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  • SQL Express 2008 R2 on Amazon EC2 instance: tons of free memory, poor performance

    - by gravyface
    The old SQL Express 2005 was running on a low-end single Xeon CPU Dell server, RAID 5 7200 disks, 2 GB RAM (SBS 2003). I have not done any baseline measurements on the old physical server, but the Web app is used by half a dozen people (maybe 2 concurrently), so I figured "how bad can an Amazon EC2 instance be?". It's pretty horrible: a difference of 8 seconds of load time on one screen. First of all, I'm not a SQL guru, but here's what I've tried: Had a Small Instance, now running a c1.medium (High Cpu Medium) Windows 2008 32-bit R2 EBS-backed instance running IIS 7.5 and SQL Express 2008 R2. No noticeable improvement. Changed Page File from fixed 256 to Automatic. Setup a Striped Mirror from within Disk Management with two attached 1 GB EBS volumes. Moved database and transaction log, left everything else on the boot EBS volume. No noticeable change. Looked at memory, ~1000 MB of physical memory free (1.7 GB total). Changed SQL instance to use a minimum of 1024 RAM; restarted server, no change in memory usage. SQL still only using ~28MB of RAM(!). So I'm thinking: this database is tiny (28MB), why isn't the whole thing cached in RAM? Surely that would speed up performance. The transaction log is 241 MB. Seems kind of large in comparison -- has this not been committed? Is it a cause of performance degradation? I recall something about Recovery Models and log sizes somewhere in my travels, but not positive. Another thing: the old server was running SQL Express 2005. Not sure if that has any impact, but I tried changing the compatibility level from SQL 2000 to 2008, but that had no effect. Anyways, what else can I try here? Seems ridiculous to throw more virtual hardware at this thing. I know I/O is going to be rough on EBS volumes, but surely others are successfully running small .NET/SQL apps on reasonably priced instances?

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  • What server setup for a small web development company? [closed]

    - by Giordano
    I co-own a company with a friend of mine and we have decided to buy a new server to support our business (our current server is an Asus EEE Box, working great but too limited :) ). I should mention that we are web developers but occasionally we do small-office sys admin. Thus, 99% of time we work on GNU/Linux (mainly Ubuntu) but from time to time we need to setup a Windows environment to assist some customers (e.g. setup a temporary SQL Server 2008). Our requirements: Low budget: we don't want the cheapest solution out there but we can't afford to spend too much. Budget could be ~1000-1500€ (before VAT) Robustness: we would like to setup a RAID array and maybe have an external disk where we can store backups Virtualization: we need to be able to setup few servers for development. The scenario is something like this (~8 appliances running in parallel): Redmine + GIT server Bacula server FTP server 3-4 virtual appliances that could be set up on demand to test our applications or support a customer. The appliances could be: LAMP, Tomcat+PostgreSQL, SQL Server Support: if something breaks down it shouldn't be too difficult to find a replacement. Now, given the main requirements, there are some doubts we need to clarify: Do you suggest to buy a prepackaged solution (for example a customized Dell PowerEdge T110 or T310) or to assemble the server by ourselves (buy the separate components)? What RAID configuration do you suggest? I was thinking of RAID1 (probably cheaper) or RAID5. should we buy a hardware RAID controller or is it ok to use a software RAID (mdadm)? In case, which controller do you suggest? What processor do you suggest (Intel Xeon, i3, i5, i7, AMD)? How much RAM? (I was thinking at least 8GB, ~1GB per appliance) What virtualization software do you recommend? VMWare seems to be the best choice, but what about XEN or KVM? We don't want to buy licenses at the moment so we would like to consider only free options. What OS do you recommend? We know Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo very well (we would like to use Ubuntu Server), however it seems a lot of people goes for CentOS. Thanks in advance if you can help us with this! It's our first "serious" server so many doubts popped up :) Please feel free to add further recommendations if you have some to share ;) Have a nice day

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  • AGENT: The World's Smartest Watch

    - by Rob Chartier
    AGENT: The World's Smartest Watch by Secret Labs + House of Horology Disclaimer: Most if not all of this content has been gleaned from the comments on the Kickstarter project page and comments section. Any discrepancies between this post and any documentation on agentwatches.com, kickstarter.com, etc.., those official sites take precedence. Overview The next generation smartwatch with brand-new technology. World-class developer tools, unparalleled battery life, Qi wireless charging. Kickstarter Page, Comments Funding period : May 21, 2013 - Jun 20, 2013 MSRP : $249 Other Urls http://www.agentwatches.com/ https://www.facebook.com/agentwatches http://twitter.com/agentwatches http://pinterest.com/agentwatches/ http://paper.li/robchartier/1371234640 Developer Story The first official launch of the preview SDK and emulator will happen on 20-Jun-2013.  All development will be done in Visual Studio 2012, using the .NET Micro Framework SDK 2.3.  The SDK will ship with the first round of the expected API for developers along with an emulator. With that said, there is no need to wait for the SDK.  You can download the tooling now and get started with Apps and Faces immediately.  The only thing that you will not be able to work with is the API; but for example, watch faces, you can start building the basic face rendering with the Bitmap graphics drawing in the .NET Micro Framework.   Does it look good? Before we dig into any more of the gory details, here are a few photos of the current available prototype models.   The watch on the tiny QI Charter   If you wander too far away from your phone, your watch will let you know with a vibration and a message, all but one button will dismiss the message.   An app showing the premium weather data!   Nice stitching on the straps, leather and silicon will be available, along with a few lengths to choose from (short, regular, long lengths). On to those gory details…. Hardware Specs Processor 120MHz ARM Cortex-M4 processor (ATSAM4SD32) with secondary AVR co-processor Flash & RAM 2MB of onboard flash and 160KB of RAM 1/4 of the onboard flash will be used by the OS The flash is permanent (non-volatile) storage. Bluetooth Bluetooth 4.0 BD/EDR + LE Bluetooth 4.0 is backwards compatible with Bluetooth 2.1, so classic Bluetooth functions (BD/EDR, SPP/AVRCP/PBAP/etc.) will work fine. Sensors 3D Accelerometer (Motion) ST LSM303DLHC Ambient Light Sensor Hardware power metering Vibration Motor (You can pulse it to create vibration patterns, not sure about the vibration strength - driven with PWM) No piezo/speaker or microphone. Other QI Wireless Charging, no NFC, no wall adapter included Custom LED Backlight No GPS in the watch. It uses the GPS in your phone. AGENT watch apps are deployed and debugged wirelessly from your PC via Bluetooth. RoHS, Pb-free Battery Expected to use a CR2430-sized rechargeable battery – replaceable (Mouser, Amazon) Estimated charging time from empty is 2 hours with provided charger 7 Days typical with Bluetooth on, 30 days with Bluetooth off (watch-face only mode) The battery should last at least 2 years, with 100s of charge cycles. Physical dimensions Roughly 38mm top-to-bottom on the front face 35mm left-to-right on the front face and around 12mm in depth 22mm strap Two ~1/16" hex screws to attach the watch pin The top watchcase material candidates are PVD stainless steel, brushed matte ceramic, and high-quality polycarbonate (TBD). The glass lens is mineral glass, Anti-glare glass lens Strap options Leather and silicon straps will be available Expected to have three sizes Display 1.28" Sharp Memory Display The display stays on 100% of the time. Dimensions: 128x128 pixels Buttons Custom "Pusher" buttons, they will not make noise like a mouse click, and are very durable. The top-left button activates the backlight; bottom-left changes apps; three buttons on the right are up/select/down and can be used for custom purposes by apps. Backup reset procedure is currently activated by holding the home/menu button and the top-right user button for about ten seconds Device Support Android 2.3 or newer iPhone 4S or newer Windows Phone 8 or newer Heart Rate monitors - Bluetooth SPP or Bluetooth LE (GATT) is what you'll want the heart monitor to support. Almost limitless Bluetooth device support! Internationalization & Localization Full UTF8 Support from the ground up. AGENT's user interface is in English. Your content (caller ID, music tracks, notifications) will be in your native language. We have a plan to cover most major character sets, with Latin characters pre-loaded on the watch. Simplified Chinese will be available Feature overview Phone lost alert Caller ID Music Control (possible volume control) Wireless Charging Timer Stopwatch Vibrating Alarm (possibly custom vibrations for caller id) A few default watch faces Airplane mode (by demand or low power) Can be turned off completely Customizable 3rd party watch faces, applications which can be loaded over bluetooth. Sample apps that maybe installed Weather Sample Apps not installed Exercise App Other Possible Skype integration over Bluetooth. They will provide an AGENT app for your smartphone (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone). You'll be able to use it to load apps onto the watch.. You will be able to cancel phone calls. With compatible phones you can also answer, end, etc. They are adopting the standard hands-free profile to provide these features and caller ID.

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  • LWJGL - Eclipse error [on hold]

