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• Oracle Open World 2012: SQL Developer Recap

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Last week was the ‘big show’ in San Francisco. I was very happy to meet many of you in person. And many of you had questions – lots of questions! We had full or overflowing rooms for our sessions and hands-on-labs. The SQL Developer ‘booths’ were also slammed several times. So exciting to see so many of YOU excited about SQL Developer. It’s very cool to hear the stories of our tools saving you and your organizations so much time (and money!) Instead of doing a Day 0 – Day 9 recap, I thought I’d share with you the questions that I heard more than once. And just for giggles, I’ll throw in some answers as well So in no particular order… What’s the difference between Oracle SQL Developer & Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler? Mathematically speaking – two words. But as far as the actual modeling features go, there’s no difference between the two applications. The same ‘code’ or features as it pertains to data modeling and design are in both tools. However, in SQL Developer you have all of the OTHER features fighting for real estate in the UI. So I have a general rule of thumb – if you spend MOST of your time in the database, use SQL Developer. And if you spend most of your time in the data model, run the separate and dedicated program, Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Here’s a couple of screenshots to drive home the UI point: Oracle SQL Developer Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler running INSIDE of SQL Developer. Notice how the Modeler menu items fold under the file menu? Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler Easier to navigate and manipulate your models with the stand alone modeler. Just no worksheet to run your ad-hoc queries, etc. Don’t forget you can disable the Data Modeler inside of SQL Developer via the Extensions preference page. How can I model my table partitions? Partitioning is defined via the Physical model. So after you have finished your relational model, you need to generate a physical model. Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler Physical Model and Partitioning Open the properties for your physical model table. Enable the ‘partitioned’ property. Once you do so, the ‘Partitioning’ page will activate. Lots and lots of partitioning support and options here But what about Interval Partitioning? An extension of range partitioning in 11gR2, we don’t currently support this partitioning scheme in SQL Developer. But we’re working on it! Can SQL Developer ignore column order when comparing models? Yes! After you start a model compare, one of your options is to disregard the order of an attribute or column definition. Tell SQL Developer you don’t care when your column shows up, just as long as it DOES show up. Wow, you got a lot of questions around modeling! Is that normal? Yes! While we appreciate that many folks inherit their applications and associated designs, new applications are being ‘born’ every day. Since both of our tools are free for anyone to design their new Oracle applications with, we attract a fair amount of attention I want to do a Hands On Lab. How do I get your software and instructional guides? Go here. Download VirtualBox. Then download the VB image. Import the appliance. Start it. Connect oracle/oracle on the OEL VM. Click on ‘Start Here’ in the desktop. Follow the instructions. If you need help, ask away! You went too fast in your Tips & Tricks session. Do you have cliff notes? Yes! And you’re SO close to finding them! Just go to my SQL Developer resources page. All of my tips are documented on this blog somewhere. I’ve indexed the most popular ones on the resource page. You can use the Search dialog on the right to find the rest. Or just send me a comment or question, and I’ll do my best to answer them as they come in.

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• Oracle Fusion Applications: Changing the Game

