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  • SQL SERVER – Example of Performance Tuning for Advanced Users with DB Optimizer

    - by Pinal Dave
    Performance tuning is such a subject that everyone wants to master it. In beginning everybody is at a novice level and spend lots of time learning how to master the art of performance tuning. However, as we progress further the tuning of the system keeps on getting very difficult. I have understood in my early career there should be no need of ego in the technology field. There are always better solutions and better ideas out there and we should not resist them. Instead of resisting the change and new wave I personally adopt it. Here is a similar example, as I personally progress to the master level of performance tuning, I face that it is getting harder to come up with optimal solutions. In such scenarios I rely on various tools to teach me how I can do things better. Once I learn about tools, I am often able to come up with better solutions when I face the similar situation next time. A few days ago I had received a query where the user wanted to tune it further to get the maximum out of the performance. I have re-written the similar query with the help of AdventureWorks sample database. SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Employee e INNER JOIN HumanResources.EmployeeDepartmentHistory edh ON e.BusinessEntityID = edh.BusinessEntityID INNER JOIN HumanResources.Shift s ON edh.ShiftID = s.ShiftID; User had similar query to above query was used in very critical report and wanted to get best out of the query. When I looked at the query – here were my initial thoughts Use only column in the select statements as much as you want in the application Let us look at the query pattern and data workload and find out the optimal index for it Before I give further solutions I was told by the user that they need all the columns from all the tables and creating index was not allowed in their system. He can only re-write queries or use hints to further tune this query. Now I was in the constraint box – I believe * was not a great idea but if they wanted all the columns, I believe we can’t do much besides using *. Additionally, if I cannot create a further index, I must come up with some creative way to write this query. I personally do not like to use hints in my application but there are cases when hints work out magically and gives optimal solutions. Finally, I decided to use Embarcadero’s DB Optimizer. It is a fantastic tool and very helpful when it is about performance tuning. I have previously explained how it works over here. First open DBOptimizer and open Tuning Job from File >> New >> Tuning Job. Once you open DBOptimizer Tuning Job follow the various steps indicates in the following diagram. Essentially we will take our original script and will paste that into Step 1: New SQL Text and right after that we will enable Step 2 for Generating Various cases, Step 3 for Detailed Analysis and Step 4 for Executing each generated case. Finally we will click on Analysis in Step 5 which will generate the report detailed analysis in the result pan. The detailed pan looks like. It generates various cases of T-SQL based on the original query. It applies various hints and available hints to the query and generate various execution plans of the query and displays them in the resultant. You can clearly notice that original query had a cost of 0.0841 and logical reads about 607 pages. Whereas various options which are just following it has different execution cost as well logical read. There are few cases where we have higher logical read and there are few cases where as we have very low logical read. If we pay attention the very next row to original query have Merge_Join_Query in description and have lowest execution cost value of 0.044 and have lowest Logical Reads of 29. This row contains the query which is the most optimal re-write of the original query. Let us double click over it. Here is the query: SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Employee e INNER JOIN HumanResources.EmployeeDepartmentHistory edh ON e.BusinessEntityID = edh.BusinessEntityID INNER JOIN HumanResources.Shift s ON edh.ShiftID = s.ShiftID OPTION (MERGE JOIN) If you notice above query have additional hint of Merge Join. With the help of this Merge Join query hint this query is now performing much better than before. The entire process takes less than 60 seconds. Please note that it the join hint Merge Join was optimal for this query but it is not necessary that the same hint will be helpful in all the queries. Additionally, if the workload or data pattern changes the query hint of merge join may be no more optimal join. In that case, we will have to redo the entire exercise once again. This is the reason I do not like to use hints in my queries and I discourage all of my users to use the same. However, if you look at this example, this is a great case where hints are optimizing the performance of the query. It is humanly not possible to test out various query hints and index options with the query to figure out which is the most optimal solution. Sometimes, we need to depend on the efficiency tools like DB Optimizer to guide us the way and select the best option from the suggestion provided. Let me know what you think of this article as well your experience with DB Optimizer. Please leave a comment. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Joins, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • String Format for DateTime in C#

    - by SAMIR BHOGAYTA
    String Format for DateTime [C#] This example shows how to format DateTime using String.Format method. All formatting can be done also using DateTime.ToString method. Custom DateTime Formatting There are following custom format specifiers y (year), M (month), d (day), h (hour 12), H (hour 24), m (minute), s (second), f (second fraction), F (second fraction, trailing zeroes are trimmed), t (P.M or A.M) and z (time zone). Following examples demonstrate how are the format specifiers rewritten to the output. [C#] // create date time 2008-03-09 16:05:07.123 DateTime dt = new DateTime(2008, 3, 9, 16, 5, 7, 123); String.Format("{0:y yy yyy yyyy}", dt); // "8 08 008 2008" year String.Format("{0:M MM MMM MMMM}", dt); // "3 03 Mar March" month String.Format("{0:d dd ddd dddd}", dt); // "9 09 Sun Sunday" day String.Format("{0:h hh H HH}", dt); // "4 04 16 16" hour 12/24 String.Format("{0:m mm}", dt); // "5 05" minute String.Format("{0:s ss}", dt); // "7 07" second String.Format("{0:f ff fff ffff}", dt); // "1 12 123 1230" sec.fraction String.Format("{0:F FF FFF FFFF}", dt); // "1 12 123 123" without zeroes String.Format("{0:t tt}", dt); // "P PM" A.M. or P.M. String.Format("{0:z zz zzz}", dt); // "-6 -06 -06:00" time zone You can use also date separator / (slash) and time sepatator : (colon). These characters will be rewritten to characters defined in the current DateTimeForma­tInfo.DateSepa­rator and DateTimeForma­tInfo.TimeSepa­rator. [C#] // date separator in german culture is "." (so "/" changes to ".") String.Format("{0:d/M/yyyy HH:mm:ss}", dt); // "9/3/2008 16:05:07" - english (en-US) String.Format("{0:d/M/yyyy HH:mm:ss}", dt); // "9.3.2008 16:05:07" - german (de-DE) Here are some examples of custom date and time formatting: [C#] // month/day numbers without/with leading zeroes String.Format("{0:M/d/yyyy}", dt); // "3/9/2008" String.Format("{0:MM/dd/yyyy}", dt); // "03/09/2008" // day/month names String.Format("{0:ddd, MMM d, yyyy}", dt); // "Sun, Mar 9, 2008" String.Format("{0:dddd, MMMM d, yyyy}", dt); // "Sunday, March 9, 2008" // two/four digit year String.Format("{0:MM/dd/yy}", dt); // "03/09/08" String.Format("{0:MM/dd/yyyy}", dt); // "03/09/2008" Standard DateTime Formatting In DateTimeForma­tInfo there are defined standard patterns for the current culture. For example property ShortTimePattern is string that contains value h:mm tt for en-US culture and value HH:mm for de-DE culture. Following table shows patterns defined in DateTimeForma­tInfo and their values for en-US culture. First column contains format specifiers for the String.Format method. Specifier DateTimeFormatInfo property Pattern value (for en-US culture) t ShortTimePattern h:mm tt d ShortDatePattern M/d/yyyy T LongTimePattern h:mm:ss tt D LongDatePattern dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy f (combination of D and t) dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy h:mm tt F FullDateTimePattern dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy h:mm:ss tt g (combination of d and t) M/d/yyyy h:mm tt G (combination of d and T) M/d/yyyy h:mm:ss tt m, M MonthDayPattern MMMM dd y, Y YearMonthPattern MMMM, yyyy r, R RFC1123Pattern ddd, dd MMM yyyy HH':'mm':'ss 'GMT' (*) s SortableDateTi­mePattern yyyy'-'MM'-'dd'T'HH':'mm':'ss (*) u UniversalSorta­bleDateTimePat­tern yyyy'-'MM'-'dd HH':'mm':'ss'Z' (*) (*) = culture independent Following examples show usage of standard format specifiers in String.Format method and the resulting output. [C#] String.Format("{0:t}", dt); // "4:05 PM" ShortTime String.Format("{0:d}", dt); // "3/9/2008" ShortDate String.Format("{0:T}", dt); // "4:05:07 PM" LongTime String.Format("{0:D}", dt); // "Sunday, March 09, 2008" LongDate String.Format("{0:f}", dt); // "Sunday, March 09, 2008 4:05 PM" LongDate+ShortTime String.Format("{0:F}", dt); // "Sunday, March 09, 2008 4:05:07 PM" FullDateTime String.Format("{0:g}", dt); // "3/9/2008 4:05 PM" ShortDate+ShortTime String.Format("{0:G}", dt); // "3/9/2008 4:05:07 PM" ShortDate+LongTime String.Format("{0:m}", dt); // "March 09" MonthDay String.Format("{0:y}", dt); // "March, 2008" YearMonth String.Format("{0:r}", dt); // "Sun, 09 Mar 2008 16:05:07 GMT" RFC1123 String.Format("{0:s}", dt); // "2008-03-09T16:05:07" SortableDateTime String.Format("{0:u}", dt); // "2008-03-09 16:05:07Z" UniversalSortableDateTime

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  • NoSQL Memcached API for MySQL: Latest Updates

    - by Mat Keep
    With data volumes exploding, it is vital to be able to ingest and query data at high speed. For this reason, MySQL has implemented NoSQL interfaces directly to the InnoDB and MySQL Cluster (NDB) storage engines, which bypass the SQL layer completely. Without SQL parsing and optimization, Key-Value data can be written directly to MySQL tables up to 9x faster, while maintaining ACID guarantees. In addition, users can continue to run complex queries with SQL across the same data set, providing real-time analytics to the business or anonymizing sensitive data before loading to big data platforms such as Hadoop, while still maintaining all of the advantages of their existing relational database infrastructure. This and more is discussed in the latest Guide to MySQL and NoSQL where you can learn more about using the APIs to scale new generations of web, cloud, mobile and social applications on the world's most widely deployed open source database The native Memcached API is part of the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate, and is already available in the GA release of MySQL Cluster. By using the ubiquitous Memcached API for writing and reading data, developers can preserve their investments in Memcached infrastructure by re-using existing Memcached clients, while also eliminating the need for application changes. Speed, when combined with flexibility, is essential in the world of growing data volumes and variability. Complementing NoSQL access, support for on-line DDL (Data Definition Language) operations in MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster enables DevOps teams to dynamically update their database schema to accommodate rapidly changing requirements, such as the need to capture additional data generated by their applications. These changes can be made without database downtime. Using the Memcached interface, developers do not need to define a schema at all when using MySQL Cluster. Lets look a little more closely at the Memcached implementations for both InnoDB and MySQL Cluster. Memcached Implementation for InnoDB The Memcached API for InnoDB is previewed as part of the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate. As illustrated in the following figure, Memcached for InnoDB is implemented via a Memcached daemon plug-in to the mysqld process, with the Memcached protocol mapped to the native InnoDB API. Figure 1: Memcached API Implementation for InnoDB With the Memcached daemon running in the same process space, users get very low latency access to their data while also leveraging the scalability enhancements delivered with InnoDB and a simple deployment and management model. Multiple web / application servers can remotely access the Memcached / InnoDB server to get direct access to a shared data set. With simultaneous SQL access, users can maintain all the advanced functionality offered by InnoDB including support for Foreign Keys, XA transactions and complex JOIN operations. Benchmarks demonstrate that the NoSQL Memcached API for InnoDB delivers up to 9x higher performance than the SQL interface when inserting new key/value pairs, with a single low-end commodity server supporting nearly 70,000 Transactions per Second. Figure 2: Over 9x Faster INSERT Operations The delivered performance demonstrates MySQL with the native Memcached NoSQL interface is well suited for high-speed inserts with the added assurance of transactional guarantees. You can check out the latest Memcached / InnoDB developments and benchmarks here You can learn how to configure the Memcached API for InnoDB here Memcached Implementation for MySQL Cluster Memcached API support for MySQL Cluster was introduced with General Availability (GA) of the 7.2 release, and joins an extensive range of NoSQL interfaces that are already available for MySQL Cluster Like Memcached, MySQL Cluster provides a distributed hash table with in-memory performance. MySQL Cluster extends Memcached functionality by adding support for write-intensive workloads, a full relational model with ACID compliance (including persistence), rich query support, auto-sharding and 99.999% availability, with extensive management and monitoring capabilities. All writes are committed directly to MySQL Cluster, eliminating cache invalidation and the overhead of data consistency checking to ensure complete synchronization between the database and cache. Figure 3: Memcached API Implementation with MySQL Cluster Implementation is simple: 1. The application sends reads and writes to the Memcached process (using the standard Memcached API). 2. This invokes the Memcached Driver for NDB (which is part of the same process) 3. The NDB API is called, providing for very quick access to the data held in MySQL Cluster’s data nodes. The solution has been designed to be very flexible, allowing the application architect to find a configuration that best fits their needs. It is possible to co-locate the Memcached API in either the data nodes or application nodes, or alternatively within a dedicated Memcached layer. The benefit of this flexible approach to deployment is that users can configure behavior on a per-key-prefix basis (through tables in MySQL Cluster) and the application doesn’t have to care – it just uses the Memcached API and relies on the software to store data in the right place(s) and to keep everything synchronized. Using Memcached for Schema-less Data By default, every Key / Value is written to the same table with each Key / Value pair stored in a single row – thus allowing schema-less data storage. Alternatively, the developer can define a key-prefix so that each value is linked to a pre-defined column in a specific table. Of course if the application needs to access the same data through SQL then developers can map key prefixes to existing table columns, enabling Memcached access to schema-structured data already stored in MySQL Cluster. Conclusion Download the Guide to MySQL and NoSQL to learn more about NoSQL APIs and how you can use them to scale new generations of web, cloud, mobile and social applications on the world's most widely deployed open source database See how to build a social app with MySQL Cluster and the Memcached API from our on-demand webinar or take a look at the docs Don't hesitate to use the comments section below for any questions you may have 

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  • Silverlight 5 &ndash; What&rsquo;s New? (Including Screenshots &amp; Code Snippets)