    - by Zarkopafilis
    When I try to run my lwjgl project, an error pops . Here is the log file: # A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment: # EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) at pc=0x6d8fcc0a, pid=5612, tid=900 # JRE version: 6.0_16-b01 Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (14.2-b01 mixed mode windows-x86 ) Problematic frame: V [jvm.dll+0xfcc0a] # If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit: http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport/crash.jsp # --------------- T H R E A D --------------- Current thread (0x016b9000): JavaThread "main" [_thread_in_vm, id=900, stack(0x00160000,0x001b0000)] siginfo: ExceptionCode=0xc0000005, reading address 0x00000000 Registers: EAX=0x00000000, EBX=0x00000000, ECX=0x00000006, EDX=0x00000000 ESP=0x001af4d4, EBP=0x001af524, ESI=0x016b9000, EDI=0x016b9110 EIP=0x6d8fcc0a, EFLAGS=0x00010246 Top of Stack: (sp=0x001af4d4) 0x001af4d4: 6da44bd8 016b9110 00000000 001af668 0x001af4e4: ffffffff 22200000 001af620 76ec39c2 0x001af4f4: 001af524 6d801086 0000000b 001afd34 0x001af504: 016b9000 016dd990 016b9000 00000000 0x001af514: 001af5f4 6d9ee000 6d9ef2f0 ffffffff 0x001af524: 001af58c 10008c85 016b9110 00000000 0x001af534: 00000000 000a0554 00000000 00000024 0x001af544: 00000000 00000000 001af6ac 00000000 Instructions: (pc=0x6d8fcc0a) 0x6d8fcbfa: e8 e8 d0 1d 08 00 8b 45 10 c7 45 d8 0b 00 00 00 0x6d8fcc0a: 8b 00 8b 48 08 0f b7 51 26 8b 40 0c 8b 4c 90 20 Stack: [0x00160000,0x001b0000], sp=0x001af4d4, free space=317k Native frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code, C=native code) V [jvm.dll+0xfcc0a] C [lwjgl.dll+0x8c85] C [USER32.dll+0x18876] C [USER32.dll+0x170f4] C [USER32.dll+0x1119e] C [ntdll.dll+0x460ce] C [USER32.dll+0x10e29] C [USER32.dll+0x10e84] C [lwjgl.dll+0x1cf0] j org.lwjgl.opengl.WindowsDisplay.createWindow(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DrawableLWJGL;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DisplayMode;Ljava/awt/Canvas;II)V+102 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.createWindow()V+71 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/Drawable;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/ContextAttribs;)V+72 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;)V+12 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create()V+7 j zarkopafilis.koding.io.javafx.Main.main([Ljava/lang/String;)V+16 v ~StubRoutines::call_stub V [jvm.dll+0xecf9c] V [jvm.dll+0x1741e1] V [jvm.dll+0xed01d] V [jvm.dll+0xf5be5] V [jvm.dll+0xfd83d] C [javaw.exe+0x2155] C [javaw.exe+0x833e] C [kernel32.dll+0x51154] C [ntdll.dll+0x5b2b9] C [ntdll.dll+0x5b28c] Java frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code) j org.lwjgl.opengl.WindowsDisplay.nCreateWindow(IIIIZZJ)J+0 j org.lwjgl.opengl.WindowsDisplay.createWindow(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DrawableLWJGL;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/DisplayMode;Ljava/awt/Canvas;II)V+102 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.createWindow()V+71 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/Drawable;Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/ContextAttribs;)V+72 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Lorg/lwjgl/opengl/PixelFormat;)V+12 j org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create()V+7 j zarkopafilis.koding.io.javafx.Main.main([Ljava/lang/String;)V+16 v ~StubRoutines::call_stub --------------- P R O C E S S --------------- Java Threads: ( = current thread ) 0x0179a400 JavaThread "Low Memory Detector" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=4460, stack(0x0b900000,0x0b950000)] 0x01795400 JavaThread "CompilerThread0" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=5264, stack(0x0b8b0000,0x0b900000)] 0x01790c00 JavaThread "Attach Listener" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=6080, stack(0x0b860000,0x0b8b0000)] 0x01786400 JavaThread "Signal Dispatcher" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=1204, stack(0x0b810000,0x0b860000)] 0x01759c00 JavaThread "Finalizer" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=5772, stack(0x0b7c0000,0x0b810000)] 0x01755000 JavaThread "Reference Handler" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=4696, stack(0x01640000,0x01690000)] =0x016b9000 JavaThread "main" [_thread_in_vm, id=900, stack(0x00160000,0x001b0000)] Other Threads: 0x01751c00 VMThread [stack: 0x015f0000,0x01640000] [id=4052] 0x0179c800 WatcherThread [stack: 0x0b950000,0x0b9a0000] [id=3340] VM state:not at safepoint (normal execution) VM Mutex/Monitor currently owned by a thread: None Heap def new generation total 960K, used 816K [0x037c0000, 0x038c0000, 0x03ca0000) eden space 896K, 91% used [0x037c0000, 0x0388c2c0, 0x038a0000) from space 64K, 0% used [0x038a0000, 0x038a0000, 0x038b0000) to space 64K, 0% used [0x038b0000, 0x038b0000, 0x038c0000) tenured generation total 4096K, used 0K [0x03ca0000, 0x040a0000, 0x077c0000) the space 4096K, 0% used [0x03ca0000, 0x03ca0000, 0x03ca0200, 0x040a0000) compacting perm gen total 12288K, used 2143K [0x077c0000, 0x083c0000, 0x0b7c0000) the space 12288K, 17% used [0x077c0000, 0x079d7e38, 0x079d8000, 0x083c0000) No shared spaces configured. Dynamic libraries: 0x00400000 - 0x00424000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\javaw.exe 0x77550000 - 0x7768e000 C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll 0x75a80000 - 0x75b54000 C:\Windows\system32\kernel32.dll 0x758d0000 - 0x7591b000 C:\Windows\system32\KERNELBASE.dll 0x759e0000 - 0x75a80000 C:\Windows\system32\ADVAPI32.dll 0x76070000 - 0x7611c000 C:\Windows\system32\msvcrt.dll 0x77250000 - 0x77269000 C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\sechost.dll 0x771a0000 - 0x77241000 C:\Windows\system32\RPCRT4.dll 0x76eb0000 - 0x76f79000 C:\Windows\system32\USER32.dll 0x76e60000 - 0x76eae000 C:\Windows\system32\GDI32.dll 0x77770000 - 0x7777a000 C:\Windows\system32\LPK.dll 0x75fd0000 - 0x7606e000 C:\Windows\system32\USP10.dll 0x770b0000 - 0x770cf000 C:\Windows\system32\IMM32.DLL 0x770d0000 - 0x7719c000 C:\Windows\system32\MSCTF.dll 0x7c340000 - 0x7c396000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\msvcr71.dll 0x6d800000 - 0x6da8b000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\client\jvm.dll 0x73a00000 - 0x73a32000 C:\Windows\system32\WINMM.dll 0x75610000 - 0x7565b000 C:\Windows\system32\apphelp.dll 0x6d7b0000 - 0x6d7bc000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\verify.dll 0x6d330000 - 0x6d34f000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\java.dll 0x6d290000 - 0x6d298000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\hpi.dll 0x776e0000 - 0x776e5000 C:\Windows\system32\PSAPI.DLL 0x6d7f0000 - 0x6d7ff000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\zip.dll 0x10000000 - 0x1004c000 C:\Users\theo\Desktop\workspace\JavaFX1\lib\natives\windows\lwjgl.dll 0x5d170000 - 0x5d238000 C:\Windows\system32\OPENGL32.dll 0x6e7b0000 - 0x6e7d2000 C:\Windows\system32\GLU32.dll 0x70620000 - 0x70707000 C:\Windows\system32\DDRAW.dll 0x70610000 - 0x70616000 C:\Windows\system32\DCIMAN32.dll 0x75b60000 - 0x75cfd000 C:\Windows\system32\SETUPAPI.dll 0x759b0000 - 0x759d7000 C:\Windows\system32\CFGMGR32.dll 0x76d70000 - 0x76dff000 C:\Windows\system32\OLEAUT32.dll 0x75db0000 - 0x75f0c000 C:\Windows\system32\ole32.dll 0x758b0000 - 0x758c2000 C:\Windows\system32\DEVOBJ.dll 0x74060000 - 0x74073000 C:\Windows\system32\dwmapi.dll 0x74b60000 - 0x74b69000 C:\Windows\system32\VERSION.dll 0x745f0000 - 0x7478e000 C:\Windows\WinSxS\x86_microsoft.windows.common-controls_6595b64144ccf1df_6.0.7600.16661_none_420fe3fa2b8113bd\COMCTL32.dll 0x75d50000 - 0x75da7000 C:\Windows\system32\SHLWAPI.dll 0x74370000 - 0x743b0000 C:\Windows\system32\uxtheme.dll 0x22200000 - 0x22206000 C:\Program Files\ESET\ESET Smart Security\eplgHooks.dll VM Arguments: jvm_args: -Djava.library.path=C:\Users\theo\Desktop\workspace\JavaFX1\lib\natives\windows -Dfile.encoding=Cp1253 java_command: zarkopafilis.koding.io.javafx.Main Launcher Type: SUN_STANDARD Environment Variables: PATH=C:/Program Files/Java/jre6/bin/client;C:/Program Files/Java/jre6/bin;C:/Program Files/Java/jre6/lib/i386;C:\Perl\site\bin;C:\Perl\bin;C:\Ruby200\bin;C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Windows Live;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Shared;C:\Users\theo\Desktop\eclipse; USERNAME=theo OS=Windows_NT PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER=x86 Family 6 Model 37 Stepping 5, GenuineIntel --------------- S Y S T E M --------------- OS: Windows 7 Build 7600 CPU:total 4 (8 cores per cpu, 2 threads per core) family 6 model 37 stepping 5, cmov, cx8, fxsr, mmx, sse, sse2, sse3, ssse3, sse4.1, sse4.2, ht Memory: 4k page, physical 2097151k(1257972k free), swap 4194303k(4194303k free) vm_info: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (14.2-b01) for windows-x86 JRE (1.6.0_16-b01), built on Jul 31 2009 11:26:58 by "java_re" with MS VC++ 7.1 time: Wed Oct 23 22:00:12 2013 elapsed time: 0 seconds Code: Display.setDisplayMode(new DisplayMode(800,600)); Display.create();//Error here I am using JDK 6

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  • 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

    - by Michael Snow
    Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-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;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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  • Top 20 Daily Deal Sites In India

    - by Damodhar
    If you have never heard of Groupon recently, you probably are not working in the tech industry because it is all over the blogosphere. After all, growing from zero to US$1.35 billion valuation in 18 months is pretty AMAZING. Inspired by this, the following bunch of Groupon clone’s are already rising in India. Definitely this business model is emerging and changes the way online shopping happens in India. SnapDeal SnapDeal features a Best deals Coupons at an unbeatable price on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in our city. It provides vouchers and discounts in all the major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. KhojGuru Exclusive Discount coupons from hundreds of brands and retailers. These discounts can be easily downloaded as an SMS on to the mobile phone or their print out can be taken. MyDala A platform which gets us great deals in our city.Leveraging the “power of group buying”. Group buying happens when like minded people come together to get deals that we can never get on our own as individuals. SoSasta Great place which would not only tell us about the hidden treasures of our city — but also made them affordable to us at the end of the month. DealsAndYou Deals and You is a group buying portal that features a daily deal on the best stuff in some of India’s leading cities. AajKaCatch Its concept is to provide you the most unique, useful and qualitative product at a very low price. So you can now shop without the hassles of clustered products. BindassBargain Bindaas Bargain offers a new deal every day! Great stuff ranging from cool gadgets, home theatres, luxury watches, smash games. MasthiDeals It get you a great deal on a great stuff to do, eat, buy or see in your city. They have a team of about 25 wonderful people working in Chennai office working side by side with folks in MasthiDeal’s other cities. Koovs Founded by a team of IIT alumni who have brought in their expertise from the internet industry. Koovs is a Bangalore based start up and one point solution for all your desires. Taggle It brings you a variety of offers from some of the most respected brands in the country.This website uses collective buying to create a win-win for local businesses and their customers. BuzzInTown Buzzintown.com is a portal owned by Wortal Inc. There are a US headquartered company, with a presence pan-India through their India subsidiary, managed by a vastly experienced set of global leaders from the media, entertainment and technology industries. BuyThePrice It lines up the best win – win deals for both consumers and vendors and also ensures that each of the orders are dispatched in the shortest time possible. 24HoursLoot 24hoursLoot is an online store for selling a new t-shirt (sometime other products) everyday at deep discounted price in limited quantity/stock. DealMagic Customers get exposure to the best their city has to offer, at unbeatable prices (50-90% off).  We never feature more than one business on our website on any given day, so we have to be very very selective on who gets featured. Dealivore ICUMI Technologies Pvt Ltd is the company operating the Dealivore service. Founded in December 2009, ICUMI is privately owned and funded. LootMore An online store that exclusively focuses on selling cool quality stuff at cheap prices. Here you’ll always find the latest and greatest brands at prices you can afford. Foodome The deals features the best coupons at an unbeatable price on restaurants, fine dining on where to spend your birthday party.They provide coupon only in Chennai as of now. Top Online Shopping Sites- Nation Wide ebay.in eBay is The World’s Online Marketplace, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis. With a diverse and passionate community of individuals and small businesses, eBay offers an online platform where millions of items are traded each day. FutureBazzar Future Group, led by its founder and Group CEO, Mr. Kishore Biyani, is one of India’s leading business houses with multiple businesses spanning across the consumption space. TradeUs Launched in July 2009 and in a short span of time it has turned into one of India’s foremost shopping portals setting the Indian e-commerce abode aflame. BigShoeBazzar (BSB) is the largest online authorized shoe store in South Asia. Croma Promoted by Infiniti Retail Ltd, a 100% subsidiary of Tata Sons.One of the world’s leading retailers, ensuring that you buy nothing but the best. This article titled,Top 20 Daily Deal Sites In India, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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  • Silverlight 5 Hosting :: Features in Silverlight 5 and Release Date

    - by mbridge
    Silverlight 5 is finally announced in the Silverlight FireStarter Event on the 2nd December, 2010. This new version of Silverlight which was earlier labeled as 'Future of Microsoft Silverlight' has now come much closer to go live as the first Silverlight 5 Beta version is expected to be shipped during the early months of 2011. However for the full fledged and the final release of Silverlight 5, we have to wait many more months as the same is likely to be made available within the Q3 2011. As would have been usually expected, this latest edition would feature many new capabilities thereby extending the developer productivity to a whole new dimension of premium media experience and feature-rich business applications. It comes along with many new feature updates as well as the inclusion of new technologies to improve the standard of the Silverlight applications which are now fine-tuned to produce next generation business and media solutions that is capable to meet the requirements of the advanced web-based app development. The Silverlight 5 is all set to replace the previous fourth version which now includes more than forty new features while also dropping various deprecated elements that was prevalent earlier. It has brought around some major performance enhancements and also included better support for various other tools and technologies. Following are some of the changes that are registered to be available under the Silverlight 5 Beta edition which is scheduled to be launched during the Q1 2011. Silverlight 5 : Premium Media Experiences The media features of Silverlight 5 has seen some major enhancements with a lot of optimizations being made to deliver richer solutions. It's capability has now been extended to make things easier, faster and capable of performing the desired tasks in the most efficient manner. The Silverlight media solutions has already been a part of many companies in the recent days where various on-demand Silverlight services were featured but with the arrival of the next generation premium media solution of Silverlight 5, it is expected to register new heights of success and global user acclamation for using it with many esteemed web-based projects and media solutions. - The most happening element in the new Silverlight 5 will be its support for utilizing the GPU based hardware acceleration which is intended to lower down the CPU load to a significant extent and thereby allowing faster rendering of media contents without consuming much resources. This feature is believed to be particularly helpful for low configured machines to run full HD media content without any lagging caused due to processor load. It will hence be one great feature to revolutionize the new generation high quality media contents to be available within the web in a more efficient manner with its hardware decoded video playback capabilities. - With the inclusion of hardware video decoding to minimize the processor load, the Silverlight 5 also comes with another optimization enhancement to also reduce the power consumption level by making new methods to deal with the power-saver settings. With this optimization in effect, the computer would be automatically allowed to switch to sleep mode while no video playback is in progress and also to prevent any screensavers to popup and cause annoyances during any video playback. There would also be other power saver options which will be made available to best suit the users requirements and purpose. - The Silverlight trickplay feature is another great way to tweak any silverlight powered media content as is used for many video tutorial sites or for dealing with any sort of presentations. This feature enables the user to modify the playback speed to either slowdown or speedup during the playback durations based on the requirements without compromising on the quality of output. Normally such manipulations always makes the content's audio to go off-pitch, but the same will not be the case with TrickPlay and the audio would seamlessly progress with the video without skipping any of its part. - In addition to all of the above, the new Silverlight 5 will be featuring wireless control of all the media contents by making use of remote controllers. With the use of such remote devices, it will be easier to handle the various media playback controls thereby providing more freedom while experiencing the premium media services. Silverlight 5 : Business Application Development The application development standard has been extended with more possibilities by bringing forth new and useful technologies and also reviving the existing methods to work better than what it was used to. From the UI improvements to advanced technical aspects, the Silverlight 5 scores high on all grounds to produce great next generation business delivered applications by putting in more creativity and resourceful touch to all the apps being produced with it. - The WPF feature of Silverlight is made more effective by introducing new standards of Databinding which is intended to improve the productivity standards of the Silverlight application developer. It brings in a lot of convenience in debugging the databinding components or expressions and hence making things work in a flawless manner. Some additional features related to databinding includes that of Ancestor RelativeSource, Implicit DataTemplates and Model View ViewModel (MVVM) support with DataContextChanged event and many other new features relating it. - It now comes with a refined text and printing service which facilitates better clarity of the text rendering and also many positive changes which are being applied to the layout pattern. New supports has been added to include OpenType font, multi-column text, linked-text containers and character leading support to name a few among the available features.This also includes some important printing aspects like that of Postscript Vector Printing API which allows to program our printing tasks in a user defined way and Pivot functionality for visualization concerns of informations. - The Graphics support is the key improvements being incorporated which now enables to utilize three dimensional graphics pattern using GPU acceleration. It can manage to provide some really cool visualizations being curved to provide media contents within the business apps with also the support for full HD contents at 1080p quality. - Silverlight 5 includes the support for 64-bit operating systems and relevant browsers and is also optimized to provide better performance. It can support the background thread for the networking which can reduce the latency of the network to a considerable extent. The Out-of-Browser functionality adds the support for utilizing various libraries and also the Win32 API. It also comes with testing support with VS 2010 which is mostly an automated procedure and has also enabled increased security aspects of all the Silverlight 5 developed applications by using the improved version of group policy support.

