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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #034

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 UDF – User Defined Function to Strip HTML – Parse HTML – No Regular Expression The UDF used in the blog does fantastic task – it scans entire HTML text and removes all the HTML tags. It keeps only valid text data without HTML task. This is one of the quite commonly requested tasks many developers have to face everyday. De-fragmentation of Database at Operating System to Improve Performance Operating system skips MDF file while defragging the entire filesystem of the operating system. It is absolutely fine and there is no impact of the same on performance. Read the entire blog post for my conversation with our network engineers. Delay Function – WAITFOR clause – Delay Execution of Commands How do you delay execution of the commands in SQL Server – ofcourse by using WAITFOR keyword. In this blog post, I explain the same with the help of T-SQL script. Find Length of Text Field To measure the length of TEXT fields the function is DATALENGTH(textfield). Len will not work for text field. As of SQL Server 2005, developers should migrate all the text fields to VARCHAR(MAX) as that is the way forward. Retrieve Current Date Time in SQL Server CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, GETDATE(), {fn NOW()} There are three ways to retrieve the current datetime in SQL SERVER. CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, GETDATE(), {fn NOW()} Explanation and Comparison of NULLIF and ISNULL An interesting observation is NULLIF returns null if it comparison is successful, whereas ISNULL returns not null if its comparison is successful. In one way they are opposite to each other. Here is my question to you - How to create infinite loop using NULLIF and ISNULL? If this is even possible? 2008 Introduction to SERVERPROPERTY and example SERVERPROPERTY is a very interesting system function. It returns many of the system values. I use it very frequently to get different server values like Server Collation, Server Name etc. SQL Server Start Time We can use DMV to find out what is the start time of SQL Server in 2008 and later version. In this blog you can see how you can do the same. Find Current Identity of Table Many times we need to know what is the current identity of the column. I have found one of my developers using aggregated function MAX () to find the current identity. However, I prefer following DBCC command to figure out current identity. Create Check Constraint on Column Some time we just need to create a simple constraint over the table but I have noticed that developers do many different things to make table column follow rules than just creating constraint. I suggest constraint is a very useful concept and every SQL Developer should pay good attention to this subject. 2009 List Schema Name and Table Name for Database This is one of the blog post where I straight forward display script. One of the kind of blog posts, which I still love to read and write. Clustered Index on Separate Drive From Table Location A table devoid of primary key index is called heap, and here data is not arranged in a particular order, which gives rise to issues that adversely affect performance. Data must be stored in some kind of order. If we put clustered index on it then the order will be forced by that index and the data will be stored in that particular order. Understanding Table Hints with Examples Hints are options and strong suggestions specified for enforcement by the SQL Server query processor on DML statements. The hints override any execution plan the query optimizer might select for a query. 2010 Data Pages in Buffer Pool – Data Stored in Memory Cache One of my earlier year article, which I still read it many times and point developers to read it again. It is clear from the Resultset that when more than one index is used, datapages related to both or all of the indexes are stored in Memory Cache separately. TRANSACTION, DML and Schema Locks Can you create a situation where you can see Schema Lock? Well, this is a very simple question, however during the interview I notice over 50 candidates failed to come up with the scenario. In this blog post, I have demonstrated the situation where we can see the schema lock in database. 2011 Solution – Puzzle – Statistics are not updated but are Created Once In this example I have created following situation: Create Table Insert 1000 Records Check the Statistics Now insert 10 times more 10,000 indexes Check the Statistics – it will be NOT updated Auto Update Statistics and Auto Create Statistics for database is TRUE Now I have requested two things in the example 1) Why this is happening? 2) How to fix this issue? Selecting Domain from Email Address This is a straight to script blog post where I explain how to select only domain name from entire email address. Solution – Generating Zero Without using Any Numbers in T-SQL How to get zero digit without using any digit? This is indeed a very interesting question and the answer is even interesting. Try to come up with answer in next 10 minutes and if you can’t come up with the answer the blog post read this post for solution. 2012 Simple Explanation and Puzzle with SOUNDEX Function and DIFFERENCE Function In simple words - SOUNDEX converts an alphanumeric string to a four-character code to find similar-sounding words or names. DIFFERENCE function returns an integer value. The  integer returned is the number of characters in the SOUNDEX values that are the same. Read Only Files and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) I have come across a very interesting feature in SSMS related to “Read Only” files. I believe it is a little unknown feature as well so decided to write a blog about the same. Identifying Column Data Type of uniqueidentifier without Querying System Tables How do I know if any table has a uniqueidentifier column and what is its value without using any DMV or System Catalogues? Only information you know is the table name and you are allowed to return any kind of error if the table does not have uniqueidentifier column. Read the blog post to find the answer. Solution – User Not Able to See Any User Created Object in Tables – Security and Permissions Issue Interesting question – “When I try to connect to SQL Server, it lets me connect just fine as well let me open and explore the database. I noticed that I do not see any user created instances but when my colleague attempts to connect to the server, he is able to explore the database as well see all the user created tables and other objects. Can you help me fix it?” Importing CSV File Into Database – SQL in Sixty Seconds #018 – Video Here is interesting small 60 second video on how to import CSV file into Database. ColumnStore Index – Batch Mode vs Row Mode Here is the logic behind when Columnstore Index uses Batch Mode and when it uses Row Mode. A batch typically represents about 1000 rows of data. Batch mode processing also uses algorithms that are optimized for the multicore CPUs and increased memory throughput. Follow up – Usage of $rowguid and $IDENTITY This is an excellent follow up blog post of my earlier blog post where I explain where to use $rowguid and $identity.  If you do not know the difference between them, this is a blog with a script example. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Elegance, thy Name is jQuery

  - by SGWellens

  So, I'm browsing though some questions over on the Stack Overflow website and I found a good jQuery question just a few minutes old. Here is a link to it. It was a tough question; I knew that by answering it, I could learn new stuff and reinforce what I already knew: Reading is good, doing is better. Maybe I could help someone in the process too. I cut and pasted the HTML from the question into my Visual Studio IDE and went back to Stack Overflow to reread the question. Dang, someone had already answered it! And it was a great answer. I never even had a chance to start analyzing the issue. Now I know what a one-legged man feels like in an ass-kicking contest. Nevertheless, since the question and answer were so interesting, I decided to dissect them and learn as much as possible. The HTML consisted of some divs separated by h3 headings.  Note the elements are laid out sequentially with no programmatic grouping: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div></form></body>  The requirement was to wrap a div around each h3 heading and the subsequent divs grouping them into sections. Why? I don't know, I suppose if you screen-scrapped some HTML from another site, you might want to reformat it before displaying it on your own. Anyways… Here is the marvelously, succinct posted answer: $('.heading').each(function(){ $(this).nextUntil('.heading').andSelf().wrapAll('<div class="section">');}); I was familiar with all the parts except for nextUntil and andSelf. But, I'll analyze the whole answer for completeness. I'll do this by rewriting the posted answer in a different style and adding a boat-load of comments: function Test(){ // $Sections is a jQuery object and it will contain three elements var $Sections = $('.heading'); // use each to iterate over each of the three elements $Sections.each(function () { // $this is a jquery object containing the current element // being iterated var $this = $(this); // nextUntil gets the following sibling elements until it reaches // an element with the CSS class 'heading' // andSelf adds in the source element (this) to the collection $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading').andSelf(); // wrap the elements with a div $this.wrapAll('<div class="section" >'); });}  The code here doesn't look nearly as concise and elegant as the original answer. However, unless you and your staff are jQuery masters, during development it really helps to work through algorithms step by step. You can step through this code in the debugger and examine the jQuery objects to make sure one step is working before proceeding on to the next. It's much easier to debug and troubleshoot when each logical coding step is a separate line of code. Note: You may think the original code runs much faster than this version. However, the time difference is trivial: Not enough to worry about: Less than 1 millisecond (tested in IE and FF). Note: You may want to jam everything into one line because it results in less traffic being sent to the client. That is true. However, most Internet servers now compress HTML and JavaScript by stripping out comments and white space (go to Bing or Google and view the source). This feature should be enabled on your server: Let the server compress your code, you don't need to do it. Free Career Advice: Creating maintainable code is Job One—Maximum Priority—The Prime Directive. If you find yourself suddenly transferred to customer support, it may be that the code you are writing is not as readable as it could be and not as readable as it should be. Moving on… I created a CSS class to enhance the results: .section{ background-color: yellow; border: 2px solid black; margin: 5px;} Here is the rendered output before:   …and after the jQuery code runs.   Pretty Cool! But, while playing with this code, the logic of nextUntil began to bother me: What happens in the last section? What stops elements from being collected since there are no more elements with the .heading class? The answer is nothing.  In this case it stopped collecting elements because it was at the end of the page.  But what if there were additional HTML elements? I added an anchor tag and another div to the HTML: <h3 class="heading">Heading 1</h3> <div>Content</div> <div>More content</div> <div>Even more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 2</h3> <div>some content</div> <div>some more content</div><h3 class="heading">Heading 3</h3> <div>other content</div><a>this is a link</a><div>unrelated div</div> </form></body> The code as-is will include both the anchor and the unrelated div. This isn't what we want.   My first attempt to correct this used the filter parameter of the nextUntil function: nextUntil('.heading', 'div')  This will only collect div elements. But it merely skipped the anchor tag and it still collected the unrelated div:   The problem is we need a way to tell the nextUntil function when to stop. CSS selectors to the rescue! nextUntil('.heading, a')  This tells nextUntil to stop collecting elements when it gets to an element with a .heading class OR when it gets to an anchor tag. In this case it solved the problem. FYI: The comma operator in a CSS selector allows multiple criteria.   Bingo! One final note, we could have broken the code down even more: We could have replaced the andSelf function here: $this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a').andSelf(); With this: // get all the following siblings and then add the current item$this = $this.nextUntil('.heading, a');$this.add(this);  But in this case, the andSelf function reads real nice. In my opinion. Here's a link to a jsFiddle if you want to play with it. I hope someone finds this useful Steve Wellens CodeProject

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• Becoming A Great Developer

  - by Lee Brandt

  Image via Wikipedia I’ve been doing the whole programming thing for awhile and reading and watching some of the best in the business. I have come to notice that the really great developers do a few things that (I think) makes them great. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that I am one of these few. I still struggle with doing some of the things that makes one great at development. Coincidently, many of these things also make you a better person period. Believe That Guidance Is Better Than Answers This is one I have no problem with. I prefer guidance any time I am learning from another developer. Answers may get you going, but guidance will leave you stranded. At some point, you will come across a problem that can only be solved by thinking for yourself and this is where that guidance will really come in handy. You can use that guidance and extrapolate whatever technology to salve that problem (if it’s the right tool for solving that problem). The problem is, lots of developers simply want someone to tell them, “Do this, then this, then set that, and write this.” Favor thinking and learn the guidance of doing X and don’t ask someone to show you how to do X, if that makes sense. Read, Read and Read If you don’t like reading, you’re probably NOT going to make it into the Great Developer group. Great developers read books, they read magazines and they read code. Open source playgrounds like SourceForge, CodePlex and GitHub, have made it extremely easy to download code from developers you admire and see how they do stuff. Chances are, if you read their blog too, they’ll even explain WHY they did what they did (see “Guidance” above). MSDN and Code Magazine have not only code samples, but explanations of how to use certain technologies and sometimes even when NOT to use that same technology. Books are also out on just about every topic. I still favor the less technology centric books. For instance, I generally don’t buy books like, “Getting Started with Jiminy Jappets”. I look for titles like, “How To Write More Effective Code” (again, see guidance). The Addison-Wesley Signature Series is a great example of these types of books. They teach technology-agnostic concepts. Head First Design Patterns is another great guidance book. It teaches the "Gang Of Four" Design Patterns in a very easy-to-understand, picture-heavy way (I LIKE pictures). Hang Your Balls Out There Even though the advice came from a 3rd-shift Kinko’s attendant, doesn’t mean it’s not sound advice. Write some code and put it out for others to read, criticize and castigate you for. Understand that there are some real jerks out there who are absolute geniuses. Don’t be afraid to get some great advice wrapped in some really nasty language. Try to take what’s good about it and leave what’s not. I have a tough time with this myself. I don’t really have any code out there that is available for review (other than my demo code). It takes some guts to do, but in the end, there is no substitute for getting a community of developers to critique your code and give you ways to improve. Get Involved Speaking of community, the local and online user groups and discussion forums are a great place to hear about technologies and techniques you might never come across otherwise. Mostly because you might not know to look. But, once you sit down with a bunch of other developers and start discussing what you’re interested in, you may open up a whole new perspective on it. Don’t just go to the UG meetings and watch the presentations either, get out there and talk, socialize. I realize geeks weren’t meant to necessarily be social creatures, but if you’re amongst other geeks, it’s much easier. I’ve learned more in the last 3-4 years that I have been involved in the community that I did in my previous 8 years of coding without it. Socializing works, even if socialism doesn’t. Continuous Improvement Lean proponents might call this “Kaizen”, but I call it progress. We all know, especially in the technology realm, if you’re not moving ahead, you’re falling behind. It may seem like drinking from a fire hose, but step back and pick out the technologies that speak to you. The ones that may you’re little heart go pitter-patter. Concentrate on those. If you’re still overloaded, pick the best of the best. Just know that if you’re not looking at the code you wrote last week or at least last year with some embarrassment, you’re probably stagnating. That’s about all I can say about that, cause I am all out of clichés to throw at it. :0) Write Code Great painters paint, great writers write, and great developers write code. The most sure-fire way to improve your coding ability is to continue writing code. Don’t just write code that your work throws on you, pick that technology you love or are curious to know more about and walk through some blog demo examples. Take the language you use everyday and try to get it to do something crazy. Who knows, you might create the next Google search algorithm! All in all, being a great developer is about finding yourself in all this code. If it is just a job to you, you will probably never be one of the “Great Developers”, but you’re probably okay with that. If, on the other hand, you do aspire to greatness, get out there and GET it. No one’s going hand it to you.

