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• Benefits of PerformancePoint Services Using SharePoint Server 2010

  - by Wayne

  What is PerformancePoint Services? Most of the time it happens that the metrics that make up your key performance indicators are not simple values from a data source. In SharePoint Server 2007 PerformancePoint Services, you could create two kinds of KPI metrics: Simple single value metrics from any supported data source or Complex multiple value metrics from a single Analysis Services data source using MDX. Now things are even easier with Performance Point Services in SharePoint 2010. Let us check what is it? PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint Server 2010 is a performance management service that you can use to monitor and analyze your business. By providing flexible, easy-to-use tools for building dashboards, scorecards, reports, and key performance indicators (KPIs), PerformancePoint Services can help everyone across an organization make informed business decisions that align with companywide objectives and strategy. Scorecards, dashboards, and KPIs help drive accountability. Integrated analytics help employees move quickly from monitoring information to analyzing it and, when appropriate, sharing it throughout the organization. Prior to the addition of PerformancePoint Services to SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 functioned as a standalone server. Now PerformancePoint functionality is available as an integrated part of the SharePoint Server Enterprise license, as is the case with Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The popular features of earlier versions of PerformancePoint Services are preserved along with numerous enhancements and additional functionality. New PerformancePoint Services features PerformancePoint Services now can utilize SharePoint Server scalability, collaboration, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities. Dashboards and dashboard items are stored and secured within SharePoint lists and libraries, providing you with a single security and repository framework. New features and enhancements of SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services • With PerformancePoint Services, functioning as a service in SharePoint Server, dashboards and dashboard items are stored and secured within SharePoint lists and libraries, providing you with a single security and repository framework. The new architecture also takes advantage of SharePoint Server scalability, collaboration, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities. You also can include and link PerformancePoint Services Web Parts with other SharePoint Server Web Parts on the same page. The new architecture also streamlines security models that simplify access to report data. • The Decomposition Tree is a new visualization report type available in PerformancePoint Services. You can use it to quickly and visually break down higher-level data values from a multi-dimensional data set to understand the driving forces behind those values. The Decomposition Tree is available in scorecards and analytic reports and ultimately in dashboards. • You can access more detailed business information with improved scorecards. Scorecards have been enhanced to make it easy for you to drill down and quickly access more detailed information. PerformancePoint scorecards also offer more flexible layout options, dynamic hierarchies, and calculated KPI features. Using this enhanced functionality, you can now create custom metrics that use multiple data sources. You can also sort, filter, and view variances between actual and target values to help you identify concerns or risks. • Better Time Intelligence filtering capabilities that you can use to create and use dynamic time filters that are always up to date. Other improved filters improve the ability for dashboard users to quickly focus in on information that is most relevant. • Ability to include and link PerformancePoint Services Web Parts together with other PerformancePoint Services Web parts on the same page. • Easier to author and publish dashboard items by using Dashboard Designer. • SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 support. • Increased support for accessibility compliance in individual reports and scorecards. • The KPI Details report is a new report type that displays contextually relevant information about KPIs, metrics, rows, columns, and cells within a scorecard. The KPI Details report works as a Web part that links to a scorecard or individual KPI to show relevant metadata to the end user in SharePoint Server. This Web part can be added to PerformancePoint dashboards or any SharePoint Server page. • Create analytics reports to better understand underlying business forces behind the results. Analytic reports have been enhanced to support value filtering, new chart types, and server-based conditional formatting. To conclude, PerformancePoint Services, by becoming tightly integrated with SharePoint Server 2010, takes advantage of many enterprise-level SharePoint Server 2010 features. Unfortunately, SharePoint Foundation 2010 doesn’t include this feature. There are still many choices in SharePoint family of products that include SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server 2007 and associated free SharePoint web parts and templates.

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• Verizon Wireless Supports its Mission-Critical Employee Portal with MySQL

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Verizon Wireless, the #1 mobile carrier in the United States, operates the nation’s largest 3G and 4G LTE network, with the most subscribers (109 millions) and the highest revenue ($70.2 Billion in 2011). Verizon Wireless built the first wide-area wireless broadband network and delivered the first wireless consumer 3G multimedia service in the US, and offers global voice and data services in more than 200 destinations around the world. To support 4.2 million daily wireless transactions and 493,000 calls and emails transactions produced by 94.2 million retail customers, Verizon Wireless employs over 78,000 employees with area headquarters across the United States. The Business Challenge Seeing the stupendous rise in social media, video streaming, live broadcasting…etc which redefined the scope of technology, Verizon Wireless, as a technology savvy company, wanted to provide a platform to its employees where they could network socially, view and host microsites, stream live videos, blog and provide the latest news. The IT team at Verizon Wireless had abundant experience with various technology platforms to support the huge number of applications in the company. However, open-source products weren’t yet widely used in the organization and the team had the ambition to adopt such technologies and see if the architecture could meet Verizon Wireless’ rigid requirements. After evaluating a few solutions, the IT team decided to use the LAMP stack for Vzweb, its mission-critical, 24x7 employee portal, with Drupal as the front end and MySQL on Linux as the backend, and for a few other internal websites also on MySQL. The MySQL Solution Verizon Wireless started to support its employee portal, Vzweb, its online streaming website, Vztube, and internal wiki pages, Vzwiki, with MySQL 5.1 in 2010. Vzweb is the main internal communication channel for Verizon Wireless, while Vztube hosts important company-wide webcasts regularly for executive-level announcements, so both channels have to be live and accessible all the time for its 78,000 employees across the United States. However during the initial deployment of the MySQL based Intranet, the application experienced performance issues. High connection spikes occurred causing slow user response time, and the IT team applied workarounds to continue the service. A number of key performance indexes (KPI) for the infrastructure were identified and the operational framework redesigned to support a more robust website and conform to the 99.985% uptime SLA (Service-Level Agreement). The MySQL DBA team made a series of upgrades in MySQL: Step 1: Moved from MyISAM to InnoDB storage engine in 2010 Step 2: Upgraded to the latest MySQL 5.1.54 release in 2010 Step 3: Upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5 in 2011, and leveraging MySQL Thread Pool as part of MySQL Enterprise Edition to scale better After making those changes, the team saw a much better response time during high concurrency use cases, and achieved an amazing performance improvement of 1400%! In January 2011, Verizon CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, announced the iPhone launch during the opening keynote at Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and that presentation was streamed live to its 78,000 employees. The event was broadcasted flawlessly with MySQL as the database. Later in 2011, Hurricane Irene attacked the East Coast of United States and caused major life and financial damages. During the hurricane, the team directed more traffic to its west coast data center to avoid potential infrastructure damage in the East Coast. Such transition was executed smoothly and even though the geographical distance became longer for the East Coast users, there was no impact in the performance of Vzweb and Vztube, and the SLA goal was achieved. “MySQL is the key component of Verizon Wireless’ mission-critical employee portal application,” said Shivinder Singh, senior DBA at Verizon Wireless. “We achieved 1400% performance improvement by moving from the MyISAM storage engine to InnoDB, upgrading to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5, and using the MySQL Thread Pool to support high concurrent user connections. MySQL has become part of our IT infrastructure, on which potentially more future applications will be built.” To learn more about MySQL Enterprise Edition, Get our Product Guide.

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• Preview and Purchase Ebooks with Kindle for PC

  - by Matthew Guay

  Want to look over a new book, or buy it immediately in ebook format?  Here’s how you can preview and purchase most new books from your PC the easy way. Most new books, including almost all New York Times Bestsellers, are available in ebook format from Amazon’s Kindle store.  The Kindle store also includes numerous free ebooks, including out-of-print classics and a surprising amount of recent books.  With the free Kindle for PC reader, you can read any of these ebooks without having to purchase a Kindle device. Preview Ebooks Before you Purchase Sometimes, it can be hard to know if you want to purchase a new book without reading some of it first.  With Kindle for PC, however, you can download a sample of any ebook available for free.  The sample usually includes the table of contents, forward or introduction, and often part or all of the first chapter. To get an ebook sample, find the book you want in the Kindle store (link below). Now, under the Try it free box, select the correct computer or device to send the sample to, and click Send Sample now. Amazon will thank you for your order, even though this is only a free preview.  Click the Go to Kindle for PC button to open Kindle and read your ebook preview.   Or, if Kindle is already running, press the Refresh button in the top right corner to check for new ebooks and previews. Kindle will synchronize and download the previews you selected. The most recently downloaded items show up on the top left.  All sample books have a red “Sample” bar on the bottom of their cover, and they also include links to Buy or view more info about it on it’s cover.  Double-click your sample to start reading it. Your ebook sample will usually open at the introduction or beginning of the first chapter, but you can also view the index, cover, and more. When you reach the end of the sample book, you can click a link to buy the book or view more details about it.  Strangely, both of these links currently take you to the ebook’s page on Amazon.com, but perhaps in the future the Buy link will directly let you purchase the book. Or, you can also click Buy Now on a sample book directly from your Kindle library. If you clicked one of these links, you will be returned to the ebook’s page on Amazon.  Choose the PC or Kindle you want the book delivered to, and this time, select Buy Now with 1-Click. Add your payment info if you’re not already setup for 1-Click Shopping, and then you’ll be shown the same Thank you page as before.  Refresh Kindle for PC, and your new ebook will automatically download.  Strangely, the sample ebook is not automatically removed, so you can right-click on the sample and select Delete this Book.  Additionally, your last-read page in the sample is not synced to the purchased book, so you may have to find your place again. Now, enjoy your full ebook! Download Free Books for Kindle The Kindle Store has an amazing amount of free ebooks.  Some free books may only be free for a limited time as a promotion, while others, such as old classics, may always be free.  Either which way, once you download it, you can keep it forever. When you find a free ebook you want, select the Kindle or PC you want to download it to and click “Buy now with 1-Click”.  Notice that this book shows it’s price is $0.00, but the button still says Buy now.  Rest assured, if the book’s price show up as $0.00, you will not be charged anything for downloading it. Your ebook will download as usual after your next refresh.  Note that you can still download the sample first if you want, but since the book is free, just download the whole thing and delete it if you don’t want it. Redownload your Purchased or Free Books If you install Kindle on a new PC or delete a book from your library, you can always re-download it from your Amazon account.  Browse to the Manage your Kindle page on Amazon (link below) sign in with your Amazon account, and scroll down to the list of your purchased content. Select the book you wish to download, then choose the Kindle or PC you want to download it to and press Go. Note: There is a “Delete this title” button right below this.  If you press the Delete button, you will not ever be able to re-download it. Or, you can download the book directly from the Archived Items tab in Kindle on your other PC. And, if you have your Kindle content on multiple computers, your reading will be synced via Whispersync.  You can start reading on your desktop, and then resume where you left off from your laptop. Conclusion With these tips and tricks, it is much easier to preview and purchase new books, find and download free ebooks, and re-download any you’ve deleted from your PC.  Have fun filling up your digital library! Links Manage your Kindle account Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Read Mobi eBooks on Kindle for PCRead Kindle Books On Your Computer with Kindle for PCHow to See Where a TinyUrl Is Really Linking ToEdit Microsoft Word 2007 Documents in Print PreviewWhy Can’t I Turn the Details/Preview Panes On or Off in Windows Vista Explorer? 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• SQL SERVER – SSMS: Top Object and Batch Execution Statistics Reports