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  • Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

    - by ScottGu
    Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • BizTalk host throttling &ndash; Singleton pattern and High database size

    - by S.E.R.
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/SERivas/archive/2013/06/30/biztalk-host-throttling-ndash-singleton-pattern-and-high-database-size.aspxI have worked for some days around the singleton pattern (for those unfamiliar with it, read this post by Victor Fehlberg) and have come across a few very interesting posts, among which one dealt with performance issues (here, also by Victor Fehlberg). Simply put: if you have an orchestration which implements the singleton pattern, then performances will continuously decrease as the orchestration receives and consumes messages, and that behavior is more obvious when the orchestration never ends (ie : it keeps looping and never terminates or completes). As I experienced the same kind of problem (actually I was alerted by SCOM, which told me that the host was being throttled because of High database size), I thought it would be a good idea to dig a little bit a see what happens deep inside BizTalk and thus understand the reasons for this behavior. NOTE: in this article, I will focus on this High database size throttling condition. I will try and work on the other conditions in some not too distant future… Test conditions The singleton orchestration For the purpose of this study, I have created the following orchestration, which is a very basic implementation of a singleton that piles up incoming messages, then does something else when a certain timeout has been reached without receiving another message: Throttling settings I have two distinct hosts : one that hosts the receive port (basic FILE port) : Ports_ReceiveHostone that hosts the orchestration : ProcessingHost In order to emphasize the throttling mechanism, I have modified the throttling settings for each of these hosts are as follows (all other parameters are set to the default value): [Throttling thresholds] Message count in database: 500 (default value : 50000) Evolution of performance counters when submitting messages Since we are investigating the High database size throttling condition, here are the performance counter that we should take a look at (all of them are in the BizTalk:Message Agent performance object): Database sizeHigh database sizeMessage delivery throttling stateMessage publishing throttling stateMessage delivery delay (ms)Message publishing delay (ms)Message delivery throttling state durationMessage publishing throttling state duration (If you are not used to Perfmon, I strongly recommend that you start using it right now: it is a wonderful tool that allows you to open the hood and see what is going on inside BizTalk – and other systems) Database size It is quite obvious that we will start by watching the database size and high database size counters, just to see when the first reaches the configured threshold (500) and when the second rings the alarm. NOTE : During this test I submitted 600 messages, one message at a time every 10ms to see the evolution of the counters we have previously selected. It might not show very well on this screenshot, but here is what happened: From 15:46:50 to 15:47:50, the database size for the Ports_ReceiveHost host (blue line) kept growing until it reached a maximum of 504.At 15:47:50, the high database size alert fires At first I was surprised by this result: why is it the database size of the receiving host that keeps growing since it is the processing host that piles up messages? Actually, it makes total sense. This counter measures the size of the database queue that is being filled by the host, not consumed. Therefore, the high database size alert is raised on the host that fills the queue: Ports_ReceiveHost. More information is available on the Public MPWiki page. Now, looking at the Message publishing throttling state for the receiving host (green line), we can see that a throttling condition has been reached at 15:47:50: We can also see that the Message publishing delay(ms) (blue line) has begun growing slowly from this point. All of this explains why performances keep decreasing when a singleton keeps processing new messages: the database size grows and when it has exceeded the Message count in database threshold, the host is throttled and the publishing delay keeps increasing. Digging further So, what happens to the database queue then? Is it flushed some day or does it keep growing and growing indefinitely? The real question being: will the host be throttled forever because of this singleton? To answer this question, I set the Message count in database threshold to 20 (this value is very low in order not to wait for too long, otherwise I certainly would have fallen asleep in front of my screen) and I submitted 30 messages. The test was started at 18:26. At 18:56 (ie : exactly 30min later) the throttling was stopped and the database size was divided by 2. 30 min later again, the database size had dropped to almost zero: I guess I’ll have to find some documentation and do some more testing before I sort this out! My guess is that some maintenance job is at work here, though I cannot tell which one Digging even further If we take a look at the Message delivery throttling state counter for the processing host, we can see that this host was also throttled during the submission of the 600 documents: The value for the counter was 1, meaning that Message delivery incoming rate for the host instance exceeds the Message delivery outgoing rate * the specified Rate overdrive factor (percent) value. We will see this another day… :) A last word Let’s end this article with a warning: DO NOT CHANGE THE THROTTLING SETTINGS LIGHTLY! The temptation can be great to just bypass throttling by setting very high values for each parameter (or zero in some cases, which simply disables throttling). Nevertheless, always keep in mind that this mechanism is here for a very good reason: prevent your BizTalk infrastructure from exploding!! So whatever you do with those settings, do a lot of testing and benchmarking!

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  • Cant correctly install Lazarus

    - by user206316
    I have a little problem with installing and running Lazarus. I just upgrade ubuntu from 13.04 to 13.10. When i had 13.04, i could install lazarus without any problems, but in 13.10 lazarus magicaly dissapeared, and when i tried install it from ubuntu software center, it said something like in my software resources lazarus-ide-0.9.30.4 doesnt exist. After some research on net i tried delete all files from earlier installations, download deb packages from sourceforge and install them, but when i want to instal fpc-src, error shows up with output: (Reading database ... 100% (Reading database ... 239063 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking fpc-src (from .../Stiahnut/Lazarus/fpc-src.deb) ... dpkg: error processing /home/richi/Stiahnut/Lazarus/fpc-src.deb (--install): trying to overwrite '/usr/share/fpcsrc/2.6.2/rtl/nativent/tthread.inc', which is also in package fpc-source-2.6.2 2.6.2-5 dpkg-deb (subprocess): decompressing archive member: internal gzip write error: Broken pipe dpkg-deb: error: subprocess <decompress> returned error exit status 2 dpkg-deb (subprocess): cannot copy archive member from '/home/richi/Stiahnut/Lazarus/fpc-src.deb' to decompressor pipe: failed to write (Broken pipe) when i started lazarus, it of course tell me that it cant find fpc compier and fpc sources. So, please, i really need program for school and i dont wanna reinstall os anymore or something like that :( (Ubuntu 13.10 64bit) P.S: im not skilled in linux so if u know some commands to fix it just write them for copy and paste :) P.P.S:Sorry for bad English, im Slovak xD P.P.P.S: Thank so much for any answers update: output from sudo dpkg -l | grep "^rc" richi@Richi-Ubuntu:~/lazarus1.0.12$ sudo dpkg -l | grep "^rc" rc account-plugin-generic-oauth 0.10bzr13.03.26-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 GNOME Control Center account plugin for single signon - generic OAuth rc appmenu-gtk:amd64 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 amd64 Export GTK menus over DBus rc appmenu-gtk3:amd64 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 amd64 Export GTK menus over DBus rc fp-compiler-2.6.0 2.6.0-9 amd64 Free Pascal - compiler rc fp-utils-2.6.0 2.6.0-9 amd64 Free Pascal - utilities rc lazarus-ide-0.9.30.4 0.9.30.4-4 amd64 IDE for Free Pascal - common IDE files rc lazarus-ide-1.0.10 1.0.10+dfsg-1 amd64 IDE for Free Pascal - common IDE files rc lcl-utils-0.9.30.4 0.9.30.4-4 amd64 Lazarus Components Library - command line build tools rc lcl-utils-1.0.10 1.0.10+dfsg-1 amd64 Lazarus Components Library - command line build tools rc libbamf3-1:amd64 0.4.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 amd64 Window matching library - shared library rc libboost-filesystem1.49.0 1.49.0-4 amd64 filesystem operations (portable paths, iteration over directories, etc) in C++ rc libboost-signals1.49.0 1.49.0-4 amd64 managed signals and slots library for C++ rc libboost-system1.49.0 1.49.0-4 amd64 Operating system (e.g. diagnostics support) library rc libboost-thread1.49.0 1.49.0-4 amd64 portable C++ multi-threading rc libbrlapi0.5:amd64 4.4-8ubuntu4 amd64 braille display access via BRLTTY - shared library rc libcamel-1.2-40 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 Evolution MIME message handling library rc libcolumbus0-0 0.4.0daily13.04.16~13.04-0ubuntu1 amd64 error tolerant matching engine - shared library rc libdns95 1:9.9.2.dfsg.P1-2ubuntu2.1 amd64 DNS Shared Library used by BIND rc libdvbpsi7 0.2.2-1 amd64 library for MPEG TS and DVB PSI tables decoding and generating rc libebackend-1.2-5 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 Utility library for evolution data servers rc libedata-book-1.2-15 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 Backend library for evolution address books rc libedata-cal-1.2-18 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 amd64 Backend library for evolution calendars rc libgc1c3:amd64 1:7.2d-0ubuntu5 amd64 conservative garbage collector for C and C++ rc libgd2-xpm:amd64 2.0.36~rc1~dfsg-6.1ubuntu1 amd64 GD Graphics Library version 2 rc libgd2-xpm:i386 2.0.36~rc1~dfsg-6.1ubuntu1 i386 GD Graphics Library version 2 rc libgnome-desktop-3-4 3.6.3-0ubuntu1 amd64 Utility library for loading .desktop files - runtime files rc libgphoto2-2:amd64 2.4.14-2 amd64 gphoto2 digital camera library rc libgphoto2-2:i386 2.4.14-2 i386 gphoto2 digital camera library rc libgphoto2-port0:amd64 2.4.14-2 amd64 gphoto2 digital camera port library rc libgphoto2-port0:i386 2.4.14-2 i386 gphoto2 digital camera port library rc libgtksourceview-3.0-0:amd64 3.6.3-0ubuntu1 amd64 shared libraries for the GTK+ syntax highlighting widget rc libgweather-3-1 3.6.2-0ubuntu1 amd64 GWeather shared library rc libharfbuzz0:amd64 0.9.13-1 amd64 OpenType text shaping engine rc libibus-1.0-0:amd64 1.4.2-0ubuntu2 amd64 Intelligent Input Bus - shared library rc libical0 0.48-2 amd64 iCalendar library implementation in C (runtime) rc libimobiledevice3 1.1.4-1ubuntu6.2 amd64 Library for communicating with the iPhone and iPod Touch rc libisc92 1:9.9.2.dfsg.P1-2ubuntu2.1 amd64 ISC Shared Library used by BIND rc libkms1:amd64 2.4.46-1 amd64 Userspace interface to kernel DRM buffer management rc libllvm3.2:i386 1:3.2repack-7ubuntu1 i386 Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), runtime library rc libmikmod2:amd64 3.1.12-5 amd64 Portable sound library rc libpackagekit-glib2-14:amd64 0.7.6-3ubuntu1 amd64 Library for accessing PackageKit using GLib rc libpoppler28:amd64 0.20.5-1ubuntu3 amd64 PDF rendering library rc libraw5:amd64 0.14.7-0ubuntu1.13.04.2 amd64 raw image decoder library rc librhythmbox-core6 2.98-0ubuntu5 amd64 support library for the rhythmbox music player rc libsdl-mixer1.2:amd64 1.2.12-7ubuntu1 amd64 Mixer library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 1.2, libraries rc libsnmp15 5.4.3~dfsg-2.7ubuntu1 amd64 SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) library rc libsyncdaemon-1.0-1 4.2.0-0ubuntu1 amd64 Ubuntu One synchronization daemon library rc libunity-core-6.0-5 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 amd64 Core library for the Unity interface. rc libusb-0.1-4:i386 2:0.1.12-23.2ubuntu1 i386 userspace USB programming library rc libwayland0:amd64 1.0.5-0ubuntu1 amd64 wayland compositor infrastructure - shared libraries rc linux-image-3.8.0-19-generic 3.8.0-19.30 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-31-generic 3.8.0-31.46 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-19-generic 3.8.0-19.30 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-31-generic 3.8.0-31.46 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP rc screen-resolution-extra 0.15ubuntu1 all Extension for the GNOME screen resolution applet rc unity-common 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 all Common files for the Unity interface.