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• Trigger Happy

  - by Tim Dexter

  Its been a while, I know, we’ll say no more OK? I’ll just write …In the latest BIP 11.1.1.6 release and if I’m really honest; the release before this (we'll call it dot 5 for brevity.) The boys and gals in the engine room have been real busy enhancing BIP with some new functionality. Those of you that use the scheduling engine in OBIEE may already know and use the ‘conditional scheduling’ feature. This allows you to be more intelligent about what reports get run and sent to folks on a scheduled basis. You create a ‘trigger’ analysis (answer) that is executed at schedule time prior to the main report. When the schedule rolls around, the trigger is run, if it returns rows, then the main report is run and delivered. If there are no rows returned, then the main report is not run. Useful right? Your users are not bombarded with 20 reports in their inbox every week that they need to wade throu. They get a handful that they know they need to look at. If you ensure you use conditional formatting in the report then they can find the anomalous data in the reports very quickly and move on to the rest of their day more quickly. You could even think of OBIEE as a virtual team member, scouring the data on your behalf 24/7 and letting you know when its found an issue.BI Publisher, wanting the team t-shirt and the khaki pants, has followed suit. You can now set up ‘triggers’ for it to execute before it runs the main report. Just like its big brother, if the scheduled report trigger returns rows of data; it then executes the main report. Otherwise, the report is skipped until the next schedule time rolls around. Sound familiar?BIP differs a little, in that you only need to construct a query to act as the trigger rather than a complete report. Let assume we have a monthly wage by department report on a schedule. We only want to send the report to managers if their departmental wages reach and/or exceed a certain amount. The toughest part about this is coming up with the SQL to test the business rule you want to implement. For my example, its not that tough: select d.department_name, sum(e.salary) as wage_total from employees e, departments d where d.department_id = e.department_id group by d.department_name having sum(e.salary) > 230000 We're looking for departments where the wage cost is greater than 230,000 Dexter Dollars! With a bit of messing I found out you can parametrize the query. Users can then set a value at schedule time if they need to. To create the trigger is straightforward enough. You can create multiple triggers for users to select at schedule time. Notice I also used a parameter in the query, :wamount. Note the matching parameter in the tree on the left. You also dont need to return multiple columns, one is fine, the key is if there are rows returned. You can build the rest of your report as usual. At scheduling time the Schedule tab has a bit more on it. If your users want to set the trigger, they check the Use Trigger box. The page will then pop fields to pick the appropriate trigger they want to use, even a trigger on another data model if needed. Note it will also ask for the parameter value associated with the trigger. At this point you should note that the data model does not make a distinction between trigger and data model (extract) parameters. So users will see the parameters on the General and Schedule tabs. If per chance you do need to just have a trigger parameters. You can just hide them from the report using the Parameters popup in the report designer, just un-check the 'Show' box I have tested the opposite case where you do not want main report parameters seen in the trigger section. BIP handles that for you! Once the report hits its allotted schedule time, the trigger is executed. Based on the results the report will either run or be 'skipped.' Now, you have a smarter scheduler that will only deliver reports when folks need to see them and take action on the contents. More official info here for developers and here for users.

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• Keep it Professional &ndash; Multiple Environments

  - by AjarnMark

  I have certainly been reading blogs a whole lot more than writing them the last several weeks, and it’s about time I got back to writing.  I have been collecting several topics and references for blog posts…some of which will probably just never get written as the timeliness of the topics fade over time.  Nonetheless, I’m back, and I think it is time to revive my Doing Business Right series, this time coming from the slant of managing a development team rather than the previous angle of being self-employed.  First up: separating Dev, Test, and Prod. A few months ago, Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT) wrote a great post about separating your Dev, Test/UAT, and Prod environments.  This post covers all the important points such as removing Developer access from both PROD and UAT, and the importance of proper deployment (a.k.a. promotion) procedures.  I won’t repeat it all here, go read the original!  But what I do want to address is what I believe to be the #1 excuse people use for not having separate environments:  Money.  I discussed this briefly in my comment on Colin’s post at the time, but let me repeat it here and expand on it a bit. Don’t let the size of your company or the size of its budget dictate whether you do things professionally or not.  I am convinced that most developers and development teams would agree that it is a best practice to have separate environments for development, testing, and production (a.k.a. Live).  So why don’t they?  Because they think that it means separate servers which means more money.  While having separate physical servers for the different environments would be ideal, it is not an absolute requirement in order to make this work.  Here are a few ideas: Use multiple instances of SQL Server and multiple Web Sites with Headers or Ports.  For no additional fees* you can install multiple instances of SQL Server on the same machine.  This gives you a nice separation, allowing you to even use the same database names as will appear in PROD, yet isolating the data and security access.  And in IIS, you can create multiple Web Sites on the same server just by using Host Headers or different port numbers to separate them.  This approach does still pose the risk of non-Prod environments impacting performance on Prod, but when your application is busy enough for that to be a concern, you can probably afford one of the other options. Use desktop PCs instead of servers.  Instead of investing in full server-grade hardware, you can mimic the separate environments on old desktop PCs and at least get functional equivalency, if not performance matching.  The last I checked, Microsoft did not require separate licensing for SQL Server if that installation was used exclusively for dev or test purposes*.  There may be some version or performance differences between this approach and what you have in Prod, but you have isolated test from impacting Prod resources this way. Virtualization.  This is of course one of the hot topics of the day, and I would be remiss if I did not suggest this.  It is quite easy these days to setup virtual machines so that, again, your environments are fairly isolated from one another, and you retain all the security and procedural benefits of having separate environments. So the point is, keep your high professional standards intact.  You don’t need to compromise on using proper procedure just because you work in a small company with a small budget.  Keep doing things the right way! By the way, where I work, our DEV environment is not on a server.  All development is done on the developer’s individual workstation where it can be isolated from other developers’ work for the duration of writing the code, but also where the developers have to reconcile (merge) differences in code under concurrent development.  This usually means that each change is executed multiple times (once per developer to update their environments with the latest changes from others) giving us an extra, informal. test deployment before even going to the Test/UAT server.  It also means that if the network goes down, the developers can continue to hum along because they are not dependent on networked resources.  In fact, they will likely be even more productive because they aren’t being interrupted by email…but that’s another post I need to write. * I am not a lawyer, nor a licensing specialist, but it appeared to be so the last time I checked.  When in doubt, consult an expert on the topic.

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• ASP.NET MVC: Using ProfileRequiredAttribute to restrict access to pages

  - by DigiMortal

  If you are using AppFabric Access Control Services to authenticate users when they log in to your community site using Live ID, Google or some other popular identity provider, you need more than AuthorizeAttribute to make sure that users can access the content that is there for authenticated users only. In this posting I will show you hot to extend the AuthorizeAttribute so users must also have user profile filled. Semi-authorized users When user is authenticated through external identity provider then not all identity providers give us user name or other information we ask users when they join with our site. What all identity providers have in common is unique ID that helps you identify the user. Example. Users authenticated through Windows Live ID by AppFabric ACS have no name specified. Google’s identity provider is able to provide you with user name and e-mail address if user agrees to publish this information to you. They both give you unique ID of user when user is successfully authenticated in their service. There is logical shift between ASP.NET and my site when considering user as authorized. For ASP.NET MVC user is authorized when user has identity. For my site user is authorized when user has profile and row in my users table. Having profile means that user has unique username in my system and he or she is always identified by this username by other users. My solution is simple: I created my own action filter attribute that makes sure if user has profile to access given method and if user has no profile then browser is redirected to join page. Illustrating the problem Usually we restrict access to page using AuthorizeAttribute. Code is something like this. [Authorize] public ActionResult Details(string id) {     var profile = _userRepository.GetUserByUserName(id);     return View(profile); } If this page is only for site users and we have user profiles then all users – the ones that have profile and all the others that are just authenticated – can access the information. It is okay because all these users have successfully logged in in some service that is supported by AppFabric ACS. In my site the users with no profile are in grey spot. They are on half way to be users because they have no username and profile on my site yet. So looking at the image above again we need something that adds profile existence condition to user-only content. [ProfileRequired] public ActionResult Details(string id) {     var profile = _userRepository.GetUserByUserName(id);     return View(profile); } Now, this attribute will solve our problem as soon as we implement it. ProfileRequiredAttribute: Profiles are required to be fully authorized Here is my implementation of ProfileRequiredAttribute. It is pretty new and right now it is more like working draft but you can already play with it. public class ProfileRequiredAttribute : AuthorizeAttribute {     private readonly string _redirectUrl;       public ProfileRequiredAttribute()     {         _redirectUrl = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["JoinUrl"];         if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(_redirectUrl))             _redirectUrl = "~/";     }              public override void OnAuthorization(AuthorizationContext filterContext)     {         base.OnAuthorization(filterContext);           var httpContext = filterContext.HttpContext;         var identity = httpContext.User.Identity;           if (!identity.IsAuthenticated || identity.GetProfile() == null)             if(filterContext.Result == null)                 httpContext.Response.Redirect(_redirectUrl);          } } All methods with this attribute work as follows: if user is not authenticated then he or she is redirected to AppFabric ACS identity provider selection page, if user is authenticated but has no profile then user is by default redirected to main page of site but if you have application setting with name JoinUrl then user is redirected to this URL. First case is handled by AuthorizeAttribute and the second one is handled by custom logic in ProfileRequiredAttribute class. GetProfile() extension method To get user profile using less code in places where profiles are needed I wrote GetProfile() extension method for IIdentity interface. There are some more extension methods that read out user and identity provider identifier from claims and based on this information user profile is read from database. If you take this code with copy and paste I am sure it doesn’t work for you but you get the idea. public static User GetProfile(this IIdentity identity) {     if (identity == null)         return null;       var context = HttpContext.Current;     if (context.Items["UserProfile"] != null)         return context.Items["UserProfile"] as User;       var provider = identity.GetIdentityProvider();     var nameId = identity.GetNameIdentifier();       var rep = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<IUserRepository>();     var profile = rep.GetUserByProviderAndNameId(provider, nameId);       context.Items["UserProfile"] = profile;       return profile; } To avoid round trips to database I cache user profile to current request because the chance that profile gets changed meanwhile is very minimal. The other reason is maybe more tricky – profile objects are coming from Entity Framework context and context has also HTTP request as lifecycle. Conclusion This posting gave you some ideas how to finish user profiles stuff when you use AppFabric ACS as external authentication provider. Although there was little shift between us and ASP.NET MVC with interpretation of “authorized” we were easily able to solve the problem by extending AuthorizeAttribute to get all our requirements fulfilled. We also write extension method for IIdentity that returns as user profile based on username and caches the profile in HTTP request scope.

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• Interview with Ronald Bradford about MySQL Connect