    - by mbcrump
    Silverlight 5 is coming next year (2011) and this blog post will tell you what you need to know before the beta ships. First, let me address people saying that it is dead after PDC 2010. I believe that it’s best to see what the market is doing, not the vendor. Below is a list of companies that are developing Silverlight 4 applications shown during the Silverlight Firestarter. Some of the companies have shipped and some haven’t. It’s just great to see the actual company names that are working on Silverlight instead of “people are developing for Silverlight”. The next thing that I wanted to point out was that HTML5, WPF and Silverlight can co-exist. In case you missed Scott Gutherie’s keynote, they actually had a slide with all three stacked together. This shows Microsoft will be heavily investing in each technology.  Even I, a Silverlight developer, am reading Pro HTML5. Microsoft said that according to the Silverlight Feature Voting site, 21k votes were entered. Microsoft has implemented about 70% of these votes in Silverlight 5. That is an amazing number, and I am crossing my fingers that Microsoft bundles Silverlight with Windows 8. Let’s get started… what’s new in Silverlight 5? I am going to show you some great application and actual code shown during the Firestarter event. Media Hardware Video Decode – Instead of using CPU to decode, we will offload it to GPU. This will allow netbooks, etc to play videos. Trickplay – Variable Speed Playback – Pitch Correction (If you speed up someone talking they won’t sound like a chipmunk). Power Management – Less battery when playing video. Screensavers will no longer kick in if watching a video. If you pause a video then screensaver will kick in. Remote Control Support – This will allow users to control playback functions like Pause, Rewind and Fastforward. IIS Media Services 4 has shipped and now supports Azure. Data Binding Layout Transitions – Just with a few lines of XAML you can create a really rich experience that is not using Storyboards or animations. RelativeSource FindAncestor – Ancestor RelativeSource bindings make it much easier for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control. Custom Markup Extensions – Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers. This is great for MVVM support. Changing Styles during Runtime By Binding in Style Setters – Changing Styles at runtime used to be a real pain in Silverlight 4, now it’s much easier. Binding in style setters allows bindings to reference other properties. XAML Debugging – Below you can see that we set a breakpoint in XAML. This shows us exactly what is going on with our binding.  WCF & RIA Services WS-Trust Support – Taken from Wikipedia: WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure message exchange. You can reduce network latency by using a background thread for networking. Supports Azure now.  Text and Printing Improved text clarity that enables better text rendering. Multi-column text flow, Character tracking and leading support, and full OpenType font support.  Includes a new Postscript Vector Printing API that provides control over what you print . Pivot functionality baked into Silverlight 5 SDK. Graphics Immediate mode graphics support that will enable you to use the GPU and 3D graphics supports. Take a look at what was shown in the demos below. 1) 3D view of the Earth – not really a real-world application though. A doctor’s portal. This demo really stood out for me as it shows what we can do with the 3D / GPU support. Out of Browser OOB applications can now create and manage childwindows as shown in the screenshot below.  Trusted OOB applications can use P/Invoke to call Win32 APIs and unmanaged libraries.  Enterprise Group Policy Support allow enterprises to lock down or up the sandbox capabilities of Silverlight 5 applications. In this demo, he tore the “notes” off of the application and it appeared in a new window. See the black arrow below. In this demo, he connected a USB Device which fired off a local Win32 application that provided the data off the USB stick to Silverlight. Another demo of a Silverlight 5 application exporting data right into Excel running inside of browser. Testing They demoed Coded UI, which is available now in the Visual Studio Feature Pack 2. This will allow you to create automated testing without writing any code manually. Performance: Microsoft has worked to improve the Silverlight startup time. Silverlight 5 provides 64-bit browser support.  Silverlight 5 also provides IE9 Hardware acceleration.   I am looking forward to Silverlight 5 and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading and I hope you visit again soon.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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  • Scaling-out Your Services by Message Bus based WCF Transport Extension &ndash; Part 1 &ndash; Background

    - by Shaun
    Cloud computing gives us more flexibility on the computing resource, we can provision and deploy an application or service with multiple instances over multiple machines. With the increment of the service instances, how to balance the incoming message and workload would become a new challenge. Currently there are two approaches we can use to pass the incoming messages to the service instances, I would like call them dispatcher mode and pulling mode.   Dispatcher Mode The dispatcher mode introduces a role which takes the responsible to find the best service instance to process the request. The image below describes the sharp of this mode. There are four clients communicate with the service through the underlying transportation. For example, if we are using HTTP the clients might be connecting to the same service URL. On the server side there’s a dispatcher listening on this URL and try to retrieve all messages. When a message came in, the dispatcher will find a proper service instance to process it. There are three mechanism to find the instance: Round-robin: Dispatcher will always send the message to the next instance. For example, if the dispatcher sent the message to instance 2, then the next message will be sent to instance 3, regardless if instance 3 is busy or not at that moment. Random: Dispatcher will find a service instance randomly, and same as the round-robin mode it regardless if the instance is busy or not. Sticky: Dispatcher will send all related messages to the same service instance. This approach always being used if the service methods are state-ful or session-ful. But as you can see, all of these approaches are not really load balanced. The clients will send messages at any time, and each message might take different process duration on the server side. This means in some cases, some of the service instances are very busy while others are almost idle. For example, if we were using round-robin mode, it could be happened that most of the simple task messages were passed to instance 1 while the complex ones were sent to instance 3, even though instance 1 should be idle. This brings some problem in our architecture. The first one is that, the response to the clients might be longer than it should be. As it’s shown in the figure above, message 6 and 9 can be processed by instance 1 or instance 2, but in reality they were dispatched to the busy instance 3 since the dispatcher and round-robin mode. Secondly, if there are many requests came from the clients in a very short period, service instances might be filled by tons of pending tasks and some instances might be crashed. Third, if we are using some cloud platform to host our service instances, for example the Windows Azure, the computing resource is billed by service deployment period instead of the actual CPU usage. This means if any service instance is idle it is wasting our money! Last one, the dispatcher would be the bottleneck of our system since all incoming messages must be routed by the dispatcher. If we are using HTTP or TCP as the transport, the dispatcher would be a network load balance. If we wants more capacity, we have to scale-up, or buy a hardware load balance which is very expensive, as well as scaling-out the service instances. Pulling Mode Pulling mode doesn’t need a dispatcher to route the messages. All service instances are listening to the same transport and try to retrieve the next proper message to process if they are idle. Since there is no dispatcher in pulling mode, it requires some features on the transportation. The transportation must support multiple client connection and server listening. HTTP and TCP doesn’t allow multiple clients are listening on the same address and port, so it cannot be used in pulling mode directly. All messages in the transportation must be FIFO, which means the old message must be received before the new one. Message selection would be a plus on the transportation. This means both service and client can specify some selection criteria and just receive some specified kinds of messages. This feature is not mandatory but would be very useful when implementing the request reply and duplex WCF channel modes. Otherwise we must have a memory dictionary to store the reply messages. I will explain more about this in the following articles. Message bus, or the message queue would be best candidate as the transportation when using the pulling mode. First, it allows multiple application to listen on the same queue, and it’s FIFO. Some of the message bus also support the message selection, such as TIBCO EMS, RabbitMQ. Some others provide in memory dictionary which can store the reply messages, for example the Redis. The principle of pulling mode is to let the service instances self-managed. This means each instance will try to retrieve the next pending incoming message if they finished the current task. This gives us more benefit and can solve the problems we met with in the dispatcher mode. The incoming message will be received to the best instance to process, which means this will be very balanced. And it will not happen that some instances are busy while other are idle, since the idle one will retrieve more tasks to make them busy. Since all instances are try their best to be busy we can use less instances than dispatcher mode, which more cost effective. Since there’s no dispatcher in the system, there is no bottleneck. When we introduced more service instances, in dispatcher mode we have to change something to let the dispatcher know the new instances. But in pulling mode since all service instance are self-managed, there no extra change at all. If there are many incoming messages, since the message bus can queue them in the transportation, service instances would not be crashed. All above are the benefits using the pulling mode, but it will introduce some problem as well. The process tracking and debugging become more difficult. Since the service instances are self-managed, we cannot know which instance will process the message. So we need more information to support debug and track. Real-time response may not be supported. All service instances will process the next message after the current one has done, if we have some real-time request this may not be a good solution. Compare with the Pros and Cons above, the pulling mode would a better solution for the distributed system architecture. Because what we need more is the scalability, cost-effect and the self-management.   WCF and WCF Transport Extensibility Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. In the .NET world WCF is the best way to implement the service. In this series I’m going to demonstrate how to implement the pulling mode on top of a message bus by extending the WCF. I don’t want to deep into every related field in WCF but will highlight its transport extensibility. When we implemented an RPC foundation there are many aspects we need to deal with, for example the message encoding, encryption, authentication and message sending and receiving. In WCF, each aspect is represented by a channel. A message will be passed through all necessary channels and finally send to the underlying transportation. And on the other side the message will be received from the transport and though the same channels until the business logic. This mode is called “Channel Stack” in WCF, and the last channel in the channel stack must always be a transport channel, which takes the responsible for sending and receiving the messages. As we are going to implement the WCF over message bus and implement the pulling mode scaling-out solution, we need to create our own transport channel so that the client and service can exchange messages over our bus. Before we deep into the transport channel, let’s have a look on the message exchange patterns that WCF defines. Message exchange pattern (MEP) defines how client and service exchange the messages over the transportation. WCF defines 3 basic MEPs which are datagram, Request-Reply and Duplex. Datagram: Also known as one-way, or fire-forgot mode. The message sent from the client to the service, and no need any reply from the service. The client doesn’t care about the message result at all. Request-Reply: Very common used pattern. The client send the request message to the service and wait until the reply message comes from the service. Duplex: The client sent message to the service, when the service processing the message it can callback to the client. When callback the service would be like a client while the client would be like a service. In WCF, each MEP represent some channels associated. MEP Channels Datagram IInputChannel, IOutputChannel Request-Reply IRequestChannel, IReplyChannel Duplex IDuplexChannel And the channels are created by ChannelListener on the server side, and ChannelFactory on the client side. The ChannelListener and ChannelFactory are created by the TransportBindingElement. The TransportBindingElement is created by the Binding, which can be defined as a new binding or from a custom binding. For more information about the transport channel mode, please refer to the MSDN document. The figure below shows the transport channel objects when using the request-reply MEP. And this is the datagram MEP. And this is the duplex MEP. After investigated the WCF transport architecture, channel mode and MEP, we finally identified what we should do to extend our message bus based transport layer. They are: Binding: (Optional) Defines the channel elements in the channel stack and added our transport binding element at the bottom of the stack. But we can use the build-in CustomBinding as well. TransportBindingElement: Defines which MEP is supported in our transport and create the related ChannelListener and ChannelFactory. This also defines the scheme of the endpoint if using this transport. ChannelListener: Create the server side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelListener to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelListener for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. ChannelFactory: Create the client side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelFactory to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelFactory for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. Channels: Based on the MEPs we want to support, we need to implement the channels accordingly. For example, if we want our transport support Request-Reply mode we should implement IRequestChannel and IReplyChannel. In this series I will implement all 3 MEPs listed above one by one. Scaffold: In order to make our transport extension works we also need to implement some scaffold stuff. For example we need some classes to send and receive message though out message bus. We also need some codes to read and write the WCF message, etc.. These are not necessary but would be very useful in our example.   Message Bus There is only one thing remained before we can begin to implement our scaling-out support WCF transport, which is the message bus. As I mentioned above, the message bus must have some features to fulfill all the WCF MEPs. In my company we will be using TIBCO EMS, which is an enterprise message bus product. And I have said before we can use any message bus production if it’s satisfied with our requests. Here I would like to introduce an interface to separate the message bus from the WCF. This allows us to implement the bus operations by any kinds bus we are going to use. The interface would be like this. 1: public interface IBus : IDisposable 2: { 3: string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null); 4:  5: void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo); 6:  7: BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo); 8: } There are only three methods for the bus interface. Let me explain one by one. The SendRequest method takes the responsible for sending the request message into the bus. The parameters description are: message: The WCF message content. fromClient: Indicates if this message was came from the client. from: The channel ID that this message was sent from. The channel ID will be generated when any kinds of channel was created, which will be explained in the following articles. to: The channel ID that this message should be received. In Request-Reply and Duplex MEP this is necessary since the reply message must be received by the channel which sent the related request message. The SendReply method takes the responsible for sending the reply message. It’s very similar as the previous one but no “from” parameter. This is because it’s no need to reply a reply message again in any MEPs. The Receive method takes the responsible for waiting for a incoming message, includes the request message and specified reply message. It returned a BusMessage object, which contains some information about the channel information. The code of the BusMessage class is 1: public class BusMessage 2: { 3: public string MessageID { get; private set; } 4: public string From { get; private set; } 5: public string ReplyTo { get; private set; } 6: public string Content { get; private set; } 7:  8: public BusMessage(string messageId, string fromChannelId, string replyToChannelId, string content) 9: { 10: MessageID = messageId; 11: From = fromChannelId; 12: ReplyTo = replyToChannelId; 13: Content = content; 14: } 15: } Now let’s implement a message bus based on the IBus interface. Since I don’t want you to buy and install the TIBCO EMS or any other message bus products, I will implement an in process memory bus. This bus is only for test and sample purpose. It can only be used if the service and client are in the same process. Very straightforward. 1: public class InProcMessageBus : IBus 2: { 3: private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity> _queue; 4: private readonly object _lock; 5:  6: public InProcMessageBus() 7: { 8: _queue = new ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity>(); 9: _lock = new object(); 10: } 11:  12: public string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null) 13: { 14: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, from, to); 15: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 16: return entity.ID.ToString(); 17: } 18:  19: public void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo) 20: { 21: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, null, replyTo); 22: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 23: } 24:  25: public BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo) 26: { 27: InProcMessageEntity e = null; 28: while (true) 29: { 30: lock (_lock) 31: { 32: var entity = _queue 33: .Where(kvp => kvp.Value.FromClient == fromClient && (kvp.Value.To == replyTo || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(kvp.Value.To))) 34: .FirstOrDefault(); 35: if (entity.Key != Guid.Empty && entity.Value != null) 36: { 37: _queue.TryRemove(entity.Key, out e); 38: } 39: } 40: if (e == null) 41: { 42: Thread.Sleep(100); 43: } 44: else 45: { 46: return new BusMessage(e.ID.ToString(), e.From, e.To, e.Content); 47: } 48: } 49: } 50:  51: public void Dispose() 52: { 53: } 54: } The InProcMessageBus stores the messages in the objects of InProcMessageEntity, which can take some extra information beside the WCF message itself. 1: public class InProcMessageEntity 2: { 3: public Guid ID { get; set; } 4: public string Content { get; set; } 5: public bool FromClient { get; set; } 6: public string From { get; set; } 7: public string To { get; set; } 8:  9: public InProcMessageEntity() 10: : this(string.Empty, false, string.Empty, string.Empty) 11: { 12: } 13:  14: public InProcMessageEntity(string content, bool fromClient, string from, string to) 15: { 16: ID = Guid.NewGuid(); 17: Content = content; 18: FromClient = fromClient; 19: From = from; 20: To = to; 21: } 22: }   Summary OK, now I have all necessary stuff ready. The next step would be implementing our WCF message bus transport extension. In this post I described two scaling-out approaches on the service side especially if we are using the cloud platform: dispatcher mode and pulling mode. And I compared the Pros and Cons of them. Then I introduced the WCF channel stack, channel mode and the transport extension part, and identified what we should do to create our own WCF transport extension, to let our WCF services using pulling mode based on a message bus. And finally I provided some classes that need to be used in the future posts that working against an in process memory message bus, for the demonstration purpose only. In the next post I will begin to implement the transport extension step by step.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Simple Excel Export with EPPlus

    - by Jesse Taber
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/10/30/simple-excel-export-with-epplus.aspxAnyone I’ve ever met who works with an application that sits in front of a lot of data loves it when they can get that data exported to an Excel file for them to mess around with offline. As both developer and end user of a little website project that I’ve been working on, I found myself wanting to be able to get a bunch of the data that the application was collecting into an Excel file. The great thing about being both an end user and a developer on a project is that you can build the features that you really want! While putting this feature together I came across the fantastic EPPlus library. This library is certainly very well known and popular, but I was so impressed with it that I thought it was worth a quick blog post. This library is extremely powerful; it lets you create and manipulate Excel 2007/2010 spreadsheets in .NET code with a high degree of flexibility. My only gripe with the project is that they are not touting how insanely easy it is to build a basic Excel workbook from a simple data source. If I were running this project the approach I’m about to demonstrate in this post would be front and center on the landing page for the project because it shows how easy it really is to get started and serves as a good way to ease yourself in to some of the more advanced features. The website in question uses RavenDB, which means that we’re dealing with POCOs to model the data throughout all layers of the application. I love working like this so when it came time to figure out how to export some of this data to an Excel spreadsheet I wanted to find a way to take an IEnumerable<T> and just have it dumped to Excel with each item in the collection being modeled as a single row in the Excel worksheet. Consider the following class: public class Employee { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public decimal HourlyRate { get; set; } public DateTime HireDate { get; set; } } Now let’s say we have a collection of these represented as an IEnumerable<Employee> and we want to be able to output it to an Excel file for offline querying/manipulation. As it turns out, this is dead simple to do with EPPlus. Have a look: public void ExportToExcel(IEnumerable<Employee> employees, FileInfo targetFile) { using (var excelFile = new ExcelPackage(targetFile)) { var worksheet = excelFile.Workbook.Worksheets.Add("Sheet1"); worksheet.Cells["A1"].LoadFromCollection(Collection: employees, PrintHeaders: true); excelFile.Save(); } } That’s it. Let’s break down what’s going on here: Create a ExcelPackage to model the workbook (Excel file). Note that the ‘targetFile’ value here is a FileInfo object representing the location on disk where I want the file to be saved. Create a worksheet within the workbook. Get a reference to the top-leftmost cell (addressed as A1) and invoke the ‘LoadFromCollection’ method, passing it our collection of Employee objects. Behind the scenes this is reflecting over the properties of the type provided and pulling out any public members to become columns in the resulting Excel output. The ‘PrintHeaders’ parameter tells EPPlus to grab the name of the property and put it in the first row. Save the Excel file All of the heavy lifting here is being done by the ‘LoadFromCollection’ method, and that’s a good thing. Now, this was really easy to do, but it has some limitations. Using this approach you get a very plain, un-styled Excel worksheet. The column widths are all set to the default. The number format for all cells is ‘General’ (which proves particularly interesting if you have a DateTime property in your data source). I’m a “no frills” guy, so I wasn’t bothered at all by trading off simplicity for style and formatting. That said, EPPlus has tons of samples that you can download that illustrate how to apply styles and formatting to cells and a ton of other advanced features that are way beyond the scope of this post.