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  Originally posted in the Oracle Profit Magazine, November 2010 Edition. When the order processing system red-flags a customer's credit status, the IT department doesn't get the customer's call. When a supplier misses a delivery date for a key automotive assembly, it's not the CIO who has to answer for the error. Knowledge workers (known in IT circles as "users") are on the front lines when an exception occurs in an established business process. They're also the ones who study sales trends to decide when to open a new store in an up-and-coming neighborhood, which products are most profitable, how employee skill sets are evolving, and which suppliers are most efficient. In short, knowledge workers are masters of business as unusual. Traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other familiar enterprise applications excel at automating, managing, and executing standard business processes. These programs shine when everything goes as planned. Life gets even trickier when a traditional application needs to be extended with a new service or an extra step is added to a business process when new products are brought to market, divisions are merged, or companies are acquired. Monolithic applications often need the IT department to step in and make the necessary adjustments--incurring additional costs and delays. Until now. When Oracle unveiled the much-anticipated family of Oracle Fusion Applications at Oracle OpenWorld in September 2010, knowledge workers in particular had a lot to cheer about. Business users will soon have ready access to analytical information and collaboration tools in the context of what they are working on, so they can make better decisions when problems or opportunities arise. Additionally, the Oracle Fusion Applications platform will make it easy for business users to tweak processes, create new capabilities, and find information, often without the need for IT department assistance and while still following company guidelines. And IT leaders will be happy to hear about new deployment options, guided implementation and setup tools, and cost-saving management capabilities. Just as important, the underlying technologies in Oracle Fusion Applications will allow organizations to choose among their existing investments and next-generation enterprise applications so they can introduce innovations at a pace that makes the most business and financial sense. "Oracle Fusion Applications are architected so you don't have to do rip and replace," says Jim Hayes, managing director of the consulting firm Accenture. "That's very important for creating a business case that will get through the steering committee and be approved by the board. It shows you can drive value and make a difference in the near term." For these and other reasons, analysts and early adopters are calling Oracle Fusion Applications a game changer for enterprise customers. The differences become apparent in three key areas: the way we innovate, work, and adopt technology. Game Changer #1: New Standard for InnovationChange is a constant challenge for most businesses, whether the catalysts are market dynamics, new competition, or the ever-expanding regulatory environment. And, in an ongoing effort to differentiate, business leaders are constantly looking for new ways to do business, serve constituents, and bring new products and services to market. In addition, companies face significant costs to keep their applications up-to-date. For example, when a company adds new suppliers to a procurement system, the IT shop typically has to invest time, effort, and even consulting fees for custom integrations that allow various ERP systems to communicate with each other. Oracle Fusion Applications were built on Web services and a modular SOA foundation to ease customizations and integration activities among all applications--whether from Oracle or another vendor. Interfaces and updates written in ubiquitous Java, rather than a proprietary coding language, allow organizations to tap into existing in-house technical skills rather than seek expensive outside specialists. And with SOA, organizations can extend a feature set or integrate with other SOA environments by combining Web services such as "look up customer" into a new business process managed by the BPEL orchestration engine. Flexibility like this has long-term implications. "Because users capture these changes at a higher metadata layer, not in the application's code, changes and additions are protected even as new versions of Oracle Fusion Applications are released," says Steve Miranda, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle. "This is a much more sustainable approach because you don't incur costly customizations that prevent upgrades and other innovations." And changes are easier to make: if one change is made in the metadata, that change is automatically reflected throughout the application interface, business intelligence, business process, and business logic. Game Changer #2: New Standard for WorkBoosting productivity comes down to doing the basics right: running business processes more efficiently and managing exceptions more effectively, so users can accomplish more in the course of a day or spend more quality time with the most profitable customers. The fastest way to improve process efficiency is to reduce the number of steps it takes to execute common tasks, such as ordering office equipment from an internal procurement system. Oracle Fusion Applications will deliver a complete role-based user experience with business intelligence and collaboration capabilities provided in the context of the work at hand. "We created every Oracle Fusion Applications screen by asking 'What does the user need to know?' 