  - by Keith Larson

  Ronald Bradford,  an Oracle ACE Director has been busy working with  database consulting, book writing (EffectiveMySQL) while traveling and speaking around the world in support of MySQL. I was able to take some of his time to get an interview on this thoughts about theMySQL Connect conference. Keith Larson: What where your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to provide the community the MySQL Conference ?Ronald Bradford: Oracle has already been providing various different local community events including OTN Tech Days and  MySQL community days. These are great for local regions both in the US and abroad.  In previous years there has been an increase of content at Oracle Open World, however that benefits the Oracle community far more then the MySQL community.  It is good to see that Oracle is realizing the benefit in providing a large scale dedicated event for the MySQL community that includes speakers from the MySQL development teams, invested companies in the ecosystem and other community evangelists.I fully expect a successful event and look forward to hopefully seeing MySQL Connect at the upcoming Brazil and Japan OOW conferences and perhaps an event on the East Coast.Keith Larson: Since you are part of the content committee, what did you think of the submissions that were received during call for papers?Ronald Bradford: There was a large number of quality submissions to the number of available presentation sessions. As with the previous years as a committee member for the annual MySQL conference, there is always a large variety of common cornerstone MySQL features as well as new products and upcoming companies sharing their MySQL experiences. All of the usual major players in the ecosystem will in presenting at MySQL Connect including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Continuent, Percona, Tokutek, Sphinx and Amazon to name a few.  This is ensuring the event will have a large number of quality speakers and a difficult time in choosing what to attend. Keith Larson: What sessions do you look forwarding to attending? Ronald Bradford: As with most quality conferences you can only be in one place at one time, so with multiple tracks per session it is always difficult to decide. The continued work and success with MySQL Cluster, and with a number of sessions I am sure will be popular. The features that interest me the most are around the optimizer, where there are several sessions on new features, and on the importance of backups. There are three presentations in this area to choose from.Keith Larson: Are you going to cover any of the content in your books at your MySQL Connect sessions?Ronald Bradford: I will be giving two presentations at MySQL Connect. The first will include the techniques available for creating better indexes where I will be touching on some aspects of the first Effective MySQL book on Optimizing SQL Statements.  In my second presentation from experiences of managing 500+ AWS MySQL instances, I will be touching on areas including SQL tuning, backup and recovery and scale out with replication.   These are the key topics of the initial books in the Effective MySQL series that focus on performance, scalability and business continuity.  The books however cover a far greater amount of detail then can be presented in a 1 hour session. Keith Larson: What features of MySQL 5.6 do you look forward to the most ?Ronald Bradford: I am very impressed with the optimizer trace feature. The ability to see exposed information is invaluable not just for MySQL 5.6, but to also apply information discerned for optimizing SQL statements in earlier versions of MySQL.  Not everybody understands that it is easy to deploy a MySQL 5.6 slave into an existing topology running an older version if MySQL for evaluation of many new features.  You can use the new mysqlbinlog streaming feature for duplicating master binary logs on an older version with a MySQL 5.6 slave.  The improvements in instrumentation in the Performance Schema are exciting.   However, as with my upcoming Replication Techniques in Depth title, that will be available for sale at MySQL Connect, there are numerous replication features, some long overdue with provide significant management benefits. Crash Save Slaves, Global transaction Identifiers (GTID)  and checksums just to mention a few.Keith Larson: You have been to numerous conferences, what would you recommend for people at the conference? Ronald Bradford: Make the time to meet and introduce yourself to the speakers that cover the topics that most interest you. The MySQL ecosystem has a very strong community.  The relationships you build with presenters, developers and architects in MySQL can be invaluable, however they are created over time. Get to know these people, interact with them over time.  This is the opportunity to learn more then just the content from a 1 hour session. Keith Larson: Any additional tips to handling the long hours ? Ronald Bradford: Conferences can be hard, especially with all the post event drinking.  This is a two day event and I am sure will include additional events on Friday and Saturday night so come well prepared, and leave work behind. Take the time to learn something new.   You can always catchup on sleep later. Keith Larson: Thank you so much for taking some time to do this I look forward to seeing you at the MySQL Connect conference.  Please stay tuned here for more updates on MySQL. 

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• Upcoming User Group Events in 2011

  - by john.orourke(at)oracle.com

  At a recent customer event, someone asked me if Oracle had any plans to re-create the Hyperion Solutions Conference.  Unfortunately the answer is no.  With so many different product lines it would be challenging and costly for Oracle to run separate user conferences for every product line, and it would create too many events for customers with multiple products to attend.  So Oracle Open World is the company's main event for showcasing what's new and what's coming across all product lines.  If customers find Oracle OpenWorld too overwhelming or if the timing is bad, there are a number of other conferences, which are run by Oracle user groups and include a number of sessions focused on Oracle Hyperion EPM and BI products.  Here's a sneak preview of what's coming up for conferences in 2011 where you can network with other Hyperion users and learn what's new and what's coming in our products. Alliance 2011:  This conference is run by the Oracle Higher Education User Group (HEUG).  It's being held March 27 - 30th in lovely Denver, Colorado.  (a great location and time for skiers!)  This event is targeted at customers in Higher Education and Public Sector organizations and is expecting to draw over 3,500 attendees.  There will be a number of sessions focusing on Oracle Hyperion EPM and BI products in the Budgeting track, as well as the Reporting & BI track.  This includes product-focused sessions delivered by Oracle and partners, as well as case studies delivered by customers.  Here's a link to the registration page where you can get more information: http://www.heug.org/p/cm/ld/fid=255 Collaborate 2011:  This conference is run by three different user groups;  OAUG, IOUG and Quest.  It's being held April 10 - 14th in sunny Orlando, Florida.  (yes, sunshine and warmth!)  This event is targeted to customers with Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Hyperion, Primavera and other products and is expected to draw over 5,000 attendees.  You'll find a number of sessions focused on Oracle Hyperion EPM and BI products in the BI/Data Warehousing/EPM track.  This includes product-focused sessions delivered by Oracle, our partners, and customers as well as a number of customer case studies.  There will also be an exhibit area with a number of demo pods focused on EPM and BI products.  Here's a link to the conference web site where you can get more information: http://collaborate.oaug.org/ Also, please note that the OAUG has a Hyperion SIG that runs focused EPM/Hyperion events throughout the year.  Here's a link to their web site where you can get more information: http://hyperionsig.oaug.org/ Kscope 2011:  Formerly the Kaleidoscope conference, this one is run by the Oracle Developer Tools User Group (ODTUG).  This conference is being held June 26 - 30th in Long Beach, CA. (surf's up!)  Historically, this event has focused on Oracle Development tools, but over the past few years the EPM and BI content has grown with over 100 sessions planned this year.  So this event is becoming a great venue for existing Hyperion customers to learn about the latest developments with Oracle Essbase, Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle BI and other products.   You'll also find hands-on workshops, product demonstrations as well as EPM and BI Symposiums run by Oracle Development staff.  Here's a link to the web site where you can get more details.  http://www.kscope11.com/biepm UKOUG Conference Series:  EPM and Hyperion 2011:  For Hyperion customers in the UK, the UKOUG has a Hyperion SIG that runs a focused conference for EPM and Hyperion products.  The 2011 event is planned for June in London.  Here's a link to the web site for this event where you can get more information: http://hyperion.ukoug.org/default.asp?p=8461 In addition to these conferences, you can also find Oracle EPM and BI content at regional user group meetings globally as well as Marketing events run by Oracle.  Check the events page at www.oracle.com for the details on upcoming Marketing and regional User Group events.  So while Oracle will not be trying to replicate the Hyperion Solutions conference, the good news is that there are a number of other events available where customers can find out what's new and what's coming with Oracle EPM and BI products.  And these events are running at different times of the year in different locations - so you can pick the event that makes the most sense for your company from a timing and location standpoint. I'll be delivering a number of sessions at the Alliance and Collaborate conferences and hope to see many of our loyal customers and partners at these events.  And there's always Oracle OpenWorld coming up in October, for which the planning has already started.  I look forward to seeing you in 2011.

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• Oracle Flashback Technologies - Overview

  - by Sridhar_R-Oracle

  Oracle Flashback Technologies - IntroductionIn his May 29th 2014 blog, my colleague Joe Meeks introduced Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) and discussed both planned and unplanned outages. Let’s take a closer look at unplanned outages. These can be caused by physical failures (e.g., server, storage, network, file deletion, physical corruption, site failures) or by logical failures – cases where all components and files are physically available, but data is incorrect or corrupt. These logical failures are usually caused by human errors or application logic errors. This blog series focuses on these logical errors – what causes them and how to address and recover from them using Oracle Database Flashback. In this introductory blog post, I’ll provide an overview of the Oracle Database Flashback technologies and will discuss the features in detail in future blog posts. Let’s get started. We are all human beings (unless a machine is reading this), and making mistakes is a part of what we do…often what we do best!  We “fat finger”, we spill drinks on keyboards, unplug the wrong cables, etc.  In addition, many of us, in our lives as DBAs or developers, must have observed, caused, or corrected one or more of the following unpleasant events: Accidentally updated a table with wrong values !! Performed a batch update that went wrong - due to logical errors in the code !! Dropped a table !! How do DBAs typically recover from these types of errors? First, data needs to be restored and recovered to the point-in-time when the error occurred (incomplete or point-in-time recovery).  Moreover, depending on the type of fault, it’s possible that some services – or even the entire database – would have to be taken down during the recovery process.Apart from error conditions, there are other questions that need to be addressed as part of the investigation. For example, what did the data look like in the morning, prior to the error? What were the various changes to the row(s) between two timestamps? Who performed the transaction and how can it be reversed?  Oracle Database includes built-in Flashback technologies, with features that address these challenges and questions, and enable you to perform faster, easier, and convenient recovery from logical corruptions. HistoryFlashback Query, the first Flashback Technology, was introduced in Oracle 9i. It provides a simple, powerful and completely non-disruptive mechanism for data verification and recovery from logical errors, and enables users to view the state of data at a previous point in time.Flashback Technologies were further enhanced in Oracle 10g, to provide fast, easy recovery at the database, table, row, and even at a transaction level.Oracle Database 11g introduced an innovative method to manage and query long-term historical data with Flashback Data Archive. The 11g release also introduced Flashback Transaction, which provides an easy, one-step operation to back out a transaction. Oracle Database versions 11.2.0.2 and beyond further enhanced the performance of these features. Note that all the features listed here work without requiring any kind of restore operation.In addition, Flashback features are fully supported with the new multi-tenant capabilities introduced with Oracle Database 12c, Flashback Features Oracle Flashback Database enables point-in-time-recovery of the entire database without requiring a traditional restore and recovery operation. It rewinds the entire database to a specified point in time in the past by undoing all the changes that were made since that time.Oracle Flashback Table enables an entire table or a set of tables to be recovered to a point in time in the past.Oracle Flashback Drop enables accidentally dropped tables and all dependent objects to be restored.Oracle Flashback Query enables data to be viewed at a point-in-time in the past. This feature can be used to view and reconstruct data that was lost due to unintentional change(s) or deletion(s). This feature can also be used to build self-service error correction into applications, empowering end-users to undo and correct their errors.Oracle Flashback Version Query offers the ability to query the historical changes to data between two points in time or system change numbers (SCN) Oracle Flashback Transaction Query enables changes to be examined at the transaction level. This capability can be used to diagnose problems, perform analysis, audit transactions, and even revert the transaction by undoing SQLOracle Flashback Transaction is a procedure used to back-out a transaction and its dependent transactions.Flashback technologies eliminate the need for a traditional restore and recovery process to fix logical corruptions or make enquiries. Using these technologies, you can recover from the error in the same amount of time it took to generate the error. All the Flashback features can be accessed either via SQL command line (or) via Enterprise Manager.  Most of the Flashback technologies depend on the available UNDO to retrieve older data. The following table describes the various Flashback technologies: their purpose, dependencies and situations where each individual technology can be used.   Example Syntax Error investigation related:The purpose is to investigate what went wrong and what the values were at certain points in timeFlashback Queries  ( select .. as of SCN | Timestamp )   - Helps to see the value of a row/set of rows at a point in timeFlashback Version Queries  ( select .. versions between SCN | Timestamp and SCN | Timestamp)  - Helps determine how the value evolved between certain SCNs or between timestamps Flashback Transaction Queries (select .. XID=)   - Helps to understand how the transaction caused the changes.Error correction related:The purpose is to fix the error and correct the problems,Flashback Table  (flashback table .. to SCN | Timestamp)  - To rewind the table to a particular timestamp or SCN to reverse unwanted updates Flashback Drop (flashback table ..  to before drop )  - To undrop or undelete a table Flashback Database (flashback database to SCN  | Restore Point )  - This is the rewind button for Oracle databases. You can revert the entire database to a particular point in time. It is a fast way to perform a PITR (point-in-time recovery). Flashback Transaction (DBMS_FLASHBACK.TRANSACTION_BACKOUT(XID..))  - To reverse a transaction and its related transactions Advanced use cases Flashback technology is integrated into Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) and Oracle Data Guard. So, apart from the basic use cases mentioned above, the following use cases are addressed using Oracle Flashback. Block Media recovery by RMAN - to perform block level recovery Snapshot Standby - where the standby is temporarily converted to a read/write environment for testing, backup, or migration purposes Re-instate old primary in a Data Guard environment – this avoids the need to restore an old backup and perform a recovery to make it a new standby. Guaranteed Restore Points - to bring back the entire database to an older point-in-time in a guaranteed way. and so on..I hope this introductory overview helps you understand how Flashback features can be used to investigate and recover from logical errors.  As mentioned earlier, I will take a deeper-dive into to some of the critical Flashback features in my upcoming blogs and address common use cases.

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• Getting a handle on mobile data

  - by Eric Jensen

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} written by Ashok Joshi The proliferation of mobile devices in the corporate world is both a blessing as well as a challenge.  Mobile devices improve productivity and the velocity of business for the end users; on the other hand, IT departments need to manage the corporate data and applications that run on these devices. Oracle Database Mobile Server (DMS for short) provides a simple and effective way to deal with the management challenge.  DMS supports data synchronization between a central Oracle database server and data on mobile devices.  It also provides authentication, encryption and application and device management.  Finally, DMS is a highly scalable solution that can be used to manage hundreds of thousands of devices.   Here’s a simplified outline of how such a solution might work. Each device runs local sync and mgmt agents that handle bidirectional data flow with an Oracle enterprise backend, run remote commands, and provide status to the management console. For example, mobile admins could monitor multiple networks of mobile devices, upgrade their software remotely, and even destroy the local database on a compromised device. DMS supports either Oracle Berkeley DB or SQLite for device-local storage, and runs on a wide variety of mobile platforms. The schema for the device-local database is pretty simple – it contains the name of the application that’s installed on the device as well as details such as product name, version number, time of last access etc. Each mobile user has an account on the monitoring system.  DMS supports authentication via the Oracle database authentication mechanisms or alternately, via an external authentication server such as Oracle Identity Management. DMS also provides the option of encrypting the data on disk as well as while it is being synchronized. Whenever a device connects with DMS, it sends the list of all local application changes to the server; the server updates the central repository with this information.  Synchronization can be triggered on-demand, whenever there’s a change on the device (e.g. new application installed or an existing application removed) or via a rule-based schedule (e.g. every Saturday). Synchronization is very fast and efficient, since only the changes are propagated.  This includes resume capability; should synchronization be interrupted for any reason, the next synchronization will resume where the previous synchronization was interrupted. If the device should be lost or stolen, DMS has the capability to remove the applications and/or data from the device. This ability to control access to sensitive data and applications is critical in the corporate environment. The central repository also allows the IT manager to track the kinds of applications that mobile users use and recommend patches and upgrades, while still allowing the mobile user full control over what applications s/he downloads and uses on the device.  This is useful since most devices are used for corporate as well as personal information. In certain restricted use scenarios, the IT manager can also control whether a certain application can be installed on a mobile device.  Should an unapproved application be installed, it can easily be removed the next time the device connects with the central server. Oracle Database mobile server provides a simple, effective and highly secure and scalable solution for managing the data and applications for the mobile workforce.