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  • What’s New for Oracle Commerce? Executive QA with John Andrews, VP Product Management, Oracle Commerce

    - by Katrina Gosek
    Oracle Commerce was for the fifth time positioned as a leader by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce. This inspired me to sit down with Oracle Commerce VP of Product Management, John Andrews to get his perspective on what continues to make Oracle a leader in the industry and what’s new for Oracle Commerce in 2013. Q: Why do you believe Oracle Commerce continues to be a leader in the industry? John: Oracle has a great acquisition strategy – it brings best-of-breed technologies into the product fold and then continues to grow and innovate them. This is particularly true with products unified into the Oracle Commerce brand. Oracle acquired ATG in late 2010 – and then Endeca in late 2011. This means that under the hood of Oracle Commerce you have market-leading technologies for cross-channel commerce and customer experience, both designed and developed in direct response to the unique challenges online businesses face. And we continue to innovate on capabilities core to what our customers need to be successful – contextual and personalized experience delivery, merchant-inspired tools, and architecture for performance and scalability. Q: It’s not a slow moving industry. What are you doing to keep the pace of innovation at Oracle Commerce? John: Oracle owes our customers the most innovative commerce capabilities. By unifying the core components of ATG and Endeca we are delivering on this promise. Oracle Commerce is continuing to innovate and redefine how commerce is done and in a way that drive business results and keeps customers coming back for experiences tailored just for them. Our January and May 2013 releases not only marked the seventh significant releases for the solution since the acquisitions of ATG and Endeca, we also continue to demonstrate rapid and significant progress on the unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities of the two commerce technologies. Q: Can you tell us what was notable about these latest releases under the Oracle Commerce umbrella? John: Specifically, our latest product innovations give businesses selling online the ability to get to market faster with more personalized commerce experiences in the following ways: Mobile: the latest Commerce Reference Application in this release offers a wider range of examples for online businesses to leverage for iOS development and specifically new iPad reference capabilities. This release marks the first release of the iOS Universal application that serves both the iPhone and iPad devices from a single download or binary. Business users can now drive page content management and layout of search results and category pages, as well as create additional storefront elements such as categories, facets / dimensions, and breadcrumbs through Experience Manager tools. Cross-Channel Commerce: key commerce platform capabilities have been added to support cross-channel commerce, including an expanded inventory model to maintain inventory for stores, pickup in stores and Web-based returns. Online businesses with in-store operations can now offer advanced shipping options on the web and make returns and exchange logic easily available on the web. Multi-Site Capabilities: significant enhancements to the Commerce Platform multi-site architecture that allows business users to quickly launch and manage multiple sites on the same cluster and share data, carts, and other components. First introduced in 2010, with this latest release business users can now partition or share customer profiles, control users’ site-based access, and manage personalization assets using site groups. Internationalization: continued language support and enhancements for business user tools as well and search and navigation. Guided Search now supports 35 total languages with 11 new languages (including Danish, Arabic, Norwegian, Serbian Cyrillic) added in this release. Commerce Platform tools now include localized support for 17 locales with 4 new languages (Danish, Portuguese (European), Finnish, and Thai). No development or customization is required in order for business users to use the applications in any of these supported languages. Business Tool Experience: valuable new Commerce Merchandising features include a new workflow for making emergency changes quickly and increased visibility into promotions rules and qualifications in preview mode. Oracle Commerce business tools continue to become more and more feature rich to provide intuitive, easy- to-use (yet powerful) capabilities to allow business users to manage content and the shopping experience. Commerce & Experience Unification: demonstrable unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities include – productized cartridges that provide supported integration between the Commerce Platform and Experience Management tools, cross-channel returns, Oracle Service Cloud integration, and integrated iPad application. The mission guiding our product development is to deliver differentiated, personalized user experiences across any device in a contextual manner – and to give the business the best tools to tune and optimize those user experiences to meet their business objectives. We also need to do this in a way that makes it operationally efficient for the business, keeping the overall total cost of ownership low – yet also allows the business to expand, whether it be to new business models, geographies or brands. To learn more about the latest Oracle Commerce releases and mission, visit the links below: • Hear more from John about the Oracle Commerce mission • Hear from Oracle Commerce customers • Documentation on the new releases • Listen to the Oracle ATG Commerce 10.2 Webcast • Listen to the Oracle Endeca Commerce 3.1.2 Webcast

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  • Protecting offline IRM rights and the error "Unable to Connect to Offline database"

    - by Simon Thorpe
    One of the most common problems I get asked about Oracle IRM is in relation to the error message "Unable to Connect to Offline database". This error message is a result of how Oracle IRM is protecting the cached rights on the local machine and if that cache has become invalid in anyway, this error is thrown. Offline rights and security First we need to understand how Oracle IRM handles offline use. The way it is implemented is one of the main reasons why Oracle IRM is the leading document security solution and demonstrates our methodology to ensure that solutions address both security and usability and puts the balance of these two in your control. Each classification has a set of predefined roles that the manager of the classification can assign to users. Each role has an offline period which determines the amount of time a user can access content without having to communicate with the IRM server. By default for the context model, which is the classification system that ships out of the box with Oracle IRM, the offline period for each role is 3 days. This is easily changed however and can be as low as under an hour to as long as years. It is also possible to switch off the ability to access content offline which can be useful when content is very sensitive and requires a tight leash. So when a user is online, transparently in the background, the Oracle IRM Desktop communicates with the server and updates the users rights and offline periods. This transparent synchronization period is determined by the server and communicated to all IRM Desktops and allows for users rights to be kept up to date without their intervention. This allows us to support some very important scenarios which are key to a successful IRM solution. A user doesn't have to make any decision when going offline, they simply unplug their laptop and they already have their offline periods synchronized to the maximum values. Any solution that requires a user to make a decision at the point of going offline isn't going to work because people forget to do this and will therefore be unable to legitimately access their content offline. If your rights change to REMOVE your access to content, this also happens in the background. This is very useful when someone has an offline duration of a week and they happen to make a connection to the internet 3 days into that offline period, the Oracle IRM Desktop detects this online state and automatically updates all rights for the user. This means the business risk is reduced when setting long offline periods, because of the daily transparent sync, you can reflect changes as soon as the user is online. Of course, if they choose not to come online at all during that week offline period, you cannot effect change, but you take that risk in giving the 7 day offline period in the first place. If you are added to a NEW classification during the day, this will automatically be synchronized without the user even having to open a piece of content secured against that classification. This is very important, consider the scenario where a senior executive downloads all their email but doesn't open any of it. Disconnects the laptop and then gets on a plane. During the flight they attempt to open a document attached to a downloaded email which has been secured against an IRM classification the user was not even aware they had access to. Because their new role in this classification was automatically synchronized their experience is a good one and the document opens. More information on how the Oracle IRM classification model works can be found in this article by Martin Abrahams. So what about problems accessing the offline rights database? So onto the core issue... when these rights are cached to your machine they are stored in an encrypted database. The encryption of this offline database is keyed to the instance of the installation of the IRM Desktop and the Windows user account. Why? Well what you do not want to happen is for someone to get their rights for content and then copy these files across hundreds of other machines, therefore getting access to sensitive content across many environments. The IRM server has a setting which controls how many times you can cache these rights on unique machines. This is because people typically access IRM content on more than one computer. Their work desktop, a laptop and often a home computer. So Oracle IRM allows for the usability of caching rights on more than one computer whilst retaining strong security over this cache. So what happens if these files are corrupted in someway? That's when you will see the error, Unable to Connect to Offline database. The most common instance of seeing this is when you are using virtual machines and copy them from one computer to the next. The virtual machine software, VMWare Workstation for example, makes changes to the unique information of that virtual machine and as such invalidates the offline database. How do you solve the problem? Resolution is however simple. You just delete all of the offline database files on the machine and they will be recreated with working encryption when the Oracle IRM Desktop next starts. However this does mean that the IRM server will think you have your rights cached to more than one computer and you will need to rerequest your rights, even though you are only going to be accessing them on one. Because it still thinks the old cache is valid. So be aware, it is good practice to increase the server limit from the default of 1 to say 3 or 4. This is done using the Enterprise Manager instance of IRM. So to delete these offline files I have a simple .bat file you can use; Download DeleteOfflineDBs.bat Note that this uses pskillto stop the irmBackground.exe from running. This is part of the IRM Desktop and holds open a lock to the offline database. Either kill this from task manager or use pskillas part of the script.

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  • What’s Your Tax Strategy? Automate the Tax Transfer Pricing Process!

    - by tobyehatch
    Does your business operate in multiple countries? Well, whether you like it or not, many local and international tax authorities inspect your tax strategy.  Legal, effective tax planning is perceived as a “moral” issue. CEOs are being asked to testify on their process of tax transfer pricing between multinational legal entities.  Marc Seewald, Senior Director of Product Management for EPM Applications specializing in all tax subjects and Product Manager for Oracle Hyperion Tax Provisioning, and Bart Stoehr, Senior Director of Product Strategy for Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management joined me for a discussion/podcast on this interesting subject.  So what exactly is “tax transfer pricing”? Marc defined it this way. “Tax transfer pricing is a profit allocation methodology required to be used by multinational corporations. Specifically, the ultimate goal of the transfer pricing is to ensure that the global multinational pays their fair share of income tax in each of their local markets. Specifically, it prevents companies from unfairly moving profit from ‘high tax’ countries to ‘low tax’ countries.” According to Marc, in today’s global economy, profitability can be significantly impacted by goods and services exchanged between the related divisions within a single multinational company.  To ensure that these cost allocations are done fairly, there are rules that govern the process. These rules ensure that intercompany allocations fairly represent the actual nature of the businesses activity- as if two divisions were unrelated - and provide a clear audit trail of how the costs have been allocated to prove that allocations fall within reasonable ranges.  What are the repercussions of improper tax transfer pricing? How important is it? Tax transfer pricing allocations can materially impact the amount of overall corporate income taxes paid by a company worldwide, in some cases by hundreds of millions of dollars!  Since so much tax revenue is at stake, revenue agencies like the IRS, and international regulatory bodies like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are pushing to reform and clarify reporting for tax transfer pricing. Most recently the OECD announced an “Action Plan for Base Erosion and Profit Shifting”. As Marc explained, the times are changing and companies need to be responsive to this issue. “It feels like every other week there is another company being accused of avoiding taxes,” said Marc. Most recently, Caterpillar was accused of avoiding billions of dollars in taxes. In the last couple of years, Apple, GE, Ikea, and Starbucks, have all been accused of tax avoidance. It’s imperative that companies like these have a clear and auditable tax transfer process that enables them to justify tax transfer pricing allocations and avoid steep penalties and bad publicity. Transparency and efficiency are what is needed when it comes to the tax transfer pricing process. Bart explained that tax transfer pricing is driving a deeper inspection of profit recognition specifically focused on the tax element of profit.  However, allocations needed to support tax profitability are nearly identical in process to allocations taking place in other parts of the finance organization. For example, the methods and processes necessary to arrive at tax profitability by legal entity are no different than those used to arrive at fully loaded profitability for a product line. In fact, there is a great opportunity for alignment across these two different functions.So it seems that tax transfer pricing should be reflected in profitability in general. Bart agreed and told us more about some of the critical sub-processes of an overall tax transfer pricing process within the Oracle solution for tax transfer pricing.  “First, there is a ton of data preparation, enrichment and pre-allocation data analysis that is managed in the Oracle Hyperion solution. This serves as the “data staging” to the next, critical sub-processes.  From here, we leverage the Oracle EPM platform’s ability to re-use dimensions and legal entity driver data and financial data with Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM).  Within HPCM, we manage the driver data, define the legal entity to legal entity allocation rules (like cost plus), and have the option to test out multiple, simultaneous tax transfer pricing what-if scenarios.  Once processed, a tax expert can evaluate the effectiveness of any one scenario result versus another via a variance analysis configured with HPCM’s pre-packaged reporting capability known as Oracle Hyperion SmartView for Office.”   Further, Bart explained that the ability to visibly demonstrate how a cost or revenue has been allocated is really helpful and auditable.  “HPCM’s Traceability Maps are that visual representation of all allocation flows that have been executed and is the tax transfer analyst’s best friend in maintaining clear documentation for tax transfer pricing audits. Simply click and drill as you inspect the chain of allocation definitions and results. Once final, the post-allocated tax data can be compared to the GL to create invoices and journal entries for posting to your GL system of choice.  Of course, there is a framework for overall governance of the journal entries, allocation percentages, and reporting to include necessary approvals.” Lastly, Marc explained that the key value in using the Oracle Hyperion solution for tax transfer pricing is that it keeps everything in alignment in one single place. Specifically, Oracle Hyperion effectively becomes the single book of record for the GAAP, management, and the tax set of books. There are many benefits to having one source of the truth. These include EFFICIENCY, CONTROLS and TRANSPARENCY.So, what’s your tax strategy? Why not automate the tax transfer pricing process!To listen to the entire podcast, click here.To learn more about Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM), click here.