'What does he or she need to do?' and 'Who do they need to work with to get the job done?'" Miranda explains. So when the sales department heads need new laptops, the self-service procurement screen will not only display a list of approved vendors and configurations, but also a running list of reviews by coworkers who recently purchased the various models. Embedded intelligence may also display prevailing delivery lead times based on actual order histories, not the generic shipping dates vendors may quote. The pervasive business intelligence serves many other business activities across all areas of the enterprise. For example, a manager considering whether to promote a direct report can see the person's employee profile, with a salary history, appraisal summaries, and a rundown of skills and training. This approach to business intelligence also has implications for supply chain management. "One of the challenges at Ingersoll Rand is lack of visibility in our supply chain," says Mike Macrie, global director of enterprise applications for global industrial firm Ingersoll Rand. "Oracle Fusion Applications are going to provide the embedded intelligence to give us that visibility and give us the ability to analyze those orders at any point in our supply chain." Oracle Fusion Applications will also create a "role-based user experience" that displays a work list of events that need attention, based on user job function. Role awareness guides users with daily lists of action items and exceptions. So a credit manager may see seven invoices with discounts that are about to expire or 12 suppliers that have been put on hold because credit memos are awaiting approval. Individualization extends to the search capabilities of Oracle Fusion Applications. The platform uses Web-style search screens powered by an Oracle enterprise search engine, with a security framework that filters search results so individuals will only see the internal information they're authorized to access. A further aid to productivity is Oracle Fusion Applications' integration with Web 2.0 collaboration and social networking resources for business environments. Hover-over text will reveal relevant contact information whenever the name of a person appears in an Oracle Fusion Application. Users can connect via an online chat, phone call, or instant message without leaving the main application, reducing the time required for an accounts payable staffer to resolve a mismatch between an invoiced charge and the service record, for example. Addresses of suppliers, customers, or partners will also initiate hover-over text to show contact details and Web-based maps. Finally, Oracle Fusion Applications will promote a new way of working with purpose-driven communities that can bring new efficiencies to everything from cultivating sales leads to managing new projects. As soon as a lead or project materializes, the applications will automatically gather relevant participants into an online community that shares member contact information, schedules, discussion forums, and Wiki pages. "Oracle Fusion Applications will allow us to take it to the next level with embedded Web 2.0 tools and the embedded analytics," says Steve Printz, CIO and vice president, supply chain management, at window-and-door manufacturer Pella. "[This] allows those employees today who are processing transactions to really contribute to the success of the company and become decision-makers." Game Changer #3: New Standard for Technology AdoptionAs IT becomes a dominant component of how businesses run and compete, organizations need to lower the cost of implementing applications and introducing new application features. In the past, rolling out new code often required creating a test bed system, moving beta code to a separate system for user feedback, and--once all the revisions were made--moving version one of the software onto production systems, where business users could finally get the needed new features. Oracle Fusion Applications will use a dedicated setup manager application to streamline this process. First, the setup manager will help scope out the project, querying users about their requirements. "From those questions and answers we determine the steps and the order of those steps that will enable that task," Miranda says. Next, system utilities will assign tasks to owners, track completion status, and monitor the overall status of a programming effort. Oracle Fusion Applications can then recommend Web services that allow users to migrate setup choices and steps across all the various deployments of the application. Those setup capabilities automate the migration from test systems to production systems, as well as between different business units that may be using the same application. "The self-service ability of the setup manager helps business users change setups with very little intervention from the IT team," says Ravi Kumar, vice president at IT services company Infosys. "That to me is a big difference from how we've viewed enterprise applications before." For additional flexibility, organizations will be able to adopt Oracle Fusion Applications modules in either of two modes: a single-instance alternative uses one database for all Oracle Fusion Applications, while a "pillar mode" creates separate databases to underpin each application. This means IT departments running any one of Oracle's applications or even third-party applications can plug Oracle Fusion Applications modules into their environment and see additional business value created on top of their existing systems. And Oracle Fusion Applications offer a hybrid approach to deployment. The applications are all software-as-a-service-ready, so customers can choose on-premises, public or private cloud, or a combination of these to suit their business needs. It's that combination of flexibility and a roadmap for the future that may be the biggest game changer of all. "The Oracle Fusion Applications architecture allows us to migrate our company at a pace that's consistent with our business strategy, whereas before we might have had to do it with a massive upgrade," says Macrie of Ingersoll Rand. "We're looking forward to that architecture to really give us more flexibility in how we migrate over time." For More InformationUser Input Key to the Success of Oracle Fusion ApplicationsTransforming Coexistence into Strategic ValueUnder the HoodOracle Fusion ApplicationsOracle Service-Oriented Architecture  