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• IndyTechFest Recap

  - by Johnm

  The sun had yet to raise above the horizon on Saturday, May 22nd and I was traveling toward the location of the 2010 IndyTechFest. In my freshly awaken, and pre-coffee, state I reflected on the months that preceded this day and how quickly they slipped away. The big day had finally come and the morning dew glistened with a unique brightness that morning. What is this all about? For those who are unfamiliar with IndyTechFest, it is a regional conference held in Indianapolis and hosted by the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association (IndyNDA) and the Indianapolis Professional Association for SQL Server (IndyPASS).  The event presents multiple tracks and sessions covering subjects such as Business Intelligence,  Database Administration, .NET Development, SharePoint Development, Windows Mobile Development as well as non-Microsoft topics such as Lean and MongoDB. This year's event was the third hosting of IndyTechFest. No man is an island No event such as IndyTechFest is executed by a single person. My fellow co-founders, with their highly complementary skill sets and philanthropy make the process very enjoyable. Our amazing volunteers and their aid were indispensible. The generous financial support of our sponsors that made the event and fabulous prizes possible. The spectacular line up of speakers who came from near and far to donate their time and knowledge. Our beloved attendees who sacrificed the first sunny Saturday in weeks to expand their skill sets and network with their peers. We are deeply appreciative. Challenges in preparation With the preparation of any event comes challenges. It is these challenges that makes the process of planning an event so interesting. This year's largest challenge was the location of the event. In the past two years IndyTechFest was held at the Gene B. Glick Junior Achievement Center in Indianapolis. This facility has been the hub of the Indy technical community for many years. As the big day drew near, the facility's availability came into question due to some recent changes that had occurred with those who operated the facility. We began our search for an alternative option. Thankfully, the Marriott Indianapolis East was available, was very spacious and willing to work within the range of our budget. Within days of our event, the decision to move proved to be wise since the prior location had begun renovations to the interior. Whew! Always trust your gut. Every day it's getting better At the ending of each year, we huddle together, review the evaluations and identify an area in which the event could improve. This year's big opportunity for improvement resided in the prize give-away portion at the end of the day. In the 2008 event, admittedly, this portion was rather chaotic, rushed and disorganized. This year, we broke the drawing into two sections, of which each attendee received two tickets. The first ticket was a drawing for the mountain of books that were given away. The second ticket was a drawing for the big prizes, the 2 Xboxes, 3 laptops and iPad. We peppered the ticket drawings with gift card raffles and tossing t-shirts into the audience. If at first you don't succeed, try and try again Each year of IndyTechFest, we have offered a means for ad-hoc sessions or discussion groups to pop-up. To our disappointment it was something that never quite took off. We have always believed that this unique type of session was valuable and wanted to figure out a way to make it work for this year. A special thanks to Alan Stevens, who took on and facilitated the "open space" track and made it an official success. Share with your tweety When the attendee badges were designed we decided to place an emphasis on the attendee's Twitter account as well as the events hash-tag (#IndyTechFest) to encourage some real-time buzz during the day. At the host table we displayed a Twitter feed for all to enjoy. It was quite successful and encouraging use of social media. My badge was missing my Twitter account since it was recently changed. For those who care to follow my rather sparse tweets, my address is @johnnydata. Man, this is one long blog post! All in all it was a very successful event. It is always great to see new faces and meet old friends. The planning for the 2011 IndyTechFest will kick off very soon. We have more capacity for future growth and a truck full of great ideas. Stay tuned!

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• Say What? Podcasting As Part of Your Content Marketing

  - by Mike Stiles

  What do you usually do in your car on the way to work?  Sing along to radio? Stream Pandora or iHeartRadio? Talk on the phone? Sit in total silence? Whatever it is you do, you could be using that time to make yourself an expert in any range of topics…using podcasts. We invite you to follow or subscribe to the daily Oracle Social Spotlight podcast, a quick roundup of the day’s top stories around social marketing and the social networks. After podcasts arrived in 2004, growth was steady but slow. The concept was strong: anyone with a passion for any subject could make a show for anyone who cared to listen. Enter the smartphone, iTunes, new podcasting platforms, and social, and podcasting became easier than ever and made more sense for both podcasters and listeners. Stats show 1 in 5 smartphone owners are podcast consumers and 29% of Americans have listened to a podcast. The potential audience is also larger than ever. “Baked in” podcast apps on over 200 million devices expose users to volumes of audio content with just a tap. 97 million Americans are driving to work every day by themselves. And 38% of Americans listen to audio on a digital device each week, a number that’s projected to double by 2015. Does that mean your brand should be podcasting? That’s part of a larger discussion about your overall content strategy, provided you have one. But if you do and podcasting is a component of it, here are some things to keep in mind: Don’t podcast just to do it. Podcast because you thought of a show customers and prospects will like that they can’t get anywhere else. Sound quality matters. Good microphones are not expensive. Bad sound is annoying, makes your brand feel cheap, and will turn today’s sophisticated ears off. The host matters. Many think they belong on the radio. Few actually do. Your brand’s host should be comfortable & likeable. A top advantage of a podcast is people can bond with a real person. It’s a trust opportunity, so don’t take it lightly. The content matters. “All killer, no filler” means don’t allow babbling just to fill enough time for an episode. Value the listeners’ time, because that time is hard to get. Put time, effort and creativity into it. Sure you’re a business, but you’re competing with content from professional media and showbiz producers. If you can include music, sound effects, and things that amuse the ears, do it. If you start, be consistent. The #1 flaw in podcasting is when listeners can’t count on another episode or don’t know when it’s coming. Don’t skip doing shows just because you can. Get committed. Get your cover art right. Podcasting is about audio, but people shop for podcasts by glancing through graphics. Yours has to be professional, cool, and informative to get listeners interested. Cross-promote your podcast on all your channels. The competition for listeners is fierce, so if you have existing audiences you can leverage to launch your show, use them. Optimize it for mobile. Assume that’s where most listening will take place. If you’re using one of the podcast platform apps, you should be in good shape. Frankly, the percentage of brands that are podcasting is quite low, and that’s okay. Once you move beyond blogging and start connecting with real voices, poor execution can do damage. But more (32%) marketers want to learn how to use podcasting, and more (23%) were increasing their podcasting throughout this year. Bottom line, you want to share your brand’s message and stories wherever your audience might be and in whatever way they prefer to take in content. Many prefer to do that while driving or working out, using the eyes and hands-free medium of audio. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng

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• Given an XML which contains a representation of a graph, how to apply it DFS algorithm? [on hold]

  - by winston smith

  Given the followin XML which is a directed graph: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?> <!DOCTYPE graph PUBLIC "-//FC//DTD red//EN" "../dtd/graph.dtd"> <graph direct="1"> <vertex label="V0"/> <vertex label="V1"/> <vertex label="V2"/> <vertex label="V3"/> <vertex label="V4"/> <vertex label="V5"/> <edge source="V0" target="V1" weight="1"/> <edge source="V0" target="V4" weight="1"/> <edge source="V5" target="V2" weight="1"/> <edge source="V5" target="V4" weight="1"/> <edge source="V1" target="V2" weight="1"/> <edge source="V1" target="V3" weight="1"/> <edge source="V1" target="V4" weight="1"/> <edge source="V2" target="V3" weight="1"/> </graph> With this classes i parsed the graph and give it an adjacency list representation: import java.io.IOException; import java.util.HashSet; import java.util.LinkedList; import java.util.Collection; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.logging.Level; import java.util.logging.Logger; import practica3.util.Disc; public class ParsingXML { public static void main(String[] args) { try { // TODO code application logic here Collection<Vertex> sources = new HashSet<Vertex>(); LinkedList<String> lines = Disc.readFile("xml/directed.xml"); for (String lin : lines) { int i = Disc.find(lin, "source=\""); String data = ""; if (i > 0 && i < lin.length()) { while (lin.charAt(i + 1) != '"') { data += lin.charAt(i + 1); i++; } Vertex v = new Vertex(); v.setName(data); v.setAdy(new HashSet<Vertex>()); sources.add(v); } } Iterator it = sources.iterator(); while (it.hasNext()) { Vertex ver = (Vertex) it.next(); Collection<Vertex> adyacencias = ver.getAdy(); LinkedList<String> ls = Disc.readFile("xml/graphs.xml"); for (String lin : ls) { int i = Disc.find(lin, "target=\""); String data = ""; if (lin.contains("source=\""+ver.getName())) { Vertex v = new Vertex(); if (i > 0 && i < lin.length()) { while (lin.charAt(i + 1) != '"') { data += lin.charAt(i + 1); i++; } v.setName(data); } i = Disc.find(lin, "weight=\""); data = ""; if (i > 0 && i < lin.length()) { while (lin.charAt(i + 1) != '"') { data += lin.charAt(i + 1); i++; } v.setWeight(Integer.parseInt(data)); } if (v.getName() != null) { adyacencias.add(v); } } } } for (Vertex vert : sources) { System.out.println(vert); System.out.println("adyacencias: " + vert.getAdy()); } } catch (IOException ex) { Logger.getLogger(ParsingXML.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } } } This is another class: import java.util.Collection; import java.util.Objects; public class Vertex { private String name; private int weight; private Collection ady; public Collection getAdy() { return ady; } public void setAdy(Collection adyacencias) { this.ady = adyacencias; } public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String nombre) { this.name = nombre; } public int getWeight() { return weight; } public void setWeight(int weight) { this.weight = weight; } @Override public int hashCode() { int hash = 7; hash = 43 * hash + Objects.hashCode(this.name); hash = 43 * hash + this.weight; return hash; } @Override public boolean equals(Object obj) { if (obj == null) { return false; } if (getClass() != obj.getClass()) { return false; } final Vertex other = (Vertex) obj; if (!Objects.equals(this.name, other.name)) { return false; } if (this.weight != other.weight) { return false; } return true; } @Override public String toString() { return "Vertice{" + "name=" + name + ", weight=" + weight + '}'; } } And finally: /** * * @author user */ /* -*-jde-*- */ /* <Disc.java> Contains the main argument*/ import java.io.*; import java.util.LinkedList; /** * Lectura y escritura de archivos en listas de cadenas * Ideal para el uso de las clases para gráficas. * * @author Peralta Santa Anna Victor Miguel * @since Julio 2011 */ public class Disc { /** * Metodo para lectura de un archivo * * @param fileName archivo que se va a leer * @return El archivo en representacion de lista de cadenas */ public static LinkedList<String> readFile(String fileName) throws IOException { BufferedReader file = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName)); LinkedList<String> textlist = new LinkedList<String>(); while (file.ready()) { textlist.add(file.readLine().trim()); } file.close(); /* for(String linea:textlist){ if(linea.contains("source")){ //String generado = linea.replaceAll("<\\w+\\s+\"", ""); //System.out.println(generado); } }*/ return textlist; }//readFile public static int find(String linea,String palabra){ int i,j; boolean found = false; for(i=0,j=0;i<linea.length();i++){ if(linea.charAt(i)==palabra.charAt(j)){ j++; if(j==palabra.length()){ found = true; return i; } }else{ continue; } } if(!found){ i= -1; } return i; } /** * Metodo para la escritura de un archivo * * @param fileName archivo que se va a escribir * @param tofile la lista de cadenas que quedaran en el archivo * @param append el bit que dira si se anexa el contenido o se empieza de cero */ public static void writeFile(String fileName, LinkedList<String> tofile, boolean append) throws IOException { FileWriter file = new FileWriter(fileName, append); for (int i = 0; i < tofile.size(); i++) { file.write(tofile.get(i) + "\n"); } file.close(); }//writeFile /** * Metodo para escritura de un archivo * @param msg archivo que se va a escribir * @param tofile la cadena que quedaran en el archivo * @param append el bit que dira si se anexa el contenido o se empieza de cero */ public static void writeFile(String msg, String tofile, boolean append) throws IOException { FileWriter file = new FileWriter(msg, append); file.write(tofile); file.close(); }//writeFile }// I'm stuck on what can be the best way to given an adjacency list representation of the graph how to apply it Depth-first search algorithm. Any idea of how to aproach to complete the task?

