performing a Cartesian product of two sequences object. However, it can produce very large result sets that may caused a problem of performance. So use with precautions :)

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• An Unstoppable Force!

  - by TammyBednar

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Building a high-availability database platform presents unique challenges. Combining servers, storage, networking, OS, firmware, and database is complicated and raises important concerns: Will coordination between multiple SME’s delay deployment? Will it be reliable? Will it scale? Will routine maintenance consume precious IT-staff time? Ultimately, will it work? Enter the Oracle Database Appliance, a complete package of software, server, storage, and networking that’s engineered for simplicity. It saves time and money by simplifying deployment, maintenance, and support of database workloads. Plus, it’s based on Intel Xeon processors to ensure a high level of performance and scalability. Take a look at this video to compare Heather and Ted’s approach to building a server for their Oracle database! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os4RDVclWS8 If you missed the “Compare Database Platforms: Build vs. Buy” webcast or want to listen again to find out how Jeff Schulte - Vice President at Yodlee uses Oracle Database Appliance.

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• Is IE9 a modern browser?

  - by anirudha

  Is IE9 a modern browser? i show you a post who compare IE as well as they compare chrome. Is IE9 a modern browser? well Are you thing that they make something bettter then thing another that what Firefox and chrome do whenever Microsoft do this. that's point that Microsoft always blast IE because they make version upon version not upon update like Firefox make 3.6.14 after 3.6.13 and chrome give update soon as possible but IE not come soon. they will thing for making 10 instead of giving update on 9. well what they tell us new. they make fool public everytime i believe they make fool public as same as today they maked for version 9 they show developer tool in 9 have three new tabs or pael are this enough. whenever  in chrome and firefox their is many plugin who make development easier IE still have a developer tool who not have enough power like Firebug in Firefox. they show performance but forget luna user [window xp] and their IE never runs on other plateform but chrome and firefox can. no customization in IE whenever chrome and firefox have uncountable plugin and addons. show features now in IE who already implemented in firefox very early. well their is no rule that static goes right every time not sure that IE and Firefox both are right in their language. their is no one predict what thing goes better in future. so well keep a thing in mind never wasted time and also thing to make task easier even you need to use sollution opensource or closesoure inside or outside MS does not matter. well everyone tell you much more then they do even IE and some other. they never tell you this thing not in IE but in another can be found they never tell you use other whenever you need a thing and never can be found in their software. you need to more beware of IE because they make them commorcial not really for public if really then why they stop wxp user to use them as well firefox and chrome never force. because they need a thing that force more then more copy of windows sale. so they thing to add a thing in window 8. the IE9 they thing to make before that they thing to make  this for windows 8. they always force user to purchase this for this. this for this. and this trick sell their software. well outside MS Mozilla and Chrome all behave better with user and their feedback. they respect user their privacy and feedback. if you not believe that how much problem you found in IE and they got solved soon as in chrome and firefox bug kill soon. because IE not opensource we need to  boycutt them secondly their is no customization then they make user task easier even with twitter and facebook.