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• Distinctly LINQ &ndash; Getting a Distinct List of Objects

  - by David Totzke

  Let’s say that you have a list of objects that contains duplicate items and you want to extract a subset of distinct items.  This is pretty straight forward in the trivial case where the duplicate objects are considered the same such as in the following example: List<int> ages = new List<int> { 21, 46, 46, 55, 17, 21, 55, 55 }; IEnumerable<int> distinctAges = ages.Distinct(); Console.WriteLine("Distinct ages:"); foreach (int age in distinctAges) { Console.WriteLine(age); } /* This code produces the following output: Distinct ages: 21 46 55 17 */ What if you are working with reference types instead?  Imagine a list of search results where items in the results, while unique in and of themselves, also point to a parent.  We’d like to be able to select a bunch of items in the list but then see only a distinct list of parents.  Distinct isn’t going to help us much on its own as all of the items are distinct already.  Perhaps we can create a class with just the information we are interested in like the Id and Name of the parents.  public class SelectedItem { public int ItemID { get; set; } public string DisplayName { get; set; } } We can then use LINQ to populate a list containing objects with just the information we are interested in and then get rid of the duplicates. IEnumerable<SelectedItem> list = (from item in ResultView.SelectedRows.OfType<Contract.ReceiptSelectResults>() select new SelectedItem { ItemID = item.ParentId, DisplayName = item.ParentName }) .Distinct(); Most of you will have guessed that this didn’t work.  Even though some of our objects are now duplicates, because we are working with reference types, it doesn’t matter that their properties are the same, they’re still considered unique.  What we need is a way to define equality for the Distinct() extension method. IEqualityComparer<T> Looking at the Distinct method we see that there is an overload that accepts an IEqualityComparer<T>.  We can simply create a class that implements this interface and that allows us to define equality for our SelectedItem class. public class SelectedItemComparer : IEqualityComparer<SelectedItem> { public new bool Equals(SelectedItem abc, SelectedItem def) { return abc.ItemID == def.ItemID && abc.DisplayName == def.DisplayName; } public int GetHashCode(SelectedItem obj) { string code = obj.DisplayName + obj.ItemID.ToString(); return code.GetHashCode(); } } In the Equals method we simply do whatever comparisons are necessary to determine equality and then return true or false.  Take note of the implementation of the GetHashCode method.  GetHashCode must return the same value for two different objects if our Equals method says they are equal.  Get this wrong and your comparer won’t work .  Even though the Equals method returns true, mismatched hash codes will cause the comparison to fail.  For our example, we simply build a string from the properties of the object and then call GetHashCode() on that. Now all we have to do is pass an instance of our IEqualitlyComarer<T> to Distinct and all will be well: IEnumerable<SelectedItem> list =     (from item in ResultView.SelectedRows.OfType<Contract.ReceiptSelectResults>()         select new SelectedItem { ItemID = item.dahfkp, DisplayName = item.document_code })                         .Distinct(new SelectedItemComparer());   Enjoy. Dave Just because I can… Technorati Tags: LINQ,C#

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• Imperative Programming v/s Declarative Programming v/s Functional Programming

  - by kaleidoscope

  Imperative Programming :: Imperative programming is a programming paradigm that describes computation in terms of statements that change a program state. In much the same way as the imperative mood in natural languages expresses commands to take action, imperative programs define sequences of commands for the computer to perform. The focus is on what steps the computer should take rather than what the computer will do (ex. C, C++, Java). Declarative Programming :: Declarative programming is a programming paradigm that expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow. It attempts to minimize or eliminate side effects by describing what the program should accomplish, rather than describing how to go about accomplishing it. The focus is on what the computer should do rather than how it should do it (ex. SQL). A  C# example of declarative v/s. imperative programming is LINQ. With imperative programming, you tell the compiler what you want to happen, step by step. For example, let's start with this collection, and choose the odd numbers: List<int> collection = new List<int> { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 }; With imperative programming, we'd step through this, and decide what we want: List<int> results = new List<int>(); foreach(var num in collection) {     if (num % 2 != 0)           results.Add(num); } Here’s what we are doing: *Create a result collection *Step through each number in the collection *Check the number, if it's odd, add it to the results With declarative programming, on the other hand, we write the code that describes what you want, but not necessarily how to get it var results = collection.Where( num => num % 2 != 0); Here, we're saying "Give us everything where it's odd", not "Step through the collection. Check this item, if it's odd, add it to a result collection." Functional Programming :: Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions.Functional programming has its roots in the lambda calculus. It is a subset of declarative languages that has heavy focus on recursion. Functional programming can be a mind-bender, which is one reason why Lisp, Scheme, and Haskell have never really surpassed C, C++, Java and COBOL in commercial popularity. But there are benefits to the functional way. For one, if you can get the logic correct, functional programming requires orders of magnitude less code than imperative programming. That means fewer points of failure, less code to test, and a more productive (and, many would say, happier) programming life. As systems get bigger, this has become more and more important. To know more : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/602444/what-is-functional-declarative-and-imperative-programming http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb669144.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_programming   Technorati Tags: Ranjit,Imperative Programming,Declarative programming,Functional Programming

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• Day 2 - Game Design Documentation