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  • SQLAuthority News – A Real Story of Book Getting ‘Out of Stock’ to A 25% Discount Story Available

    - by pinaldave
    As many of my readers may know, I have recently written a few books.  Right now I’d like to talk about SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers (http://bit.ly/sqlinterviewbook ), my newest release. What inspired me to write this book was similar to my motivations for my previous titles – I wanted to help people understand SQL Server concepts and ace interview questions so that they could get a great job they love, as much as I love my own job. If you are new to SQL Server, don’t think I left you out of my book writing efforts. If you are new to the subject or have not had to deal with SQL Server in a long time, this book is perfect for someone who wants or needs a last minute refresher. If you are facing an upcoming interview and want to impress your future bosses, this book is perfect for getting you up to speed in a short time. However, if you are already an expert, you will still find a lot to learn and many pointers and suggestions that go deep into the subject. As I said before, I wrote this book in order to help my community, and I certainly hoped that this book would become popular. However, we decided to print a very limited number of copies to begin with. We did not think that it would sell out since much of the information is available for free online. We could not have been more wrong! We incorrectly estimated what people wanted. We did not realize that there is still a need and an interest for structured learning. So, with great reservations, we printed quite a large number of copies – and it still ran out in 36 hours! We got call from the online store with a request for more copies within 12 hours. But we had printed only as many as we had sent them. There were no extra copies. We finally talked to the printer to get more copies. However, due to festivals and holidays the copies could not be shipped to the online retailer for two days. We knew for sure that they were going to be out of the book for 48 hours. 48 hours – this was very difficult as the book was very highly anticipated. Many people wanted to buy this book quickly, and receive it soon in order to meet a deadline or to study for an upcoming test of their knowledge. But now this book was out of stock on the retail store. The way the online store works is that if the Indian-priced book is not there they list the US version of the book so that buyers will not be disappointed. The problem was that the US price of the book is three times more than the Indian price – which means one has to pay three times as much to buy this book instead of the previous very low price. We received a lot of communication on this subject, here are some examples: We are now businessmen and only focusing on money Why has the price tripled in 36 hours Why we are not honest with the price If the prices will ever come down And some of the letters we cannot post here! Well, finally after 48 hours the Indian stock was finally available online. Thanks to our printer who worked day and night to get all the copies printed. He divided the complete stock in two parts. The first part they sent immediately to online retailer  and the second part they kept with them to sell. Finally, the online retailer got them online promptly as well, and the price returned to normal. Our book once again got in business and became the eighth most popular new release in 36 hours. We appreciate your love and support. Without all of your interest and love we would have never come this far and the book would not be so successful. After thinking about all your support and how patient you were with our online troubles, the online retailer has decided to give an extra 25% discount for a limited time only. I think the 48 hours when the book was out of stock were very horrible and stressful and I’d like to apologize to my loyal readers for the mishap. I hope that the 25% off is enough to sooth any remaining hurt feelings, and that everyone will continue to learn and discover things in the book. Once again thank you so much and I truly hope that you all enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it. My book SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers is available now. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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  • SQLAuthority News – Why VoIP Service Providers Should Think About NuoDB’s Geo Distribution

    - by Pinal Dave
    You can always tell when someone’s showing off their cool, cutting edge comms technology. They tend to raise their voice a lot. Back in the day they’d announce their gadget leadership to the rest of the herd by shouting into their cellphone. Usually the message was no more urgent than “Hi, I’m on my cellphone!” Now the same types will loudly name-drop a different technology to the rest of the airport lounge. “I’m leveraging the wifi,” a fellow passenger bellowed, the other day, as we filtered through the departure gate. Nobody needed to know that, but the subtext was “look at me everybody”. You can tell the really advanced mobile user – they tend to whisper. Their handset has a microphone (how cool is that!) and they know how to use it. Sometimes these shouty public broadcasters aren’t even connected anyway because the database for their Voice over IP (VoIP) platform can’t cope. This will happen if they are using a traditional SQL model to try and cope with a phone network which has far flung offices and hundreds of mobile employees. That, like shouting into your phone, is just wrong on so many levels. What VoIP needs now is a single, logical database across multiple servers in different geographies. It needs to be updated in real-time and automatically scaled out during times of peak demand. A VoIP system should scale up to handle increased traffic, but just as importantly is must then go back down in the off peak hours. Try this with a MySQL database. It can’t scale easily enough, so it will keep your developers busy. They’ll have spent many hours trying to knit the different databases together. Traditional relational databases can possibly achieve this, at a price. Mind you, you could extend baked bean cans and string to every point on the network and that would be no less elegant. That’s not really following engineering principles though is it? Having said that, most telcos and VoIP systems use a separate, independent solution for each office location, which they link together – loosely.  The more office locations, the more complex and expensive the solution becomes and so the more you spend on maintenance. Ideally, you’d have a fluid system that can automatically shift its shape as the need arises. That’s the point of software isn’t it – it adapts. Otherwise, we might as well return to the old days. A MySQL system isn’t exactly baked bean cans attached by string, but it’s closer in spirit to the old many teethed mechanical beast that was employed in the first type of automated switchboard. NuoBD’s NewSQL is designed to be a single database that works across multiple servers, which can scale easily, and scale on demand. That’s one system that gives high connectivity but no latency, complexity or maintenance issues. MySQL works in some circumstances, but a period of growth isn’t one of them. So as a company moves forward, the MySQL database can’t keep pace. Data storage and data replication errors creep in. Soon the diaspora of offices becomes a problem. Your telephone system isn’t just distributed, it is literally all over the place. Though voice calls are often a software function, some of the old habits of telephony remain. When you call an engineer out, some of them will listen to what you’re asking for and announce that it cannot be done. This is what happens if you ask, say, database engineers familiar with Oracle or Microsoft to fulfill your wish for a low maintenance system built on a single, fluid, scalable database. No can do, they’d say. In fact, I heard one shouting something similar into his VoIP handset at the airport. “I can’t get on the network, Mac. I’m on MySQL.” You can download NuoDB from here. “NuoDB provides the ability to replicate data globally in real-time, which is not available with any other product offering,” states Weeks.  “That alone is remarkable and it works. I’ve seen it. I’ve used it.  I’ve tested it. The ability to deploy NuoDB removes a tremendous burden from our support and engineering teams.” Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: NuoDB

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  • 10 Great Free Icon Packs To Theme Your Android Phone

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Android allows you to customize your home screen, adding widgets, arranging shortcuts and folders, choosing a background, and even replacing the included launcher entirely. You can install icon packs to theme your app icons, too. Third-party launchers use standard app icons by default, but they don’t have to. You can install icon packs that third-party launchers will use in place of standard app icons. How to Use Icon Packs To use icon packs, you’ll need to use a third-party launcher that supports them, such as Nova, Apex, ADW, Go Launcher, Holo Launcher, or Action Launcher Pro. Once you’re using a third-party launcher, you can install an icon pack and go into your launcher’s settings. You’ll find an option that allows you to choose between the icon packs you’ve installed. Many of these icon packs also include wallpapers, which you can set in the normal way. MIUI 5 Icons This icon pack offers over 1900 free icons that are similar to the icons used by the MIUi ROM developed by China’s Xiaomi Tech. The large list of icons is a big plus — this pack will give the majority of your app icons a very slick, consistent look. DCikonZ Theme DCikonZ is a free icon theme that includes a whopping 4000+ icons with a consistent look. This icon theme stands out not just because it’s huge, but also for offering for going in its own direction and avoiding the super-simple, flat look many icon packs use. Holo Icons Holo Icons replaces many app icons with simple, consistent-looking that match Google’s Holo style. If you’re a fan of Android’s Holo look, give it a try. It even tweaks many of the icons from Google’s own apps to make them look more consistent. Square Icon Pack Square Icon Pack turns your icons into simple squares. Even Google Chrome becomes an orb instead of a square. This makes every icon a consistent size and offers a unique look. The icons here almost look a bit like the small-size tiles available on Windows Phone and Windows 8.1. The free version doesn’t offer as many icons as the paid version, but it does offer icons for many popular apps. Rounded Want rounded icons instead? Try the Rounded icon theme, which offers simple rounded icons. The developer says they’re inspired by the consistently round icons used on Mozilla’s Firefox OS. Crumbled Icon Pack Crumbled Icon Pack applies an effect that makes icons look as if they’r crumbling. Rather than theming individual icons, Crumbled Icon Pack adds an effect to every app icon on your device. This means that all your app icons will be themed and consistent. Dainty Icon Pack Is your Android home screen too colorful? Dainty Icon Pack offers simple, gray-on-white icons for over 1200 apps. It’d be ideal over a simple background. The contrast may be a bit low here with the gray-on-white, but it’s otherwise very slick. Simplex Icons Simplex Icons offers more contrast, with black-on-gray icons. This icon pack could simplify busy home screens, allowing photographic wallpapers to come through. Min Icon Set Min attempts to go as minimal as possible, offering simple white icons for over 570 apps. It would be ideal over a simple wallpaper with app names hidden in your launcher, offering a calming, minimal home screen. For apps it doesn’t recognize, it will enclose part of the app’s icon in a white circle. Elegance Elegance goes in another direction entirely, offering icons that incorporate more details and gradients rather than going for minimalism. Its over 1200 icons offer another good option for people who aren’t into the minimal, flat look. Icon pack designers generally have to create and include their own icons to replace icons associated with specific apps, so you’ll probably find a few of your app icons aren’t replaced with most of these themes. Of course, a standard Android phone without an icon pack doesn’t have consistent icons, either. Even if all the icons in your app drawer aren’t themed, the few app icons you have on your home screen will be if you use widely used apps.     

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  • Social Business Forum Milano: Day 2

    - by me
    @YourService. The business world has flipped and small business can capitalize  by Frank Eliason (twitter: @FrankEliason ) Technology and social media tools have made it easier than ever for companies to communicate with consumers. They can listen and join in on conversations, solve problems, get instant feedback about their products and services, and more. So why, then, are most companies not doing this? Instead, it seems as if customer service is at an all time low, and that the few companies who are choosing to focus on their customers are experiencing a great competitive advantage. At Your Service explains the importance of refocusing your business on your customers and your employees, and just how to do it. Explains how to create a culture of empowered employees who understand the value of a great customer experience Advises on the need to communicate that experience to their customers and potential customers Frank Eliason, recognized by BusinessWeek as the 'most famous customer service manager in the US, possibly in the world,' has built a reputation for helping large businesses improve the way they connect with customers and enhance their relationships Quotes from the Audience: Bertrand Duperrin ?@bduperrin social service is not about shutting up the loudest cutsomers ! #sbf12 @frankeliason Paolo Pelloni ?@paolopelloniGautam Ghosh ?@GautamGhosh RT @cecildijoux: #sbf12 @frankeliason you need to change things and fix the approach it's not about social media it's about driving change  Peter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser #sbf12 Company Experience = Product Experience + Customer Interactions + Employee Experience @yourservice Engage or lose! Socialize, mobilize, conversify: engage your employees to improve business performance Christian Finn (twitter: @cfinn) First Christian was presenting the flying monkey   Then he outlined the four principals to fix the Intranet: 1. Socalize the Intranet 2. Get Thee to a Single Repository 3. Mobilize the Intranet 4. Conversationalize Your Processes Quotes from the Audience: Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Engaged employees think their work bring out the best of their ideas @cfinn #sbf12 http://pic.twitter.com/68eddp48 John Stepper ?@johnstepper I like @cfinn's "conversify your processes" A nice related concept to "narrating your work", part of working out loud. http://johnstepper.com/2012/05/26/working-out-loud-your-personal-content-strategy/ Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Organizations are talent markets - socializing your intranet makes this market function better @cfinn #sbf12 For profit, productivity, and personal benefit: creating a collaborative culture at Deutsche Bank John Stepper (twitter:@johnstepper) Driving adoption of collaboration + social media platforms at Deutsche Bank. John shared some great best practices on how to deploy an enterprise wide  community model  in a large company. He started with the most important question What is the commercial value of adding social ? Then he talked about the success of Community of Practices deployment and outlined some key use cases including the relevant measures to proof the ROI of the investment. Examples:  Community of practice -> measure: systematic collection of value stories  Self-service website  -> measure: based on representative models Optimizing asset inventory - > measure: Actual counts  This use case was particular interesting.  It is a crowd sourced spending/saving of infrastructure model.  User can cancel IT services they don't need (as example Software xx).  5% of the saving goes to social responsibility projects. The John outlined some  best practices on how to address the WIIFM (What's In It For Me) question of the individual users:  - change from hierarchy to graph -  working out loud = observable work + narrating  your work  - add social skills to career objectives - example: building a purposeful social network course/training as part of the job development curriculum And last but not least John gave some important tips on how to get senior management buy-in by establishing management sponsored division level collaboration boards which defines clear uses cases and measures. This divisional use cases are then implemented using a common social platform.  Thanks John - I learned a lot from your presentation!   Quotes from the Audience: Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 what's in it for individuals at Deutsche Bank? Shapping their reputations in a big org says @johnstepper #e20Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl Any reason why not? MT @magatorlibero #sbf12 is Deutsche B. experience on applying social inside company applicable to Italian people? Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Your career is not a ladder, it is a network that opens up opportunities - @johnstepper #sbf12 Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg @johnstepper: Institutionalizing collaboration is next - collaboration woven into the fabric of daily work #sbf12 Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 @johnstepper talking about how Deutsche Bank is using #socbiz to build purposeful CoP & save money

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  • Measuring Usability with Common Industry Format (CIF) Usability Tests