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• SQL Saturday 194 - Exeter

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Many kudos goes to Jonathan and Annette Allen and the others on the team for confirming SQL Saturday 194 in Exeter on the 8th and 9th of March.  The event home page is here http://www.sqlsaturday.com/194/eventhome.aspx and I delighted that myself and Dave Morrison will be presenting a full day pre-con on the 8th on favourite subjects “TSQL and Internals”. Here is the full abstract : TSQL and internals - When faced with performance issues there are many lines of attack. Tuning the engine itself can get you so far, however for maximum effect you need to understand how the engine and how it translates SQL statements into performable actions. This is not a simple task, it is a massive task to deal with a multi-table join and the number of permutations can be immense. To back up this knowledge, we can create better performing TSQL and understand the impact that is has upon the engine and recognize the pitfalls and gotcha’s that exist in SQLServer. Ultimately, there is no ‘best way’ to perform a single task only many variations of ‘it depends’ , but now we can pick the most appropriate option for the required dataload. Over the years, there have been many myths and misconceptions have grown around the product, some have basis in older versions and some are just wrong. Continuing to build on the knowledge given so far these issue will be explored and broken down and proved or disproved. Finally we will look to the future and explore SQL Server 2012 and the new functionality that that brings and some of the common uses that we will be able to address. After completion of this days pre-con, attendees will have a more complete knowledge of execution plans, and how they relate to the physical and logical actions that SQLServer will be executing on their behalf. The attendees will also have a more rounded and fuller knowledge of TSQL and the implications of incorrectly defining a query. Dave is a fountain of knowledge on execution plans and optimizer internals and ,though i may flatter myself, I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to TSQL and such matters.  I hope that if you cant join us, then there are other pre-cons available from other experts in their fields that may ‘float you boat’ too.  The pre-con page is http://sqlsouthwest.co.uk/SQLSaturday_precon.htm Also, excitingly, this pre-con day is sponsored by Fusion-IO which is a great boon for the day. If you want a more of this then i am offering a 2 day TSQL course starting on the 19th of March. More details on this are available here

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• Oracle OpenWorld is on the Horizon

  - by Matthew Haavisto

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is only a few months away, and we're excited about our slate of sessions and other activities scheduled this year.  PeopleSoft sessions are perennially among the best attended and well-received sessions, and we plan to keep that trend going. We have a full complement of sessions planned, from updates for some of your yearly favorites to lots of completely new topics.  Some of the long-standing favorites include the PeopleSoft Technology Roadmap, PeopleTools Tips and Techniques and a number of candid panel discussions. Coverage of the latest trends include new sessions on PeopleSoft on mobile platforms, PeopleSoft's new user experience and interaction model, advances in reporting and analytics and employing virtualization to reduce costs.  The PeopleTools team is also working closely with Applications groups this year to demonstrate to users how advances in PeopleTools will have a direct and beneficial impact on the latest applications releases.  There are plenty of sessions for developers and administrators as well, from sessions on enhancing, integrating, maintaining, and securing your applications, to tuning for performance.  We'll also update you on the latest platform roadmap. In addition to these conventional sessions, we will of course be manning the demo pods, where you'll be able to see the latest functionality first hand. We plan to engage in lots of direct customer interaction.  One of the highlights each year for our team as well as attendees is the session in which a panel of senior PeopleTools leaders talks candidly and engages in open Q&A with customers about our products.  This is definitely a discussion worth joining in on. Keep your eyes on this blog in the coming weeks for details on many of the sessions we have planned.  We look forward to seeing you at OpenWorld 2012!

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• Movement prediction for non-shooters

  - by ShadowChaser

  I'm working on an isometric (2D) game with moderate-scale multiplayer - 20-30 players. I've had some difficulty getting a good movement prediction implementation in place. Right now, clients are authoritative for their own position. The server performs validation and broad-scale cheat detection, and I fully realize that the system will never be fully robust against cheating. However, the performance and implementation tradeoffs work well for me right now. Given that I'm dealing with sprite graphics, the game has 8 defined directions rather than free movement. Whenever the player changes their direction or speed (walk, run, stop), a "true" 3D velocity is set on the entity and a packet it sent to the server with the new movement state. In addition, every 250ms additional packets are transmitted with the player's current position for state updates on the server as well as for client prediction. After the server validates the packet, it gets automatically distributed to all of the other "nearby" players. Client-side, all entities with non-zero velocity (ie/ moving entities) are tracked and updated by a rudimentary "physics" system - basically nothing more than changing the position by the velocity according to the elapsed time slice (40ms or so). What I'm struggling with is how to implement clean movement prediction. I have the nagging suspicion that I've made a design mistake somewhere. I've been over the Unreal, Half-life, and all other movement prediction/lag compensation articles I could find, but they all seam geared toward shooters: "Don't send each control change, send updates every 120ms, server is authoritative, client predicts, etc". Unfortunately, that style of design won't work well for me - there's no 3D environment so each individual state change is important. 1) Most of the samples I saw tightly couple movement prediction right into the entities themselves. For example, storing the previous state along with the current state. I'd like to avoid that and keep entities with their "current state" only. Is there a better way to handle this? 2) What should happen when the player stops? I can't interpolate to the correct position, since they might need to walk backwards or another strange direction if their position is too far ahead. 3) What should happen when entities collide? If the current player collides with something, the answer is simple - just stop the player from moving. But what happens if two entities take up the same space on the server? What if the local prediction causes a remote entity to collide with the player or another entity - do I stop them as well? If the prediction had the misfortune of sticking them in front of a wall that the player has gone around, the prediction will never be able to compensate and once the error gets to high the entity will snap to the new position.