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• Refactoring a Single Rails Model with large methods & long join queries trying to do everything

  - by Kelseydh

  I have a working Ruby on Rails Model that I suspect is inefficient, hard to maintain, and full of unnecessary SQL join queries. I want to optimize and refactor this Model (Quiz.rb) to comply with Rails best practices, but I'm not sure how I should do it. The Rails app is a game that has Missions with many Stages. Users complete Stages by answering Questions that have correct or incorrect Answers. When a User tries to complete a stage by answering questions, the User gets a Quiz entry with many Attempts. Each Attempt records an Answer submitted for that Question within the Stage. A user completes a stage or mission by getting every Attempt correct, and their progress is tracked by adding a new entry to the UserMission & UserStage join tables. All of these features work, but unfortunately the Quiz.rb Model has been twisted to handle almost all of it exclusively. The callbacks began at 'Quiz.rb', and because I wasn't sure how to leave the Quiz Model during a multi-model update, I resorted to using Rails Console to have the @quiz instance variable via self.some_method do all the heavy lifting to retrieve every data value for the game's business logic; resulting in large extended join queries that "dance" all around the Database schema. The Quiz.rb Model that Smells: class Quiz < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user has_many :attempts, dependent: :destroy before_save :check_answer before_save :update_user_mission_and_stage accepts_nested_attributes_for :attempts, :reject_if => lambda { |a| a[:answer_id].blank? }, :allow_destroy => true #Checks every answer within each quiz, adding +1 for each correct answer #within a stage quiz, and -1 for each incorrect answer def check_answer stage_score = 0 self.attempts.each do |attempt| if attempt.answer.correct? == true stage_score += 1 elsif attempt.answer.correct == false stage_score - 1 end end stage_score end def winner return true end def update_user_mission_and_stage ####### #Step 1: Checks if UserMission exists, finds or creates one. #if no UserMission for the current mission exists, creates a new UserMission if self.user_has_mission? == false @user_mission = UserMission.new(user_id: self.user.id, mission_id: self.current_stage.mission_id, available: true) @user_mission.save else @user_mission = self.find_user_mission end ####### #Step 2: Checks if current UserStage exists, stops if true to prevent duplicate entry if self.user_has_stage? @user_mission.save return true else ####### ##Step 3: if step 2 returns false: ##Initiates UserStage creation instructions #checks for winner (winner actions need to be defined) if they complete last stage of last mission for a given orientation if self.passed? && self.is_last_stage? && self.is_last_mission? create_user_stage_and_update_user_mission self.winner #NOTE: The rest are the same, but specify conditions that are available to add badges or other actions upon those conditions occurring: ##if user completes first stage of a mission elsif self.passed? && self.is_first_stage? && self.is_first_mission? create_user_stage_and_update_user_mission #creates user badge for finishing first stage of first mission self.user.add_badge(5) self.user.activity_logs.create(description: "granted first-stage badge", type_event: "badge", value: "first-stage") #If user completes last stage of a given mission, creates a new UserMission elsif self.passed? && self.is_last_stage? && self.is_first_mission? create_user_stage_and_update_user_mission #creates user badge for finishing first mission self.user.add_badge(6) self.user.activity_logs.create(description: "granted first-mission badge", type_event: "badge", value: "first-mission") elsif self.passed? create_user_stage_and_update_user_mission else self.passed? == false return true end end end #Creates a new UserStage record in the database for a successful Quiz question passing def create_user_stage_and_update_user_mission @nu_stage = @user_mission.user_stages.new(user_id: self.user.id, stage_id: self.current_stage.id) @nu_stage.save @user_mission.save self.user.add_points(50) end #Boolean that defines passing a stage as answering every question in that stage correct def passed? self.check_answer >= self.number_of_questions end #Returns the number of questions asked for that stage's quiz def number_of_questions self.attempts.first.answer.question.stage.questions.count end #Returns the current_stage for the Quiz, routing through 1st attempt in that Quiz def current_stage self.attempts.first.answer.question.stage end #Gives back the position of the stage relative to its mission. def stage_position self.attempts.first.answer.question.stage.position end #will find the user_mission for the current user and stage if it exists def find_user_mission self.user.user_missions.find_by_mission_id(self.current_stage.mission_id) end #Returns true if quiz was for the last stage within that mission #helpful for triggering actions related to a user completing a mission def is_last_stage? self.stage_position == self.current_stage.mission.stages.last.position end #Returns true if quiz was for the first stage within that mission #helpful for triggering actions related to a user completing a mission def is_first_stage? self.stage_position == self.current_stage.mission.stages_ordered.first.position end #Returns true if current user has a UserMission for the current stage def user_has_mission? self.user.missions.ids.include?(self.current_stage.mission.id) end #Returns true if current user has a UserStage for the current stage def user_has_stage? self.user.stages.include?(self.current_stage) end #Returns true if current user is on the last mission based on position within a given orientation def is_first_mission? self.user.missions.first.orientation.missions.by_position.first.position == self.current_stage.mission.position end #Returns true if current user is on the first stage & mission of a given orientation def is_last_mission? self.user.missions.first.orientation.missions.by_position.last.position == self.current_stage.mission.position end end My Question Currently my Rails server takes roughly 500ms to 1 sec to process single @quiz.save action. I am confident that the slowness here is due to sloppy code, not bad Database ERD design. What does a better solution look like? And specifically: Should I use join queries to retrieve values like I did here, or is it better to instantiate new objects within the model instead? Or am I missing a better solution? How should update_user_mission_and_stage be refactored to follow best practices? Relevant Code for Reference: quizzes_controller.rb w/ Controller Route Initiating Callback: class QuizzesController < ApplicationController before_action :find_stage_and_mission before_action :find_orientation before_action :find_question def show end def create @user = current_user @quiz = current_user.quizzes.new(quiz_params) if @quiz.save if @quiz.passed? if @mission.next_mission.nil? && @stage.next_stage.nil? redirect_to root_path, notice: "Congratulations, you have finished the last mission!" elsif @stage.next_stage.nil? redirect_to [@mission.next_mission, @mission.first_stage], notice: "Correct! Time for Mission #{@mission.next_mission.position}", info: "Starting next mission" else redirect_to [@mission, @stage.next_stage], notice: "Answer Correct! You passed the stage!" end else redirect_to [@mission, @stage], alert: "You didn't get every question right, please try again." end else redirect_to [@mission, @stage], alert: "Sorry. We were unable to save your answer. Please contact the admministrator." end @questions = @stage.questions.all end private def find_stage_and_mission @stage = Stage.find(params[:stage_id]) @mission = @stage.mission end def find_question @question = @stage.questions.find_by_id params[:id] end def quiz_params params.require(:quiz).permit(:user_id, :attempt_id, {attempts_attributes: [:id, :quiz_id, :answer_id]}) end def find_orientation @orientation = @mission.orientation @missions = @orientation.missions.by_position end end Overview of Relevant ERD Database Relationships: Mission - Stage - Question - Answer - Attempt <- Quiz <- User Mission - UserMission <- User Stage - UserStage <- User Other Models: Mission.rb class Mission < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :orientation has_many :stages has_many :user_missions, dependent: :destroy has_many :users, through: :user_missions #SCOPES scope :by_position, -> {order(position: :asc)} def stages_ordered stages.order(:position) end def next_mission self.orientation.missions.find_by_position(self.position.next) end def first_stage next_mission.stages_ordered.first end end Stage.rb: class Stage < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :mission has_many :questions, dependent: :destroy has_many :user_stages, dependent: :destroy has_many :users, through: :user_stages accepts_nested_attributes_for :questions, reject_if: :all_blank, allow_destroy: true def next_stage self.mission.stages.find_by_position(self.position.next) end end Question.rb class Question < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :stage has_many :answers, dependent: :destroy accepts_nested_attributes_for :answers, :reject_if => lambda { |a| a[:body].blank? }, :allow_destroy => true end Answer.rb: class Answer < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :question has_many :attempts, dependent: :destroy end Attempt.rb: class Attempt < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :answer belongs_to :quiz end User.rb: class User < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :school has_many :activity_logs has_many :user_missions, dependent: :destroy has_many :missions, through: :user_missions has_many :user_stages, dependent: :destroy has_many :stages, through: :user_stages has_many :orientations, through: :school has_many :quizzes, dependent: :destroy has_many :attempts, through: :quizzes def latest_stage_position self.user_missions.last.user_stages.last.stage.position end end UserMission.rb class UserMission < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user belongs_to :mission has_many :user_stages, dependent: :destroy end UserStage.rb class UserStage < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user belongs_to :stage belongs_to :user_mission end

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love"

  - by Jeff

  This is the third post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch in the next month or two. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects I finally hit a point in the re-do of CoasterBuzz where I feel like the major pieces are in place... rewritten, ported and what not, so that I can focus now on front-end design and more interesting creative problems. I've been asked on more than one occasion (OK, just twice) what's going on under the covers, so I figure this might be a good time to explain the overall architecture. As it turns out, I'm using a whole lof of the "Web stack of love," as Scott Hanselman likes to refer to it. Oh that Hanselman. First off, at the center of it all, is BizTalk. Just kidding. That's "enterprise architecture" humor, where every discussion starts with how they'll use BizTalk. Here are the bigger moving parts: It's fairly straight forward. A common library lives in a number of Web apps, all of which are (or will be) powered by ASP.NET MVC 4. They all talk to the same database. There is the main Web site, which also has the endpoint for the Silverlight-based Feed app. The cstr.bz site handles redirects, which are generated when news items are published and sent to Twitter. Facebook publishing is handled via the RSS Graffiti Facebook app. The API site handles requests from the Windows Phone app. The main site depends very heavily on POP Forums, the open source, MVC-based forum I maintain. It serves a number of functions, primarily handling users. These user objects serve in non-forum roles to handle things like news and database contributions, maintaining track records (coaster nerd for "list of rides I've been on") and, perhaps most importantly, paid club memberships. Before I get into more specifics, note that the "glue" for everything is Ninject, the dependency injection framework. I actually prefer StructureMap these days, but I started with Ninject in POP Forums a long time ago. POP Forums has a static class, PopForumsActivation, that new's up an instance of the container, and you can call it from where ever. The downside is that the forums require Ninject in your MVC app as the default dependency resolver. At some point, I'll decouple it, but for now it's not in the way. In the general sense, the entire set of apps follow a repository-service-controller-view pattern. Repos just do data access, service classes do business logic, controllers compose and route, views view. The forum also provides Scoring Game functionality. The Scoring Game is a reasonably abstract framework to award users points based on certain actions, and then award achievements when a certain number of point events happen. For example, the forum already awards a point when someone plus-one's a post you made. You can set up an achievement that says, "Give the user an award when they've had 100 posts plus'd." It also does zero-point entries into the ledger, so if you make a post, you could award an achievement based on 100 posts made. Wiring in the scoring game to CoasterBuzz functionality is just a matter of going to the Ninject container and getting an instance of the event publisher, and passing it events. Forum adapters were introduced into POP Forums a few versions ago, and they can intercept the model generated for forum topic lists and threads and designate an alternate view. These are used to make the "Day in Pictures" forum, where users can upload photos as frame-by-frame photo threads. Another adapter adds an association UI, so users can associate specific amusement parks with their trip report posts. The Silverlight-based Feed app talks to a simple JSON endpoint in the main app. This uses an underlying library I wrote ages ago, simply called Feeds, that aggregates event information. You inherit from a base class that creates instances of a publisher interface, and then use that class to send it an event type and any number of data fields. Feeds has two publishers: One is to the database, and that's used for the endpoint that talks to the Silverlight app. The second publisher publishes to Twitter, if the event is of the type "news." The wiring is a little strange, because for the new posts and topics events, I'm actually pulling out the forum repository classes from the Ninject container and replacing them with overridden methods to publish. I should probably be doing this at the service class level, but whatever. It's my mess. cstr.bz doesn't do anything interesting. It looks up the path, and if it has a match, does a 301 redirect to the long URL. The API site just serves up JSON for the Windows Phone app. The Windows Phone app is Silverlight, of course, and there isn't much to it. It does use the control toolkit, but beyond that, it relies on a simple class that creates a Webclient and calls the server for JSON to deserialize. The same class is now used by the Feed app, which used to use WCF. Simple is better. Data access in POP Forums is all straight SQL, because a lot of it was ported from the ASP.NET version. Most CoasterBuzz data access is handled by the Entity Framework, using the code-first model. The context class in this case does a lot of work to make sure that the table and key mapping works, since much of it breaks from the normal conventions of EF. One of the more powerful things you can do with EF, once you understand the little gotchas, is split tables by row into different entities. For example, a roller coaster photo has everything in the same row, including the metadata, the thumbnail bytes and the image itself. Obviously, if you want to get a list of photos to iterate over in a view, you don't want to get the image data. The use of navigation properties makes it easier to get just what you want. The front end includes Razor views in MVC, and jQuery is used for client-side goodness. I'm also using jQuery UI in a few places, for tabs, a dialog box and autocomplete. I'm also, tentatively, using jQuery Mobile. I've already ported most forum views to Mobile, but they need some work as v1.1 isn't finished yet. I'm not sure if I'll ship CoasterBuzz with mobile views or not yet. It's on the radar, but not something in my delivery criteria. That covers all of the big frameworks in play. Next time I hope to talk more about the front-end experience, which to me is where most of the fun is these days. Hoping to launch in the next month or two. Getting tired of looking at the old site!