    - by Applications User Experience
    Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience A User-centered Research and Design Process The Oracle Fusion Applications user experience was five years in the making. The development of this suite included an extensive and comprehensive user experience design process: ethnographic research, low-fidelity workflow prototyping, high fidelity user interface (UI) prototyping, iterative formative usability testing, development feedback and iteration, and sales and customer evaluation throughout the design cycle. However, this process does not stop when our products are released. We conduct summative usability testing using the ISO 25062 Common Industry Format (CIF) for usability test reports as an organizational framework. CIF tests allow us to measure the overall usability of our released products.  These studies provide benchmarks that allow for comparisons of a specific product release against previous versions of our product and against other products in the marketplace. What Is a CIF Usability Test? CIF refers to the internationally standardized method for reporting usability test findings used by the software industry. The CIF is based on a formal, lab-based test that is used to benchmark the usability of a product in terms of human performance and subjective data. The CIF was developed and is endorsed by more than 375 software customer and vendor organizations led by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), a US government entity. NIST sponsored the CIF through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards-making processes. Oracle played a key role in developing the CIF. The CIF report format and metrics are consistent with the ISO 9241-11 definition of usability: “The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” Our goal in conducting CIF tests is to measure performance and satisfaction of a representative sample of users on a set of core tasks and to help predict how usable a product will be with the larger population of customers. Why Do We Perform CIF Testing? The overarching purpose of the CIF for usability test reports is to promote incorporation of usability as part of the procurement decision-making process for interactive products. CIF provides a common format for vendors to report the methods and results of usability tests to customer organizations, and enables customers to compare the usability of our software to that of other suppliers. CIF also enables us to compare our current software with previous versions of our software. CIF Testing for Fusion Applications Oracle Fusion Applications comprises more than 100 modules in seven different product families. These modules encompass more than 400 task flows and 400 user roles. Due to resource constraints, we cannot perform comprehensive CIF testing across the entire product suite. Therefore, we had to develop meaningful inclusion criteria and work with other stakeholders across the applications development organization to prioritize product areas for testing. Ultimately, we want to test the product areas for which customers might be most interested in seeing CIF data. We also want to build credibility with customers; we need to be able to make the case to current and prospective customers that the product areas tested are representative of the product suite as a whole. Our goal is to test the top use cases for each product. The primary activity in the scoping process was to work with the individual product teams to identify the key products and business process task flows in each product to test. We prioritized these products and flows through a series of negotiations among the user experience managers, product strategy, and product management directors for each of the primary product families within the Oracle Fusion Applications suite (Human Capital Management, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Financials, Projects, and Procurement). The end result of the scoping exercise was a list of 47 proposed CIF tests for the Fusion Applications product suite.  Figure 1. A participant completes tasks during a usability test in Oracle’s Usability Labs Fusion Supplier Portal CIF Test The first Fusion CIF test was completed on the Supplier Portal application in July of 2011.  Fusion Supplier Portal is part of an integrated suite of Procurement applications that helps supplier companies manage orders, schedules, shipments, invoices, negotiations and payments. The user roles targeted for the usability study were Supplier Account Receivables Specialists and Supplier Sales Representatives, including both experienced and inexperienced users across a wide demographic range.  The test specifically focused on the following functionality and features: Manage payments – view payments Manage invoices – view invoice status and create invoices Manage account information – create new contact, review bank account information Manage agreements – find and view agreement, upload agreement lines, confirm status of agreement lines upload Manage purchase orders (PO) – view history of PO, request change to PO, find orders Manage negotiations – respond to request for a quote, check the status of a negotiation response These product areas were selected to represent the most important subset of features and functionality of the flow, in terms of frequency and criticality of use by customers. A total of 20 users participated in the usability study. The results of the Supplier Portal evaluation were favorable and exceeded our expectations. Figure 2. Fusion Supplier Portal Next Studies We plan to conduct two Fusion CIF usability studies per product family over the next nine months. The next product to be tested will be Self-service Procurement. End users are currently being recruited to participate in this usability study, and the test sessions are scheduled to begin during the last week of November.

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  • And the Winners of Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards in Data Integration are…

    - by Irem Radzik
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Raymond James and Morrison Supermarkets were selected for the data integration category for their innovative use of Oracle’s data integration products and the great results they have achieved. In this blog I would like to briefly introduce you to these award winning projects. Raymond James is a diversified financial services company, which provides financial planning, wealth management, investment banking, and asset management. They are using Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator to feed their operational data store (ODS), which supports application services across the enterprise. A major requirement for their project was low data latency, as key decisions are made based on the data in the ODS. They were able to fulfill this requirement due to the Oracle Data Integrator’s integrated solution with Oracle GoldenGate. Oracle GoldenGate captures changed data from different systems including Oracle Database, HP NonStop and Microsoft SQL Server into a single data store on SQL Server 2008. Oracle Data Integrator provides data transformations for the ODS. Leveraging ODI’s integration with GoldenGate, Raymond James now sees a 9 second median latency (from source commit to ODS target commit). The ODS solution delivers high quality, accurate data for consuming applications such as Raymond James’ next generation client and portfolio management systems as well as real-time operational reporting. It enables timely information for making better decisions. There are more benefits Raymond James achieved with this implementation of Oracle’s data integration solution. The software developers and architects of this solution, Tim Garrod and Ryan Fonnett, have told us during their presentation at OpenWorld that they also reduced application complexity significantly while improving developer productivity through trusted operational services. They were able to utilize CDC to generate alerts for business users, and for applications (for example for cache hydration mechanisms). One cool innovation example among many in this project is that using ODI's flexible architecture, Tim and Ryan could build 24/7 self-healing processes. And these processes have hardly failed. Integration processes fixes the errors itself. Pretty amazing; and a great solution for environments that need such reliability and availability. (You can see Tim and Ryan’s photo with the Innovation Award above.) The other winner of this year in the data integration category, Morrison Supermarkets, is the UK’s 4th largest grocery retailer. The company has been migrating all their legacy applications on to a new-world application set based on Oracle and consolidating all BI on to a single Oracle platform. The company recently implemented Oracle Exadata as the data warehouse engine and uses Oracle Business Intelligence EE. Their goal with deploying GoldenGate and ODI was to provide BI data to the enterprise in a way that it also supports operational decision making requirements from a wide range of Oracle based ERP applications such as E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Oracle Retail Suite. They use GoldenGate’s log-based change data capture capabilities and Oracle Data Integrator to populate the Oracle Retail Data Model. The electronic point of sale (EPOS) integration solution they built processes over 80 million transactions/day at busy periods in near real time (15 mins). It provides valuable insight to Retail and Commercial teams for both intra-day and historical trend analysis. As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, the right data integration platform can transform the business. Here is another example: The point-of-sale integration enabled the grocery chain to optimize its stock management, leading to another award: Morrisons won the Grocer 33 award in 2012 - beating all other major UK supermarkets in product availability. Congratulations, Morrisons,on another award! Celebrating the innovation and the success of our customers with Oracle’s data integration products was definitely a highlight of Oracle OpenWorld for me. I look forward to hearing more from Raymond James, Morrisons, and the other customers that presented their data integration projects at OpenWorld, on how they are creating more value for their organizations.

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  • Independence Day for Software Components &ndash; Loosening Coupling by Reducing Connascence

    - by Brian Schroer
    Today is Independence Day in the USA, which got me thinking about loosely-coupled “independent” software components. I was reminded of a video I bookmarked quite a while ago of Jim Weirich’s “Grand Unified Theory of Software Design” talk at MountainWest RubyConf 2009. I finally watched that video this morning. I highly recommend it. In the video, Jim talks about software connascence. The dictionary definition of connascence (con-NAY-sense) is: 1. The common birth of two or more at the same time 2. That which is born or produced with another. 3. The act of growing together. The brief Wikipedia page about Connascent Software Components says that: Two software components are connascent if a change in one would require the other to be modified in order to maintain the overall correctness of the system. Connascence is a way to characterize and reason about certain types of complexity in software systems. The term was introduced to the software world in Meilir Page-Jones’ 1996 book “What Every Programmer Should Know About Object-Oriented Design”. The middle third of that book is the author’s proposed graphical notation for describing OO designs. UML became the standard about a year later, so a revised version of the book was published in 1999 as “Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Design in UML”. Weirich says that the third part of the book, in which Page-Jones introduces the concept of connascence “is worth the price of the entire book”. (The price of the entire book, by the way, is not much – I just bought a used copy on Amazon for $1.36, so that was a pretty low-risk investment. I’m looking forward to getting the book and learning about connascence from the original source.) Meanwhile, here’s my summary of Weirich’s summary of Page-Jones writings about connascence: The stronger the form of connascence, the more difficult and costly it is to change the elements in the relationship. Some of the connascence types, ordered from weak to strong are: Connascence of Name Connascence of name is when multiple components must agree on the name of an entity. If you change the name of a method or property, then you need to change all references to that method or property. Duh. Connascence of name is unavoidable, assuming your objects are actually used. My main takeaway about connascence of name is that it emphasizes the importance of giving things good names so you don’t need to go changing them later. Connascence of Type Connascence of type is when multiple components must agree on the type of an entity. I assume this is more of a problem for languages without compilers (especially when used in apps without tests). I know it’s an issue with evil JavaScript type coercion. Connascence of Meaning Connascence of meaning is when multiple components must agree on the meaning of particular values, e.g that “1” means normal customer and “2” means preferred customer. The solution to this is to use constants or enums instead of “magic” strings or numbers, which reduces the coupling by changing the connascence form from “meaning” to “name”. Connascence of Position Connascence of positions is when multiple components must agree on the order of values. This refers to methods with multiple parameters, e.g.: eMailer.Send("[email protected]", "[email protected]", "Your order is complete", "Order completion notification"); The more parameters there are, the stronger the connascence of position is between the component and its callers. In the example above, it’s not immediately clear when reading the code which email addresses are sender and receiver, and which of the final two strings are subject vs. body. Connascence of position could be improved to connascence of type by replacing the parameter list with a struct or class. This “introduce parameter object” refactoring might be overkill for a method with 2 parameters, but would definitely be an improvement for a method with 10 parameters. This points out two “rules” of connascence:  The Rule of Degree: The acceptability of connascence is related to the degree of its occurrence. The Rule of Locality: Stronger forms of connascence are more acceptable if the elements involved are closely related. For example, positional arguments in private methods are less problematic than in public methods. Connascence of Algorithm Connascence of algorithm is when multiple components must agree on a particular algorithm. Be DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself. If you have “cloned” code in multiple locations, refactor it into a common function.   Those are the “static” forms of connascence. There are also “dynamic” forms, including… Connascence of Execution Connascence of execution is when the order of execution of multiple components is important. Consumers of your class shouldn’t have to know that they have to call an .Initialize method before it’s safe to call a .DoSomething method. Connascence of Timing Connascence of timing is when the timing of the execution of multiple components is important. I’ll have to read up on this one when I get the book, but assume it’s largely about threading. Connascence of Identity Connascence of identity is when multiple components must reference the entity. The example Weirich gives is when you have two instances of the “Bob” Employee class and you call the .RaiseSalary method on one and then the .Pay method on the other does the payment use the updated salary?   Again, this is my summary of a summary, so please be forgiving if I misunderstood anything. Once I get/read the book, I’ll make corrections if necessary and share any other useful information I might learn.   See Also: Gregory Brown: Ruby Best Practices Issue #24: Connascence as a Software Design Metric (That link is failing at the time I write this, so I had to go to the Google cache of the page.)

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  • An Alphabet of Eponymous Aphorisms, Programming Paradigms, Software Sayings, Annoying Alliteration

    - by Brian Schroer
    Malcolm Anderson blogged about “Einstein’s Razor” yesterday, which reminded me of my favorite software development “law”, the name of which I can never remember. It took much Wikipedia-ing to find it (Hofstadter’s Law – see below), but along the way I compiled the following list: Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Brook’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Law of Demeter: Each unit should only talk to its friends; don't talk to strangers. Einstein’s Razor: “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler” is the popular paraphrase, but what he actually said was “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience”, an overly complicated quote which is an obvious violation of Einstein’s Razor. (You can tell by looking at a picture of Einstein that the dude was hardly an expert on razors or other grooming apparati.) Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives: Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment. - O'Toole's Corollary: The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Morris’s Corollary: “…including Common Lisp”) Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Issawi’s Omelet Analogy: One cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs - but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelet. Jackson’s Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don't do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet. Kaner’s Caveat: A program which perfectly meets a lousy specification is a lousy program. Liskov Substitution Principle (paraphrased): Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it Mason’s Maxim: Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do. Nils-Peter Nelson’s Nil I/O Rule: The fastest I/O is no I/O.    Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Quentin Tarantino’s Pie Principle: “…you want to go home have a drink and go and eat pie and talk about it.” (OK, he was talking about movies, not software, but I couldn’t find a “Q” quote about software. And wouldn’t it be cool to write a program so great that the users want to eat pie and talk about it?) Raymond’s Rule: Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.  Sowa's Law of Standards: Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X. Turing’s Tenet: We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as very humble programmers.  Udi Dahan’s Race Condition Rule: If you think you have a race condition, you don’t understand the domain well enough. These rules didn’t exist in the age of paper, there is no reason for them to exist in the age of computers. When you have race conditions, go back to the business and find out actual rules. Van Vleck’s Kvetching: We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer -- and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply. Wheeler’s Law: All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection. Wheeler also said “Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.”. The Wrong Road Rule of Mr. X (anonymous): No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back. Yourdon’s Rule of Two Feet: If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave. Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Zawinski is also responsible for “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems.” He once commented about X Windows widget toolkits: “Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.”