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• Collaborative work (small team) - Best practices

  - by LEM01

  I'm currently working in a very small team of programmers (2-3) and I'm looking for advices/best practices on how to organise our work. We're all working on the same application using PHP. Today we're kind of all working on our way. Today situation: List item that have to be worked on by each dev 1/week. What has to be done is defined at a high functional level (ex: Build the search engine for this product..) Commit / merge our individual branches (git) every week before the next meeting No real dev rules, no code review No test written (aouutch) Problems faced: Code quality issue: discovering someone else code is sometime tough (inline, variable+function+class names, spaces, comments..) Changes in already existing classes (impact on someone else work) Responsibility of each dev unclear: after getting someone else code and discover something messy, should I make the change? Should he make the change? How to plan those things,... What I'm looking for: Basically I'm looking into structuring the way we develop things in order to avoid frustration and improve overall quality. How to define coding standards (naming convention, code rules...)? Do you you any validation script to make sure code is valid before committing? Do you think that defining an architect role in the team is needed? Someone that would actually define what has to be developed during the next phase. By defining interfaces or class descriptions that have to be written. (Does it make sense in such a small team?) Today we're losing time into understanding what others did or tried to do, we're also losing time in discussion like "you should have done it that way! Why is this class doing that and not that..? Shouldn't we have a embedded class rather that this set of data...". I'm looking into a work process, maybe with more defined responsibilities and process in order to improve our performance. If you have experience, advices, best practices or anything to share that we could benefit from it will be much appreciated! Thanks a lot for your time!

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• Best way to determine surface normal for a group of pixels?

  - by Paul Renton

  One of my current endeavors is creating a 2D destructible terrain engine for iOS Cocos2D (See https://github.com/crebstar/PWNDestructibleTerrain ). It is in an infant stages no doubt, but I have made significant progress since starting a couple weeks ago. However, I have run into a bit of a performance road block with calculating surface normals. Note: For my destructible terrain engine, an alpha of 0 is considered to not be solid ground. The method posted below works just great given small rectangles, such as n < 30. Anything above 30 causes a dip in the frame rate. If you approach 100x100 then you might as well read a book while the sprite attempts to traverse the terrain. At the moment this is the best I can come up with for altering the angle on a sprite as it roams across terrain (to get the angle for a sprite's orientation just take dot product of 100 * normal * (1,0) vector). -(CGPoint)getAverageSurfaceNormalAt:(CGPoint)pt withRect:(CGRect)area { float avgX = 0; float avgY = 0; ccColor4B color = ccc4(0, 0, 0, 0); CGPoint normal; float len; for (int w = area.size.width; w >= -area.size.width; w--) { for (int h = area.size.height; h >= -area.size.height; h--) { CGPoint pixPt = ccp(w + pt.x, h + pt.y); if ([self pixelAt:pixPt colorCache:&color]) { if (color.a != 0) { avgX -= w; avgY -= h; } // end inner if } // end outer if } // end inner for } // end outer for len = sqrtf(avgX * avgX + avgY * avgY); if (len == 0) { normal = ccp(avgX, avgY); } else { normal = ccp(avgX/len, avgY/len); } // end if return normal; } // end get My problem is I have sprites that require larger rectangles in order for their movement to look realistic. I considered doing a cache of all surface normals, but this lead to issues of knowing when to recalculate the surface normals and these calculations also being quite expensive (also how large should the blocks be?). Another smaller issue is I don't know how to properly treat the case when length is = 0. So I am stuck... Any advice from the community would be greatly appreciated! Is my method the best possible one? Or should I rethink the algorithm? I am new to game development and always looking to learn new tips and tricks.