  - by Pinal Dave

  The month of June till mid of July has been the fever of sports. First, it was Wimbledon Tennis and then the Soccer fever was all over. There is a huge number of fan followers and it is great to see the level at which people sometimes worship these sports. Being an Indian, I cannot forget to mention the India tour of England later part of July. Following these sports and as the events unfold to the finals, there are a number of ways the statisticians can slice and dice the numbers. Cue from soccer I can surely say there is a team performance against another team and then there is individual member fairs against a particular opponent. Such statistics give us a fair idea to how a team in the past or in the recent past has fared against each other, head-to-head stats during World cup and during other neutral venue games. All these statistics are just pointers. In reality, they don’t reflect the calibre of the current team because the individuals who performed in each of these games are totally different (Typical example being the Brazil Vs Germany semi-final match in FIFA 2014). So at times these numbers are misleading. It is worth investigating and get the next level information. Similar to these statistics, SQL Server Management studio is also equipped with a number of reports like a) Object Execution Statistics report and b) Batch Execution Statistics reports. As discussed in the example, the team scorecard is like the Batch Execution statistics and individual stats is like Object Level statistics. The analogy can be taken only this far, trust me there is no correlation between SQL Server functioning and playing sports – It is like I think about diet all the time except while I am eating. Performance – Batch Execution Statistics Let us view the first report which can be invoked from Server Node -> Reports -> Standard Reports -> Performance – Batch Execution Statistics. Most of the values that are displayed in this report come from the DMVs sys.dm_exec_query_stats and sys.dm_exec_sql_text(sql_handle). This report contains 3 distinctive sections as outline below.   Section 1: This is a graphical bar graph representation of Average CPU Time, Average Logical reads and Average Logical Writes for individual batches. The Batch numbers are indicative and the details of individual batch is available in section 3 (detailed below). Section 2: This represents a Pie chart of all the batches by Total CPU Time (%) and Total Logical IO (%) by batches. This graphical representation tells us which batch consumed the highest CPU and IO since the server started, provided plan is available in the cache. Section 3: This is the section where we can find the SQL statements associated with each of the batch Numbers. This also gives us the details of Average CPU / Average Logical Reads and Average Logical Writes in the system for the given batch with object details. Expanding the rows, I will also get the # Executions and # Plans Generated for each of the queries. Performance – Object Execution Statistics The second report worth a look is Object Execution statistics. This is a similar report as the previous but turned on its head by SQL Server Objects. The report has 3 areas to look as above. Section 1 gives the Average CPU, Average IO bar charts for specific objects. The section 2 is a graphical representation of Total CPU by objects and Total Logical IO by objects. The final section details the various objects in detail with the Avg. CPU, IO and other details which are self-explanatory. At a high-level both the reports are based on queries on two DMVs (sys.dm_exec_query_stats and sys.dm_exec_sql_text) and it builds values based on calculations using columns in them: SELECT * FROM    sys.dm_exec_query_stats s1 CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(sql_handle) AS s2 WHERE   s2.objectid IS NOT NULL AND DB_NAME(s2.dbid) IS NOT NULL ORDER BY  s1.sql_handle; This is one of the simplest form of reports and in future blogs we will look at more complex reports. I truly hope that these reports can give DBAs and developers a hint about what is the possible performance tuning area. As a closing point I must emphasize that all above reports pick up data from the plan cache. If a particular query has consumed a lot of resources earlier, but plan is not available in the cache, none of the above reports would show that bad query. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Reports

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• Code Structure / Level Design: Plants vs Zombies game level dissection

  - by lalan

  Hi Friends, I am interested in learning the class structure of Plants vs Zombies, particularly level design; for those who haven't played it - this video contains nice play-through: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89DfdOIJ4xw. How would I go ahead and design the code, mostly structure & classes, which allows for maximum flexibility & clean development? I am familiar with data driven design concepts, and would use events to handle most of dynamic behavior. Dissection at macro level: (Once every Level) Load tilemap, props, etc -- basically build the map (Once every Level) Camera Movement - might consider it as short cut-scene (Once every Level) Show Enemies you'll face during present level (Once every Level) Unit Selection Window/Panel - selection of defensive plants (Once every Level) Camera Movement - might consider it as short cut-scene (Once every Level) HUD Creation - based on unit selection (Level Loop) Enemy creation - based on types of zombies allowed (Level Loop) Sun/Resource generation (Level Loop) Show messages like 'huge wave of zombies coming', 'final wave' (Level Loop) Other unique events - Spawn gifts, money, tombstones, etc (Once every Level) Unlock new plant Potential game scripts: a) Level definitions: Level_1_1.xml, Level_1_2.xml, etc. Level_1_1.xml :: Sample script <map> <tilemap>tilemapFrontLawn</tilemap> <SpawnPoints> tiles where particular type of zombies (land vs water) may spawn</spawnPoints> <props> position, entity array -- lawnmower, </props> </map> <zombies> <... list of zombies who gonna attack by ids...> </zombies> <plants> <... list by plants which are available for defense by ids...> </plants> <progression> <ZombieWave name='first wave' spawnScript='zombieLightWave.lua' unlock='null'> <startMessages time=1.5>Ready</startMessages> <endMessages time=1.5>Huge wave of zombies incoming</endMessages> </ZombieWave> </progression> b) Entities definitions: .xmls containing zombies, plants, sun, lawnmower, coins, etc description. Potential classes: //LevelManager - Based on the level under play, it will load level script. Few of the // functions it may have: class LevelManager { public: bool load(string levelFileName); bool enter(); bool update(float deltatime); bool exit(); private: LevelData* mLevelData; } // LevelData - Contains the details of level loaded by LevelManager. class LevelData { private: string file; // array of camera,dialog,attackwaves, etc in active level LevelCutSceneCamera** mArrayCutSceneCamera; LevelCutSceneDialog** mArrayCutSceneDialog; LevelAttackWave** mArrayAttackWave; .... // which camera,dialog,attackwave is active in level uint mCursorCutSceneCamera; uint mCursorCutSceneDialog; uint mCursorAttackWave; public: // based on cursor, get the next camera,dialog,attackwave,etc in active level // return false/true based on failure/success bool nextCutSceneCamera(LevelCutSceneCamera**); bool nextCutSceneDialog(LevelCutSceneDialog**); } // LevelUnderPlay- LevelManager class LevelUnderPlay { private: LevelCutSceneCamera* mCutSceneCamera; LevelCutSceneDialog* mCutSceneDialog; LevelAttackWave* mAttackWave; Entities** mSelectedPlants; Entities** mAllowedZombies; bool isCutSceneCameraActive; public: bool enter(); bool update(float deltatime); bool exit(); } I am totally confused.. :( Does it make sense of using class composition (have flat class hierarchy) for managing levels. Is it a good idea to just add/remove/update sprites (or any drawable stuff) to current scene from LevelManager or LevelUnderPlay? If I want to make non-linear level design, how should I go ahead? Perhaps I would need a LevelProgression class, which would decide what to do based on decision tree. Any suggestions would be appreciated very much. Thank for your time, lalan

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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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• SQL SERVER – Planned and Unplanned Availablity Group Failovers – Notes from the Field #031

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Note from Pinal]: This is a new episode of Notes from the Fields series. AlwaysOn is a very complex subject and not everyone knows many things about this. The matter of the fact is there is very little information available on this subject online and not everyone knows everything about this. This is why when a very common question related to AlwaysOn comes, people get confused. In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert John Sterrett (Group Principal at Linchpin People) explains a very common issue DBAs and Developer faces in their career and is related to Planned and Unplanned Availablity Group Failovers. Linchpin People are database coaches and wellness experts for a data driven world. Read the experience of John in his own words. Whenever a disaster occurs it will be a stressful scenario regardless of how small or big the disaster is. This gets multiplied when it is your first time working with newer technology or the first time you are going through a disaster without a proper run book. Today, were going to help you establish a run book for creating a planned failover with availability groups. To make today’s session simple were going to have two instances of SQL Server 2012 included in an availability group and walk through the steps of doing an unplanned failover.  We will focus on using the user interface and T-SQL to complete the failovers. We are going to use a two replica Availability Group where each replica is in another location. Therefore, we will be covering Asynchronous (non automatic failover) the following is a breakdown of our availability group utilized today. Seeing the following screen might be scary the first time you come across an unplanned failover.  It looks like our test database used in this Availability Group is not functional and it currently isn’t. The database status is not synchronizing which makes sense because the primary replica went down so it couldn’t synchronize. With that said, we can still failover and make it functional while we troubleshoot why we lost our primary replica. To start we are going to right click on the availability group that needs to be restarted and select failover. This will bring up the following wizard, which will walk you through several steps needed to complete the failover using the graphical user interface provided with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). You are going to see warning messages simply because we are in Asynchronous commit mode and can not guarantee ‘no data loss’ when we do failover. Just incase you missed it; you get another screen warning you about potential data loss because we are in Asynchronous mode. Next we get to connect to the specific replica we want to become the primary replica after the failover occurs. In our case, we only have two replicas so this is trivial. In order to failover, it’s required to connect to the replica that will become primary.  The following screen shows that the connection has been made successfully. Next, you will see the final summary screen. Once again, this reminds you that the failover action will cause data loss as were using Asynchronous commit mode due to the distance between instances used for disaster recovery. Finally, once the failover is completed you will see the following screen. If you followed along this long you might be wondering what T-SQL scripts are generated for clicking through all the sections of the wizard. If you have used Database Mirroring in the past you might be surprised.  It’s not too different, which makes sense because the data is being replicated via SQL Server endpoints just like the good old database mirroring. Now were going to take a look at how to do a failover with just T-SQL. First, were going to need to open a new query window and run our query in SQLCMD mode. Just incase you haven’t used SQLCMD mode before we will show you how to enable it below. Now you can run the following statement. Notice, we connect to the replica we want to become primary after failover and specify to force failover to allow data loss. We can use the following script to failback over when our primary instance comes back online. -- YOU MUST EXECUTE THE FOLLOWING SCRIPT IN SQLCMD MODE. :Connect SQL2012PROD1 ALTER AVAILABILITY GROUP [AGSQL2] FORCE_FAILOVER_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS; GO Are your servers running at optimal speed or are you facing any SQL Server Performance Problems? If you want to get started with the help of experts read more over here: Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Html.RenderAction Failed when Validation Failed