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• What Counts For A DBA: Foresight

  - by drsql

  Of all the valuable attributes of a DBA covered so far in this series, ranging from passion to humility to practicality, perhaps one of the most important attributes may turn out to be the most seemingly-nebulous: foresight. According to Free Dictionary foresight is the "perception of the significance and nature of events before they have occurred". Foresight does not come naturally to most people, as the parent of any teenager will attest. No matter how clearly you see their problems coming they won't listen, and have to fail before eventually (hopefully) learning for themselves. Having graduated from the school of hard knocks, the DBA, the naive teenager no longer, acquires the ability to foretell how events will unfold in response to certain actions or attitudes with the unerring accuracy of a doom-laden prophet. Like Simba in the Lion King, after a few blows to the head, we foretell that a sore head that will be the inevitable consequence of a swing of Rafiki's stick, and we take evasive action. However, foresight is about more than simply learning when to duck. It's about taking the time to understand and prevent the habits that caused the stick to swing in the first place. And based on this definition, I often think there is a lot less foresight on display in my industry than there ought to be. Most DBAs reading this blog will spot a line such as the following in a piece of "working" code, understand immediately why it is less than optimimum, and take evasive action. …WHERE CAST (columnName as int) = 1 However, the programmers who regularly write this sort of code clearly lack that foresight, and this and numerous other examples of similarly-malodorous code prevail throughout our industry (and provide premium-grade fertilizer for the healthy growth of many a consultant's bank account). Sometimes, perhaps harried by impatient managers and painfully tight deadlines, everyone makes mistakes. Yes, I too occasionally write code that "works", but basically stinks. When the problems manifest, it is sometimes accompanied by a sense of grim recognition that somewhere in me existed the foresight to know that that approach would lead to this problem. However, in the headlong rush, warning signs got overlooked, lessons learned previously, which could supply the foresight to the current project, were lost and not applied.   Of course, the problem often is a simple lack of skills, training and knowledge in the relevant technology and/or business space; programmers and DBAs forced to do their best in the face of inadequate training, or to apply their skills in areas where they lack experience. However, often the problem goes deeper than this; I detect in some DBAs and programmers a certain laziness of attitude.   They veer from one project to the next, going with "whatever works", unwilling or unable to take the time to understand where their actions are leading them. Of course, the whole "Agile" mindset is often interpreted to favor flexibility and rapid production over aiming to get things right the first time. The faster you try to travel in the dark, frequently changing direction, the more important it is to have someone who has the foresight to know at least roughly where you are heading. This is doubly true for the data tier which, no matter how you try to deny it, simply cannot be "redone" every month as you learn aspects of the world you are trying to model that, with a little bit of foresight, you would have seen coming.   Sometimes, when as a DBA you can glance briefly at 200 lines of working SQL code and know instinctively why it will cause problems, foresight can feel like magic, but it isn't; it's more like muscle memory. It is acquired as the consequence of good experience, useful communication with those around you, and a willingness to learn continually, through continued education as well as from failure. Foresight can be deployed only by finding time to understand how the lessons learned from other DBAs, and other projects, can help steer the current project in the right direction.   C.S. Lewis once said "The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is." It cannot be avoided; the quality of what you build now is going to affect you, and others, at some point in the future. Take the time to acquire foresight; it is a love letter to your future self, to say you cared.

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• LA SPÉCIALISATION POUR SE DIFFÉRENCIER ET ÊTRE VALORISÉ

  - by michaela.seika(at)oracle.com

  Software. Hardware. Complete. inside the Click Here The order you must follow to make the colored link appear in browsers. If not the default window link will appear 1. Select the word you want to use for the link 2. Select the desired color, Red, Black, etc 3. Select bold if necessary ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Templates use two sizes of fonts and the sans-serif font tag for the email. All Fonts should be (Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif) tags Normal size reading body fonts should be set to the size of 2. Small font sizes should be set to 1 !!!!!!!DO NOT USE ANY OTHER SIZE FONT FOR THE EMAILS!!!!!!!! ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ --     LA SPÉCIALISATION  POUR SE DIFFÉRENCIER ET ÊTRE VALORISÉ       Le marché nous demande de plus en plus de solutions et d’engagements. Pour bâtir ces solutions nous nous appuyons sur vous, Partenaires Oracle. En matière d’engagements, Oracle se doit de communiquer auprès du marché quant à la spécialisation de ses partenaires, sur leurs compétences en fonction des projets que les clients nous demandent d’adresser. Plus de 50 spécialisations sont à ce jour disponibles pour les partenaires Gold, Platinum et Diamond : • Sur les produits Technologiques tels que la Base de Données, les options de la Base, la SOA, la Business Intelligence, … • Sur les produits Applicatifs, tels que l’ERP, le CRM, … • Sur les produits Hardware, les Systèmes d’exploitation. Afin de vous aider à vous spécialiser et donc à vous certifier, nos 2 distributeurs à valeur ajoutée, Altimate et Arrow ECS, vous assistent dans cette démarche. ALTIMATE vous propose de participer Lunch & Spécialisation tour Profitez de ces dispositifs qui sont mis en place pour vous afin de vous spécialiser et profiter de tous les bénéfices auxquels vous donne accès la spécialisation. ARROW ECS vous propose de participer : L'Ecole de la spécialisation Oracle by Arrow Profitez de ces dispositifs qui sont mis en place pour vous afin de vous spécialiser et profiter de tous les bénéfices auxquels vous donne accès la spécialisation. Oracle Solutions Tour Découvrez la solution Oracle lors de ce tour de France. Au programme :  roadmaps, ateliers produits et solutions, certifications     BÉNÉFICES en savoir + • l’engagement d’Oracle aux côtés des partenaires pour adresser les grands dossiers • la visibilité auprès des clients pour être identifié comme Expert sur une offre, reconnu et validé par Oracle • le support (accès support gratuit), Oracle University (vouchers pour certifier gratuitement vos équipes de Consultants Implementation) • les budgets Marketing (lead generation, création de campagnes Marketing, être sponsor d’événements clients)   Différenciez-vous en vous spécialisant sur votre domaine d’expertise et accélérez votre succès ! Oracle et ses Distributeurs à Valeur Ajoutée     Eric Fontaine Directeur Alliances & Channel Technologie Europe du Sud vous présente en vidéo la spécialisation et ses avantages.                                         CONTACTS : ORACLE Jean-Jacques PanissiéOracle Partner Development A&C Technology +33 157 60 28 52 ALTIMATE Sophie Daval +33 1 34 58 47 68 ARROW [email protected] +33 1 49 97 59 63          

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• User-Defined Customer Events & their impact (FA Type Profile)

  - by Rajesh Sharma

  CC&B automatically creates field activities when a specific Customer Event takes place. This depends on the way you have setup your Field Activity Type Profiles, the templates within, and associated SP Condition(s) on the template. CC&B uses the service point type, its state and referenced customer event to determine which field activity type to generate.   Customer events available in the base product include: Cut for Non-payment (CNP) Disconnect Warning (DIWA) Reconnect for Payment (REPY) Reread (RERD) Stop Service (STOP) Start Service (STRT) Start/Stop (STSP)   Note the Field values/codes defined for each event.   CC&B comes with a flexibility to define new set of customer events. These can be defined in the Look Up - CUST_EVT_FLG. Values from the Look Up are used on the Field Activity Type Profile Template page.     So what's the use of having user-defined Customer Events? And how will the system detect such events in order to create field activity(s)?   Well, system can only detect such events when you reference a user-defined customer event on a Severance Event Type for an event type Create Field Activities.     This way you can create additional field activities of a specific field activity type for user-defined customer events.   One of our customers adopted this feature and created a user-defined customer event CNPW - Cut for Non-payment for Water Services. This event was then linked on a Field Activity Type Profile and referenced on a Severance Event - CUT FOR NON PAY-W. The associated Severance Process was configured to trigger a reconnection process if it was cancelled (done by defining a Post Cancel Algorithm). Whenever this Severance Event was executed, a specific type of Field Activity was generated for disconnection purposes. The Field Activity type was determined by the system from the Field Activity Type Profile referenced for the SP Type, SP's state and the referenced user-defined customer event. All was working well until the time when they realized that in spite of the Severance Process getting cancelled (when a payment was made); the Post Cancel Algorithm was not executed to start a Reconnection Severance Process for the purpose of generating a reconnection field activity and reconnecting the service.   Basically, the Post Cancel algorithm (if specified on a Severance Process Template) is triggered when a Severance Process gets cancelled because a credit transaction has affected/relieved a Service Agreement's debt.   So what exactly was happening? Now we come to actual question as to what is the impact in having a user-defined customer event.   System defined/base customer events are hard-coded across the entire system. There is an impact even if you remove any customer event entry from the Look Up. User-defined customer events are not recognized by the system anywhere else except in the severance process, as described above.   There are few programs which have routines to first validate the completion of disconnection field activities, which were raised as a result of customer event CNP - Cut for Non-payment in order to perform other associated actions. One such program is the Post Cancel Algorithm, referenced on a Severance Process Template, generally used to reconnect services which were disconnected from other Severance Event, specifically CNP - Cut for Non-Payment. Post cancel algorithm provided by the product - SEV POST CAN does the following (below is the algorithm's description):   This algorithm is called after a severance process has been cancelled (typically because the debt was paid and the SA is no longer eligible to be on the severance process). It checks to see if the process has a completed 'disconnect' event and, if so, starts a reconnect process using the Reconnect Severance Process Template defined in the parameter.    Notice the underlined text. This algorithm implicitly checks for Field Activities having completed status, which were generated from Severance Events as a result of CNP - Cut for Non-payment customer event.   Now if we look back to the customer's issue, we can relate that the Post Cancel algorithm was triggered, but was not able to find any 'Completed' CNP - Cut for Non-payment related field activity. And hence was not able to start a reconnection severance process. This was because a field activity was generated and completed for a customer event CNPW - Cut for Non-payment of Water Services instead.   To conclude, if you introduce new customer events that extend or simulate base customer events, the ones that are included in the base product, ensure that there is no other impact either direct or indirect to other business functions that the application has to offer.  

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• How to Achieve Real-Time Data Protection and Availabilty....For Real

  - by JoeMeeks

  There is a class of business and mission critical applications where downtime or data loss have substantial negative impact on revenue, customer service, reputation, cost, etc. Because the Oracle Database is used extensively to provide reliable performance and availability for this class of application, it also provides an integrated set of capabilities for real-time data protection and availability. Active Data Guard, depicted in the figure below, is the cornerstone for accomplishing these objectives because it provides the absolute best real-time data protection and availability for the Oracle Database. This is a bold statement, but it is supported by the facts. It isn’t so much that alternative solutions are bad, it’s just that their architectures prevent them from achieving the same levels of data protection, availability, simplicity, and asset utilization provided by Active Data Guard. Let’s explore further. Backups are the most popular method used to protect data and are an essential best practice for every database. Not surprisingly, Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) is one of the most commonly used features of the Oracle Database. But comparing Active Data Guard to backups is like comparing apples to motorcycles. Active Data Guard uses a hot (open read-only), synchronized copy of the production database to provide real-time data protection and HA. In contrast, a restore from backup takes time and often has many moving parts - people, processes, software and systems – that can create a level of uncertainty during an outage that critical applications can’t afford. This is why backups play a secondary role for your most critical databases by complementing real-time solutions that can provide both data protection and availability. Before Data Guard, enterprises used storage remote-mirroring for real-time data protection and availability. Remote-mirroring is a sophisticated storage technology promoted as a generic infrastructure solution that makes a simple promise – whatever is written to a primary volume will also be written to the mirrored volume at a remote site. Keeping this promise is also what causes data loss and downtime when the data written to primary volumes is corrupt – the same corruption is faithfully mirrored to the remote volume making both copies unusable. This happens because remote-mirroring is a generic process. It has no  intrinsic knowledge of Oracle data structures to enable advanced protection, nor can it perform independent Oracle validation BEFORE changes are applied to the remote copy. There is also nothing to prevent human error (e.g. a storage admin accidentally deleting critical files) from also impacting the remote mirrored copy. Remote-mirroring tricks users by creating a false impression that there are two separate copies of the Oracle Database. In truth; while remote-mirroring maintains two copies of the data on different volumes, both are part of a single closely coupled system. Not only will remote-mirroring propagate corruptions and administrative errors, but the changes applied to the mirrored volume are a result of the same Oracle code path that applied the change to the source volume. There is no isolation, either from a storage mirroring perspective or from an Oracle software perspective.  Bottom line, storage remote-mirroring lacks both the smarts and isolation level necessary to provide true data protection. Active Data Guard offers much more than storage remote-mirroring when your objective is protecting your enterprise from downtime and data loss. Like remote-mirroring, an Active Data Guard replica is an exact block for block copy of the primary. Unlike remote-mirroring, an Active Data Guard replica is NOT a tightly coupled copy of the source volumes - it is a completely independent Oracle Database. Active Data Guard’s inherent knowledge of Oracle data block and redo structures enables a separate Oracle Database using a different Oracle code path than the primary to use the full complement of Oracle data validation methods before changes are applied to the synchronized copy. These include: physical check sum, logical intra-block checking, lost write validation, and automatic block repair. The figure below illustrates the stark difference between the knowledge that remote-mirroring can discern from an Oracle data block and what Active Data Guard can discern. An Active Data Guard standby also provides a range of additional services enabled by the fact that it is a running Oracle Database - not just a mirrored copy of data files. An Active Data Guard standby database can be open read-only while it is synchronizing with the primary. This enables read-only workloads to be offloaded from the primary system and run on the active standby - boosting performance by utilizing all assets. An Active Data Guard standby can also be used to implement many types of system and database maintenance in rolling fashion. Maintenance and upgrades are first implemented on the standby while production runs unaffected at the primary. After the primary and standby are synchronized and all changes have been validated, the production workload is quickly switched to the standby. The only downtime is the time required for user connections to transfer from one system to the next. These capabilities further expand the expectations of availability offered by a data protection solution beyond what is possible to do using storage remote-mirroring. So don’t be fooled by appearances.  Storage remote-mirroring and Active Data Guard replication may look similar on the surface - but the devil is in the details. Only Active Data Guard has the smarts, the isolation, and the simplicity, to provide the best data protection and availability for the Oracle Database. Stay tuned for future blog posts that dive into the many differences between storage remote-mirroring and Active Data Guard along the dimensions of data protection, data availability, cost, asset utilization and return on investment. For additional information on Active Data Guard, see: Active Data Guard Technical White Paper Active Data Guard vs Storage Remote-Mirroring Active Data Guard Home Page on the Oracle Technology Network