  - by dapostolov

  So yesterday I didn't cut any code for my game but I was able to do a tiny bit of research on the XNA Game Development Technology and the communities out there and do you know what? I feel I'm a bit closer to my goal. The bad news is today I didn't cut code either. However, not all is lost because I wanted to get my ideas on paper and today I just did that.  Today, I began to jot down notes about the game and how I felt the visual elements would interact with each other. Unlike my workplace, my personal level of documentation is nothing more than a task list or a mind map of my ideas; it helps me streamline my solutions quiet effectively and circumvent the long process of articulating each thought to the n-th degree. I truly dislike documentation (because I have an extremely hard time articulating my thought and solutions); however, because I tend to do a really good job with documentation I tend to get stuck writing the buggers. But as a generalist remark: 'No Developer likes documentation.' For now let's stick with my basic notes and call this post a living document. Here are my notes, fresh, from after watching the new first episode of Merlin second season! Actually, a quick recommendation to anyone who is reading this (if anyone is): I truly recommend you envelope yourself in the medium or task you're trying to tackle. Be one with moment and feel it! For instance: Are you writing a fantasy script / game? What would the music of the genre sound like? For me the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is frackin awesome. There are many other good CD's out there, which I listen to (some who even use medival instruments, but Conan I keep returning to. It's a creative trigger for me. Ask yourself what would the imagery look like? Time to surf google for artist renditions of fantasy! What would the game feel like? Start playing some of your favorite games that inspire you, be wary though, have some self control and don't let it absorb your time. Anyhow, onto the documentation... Screens, Scenes, and Sprites. Oh My! (groan...) The first thing that came to mind were the screens, I thought the following would suffice: Menu Screen Character Customisation Screen Loading Screen? Battle Ground The Menu Screen Ok. So, the thought here is when the game loads a huge title is displayed: Wizard Wars. The player is prompted with 3 menu items: 1 Player Game, 2 Player Game, and Exit. Since I'm targetting the PC platform, as a non-networked game to start, I picture myself running my mouse over each menu option and the visual element of the menu item changes, along with a sound to indicate that I am over a curent menu item. And as I move my mouse away, it changes back, and possibly an exit mouse sound. Maybe on the screen somewhere is a brazier alit with a magical tome open right beside it, OR, maybe the tome is the menu! I hear the menu music as mellow, not obtrusive or piercing. On a menu item select, a confirmation sound bellows to indicate the players selection. The Esc key will always return me to the previous screens or desktop. The menu screen must feel...dark, like a really important ritual is about to happen and thus the music should build up. 1 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) 2 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) Exit - > Back to Windows Notes: So the first thing I pick up here are a couple things: First and foremost, my artistic abilities suck crap, so I may have to hire an artist (now that i've said that, lets get techy) graphical objects will be positioned within a scene on each screen / window. Menu items will be represented grapically, possibly animated, and have sound / animation effects triggered by user input or a time line. I have an animated scene involving a brazier or fire on a stick IF I was to move this game to the xbox, I'd have to track which menu item is currently selected (unless I do a mouse pointer type thing.) WindowObject has a scene A Scene has many GameObjects GameObject has a position graphic or animation MenuObject is a GameObject which has a mouse in, mouse out, and click event which either does something graphically (animation), does something with sound, or moves to another screen.  Character Customisation Screen With either the 1 or 2 player option selected, both selections will come to this screen; a wizard requires a name, powers, and vestements of course! Player one will configure his character first and then player two. I considered a split screen for PC but to have two people fighting over a keyboard would probably suck. For XBox, a split screen could work; maybe when I get into the networking portion (phase 2 blog?) of this game I will remove the 2 player option for PC and provide only multiplayer and I will leave 2 player for xbox...hmm... Anyhow...I picture the creation process as follows: Name: (textbox / keyboard entry) - for xbox, this would have to be different. Robe Color: (color box, or something) Stats: Speed, Oomph, and Health. (as sliders) 1 as minimum and 10 as maximum. Ok, Back, and Cancel buttons / options. Each stat has a benefit which are listed below. The idea is the player decides if he wants his wizard to run fast, be a tank and ... hit with a purse.Regardless, the player will have a pool of 12 points to use. Ideally, A balanced wizard will have 5 in each attribute. Spells? The only spell of choice is a ball of fire which comes without question. The music and screen should still feel like a ritual. The Character Speed Basically, how fast your character moves and casts. Oomph (Best Monster Truck Voice): PURE POWAH!!! The damage output of your fireball. Health How much damage you can take. Notes: I realise the game dynamics may sound uninteresting at the moment; but I think after a couple releases, we could have some other grand ideas such as: saved profiles, gold to upgrade arsenal of spells, talents, etc...but for now...a vanilla fireball thrower mage will suffice for this experiment. OK. So... a MenuObject  may need to be loosely coupled to allow future items such as networking? may be a button? a CharacterObject has a name speed oomph health and a funky robe color. cap on the three stats (1-10) an arsenal of 1 spell (possibly could expand this) The Loading Screen As is. The Battleground Screen For now, I'm keeping the screen as max resolution for the PC. The screen isn't going to move or even be a split screen. I'm not aiming high here because I want to see what level of change is involved when new features / concepts are added to game content. I'm interested to find out if we could apply techniques such as MVC or MVVM to this type of development or is it too tightly coupled? This reminds me when when my best friend and I were brainstorming our game idea (this is going back a while...1994, 6?) and he cringed at the thought of bringing business technology into games, especially when I suggested a database to store character information and COM / DCOM as the medium, but it seems I wasn't far off (reflecting); just like his implementation of a xml "config file" for dynamic direct-x menus back before .net in 1999...anyhow...i digress... The Battle One screen, two characters lobing balls of fire at each other...It doesn't get better than that. Every so often a scroll appears...and the fireballs bounce off walls, or the wizard has rapid fire, or even scrolls of healing! The scroll options are endless. Two bars at the top, each the color of the wizard (with their name beside the bar) indicate how much health they have. Possibly the appearance of the scrolls means the battle is taking too long? I'm thinking 1 player controls: up, down, left, right and space to fire the button. Or even possibly, mouse click and shift - mouse button to fire a spell in the direction they are facing. Two player controls: a, s, d, f and space AND arrows (up, down, left, right) and Del key or Crtl. The game ends when a player has 0 health and a dialog box appears asking for a rematch / reconfigure / exit. Health goes down when a fireball (friendly or not), connects with a wizard. When a wizard connects with a scroll, a countdown clock / icon appears near the health bar and the wizard begins to glow. For the most part, a wizard can have only scroll 1 effect on him at a time. Notes: Ok, there's alot to cover here. a CharacterObject is a GameObject it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has sounds (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, whistling, other?) it has animations (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, idle, other?) it has a lifespan (determined by health) it is alive or dead it has a position a ScrollObject is a GameObject it carries a transferance of points "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it carries a transferance of "other" it is stationary it has a sound on impact it has a stationary animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by game) it is alive or dead it has a position a WallObject is a GameObject it has a sound on fireball impact? it is a still image / stationary it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it is dead it has a position A FireBall is a GameObject it carries a transferance of poinst "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has a sound it has a travel animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by caster) it is alive or dead it has a position As I look at this, I can see some common attributes in each object that I can carry up to the GameObject. I think I'm going to end the documentation here, it's taken me a bit of time to type this all out, tomorrow. I'll load up my IDE and my paint studio to get some good old fashioned cowboy hacking going!   D.