  - by Shaun

  RenderAction method had been introduced when ASP.NET MVC 1.0 released in its MvcFuture assembly and then final announced along with the ASP.NET MVC 2.0. Similar as RenderPartial, the RenderAction can display some HTML markups which defined in a partial view in any parent views. But the RenderAction gives us the ability to populate the data from an action which may different from the action which populating the main view. For example, in Home/Index.aspx we can invoke the Html.RenderPartial(“MyPartialView”) but the data of MyPartialView must be populated by the Index action of the Home controller. If we need the MyPartialView to be shown in Product/Create.aspx we have to copy (or invoke) the relevant code from the Index action in Home controller to the Create action in the Product controller which is painful. But if we are using Html.RenderAction we can tell the ASP.NET MVC from which action/controller the data should be populated. in that way in the Home/Index.aspx and Product/Create.aspx views we just need to call Html.RenderAction(“CreateMyPartialView”, “MyPartialView”) so it will invoke the CreateMyPartialView action in MyPartialView controller regardless from which main view. But in my current project we found a bug when I implement a RenderAction method in the master page to show something that need to connect to the backend data center when the validation logic was failed on some pages. I created a sample application below.   Demo application I created an ASP.NET MVC 2 application and here I need to display the current date and time on the master page. I created an action in the Home controller named TimeSlot and stored the current date into ViewDate. This method was marked as HttpGet as it just retrieves some data instead of changing anything. 1: [HttpGet] 2: public ActionResult TimeSlot() 3: { 4: ViewData["timeslot"] = DateTime.Now; 5: return View("TimeSlot"); 6: } Next, I created a partial view under the Shared folder to display the date and time string. 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<dynamic>" %> 2:  3: <span>Now: <% 1: : ViewData["timeslot"].ToString() %></span> Then at the master page I used Html.RenderAction to display it in front of the logon link. 1: <div id="logindisplay"> 2: <% 1: Html.RenderAction("TimeSlot", "Home"); %> 3:  4: <% 1: Html.RenderPartial("LogOnUserControl"); %> 5: </div> It’s fairly simple and works well when I navigated to any pages. But when I moved to the logon page and click the LogOn button without input anything in username and password the validation failed and my website crashed with the beautiful yellow page. (I really like its color style and fonts…)   How ASP.NET MVC executes Html.RenderAction In this example all other pages were rendered successful which means the ASP.NET MVC found the TimeSolt action under the Home controller except this situation. The only different is that when I clicked the LogOn button the browser send an HttpPost request to the server. Is that the reason of this bug? I created another action in Home controller with the same action name but for HttpPost. 1: [HttpPost] 2: [ActionName("TimeSlot")] 3: public ActionResult TimeSlot(object dummy) 4: { 5: return TimeSlot(); 6: } Or, I can use the AcceptVerbsAttribute on the TimeSlot action to let it allow both HttpGet and HttpPost. 1: [AcceptVerbs("GET", "POST")] 2: public ActionResult TimeSlot() 3: { 4: ViewData["timeslot"] = DateTime.Now; 5: return View("TimeSlot"); 6: } And then repeat what I did before and this time it worked well. Why we need the action for HttpPost here as it’s just data retrieving? That is because of how ASP.NET MVC executes the RenderAction method. In the source code of ASP.NET MVC we can see when proforming the RenderAction ASP.NET MVC creates a RequestContext instance from the current RequestContext and created a ChildActionMvcHandler instance which inherits from MvcHandler class. Then the ASP.NET MVC processes the handler through the HttpContext.Server.Execute method. That means it performs the action as a stand-alone request asynchronously and flush the result into the  TextWriter which is being used to render the current page. Since when I clicked the LogOn the request was in HttpPost so when ASP.NET MVC processed the ChildActionMvcHandler it would find the action which allow the current request method, which is HttpPost. Then our TimeSlot method in HttpGet would not be matched.   Summary In this post I introduced a bug in my currently developing project regards the new Html.RenderAction method provided within ASP.NET MVC 2 when processing a HttpPost request. In ASP.NET MVC world the underlying Http information became more important than in ASP.NET WebForm world. We need to pay more attention on which kind of request it currently created and how ASP.NET MVC processes.   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• How does one find out which application is associated with an indicator icon?

  - by Amos Annoy

  It is trivial to do this in Ubuntu 10.04. The question is specific to Ubuntu 12.04. some pertinent references (src: answer to What is the difference between indicators and a system tray?: Here is the documentation for indicators: Application indicators | Ubuntu App Developer libindicate Reference Manual libappindicator Reference Manual also DesktopExperienceTeam/ApplicationIndicators - Ubuntu Wiki ref: How can the application that makes an indicator icon be identified? bookmark: How does one find out which application is associated with an indicator icon in Ubuntu 12.04? is a serious question for reasons & problems outlined below and for which a significant investment has been made and is necessary for remedial purposes. reviewing refs. to find an orchestrated resolution ... (an indicator ap. indicator maybe needed) This has nothing to do (does it?) with right click. How can an indicator's icon in Ubuntu 12.04 be matched with the program responsible for it's manifestation on the top panel? A list of running applications can include all processes using System Monitor. How is the correct matching process found for an indicator? How are the sub-indicator applications identified? These are the aps associated with the components of an indicators drop-down menu. (This was to be a separate question and quite naturally follows up the progression. It is included here as it is obvious there is no provisioning to track down offending either sub or indicator aps. easily.) (The examination of SM points out a rather poignant factor in the faster battery depletion and shortened run time - the ambient quiescent CPU rate in 12.04 is now well over 20% when previously, in 10.04, it was well under 10%, between 5% and 7%! - the huge inordinate cpu overhead originates from Xorg and compiz - after booting the system, only SM is run and All Processes are selected, sorting on %CPU - switching between Resources and Processes profiles the execution overhead problem - running another ap like gedit "Text Editor" briefly gives it CPU priority - going back to S&M several aps. are at the top of the list in order: gnome-system-monitor as expected, then: Xorg, compiz, unity-panel-service, hud-service, with dbus-daemon and kworker/x:y's mixed in with some expected daemons and background tasks like nm-applet - not only do Xorg and compiz require excessive CPU time but their entourage has to come along too! further exacerbating the problem - our compute bound tasks no longer work effectively in the field - reduced battery life, reduced CPU time for custom ap.s etc. - and all this precipitated from an examination of what is going on with the battery ap. indicator - this was and is not a flippant, rhetorical or idle musing but has consequences for the credible deployment of 12.04 to reduce the negative impact of its overhead in a production environment) (I have a problem with the battery indicator - it sometimes has % and other times hh:mm - it is necessary to know the ap. & v. to get more info on controlling same. ditto: There are issues with other indicator aps.: NM vs. iwlist/iwconfig conflict, BT ap. vs RF switch, Battery ap. w/ no suspend/sleep for poor battery runtime, ... the list goes on) Details from: How can I find Application Indicator ID's? suggests looking at: file:///usr/share/indicator-application/ordering-override.keyfile [Ordering Index Overrides] nm-applet=1 gnome-power-manager=2 ibus=3 gst-keyboard-xkb=4 gsd-keyboard-xkb=5 which solves the battery ap. identification, and presumably nm is NetworkManager for the rf icon, but the envelope, blue tooth and speaker indicator aps. are still a mystery. (Also, the ordering is not correlated.) Mind you, it was simple in the past to simply right click to get the About option to find the ap. & v. info. browsing around and about: file:///usr/share/indicator-application/ordering-override.keyfile examined: file:///usr/share/indicators file:///usr/share/indicators/messages/applications/ ... perhaps?/presumably? the information sought may be buried in file:///usr/share/indicators A reference in the comments was given to: What is the difference between indicators and a system tray? quoting from that source ... Unfortunately desktop indicators are not well documented yet: I couldn't find any specification doc ... Well ... the actual document https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopExperienceTeam/ApplicationIndicators#Summary does not help much but it's existential information provides considerable insight ...