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• Adding a DLL to the GAC in Windows 7

  - by Jim Giercyk

  I recently created a DLL and I wanted to reference it from a project I was developing in Visual Studio.  In previous versions of Windows, doing so was simply a matter of dropping the DLL file in the C:\Windows\assembly folder.  That would add the DLL to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and make it accessible in Visual Studio.  However, as is often the case, Window 7 is different.  Even if you have Administrator privileges on your machine, you still do not have permission to drop a file in the assembly folder.  Undaunted, I thought about using the old DOS command line utility gacutil.exe.  Microsoft developed the tool as part of the .Net framework, and it is available in the Windows SDK Framework Tools.  If you have never used gacutil.exe before, you can find out everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ex0ss12c(v=vs.80).aspx .  Unfortunately, if you do not have the Windows SDK loaded on your development machine, you will need to install it to use gacutil, but it is relatively quick and painless, and the framework tools are very useful.  Look here for your latest SDK: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/search.aspx?q=Windows%20SDK .   After installing the SDK, I tried installing my DLL to the GAC by running gacutil from a DOS command line: That’s odd.  Microsoft is shipping a tool that cannot be executed even with Administrator rights?  Let me stop here and say that I am by no means a Windows security expert, so I actually did contact my system administrators, and they were not sure how to fix the problem….there must be a super administrator access level, but it isn’t available to your average developer in my company.  The solution outlined here is working within the boundaries of a normal windows Administrator. So, now the hacker in me bubbles to the surface.  What if I were to create a simple BAT file containing the gacutil command?  It’s so crazy it just might work!  Ugh!  I was starting to think this would never work, but then I realized that simply executing a batch program did not change my level of access.  Typically in Windows 7, you would select the “Run As Administrator” option to temporarily act as an administrator for the purpose of executing a process.  However, that option is not available for BAT files run from the command line.  SOLUTION: Create a desktop shortcut to execute the BAT file, which in turn will execute the line command…..are you still with me?  I created a shortcut and pointed it to my batch file.  Theoretically, all I need to do now is right-click on the shortcut and select “Run As Administrator” and we’re good, right?  Well, kinda.  If you notice the syntax of my BAT file, the name of the DLL is passed in as a parameter.  Therefore, I either have to hard-code the file name in the BAT program (YUCK!!), or I can leave the parameter and drag the DLL file to the shortcut and drop it.  Sweet, drag-and-drop works for me…..but if I use the drag-and-drop method, there is no way for me to right-click and select “Run As Administrator”.  That is not a problem…..I simply have to adjust the properties of the shortcut I created and I am in business.  I Right-clicked on the shortcut and select “Properties”.  Under the “Shortcut” tab there is an “Advanced” button…..I clicked it. All I needed to do was check the “Run As Administrator” box: In summary, what I have done is create a BAT file to execute a command line utility, gacutil.exe.  Then, rather than executing the BAT file from the command line, I created a desktop shortcut to run it and set the shortcut properties to “Run As Administrator”.  This will effectively mean I am executing the command line utility with Administrator privileges.  Pretty sneaky. Now, when I drag the DLL file  over to the shortcut, it starts the BAT file and adds the DLL to the assembly cache.  I created another BAT file to remove a DLL from the GAC in case the need should arise.  The code for that is: Give it a try.  I can’t imagine why updating the GAC has been made into such a chore in Windows 7.  Hopefully there is a service pack in the works that will give developers the functionality they had in Windows XP, but in the meantime, this workaround is extremely useful.

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• Breaking up the Workday– Overcoming the Workaholic Syndrome

  - by dwahlin

  Hi, my name’s Dan Wahlin and I’m a workaholic – I admit it. It’s good from the standpoint that I get a lot done but it also has a lot of cons associated with it as well that I’m not proud of. I literally can’t watch TV without feeling like I should be doing something more productive (although I have no problem going to see movies at a theater or watching sporting events – that’s my escape I guess). On vacation it’s sometimes difficult the first few days to just “let go” of work and enjoy the time with my family. I always feel like I should be checking email and following up with different business projects. Fortunately, my wife knows me really well after 17 years of marriage and “gently” restricts my usage of laptops and other gadgets while we’re out. She also reminds me that constantly burying my face in gadgets just isn’t cool and shows a distinct lack of self control. On a given day I typically put in between 12 (at a minimum) up to 16-18 hours working on projects. My company does .NET consulting (ASP.NET/jQuery, SharePoint and Silverlight) but we also do a lot in the training space so there’s always a client project, some new courseware or some other deliverable that has to be worked on. My normal process for handling that is to just work my butt off and see how much I can get done. That process has worked well for a long time but when you start realizing that your happiness comes from how much work you accomplished that day then you have a problem. That’s especially true if you have kids (which I do….two awesome boys). It’s almost as if working more hours feels like I’m more successful or something which is of course ridiculous. It may actually mean that I’m too distracted or disorganized. Lately I’ve realized that while I’m still productive and always meet my deadlines, I’m really burnt out by the afternoon and have lost some of the excitement I used to have. Part of that’s normal I think given that I’ve been doing this for close to 15 years now, but in thinking through it more I realized that I just need to get away from the desk and take a break. By far, the happiest time of my life was my childhood. Part of that was due to having awesome parents, having far less responsibility (a big factor I suspect), being able to hang-out with friends at school, playing sports, games, etc. but I think a big part of the overall happiness came from being outside a lot. I lived on my bike as a little kid and as I grew up I shared time between riding an ATV all over the place, shooting hoops on the basketball court, playing golf and working on a golf course (all outside work of course).  Being a software developer and trainer I generally spend 95% or more of my day indoors and only see the sun when driving from place to place or by looking out the window (that’s sad because I live in a suburb of Phoenix, AZ where it’s nearly always sunny). I haven’t looked into any scientific studies on the matter, but I’d be willing to bet there’s a direct correlation between overall productivity/happiness and being outside some throughout the day (sunny or not). But, I wasn’t sure what to do about it since I do have a lot of deadlines I need to meet after all. While talking with my wife last night I mentioned how I feel like I’m in a rut and want to get the “fun” back that I used to have. She immediately said that I need to start making time for breaks (a real quick fact – she’s a lot smarter than me and nearly always right). Of course my first thought was that I’d be less productive taking breaks. If I spend 2 hours just relaxing then I’m losing 2 hours of work. But, I thought about it more and realized that I’m probably less productive when I work 10+ hours and only take less than 30 minutes for a lunch break to relax a little. I bet my brain is screaming, “Please let me relax a little so I can figure out these problems you’re trying to resolve!”. So, starting today I’m going to try to break the workaholic habit and spend time outside of the office. That could mean sitting around outside, working out, golfing, or whatever. I’ve decided that no gadgets are allowed during that time and that I shouldn’t work for more than 4 hours straight without taking a break. I have no idea how my little “break the workaholic syndrome” experiment will go or how long it will last, but I’d be very interested in hearing from others on how they keep fresh and focused without working yourself to death. If you have any specific ideas, techniques or practices you follow please share them. There’s a lot more to life than work and some of us (and I’m thinking of myself specifically) need to take a long, hard look at what kind of balance we currently have. I’d hate to look back at my life when I’m 80 years old and say, “The only thing I did was work – I missed out on life!”.

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• Do you know your ADF "grace period?"

  - by Chris Muir

  What does the term "support" mean to you in context of vendors such as Oracle giving your organization support with our products? Over the last few weeks I'm taken a straw poll to discuss this very question with customers, and I've received a wide array of answers much to my surprise (which I've paraphrased): "Support means my staff can access dedicated resources to assist them solve problems" "Support means I can call Oracle at anytime to request assistance" "Support means we can expect fixes and patches to bugs in Oracle software" The last expectation is the one I'd like to focus on in this post, keep it in mind while reading this blog. From Oracle's perspective as we're in the business of support, we in fact offer numerous services which are captured on the table in the following page. As the text under the table indicates, you should consult the relevant Oracle Lifetime Support brochures to understand the length of time Oracle will support Oracle products. As I'm a product manager for ADF that sits under the FMW tree of Oracle products, let's consider ADF in particular. The FMW brochure is found here. On page 8 and 9 you'll see the current "Application Development Framework 11gR1 (11.1.1.x)" and "Application Development Framework 11gR2 (11.1.2)" releases are supported out to 2017 for Extended Support. This timeframe is pretty standard for Oracle's current released products, though as new releases roll in we should see those dates extended. On page 8 of the PDF note the comment at the end of this page that refers to the Oracle Support document 209768.1: For more-detailed information on bug fix and patch release policies, please refer to the “Error Correction Support Policy” on MyOracle Support. This policy document is important as it introduces Oracle's Error Correction Support Policy which addresses "patches and fixes". You can find it attached the previous Oracle Support document 209768.1. Broadly speaking while Oracle does provide "generalized support" up to 2017 for ADF, the Error Correction Support Policy dictates when Oracle will provide "patches and fixes" for Oracle software, and this is where the concept of the "grace period" comes in. As Oracle releases different versions of Oracle software, say 11.1.1.4.0, you are fully supported for patches and fixes for that specific version. However when we release the next version, say 11.1.1.5.0, Oracle provides at minimum of 3 months to a maximum of 1 year "grace period" where we'll continue to provide patches and fixes for the previous version. This gives you time to move from 11.1.1.4.0 to 11.1.1.5.0 without being unsupported for patches and fixes. The last paragraph does generalize as I've attempted to highlight the concept of the grace period rather than the specific dates for any version. For specific ADF and FMW versions and their respective grace periods and when they terminated you must visit Oracle Support Note 1290894.1. I'd like to include a screenshot here of the relevant table from that Oracle Support Note but as it is will be frequently updated it's better I force you to visit that note. Be careful to heed the comment in the note: According to policy, the Grace Period has passed because a newer Patch Set has been released for more than a year. Its important to note that the Lifetime Support Policy and Error Correction Support Policy documents are the single source of truth, subject to change, and will provide exceptions when required. This My Oracle Support document is providing a summary of the Grace Period dates and time lines for planning purposes. So remember to return to the policy document for all definitions, note 1290894.1 is a summary only and not guaranteed to be up to date or correct. A last point from Oracle's perspective. Why doesn't Oracle provide patches and fixes for all releases as long as they're supported? Amongst other reasons, it's a matter of practicality. Consider JDeveloper 10.1.3 released in 2005. JDeveloper 10.1.3 is still currently supported to 2017, but since that version was released there has been just under 20 newer releases of JDeveloper. Now multiply that across all Oracle's products and imagine the number of releases Oracle would have to provide fixes and patches for, and maintain environments to test them, build them, staff to write them and more, it's simple beyond the capabilities of even a large software vendor like Oracle. So the "grace period" restricts that patches and fixes window to something manageable. In conclusion does the concept of the "grace period" matter to you? If you define support as "getting assistance from Oracle" then maybe not. But if patches and fixes are important to you, then you need to understand the "grace period" and operate within the bounds of Oracle's Error Correction Support Policy. Disclaimer: this blog post was written July 2012. Oracle Support policies do change from time to time so the emphasis is on you to double check the facts presented in this blog.