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• PHP - Internal APIs/Libraries - What makes sense?

  - by Mark Locker

  I've been having a discussion lately with some colleagues about the best way to approach a new project, and thought it'd be interesting to get some external thoughts thrown into the mix. Basically, we're redeveloping a fairly large site (written in PHP) and have differing opinions on how the platform should be setup. Requirements: The platform will need to support multiple internal websites, as well as external (non-PHP) projects which at the moment consist of a mobile app and a toolbar. We have no plans/need in the foreseeable future to open up an API externally (for use in products other than our own). My opinion: We should have a library of well documented native model classes which can be shared between projects. These models will represent everything in our database and can take advantage of object orientated features such as inheritance, traits, magic methods, etc. etc. As well as employing ORM. We can then add an API layer on top of these models which can basically accept requests and route them to the appropriate methods, translating the response so that it can be used platform independently. This routing for each method can be setup as and when it's required. Their opinion: We should have a single HTTP API which is used by all projects (internal PHP ones or otherwise). My thoughts: To me, there are a number of issues with using the sole HTTP API approach: It will be very expensive performance wise. One page request will result in several additional http requests (which although local, are still ones that Apache will need to handle). You'll lose all of the best features PHP has for OO development. From simple inheritance, to employing the likes of ORM which can save you writing a lot of code. For internal projects, the actual process makes me cringe. To get a users name, for example, a request would go out of our box, over the LAN, back in, then run through a script which calls a method, JSON encodes the output and feeds that back. That would then need to be JSON decoded, and be presented as an array ready to use. Working with arrays, as appose to objects, makes me sad in a modern PHP framework. Their thoughts (and my responses): Having one method of doing thing keeps things simple. - You'd only do things differently if you were using a different language anyway. It will become robust. - Seeing as the API will run off the library of models, I think my option would be just as robust. What do you think? I'd be really interested to hear the thoughts of others on this, especially as opinions on both sides are not founded on any past experience.

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• Drawing flaming letters in 3D with OpenGL ES 2.0

  - by Chiquis

  I am a bit confused about how to achieve this. What I want is to "draw with flames". I have achieved this with textures successfully, but now my concern is about doing this with particles to achieve the flaming effect. Am I supposed to create a path along which I should add many particle emitters that will be emitting flame particles? I understand the concept for 2D, but for 3D are the particles always supposed to be facing the user? Something else I'm worried about is the performance hit that will occur by having that many particle emitters, because there can be many letters and drawings at the same time, and each of these elements will have many particle emitters. More detailed explanation: I have a path of points, which is my model. Imagine a dotted letter "S" for example. I want make the "S" be on fire. The "S" is just an example it can be a circle, triangle, a line, pretty much any path described by my set of points. For achieving this fire effect I thought about using particles. So I am using a program called "Particle Designer" to create a fire style particle emitter. This emitter looks perfect on 2D on the iphone screen dimensions. So then I thought that I could probably draw an S or any other figure if i place many particle emitters next to each other following the path described. To move from the 2D version to the 3D version I thought about, scaling the emitter (with a scale matrix multiplication in its model matrix) and then moving it to a point in my 3D world. I did this and it works. So now I have 1 particle emitter in the 3D world. My question is, is this how you would achieve a flaming letter? Is this too inefficient if i expect to have many flaming paths on my world? Am i supposed to rotate the particle's quad so that its always looking at the user? (the last one is because i noticed that if u look at it from the side the particles start to flatten out)

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