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• Auto DOP and Concurrency

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  After spending some time in the cloud, I figured it is time to come down to earth and start discussing some of the new Auto DOP features some more. As Database Machines (the v2 machine runs Oracle Database 11.2) are effectively selling like hotcakes, it makes some sense to talk about the new parallel features in more detail. For basic understanding make sure you have read the initial post. The focus there is on Auto DOP and queuing, which is to some extend the focus here. But now I want to discuss the concurrency a little and explain some of the relevant parameters and their impact, specifically in a situation with concurrency on the system. The goal of Auto DOP The idea behind calculating the Automatic Degree of Parallelism is to find the highest possible DOP (ideal DOP) that still scales. In other words, if we were to increase the DOP even more  above a certain DOP we would see a tailing off of the performance curve and the resource cost / performance would become less optimal. Therefore the ideal DOP is the best resource/performance point for that statement. The goal of Queuing On a normal production system we should see statements running concurrently. On a Database Machine we typically see high concurrency rates, so we need to find a way to deal with both high DOP’s and high concurrency. Queuing is intended to make sure we Don’t throttle down a DOP because other statements are running on the system Stay within the physical limits of a system’s processing power Instead of making statements go at a lower DOP we queue them to make sure they will get all the resources they want to run efficiently without trashing the system. The theory – and hopefully – practice is that by giving a statement the optimal DOP the sum of all statements runs faster with queuing than without queuing. Increasing the Number of Potential Parallel Statements To determine how many statements we will consider running in parallel a single parameter should be looked at. That parameter is called PARALLEL_MIN_TIME_THRESHOLD. The default value is set to 10 seconds. So far there is nothing new here…, but do realize that anything serial (e.g. that stays under the threshold) goes straight into processing as is not considered in the rest of this post. Now, if you have a system where you have two groups of queries, serial short running and potentially parallel long running ones, you may want to worry only about the long running ones with this parallel statement threshold. As an example, lets assume the short running stuff runs on average between 1 and 15 seconds in serial (and the business is quite happy with that). The long running stuff is in the realm of 1 – 5 minutes. It might be a good choice to set the threshold to somewhere north of 30 seconds. That way the short running queries all run serial as they do today (if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it) and allows the long running ones to be evaluated for (higher degrees of) parallelism. This makes sense because the longer running ones are (at least in theory) more interesting to unleash a parallel processing model on and the benefits of running these in parallel are much more significant (again, that is mostly the case). Setting a Maximum DOP for a Statement Now that you know how to control how many of your statements are considered to run in parallel, lets talk about the specific degree of any given statement that will be evaluated. As the initial post describes this is controlled by PARALLEL_DEGREE_LIMIT. This parameter controls the degree on the entire cluster and by default it is CPU (meaning it equals Default DOP). For the sake of an example, let’s say our Default DOP is 32. Looking at our 5 minute queries from the previous paragraph, the limit to 32 means that none of the statements that are evaluated for Auto DOP ever runs at more than DOP of 32. Concurrently Running a High DOP A basic assumption about running high DOP statements at high concurrency is that you at some point in time (and this is true on any parallel processing platform!) will run into a resource limitation. And yes, you can then buy more hardware (e.g. expand the Database Machine in Oracle’s case), but that is not the point of this post… The goal is to find a balance between the highest possible DOP for each statement and the number of statements running concurrently, but with an emphasis on running each statement at that highest efficiency DOP. The PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET parameter is the all important concurrency slider here. Setting this parameter to a higher number means more statements get to run at their maximum parallel degree before queuing kicks in.  PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET is set per instance (so needs to be set to the same value on all 8 nodes in a full rack Database Machine). Just as a side note, this parameter is set in processes, not in DOP, which equates to 4* Default DOP (2 processes for a DOP, default value is 2 * Default DOP, hence a default of 4 * Default DOP). Let’s say we have PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET set to 128. With our limit set to 32 (the default) we are able to run 4 statements concurrently at the highest DOP possible on this system before we start queuing. If these 4 statements are running, any next statement will be queued. To run a system at high concurrency the PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET should be raised from its default to be much closer (start with 60% or so) to PARALLEL_MAX_SERVERS. By using both PARALLEL_SERVER_TARGET and PARALLEL_DEGREE_LIMIT you can control easily how many statements run concurrently at good DOPs without excessive queuing. Because each workload is a little different, it makes sense to plan ahead and look at these parameters and set these based on your requirements.

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• Spolskism or Twitterism: A Doctor writes...

  - by Phil Factor

  "I never realized I had a problem. I just 'twittered' because it was a social thing to do. All my mates were doing it. It made me feel good to have 'followers'; it bolstered my self-esteem. Of course, you don't think of the long-term effects on your work and on the way you think. There's no denying that it impairs your judgment…" Yes, this story is typical. Hundreds of people are waking up to the long term effects of twittering, and seeking help. Dave, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our reporter… "I started using Twitter at work. Just a few minutes now and then, throughout the day. A lot of my colleagues were doing it and I thought 'Well, that's cool; it must be part of what I should be doing at work'. Soon, I was avidly reading every twitter that came my way, and counting the minutes between my own twitters. I tried to kid myself that it was all about professional development and getting other people to help you with work-related problems, but in truth I had become addicted to the buzz of the social network. The worse thing was that it made me seem busy even when I was really just frittering my time away. Inevitably, I started to get behind with my real work." Experts have identified the syndrome and given it a name: 'Twitterism', sometimes referred to as 'Spolskism', after the person who first drew attention to the pernicious damage to well-being that the practice caused, and who had the courage to take the pledge of rejecting it. According to one expert… "The occasional Twitter does little harm to the participant, and can be an adaptive way of dealing with stress. Unfortunately, it rarely stops there. The addictive qualities of the practice have put a strain on the caring professions who are faced with a flood of people making that first bold step to seeking help". Dave is one of those now seeking help for his addiction… "I had lost touch with reality. Even though I twittered my work colleagues constantly, I found I actually spoke to them less and less. Even when out socializing, I would frequently disengage from the conversation, in order to twitter. I stopped blogging. I stopped responding to emails; the only way to reach me was through the world of Twitter. Unfortunately, my denial about the harm that twittering was doing to me, my friends, and my work-colleagues was so strong that I truly couldn't see that I had a problem." Like other addictions, the help and support of others who are 'taking the cure' is important. There is a common bond between those who have 'been through hell and back' and are once more able to experience the joys of actually conversing and socializing, rather than the false comfort of solitary 'twittering'. Complete abstinence is essential to the cure. Most of those who risk even an occasional twitter face a headlong slide back into 'binge' twittering. Tom, another twitterer who has managed to kick the habit explains… "My twittering addiction now seems more like a bad dream. You get to work, and switch on the PC. You say to yourself, just open up the browser, just for a minute, just to see what people are saying on Twitter. The next thing you know, half the day has gone by. The worst thing is that when you're addicted, you get good at covering up the habit; I spent so much time looking at the screen and typing on the keyboard, people just assumed I was working hard.I know that I must never forget what it was like then, and what it's like now that I've kicked the habit. I now have more time for productive work and a real social life." Like many addictions, Spolskism has its most detrimental effects on family, friends and workmates, rather than the addict. So often nowadays, we hear the sad stories of Twitter-Widows; tales of long lonely evenings spent whilst their partners are engrossed in their twittering into their 'mobiles' or indulging in their solitary spolskistic habits in privacy, under cover of 'having to do work at home'. Workmates suffer too, when the addicts even take their laptops or mobiles into meetings in order to 'twitter' with their fellow obsessives, even stooping to complain to their followers how boring the meeting is. No; The best advice is to leave twittering to the birds. You know it makes sense.

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• XNA Notes 002

  - by George Clingerman

  This past week (much like every week in the XNA community) was filled with things happening and people doing cool things (and getting noticed for doing cool things!). You can definitely tell there are some Xbox LIVE Indie game developers starting to make some names for themselves. Can’t wait to name drop them at bars. Me- “Oh you played Game X? Yeah, I know the guy that made that. Pretty cool guy.” Yeah, I’ll be THAT guy.   Time Critical XNA News 30 days left to submit XBLIGs made in XNA Game Studio 3.1 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/08/30-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-to-app-hub.aspx Jeromy Walsh wants you to know his XNA 4.0 Winter Workshop starting soon, go get signed up! And the forum is now LIVE on GameDev.net http://gamedevelopedia.com/ http://tinyurl.com/4gg2cfv The XNA Team Per Nick Gravelyn, Aaron Stebner’s blog post is a must read for icons on Windows Phone http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72022/439597.aspx#439597 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/10/01/10070507.aspx Shawn Hargreaves writes about Sprite Billboards in a 3D world http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/01/12/spritebatch-billboards-in-a-3d-world.aspx XNA MVPs Andy “The ZMan” Dunn wants YOU to come to the MVP Summit and run a 5K http://www.indiegameguy.com/blogs/zman/archive/2010/12/26/come-to-the-mvp-summit-and-run-a-5k-yes-you.aspx Jim Perry updates his forum signature just to make it clear that he’s not speaking for Microsoft or giving official information (LOL, thanks Jim, now if only people will take the time to read that...) XNA MVP | Please use the Forum Search and read the Forum FAQs | My posts are not official info http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/70849/439613.aspx#439613 XNA Developers Robert Boyd (@werezombie) working hard at converting his RPG engine used to make Breath of Death VII and Chtulu Saves the World to XNA 4.0. If you haven’t done the upgrade yet yourself, might be useful to read back through his tweets and recent forum posts to see the problems/solutions he’s encountered. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71834/438099.aspx#438099 http://www.twitter.com/werezompire SpynDoctorGames is in the final phase before the release of Your Doodles are Bugged for the PC! Going to be interesting to watch as more XNA game developers explore the PC game market for their games. http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/24503173217521664 http://www.spyn-doctor.de @DrMistry shares some details of his next title YoYoYo http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/177-a-new-year-a-new-game-and-maybe-a-new-approach.html Travis Woodward (@RabidLionGames) has a blog post coming this weekend on Farseer and Mario-like platformer movement. http://twitter.com/RabidLionGames/statuses/24992762021548032 http://www.rabidlion.com/ S4G Interview with Radiangames http://n4g.com/news/679492/s4g-interview-with-radiangames XBLAratings.com interviews Steve Flores (@DragonDivide) developer of Alpha Squad http://www.xblaratings.com/developer-qaa/3621-alpha-squad-developer-interview XBox LIVE Indie Games If you haven’t been reading the roundups on IndieGames by NaviFairy on GayGamer, you’ve been missing out! http://gaygamer.net/2011/01/xbox_indie_review_roundup_1112.html Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 1 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/10/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-part-1/ Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 2 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/12/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-%E2%80%93-part-2/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews http://www.gamemarx.com/ Don’t forget to be following @XboxHornet . That’s a great way to snag free copies of Xbox LIVE Indie Games http://twitter.com/XboxHornet/statuses/24471103808208896 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Review posts the top 20 Xbox 360 LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://www.xbox-360-community-games-reviews.com/top-20-best-xbox-360-live-indie-games-of-2010/ VVGtv to Stream #XBLIG Again! Help out if you can. http://vvgtv.com/2011/01/07/vvgtv-to-stream-xblig-again/ Indie Gamer Magazine Issue 14 has a look at the Xbox LIVE Winter Indie Game Uprisiing http://www.indiegamemag.com/issue14/ XNA Game Development Andrew Russell announced and asked for help in his development of ExEn: XNA for iPhone, Android and Silverlight http://rockethub.com/projects/752-exen-xna-for-iphone-android-and-silverlight App Hub forums letting you down? Don’t forget about StackOverflow and the game development specific version gamedev.stackexchange http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/xna http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xna Transmute gets an update from Aaron Foley (@slyprid) and you can now add and visually edit parallax layers to your 2D tile game. http://twitpic.com/3nudj0 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/23418379574448128 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/Transmute/default.html Webcomics Weekly #75 touches on some feelings I’ve seen people try to express (myself included) when talking about game development and what types of games should be released for XBLIG http://www.pvponline.com/2011/01/05/webcomics-weekly-75-sour-oats/ Setting up a new PC for XNA development? Here’s a site that helps you quickly build a installer for all the most common applications developers use. http://ninite.com/ Fun wew thread on the XNA forums asking XBLIG/XNA developers just what their Top 10 favorite video games of all time are. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/107.aspx Christopher Hill (@Xalterax) stumbled across an entire community that does nothing but create box art. This is a great potential resource for Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers to get some awesome box art for their games. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/46582/441451.aspx#441451 http://www.vgboxart.com/browse/plat/360/ Don’t forget about the XNA Wiki, fantastic community resource (and roll up those sleeves and contribute already!) http://xnawiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