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  • SQL SERVER – Simple Example of Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 2

    - by Pinal Dave
    This is the second part of the series Incremental Statistics. Here is the index of the complete series. What is Incremental Statistics? – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1 Simple Example of Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 2 DMV to Identify Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 3 In part 1 we have understood what is incremental statistics and now in this second part we will see a simple example of incremental statistics. This blog post is heavily inspired from my friend Balmukund’s must read blog post. If you have partitioned table and lots of data, this feature can be specifically very useful. Prerequisite Here are two things you must know before you start with the demonstrations. AdventureWorks – For the demonstration purpose I have installed AdventureWorks 2012 as an AdventureWorks 2014 in this demonstration. Partitions – You should know how partition works with databases. Setup Script Here is the setup script for creating Partition Function, Scheme, and the Table. We will populate the table based on the SalesOrderDetails table from AdventureWorks. -- Use Database USE AdventureWorks2014 GO -- Create Partition Function CREATE PARTITION FUNCTION IncrStatFn (INT) AS RANGE LEFT FOR VALUES (44000, 54000, 64000, 74000) GO -- Create Partition Scheme CREATE PARTITION SCHEME IncrStatSch AS PARTITION [IncrStatFn] TO ([PRIMARY], [PRIMARY], [PRIMARY], [PRIMARY], [PRIMARY]) GO -- Create Table Incremental_Statistics CREATE TABLE [IncrStatTab]( [SalesOrderID] [int] NOT NULL, [SalesOrderDetailID] [int] NOT NULL, [CarrierTrackingNumber] [nvarchar](25) NULL, [OrderQty] [smallint] NOT NULL, [ProductID] [int] NOT NULL, [SpecialOfferID] [int] NOT NULL, [UnitPrice] [money] NOT NULL, [UnitPriceDiscount] [money] NOT NULL, [ModifiedDate] [datetime] NOT NULL) ON IncrStatSch(SalesOrderID) GO -- Populate Table INSERT INTO [IncrStatTab]([SalesOrderID], [SalesOrderDetailID], [CarrierTrackingNumber], [OrderQty], [ProductID], [SpecialOfferID], [UnitPrice],   [UnitPriceDiscount], [ModifiedDate]) SELECT     [SalesOrderID], [SalesOrderDetailID], [CarrierTrackingNumber], [OrderQty], [ProductID], [SpecialOfferID], [UnitPrice],   [UnitPriceDiscount], [ModifiedDate] FROM       [Sales].[SalesOrderDetail] WHERE      SalesOrderID < 54000 GO Check Details Now we will check details in the partition table IncrStatSch. -- Check the partition SELECT * FROM sys.partitions WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('IncrStatTab') GO You will notice that only a few of the partition are filled up with data and remaining all the partitions are empty. Now we will create statistics on the Table on the column SalesOrderID. However, here we will keep adding one more keyword which is INCREMENTAL = ON. Please note this is the new keyword and feature added in SQL Server 2014. It did not exist in earlier versions. -- Create Statistics CREATE STATISTICS IncrStat ON [IncrStatTab] (SalesOrderID) WITH FULLSCAN, INCREMENTAL = ON GO Now we have successfully created statistics let us check the statistical histogram of the table. Now let us once again populate the table with more data. This time the data are entered into a different partition than earlier populated partition. -- Populate Table INSERT INTO [IncrStatTab]([SalesOrderID], [SalesOrderDetailID], [CarrierTrackingNumber], [OrderQty], [ProductID], [SpecialOfferID], [UnitPrice],   [UnitPriceDiscount], [ModifiedDate]) SELECT     [SalesOrderID], [SalesOrderDetailID], [CarrierTrackingNumber], [OrderQty], [ProductID], [SpecialOfferID], [UnitPrice],   [UnitPriceDiscount], [ModifiedDate] FROM       [Sales].[SalesOrderDetail] WHERE      SalesOrderID > 54000 GO Let us check the status of the partition once again with following script. -- Check the partition SELECT * FROM sys.partitions WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID('IncrStatTab') GO Statistics Update Now here has the new feature come into action. Previously, if we have to update the statistics, we will have to FULLSCAN the entire table irrespective of which partition got the data. However, in SQL Server 2014 we can just specify which partition we want to update in terms of Statistics. Here is the script for the same. -- Update Statistics Manually UPDATE STATISTICS IncrStatTab (IncrStat) WITH RESAMPLE ON PARTITIONS(3, 4) GO Now let us check the statistics once again. -- Show Statistics DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS('IncrStatTab', IncrStat) WITH HISTOGRAM GO Upon examining statistics histogram, you will notice that now the distribution has changed and there is way more rows in the histogram. Summary The new feature of Incremental Statistics is indeed a boon for the scenario where there are partitions and statistics needs to be updated frequently on the partitions. In earlier version to update statistics one has to do FULLSCAN on the entire table which was wasting too many resources. With the new feature in SQL Server 2014, now only those partitions which are significantly changed can be specified in the script to update statistics. Cleanup You can clean up the database by executing following scripts. -- Clean up DROP TABLE [IncrStatTab] DROP PARTITION SCHEME [IncrStatSch] DROP PARTITION FUNCTION [IncrStatFn] GO Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Statistics, Statistics

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  • SQL SERVER – SSIS Parameters in Parent-Child ETL Architectures – Notes from the Field #040

    - by Pinal Dave
    [Notes from Pinal]: SSIS is very well explored subject, however, there are so many interesting elements when we read, we learn something new. A similar concept has been Parent-Child ETL architecture’s relationship in SSIS. Linchpin People are database coaches and wellness experts for a data driven world. In this 40th episode of the Notes from the Fields series database expert Tim Mitchell (partner at Linchpin People) shares very interesting conversation related to how to understand SSIS Parameters in Parent-Child ETL Architectures. In this brief Notes from the Field post, I will review the use of SSIS parameters in parent-child ETL architectures. A very common design pattern used in SQL Server Integration Services is one I call the parent-child pattern.  Simply put, this is a pattern in which packages are executed by other packages.  An ETL infrastructure built using small, single-purpose packages is very often easier to develop, debug, and troubleshoot than large, monolithic packages.  For a more in-depth look at parent-child architectures, check out my earlier blog post on this topic. When using the parent-child design pattern, you will frequently need to pass values from the calling (parent) package to the called (child) package.  In older versions of SSIS, this process was possible but not necessarily simple.  When using SSIS 2005 or 2008, or even when using SSIS 2012 or 2014 in package deployment mode, you would have to create package configurations to pass values from parent to child packages.  Package configurations, while effective, were not the easiest tool to work with.  Fortunately, starting with SSIS in SQL Server 2012, you can now use package parameters for this purpose. In the example I will use for this demonstration, I’ll create two packages: one intended for use as a child package, and the other configured to execute said child package.  In the parent package I’m going to build a for each loop container in SSIS, and use package parameters to pass in a value – specifically, a ClientID – for each iteration of the loop.  The child package will be executed from within the for each loop, and will create one output file for each client, with the source query and filename dependent on the ClientID received from the parent package. Configuring the Child and Parent Packages When you create a new package, you’ll see the Parameters tab at the package level.  Clicking over to that tab allows you to add, edit, or delete package parameters. As shown above, the sample package has two parameters.  Note that I’ve set the name, data type, and default value for each of these.  Also note the column entitled Required: this allows me to specify whether the parameter value is optional (the default behavior) or required for package execution.  In this example, I have one parameter that is required, and the other is not. Let’s shift over to the parent package briefly, and demonstrate how to supply values to these parameters in the child package.  Using the execute package task, you can easily map variable values in the parent package to parameters in the child package. The execute package task in the parent package, shown above, has the variable vThisClient from the parent package mapped to the pClientID parameter shown earlier in the child package.  Note that there is no value mapped to the child package parameter named pOutputFolder.  Since this parameter has the Required property set to False, we don’t have to specify a value for it, which will cause that parameter to use the default value we supplied when designing the child pacakge. The last step in the parent package is to create the for each loop container I mentioned earlier, and place the execute package task inside it.  I’m using an object variable to store the distinct client ID values, and I use that as the iterator for the loop (I describe how to do this more in depth here).  For each iteration of the loop, a different client ID value will be passed into the child package parameter. The final step is to configure the child package to actually do something meaningful with the parameter values passed into it.  In this case, I’ve modified the OleDB source query to use the pClientID value in the WHERE clause of the query to restrict results for each iteration to a single client’s data.  Additionally, I’ll use both the pClientID and pOutputFolder parameters to dynamically build the output filename. As shown, the pClientID is used in the WHERE clause, so we only get the current client’s invoices for each iteration of the loop. For the flat file connection, I’m setting the Connection String property using an expression that engages both of the parameters for this package, as shown above. Parting Thoughts There are many uses for package parameters beyond a simple parent-child design pattern.  For example, you can create standalone packages (those not intended to be used as a child package) and still use parameters.  Parameter values may be supplied to a package directly at runtime by a SQL Server Agent job, through the command line (via dtexec.exe), or through T-SQL. Also, you can also have project parameters as well as package parameters.  Project parameters work in much the same way as package parameters, but the parameters apply to all packages in a project, not just a single package. Conclusion Of the numerous advantages of using catalog deployment model in SSIS 2012 and beyond, package parameters are near the top of the list.  Parameters allow you to easily share values from parent to child packages, enabling more dynamic behavior and better code encapsulation. If you want me to take a look at your server and its settings, or if your server is facing any issue we can Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • 11gR2 11.2.0.3 Database Certified with E-Business Suie

    - by Elke Phelps (Oracle Development)
    The 11gR2 11.2.0.2 Database was certified with E-Business Suite (EBS) 11i and EBS 12 almost one year ago today.  I’m pleased to announce that 11.2.0.3, the second patchset for the 11gR2 Database is now certified. Be sure to review the interoperability notes for R11i and R12 for the most up-to-date requirements for deployment. This certification announcement is important as you plan upgrades to the technology stack for your environment. For additional upgrade direction, please refer to the recently published EBS upgrade recommendations article. Database support implications may also be reviewed in the database patching and support article. Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Prerequisites 11.5.10.2 + ATG PF.H RUP 6 and higher Certified Platforms Linux x86 (Oracle Linux 4, 5) Linux x86 (RHEL 4, 5) Linux x86 (SLES 10) Linux x86-64 (Oracle Linux 4, 5) -- Database-tier only Linux x86-64 (RHEL 4, 5) -- Database-tier only Linux x86-64 (SLES 10--Database-tier only) Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit) (10) Oracle Solaris on x86-64 (64-bit) (10) -- Database-tier only Pending Platform Certifications Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit) Microsoft Windows Server (64-bit) HP-UX PA-RISC (64-bit) HP-UX Itanium IBM: Linux on System z  IBM AIX on Power Systems Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Prerequisites Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.0.4 or later; or,Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.1 or later Certified Platforms Linux x86 (Oracle Linux 4, 5) Linux x86 (RHEL 4, 5) Linux x86 (SLES 10) Linux x86-64 (Oracle Linux 4, 5) Linux x86-64 (RHEL 4, 5) Linux x86-64 (SLES 10) Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit) (10) Oracle Solaris on x86-64 (64-bit) (10)  -- Database-tier only Pending Platform Certifications Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit) Microsoft Windows Server (64-bit) HP-UX PA-RISC (64-bit) IBM: Linux on System z IBM AIX on Power Systems HP-UX Itanium Database Feature and Option CertificationsThe following 11gR2 11.2.0.2 database options and features are supported for use: Advanced Compression Active Data Guard Advanced Security Option (ASO) / Advanced Networking Option (ANO) Database Vault  Database Partitioning Data Guard Redo Apply with Physical Standby Databases Native PL/SQL compilation Oracle Label Security (OLS) Real Application Clusters (RAC) Real Application Testing SecureFiles Virtual Private Database (VPD) Certification of the following database options and features is still underway: Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) Column Encryption 11gR2 version 11.2.0.3 Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) Tablespace Encryption 11gR2 version 11.2.0.3 About the pending certifications Oracle's Revenue Recognition rules prohibit us from discussing certification and release dates, but you're welcome to monitor or subscribe to this blog for updates, which I'll post as soon as soon as they're available.     EBS 11i References Interoperability Notes - Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0) (Note 881505.1) Using Oracle 11g Release 2 Real Application Clusters with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i (Note 823586.1) Encrypting Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Network Traffic using Advanced Security Option and Advanced Networking Option (Note 391248.1) Using Transparent Data Encryption with Oracle E-Business Release 11i (Note 403294.1) Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i with Oracle Database Vault 11gR2 (Note 1091086.1) Using Oracle E-Business Suite with a Split Configuration Database Tier on Oracle 11gR2 Version 11.2.0.1.0 (Note 946413.1) Export/Import Process for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Database Instances Using Oracle Database 11g Release 1 or 2 (Note 557738.1) Database Initialization Parameters for Oracle Applications Release 11i (Note 216205.1) EBS 12 References Interoperability Notes - Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0) (Note 1058763.1) Database Initialization Parameters for Oracle Applications Release 12 (Note 396009.1) Using Oracle 11g Release 2 Real Application Clusters with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Note 823587.1) Using Transparent Data Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Note 732764.1) Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 with Oracle Database Vault 11gR2 (Note 1091083.1) Export/Import Process for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Database Instances Using Oracle Database 11g Release 1 or 11g Release 2 (Note 741818.1) Enabling SSL in Oracle Applications Release 12 (Note 376700.1) Related Articles 11gR2 Database Certified with E-Business Suite 11i 11gR2 Database Certified with E-Business Suite 12 11gR2 11.2.0.2 Database Certified with E-Business Suite 12 Can E-Business Users Apply Database Patch Set Updates? On Apps Tier Patching and Support: A Primer for E-Business Suite Users On Database Patching and Support:  A Primer for E-Business Suite Users Quarterly E-Business Suite Upgrade Recommendations;  October 2011 Edition The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction.  It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract.   It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decision.  The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle's products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

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  • SQL SERVER – The Story of a Lesser Known Startup Parameter in SQL Server – Guest Post by Balmukund Lakhani