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• Deterministic/Consistent Unique Masking

  - by Dinesh Rajasekharan-Oracle

  One of the key requirements while masking data in large databases or multi database environment is to consistently mask some columns, i.e. for a given input the output should always be the same. At the same time the masked output should not be predictable. Deterministic masking also eliminates the need to spend enormous amount of time spent in identifying data relationships, i.e. parent and child relationships among columns defined in the application tables. In this blog post I will explain different ways of consistently masking the data across databases using Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting The readers of post should have minimal knowledge on Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, Application Data Modeling, Data Masking concepts. For more information on these concepts, please refer to Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting document Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting 12c provides four methods using which users can consistently yet irreversibly mask their inputs. 1. Substitute 2. SQL Expression 3. Encrypt 4. User Defined Function SUBSTITUTE The substitute masking format replaces the original value with a value from a pre-created database table. As the method uses a hash based algorithm in the back end the mappings are consistent. For example consider DEPARTMENT_ID in EMPLOYEES table is replaced with FAKE_DEPARTMENT_ID from FAKE_TABLE. The substitute masking transformation that all occurrences of DEPARTMENT_ID say ‘101’ will be replaced with ‘502’ provided same substitution table and column is used , i.e. FAKE_TABLE.FAKE_DEPARTMENT_ID. The following screen shot shows the usage of the Substitute masking format with in a masking definition: Note that the uniqueness of the masked value depends on the number of columns being used in the substitution table i.e. if the original table contains 50000 unique values, then for the masked output to be unique and deterministic the substitution column should also contain 50000 unique values without which only consistency is maintained but not uniqueness. SQL EXPRESSION SQL Expression replaces an existing value with the output of a specified SQL Expression. For example while masking an EMPLOYEES table the EMAIL_ID of an employee has to be in the format EMPLOYEE’s [email protected] while FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME are the actual column names of the EMPLOYEES table then the corresponding SQL Expression will look like %FIRST_NAME%||’.’||%LAST_NAME%||’@COMPANY.COM’. The advantage of this technique is that if you are masking FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME of the EMPLOYEES table than the corresponding EMAIL ID will be replaced accordingly by the masking scripts. One of the interesting aspect’s of a SQL Expressions is that you can use sub SQL expressions, which means that you can write a nested SQL and use it as SQL Expression to address a complex masking business use cases. SQL Expression can also be used to consistently replace value with hashed value using Oracle’s PL/SQL function ORA_HASH. The following SQL Expression will help in the previous example for replacing the DEPARTMENT_IDs with a hashed number ORA_HASH (%DEPARTMENT_ID%, 1000) The following screen shot shows the usage of encrypt masking format with in the masking definition: ORA_HASH takes three arguments: 1. Expression which can be of any data type except LONG, LOB, User Defined Type [nested table type is allowed]. In the above example I used the Original value as expression. 2. Number of hash buckets which can be number between 0 and 4294967295. The default value is 4294967295. You can also co-relate the number of hash buckets to a range of numbers. In the above example above the bucket value is specified as 1000, so the end result will be a hashed number in between 0 and 1000. 3. Seed, can be any number which decides the consistency, i.e. for a given seed value the output will always be same. The default seed is 0. In the above SQL Expression a seed in not specified, so it to 0. If you have to use a non default seed then the function will look like. ORA_HASH (%DEPARTMENT_ID%, 1000, 1234 The uniqueness depends on the input and the number of hash buckets used. However as ORA_HASH uses a 32 bit algorithm, considering birthday paradox or pigeonhole principle there is a 0.5 probability of collision after 232-1 unique values. ENCRYPT Encrypt masking format uses a blend of 3DES encryption algorithm, hashing, and regular expression to produce a deterministic and unique masked output. The format of the masked output corresponds to the specified regular expression. As this technique uses a key [string] to encrypt the data, the same string can be used to decrypt the data. The key also acts as seed to maintain consistent outputs for a given input. The following screen shot shows the usage of encrypt masking format with in the masking definition: Regular Expressions may look complex for the first time users but you will soon realize that it’s a simple language. There are many resources in internet, oracle documentation, oracle learning library, my oracle support on writing a Regular Expressions, out of all the following My Oracle Support document helped me to get started with Regular Expressions: Oracle SQL Support for Regular Expressions[Video](Doc ID 1369668.1) USER DEFINED FUNCTION [UDF] User Defined Function or UDF provides flexibility for the users to code their own masking logic in PL/SQL, which can be called from masking Defintion. The standard format of an UDF in Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting is: Function udf_func (rowid varchar2, column_name varchar2, original_value varchar2) returns varchar2; Where • rowid is the row identifier of the column that needs to be masked • column_name is the name of the column that needs to be masked • original_value is the column value that needs to be masked You can achieve deterministic masking by using Oracle’s built in hash functions like, ORA_HASH, DBMS_CRYPTO.MD4, DBMS_CRYPTO.MD5, DBMS_UTILITY. GET_HASH_VALUE.Please refers to the Oracle Database Documentation for more information on the Oracle Hash functions. For example the following masking UDF generate deterministic unique hexadecimal values for a given string input: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION RD_DUX (rid varchar2, column_name varchar2, orig_val VARCHAR2) RETURN VARCHAR2 DETERMINISTIC PARALLEL_ENABLE IS stext varchar2 (26); no_of_characters number(2); BEGIN no_of_characters:=6; stext:=substr(RAWTOHEX(DBMS_CRYPTO.HASH(UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_RAW(text),1)),0,no_of_characters); RETURN stext; END; The uniqueness depends on the input and length of the string and number of bits used by hash algorithm. In the above function MD4 hash is used [denoted by argument 1 in the DBMS_CRYPTO.HASH function which is a 128 bit algorithm which produces 2^128-1 unique hashed values , however this is limited by the length of the input string which is 6, so only 6^6 unique values will be generated. Also do not forget about the birthday paradox/pigeonhole principle mentioned earlier in this post. An another example is to consistently replace characters or numbers preserving the length and special characters as shown below: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION RD_DUS(rid varchar2,column_name varchar2,orig_val VARCHAR2) RETURN VARCHAR2 DETERMINISTIC PARALLEL_ENABLE IS stext varchar2(26); BEGIN DBMS_RANDOM.SEED(orig_val); stext:=TRANSLATE(orig_val,'ABCDEFGHILKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ',DBMS_RANDOM.STRING('U',26)); stext:=TRANSLATE(stext,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz',DBMS_RANDOM.STRING('L',26)); stext:=TRANSLATE(stext,'0123456789',to_char(DBMS_RANDOM.VALUE(1,9))); stext:=REPLACE(stext,'.','0'); RETURN stext; END; The following screen shot shows the usage of an UDF with in a masking definition: To summarize, Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting helps you to consistently mask data across databases using one or all of the methods described in this post. It saves the hassle of identifying the parent-child relationships defined in the application table. Happy Masking

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• Set Context User Principal for Customized Authentication in SignalR

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2014/05/27/set-context-user-principal-for-customized-authentication-in-signalr.aspxCurrently I'm working on a single page application project which is built on AngularJS and ASP.NET WebAPI. When I need to implement some features that needs real-time communication and push notifications from server side I decided to use SignalR. SignalR is a project currently developed by Microsoft to build web-based, read-time communication application. You can find it here. With a lot of introductions and guides it's not a difficult task to use SignalR with ASP.NET WebAPI and AngularJS. I followed this and this even though it's based on SignalR 1. But when I tried to implement the authentication for my SignalR I was struggled 2 days and finally I got a solution by myself. This might not be the best one but it actually solved all my problem.   In many articles it's said that you don't need to worry about the authentication of SignalR since it uses the web application authentication. For example if your web application utilizes form authentication, SignalR will use the user principal your web application authentication module resolved, check if the principal exist and authenticated. But in my solution my ASP.NET WebAPI, which is hosting SignalR as well, utilizes OAuth Bearer authentication. So when the SignalR connection was established the context user principal was empty. So I need to authentication and pass the principal by myself.   Firstly I need to create a class which delivered from "AuthorizeAttribute", that will takes the responsible for authenticate when SignalR connection established and any method was invoked. 1: public class QueryStringBearerAuthorizeAttribute : AuthorizeAttribute 2: { 3: public override bool AuthorizeHubConnection(HubDescriptor hubDescriptor, IRequest request) 4: { 5: } 6:  7: public override bool AuthorizeHubMethodInvocation(IHubIncomingInvokerContext hubIncomingInvokerContext, bool appliesToMethod) 8: { 9: } 10: } The method "AuthorizeHubConnection" will be invoked when any SignalR connection was established. And here I'm going to retrieve the Bearer token from query string, try to decrypt and recover the login user's claims. 1: public override bool AuthorizeHubConnection(HubDescriptor hubDescriptor, IRequest request) 2: { 3: var dataProtectionProvider = new DpapiDataProtectionProvider(); 4: var secureDataFormat = new TicketDataFormat(dataProtectionProvider.Create()); 5: // authenticate by using bearer token in query string 6: var token = request.QueryString.Get(WebApiConfig.AuthenticationType); 7: var ticket = secureDataFormat.Unprotect(token); 8: if (ticket != null && ticket.Identity != null && ticket.Identity.IsAuthenticated) 9: { 10: // set the authenticated user principal into environment so that it can be used in the future 11: request.Environment["server.User"] = new ClaimsPrincipal(ticket.Identity); 12: return true; 13: } 14: else 15: { 16: return false; 17: } 18: } In the code above I created "TicketDataFormat" instance, which must be same as the one I used to generate the Bearer token when user logged in. Then I retrieve the token from request query string and unprotect it. If I got a valid ticket with identity and it's authenticated this means it's a valid token. Then I pass the user principal into request's environment property which can be used in nearly future. Since my website was built in AngularJS so the SignalR client was in pure JavaScript, and it's not support to set customized HTTP headers in SignalR JavaScript client, I have to pass the Bearer token through request query string. This is not a restriction of SignalR, but a restriction of WebSocket. For security reason WebSocket doesn't allow client to set customized HTTP headers from browser. Next, I need to implement the authentication logic in method "AuthorizeHubMethodInvocation" which will be invoked when any SignalR method was invoked. 1: public override bool AuthorizeHubMethodInvocation(IHubIncomingInvokerContext hubIncomingInvokerContext, bool appliesToMethod) 2: { 3: var connectionId = hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context.ConnectionId; 4: // check the authenticated user principal from environment 5: var environment = hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context.Request.Environment; 6: var principal = environment["server.User"] as ClaimsPrincipal; 7: if (principal != null && principal.Identity != null && principal.Identity.IsAuthenticated) 8: { 9: // create a new HubCallerContext instance with the principal generated from token 10: // and replace the current context so that in hubs we can retrieve current user identity 11: hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context = new HubCallerContext(new ServerRequest(environment), connectionId); 12: return true; 13: } 14: else 15: { 16: return false; 17: } 18: } Since I had passed the user principal into request environment in previous method, I can simply check if it exists and valid. If so, what I need is to pass the principal into context so that SignalR hub can use. Since the "User" property is all read-only in "hubIncomingInvokerContext", I have to create a new "ServerRequest" instance with principal assigned, and set to "hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context". After that, we can retrieve the principal in my Hubs through "Context.User" as below. 1: public class DefaultHub : Hub 2: { 3: public object Initialize(string host, string service, JObject payload) 4: { 5: var connectionId = Context.ConnectionId; 6: ... ... 7: var domain = string.Empty; 8: var identity = Context.User.Identity as ClaimsIdentity; 9: if (identity != null) 10: { 11: var claim = identity.FindFirst("Domain"); 12: if (claim != null) 13: { 14: domain = claim.Value; 15: } 16: } 17: ... ... 18: } 19: } Finally I just need to add my "QueryStringBearerAuthorizeAttribute" into the SignalR pipeline. 1: app.Map("/signalr", map => 2: { 3: // Setup the CORS middleware to run before SignalR. 4: // By default this will allow all origins. You can 5: // configure the set of origins and/or http verbs by 6: // providing a cors options with a different policy. 7: map.UseCors(CorsOptions.AllowAll); 8: var hubConfiguration = new HubConfiguration 9: { 10: // You can enable JSONP by uncommenting line below. 11: // JSONP requests are insecure but some older browsers (and some 12: // versions of IE) require JSONP to work cross domain 13: // EnableJSONP = true 14: EnableJavaScriptProxies = false 15: }; 16: // Require authentication for all hubs 17: var authorizer = new QueryStringBearerAuthorizeAttribute(); 18: var module = new AuthorizeModule(authorizer, authorizer); 19: GlobalHost.HubPipeline.AddModule(module); 20: // Run the SignalR pipeline. We're not using MapSignalR 21: // since this branch already runs under the "/signalr" path. 22: map.RunSignalR(hubConfiguration); 23: }); On the client side should pass the Bearer token through query string before I started the connection as below. 1: self.connection = $.hubConnection(signalrEndpoint); 2: self.proxy = self.connection.createHubProxy(hubName); 3: self.proxy.on(notifyEventName, function (event, payload) { 4: options.handler(event, payload); 5: }); 6: // add the authentication token to query string 7: // we cannot use http headers since web socket protocol doesn't support 8: self.connection.qs = { Bearer: AuthService.getToken() }; 9: // connection to hub 10: self.connection.start(); 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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• Oracle participe au Forum MDM - 24 octobre 2013

  - by Louisa Aggoune

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt: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:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Dédié aux Directions Générales, Fonctionnelles et Informatiques ce 2ème Forum MDM (Master Data Management) a pour objectif de présenter les dernières nouveautés et le savoir-faire des acteurs majeurs du marché sous la forme d'ateliers. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt: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:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} ORACLE, sponsor de l'évènement, vous convie sur son stand et à son atelier: Oracle MDM et qualité des données au service de la gouvernance de vos données internes et externes ou comment enrichir et fédérer votre patrimoine informationnel avec le Social data, Big Data, Cloud data … De nombreux retours d’expérience concrets vous seront également délivrés lors de cette matinée, à travers les témoignages de : - Philippe Kirady, CARDIF, Directeur expertise métier et process- Michelle Martin, SOLVAY, Directrice Data Management- Thierry Chamfrault, TECHNIP, Directeur Qualité et méthodes IT- Manuel Amorim, LE PARISIEN, Responsable Audience et Fidélisation Département Numérique- Jean-Michel Collomb, Architecte d’entreprise, AMADEUS Global Business ServicesVous avez des problématiques de :- Gouvernance des données- Qualité des données- Référentiels de données, produits, clients, fournisseurs, RH Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt: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:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Lieu : Jeudi 24 Octobre 2013, de 8h30 à 13h30 - Centre de Conférences Paris Victoire - 52, rue de la Victoire - 75009 Paris Inscription: Par retour d'email à Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt: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:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} [email protected] ou [email protected]

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