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• Get your content off Blogger.com

  - by Daniel Moth

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

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• Execute TSQL statement with ExecuteStoreQuery in entity framework 4.0

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  I was playing with entity framework in recent days and I was searching something that how we can execute TSQL statement in entity framework. And I have found one great way to do that with entity framework ‘ExecuteStoreQuery’ method. It’s executes a TSQL statement against data source given enity framework context and returns strongly typed result. You can find more information about ExcuteStoreQuery from following link. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd487208.aspx So let’s examine how it works. So Let’s first create a table against which we are going to execute TSQL statement. So I have added a SQL Express database as following. Now once we are done with adding a database let’s add a table called Client like following. Here you can see above Client table is very simple. There are only two fields ClientId and ClientName where ClientId is primary key and ClientName is field where we are going to store client name. Now it’s time to add some data to the table. So I have added some test data like following. Now it’s time to add entity framework model class. So right click project->Add new item and select ADO.NET entity model as following. After clicking on add button a wizard will start it will ask whether we need to create model classes from database or not but we already have our client table ready so I have selected generate from database as following. Once you process further in wizard it will be presented a screen where we can select the our table like following. Now once you click finish it will create model classes with for us. Now we need a gridview control where we need to display those data. So in Default.aspx page I have added a grid control like following. <%@ Page Title="Home Page" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Site.master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="EntityFramework._Default" %> <asp:Content ID="HeaderContent" runat="server" ContentPlaceHolderID="HeadContent"> </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="BodyContent" runat="server" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent"> <h2> Welcome to ASP.NET! </h2> <p> To learn more about ASP.NET visit <a href="http://www.asp.net" title="ASP.NET Website">www.asp.net</a>. </p> <p> You can also find <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=152368&amp;clcid=0x409" title="MSDN ASP.NET Docs">documentation on ASP.NET at MSDN</a>. <asp:GridView ID="grdClient" runat="server"> </asp:GridView> </p> </asp:Content> Now once we are done with adding Gridview its time to write code for server side. So I have written following code in Page_load event of default.aspx page. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!Page.IsPostBack) { using (var context = new EntityFramework.TestEntities()) { ObjectResult<Client> result = context.ExecuteStoreQuery<Client>("Select * from Client"); grdClient.DataSource = result; grdClient.DataBind(); } } } Here in the above code you can see that I have written create a object of our entity model and then with the help of the ExecuteStoreQuery method I have execute a simple select TSQL statement which will return a object result. I have bind that object result with gridview to display data. So now we are done with coding.So let’s run application in browser. Following is output as expected. That’s it. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more..Till then happy programming.

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• Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge Winners

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. Now that OpenWorld 2012 has wrapped, I have time to tell you all about what happened. Maybe you recall that Noel (@noelportugal) and I were running a modified hackathon during the show, the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge. Without further ado, congratulations to Dimitri Gielis (@dgielis) and Martin Giffy D’Souza (@martindsouza) on their winning entry, an integration between Oracle APEX and Oracle Social Network that integrates feedback and bug submission with Oracle Social Network Conversations, allowing developers, end-users and project leaders to view and discuss the feedback on their APEX applications from within Oracle Social Network. Update: Bob Rhubart of OTN (@brhubart) interviewed Dimitri and Martin right after their big win. Money quote from Dimitri when asked what he’d buy with the $500 in Amazon gift cards, “Oracle Social Network.” Nice one. In their own words: In the developers perspective it’s important to get feedback soon, so after a first iteration and end-users start to test, they can give feedback of the application. Previously it stopped there, and it was up to the developer to communicate further with email, phone etc. With OSN every feedback and communication gets logged and other people can see the discussion immediately as well. For the end users perspective he can now communicate in a more efficient way to not only the developers, but also between themselves. Maybe many end-users (in different locations) would like to change some behaviour, by using OSN they can see the entry somebody put in with a screenshot and they can just start to chat about it. Some key technical end users can have lighten the tasks of the development team by looking at the feedback first and start to communicate with their peers. For the project manager he has now the ability to really see what communication has taken place in certain areas and can make decisions on that. Later, if things come up again, he can always go back in OSN and see what was said at that moment in time. Integrating OSN in the APEX applications enhances the user experience, makes the lives of the developers easier and gives a better overview to project managers. Incidentally, you may already know Dimitri and Martin, since both are Oracle Ace Directors. I ran into Martin at the Ace Director briefings Friday before the conference started, and at that point, he wasn’t sure he’d have time to enter the Challenge. After some coaxing, he and Dimitri agreed to give it a go and banged out their entry on Tuesday night, or more accurately, very early Wednesday morning, the day of the Challenge judging. I think they said it took them about four hours of hardcore coding to get it done, very much like a traditional hackathon, which is essentially a code sprint from idea to finished product. Here are some screenshots of the workflow they built. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } I love this idea, i.e. closing the loop between web developers and users, a very common pain point, and so did our judges. Speaking of, special thanks to our panel of three judges: Reggie Bradford (@reggiebradford), serial entrepreneur, founder of Vitrue and SVP of Cloud Product Development at Oracle Robert Hipps (@roberthipps), VP of Development for Oracle Social Network and my former boss Roland Smart (@rsmartx), VP of Social Marketing and the brains behind the Oracle Social Developer Community Finally, thanks to everyone who made this possible, including: The three other teams from HarQen (@harqen), TEAM Informatics (@teaminformatics) and Fishbowl Solutions (@fishbowle20) featuring Friend of the ‘Lab John Sim (@jrsim_uix), who finished and presented entries. I’ll be posting the details of their work this week. The one guy who finished an entry, but couldn’t make the judging, Bex Huff (@bex). Bex rallied from a hospitalization due to an allergic reaction during the show; he’s fine, don’t worry. I’ll post details of his work next week, too. The 40-plus people who registered to compete in the Challenge. Noel for all his hard work, sample code, and flying monkey target, more on that to come. The Oracle Social Network development team for supporting this event. Everyone in legal and the beta program office for their help. And finally, the Oracle Technology Network (@oracletechnet) for hosting the event and providing countless hours of operational and moral support. Sorry if I’ve missed some people, since this was a huge team effort. This event was a big success, and we plan to do similar events in the future. Stay tuned to this channel for more. 

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• Delving into design patterns, and what that means for the Oracle user experience

  - by Kathy.Miedema

  By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience George Hackman, Senior Director, Applications User Experiences The Oracle Applications User Experience team has some exciting things happening around Fusion Applications design patterns. Because we’re hoping to have some new offerings soon (stay tuned with VoX to see what’s in the pipeline around Fusion Applications design patterns), now is a good time to talk more about what design patterns can do for the individual user as well as the entire company. George Hackman, Senior Director of Operations User Experience, says the first thing to note is that user experience is not just about the user interface. It’s about understanding how people do things, observing them, and then finding the patterns that emerge. The Applications UX team develops those patterns and then builds them into Oracle applications. What emerges, Hackman says, is a consistent, efficient user experience that promotes a productive workplace. Creating design patterns What is a design pattern in the context of enterprise software? “Every day, people use technology to get things done,” Hackman says. “They navigate a virtual world that reaches from enterprise to consumer apps, and from desktop to mobile. This virtual world is constantly under construction. New areas are being developed and old areas are being redone. As this world is being built and remodeled, efficient pathways and practices emerge. “Oracle's user experience team watches users navigate this world. We measure their productivity and ask them about their satisfaction. We take the most efficient, most productive pathways from the enterprise and consumer world and turn them into Oracle's user experience patterns.” Hackman describes the process as combining all of the best practices from every part of a user’s world. Members of the user experience team observe, analyze, design, prototype, and measure each work task to find the best possible pattern for a particular work flow. As the team builds the patterns, “we make sure they are fully buildable using Oracle technology,” Hackman said. “So customers know they can use these patterns. There’s no need to make something up from scratch, not knowing whether you can even build it.” Hackman says that creating something on a computer is a good example of a user experience pattern. “People are creating things all the time,” he says. “On the consumer side, they are creating documents. On the enterprise side, they are creating expense reports. On a mobile phone, they are creating contacts. They are using different apps like iPhone or Facebook or Gmail or Oracle software, all doing this creation process.” The Applications UX team starts their process by observing how people might create something. “We observe people creating things. We see the patterns, we analyze and document, then we apply them to our products. It might be different from phone to web browser, but we have these design patterns that create a consistent experience across platforms, and across products, too. The result for customers Oracle constantly improves its part of the virtual world, Hackman said. New products are created and existing products are upgraded. Because Oracle builds user experience design patterns, Oracle's virtual world becomes both more powerful and more familiar at the same time. Because of design patterns, users can navigate with ease as they embrace the latest technology – because it behaves the way they expect it to. This means less training and faster adoption for individual users, and more productivity for the business as a whole. Hackman said Oracle gives customers and partners access to design patterns so that they can build in the virtual world using the same best practices. Customers and partners can extend applications with a user experience that is comfortable and familiar to their users. For businesses that are integrating different Oracle applications, design patterns are key. The user experience created in E-Business Suite should be similar to the user experience in Fusion Applications, Hackman said. If a user is transitioning from one application to the other, it shouldn’t be difficult for them to do their work. With design patterns, it isn’t. “Oracle user experience patterns are the building blocks for the virtual world that ensure productivity, consistency and user satisfaction,” Hackman said. “They are built for the enterprise, but incorporate the best practices from across the virtual world. They empower productivity and facilitate social interaction. When you build with patterns, you get all the end-user benefits of less training / retraining from the finished product. You also get faster / cheaper development.” What’s coming? You can already access design patterns to help you build Dashboards with OBIEE here. And we promised you at the beginning that we had something in the pipeline on Fusion Applications design patterns. Look for the announcement about when they are available here on VoX.