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  • Recent Innovations to ILOM

    - by B.Koch
    by Josh Rosen If you are wondering how Oracle can make some of the most advanced, reliable, and fault tolerant servers on the market, look no further than Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager or ILOM.  We build ILOM into every server we create, from Oracle x86 Systems such as X3-2 to the SPARC T-Series family. Oracle ILOM is an embedded service processor, but it's really more than that.  It's a computer within a computer.  It's smart, it's tightly integrated into all aspects of the server's operation, and it's a big reason why Oracle servers are used for some of the most mission-critical workloads out there. To understand the value of ILOM, there is no better place to start than its fault management capability.  We have taken the sophisticated fault management architecture from Solaris, developed and refined over a decade, and built it into each and every ILOM. ILOM detects a potential issue at its earliest stage, watching low-level sensors.   If the root cause of a problem is not clear from a single error reading, ILOM will look for other clues and combine multiple pieces of information to correctly identify a failing component. ILOM provides peace of mind. We tailor our fault management for each new server platform that we produce.  You can rest assured that it's always actively keeping the server healthy.  And if there is a problem, you can be confident it will let you know by sending you a notification by e-mail or trap. We also heard IT managers tell us they needed a Ph.D. in computer engineering to manage today's servers. It doesn't have to be that way.  Thanks to the latest innovations to Oracle ILOM, we present hardware inventory and status in way that makes sense – to anyone.  Green means everything is healthy and red means something is wrong.  When a component needs to be replaced a clear message indicates where the problem is and points you at a knowledge article about that problem.  It's that simple. Simpler management and simple interfaces mean reduced complexity and lower costs to manage.  And we know that's really important. ILOM does all this while also providing advanced service processor features you depend on for managing enterprise class systems.  You can remotely control the server power, interact with a virtual video console for the server, and mount media on the server remotely.  There is no need to spend money on a KVM switch to get this functionality. And when people hear how advanced ILOM is, they can't believe ILOM is free.  All features are enabled and included with each Oracle server that you buy.  There are no advanced licenses you need to purchase or features to unlock. Configuring ILOM has also never been easier.  It is now possible to configure almost all aspects of the server directly from ILOM.  This includes changing BIOS settings, persistently modifying boot order, and optimizing power settings -- all directly from ILOM. But Oracle's innovation does not stop with ILOM.  Oracle has engineered Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center to integrate directly with ILOM, providing centralized management across all of our servers. Ops Center will discover each of your Oracle servers over the network by searching for ILOMs.  When it finds one, it knows how to communicate with ILOM to monitoring and configure that server from application to disk. Since every server that Oracle produces, from x86 Systems to SPARC T-Series up and down the line, comes with Oracle ILOM, you can manage all Oracle servers in the same way.  And while all of our servers may have different components on the inside, each with their specialized functions, the way you integrate them and the way you monitor and manage them is exactly the same. Oracle ILOM is state-of-art.  If you are looking for a server that make systems management simple and is easy to integrate and maintain, check out the latest advances to Oracle ILOM. Josh Rosen is a Principal Product Manager at Oracle and previously spent more than a decade as a developer and architect of system management software. Josh has worked on system management for many of Oracle's hardware products ranging from the earliest blade systems to the latest Oracle x86 servers.

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  • OTN Architect Day Headed to Reston, VA - May 16

    - by Bob Rhubart
    In 2011 OTN Architect Day made stops in Chicago, Denver, Phoenix, Redwood Shores, and Toronto. The 2012 series begins with OTN Architect Day in Reston, VA on Wednesday May 16. Registration is now open for this free event, but don't get caught napping -- seating is limited, and the event is just 5 weeks away. The information below reflects the most recent updates to the event agenda, including the addition of Oracle ACE Director Kai Yu as the guest keynote speaker. Kai is Senior System Engineer / Architect at Dell, Inc., and has been very busy of late as a speaker at various industry and Oracle User Group events. I'm very happy Kai has agreed to make the trek from his hometown in Austin, TX to share his insight at the Architect Day event in Reston.  If you're in the area, put this one on your calendar. You won't be sorry.   Venue Sheraton Reston Hotel 11810 Sunrise Valley Drive Reston, VA 20191 Event Agenda 8:30 am - 9:00 am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00 am - 9:15 am Welcome and Opening Comments 9:15 am - 10:00 am Engineered Systems: Oracle's Vision for the Future | Ralf Dossman Oracle's Exadata and Exalogic are impressive products in their own right. But working in combination they deliver unparalleled transaction processing performance with up to a 30x increase over existing legacy systems, with the lowest cost of ownership over a 3 or 5 year basis than any other hardware. In this session you'll learn how to leverage Oracle's Engineered Systems within your enterprise to deliver record-breaking performance at the lowest TCO. 10:00 am - 10:30 am High Availability Infrastructure for Cloud Computing | Kai Yu Infrastructure high availability is extremely critical to Cloud Computing. In a Cloud system that hosts a large number of databases and applications with different SLAs, any unplanned outage can be devastating, and even a small planned downtime may be unacceptable. This presentation will discuss various technology solutions and the related best practices that system architects should consider in cloud infrastructure design to ensure high availability. 10:30 am - 10:45 am Break 10:45 am - 11:30 am Breakout Sessions: (pick one) Innovations in Grid Computing with Oracle Coherence | Bjorn Boe Learn how Coherence can increase the availability, scalability and performance of your existing applications with its advanced low-latency data-grid technologies. Also hear some interesting industry-specific use cases that customers had implemented and how Oracle is integrating Coherence into its Enterprise Java stack. Cloud Computing - Making IT Simple | Scott Mattoon The road to Cloud Computing is not without a few bumps. This session will help to smooth out your journey by tackling some of the potential complications. We'll examine whether standardization is a prerequisite for the Cloud. We'll look at why refactoring isn't just for application code. We'll check out deployable entities and their simplification via higher levels of abstraction. And we'll close out the session with a look at engineered systems and modular clouds. 11:30 pm - 12:15 pm Breakout Sessions: (pick one) Oracle Enterprise Manager | Joe Diemer Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) provides complete lifecycle management for the cloud - from automated cloud setup to self-service delivery to cloud operations. In this session you'll learn how to take control of your cloud infrastructure with EM features including Consolidation Planning and Self-Service provisioning with Metering and Chargeback. Come hear how Oracle is expanding its management capabilities into the cloud! Rationalization and Defense in Depth - Two Steps Closer to the Clouds | Dave Chappelle Security represents one of the biggest concerns about cloud computing. In this session we'll get past the FUD with a real-world look at some key issues. We'll discuss the infrastructure necessary to support rationalization and security services, explore architecture for defense -in-depth, and deal frankly with the good, the bad, and the ugly in Cloud security. 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm Lunch 1:40 pm - 2:00 pm Panel Discussion - Q&A 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm Breakout Sessions: (pick one) 21st Century SOA | Peter Belknap Service Oriented Architecture has evolved from concept to reality in the last decade. The right methodology coupled with mature SOA technologies has helped customers demonstrate success in both innovation and ROI. In this session you will learn how Oracle SOA Suite's orchestration, virtualization, and governance capabilities provide the infrastructure to run mission critical business and system applications. And we'll take a special look at the convergence of SOA & BPM using Oracle's Unified technology stack. Track B: Oracle Cloud Reference Architecture | Anbu Krishnaswamy Cloud initiatives are beginning to dominate enterprise IT roadmaps. Successful adoption of Cloud and the subsequent governance challenges warrant a Cloud reference architecture that is applied consistently across the enterprise. This presentation gives an overview of Oracle's Cloud Reference Architecture, which is part of the Cloud Enterprise Technology Strategy (ETS). Concepts covered include common management layer capabilities, service models, resource pools, and use cases. 2:45 pm - 3:00 pm Break 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Roundtable Discussions 4:00 pm - 4:15 pm Closing Comments & Readouts from Roundtable 4:15 pm - 5:00 pm Cocktail Reception / Networking Session schedule and content subject to change.

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  • Do Not Optimize Without Measuring

    - by Alois Kraus
    Recently I had to do some performance work which included reading a lot of code. It is fascinating with what ideas people come up to solve a problem. Especially when there is no problem. When you look at other peoples code you will not be able to tell if it is well performing or not by reading it. You need to execute it with some sort of tracing or even better under a profiler. The first rule of the performance club is not to think and then to optimize but to measure, think and then optimize. The second rule is to do this do this in a loop to prevent slipping in bad things for too long into your code base. If you skip for some reason the measure step and optimize directly it is like changing the wave function in quantum mechanics. This has no observable effect in our world since it does represent only a probability distribution of all possible values. In quantum mechanics you need to let the wave function collapse to a single value. A collapsed wave function has therefore not many but one distinct value. This is what we physicists call a measurement. If you optimize your application without measuring it you are just changing the probability distribution of your potential performance values. Which performance your application actually has is still unknown. You only know that it will be within a specific range with a certain probability. As usual there are unlikely values within your distribution like a startup time of 20 minutes which should only happen once in 100 000 years. 100 000 years are a very short time when the first customer tries your heavily distributed networking application to run over a slow WIFI network… What is the point of this? Every programmer/architect has a mental performance model in his head. A model has always a set of explicit preconditions and a lot more implicit assumptions baked into it. When the model is good it will help you to think of good designs but it can also be the source of problems. In real world systems not all assumptions of your performance model (implicit or explicit) hold true any longer. The only way to connect your performance model and the real world is to measure it. In the WIFI example the model did assume a low latency high bandwidth LAN connection. If this assumption becomes wrong the system did have a drastic change in startup time. Lets look at a example. Lets assume we want to cache some expensive UI resource like fonts objects. For this undertaking we do create a Cache class with the UI themes we want to support. Since Fonts are expensive objects we do create it on demand the first time the theme is requested. A simple example of a Theme cache might look like this: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Drawing; struct Theme { public Color Color; public Font Font; } static class ThemeCache { static Dictionary<string, Theme> _Cache = new Dictionary<string, Theme> { {"Default", new Theme { Color = Color.AliceBlue }}, {"Theme12", new Theme { Color = Color.Aqua }}, }; public static Theme Get(string theme) { Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } return cached; } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Theme item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); } } This cache does create font objects only once since on first retrieve of the Theme object the font is added to the Theme object. When we let the application run it should print “Creating new font” only once. Right? Wrong! The vigilant readers have spotted the issue already. The creator of this cache class wanted to get maximum performance. So he decided that the Theme object should be a value type (struct) to not put too much pressure on the garbage collector. The code Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } does work with a copy of the value stored in the dictionary. This means we do mutate a copy of the Theme object and return it to our caller. But the original Theme object in the dictionary will have always null for the Font field! The solution is to change the declaration of struct Theme to class Theme or to update the theme object in the dictionary. Our cache as it is currently is actually a non caching cache. The funny thing was that I found out with a profiler by looking at which objects where finalized. I found way too many font objects to be finalized. After a bit debugging I found the allocation source for Font objects was this cache. Since this cache was there for years it means that the cache was never needed since I found no perf issue due to the creation of font objects. the cache was never profiled if it did bring any performance gain. to make the cache beneficial it needs to be accessed much more often. That was the story of the non caching cache. Next time I will write something something about measuring.