    - by Pinal Dave
    This is a fantastic blog post from my dear friend Balmukund ( blog | twitter | facebook ). He had presented a fantastic session in our last UG and there were lots of requests from attendees that he blogs about it. Well, here is the blog post about the same very popular UG session. Let us read the entire blog post in the voice of the Balmukund himself. During my last session in SQL Bangalore User Group (Facebook) meeting, I was lucky enough to deliver a session on SQL Server Startup issue. The name of the session was “SQL Engine Starting Trouble – How to start?” From the feedback, I realized that one of the “not well known” startup parameter is “-m”. Okay, you might say “I know that this is used to start the SQL in single user mode”. But what you might not know is that you can pass a string with -m which has special meaning and use. I have used this parameter in my blog here but looks like not many of you have seen that. It happens most of the time when we want to start SQL Server in single user mode, someone else makes connection before you can. The only choice you have is to repeat same process again till you succeed. Some smart DBAs may disable the remote network protocols (TCP/IP and Named Pipes) of SQL Instance and allow only local connections to SQL. Once the activity is complete, our dear smart DBA has to remember to re-enable network protocols. Sometimes, it may be a local service or application getting connection to SQL before we can. There is a better way to deal with it. Yes, you have guessed it correctly: -m parameter which a string. Since I work with SQL Product Support team, I may know little more undocumented commands and parameters, but this is not an undocumented stuff. It’s already documented in books online. So in this blog, I am going to show a demo of its usage. As documentation shows, “Do not use this option as a security feature.” So please read this blog as knowledge enhancer and troubleshooting issues not security feature. In my laptop, I have a default instance of SQL Server 2012 and here is what we would in the configuration manager. Now, I would go ahead and stop SQL Service by selecting SQL Server (MSSQLServer) > Right Click > Stop. There are multiple ways to start SQL with startup parameter. 1) Use Net Start Command from command prompt Net Start MSSQLServer /mSQLCMD The above command is the simplest way to add startup parameter to SQL. This parameter would be cleared once we stop and start SQL. 2) Add Startup Parameter via configuration manager. Step is already listed here. We need to add -mSQLCMD If we compare 1 and 2, it’s clear that unless we modify startup parameter and remove -m, it would be in effect. 3) Start SQL Service via command line SQLServr.exe –mSQLCMD –s<InstanceName> Wait, what does SQLCMD mean with /m? It’s the instruction to SQL that start SQL Server in Single User Mode and allow only the application which is SQLCMD. Any other application would fail with Login Failed for User Error message. It would be important to note that string is case sensitive. This value should be picked up from application_name column from sys.dm_exec_sessions. I have made a connection using SQLCMD and as we can see it comes as upper case “SQLCMD”. If we want only management studio query windows to connect then we need to give -m” Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio – Query” as startup parameter. In below example, I have given it as SQLCMd (lower case d at the end) and we would notice that we would not be able to connect to SQL Instance. Above proves that parameter works as expected and it’s case sensitive. Error Log would show below information. How to get error log location? I have already blogged about it. Hope you have learned something new. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Prevent Changing the Screen Saver and Wallpaper in Windows 7

    - by Mysticgeek
    Sometimes you might not want users to have the ability to change Screen Savers and Wallpaper on Windows 7 workstations. Today we look at how to prevent them from changing either one or both. You might administer computers in your home or small office and find it annoying when users continuously change the wallpaper and Screen Savers to something obnoxious. A lot of times they might be inexperienced users and download these so-called “wonderful and free” Screen Saver/Wallpaper packages from shady sites that include loads of Spyware. Preventing users from changing them is another helpful tool to avoid wasteful time spent switching things back. Prevent Changing Screensavers & Wallpaper Using Group Policy Editor  Note: This method uses Group Policy which is not available in Home versions on Windows 7. Open the Start Menu and enter gpedit.msc into the Search box and hit Enter. When Local Group Policy Editor opens, navigate to User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Control Panel \ Personalization. Then in the right column double-click on Prevent changing desktop background. Now check the radio button next to Enabled, then click OK. Back on the Group Policy Screen, double-click on Prevent changing screen saver. In the next screen select the radio button next to Enable, click OK, then close out of Group Policy Editor. Now when a user goes into the Personalization section, the Desktop Background hyperlink is now grayed out and inactive. Notice the message One or more of the settings on this page has been disabled by the system administrator at the bottom of the section. If they click to change the Screen Saver, an error message will pop up letting them know the function is disabled. Prevent Changing Screensavers & Wallpaper Using a Registry Hack You can also make a couple Registry changes to prevent users from changing the Wallpaper & Screen Saver…which will work on Home versions of Windows 7. Before making any Registry changes make sure you back it up first. Open the Registry by typing regedit into the Search box in the Start menu and hit Enter. First we’ll start with the Wallpaper. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System and create a new String Value and name it Wallpaper. Then modify the Value data to point to the location of the Wallpaper you want it to always be. Where in this example it’s our main wallpaper on our local drive…then click OK. Now let’s make sure they can’t change the Screen Saver. In the same Registry location, we need to make a new DWORD (32-bit) Value. Give it the Value name of NoDispScrSavPage and the value data of “1” and click OK. Close out of the Registry and restart the machine or simply log off then back on again for the changes to take effect. Results For the Wallpapers, a user can still go in and see the selections, however if they try to change it to something else… It will just go back to the Personalization screen and no changes will be made, as we set the value to only be the background we specified. If the user tries to make a change to the Screen Saver, the hyperlink will be grayed out and inactive, and the message One or more of the settings on this page has been disabled by the system administrator will be displayed at the bottom of the section. Conclusion If you’re tired of users changing the Wallpaper and Screen Saver, and want another way to help avoid Malware, locking down these settings can help a lot. Again, before making any changes to the Registry, make sure to back it up. These settings should work in Vista and XP as well. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Save 1-4% More Battery Life With Windows Vista Battery SaverCustomize Your Windows Vista Logon ScreenEnable "Ubuntu Style" Logons in Windows VistaManage the Delete Confirmation Dialog box in Windows 7Dual Monitors: Use a Different Wallpaper on Each Desktop 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 Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

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  • Selling Visual Studio ALM

    - by Tarun Arora
    Introduction As a consultant I have been selling Application Lifecycle Management services using Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. I’ve been contacted various times by friends working in organization telling me that ALM processes in their company were benchmarked when dinosaurs walked the earth. Most of these individuals already know the great features Microsoft ALM tools offer and are keen to start a conversation with the CIO but don’t exactly know where to start. It is very important how you engage in your first conversation, if you start the conversation with ‘There is this great tooling from Microsoft which offers amazing features to boost developer productivity, … ‘ from experience I can tell you the reply from your CIO would be ‘I already know! Our existing landscape has a combination of bleeding edge open source and cutting edge licensed tools which already cover these features quite well, more over Microsoft products have a high licensing cost associated to them.’ You will always find it harder to sell by feature, the trick is to highlight the gap in the existing processes & tools and then highlight the impact of these gaps to the overall development processes, by now you would have captured enough attention to show off how the ALM tooling offered by Microsoft not only fills those gaps but offers great value adds to take their development practices to the next level. Rangers ALM Assessment Guide Image 1 – Welcome! First look at the Rangers ALM assessment guide Most organization already have some processes in place to cover aspects of ALM. How do you go about proving that there isn’t enough cover in place? This is where Visual Studio ALM Rangers ALM Assessment guide can help. The ALM assessment guide is really a tool that helps you gather information about Development practices and processes within a customer's environment. Several questionnaires are used to identify the current state of individual development lifecycle areas and decide on a desired state for those processes. It also presents guidance and roll-up summaries to help with recommendations moving forward. The ALM Rangers assessment guide can be downloaded from here. Image 2 – ALM Assessment guide divided into different functions of SDLC The assessment guide is divided into different functions of Software Development Lifecycle (listed below), this gives you the ability to access how mature the company is in different areas of SDLC. Architecture & Design Requirement Engineering & UX Development Software Configuration Management Governance Deployment & Operations Testing & Quality Assurance Project Planning & Management Each section has a set of questions, fill in the assessment by selecting “Never/Sometimes/Always” from the Answer column in the question sheets.  Each answer has weightage to the overall score. Each question has a link next to it, clicking the link takes you to the Reference sheet which gives you more details about the question along with a reason for “why you need to ask this question?”, “other ways to phrase the question” and “what to expect as an answer from the customer”. The trick is to engage the customer in a discussion. You need to probe a lot, listen to the customer and have a discussion with several team members, preferably without management to ensure that you receive candid feedback. This reminds me of a funny incident when during an ALM review a customer told me that they have a sophisticated semi-automated application deployment process, further discussions revealed that deployment actually involved 72 manual configuration steps per production node. Such observations can be recorded in the Issue Brainstorming worksheet for further consideration later. It is also worth mentioning the different levels of ALM maturity to the customer. By default the desired state of ALM maturity is set to Standard, it is possible to set a desired state by area, you should strive for Advanced or Dynamic, it always helps by explaining the classification and advantages. Image 3 – ALM levels by description The ALM assessment guide helps you arrive at a quantitative measure of the company’s ALM maturity. The resultant graph plotted on a spider’s web shows you the company’s current state of ALM maturity and the desired state of ALM maturity. Further since the results are classified by area you can immediately spot the areas where the customer needs immediate help. Image 4 – The spiders web! The red cross icons are areas shouting out for immediate attention, the yellow exclamation icons are areas that need improvement. These icons are calculated on the difference between the Current State of ALM maturity VS the Desired state of ALM maturity. Image 5 – Results by area Conclusion To conclude the Rangers ALM assessment guide gives you the ability to, Measure the customer’s current ALM maturity level Understand the ALM maturity level the customer desires to achieve Capture a healthy list of issues the customer wants to brainstorm further Now What’s next…? Download and get started with the Rangers ALM Assessment Guide. If you have successfully captured the above listed three pieces of information you are in a great state to make recommendations on the identified areas highlighting the benefits that Visual Studio ALM tools would offer. In the next post I will be covering how to take the ALM assessment results as the base to actually convert your recommendation into a sell.  Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. *** A special thanks goes out to fellow ranges Willy, Ethem and Philip for reviewing the blog post and providing valuable feedback. ***

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  • SPARC M7 Chip - 32 cores - Mind Blowing performance

    - by Angelo-Oracle
    The M7 Chip Oracle just announced its Next Generation Processor at the HotChips HC26 conference. As the Tech Lead in our Systems Division's Partner group, I had a front row seat to the extraordinary price performance advantage of Oracle current T5 and M6 based systems. Partner after partner tested  these systems and were impressed with it performance. Just read some of the quotes to see what our partner has been saying about our hardware. We just announced our next generation processor, the M7. This has 32 cores (up from 16-cores in T5 and 12-cores in M6). With 20 nm technology  this is our most advanced processor. The processor has more cores than anything else in the industry today. After the Sun acquisition Oracle has released 5 processors in 4 years and this is the 6th.  The S4 core  The M7 is built using the foundation of the S4 core. This is the next generation core technology. Like its predecessor, the S4 has 8 dynamic threads. It increases the frequency while maintaining the Pipeline depth. Each core has its own fine grain power estimator that keeps the core within its power envelop in 250 nano-sec granularity. Each core also includes Software in Silicon features for Application Acceleration Support. Each core includes features to improve Application Data Integrity, with almost no performance loss. The core also allows using part of the Virtual Address to store meta-data.  User-Level Synchronization Instructions are also part of the S4 core. Each core has 16 KB Instruction and 16 KB Data L1 cache. The Core Clusters  The cores on the M7 chip are organized in sets of 4-core clusters. The core clusters share  L2 cache.  All four cores in the complex share 256 KB of 4 way set associative L2 Instruction Cache, with over 1/2 TB/s of throughput. Two cores share 256 KB of 8 way set associative L2 Data Cache, with over 1/2 TB/s of throughput. With this innovative Core Cluster architecture, the M7 doubles core execution bandwidth. to maximize per-thread performance.  The Chip  Each  M7 chip has 8 sets of these core-clusters. The chip has 64 MB on-chip L3 cache. This L3 caches is shared among all the cores and is partitioned into 8 x 8 MB chunks. Each chunk is  8-way set associative cache. The aggregate bandwidth for the L3 cache on the chip is over 1.6TB/s. Each chip has 4 DDR4 memory controllers and can support upto 16 DDR4 DIMMs, allowing for 2 TB of RAM/chip. The chip also includes 4 internal links of PCIe Gen3 I/O controllers.  Each chip has 7 coherence links, allowing for 8 of these chips to be connected together gluelessly. Also 32 of these chips can be connected in an SMP configuration. A potential system with 32 chips will have 1024 cores and 8192 threads and 64 TB of RAM.  Software in Silicon The M7 chip has many built in Application Accelerators in Silicon. These features will be exposed to our Software partners using the SPARC Accelerator Program.  The M7  has built-in logic to decompress data at the speed of memory access. This means that applications can directly work on compressed data in memory increasing the data access rates. The VA Masking feature allows the use of part of the virtual address to store meta-data.  Realtime Application Data Integrity The Realtime Application Data Integrity feature helps applications safeguard against invalid, stale memory reference and buffer overflows. The first 4-bits if the Pointer can be used to store a version number and this version number is also maintained in the memory & cache lines. When a pointer accesses memory the hardware checks to make sure the two versions match. A SEGV signal is raised when there is a mismatch. This feature can be used by the Database, applications and the OS.  M7 Database In-Memory Query Accelerator The M7 chip also includes a In-Silicon Query Engines.  These accelerate tasks that work on In-Memory Columnar Vectors. Oracle In-Memory options stores data in Column Format. The M7 Query Engine can speed up In-Memory Format Conversion, Value and Range Comparisons and Set Membership lookups. This engine can work on Compressed data - this means not only are we accelerating the query performance but also increasing the memory bandwidth for queries.  SPARC Accelerated Program  At the Hotchips conference we also introduced the SPARC Accelerated Program to provide our partners and third part developers access to all the goodness of the M7's SPARC Application Acceleration features. Please get in touch with us if you are interested in knowing more about this program. 

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  • Trash Destination Adapter

    The Trash Destination and this article came from early experiences of using SSIS and community feedback at the time. When developing a package it is very useful to have a destination adapter that does nothing but consume rows with no setup requirement. You often want run a package part way through development, or just add a path so you can set a Data Viewer. There are stock tasks that can be used, but with the Trash Destination all columns are treated as selected automatically (usage type of read-only), so the pipeline knows they are required. It is also obvious that this is for development or diagnostic purposes, and is clearly not a part of the functional design of the package. It is also ideal for just playing around and exploring concepts in SSIS, and is often used in conjunction with the Data Generator Source. Using these two components it is easy to setup a test of an expression in the Derived Column Transformation for example. The Data Generator Source provides some dummy data, and the Trash Destination allows you to anchor the output path and set a Data Viewer to examine the results. It can also be used when performance tuning packages. It is a consistent and known quantity that has no external influences, so it is ideal as a destination when breaking the data flow into sections to isolate a bottleneck. The adapter is really simple to use and requires no setup. Simply drop it onto the pipeline designer and use it to terminate your data flow path. Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Finally, for 2005/2008, you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Trash Destination transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations. Downloads The Trash Destination is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Trash Destination for SQL Server 2005 Trash Destination for SQL Server 2008 Trash Destination for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.34 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.33 - SQL Server 2008 release. Includes support for upgrade of 2005 packages. RTM compatible, previously February 2008 CTP. (4 Mar 2008) Version 2.0.0.31 - SQL Server 2008 November 2007 CTP. (14 Feb 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.0.2.18 - SQL Server 2005 RTM Refresh. SP1 Compatibility Testing. (12 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.1.1 - SQL Server 2005 IDW 15 June CTP. Minor enhancements over v1.0.1.0. (11 Jun 2005) Version 1.0.1.0 - SQL Server 2005 IDW 14 April CTP. First Public Release. (30 May 2005) Troubleshooting Make sure you have downloaded the version that matches your version of SQL Server. We offer separate downloads for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012. If you an error when you try and use the component along the lines of The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed.  ... The data flow object "Konesans ..." is not installed correctly on this computer, this usually indicates that the internal cache of SSIS components needs to be updated. This is held by the SSIS service, so you need restart the the SQL Server Integration Services service. You can do this from the Services applet in Control Panel or Administrative Tools in Windows. You can also restart the computer if you prefer. You may also need to restart any current instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. The full error message is shown below for reference: TITLE: Microsoft Visual Studio ------------------------------ The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed. ------------------------------ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: The data flow object "Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.TrashDestination.Trash, Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.TrashDestination, Version=1.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b8351fe7752642cc" is not installed correctly on this computer. (Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Design) For 2005/2008, once installation is complete you need to manually add the task to the toolbox before you will see it and to be able add it to packages - How do I install a task or transform component? This is not necessary for SQL Server 2012 as the new SSIS toolbox automatically detects components. If you are still having issues then contact us, but please provide as much detail as possible about error, as well as which version of the the task you are using and details of the SSIS tools installed.