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• Tuning Red Gate: #4 of Some

  - by Grant Fritchey

  First time connecting to these servers directly (keys to the kingdom, bwa-ha-ha-ha. oh, excuse me), so I'm going to take a look at the server properties, just to see if there are any issues there. Max memory is set, cool, first possible silly mistake clear. In fact, these look to be nicely set up. Oh, I'd like to see the ANSI Standards set by default, but it's not a big deal. The default location for database data is the F:\ drive, where I saw all the activity last time. Cool, the people maintaining the servers in our company listen, parallelism threshold is set to 35 and optimize for ad hoc is enabled. No shocks, no surprises. The basic setup is appropriate. On to the problem database. Nothing wrong in the properties. The database is in SIMPLE recovery, but I think it's a reporting system, so no worries there. Again, I'd prefer to see the ANSI settings for connections, but that's the worst thing I can see. Time to look at the queries, tables, indexes and statistics because all the information I've collected over the last several days suggests that we're not looking at a systemic problem (except possibly not enough memory), but at the traditional tuning issues. I just want to note that, I started looking at the system, not the queries. So should you when tuning your environment. I know, from the data collected through SQL Monitor, what my top poor performing queries are, and the most frequently called, etc. I'm starting with the most frequently called. I'm going to get the execution plan for this thing out of the cache (although, with the cache dumping constantly, I might not get it). And it's not there. Called 1.3 million times over the last 3 days, but it's not in cache. Wow. OK. I'll see what's in cache for this database: SELECT  deqs.creation_time,         deqs.execution_count,         deqs.max_logical_reads,         deqs.max_elapsed_time,         deqs.total_logical_reads,         deqs.total_elapsed_time,         deqp.query_plan,         SUBSTRING(dest.text, (deqs.statement_start_offset / 2) + 1,                   (deqs.statement_end_offset - deqs.statement_start_offset) / 2                   + 1) AS QueryStatement FROM    sys.dm_exec_query_stats AS deqs         CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(deqs.sql_handle) AS dest         CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(deqs.plan_handle) AS deqp WHERE   dest.dbid = DB_ID('Warehouse') AND deqs.statement_end_offset > 0 AND deqs.statement_start_offset > 0 ORDER BY deqs.max_logical_reads DESC ; And looking at the most expensive operation, we have our first bad boy: Multiple table scans against very large sets of data and a sort operation. a sort operation? It's an insert. Oh, I see, the table is a heap, so it's doing an insert, then sorting the data and then inserting into the primary key. First question, why isn't this a clustered index? Let's look at some more of the queries. The next one is deceiving. Here's the query plan: You're thinking to yourself, what's the big deal? Well, what if I told you that this thing had 8036318 reads? I know, you're looking at skinny little pipes. Know why? Table variable. Estimated number of rows = 1. Actual number of rows. well, I'm betting several more than one considering it's read 8 MILLION pages off the disk in a single execution. We have a serious and real tuning candidate. Oh, and I missed this, it's loading the table variable from a user defined function. Let me check, let me check. YES! A multi-statement table valued user defined function. And another tuning opportunity. This one's a beauty, seriously. Did I also mention that they're doing a hash against all the columns in the physical table. I'm sure that won't lead to scans of a 500,000 row table, no, not at all. OK. I lied. Of course it is. At least it's on the top part of the Loop which means the scan is only executed once. I just did a cursory check on the next several poor performers. all calling the UDF. I think I found a big tuning opportunity. At this point, I'm typing up internal emails for the company. Someone just had their baby called ugly. In addition to a series of suggested changes that we need to implement, I'm also apologizing for being such an unkind monster as to question whether that third eye & those flippers belong on such an otherwise lovely child.

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• 7 reasons you had to be at JavaOne Latin America 2012

  - by Bruno.Borges

  Yesterday was 12/12/12, and everybody went crazy on Twitter with cool memes like this one. And maybe you are now wondering why I mentioned 7 (seven) on the blog title. Because I want to play numbers? Yes! Today is 7 days after JavaOne Latin America 2012 is over (... and I had to figure out an excuse for taking so long to blog about it...). So unless you were at JavaOne Latin America this year, here are 7 things you missed: OTN Lounge mini-theatreThere was a mini-theatre holding several lightning talks. We had people from SouJava JUG, GoJava JUG, Globalcode, and several other Java gurus and companies running demos, talks, and even more. For example, @drspockbr talked about the ScrumToys project, that demonstrates the power of JSF. Hands On Lab for JAX-RS and WebSocketsOne of the cool things to do during JavaOne is to come to these Hands On labs and really do something using new technologies with the help of experts. This one in particular, was covered by me, Arun Gupta, and Reza Rahman. The HOL had more people than laptops (and we had 48 laptops!) interested on understanding and learning about the new stuff that is coming within Java EE 7. Things like JAX-RS, Server-sent Events and WebSockets. Hey, if you want to try this HOL by yourself, it is available on Github, so go for it! If you have questions, just let me know! Java Community KeynoteThis keynote presented a lot of cool things like startups using Java in their projects, the Duke Awards, SouJava winning the JCP Outstanding Award, the Java Band, and even more! It was really a space where the Java community could present what they are doing and what they want to do. There's a lot of interest on the Adopt-a-JSR program and the Adopt-OpenJDK. There's also an Adopt-a-JavaEE-JSR program! Take a look if you want to participate and Make the Future Java. Java EE (JMS, JAX-RS) sessions from Reza Rahman, the HeavyMetal guyReza is a well know professional and Java EE enthusiast from the communitty who just joined Oracle this year. His sessions were very well attended, perhaps because of a high interest on the new things coming to Java EE 7 like JMS 2.0 and JAX-RS 2.0. If you want to look at what he did at this JavaOne edition, read his blog post. By the way, if you like Java and heavymetal, you should follow him on Twitter as well! :-) Java EE (WebSockets, HTML5) sessions from Arun Gupta, the GlassFish guyIf you don't know Arun Gupta, no worries. You will have time to know about him while you read his Java EE 6 Pocket Guide. Arun has been evangelizing Java EE for a long time, and is now spreading his word about the new upcoming version Java EE 7. He gave one talk about HTML5 Productivity on the Java EE 7 platform, and another one on building web apps with WebSockets. Pretty neat! Arun blogged about JavaOne Latin America as well. Read it here. Java Embedded and JavaFXIf there are two things that are really trending in the Java World right now besides Java EE 7, certainly they are JavaFX and Java Embedded. There were 14 talks covering Java Embedded, from Java Cards to Raspberry.pi, from Java ME to Java on your TV with Ginga-J. The Internet of Things is becoming true, and Java is the only platform today that can connect it all in an standardized and concise way. JavaFX gained a lot of attention too. There were 8 sessions covering what the platform has to offer in terms of Rich User Experience. The JavaFX Scene Builder is an awesome tool to start playing designing an UI, and coding for JavaFX is like coding Swing with 8 hands, one holding your coffee cup. You can achieve a lot, with your two hands (unless, you really have 8 hands, then you can achieve 4 times more :-). If you want to read more about JavaFX, go to Stephen Chin's blog post. GlassFish and Friends Party, 1st edition at JavaOne Lating AmericaThis is probably the thing that I'm most proud. We brought to Brasil the tradition of holding a happy hour for all GlassFish, Java EE friends. This party started almost 7 years ago in San Francisco, and it was about time to bring it to Brazil! The party happened on Tuesday night, right after JavaOne General Keynote, at the Tribeca Pub. We had about 80 attendees and met a lot of Java EE developers there! People from JUGs, Oracle, Locaweb and Red Hat showed up too, including some execs from Oracle that didn't resist and could not miss a party like this one.Lots of caipirinhas, beer and food to everyone, some cool music... even The Fish walking around the party with Juggy!You can see more photos from the party on an album I shared with the recently created GlassFish Brasil community on Google+ here (but you may be more interested in joining the GlassFish english community). There's also more pictures that Arun took and shared on this link. So now you may want to consider coming to Brazil next year! Java EE 7 is on its way, and Brazil is happily and patiently waiting for it, with a lot of enthusiasm. By the way, GlassFish and Java EE 6 just celebrated a Happy Birthday!

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• Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge: Bezzotech

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

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

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• SQLAuthority News – 7th Anniversary of Blog – A Personal Note