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• Agile PLM on Developing Agile PLM: Software Lifecycle Management

  - by Kerrie Foy

  Change is constant.  That saying couldn’t be truer when applied to software development.   And with all that change comes extensive product complexity.  How do you manage it all?  As software developers ourselves, we can certainly empathize with the challenge. On April 3, 2012 Stephen Van Lare, VP of PLM Product Development, hosted a webcast to share how Oracle uses Agile to develop Agile – a PLM solution for managing a PLM solution!   Stephen passionately shared his unique insight based on 10 years of using Agile PLM to manage the development process, as well as customer use cases.  He shared our time-proven view of the software’s relationship to the product record, while pointing out that PLM is not source control.  He began with the challenges of software development, which boiled down to the deduction that “despite many great tools in the software development industry, it takes a lot more than good source control, more than good bug tracking, to get to an on-time, on-budget and quality release in your marketplace.   It requires defining the right things you want to do, managing the scope, managing your schedule, and, most importantly, managing the change to all those things over the lifecycle of the process. And this is the definition of PLM.”   Stephen then defined the relationship of PLM to the software development process by detailing the two main use cases –  Product Lifecycle and Mechatronics – which can be used simultaneously and in fact are already used in most industries today.  The Product Lifecycle use case is used to manage artifacts and change throughout product development, while the Mechatronics use case involves the software, hardware and electrical design in the BOM.  In essence, PLM is just as relevant to software as the rest of the BOM when trying to maximize profits during any phase of the lifecycle. Please take the opportunity to watch Stephen Van Lare as he details how and why based on his own experience developing Agile with Agile, as well as a lively Q&A session, in the Software PLM Webcast Replay.