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  • Event Logging in LINQ C# .NET

    The first thing you'll want to do before using this code is to create a table in your database called TableHistory: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TableHistory] (     [TableHistoryID] [int] IDENTITY NOT NULL ,     [TableName] [varchar] (50) NOT NULL ,     [Key1] [varchar] (50) NOT NULL ,     [Key2] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [Key3] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [Key4] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [Key5] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [Key6] [varchar] (50)NULL ,     [ActionType] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [Property] [varchar] (50) NULL ,     [OldValue] [varchar] (8000) NULL ,     [NewValue] [varchar] (8000) NULL ,     [ActionUserName] [varchar] (50) NOT NULL ,     [ActionDateTime] [datetime] NOT NULL ) Once you have created the table, you'll need to add it to your custom LINQ class (which I will refer to as DboDataContext), thus creating the TableHistory class. Then, you'll need to add the History.cs file to your project. You'll also want to add the following code to your project to get the system date: public partial class DboDataContext{ [Function(Name = "GetDate", IsComposable = true)] public DateTime GetSystemDate() { MethodInfo mi = MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod() as MethodInfo; return (DateTime)this.ExecuteMethodCall(this, mi, new object[] { }).ReturnValue; }}private static Dictionary<type,> _cachedIL = new Dictionary<type,>();public static T CloneObjectWithIL<t>(T myObject){ Delegate myExec = null; if (!_cachedIL.TryGetValue(typeof(T), out myExec)) { // Create ILGenerator DynamicMethod dymMethod = new DynamicMethod("DoClone", typeof(T), new Type[] { typeof(T) }, true); ConstructorInfo cInfo = myObject.GetType().GetConstructor(new Type[] { }); ILGenerator generator = dymMethod.GetILGenerator(); LocalBuilder lbf = generator.DeclareLocal(typeof(T)); //lbf.SetLocalSymInfo("_temp"); generator.Emit(OpCodes.Newobj, cInfo); generator.Emit(OpCodes.Stloc_0); foreach (FieldInfo field in myObject.GetType().GetFields( System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Public | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic)) { // Load the new object on the eval stack... (currently 1 item on eval stack) generator.Emit(OpCodes.Ldloc_0); // Load initial object (parameter) (currently 2 items on eval stack) generator.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0); // Replace value by field value (still currently 2 items on eval stack) generator.Emit(OpCodes.Ldfld, field); // Store the value of the top on the eval stack into // the object underneath that value on the value stack. // (0 items on eval stack) generator.Emit(OpCodes.Stfld, field); } // Load new constructed obj on eval stack -> 1 item on stack generator.Emit(OpCodes.Ldloc_0); // Return constructed object. --> 0 items on stack generator.Emit(OpCodes.Ret); myExec = dymMethod.CreateDelegate(typeof(Func<t,>)); _cachedIL.Add(typeof(T), myExec); } return ((Func<t,>)myExec)(myObject);}I got both of the above methods off of the net somewhere (maybe even from CodeProject), but it's been long enough that I can't recall where I got them.Explanation of the History ClassThe History class records changes by creating a TableHistory record, inserting the values for the primary key for the table being modified into the Key1, Key2, ..., Key6 columns (if you have more than 6 values that make up a primary key on any table, you'll want to modify this), setting the type of change being made in the ActionType column (INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE), old value and new value if it happens to be an update action, and the date and Windows identity of the user who made the change.Let's examine what happens when a call is made to the RecordLinqInsert method:public static void RecordLinqInsert(DboDataContext dbo, IIdentity user, object obj){ TableHistory hist = NewHistoryRecord(obj); hist.ActionType = "INSERT"; hist.ActionUserName = user.Name; hist.ActionDateTime = dbo.GetSystemDate(); dbo.TableHistories.InsertOnSubmit(hist);}private static TableHistory NewHistoryRecord(object obj){ TableHistory hist = new TableHistory(); Type type = obj.GetType(); PropertyInfo[] keys; if (historyRecordExceptions.ContainsKey(type)) { keys = historyRecordExceptions[type].ToArray(); } else { keys = type.GetProperties().Where(o => AttrIsPrimaryKey(o)).ToArray(); } if (keys.Length > KeyMax) throw new HistoryException("object has more than " + KeyMax.ToString() + " keys."); for (int i = 1; i <= keys.Length; i++) { typeof(TableHistory) .GetProperty("Key" + i.ToString()) .SetValue(hist, keys[i - 1].GetValue(obj, null).ToString(), null); } hist.TableName = type.Name; return hist;}protected static bool AttrIsPrimaryKey(PropertyInfo pi){ var attrs = from attr in pi.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(ColumnAttribute), true) where ((ColumnAttribute)attr).IsPrimaryKey select attr; if (attrs != null && attrs.Count() > 0) return true; else return false;}RecordLinqInsert takes as input a data context which it will use to write to the database, the user, and the LINQ object to be recorded (a single object, for instance, a Customer or Order object if you're using AdventureWorks). It then calls the NewHistoryRecord method, which uses LINQ to Objects in conjunction with the AttrIsPrimaryKey method to pull all the primary key properties, set the Key1-KeyN properties of the TableHistory object, and return the new TableHistory object. The code would be called in an application, like so: Continue span.fullpost {display:none;}

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  • Get your content off Blogger.com

    - by Daniel Moth
    Due to blogger.com deprecating FTP users I've decided to move my blog. When I think of the content of a blog, 4 items come to mind: blog posts, comments, binary files that the blog posts linked to (e.g. images, ZIP files) and the CSS+structure of the blog. 1. Binaries The binary files you used in your blog posts are sitting on your own web space, so really blogger.com is not involved with that. Nothing for you to do at this stage, I'll come back to these in another post. 2. CSS and structure In the best case this exists as a separate CSS file on your web space (so no action for now) or in a worst case, like me, your CSS is embedded with the HTML. In the latter case, simply navigate from you dashboard to "Template" then "Edit HTML" and copy paste the contents of the box. Save that locally in a txt file and we'll come back to that in another post. 3. Blog posts and Comments The blog posts and comments exist in all the HTML files on your own web space. Parsing HTML files to extract that can be painful, so it is easier to download the XML files from blogger's servers that contain all your blog posts and comments. 3.1 Single XML file, but incomplete The obvious thing to do is go into your dashboard "Settings" and under the "Basic" tab look at the top next to "Blog Tools". There is a link there to "Export blog" which downloads an XML file with both comments and posts. The problem with that is that it only contains 200 comments - if you have more than that, you will lose the surplus. Also, this XML file has a lot of noise, compared to the better solution described next. (note that a tool I will refer to in a future post deals with either kind of XML file) 3.2 Multiple XML files First you need to find your blog ID. In case you don't know what that is, navigate to the "Template" as described in section 2 above. You will find references to the blog id in the HTML there, but you can also see it as part of the URL in your browser: blogger.com/template-edit.g?blogID=YOUR_NUMERIC_ID. Mine is 7 digits. You can now navigate to these URLs to download the XML for your posts and comments respectively: blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/posts/default?max-results=500&start-index=1 blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/comments/default?max-results=200&start-index=1 Note that you can only get 500 posts at a time and only 200 comments at a time. To get more than that you have to change the URL and download the next batch. To get you started, to get the XML for the next 500 posts and next 200 comments respectively you’d have to use these URLs: blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/posts/default?max-results=500&start-index=501 blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/comments/default?max-results=200&start-index=201 ...and so on and so forth. Keep all the XML files in the same folder on your local machine (with nothing else in there). 4. Validating the XML aka editing older blog posts The XML files you just downloaded really contain HTML fragments inside for all your blog posts. If you are like me, your blog posts did not conform to XHTML so passing them to an XML parser (which is what we will want to do) will result in the XML parser choking. So the next step is to fix that. This can be no work at all for you, or a huge time sink or just a couple hours of pain (which was my case). The process I followed was to attempt to load the XML files using XmlDocument.Load and wait for the exception to be thrown from my code. The exception would point to the exact offending line and column which would help me fix the issue. Rather than fix it in the XML itself, I would go back and edit the offending blog post and fix it there - recommended! Then I'd repeat the cycle until the XML could be loaded in the XmlDocument. To give you an idea, some of the issues I encountered are: extra or missing quotes in img and href elements, direct usage of chevrons instead of encoding them as &lt;, missing closing tags, mismatched nested pairs of elements and capitalization of html elements. For a full list of things that may go wrong see this. 5. Opportunity for other changes I also found a few posts that did not have a category assigned so I fixed those too. I took the further opportunity to create new categories and tag some of my blog posts with that. Note that I did not remove/change categories of existing posts, but only added.   In an another post we'll see how to use the XML files you stored in the local folder… Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • MySQL Connect Only 10 Days Away - Focus on InnoDB Sessions

    - by Bertrand Matthelié
    Time flies and MySQL Connect is only 10 days away! You can check out the full program here as well as in the September edition of the MySQL newsletter. Mat recently blogged about the MySQL Cluster sessions you’ll have the opportunity to attend, and below are those focused on InnoDB. Remember you can plan your schedule with Schedule Builder. Saturday, 1.00 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: 10 Things You Should Know About InnoDB—Calvin Sun, Oracle InnoDB is the default storage engine for Oracle’s MySQL as of MySQL Release 5.5. It provides the standard ACID-compliant transactions, row-level locking, multiversion concurrency control, and referential integrity. InnoDB also implements several innovative technologies to improve its performance and reliability. This presentation gives a brief history of InnoDB; its main features; and some recent enhancements for better performance, scalability, and availability. Saturday, 5.30 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: Demystified MySQL/InnoDB Performance Tuning—Dimitri Kravtchuk, Oracle This session covers performance tuning with MySQL and the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL and explains the main improvements made in MySQL Release 5.5 and Release 5.6. Which setting for which workload? Which value will be better for my system? How can I avoid potential bottlenecks from the beginning? Do I need a purge thread? Is it true that InnoDB doesn't need thread concurrency anymore? These and many other questions are asked by DBAs and developers. Things are changing quickly and constantly, and there is no “silver bullet.” But understanding the configuration setting’s impact is already a huge step in performance improvement. Bring your ideas and problems to share them with others—the discussion is open, just moderated by a speaker. Sunday, 10.15 am, Room Golden Gate 4: Better Availability with InnoDB Online Operations—Calvin Sun, Oracle Many top Web properties rely on Oracle’s MySQL as a critical piece of infrastructure for serving millions of users. Database availability has become increasingly important. One way to enhance availability is to give users full access to the database during data definition language (DDL) operations. The online DDL operations in recent MySQL releases offer users the flexibility to perform schema changes while having full access to the database—that is, with minimal delay of operations on a table and without rebuilding the entire table. These enhancements provide better responsiveness and availability in busy production environments. This session covers these improvements in the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL for online DDL operations such as add index, drop foreign key, and rename column. Sunday, 11.45 am, Room Golden Gate 7: Developing High-Throughput Services with NoSQL APIs to InnoDB and MySQL Cluster—Andrew Morgan and John Duncan, Oracle Ever-increasing performance demands of Web-based services have generated significant interest in providing NoSQL access methods to MySQL (MySQL Cluster and the InnoDB storage engine of MySQL), enabling users to maintain all the advantages of their existing relational databases while providing blazing-fast performance for simple queries. Get the best of both worlds: persistence; consistency; rich SQL queries; high availability; scalability; and simple, flexible APIs and schemas for agile development. This session describes the memcached connectors and examines some use cases for how MySQL and memcached fit together in application architectures. It does the same for the newest MySQL Cluster native connector, an easy-to-use, fully asynchronous connector for Node.js. Sunday, 1.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: InnoDB Performance Tuning—Inaam Rana, Oracle The InnoDB storage engine has always been highly efficient and includes many unique architectural elements to ensure high performance and scalability. In MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6, InnoDB includes many new features that take better advantage of recent advances in operating systems and hardware platforms than previous releases did. This session describes unique InnoDB architectural elements for performance, new features, and how to tune InnoDB to achieve better performance. Sunday, 4.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: InnoDB Compression for OLTP—Nizameddin Ordulu, Facebook and Inaam Rana, Oracle Data compression is an important capability of the InnoDB storage engine for Oracle’s MySQL. Compressed tables reduce the size of the database on disk, resulting in fewer reads and writes and better throughput by reducing the I/O workload. Facebook pushes the limit of InnoDB compression and has made several enhancements to InnoDB, making this technology ready for online transaction processing (OLTP). In this session, you will learn the fundamentals of InnoDB compression. You will also learn the enhancements the Facebook team has made to improve InnoDB compression, such as reducing compression failures, not logging compressed page images, and allowing changes of compression level. Not registered yet? You can still save US$ 300 over the on-site fee – Register Now!

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  • Responsible BI for Excel, Even for Older Versions

    - by andrewbrust
    On Wednesday, I will have the honor of co-presenting, for both The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) and the New York Technology Council. on the subject of Excel and BI. My co-presenter will be none other than Bill Baker, who was a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and, essentially, the father of BI at that company.  Details on the events are here and here. We'll be talking about PowerPivot, of course, but that's not all. Probably even more important than any one product, will be our discussion of whether the usual characterization of Excel as the nemesis of IT, the guilty pleasure of business users and the antithesis of formal BI is really valid and/or hopelessly intractable. Without giving away our punchline, I'll tell you that we are much more optimistic than that. There are huge upsides to Excel and while there are real dangers to using it in the BI space, there are standards and practices you can employ to ensure Excel is used responsibly. And when those practices are followed, Excel becomes quite powerful indeed. One of the keys to this is using Excel as a data consumer rather than data storage mechanism. Caching data in Excel is OK, but only if that data is (a) not modified and (b) configured for automated periodic refresh. PowerPivot meets both criteria -- it stores a read-only copy of your data in the form of a model, and once workbook containing a PowerPivot model is published to SharePoint, it can be configured for scheduled data refresh, on the server, requiring no user intervention whatsoever. Data refresh is a bit like hard drive backup: it will only happen reliably if it's automated, and super-easy to configure. PowerPivot hits a real home run here (as does Windows Home Server for PC backup, but I digress). The thing about PowerPivot is that it's an add-in for Excel 2010. What if you're not planning to go to that new version for quite a while? What if you’ve just deployed Office 2007 in your organization? What if you're still on Office 2003, or an even earlier version? What can you do immediately to share data responsibly and easily? As it turns out, there's a feature in Excel that's been around for quite a while, that can help: Web Queries.  The Web Query feature was introduced, ostensibly, to allow Excel to pull data in from Internet Web pages…for example, data in a stock quote history table will come in nicely, as will any data in a Web page that is displayed in an HTML table.  To use the feature In Excel 2007 or 2010, click the Data Tab or the ribbon and click the “From Web” button towards the left; in older versions use the corresponding option in  the menu or  toolbars.  Next, paste a URL into the resulting dialog box and tap Enter or click the Go button.  A preview of the Web page will come up, and the dialog will allow you to select the specific table within the page whose data you’d like to import.  Here’s an example: Now just click the table, click the Import button, and the Import Data dialog appears.  You can simply click OK to bring in your data or you can first click the Properties… button and configure the data import to be refreshed at an interval in minutes that you select.  Now your data’s in the spreadsheet and ready to worked with: Your data may be vulnerable to modification, but if you’ve set up the data refresh, any accidental or malicious changes will be corrected in time anyway. The thing about this feature is that it’s most useful not for public Web pages, but for pages behind the firewall.  In effect, the Web Query feature provides an incredibly easy way to consume data in Excel that’s “published” from an application.  Users just need a URL.  They don’t need to know server and database names and since the data is read-only, providing credentials may be unnecessary, or can be handled using integrated security.  If that’s not good enough, the Web Query can be saved to a special .iqy file, which can be edited to provide POST parameter data. The only requirement is that the data must be provided in an HTML table, with the first row providing the column names.  From an ASP.NET project, it couldn’t be easier: a simple bound GridView control is totally compatible.  Use a data source control with it, and you don’t even have to write any code.  Users can link to pages that are part of an application’s UI, or developers can create pages that are specially designed for the purpose of providing an interface to the Web Query import feature.  And none of this is Microsoft- or .NET-specific.  You can create pages in any language you want (PHP comes to mind) that output the result set of a query in HTML table format, and then consume that data in a Web Query.  Then build PivotTables and charts on the data, and in Excel 2007 or 2010 you can use conditional formatting to create scorecards and dashboards. This strategy allows you to create pages that function quite similarly to the OData XML feeds rendered when .NET developers create an “Astoria” WCF Data Service.  And while it’s cool that PowerPivot and Excel 2010 can import such OData feeds, it’s good to know that older versions of Excel can function in a similar fashion, and can consume data produced by virtually any Web development platform. As a final matter, instead of just telling you that “older versions” of Excel support this feature, I’ll be more specific.  To discover what the first version of Excel was to support Web queries, go to http://bit.ly/OldSchoolXL.