  - by Pinal Dave

  Special Day Today is a very special day – seven years ago I blogged for the very first time.  Seven years ago, I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t know how to blog, or even what a blog was or what to write.  I was working as a DBA, and I was trying to solve a problem – at my job, there were a few issues I had to fix again and again and again.  There were days when I was rewriting the same solution over and over, and there were times when I would get very frustrated because I could not write the same elegant solution that I had written before.  I came up with a solution to this problem – posting these solutions online, where I could access them whenever I needed them.  At that point, I had no idea what a blog was, or even how the internet worked, I had no idea that a blog would be visible to others.  Can you believe it? Google it on Yahoo! After a few posts on this “blog,” there was a surprise for me – an e-mail saying that someone had left me a comment.  I was surprised, because I didn’t even know you could comment on a blog!  I logged on and read my comment.  It said: “I like your script,but there is a small bug.  If you could fix it, it will run on multiple other versions of SQL Server.”  I was like, “wow, someone figured out how to find my blog, and they figured out how to fix my script!”  I found the bug, I fixed the script, and a wrote a thank you note to the guy.  My first question for him was: how did you figure it out – not the script, but how to find my blog?  He said he found it from Yahoo Search (this was in the time before Google, believe it or not). From that day, my life changed.  I wrote a few more posts, I got a few more comments, and I started to watch my traffic.  People were reading, commenting, and giving feedback.  At the end of the day, people enjoyed what I was writing.  This was a fantastic feeling!  I never thought I would be writing for others.  Even today, I don’t feel like I am writing for others, but that I am simply posting what I am learning every day.  From that very first day, I decided that I would not change my intent or my blog’s purpose. 72 Million Views – 2600 Posts – 57000 comments – 10 books – 9 courses Today, this blog is my habit, my addiction, my baby.  Every day I try to learn something new, and that lesson gets posted on the blog.  Lately there have been days where I am traveling for a full 24 hours, but even on those days I try to learn something new, and later when I have free time, I will still post it to the blog.  Because of this habit, this blog has over 72 millions views, I have written more than 2600 posts, and there are 57,000 comments and counting.  I have also written 10 books, 9 courses, and learned so many things.  This blog has given me back so much more than I ever put it into it.  It gave me an education, a reason to learn something new every day, and a way to connect to people.  I like to think of it as a learning chain, a relay where we all pass knowledge from one to another. Never Ending Journey When I started the blog, I thought I would write for a few days and stop, but now after seven years I haven’t stopped and I have no intention of stopping!  However, change happens, and for this blog it will start today.  This blog started as a single resource for SQL Server, but now it has grown beyond, to Sharepoint, Personal Development, Developer Training, MySQL, Big Data, and lots of other things.  Truly speaking, this blog is more than just SQL Server, and that was always my intention.  I named it “SQL Authority,” not “SQL Server Authority”!  Loudly and clearly, I would like to announce that I am going to go back to my roots and start writing more about SQL, more about big data, and more about the other technology like relational databases, MySQL, Oracle, and others.  My goal is not to become a comprehensive resource for every technology, my goal is to learn something new every day – and now it can be so much more than just SQL Server.  I will learn it, and post it here for you. I have written a very long post on this anniversary, but here is the summary: Thank You.  You all have been wonderful.  Seven years is a long journey, and it makes me emotional.  I have been “with” this blog before I met my wife, before we had our daughter.  This blog is like a fourth member of the family.  Keep reading, keep commenting, keep supporting.  Thank you all. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: About Me, MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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• Patch an Existing NK.BIN

  - by Kate Moss' Open Space

  As you know, we can use MAKEIMG.EXE tool to create OS Image file, NK.BIN, or ROMIMAGE.EXE with a BIB for more accurate. But what if the image file is already created but need to be patched or you want to extract a file from NK.BIN? The Platform Builder provide many useful command line utilities, and today I am going to introduce one, BINMOD.EXE. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee504622.aspx is the official page for BINMOD tool. As the page says, The BinMod Tool (binmod.exe) extracts files from a run-time image, and replaces files in a run-time image and its usage binmod [-i imagename] [-r replacement_filename.ext | -e extraction_filename.ext] This is a simple tool and is easy to use, if we want to extract a file from nk.bin, just type binmod –i nk.bin –e filename.ext And that's it! Or use can try -r command to replace a file inside NK.BIN. The small tool is good but there is a limitation; due to the files in MODULES section are fixed up during ROMIMAGE so the original file format is not preserved, therefore extract or replace file in MODULE section will be impossible. So just like this small tool, this post supposed to be end here, right? Nah... It is not that easy. Just try the above example, and you will find, the tool is not work! Double check the file is in FILES section and the NK.BIN is good, but it just quits. Before you throw away this useless toy, we can try to fix it! Yes, the source of this tool is available in your CE6, private\winceos\COREOS\nk\tools\romimage\binmod. As it is a tool run in your Windows so you need to Windows SDK or Visual Studio to build the code. (I am going to save you some time by skipping the detail as building a desktop console mode program is fairly trivial) The cbinmod.cpp is the core logic for this program and follow up the error message we got, it looks like the following code is suspected.   //   // Extra sanity check...   //   if((DWORD)(HIWORD(pTOCLoc->dllfirst) << 16) <= pTOCLoc->dlllast &&       (DWORD)(LOWORD(pTOCLoc->dllfirst) << 16) <= pTOCLoc->dlllast)   {     dprintf("Found pTOC  = 0x%08x\n", (DWORD)dwpTOC);     fFoundIt = true;     break;   }    else    {     dprintf("NOTICE! Record %d looked like a TOC except DLL first = 0x%08X, and DLL last = 0x%08X\r\n", i, pTOCLoc->dllfirst, pTOCLoc->dlllast);   } The logic checks if dllfirst <= dlllast but look closer, the code only separated the high/low WORD from dllfirst but does not apply the same to dlllast, is that on purpose or a bug? While the TOC is created by ROMIMAGE.EXE, so let's move to ROMIMAGE. In private\winceos\coreos\nk\tools\romimage\romimage\bin.cpp    Module::s_romhdr.dllfirst  = (HIWORD(xip_mem->dll_data_bottom) << 16) | HIWORD(xip_mem->kernel_dll_bottom);   Module::s_romhdr.dlllast   = (HIWORD(xip_mem->dll_data_top) << 16)    | HIWORD(xip_mem->kernel_dll_top); It is clear now, the high word of dll first is the upper 16 bits of XIP DLL bottom and the low word is the upper 16 bits of kernel dll bottom; also, the high word of dll last is the upper 16 bits of XIP DLL top and the low word is the upper 16 bits of kernel dll top. Obviously, the correct statement should be if((DWORD)(HIWORD(pTOCLoc->dllfirst) << 16) <= (DWORD)(HIWORD(pTOCLoc->dlllast) << 16) &&    (DWORD)(LOWORD(pTOCLoc->dllfirst) << 16) <= (DWORD)(LOWORD(pTOCLoc->dlllast) << 16)) So update the code like this should fix this issue or just like the comment, it is an extra sanity check, you can just get rid of it, either way can make the code moving forward and everything worked as advertised.  "Extracting out copies of files from the nk.bin... replacing files... etc." Since the NK.BIN can be compressed, so the BinMod needs the compress.dll to decompress the data, the DLL can be found in C:\program files\microsoft platform builder\6.00\cepb\idevs\imgutils.

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• How to Use RDA to Generate WLS Thread Dumps At Specified Intervals?

  - by Daniel Mortimer

  Introduction There are many ways to generate a thread dump of a WebLogic Managed Server. For example, take a look at: Taking Thread Dumps - [an excellent blog post on the Middleware Magic site]or  Different ways to take thread dumps in WebLogic Server (Document 1098691.1) There is another method - use Remote Diagnostic Agent! The solution described below is not documented, but it is relatively straightforward to execute. One advantage of using RDA to collect the thread dumps is RDA will also collect configuration, log files, network, system, performance information at the same time. Instructions 1. Not familiar with Remote Diagnostic Agent? Take a look at my previous blog "Resolve SRs Faster Using RDA - Find the Right Profile" 2. Choose a profile, which includes the WebLogic Server data collection modules (for example the profile "WebLogicServer"). At RDA setup time you should see the prompt below: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- S301WLS: Collects Oracle WebLogic Server Information ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Enter the location of the directory where the domains to analyze are located (For example in UNIX, <BEA Home>/user_projects/domains or <Middleware Home>/user_projects/domains) Hit 'Return' to accept the default (/oracle/11AS/Middleware/user_projects/domains) > For a successful WLS connection, ensure that the domain Admin Server is up and running. Data Collection Type:   1  Collect for a single server (offline mode)   2  Collect for a single server (using WLS connection)   3  Collect for multiple servers (using WLS connection) Enter the item number Hit 'Return' to accept the default (1) > 2 Choose option 2 or 3. Note: Collect for a single server or multiple servers using WLS connection means that RDA will attempt to connect to execute online WLST commands against the targeted server(s). The thread dumps are collected using the WLST function - "threadDumps()". If WLST cannot connect to the managed server, RDA will proceed to collect other data and ignore the request to collect thread dumps. If in the final output you see no Thread Dump menu item, then it's likely that the managed server is in a state which prevents new connections to it. If faced with this scenario, you would have to employ alternative methods for collecting thread dumps. 3. The RDA setup will create a setup.cfg file in the RDA_HOME directory. Open this file in an editor. You will find the following parameters which govern the number of thread dumps and thread dump interval. #N.Number of thread dumps to capture WREQ_THREAD_DUMP=10 #N.Thread dump interval WREQ_THREAD_DUMP_INTERVAL=5000 The example lines above show the default settings. In other words, RDA will collect 10 thread dumps at 5000 millisecond (5 second) intervals. You may want to change this to something like: #N.Number of thread dumps to capture WREQ_THREAD_DUMP=10 #N.Thread dump interval WREQ_THREAD_DUMP_INTERVAL=30000 However, bear in mind, that such change will increase the total amount of time it takes for RDA to complete its run. 4. Once you are happy with the setup.cfg, run RDA. RDA will collect, render, generate and package all files in the output directory. 5. For ease of viewing, open up the RDA Start html file - "xxxx__start.htm". The thread dumps can be found under the WLST Collections for the target managed server(s). See screenshots belowScreenshot 1:RDA Start Page - Main Index Screenshot 2: Managed Server Sub Index Screenshot 3: WLST Collections Screenshot 4: Thread Dump Page - List of dump file links Screenshot 5: Thread Dump Dat File Link Additional Comment: A) You can view the thread dump files within the RDA Start Page framework, but most likely you will want to download the dat files for in-depth analysis via thread dump analysis tools such as: Thread Dump Analyzer -  Samurai - a GUI based tail , thread dump analysis tool If you are new to thread dump analysis - take a look at this recorded Support Advisor Webcast  Oracle WebLogic Server: Diagnosing Performance Issues through Java Thread Dumps[Slidedeck from webcast in PDF format]B) I have logged a couple of enhancement requests for the RDA Development Team to consider: Add timestamp to dump file links, dat filename and at the top of the body of the dat file Package the individual thread dumps in a zip so all dump files can be conveniently downloaded in one go.