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  • Know more about Cache Buffer Handle

    - by Liu Maclean(???)
    ??????«latch free:cache buffer handles???SQL????»?????cache buffer handle latch?????,?????????: “?????pin?buffer header???????buffer handle,??buffer handle?????????cache buffer handles?,??????cache buffer handles??????,???????cache???buffer handles,?????(reserved set)?????????????_db_handles_cached(???5)???,?????????????????SQL??????????????????????,????pin??????,????????handle,?????????5?cached buffer handles???handle????????????????,Oracle?????????????????pin?”????“?buffer,????????????????handle???db_block_buffers/processes,????_cursor_db_buffers_pinned???????cache buffer handles?????,??????,????????????SQL,????cache?buffer handles?????????,??????????????,???????????/?????” ????T.ASKMACLEAN.COM????,??????cache Buffer handle?????: cache buffer handle ??: ------------------------------ | Buffer state object | ------------------------------ | Place to hang the buffer | ------------------------------ | Consistent Get? | ------------------------------ | Proc Owning SO | ------------------------------ | Flags(RIR) | ------------------------------ ???? cache buffer handle SO: 70000046fdfe530, type: 24, owner: 70000041b018630, flag: INIT/-/-/0×00(buffer) (CR) PR: 70000048e92d148 FLG: 0×500000lock rls: 0, class bit: 0kcbbfbp: [BH: 7000001c7f069b0, LINK: 70000046fdfe570]where: kdswh02: kdsgrp, why: 0BH (7000001c7f069b0) file#: 12 rdba: 0×03061612 (12/398866) class: 1 ba: 7000001c70ee000set: 75 blksize: 8192 bsi: 0 set-flg: 0 pwbcnt: 0dbwrid: 2 obj: 66209 objn: 48710 tsn: 6 afn: 12hash: [700000485f12138,700000485f12138] lru: [70000025af67790,700000132f69ee0]lru-flags: hot_bufferckptq: [NULL] fileq: [NULL] objq: [700000114f5dd10,70000028bf5d620]use: [70000046fdfe570,70000046fdfe570] wait: [NULL]st: SCURRENT md: SHR tch: 0flags: affinity_lockLRBA: [0x0.0.0] HSCN: [0xffff.ffffffff] HSUB: [65535]where: kdswh02: kdsgrp, why: 0 # Example:#   (buffer) (CR) PR: 37290 FLG:    0#   kcbbfbp    : [BH: befd8, LINK: 7836c] (WAITING) Buffer handle (X$KCBBF) kernel cache, buffer buffer_handles Query x$kcbbf  – lists all the buffer handles ???? _db_handles             System-wide simultaneous buffer operations ,no of buffer handles_db_handles_cached      Buffer handles cached each process , no of processes  default 5_cursor_db_buffers_pinned  additional number of buffers a cursor can pin at once_session_kept_cursor_pins       Number of cursors pins to keep in a session When a buffer is pinned it is attached to buffer state object. ??? ???????? cache buffer handles latch ? buffer pin???: SESSION A : SQL> select * from v$version; BANNER ---------------------------------------------------------------- Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.5.0 - 64bi PL/SQL Release 10.2.0.5.0 - Production CORE    10.2.0.5.0      Production TNS for Linux: Version 10.2.0.5.0 - Production NLSRTL Version 10.2.0.5.0 - Production SQL> create table test_cbc_handle(t1 int); Table created. SQL> insert into test_cbc_handle values(1); 1 row created. SQL> commit; Commit complete. SQL> select rowid from test_cbc_handle; ROWID ------------------ AAANO6AABAAAQZSAAA SQL> select * from test_cbc_handle where rowid='AAANO6AABAAAQZSAAA';         T1 ----------          1 SQL> select addr,name from v$latch_parent where name='cache buffer handles'; ADDR             NAME ---------------- -------------------------------------------------- 00000000600140A8 cache buffer handles SQL> select to_number('00000000600140A8','xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx') from dual; TO_NUMBER('00000000600140A8','XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX') ----------------------------------------------------                                           1610694824 ??cache buffer handles????parent latch ??? child latch ???SESSION A hold ??????cache buffer handles parent latch ???? oradebug call kslgetl ??, kslgetl?oracle??get latch??? SQL> oradebug setmypid; Statement processed. SQL> oradebug call kslgetl 1610694824 1; Function returned 1 ?????SESSION B ???: SQL> select * from v$latchholder;        PID        SID LADDR            NAME                                                                   GETS ---------- ---------- ---------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- ----------         15        141 00000000600140A8 cache buffer handles                                                    119 cache buffer handles latch ???session A hold??,????????acquire cache buffer handle latch SQL> select * from test_cbc_handle where rowid='AAANO6AABAAAQZSAAA';         T1 ----------          1 ?????Server Process?????? read buffer, ????????"_db_handles_cached", ??process?cache 5? cache buffer handle ??"_db_handles_cached"=0,?process????5????cache buffer handle , ???? process ???pin buffer,???hold cache buffer handle latch??????cache buffer handle SQL> alter system set "_db_handles_cached"=0 scope=spfile; System altered. ????? shutdown immediate; startup; session A: SQL> oradebug setmypid; Statement processed. SQL> oradebug call kslgetl 1610694824 1; Function returned 1 session B: select * from test_cbc_handle where rowid='AAANO6AABAAAQZSAAA'; session B hang!! WHY? SQL> oradebug setmypid; Statement processed. SQL> oradebug dump systemstate 266; Statement processed.   SO: 0x11b30b7b0, type: 2, owner: (nil), flag: INIT/-/-/0x00   (process) Oracle pid=22, calls cur/top: (nil)/0x11b453c38, flag: (0) -             int error: 0, call error: 0, sess error: 0, txn error 0   (post info) last post received: 0 0 0               last post received-location: No post               last process to post me: none               last post sent: 0 0 0               last post sent-location: No post               last process posted by me: none     (latch info) wait_event=0 bits=8       holding    (efd=4) 600140a8 cache buffer handles level=3   SO: 0x11b305810, type: 2, owner: (nil), flag: INIT/-/-/0x00   (process) Oracle pid=10, calls cur/top: 0x11b455ac0/0x11b450a58, flag: (0) -             int error: 0, call error: 0, sess error: 0, txn error 0   (post info) last post received: 0 0 0               last post received-location: No post               last process to post me: none               last post sent: 0 0 0               last post sent-location: No post               last process posted by me: none     (latch info) wait_event=0 bits=2         Location from where call was made: kcbzgs:       waiting for 600140a8 cache buffer handles level=3 FBD93353:000019F0    10   162 10005   1 KSL WAIT BEG [latch: cache buffer handles] 1610694824/0x600140a8 125/0x7d 0/0x0 FF936584:00002761    10   144 10005   1 KSL WAIT BEG [latch: cache buffer handles] 1610694824/0x600140a8 125/0x7d 0/0x0 PID=22 holding ??cache buffer handles latch PID=10 ?? cache buffer handles latch, ????"_db_handles_cached"=0 ?? process??????cache buffer handles ??systemstate???? kcbbfbp cache buffer handle??, ?? "_db_handles_cached"=0 ? cache buffer handles latch?hold ?? ????cache buffer handles latch , ??? buffer?pin?????????? session A exit session B: SQL> select * from v$latchholder; no rows selected SQL> insert into test_cbc_handle values(2); 1 row created. SQL> commit; Commit complete. SQL> SQL> select t1,rowid from test_cbc_handle;         T1 ROWID ---------- ------------------          1 AAANPAAABAAAQZSAAA          2 AAANPAAABAAAQZSAAB SQL> select spid,pid from v$process where addr = ( select paddr from v$session where sid=(select distinct sid from v$mystat)); SPID                PID ------------ ---------- 19251                10 ? GDB ? SPID=19215 ?debug , ?? kcbrls ????breakpoint ??? ????release buffer [oracle@vrh8 ~]$ gdb $ORACLE_HOME/bin/oracle 19251 GNU gdb (GDB) Red Hat Enterprise Linux (7.0.1-37.el5) Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying" and "show warranty" for details. This GDB was configured as "x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu". For bug reporting instructions, please see: <http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>... Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/bin/oracle...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Attaching to program: /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/bin/oracle, process 19251 Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libskgxp10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libskgxp10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libhasgen10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libhasgen10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libskgxn2.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libskgxn2.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocr10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocr10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocrb10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocrb10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocrutl10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libocrutl10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libjox10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libjox10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libclsra10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libclsra10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libdbcfg10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libdbcfg10.so Reading symbols from /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libnnz10.so...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /s01/oracle/product/10.2.0.5/db_1/lib/libnnz10.so Reading symbols from /usr/lib64/libaio.so.1...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /usr/lib64/libaio.so.1 Reading symbols from /lib64/libdl.so.2...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/libdl.so.2 Reading symbols from /lib64/libm.so.6...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/libm.so.6 Reading symbols from /lib64/libpthread.so.0...(no debugging symbols found)...done. [Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled] Loaded symbols for /lib64/libpthread.so.0 Reading symbols from /lib64/libnsl.so.1...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/libnsl.so.1 Reading symbols from /lib64/libc.so.6...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/libc.so.6 Reading symbols from /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 Reading symbols from /lib64/libnss_files.so.2...(no debugging symbols found)...done. Loaded symbols for /lib64/libnss_files.so.2 0x00000035c000d940 in __read_nocancel () from /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (gdb) break kcbrls Breakpoint 1 at 0x10e5d24 session B: select * from test_cbc_handle where rowid='AAANPAAABAAAQZSAAA'; select hang !! GDB (gdb) c Continuing. Breakpoint 1, 0x00000000010e5d24 in kcbrls () (gdb) bt #0  0x00000000010e5d24 in kcbrls () #1  0x0000000002e87d25 in qertbFetchByUserRowID () #2  0x00000000030c62b8 in opifch2 () #3  0x00000000032327f0 in kpoal8 () #4  0x00000000013b7c10 in opiodr () #5  0x0000000003c3c9da in ttcpip () #6  0x00000000013b3144 in opitsk () #7  0x00000000013b60ec in opiino () #8  0x00000000013b7c10 in opiodr () #9  0x00000000013a92f8 in opidrv () #10 0x0000000001fa3936 in sou2o () #11 0x000000000072d40b in opimai_real () #12 0x000000000072d35c in main () SQL> oradebug setmypid; Statement processed. SQL> oradebug dump systemstate 266; Statement processed. ?????? kcbbfbp buffer cache handle ?  SO state object ? BH BUFFER HEADER  link???     ----------------------------------------     SO: 0x11b452348, type: 3, owner: 0x11b305810, flag: INIT/-/-/0x00     (call) sess: cur 11b41bd18, rec 0, usr 11b41bd18; depth: 0       ----------------------------------------       SO: 0x1182dc750, type: 24, owner: 0x11b452348, flag: INIT/-/-/0x00       (buffer) (CR) PR: 0x11b305810 FLG: 0x108000       class bit: (nil)       kcbbfbp: [BH: 0xf2fc69f8, LINK: 0x1182dc790]       where: kdswh05: kdsgrp, why: 0       BH (0xf2fc69f8) file#: 1 rdba: 0x00410652 (1/67154) class: 1 ba: 0xf297c000         set: 3 blksize: 8192 bsi: 0 set-flg: 2 pwbcnt: 272         dbwrid: 0 obj: 54208 objn: 54202 tsn: 0 afn: 1         hash: [f2fc47f8,1181f3038] lru: [f2fc6b88,f2fc6968]         obj-flags: object_ckpt_list         ckptq: [1182ecf38,1182ecf38] fileq: [1182ecf58,1182ecf58] objq: [108712a28,108712a28]         use: [1182dc790,1182dc790] wait: [NULL]         st: XCURRENT md: SHR tch: 12         flags: buffer_dirty gotten_in_current_mode block_written_once                 redo_since_read         LRBA: [0xc7.73b.0] HSCN: [0x0.1cbe52] HSUB: [1]         Using State Objects           ----------------------------------------           SO: 0x1182dc750, type: 24, owner: 0x11b452348, flag: INIT/-/-/0x00           (buffer) (CR) PR: 0x11b305810 FLG: 0x108000           class bit: (nil)           kcbbfbp: [BH: 0xf2fc69f8, LINK: 0x1182dc790]           where: kdswh05: kdsgrp, why: 0         buffer tsn: 0 rdba: 0x00410652 (1/67154)         scn: 0x0000.001cbe52 seq: 0x01 flg: 0x02 tail: 0xbe520601         frmt: 0x02 chkval: 0x0000 type: 0x06=trans data tab 0, row 0, @0x1f9a tl: 6 fb: --H-FL-- lb: 0x0  cc: 1 col  0: [ 2]  c1 02 tab 0, row 1, @0x1f94 tl: 6 fb: --H-FL-- lb: 0x2  cc: 1 col  0: [ 2]  c1 15 end_of_block_dump         (buffer) (CR) PR: 0x11b305810 FLG: 0x108000 st: XCURRENT md: SHR tch: 12 ? buffer header?status= XCURRENT mode=KCBMSHARE KCBMSHR     current share ?????  x$kcbbf ????? cache buffer handle SQL> select distinct KCBBPBH from  x$kcbbf ; KCBBPBH ---------------- 00 00000000F2FC69F8            ==>0xf2fc69f8 SQL> select * from x$kcbbf where kcbbpbh='00000000F2FC69F8'; ADDR                   INDX    INST_ID KCBBFSO_TYP KCBBFSO_FLG KCBBFSO_OWN ---------------- ---------- ---------- ----------- ----------- ----------------   KCBBFFLG    KCBBFCR    KCBBFCM KCBBFMBR         KCBBPBH ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------------- ---------------- KCBBPBF          X0KCBBPBH        X0KCBBPBF        X1KCBBPBH ---------------- ---------------- ---------------- ---------------- X1KCBBPBF        KCBBFBH            KCBBFWHR   KCBBFWHY ---------------- ---------------- ---------- ---------- 00000001182DC750        748          1          24           1 000000011B452348    1081344          1          0 00               00000000F2FC69F8 00000001182DC750 00               00000001182DC750 00 00000001182DC7F8 00                      583          0 SQL> desc x$kcbbf;  Name                                      Null?    Type  ----------------------------------------- -------- ----------------------------  ADDR                                               RAW(8)  INDX                                               NUMBER  INST_ID                                            NUMBER  KCBBFSO_TYP                                        NUMBER  KCBBFSO_FLG                                        NUMBER  KCBBFSO_OWN                                        RAW(8)  KCBBFFLG                                           NUMBER  KCBBFCR                                            NUMBER  KCBBFCM                                            NUMBER  KCBBFMBR                                           RAW(8)  KCBBPBH                                            RAW(8)  KCBBPBF                                            RAW(8)  X0KCBBPBH                                          RAW(8)  X0KCBBPBF                                          RAW(8)  X1KCBBPBH                                          RAW(8)  X1KCBBPBF                                          RAW(8)  KCBBFBH                                            RAW(8)  KCBBFWHR                                           NUMBER  KCBBFWHY                                           NUMBER gdb ?? ?process??????kcbrls release buffer? ???cache buffer handle??? SQL> select distinct KCBBPBH from  x$kcbbf ; KCBBPBH ---------------- 00

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