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• Ops Center 12c - Provisioning Solaris Using a Card-Based NIC

  - by scottdickson

  It's been a long time since last I added something here, but having some conversations this last week, I got inspired to update things. I've been spending a lot of time with Ops Center for managing and installing systems these days.  So, I suspect a number of my upcoming posts will be in that area. Today, I want to look at how to provision Solaris using Ops Center when your network is not connected to one of the built-in NICs.  We'll talk about how this can work for both Solaris 10 and Solaris 11, since they are pretty similar.  In both cases, WANboot is a key piece of the story. Here's what I want to do:  I have a Sun Fire T2000 server with a Quad-GbE nxge card installed.  The only network is connected to port 2 on that card rather than the built-in network interfaces.  I want to install Solaris on it across the network, either Solaris 10 or Solaris 11.  I have met with a lot of customers lately who have a similar architecture.  Usually, they have T4-4 servers with the network connected via 10GbE connections. Add to this mix the fact that I use Ops Center to manage the systems in my lab, so I really would like to add this to Ops Center.  If possible, I would like this to be completely hands free.  I can't quite do that yet. Close, but not quite. WANBoot or Old-Style NetBoot? When a system is installed from the network, it needs some help getting the process rolling.  It has to figure out what its network configuration (IP address, gateway, etc.) ought to be.  It needs to figure out what server is going to help it boot and install, and it needs the instructions for the installation.  There are two different ways to bootstrap an installation of Solaris on SPARC across the network.   The old way uses a broadcast of RARP or more recently DHCP to obtain the IP configuration and the rest of the information needed.  The second is to explicitly configure this information in the OBP and use WANBoot for installation WANBoot has a number of benefits over broadcast-based installation: it is not restricted to a single subnet; it does not require special DHCP configuration or DHCP helpers; it uses standard HTTP and HTTPS protocols which traverse firewalls much more easily than NFS-based package installation.  But, WANBoot is not available on really old hardware and WANBoot requires the use o Flash Archives in Solaris 10.  Still, for many people, this is a great approach. As it turns out, WANBoot is necessary if you plan to install using a NIC on a card rather than a built-in NIC. Identifying Which Network Interface to Use One of the trickiest aspects to this process, and the one that actually requires manual intervention to set up, is identifying how the OBP and Solaris refer to the NIC that we want to use to boot.  The OBP already has device aliases configured for the built-in NICs called net, net0, net1, net2, net3.  The device alias net typically points to net0 so that when you issue the command  "boot net -v install", it uses net0 for the boot.  Our task is to figure out the network instance for the NIC we want to use.  We will need to get to the OBP console of the system we want to install in order to figure out what the network should be called.  I will presume you know how to get to the ok prompt.  Once there, we have to see what networks the OBP sees and identify which one is associated with our NIC using the OBP command show-nets. SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.0 64-bit Copyright (c) 1983, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. {4} ok banner Sun Fire T200, No Keyboard Copyright (c) 1998, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.30.4.b, 32640 MB memory available, Serial #69057548. Ethernet address 0:14:4f:1d:bc:c, Host ID: 841dbc0c. {4} ok show-nets a) /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0,1 b) /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0 c) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,3 d) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 e) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,1 f) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0 g) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0,1 h) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 q) NO SELECTION Enter Selection, q to quit: d /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 has been selected. Type ^Y ( Control-Y ) to insert it in the command line. e.g. ok nvalias mydev ^Y for creating devalias mydev for /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok devalias ... net3 /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0,1 net2 /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0 net1 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0,1 net0 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 ... name aliases By looking at the devalias and the show-nets output, we can see that our Quad-GbE card must be the device nodes starting with  /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0.  The cable for our network is plugged into the 3rd slot, so the device address for our network must be /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2. With that, we can create a device alias for our network interface.  