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• Extending Blend for Visual Studio 2013

  - by Chris Skardon

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/cskardon/archive/2013/11/01/extending-blend-for-visual-studio-2013.aspxSo, I got a comment yesterday on my post about Extending Blend 4 and Blend for Visual Studio 2012 asking if I knew how to get it working for Blend for Visual Studio 2013.. My initial thoughts were, just change the location to get the blend dlls from Visual Studio 11.0 to 12.0 and you’re all set, so I went to do that, only to discover that the dlls I normally reference, well – they don’t exist. So… I’ve made a presumption that the actual process of using MEF etc is still the same. I was wrong. So, the route to discovery – required DotPeek and opening a few of blends dlls.. Browsing through the Blend install directory (./Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0/Blend/) I notice the .addin files: So I decide to peek into the SketchFlow dll, then promptly remember SketchFlow is quite a big thing, and hunting through there is not ideal, luckily there is another dll using an .addin file, ‘Microsoft.Expression.Importers.Host’, so we’ll go for that instead. We can see it’s still using the ‘IPackage’ formula, but where is that sucker? Well, we just press F12 on the ‘IPackage’ bit and DotPeek takes us there, with a very handy comment at the top: // Type: Microsoft.Expression.Framework.IPackage // Assembly: Microsoft.Expression.Framework, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a // MVID: E092EA54-4941-463C-BD74-283FD36478E2 // Assembly location: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Blend\Microsoft.Expression.Framework.dll Now we know where the IPackage interface is defined, so let’s just try writing a control. Last time I did a separate dll for the control, this time I’m not, but it still works if you want to do it that way. Let’s build a control! STEP 1 Create a new WPF application Naming doesn’t matter any more! I have gone with ‘Hello2013’ (see what I did there?) STEP 2 Delete: App.Config App.xaml MainWindow.xaml We won’t be needing them STEP 3 Change your application to be a Class Library instead. (You might also want to delete the ‘vshost’ stuff in your output directory now, as they only exist for hosting the WPF app, and just cause clutter) STEP 4 Add a reference to the ‘Microsoft.Expression.Framework.dll’ (which you can find in ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Blend’ – that’s Program Files (x86) if you’re on an x64 machine!). STEP 5 Add a User Control, I’m going with ‘Hello2013Control’, and following from last time, it’s just a TextBlock in a Grid: <UserControl x:Class="Hello2013.Hello2013Control" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="300"> <Grid> <TextBlock>Hello Blend for VS 2013</TextBlock> </Grid> </UserControl> STEP 6 Add a class to load the package – I’ve called it – yes you guessed – Hello2013Package, which will look like this: namespace Hello2013 { using Microsoft.Expression.Framework; using Microsoft.Expression.Framework.UserInterface; public class Hello2013Package : IPackage { private Hello2013Control _hello2013Control; private IWindowService _windowService; public void Load(IServices services) { _windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); Initialize(); } private void Initialize() { _hello2013Control = new Hello2013Control(); if (_windowService.PaletteRegistry["HelloPanel"] == null) _windowService.RegisterPalette("HelloPanel", _hello2013Control, "Hello Window"); } public void Unload(){} } } You might note that compared to the 2012 version we’re no longer [Exporting(typeof(IPackage))]. The file you create in STEP 7 covers this for us. STEP 7 Add a new file called: ‘<PROJECT_OUTPUT_NAME>.addin’ – in reality you can call it anything and it’ll still read it in just fine, it’s just nicer if it all matches up, so I have ‘Hello2013.addin’. Content wise, we need to have: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <AddIn AssemblyFile="Hello2013.dll" /> obviously, replacing ‘Hello2013.dll’ with whatever your dll is called. STEP 8 We set the ‘addin’ file to be copied to the output directory: STEP 9 Build! STEP 10 Go to your output directory (./bin/debug) and copy the 3 files (Hello2013.dll, Hello2013.pdb, Hello2013.addin) and then paste into the ‘Addins’ folder in your Blend directory (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Blend\Addins) STEP 11 Start Blend for Visual Studio 2013 STEP 12 Go to the ‘Window’ menu and select ‘Hello Window’ STEP 13 Marvel at your new control! Feel free to email me / comment with any problems!

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• Open World Day 3

  - by Antony Reynolds

  A Day in the Life of an Oracle OpenWorld Attendee Part IV My third day was exhibition day for me!  I took the opportunity to wander around the JavaOne and OpenWorld exhibitions to see what might be useful for me when selling WebLogic, Coherence & SOA Suite.  I found a number of interesting vendors and thought I would share what I found here.  These are not necessarily endorsements, but observations on companies that I thought had interesting looking products that fill a need I have seen at customers. Highly Available EBS Upgrades A few years ago I worked with a customer that was a port authority.  They wanted to tie E-Business Suite into their operations to provide faster processing of cargo and passengers.  However they only had a 2 hour downtime window to perform upgrades.  This was not a problem for core database and middleware technology, this could accommodate those upgrade timescales easily.  It was a problem for EBS however so I intrigued to find Rapid E-Suite Inc offering an 11i to 12i upgrade service that claims to require no outage.  This could be a real boon to EBS customers like my port friends that need to upgrade without disruption to their business. Mobile on WebLogic I have come across a number of customers who want a comprehensive mobile solution, connected and disconnected operation and so forth.  ADF only addresses part of these requirements currently so I was excited to discover mFrontiers Inc offering an apparently comprehensive solution that should integrate easily with Oracle SOA Suite to mobile enable a SOA infrastructure.  The ability to operate without a network is important for many applications, particularly in industries that require their engineers to enter buildings to perform maintenance or repairs, because network access is not always available – many of my colleagues don’t have mobile access from their homes because they live in the middle of nowhere – and disconnected support is crucial in these situations. Sharepoint Connector for WebCenter Content Obviously Sharepoint is an evil pernicious intrusion into a companies IT estate but it is widely deployed and many people like it but also would like to take advantage of Oracle products such as WebCenter Content.  So I was encouraged to see that Fishbowl Solutions have created a connector for Sharepoint that allows it to bring in content from WebCenter, it looks like a valuable way to maintain the Sharepoint interface end users are used to but extend the range of content by pulling stuff (technical term for content) from WebCenter.   Load Balancing The Enterprise Deployment Guides are Oracles bible on building highly available FMW environments, and each of them requires a front end load balancer.  I have been asked to help configure F5 Load Balancers on a number of occasions over my time at Oracle and each time I come back to it I find more useful features have been added to the BigIP line of load balancers that F5 sell, many of their documents are tailored to FMW.  I like F5, they provide (relatively) easy to use products that do what they say on the side of the box.  They may not have all the bells and whistles of some of their more expensive competitors but they do the job and do it well!  Besides which I like their logo! Other Stuff I saw lots of other interesting products and services, such as a lightweight monitoring tool for Coherence, Forms migration services, JCAPS migration services and lots of cool freebies to take home to the children! A Quiet Night Wednesday night was the partner appreciation event and I had decided to go back to the hotel and have an early night.  I decided to attend the last session of the day – a Maven/Hudson/WebLogic tutorial.  I got the wrong hotel for the session and snuck in 20 minutes late at the back and starting working on the hands on workshop.  One of my co-attendees raised his hand for help and as the presenter came over to help he suddenly stopped and yelled – “Is that Antony”!  It was my old friend Steve Button who used to be based in Redwood Shores but is now a WebLogic guru PM in Australia.  It was good to catch up with him.  As he yelled out a guy with really bad posture turned around to see who he was talking to, this turned out to be my friend Simon Haslan, Oracle ACE from the UK.  After the tutorial Simon and I retired to the coffee shop to catch up and share stories.  2 and half hours later we decided it was time to retire, so much for an early night but great to renew old friendships and find out what real customers are worrying about.

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• The clock hands of the buffer cache

  - by Tony Davis

  Over a leisurely beer at our local pub, the Waggon and Horses, Phil Factor was holding forth on the esoteric, but strangely poetic, language of SQL Server internals, riddled as it is with 'sleeping threads', 'stolen pages', and 'memory sweeps'. Generally, I remain immune to any twinge of interest in the bowels of SQL Server, reasoning that there are certain things that I don't and shouldn't need to know about SQL Server in order to use it successfully. Suddenly, however, my attention was grabbed by his mention of the 'clock hands of the buffer cache'. Back at the office, I succumbed to a moment of weakness and opened up Google. He wasn't lying. SQL Server maintains various memory buffers, or caches. For example, the plan cache stores recently-used execution plans. The data cache in the buffer pool stores frequently-used pages, ensuring that they may be read from memory rather than via expensive physical disk reads. These memory stores are classic LRU (Least Recently Updated) buffers, meaning that, for example, the least frequently used pages in the data cache become candidates for eviction (after first writing the page to disk if it has changed since being read into the cache). SQL Server clearly needs some mechanism to track which pages are candidates for being cleared out of a given cache, when it is getting too large, and it is this mechanism that is somewhat more labyrinthine than I previously imagined. Each page that is loaded into the cache has a counter, a miniature "wristwatch", which records how recently it was last used. This wristwatch gets reset to "present time", each time a page gets updated and then as the page 'ages' it clicks down towards zero, at which point the page can be removed from the cache. But what is SQL Server is suffering memory pressure and urgently needs to free up more space than is represented by zero-counter pages (or plans etc.)? This is where our 'clock hands' come in. Each cache has associated with it a "memory clock". Like most conventional clocks, it has two hands; one "external" clock hand, and one "internal". Slava Oks is very particular in stressing that these names have "nothing to do with the equivalent types of memory pressure". He's right, but the names do, in that peculiar Microsoft tradition, seem designed to confuse. The hands do relate to memory pressure; the cache "eviction policy" is determined by both global and local memory pressures on SQL Server. The "external" clock hand responds to global memory pressure, in other words pressure on SQL Server to reduce the size of its memory caches as a whole. Global memory pressure – which just to confuse things further seems sometimes to be referred to as physical memory pressure – can be either external (from the OS) or internal (from the process itself, e.g. due to limited virtual address space). The internal clock hand responds to local memory pressure, in other words the need to reduce the size of a single, specific cache. So, for example, if a particular cache, such as the plan cache, reaches a defined "pressure limit" the internal clock hand will start to turn and a memory sweep will be performed on that cache in order to remove plans from the memory store. During each sweep of the hands, the usage counter on the cache entry is reduced in value, effectively moving its "last used" time to further in the past (in effect, setting back the wrist watch on the page a couple of hours) and increasing the likelihood that it can be aged out of the cache. There is even a special Dynamic Management View, sys.dm_os_memory_cache_clock_hands, which allows you to interrogate the passage of the clock hands. Frequently turning hands equates to excessive memory pressure, which will lead to performance problems. Two hours later, I emerged from this rather frightening journey into the heart of SQL Server memory management, fascinated but still unsure if I'd learned anything that I'd put to any practical use. However, I certainly began to agree that there is something almost Tolkeinian in the language of the deep recesses of SQL Server. Cheers, Tony.

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