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  • Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing, and what does that have to do with ERP?

    - by user709270
    Tier One Defined By Lyle Ekdahl, Oracle JD Edwards Group Vice President and General Manager  I recently became aware of the latest Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing tactic. Wait now, what is Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing and what does that have to do with ERP? Well if you grew up in USA during the 50’s, 60’s and maybe a bit in the early 70’s there was a unifying media of culture known as the comic book. I was a big Iron Man fan. I always liked the troubled hero aspect of Tony Start and hey he was a technologist. This is going somewhere, just hold on. Of course comic books like most media contained advertisements. Ninety pound weakling transformed by Charles Atlas in just 15 minutes per day. Baby Ruth, Juicy Fruit Gum and all assortments of Hostess goodies were on display. The best ad was for the “Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys – The real live fun-pets you grow yourself!” These ads set the standard for exaggeration and half-truth; “…they love attention…so eager to please, they can even be trained…” The cartoon picture on the ad is of a family of royal looking sea creatures – daddy, mommy, son and little sis – sea monkey? There was a disclaimer at the bottom in fine print, “Caricatures shown not intended to depict Artemia.” Ok what ten years old knows what the heck artemia is? Well you grow up fast once you’ve been separated from your buck twenty five plus postage just to discover that it is brine shrimp. Really dumb brine shrimp that don’t take commands or do tricks. Unfortunately the technology industry is full of sea monkey sales and marketing. Yes believe it or not in some cases there is subterfuge and obfuscation used to secure contracts. Hey I get it; the picture on the box might not be the actual size. Make up what you want about your product, but here is what I don’t like, could you leave out the obvious falsity when it comes to my product, especially the negative stuff. So here is the latest one – “Oracle’s JD Edwards is NOT tier one”. Really? Definition please! Well a whole host of googleable and reputable sources confirm that a tier one vendor is large, well known, and enjoys national and international recognition. Let me see large, so thousands of customers? Oh and part of the world’s largest business software and hardware corporation? Check and check JD Edwards has that and that. Well known, enjoying national and international recognition? Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is available in 21 languages and is directly localized in 33 countries that support some of the world’s largest multinationals and many midsized domestic market companies. Something on the order of half the JD Edwards customer base is outside North America. My passport is on its third insert after 2 years and not from vacations. So if you don’t mind I am going to mark national and international recognition in the got it column. So what else is there? Well let me offer a few criteria. Longevity – The JD Edwards products benefit from 35+ years of intellectual property development; through booms, busts, mergers and acquisitions, we are still here Vision & innovation – JD Edwards is the first full suite ERP to run on the iPad as just one example Proven track record of execution – Since becoming part of Oracle, JD Edwards has released to the market over 20 deliverables including major release, point releases, new apps modules, tool releases, integrations…. Solid, focused functionality with a flexible, interoperable, extensible underlying architecture – JD Edwards offers solid core ERP with specialty modules for verticals all delivered on a well defined independent tools layer that helps enable you to scale your business without an ERP reimplementation A continuation plan – Oracle’s JD Edwards offers our customers a 6 year roadmap as well as interoperability with Oracle’s next generation of applications Oh I almost forgot that the expert sources agree on one additional thing, tier one may be a preferred vendor that offers product and services to you with appealing value. You should check out the TCO studies of JD Edwards. I think you will see what the thousands of customers that rely on these products to run their businesses enjoy – that is the tier one solution with the lowest TCO. Oh and if you get an offer to buy an ERP for no license charge, remember the picture on the box might not be the actual size. 

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  • Visual Studio &amp; TFS 11 &ndash; List of extensions and upgrades

    - by terje
    This post is a list of the extensions I recommend for use with Visual Studio 11. It’s coming up all the time – what to install, where are the download sites, last version, etc etc, and thus I thought it better to post it here and keep it updated. The basics are Visual Studio 11 connected to a Team Foundation Server 11. Note that we now are at Beta time, and that also many live in a side-by-side environment with Visual Studio 2010.  The side-by-side is supported by VS 11. However, if you installed a component supporting VS11 before you installed VS11, then you need to reinstall it.  The VSIX installer will understand that it is to apply those only for VS11, and will not touch – nor remove – the same for VS2010. A good example here is the Power Commands. The list is more or less in priority order. The focus is to get a setup which can be used for a complete coding experience for the whole ALM process. The list of course reflects what I use for my work , so it is by no means complete, and for some of the tools there are equally useful alternatives. Many components have not yet arrived with VS11 support.  I will add them as they arrive.  The components directly associated with Visual Studio from Microsoft should be common, see the Microsoft column. If you still need the VS2010 extensions, here they are: The extensions for VS 2010.   Components ready for VS 11, both upgrades and new ones Product Notes Latest Version License Applicable to Microsoft TFS Power Tools Beta 111 Side-by-side with TFS 2010 should work, but remove the Shell Extension from the TFS 2010 power tool first. March 2012(11.0.50321.0) Free TFS integration Yes ReSharper EAP for Beta 11 (updates very often, nearly daily) 7.0.3.261 pr. 16/3/2012 Free as EAP, Licensed later Coding & Quality No Power Commands1 Just reinstall, even if you already have it for VS2010. The reinstall will then apply it to VS 11 1.0.2.3 Free Coding Yes Visualization and Modelling SDK for beta Info here and here. Another download site and info here. Also download from MSDN Subscription site. Requires VS 11 Beta SDK 11 Free now, otherwise Part of MSDN Subscription Modeling Yes Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK Published 16.2.2012     Yes Visual Studio 11 Feedback tool1 Use this to really ease the process of sending bugs back to Microsoft. 1.1 Free as prerelase Visual Studio Yes             #1 Get via Visual Studio’s Tools | Extension Manager (or The Code Gallery). (From Adam : All these are auto updated by the Extension Manager in Visual Studio) #2 Works with ultimate only Components we wait for, not yet in a VS 11 version Product Notes Latest Version License Applicable to Microsoft       Coding Yes Inmeta Build Explorer     Free TFS integration No Build Manager Community Build Manager. Info here from Jakob   Free TFS Integration No Code Contracts Coming real soon   Free Coding & Quality Yes Code Contracts Editor Extensions     Free Coding & Quality Yes Web Std Update     Free Coding (Web) Yes (MSFT) Web Essentials     Free Coding (Web) Yes (MSFT) DotPeek It says up to .Net 4.0, but some tests indicates it seems to be able to handle 4.5. 1.0.0.7999 Free Coding/Investigation No Just Decompile Also says up to .net 4.0   Free Coding/Investigation No dotTrace     Licensed Quality No NDepend   Licensed Quality No tangible T4 editor     Lite version Free (Good enough) Coding (T4 templates) No Pex Moles are now integrated and improved in VS 11 as a new library called Fakes.     Coding & Unit Testing Yes Components which are now integrated into VS 11 Product Notes Productivity Power Tools Features integrated into VS11, with a few exceptions, I don’t think you will miss those. Fakes  Was Moles in 2010. Fakes is improved and made into a product.  NuGet Manager Included in the install, but still an extension package. Info here. Product installation, upgrades and patches for VS/TFS 11   Product Notes Date Applicable to Visual Studio 11 & TFS 11 Beta This is the beta release, and you are free to download and try it out. March 2012 Visual Studio and TFS SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Cumulative Update 4 The TFS 11 requires the CU1 at least, but you should go up to at least CU4, since this update solves a ghost record problem that otherwise may cause your TFS database to not release records the way it should when you clean it up, see this post for more information on that issue.  Oct 2011 SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1

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  • Global Perspective: Oracle AppAdvantage Does its Stage Debut in the UK

    - by Tanu Sood
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Global Perspective is a monthly series that brings experiences, business needs and real-world use cases from regions across the globe. This month’s feature is a follow-up from last month’s Global Perspective note from a well known ACE Director based in EMEA. My first contribution to this blog was before Oracle Open World and I was quite excited about where this initiative would take me in my understanding of the value of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Rimi Bewtra from the Oracle AppAdvantage team came as promised to the Oracle ACE Director briefings and explained what this initiative was all about and I then asked the directors to take part in the new survey. The story was really well received and then at the SOA advisory board that many of these ACE Directors already take part in there was a further discussion on how this initiative will help customers understand the benefits of adoption. A few days later Rick Beers launched the program at a lunch of invited customer executives which included one from Pella who talked about their projects (a quick recap on that here). I wasn’t able to stay for the whole event but what really interested me was that these executives who understood the technology but where looking for how they could use them to drive their businesses. Lots of ideas were bubbling up in my head about how we can use this in user groups to help our members, and the timing was fantastic as just three weeks later we had UKOUG_Apps13, our flagship Applications conference in the UK. We had independently working with Oracle marketing in the UK on an initiative called Apps Transformation to help our members look beyond just the application they use today. We have had a Fusion community page but felt the options open are now much wider than Fusion Applications, there are acquired applications, social, mobility and of course the underlying technology, Oracle Fusion Middleware. I was really pleased to be allowed to give the Oracle AppAdvantage story as a session in our conference and we are planning a special Apps Transformation event in March where I hope the Oracle AppAdvantage team will take part and we will have the results of the survey to discuss. But, life also came full circle for me. In my first post, I talked about Andrew Sutherland and his original theory that Oracle Fusion Middleware adoption had technical drivers. Well, Andrew was a speaker at our event and he gave a potted, tech-talk free update on Oracle Open World. Andrew talked about the Prevailing Technology Winds, and what is driving this today and he talked about that in the past it was the move from simply automating processes (ERP etc), through the altering of those processes (SOA) and onto consolidation. The next drivers are around the need to predict, both faster and more accurately; how to better exploit the information that we have available. He went on to talk about The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information – harnessing these forces of change with Oracle technology. Gartner really likes this concept and if you want to know more you can get their paper here. All this has made me think, and I hope it will make you too. Technology can help us drive our businesses better and understanding your needs can be the first step on your journey, which was the theme of our event in the UK. I spoke to a number of the delegates and I hope to share some of their stories in later posts. If you have a story to share, the survey is at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P335DD3 About the Author: Debra Lilley, Fujitsu Fusion Champion, UKOUG Board Member, Fusion User Experience Advocate and ACE Director. Debra has 18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since 9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Leader and then Oracle Alliance Director. She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at debrasoraclethoughts Editor’s Note: Debra has kindly agreed to share her musings and experience in a monthly column on the Fusion Middleware blog so do stay tuned…

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  • Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix

    - by Rick Strahl
    originally published in CoDe Magazine Editorial Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix, which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers. Let’s face it: ASP.NET development isn’t exactly trivial unless you already have a fair bit of familiarity with sophisticated development practices. Stick a non-developer in front of Visual Studio .NET or even the Visual Web Developer Express edition and it’s not likely that the person in front of the screen will be very productive or feel inspired. Yet other technologies like PHP and even classic ASP did provide the ability for non-developers and hobbyists to become reasonably proficient in creating basic web content quickly and efficiently. WebMatrix appears to be Microsoft’s attempt to bring back some of that simplicity with a number of technologies and tools. The key is to provide a friendly and fully self-contained development environment that provides all the tools needed to build an application in one place, as well as tools that allow publishing of content and databases easily to the web server. WebMatrix is made up of several components and technologies: IIS Developer Express IIS Developer Express is a new, self-contained development web server that is fully compatible with IIS 7.5 and based on the same codebase that IIS 7.5 uses. This new development server replaces the much less compatible Cassini web server that’s been used in Visual Studio and the Express editions. IIS Express addresses a few shortcomings of the Cassini server such as the inability to serve custom ISAPI extensions (i.e., things like PHP or ASP classic for example), as well as not supporting advanced authentication. IIS Developer Express provides most of the IIS 7.5 feature set providing much better compatibility between development and live deployment scenarios. SQL Server Compact 4.0 Database access is a key component for most web-driven applications, but on the Microsoft stack this has mostly meant you have to use SQL Server or SQL Server Express. SQL Server Compact is not new-it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been severely hobbled in the past by terrible tool support and the inability to support more than a single connection in Microsoft’s attempt to avoid losing SQL Server licensing. The new release of SQL Server Compact 4.0 supports multiple connections and you can run it in ASP.NET web applications simply by installing an assembly into the bin folder of the web application. In effect, you don’t have to install a special system configuration to run SQL Compact as it is a drop-in database engine: Copy the small assembly into your BIN folder (or from the GAC if installed fully), create a connection string against a local file-based database file, and then start firing SQL requests. Additionally WebMatrix includes nice tools to edit the database tables and files, along with tools to easily upsize (and hopefully downsize in the future) to full SQL Server. This is a big win, pending compatibility and performance limits. In my simple testing the data engine performed well enough for small data sets. This is not only useful for web applications, but also for desktop applications for which a fully installed SQL engine like SQL Server would be overkill. Having a local data store in those applications that can potentially be accessed by multiple users is a welcome feature. ASP.NET Razor View Engine What? Yet another native ASP.NET view engine? We already have Web Forms and various different flavors of using that view engine with Web Forms and MVC. Do we really need another? Microsoft thinks so, and Razor is an implementation of a lightweight, script-only view engine. Unlike the Web Forms view engine, Razor works only with inline code, snippets, and markup; therefore, it is more in line with current thinking of what a view engine should represent. There’s no support for a “page model” or any of the other Web Forms features of the full-page framework, but just a lightweight scripting engine that works with plain markup plus embedded expressions and code. The markup syntax for Razor is geared for minimal typing, plus some progressive detection of where a script block/expression starts and ends. This results in a much leaner syntax than the typical ASP.NET Web Forms alligator (<% %>) tags. Razor uses the @ sign plus standard C# (or Visual Basic) block syntax to delineate code snippets and expressions. Here’s a very simple example of what Razor markup looks like along with some comment annotations: <!DOCTYPE html> <html>     <head>         <title></title>     </head>     <body>     <h1>Razor Test</h1>          <!-- simple expressions -->     @DateTime.Now     <hr />     <!-- method expressions -->     @DateTime.Now.ToString("T")          <!-- code blocks -->     @{         List<string> names = new List<string>();         names.Add("Rick");         names.Add("Markus");         names.Add("Claudio");         names.Add("Kevin");     }          <!-- structured block statements -->     <ul>     @foreach(string name in names){             <li>@name</li>     }     </ul>           <!-- Conditional code -->        @if(true) {                        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->        <text>         true        </text>;    }    else    {        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->       <text>       false       </text>;    }    </body> </html> Like the Web Forms view engine, Razor parses pages into code, and then executes that run-time compiled code. Effectively a “page” becomes a code file with markup becoming literal text written into the Response stream, code snippets becoming raw code, and expressions being written out with Response.Write(). The code generated from Razor doesn’t look much different from similar Web Forms code that only uses script tags; so although the syntax may look different, the operational model is fairly similar to the Web Forms engine minus the overhead of the large Page object model. However, there are differences: -Razor pages are based on a new base class, Microsoft.WebPages.WebPage, which is hosted in the Microsoft.WebPages assembly that houses all the Razor engine parsing and processing logic. Browsing through the assembly (in the generated ASP.NET Temporary Files folder or GAC) will give you a good idea of the functionality that Razor provides. If you look closely, a lot of the feature set matches ASP.NET MVC’s view implementation as well as many of the helper classes found in MVC. It’s not hard to guess the motivation for this sort of view engine: For beginning developers the simple markup syntax is easier to work with, although you obviously still need to have some understanding of the .NET Framework in order to create dynamic content. The syntax is easier to read and grok and much shorter to type than ASP.NET alligator tags (<% %>) and also easier to understand aesthetically what’s happening in the markup code. Razor also is a better fit for Microsoft’s vision of ASP.NET MVC: It’s a new view engine without the baggage of Web Forms attached to it. The engine is more lightweight since it doesn’t carry all the features and object model of Web Forms with it and it can be instantiated directly outside of the HTTP environment, which has been rather tricky to do for the Web Forms view engine. Having a standalone script parser is a huge win for other applications as well – it makes it much easier to create script or meta driven output generators for many types of applications from code/screen generators, to simple form letters to data merging applications with user customizability. For me personally this is very useful side effect and who knows maybe Microsoft will actually standardize they’re scripting engines (die T4 die!) on this engine. Razor also better fits the “view-based” approach where the view is supposed to be mostly a visual representation that doesn’t hold much, if any, code. While you can still use code, the code you do write has to be self-contained. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if Razor will become the new standard view engine for MVC in the future – and in fact there have been announcements recently that Razor will become the default script engine in ASP.NET MVC 3.0. Razor can also be used in existing Web Forms and MVC applications, although that’s not working currently unless you manually configure the script mappings and add the appropriate assemblies. It’s possible to do it, but it’s probably better to wait until Microsoft releases official support for Razor scripts in Visual Studio. Once that happens, you can simply drop .cshtml and .vbhtml pages into an existing ASP.NET project and they will work side by side with classic ASP.NET pages. WebMatrix Development Environment To tie all of these three technologies together, Microsoft is shipping WebMatrix with an integrated development environment. An integrated gallery manager makes it easy to download and load existing projects, and then extend them with custom functionality. It seems to be a prominent goal to provide community-oriented content that can act as a starting point, be it via a custom templates or a complete standard application. The IDE includes a project manager that works with a single project and provides an integrated IDE/editor for editing the .cshtml and .vbhtml pages. A run button allows you to quickly run pages in the project manager in a variety of browsers. There’s no debugging support for code at this time. Note that Razor pages don’t require explicit compilation, so making a change, saving, and then refreshing your page in the browser is all that’s needed to see changes while testing an application locally. It’s essentially using the auto-compiling Web Project that was introduced with .NET 2.0. All code is compiled during run time into dynamically created assemblies in the ASP.NET temp folder. WebMatrix also has PHP Editing support with syntax highlighting. You can load various PHP-based applications from the WebMatrix Web Gallery directly into the IDE. Most of the Web Gallery applications are ready to install and run without further configuration, with Wizards taking you through installation of tools, dependencies, and configuration of the database as needed. WebMatrix leverages the Web Platform installer to pull the pieces down from websites in a tight integration of tools that worked nicely for the four or five applications I tried this out on. Click a couple of check boxes and fill in a few simple configuration options and you end up with a running application that’s ready to be customized. Nice! You can easily deploy completed applications via WebDeploy (to an IIS server) or FTP directly from within the development environment. The deploy tool also can handle automatically uploading and installing the database and all related assemblies required, making deployment a simple one-click install step. Simplified Database Access The IDE contains a database editor that can edit SQL Compact and SQL Server databases. There is also a Database helper class that facilitates database access by providing easy-to-use, high-level query execution and iteration methods: @{       var db = Database.OpenFile("FirstApp.sdf");     string sql = "select * from customers where Id > @0"; } <ul> @foreach(var row in db.Query(sql,1)){         <li>@row.FirstName @row.LastName</li> } </ul> The query function takes a SQL statement plus any number of positional (@0,@1 etc.) SQL parameters by simple values. The result is returned as a collection of rows which in turn have a row object with dynamic properties for each of the columns giving easy (though untyped) access to each of the fields. Likewise Execute and ExecuteNonQuery allow execution of more complex queries using similar parameter passing schemes. Note these queries use string-based queries rather than LINQ or Entity Framework’s strongly typed LINQ queries. While this may seem like a step back, it’s also in line with the expectations of non .NET script developers who are quite used to writing and using SQL strings in code rather than using OR/M frameworks. The only question is why was something not included from the beginning in .NET and Microsoft made developers build custom implementations of these basic building blocks. The implementation looks a lot like a DataTable-style data access mechanism, but to be fair, this is a common approach in scripting languages. This type of syntax that uses simple, static, data object methods to perform simple data tasks with one line of code are common in scripting languages and are a good match for folks working in PHP/Python, etc. Seems like Microsoft has taken great advantage of .NET 4.0’s dynamic typing to provide this sort of interface for row iteration where each row has properties for each field. FWIW, all the examples demonstrate using local SQL Compact files - I was unable to get a SQL Server connection string to work with the Database class (the connection string wasn’t accepted). However, since the code in the page is still plain old .NET, you can easily use standard ADO.NET code or even LINQ or Entity Framework models that are created outside of WebMatrix in separate assemblies as required. The good the bad the obnoxious - It’s still .NET The beauty (or curse depending on how you look at it :)) of Razor and the compilation model is that, behind it all, it’s still .NET. Although the syntax may look foreign, it’s still all .NET behind the scenes. You can easily access existing tools, helpers, and utilities simply by adding them to the project as references or to the bin folder. Razor automatically recognizes any assembly reference from assemblies in the bin folder. In the default configuration, Microsoft provides a host of helper functions in a Microsoft.WebPages assembly (check it out in the ASP.NET temp folder for your application), which includes a host of HTML Helpers. If you’ve used ASP.NET MVC before, a lot of the helpers should look familiar. Documentation at the moment is sketchy-there’s a very rough API reference you can check out here: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference Who needs WebMatrix? Uhm… good Question Clearly Microsoft is trying hard to create an environment with WebMatrix that is easy to use for newbie developers. The goal seems to be simplicity in providing a minimal development environment and an easy-to-use script engine/language that makes it easy to get started with. There’s also some focus on community features that can be used as starting points, such as Web Gallery applications and templates. The community features in particular are very nice and something that would be nice to eventually see in Visual Studio as well. The question is whether this is too little too late. Developers who have been clamoring for a simpler development environment on the .NET stack have mostly left for other simpler platforms like PHP or Python which are catering to the down and dirty developer. Microsoft will be hard pressed to win those folks-and other hardcore PHP developers-back. Regardless of how much you dress up a script engine fronted by the .NET Framework, it’s still the .NET Framework and all the complexity that drives it. While .NET is a fine solution in its breadth and features once you get a basic handle on the core features, the bar of entry to being productive with the .NET Framework is still pretty high. The MVC style helpers Microsoft provides are a good step in the right direction, but I suspect it’s not enough to shield new developers from having to delve much deeper into the Framework to get even basic applications built. Razor and its helpers is trying to make .NET more accessible but the reality is that in order to do useful stuff that goes beyond the handful of simple helpers you still are going to have to write some C# or VB or other .NET code. If the target is a hobby/amateur/non-programmer the learning curve isn’t made any easier by WebMatrix it’s just been shifted a tad bit further along in your development endeavor when you run out of canned components that are supplied either by Microsoft or the community. The database helpers are interesting and actually I’ve heard a lot of discussion from various developers who’ve been resisting .NET for a really long time perking up at the prospect of easier data access in .NET than the ridiculous amount of code it takes to do even simple data access with raw ADO.NET. It seems sad that such a simple concept and implementation should trigger this sort of response (especially since it’s practically trivial to create helpers like these or pick them up from countless libraries available), but there it is. It also shows that there are plenty of developers out there who are more interested in ‘getting stuff done’ easily than necessarily following the latest and greatest practices which are overkill for many development scenarios. Sometimes it seems that all of .NET is focused on the big life changing issues of development, rather than the bread and butter scenarios that many developers are interested in to get their work accomplished. And that in the end may be WebMatrix’s main raison d'être: To bring some focus back at Microsoft that simpler and more high level solutions are actually needed to appeal to the non-high end developers as well as providing the necessary tools for the high end developers who want to follow the latest and greatest trends. The current version of WebMatrix hits many sweet spots, but it also feels like it has a long way to go before it really can be a tool that a beginning developer or an accomplished developer can feel comfortable with. Although there are some really good ideas in the environment (like the gallery for downloading apps and components) which would be a great addition for Visual Studio as well, the rest of the development environment just feels like crippleware with required functionality missing especially debugging and Intellisense, but also general editor support. It’s not clear whether these are because the product is still in an early alpha release or whether it’s simply designed that way to be a really limited development environment. While simple can be good, nobody wants to feel left out when it comes to necessary tool support and WebMatrix just has that left out feeling to it. If anything WebMatrix’s technology pieces (which are really independent of the WebMatrix product) are what are interesting to developers in general. The compact IIS implementation is a nice improvement for development scenarios and SQL Compact 4.0 seems to address a lot of concerns that people have had and have complained about for some time with previous SQL Compact implementations. By far the most interesting and useful technology though seems to be the Razor view engine for its light weight implementation and it’s decoupling from the ASP.NET/HTTP pipeline to provide a standalone scripting/view engine that is pluggable. The first winner of this is going to be ASP.NET MVC which can now have a cleaner view model that isn’t inconsistent due to the baggage of non-implemented WebForms features that don’t work in MVC. But I expect that Razor will end up in many other applications as a scripting and code generation engine eventually. Visual Studio integration for Razor is currently missing, but is promised for a later release. The ASP.NET MVC team has already mentioned that Razor will eventually become the default MVC view engine, which will guarantee continued growth and development of this tool along those lines. And the Razor engine and support tools actually inherit many of the features that MVC pioneered, so there’s some synergy flowing both ways between Razor and MVC. As an existing ASP.NET developer who’s already familiar with Visual Studio and ASP.NET development, the WebMatrix IDE doesn’t give you anything that you want. The tools provided are minimal and provide nothing that you can’t get in Visual Studio today, except the minimal Razor syntax highlighting, so there’s little need to take a step back. With Visual Studio integration coming later there’s little reason to look at WebMatrix for tooling. It’s good to see that Microsoft is giving some thought about the ease of use of .NET as a platform For so many years, we’ve been piling on more and more new features without trying to take a step back and see how complicated the development/configuration/deployment process has become. Sometimes it’s good to take a step - or several steps - back and take another look and realize just how far we’ve come. WebMatrix is one of those reminders and one that likely will result in some positive changes on the platform as a whole. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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  • Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 3): Ghost Objects

    - by Simon Cooper
    In the previous blog post, I covered how we solved the problem of dependencies between objects and between schemas. However, that isn’t the end of the issue. The dependencies algorithm I described works when you’re querying live databases and you can get dependencies for a particular schema direct from the server, and that’s all well and good. To throw a (rather large) spanner in the works, Schema Compare also has the concept of a snapshot, which is a read-only compressed XML representation of a selection of schemas that can be compared in the same way as a live database. This can be useful for keeping historical records or a baseline of a database schema, or comparing a schema on a computer that doesn’t have direct access to the database. So, how do snapshots interact with dependencies? Inter-database dependencies don't pose an issue as we store the dependencies in the snapshot. However, comparing a snapshot to a live database with cross-schema dependencies does cause a problem; what if the live database has a dependency to an object that does not exist in the snapshot? Take a basic example schema, where you’re only populating SchemaA: SOURCE   TARGET (using snapshot) CREATE TABLE SchemaA.Table1 ( Col1 NUMBER REFERENCES SchemaB.Table1(col1));   CREATE TABLE SchemaA.Table1 ( Col1 VARCHAR2(100)); CREATE TABLE SchemaB.Table1 ( Col1 NUMBER PRIMARY KEY);   CREATE TABLE SchemaB.Table1 ( Col1 VARCHAR2(100)); In this case, we want to generate a sync script to synchronize SchemaA.Table1 on the database represented by the snapshot. When taking a snapshot, database dependencies are followed, but because you’re not comparing it to anything at the time, the comparison dependencies algorithm described in my last post cannot be used. So, as you only take a snapshot of SchemaA on the target database, SchemaB.Table1 will not be in the snapshot. If this snapshot is then used to compare against the above source schema, SchemaB.Table1 will be included in the source, but the object will not be found in the target snapshot. This is the same problem that was solved with comparison dependencies, but here we cannot use the comparison dependencies algorithm as the snapshot has not got any information on SchemaB! We've now hit quite a big problem - we’re trying to include SchemaB.Table1 in the target, but we simply do not know the status of this object on the database the snapshot was taken from; whether it exists in the database at all, whether it’s the same as the target, whether it’s different... What can we do about this sorry state of affairs? Well, not a lot, it would seem. We can’t query the original database, as it may not be accessible, and we cannot assume any default state as it could be wrong and break the script (and we currently do not have a roll-back mechanism for failed synchronizes). The only way to fix this properly is for the user to go right back to the start and re-create the snapshot, explicitly including the schemas of these 'ghost' objects. So, the only thing we can do is flag up dependent ghost objects in the UI, and ask the user what we should do with it – assume it doesn’t exist, assume it’s the same as the target, or specify a definition for it. Unfortunately, such functionality didn’t make the cut for v1 of Schema Compare (as this is very much an edge case for a non-critical piece of functionality), so we simply flag the ghost objects up in the sync wizard as unsyncable, and let the user sort out what’s going on and edit the sync script as appropriate. There are some things that we do do to alleviate somewhat this rather unhappy situation; if a user creates a snapshot from the source or target of a database comparison, we include all the objects registered from the database, not just the ones in the schemas originally selected for comparison. This includes any extra dependent objects registered through the comparison dependencies algorithm. If the user then compares the resulting snapshot against the same database they were comparing against when it was created, the extra dependencies will be included in the snapshot as required and everything will be good. Fortunately, this problem will come up quite rarely, and only when the user uses snapshots and tries to sync objects with unknown cross-schema dependencies. However, the solution is not an easy one, and lead to some difficult architecture and design decisions within the product. And all this pain follows from the simple decision to allow schema pre-filtering! Next: why adding a column to a table isn't as easy as you would think...

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  • How to shoot yourself in the foot (DO NOT Read in the office)

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/06/21/how-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-do-not-read.aspxLet me make it absolutely clear - the following is:merely collated by your Geek from http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=3917012#xx3917012xxvery, very very funny so you read it in the presence of others at your own riskso here is the list - you have been warned!C You shoot yourself in the foot.   C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."   FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling facility.   Modula-2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.   COBOL USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.   Lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...   BASIC Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.   Forth Foot yourself in the shoot.   APL You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.   Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.   Snobol If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.   HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.   Prolog You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain.   370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.   FORTRAN-77 You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you still can't do exception-processing.   Modula-2 (alternative) You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.   BASIC (compiled) You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.   Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.   Forth (alternative) BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming - where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code)   APL (alternative) You hear a gunshot and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or @#&^$%&%^ foot   Pascal (alternative) Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.   Snobol (alternative) You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).   Prolog (alternative) You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun, which then explodes in your face.   COMAL You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol, but the bore is clogged, and the pressure build-up blows apart both the pistol and your hand. or draw_pistol aim_at_foot(left) pull_trigger hop(swearing)   Scheme As Lisp, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.   Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.   Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at the feet." or The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette. or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type. or After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and confidently aim at your foot knowing it is safe. However the cordite in the round does an Unchecked Conversion, fires and shoots you in the foot anyway.   Eiffel   You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way. Smalltalk You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal. or You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bulletHole. Object Oriented Pascal You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet fired from what might currently be a gun.   PL/I You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes and drops the original one on your foot. Postscript foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage or It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you're long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though.   PERL You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife. or You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't feel. Assembly Language You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.or The bullet travels to your foot instantly, but it took you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun.   BCPL You shoot yourself somewhere in the leg -- you can't get any finer resolution than that. Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.   Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.   Powerbuilder While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it.   Standard ML By the time you get your code to typecheck, you're using a shoot to foot yourself in the gun.   MUMPS You shoot 583149 AK-47 teflon-tipped, hollow-point, armour-piercing bullets into even-numbered toes on odd-numbered feet of everyone in the building -- with one line of code. Three weeks later you shoot yourself in the head rather than try to modify that line.   Java You locate the Gun class, but discover that the Bullet class is abstract, so you extend it and write the missing part of the implementation. Then you implement the ShootAble interface for your foot, and recompile the Foot class. The interface lets the bullet call the doDamage method on the Foot, so the Foot can damage itself in the most effective way. Now you run the program, and call the doShoot method on the instance of the Gun class. First the Gun creates an instance of Bullet, which calls the doFire method on the Gun. The Gun calls the hit(Bullet) method on the Foot, and the instance of Bullet is passed to the Foot. But this causes an IllegalHitByBullet exception to be thrown, and you die.   Unix You shoot yourself in the foot or % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls %   370 JCL (alternative) You shoot yourself in the head just thinking about it.   DOS JCL You first find the building you're in in the phone book, then find your office number in the corporate phone book. Then you have to write this down, then describe, in cubits, your exact location, in relation to the door (right hand side thereof). Then you need to write down the location of the gun (loading it is a proprietary utility), then you load it, and the COBOL program, and run them, and, with luck, it may be run tonight.   VMS   $ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE" BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/ LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT   %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image or %SYS-F-FTSHT, foot shot (fifty lines of traceback omitted) sh,csh, etc You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C.   Apple System 7 Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small bomb appears with note "Error of Type 1 has occurred."   Windows 3.1 Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small box appears with note "Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct."   Windows 95 Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue. Then you will be informed that you don't have enough memory.   CP/M I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal.   DOS You finally found the gun, but can't locate the file with the foot for the life of you.   MSDOS You shoot yourself in the foot, but can unshoot yourself with add-on software.   Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.   Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.   dBase You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain, you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. or You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.   DBase IV, V1.0 You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up.   SQL You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. or Insert into Foot Select Bullet >From Gun.Hand Where Chamber = 'LOADED' And Trigger = 'PULLED'   Clipper You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot and discover that the gun that the bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. Oracle The menus for coding foot_shooting have not been implemented yet and you can't do foot shooting in SQL.   English You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. (For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.) Revelation [an implementation of the PICK Operating System] You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.   FlagShip Starting at the top of your head, you aim the gun at yourself repeatedly until, half an hour later, the gun is finally pointing at your foot and you pull the trigger. A new foot with a hole in it appears but you can't work out how to get rid of the old one and your gun doesn't work anymore.   FidoNet You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.   PicoSpan [a UNIX-based computer conferencing system] You can't shoot yourself in the foot because you're not a host. or (host variation) Whenever you shoot yourself in the foot, someone opens a topic in policy about it.   Internet You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot.   troff rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in 4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .*   Genetic Algorithms You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.   CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) You only fail to shoot everything that isn't your foot.   MS-SQL Server MS-SQL Server’s gun comes pre-loaded with an unlimited supply of Teflon coated bullets, and it only has two discernible features: the muzzle and the trigger. If that wasn't enough, MS-SQL Server also puts the gun in your hand, applies local anesthetic to the skin of your forefinger and stitches it to the gun's trigger. Meanwhile, another process has set up a spinal block to numb your lower body. It will then proceeded to surgically remove your foot, cryogenically freeze it for preservation, and attach it to the muzzle of the gun so that no matter where you aim, you will shoot your foot. In order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, you need to unstitch your trigger finger, remove your foot from the muzzle of the gun, and have it surgically reattached. Then you probably want to get some crutches and go out to buy a book on SQL Server Performance Tuning.   Sybase Sybase's gun requires assembly, and you need to go out and purchase your own clip and bullets to load the gun. Assembly is complicated by the fact that Sybase has hidden the gun behind a big stack of reference manuals, but it hasn't told you where that stack is. While you were off finding the gun, assembling it, buying bullets, etc., Sybase was also busy surgically removing your foot and cryogenically freezing it for preservation. Instead of attaching it to the muzzle of the gun, though, it packed your foot on dry ice and sent it UPS-Ground to an unnamed hookah bar somewhere in the middle east. In order to shoot your foot, you must modify your gun with a GPS system for targeting and hire some guy named "Indy" to find the hookah bar and wire the coordinates back to you. By this time, you've probably become so daunted at the tasks stand between you and shooting your foot that you hire a guy who's read all the books on Sybase to help you shoot your foot. If you're lucky, he'll be smart enough both to find your foot and to stop you from shooting it.   Magic software You spend 1 week looking up the correct syntax for GUN. When you find it, you realise that GUN will not let you shoot in your own foot. It will allow you to shoot almost anything but your foot. You then decide to build your own gun. You can't use the standard barrel since this will only allow for standard bullets, which will not fire if the barrel is pointed at your foot. After four weeks, you have created your own custom gun. It blows up in your hand without warning, because you failed to initialise the safety catch and it doesn't know whether the initial state is "0", 0, NULL, "ZERO", 0.0, 0,0, "0.0", or "0,00". You fix the problem with your remaining hand by nesting 12 safety catches, and then decide to build the gun without safety catch. You then shoot the management and retire to a happy life where you code in languages that will allow you to shoot your foot in under 10 days.FirefoxLets you shoot yourself in as many feet as you'd like, while using multiple great addons! IEA moving target in terms of standard ammunition size and doesn't always work properly with non-Microsoft ammunition, so sometimes you shoot something other than your foot. However, it's the corporate world's standard foot-shooting apparatus. Hackers seem to enjoy rigging websites up to trigger cascading foot-shooting failures. Windows 98 About the same as Windows 95 in terms of overall bullet capacity and triggering mechanisms. Includes updated DirectShot API. A new version was released later on to support USB guns, Windows 98 SE.WPF:You get your baseball glove and a ball and you head out to your backyard, where you throw balls to your pitchback. Then your unkempt-haired-cargo-shorts-and-sandals-with-white-socks-wearing neighbor uses XAML to sculpt your arm into a gun, the ball into a bullet and the pitchback into your foot. By now, however, only the neighbor can get it to work and he's only around from 6:30 PM - 3:30 AM. LOGO: You very carefully lay out the trajectory of the bullet. Then you start the gun, which fires very slowly. You walk precisely to the point where the bullet will travel and wait, but just before it gets to you, your class time is up and one of the other kids has already used the system to hack into Sony's PS3 network. Flash: Someone has designed a beautiful-looking gun that anyone can shoot their feet with for free. It weighs six hundred pounds. All kinds of people are shooting themselves in the feet, and sending the link to everyone else so that they can too. That is, except for the criminals, who are all stealing iOS devices that the gun won't work with.APL: Its (mostly) all greek to me. Lisp: Place ((gun in ((hand sight (foot then shoot))))) (Lots of Insipid Stupid Parentheses)Apple OS/X and iOS Once a year, Steve Jobs returns from sick leave to tell millions of unwavering fans how they will be able to shoot themselves in the foot differently this year. They retweet and blog about it ad nauseam, and wait in line to be the first to experience "shoot different".Windows ME Usually fails, even at shooting you in the foot. Yo dawg, I heard you like shooting yourself in the foot. So I put a gun in your gun, so you can shoot yourself in the foot while you shoot yourself in the foot. (Okay, I'm not especially proud of this joke.) Windows 2000 Now you really do have to log in, before you are allowed to shoot yourself in the foot.Windows XPYou thought you learned your lesson: Don't use Windows ME. Then, along came this new creature, built on top of Windows NT! So you spend the next couple days installing antivirus software, patches and service packs, just so you can get that driver to install, and then proceed to shoot yourself in the foot. Windows Vista Newer! Glossier! Shootier! Windows 7 The bullets come out a lot smoother. Active Directory Each bullet now has an attached Bullet Identifier, and can be uniquely identified. Policies can be applied to dictate fragmentation, and the gun will occasionally have a confusing delay after the trigger has been pulled. PythonYou try to use import foot; foot.shoot() only to realize that's only available in 3.0, to which you can't yet upgrade from 2.7 because of all those extension libs lacking support. Solaris Shoots best when used on SPARC hardware, but still runs the trigger GUI under Java. After weeks of learning the appropriate STOP command to prevent the trigger from automatically being pressed on boot, you think you've got it under control. Then the one time you ever use dtrace, it hits a bug that fires the gun. MySQL The feature that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot has been in development for about 6 years, and they are adding it into the next version, which is coming out REAL SOON NOW, promise! But you can always check it out of source control and try it yourself (just not in any environment where data integrity is important because it will probably explode.) PostgreSQLAllows you to have a smug look on your face while you shoot yourself in the foot, because those MySQL guys STILL don't have that feature. NoSQL Barrel? Who needs a barrel? Just put the bullet on your foot, and strike it with a hammer. See? It's so much simpler and more efficient that way. You can even strike multiple bullets in one swing if you swing with a good enough arc, because hammers are easy to use. Getting them to synchronize is a little difficult, though.Eclipse There are about a dozen different packages for shooting yourself in the foot, with weird interdependencies on outdated components. Once you finally navigate the morass and get one installed, you then have something to look at while you shoot yourself in the foot with that package: You can watch the screen redraw.Outlook Makes it really easy to let everyone know you shot yourself in the foot!Shooting yourself in the foot using delegates.You really need to shoot yourself in the foot but you hate firearms (you don't want any dependency on the specifics of shooting) so you delegate it to somebody else. You don't care how it is done as long is shooting your foot. You can do it asynchronously in case you know you may faint so you are called back/slapped in the face by your shooter/friend (or background worker) when everything is done.C#You prepare the gun and the bullet, carefully modeling all of the physics of a bullet traveling through a foot. Just before you're about to pull the trigger, you stumble on System.Windows.BodyParts.Foot.ShootAt(System.Windows.Firearms.IGun gun) in the extended framework, realize you just wasted the entire afternoon, and shoot yourself in the head.PHP<?phprequire("foot_safety_check.php");?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html><head> <!--Lower!--><title>Shooting me in the foot</title></head> <body> <!--LOWER!!!--><leg> <!--OK, I made this one up...--><footer><?php echo (dungSift($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "ie"))?("Your foot is safe, but you might want to wear a hard hat!"):("<div class=\"shot\">BANG!</div>"); ?></footer></leg> </body> </html>

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  • MySql for Visual Studio 1.0.2 GA has been released

    - by fernando
    MySQL for Visual Studio is a new product including all of the Visual Studio integration previously available as part of Connector/Net.  The product is now released as GA and is appropriate for use in production environments.  It is compatible with MySQL Server versions 5.0-5.7 and Visual Studio versions 2008-2012.  It is now available as part of MySql Installer for Windows (http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-installer-for-windows.html). The 1.0 version of MySQL for Visual Studio brings the following new features:   Workbench Launching.   MySql Utilities Launching.   Table Script Generation.   The functionality of the core libraries (ADO.NET, EF, ASP.NET providers is available as the separate download of Connector/NET 6.7). Features available from previous versions:        Server explorer connections     Design time support     Entity Framework designer (Database First & Model First)     Stored Routines Debugger     Intellisense     ASP.NET Website Configuration Tool Workbench Launching  ------------------------------------------- A context menu for connections in Server Explorer allows to launch Workbench (if Workbench is installed). MySql Utilities Launching  ------------------------------------------- A context menu for connections in Server Explorer allows to launch a prompt for MySql Utilities (if MySql Utilities is installed). Table Script Generation  ------------------------------------------- A context menu for tables is available in Server Explorer to generate the script for a table. The full list of bug fixes for "MySql for Visual Studio" 1.0 follows: 1.0.2 - Fix for Documentation not found (Oracle bug #6915712). - Fix for intellisense completion, now Views are displayed together with Tables calling intellisense (Oracle Bug #16881451). - Fix for parser syntax, now the parser supports the clause ALTER TABLE table_name RENAME {INDEX|KEY} old_index_name TO new_index_name introduced in MySql 5.7. (Oracle Bug #16881481) - Fix for Debugging a routine produces an error when binary log is enabled (Oracle bug #16941181). - Fix for WorkItem 552: MySql for Visual Studio Installer fails when installing against VS2008. - Fix for bug Vs plugin installer is not working (Oracle bug #16973339). - Fix for bug Release notes file has no notes about (Oracle bug #16973326). 1.0.1 - Fix for "README" file and "Release Notes" file referes to connector 6.6. - Fix for Parser fails to recognizes a complex view (Oracle bug #16815427). - Fix for Altering table's primary key in designer not working (Oracle bug #16866053). - Fix for Web configuration tool is not shown on mysql for visual studio (Oracle bug # 16902696). - Fix for Model first is not supported using mysql for visual studio (Oracle bug # 16902743). - Fix for Mysql for vs should not be installed with connector/net version < 6.7 (Oracle bug # 16902774). - Fix for Resolve assemblies dependencies between MySql.Data (Connector/Net version) and MySql.Data (WI # 460). - Fix for Showing an exception related to resources (Oracle bug #16903039). 1.0.0 - Added new option on Connection Node for Server Explorer Window in Visual Studio to give the user the option when WB is Installed to open the MySQL Utilities console window. - Added new option on Connection Node for Server Explorer Window in Visual Studio to give the user the option when WB is Installed to open the SQL Editor Window using the same connection. - Implemented a menu option to generate table script from server explorer context menu (Tracker task 433). - Fix for bug If using repair option, then vs2010 doesnt allow to connect to db (Oracle bug #16238242). - Fix for bug "Can't change the name for a view in view editor" (Oracle bug #13805346). - Fix for Debugger cannot debug stored procedures with a main begin labeled and declare statements included (Oracle bug #16002371). - Fix for bug If using repair option at Installer, then vs2010 doesnt allow to connect to db (Oracle bug #16238242). - Fix for "Cannot change the name for a Foreign Key in table designer" (Oracle bug #16238068). - Fix for error when trying to set primary key for a column with same name as mysql keyword (like INT) in table designer   (Oracle bug #16238102). - Fix for databases not displayed in connect dialog for mysql script when correcting credentials, after entering a bad password   (Oracle bug #13805337). - Fix for Debugger fails trying to debug a stored routine in a MySql server hosted in linux without lower_case_table_names option enabled   (MySql bug #69065, Oracle bug #16770384). - Fix for Debugger issue, Values through watch tab shouldn't allow to be modified (Oracle bug #14545448). - Fix for Visual Studio Mysql editor colors cannot be customized (Oracle bug #16453324, MySql bug #67994). The documentation is available as part of Connector/NET at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/connector-net.html  Enjoy and thanks for the support!  --  Fernando Gonzalez Sanchez | Software Engineer |  Oracle MySQL Windows Experience Team, Connector/NET  Guadalajara | Jalisco | Mexico

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