Naming the device alias may take a little bit of trial and error, especially in Solaris 11 where the device alias seems to matter more with the new virtualized network stack. So far in my testing, since this is the "next" network interface to be used, I have found success in naming it net4, even though it's a NIC in the middle of a card that might, by rights, be called net6 (assuming the 0th interface on the card is the next interface identified by Solaris and this is the 3rd interface on the card).  So, we will call it net4.  We need to assign a device alias to it: {4} ok nvalias net4 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok devalias net4 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 ... We also may need to have the MAC for this particular interface, so let's get it, too.  To do this, we go to the device and interrogate its properties. {4} ok cd /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok .properties assigned-addresses 82060210 00000000 03000000 00000000 01000000 82060218 00000000 00320000 00000000 00008000 82060220 00000000 00328000 00000000 00008000 82060230 00000000 00600000 00000000 00100000 local-mac-address 00 21 28 20 42 92 phy-type mif ... From this, we can see that the MAC for this interface is  00:21:28:20:42:92.  We will need this later. This is all we need to do at the OBP.  Now, we can configure Ops Center to use this interface. Network Boot in Solaris 10 Solaris 10 turns out to be a little simpler than Solaris 11 for this sort of a network boot.  Since WANBoot in Solaris 10 fetches a specified In order to install the system using Ops Center, it is necessary to create a OS Provisioning profile and its corresponding plan.  I am going to presume that you already know how to do this within Ops Center 12c and I will just cover the differences between a regular profile and a profile that can use an alternate interface. Create a OS Provisioning profile for Solaris 10 as usual.  However, when you specify the network resources for the primary network, click on the name of the NIC, probably GB_0, and rename it to GB_N/netN, where N is the instance number you used previously in creating the device alias.  This is where the trial and error may come into play.  You may need to try a few instance numbers before you, the OBP, and Solaris all agree on the instance number.  Mark this as the boot network. For Solaris 10, you ought to be able to then apply the OS Provisioning profile to the server and it should install using that interface.  And if you put your cards in the same slots and plug the networks into the same NICs, this profile is reusable across multiple servers. Why This Works If you watch the console as Solaris boots during the OSP process, Ops Center is going to look for the device alias netN.  Since WANBoot requires a device alias called just net, Ops Center uses the value of your netN device alias and assigns that device to the net alias.  That means that boot net will automatically use this device.  Very cool!  Here's a trace from the console as Ops Center provisions a server: Sun Sun Fire T200, No KeyboardCopyright (c) 1998, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.OpenBoot 4.30.4.b, 32640 MB memory available, Serial #69057548.Ethernet address 0:14:4f:1d:bc:c, Host ID: 841dbc0c.auto-boot? =            false{0} ok  {0} ok printenv network-boot-argumentsnetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok devalias net net                      /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0{0} ok devalias net4 net4                     /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok devalias net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok setenv network-boot-arguments host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:8004/cgi-bin/wanboot-cginetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:8004/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok boot net - installBoot device: /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2  File and args: - install/pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2: 1000 Mbps link up<time unavailable> wanboot info: WAN boot messages->console<time unavailable> wanboot info: configuring /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 See what happened?  Ops Center looked for the network device alias called net4 that we specified in the profile, took the value from it, and made it the net device alias for the boot.  Pretty cool! WANBoot and Solaris 11 Solaris 11 requires an additional step since the Automated Installer in Solaris 11 uses the MAC address of the network to figure out which manifest to use for system installation.  In order to make sure this is available, we have to take an extra step to associate the MAC of the NIC on the card with the host.  So, in addition to creating the device alias like we did above, we also have to declare to Ops Center that the host has this new MAC. Declaring the NIC Start out by discovering the hardware as usual.  Once you have discovered it, take a look under the Connectivity tab to see what networks it has discovered.  In the case of this system, it shows the 4 built-in networks, but not the networks on the additional cards.  These are not directly visible to the system controller.  In order to add the additional network interface to the hardware asset, it is necessary to Declare it.  We will declare that we have a server with this additional NIC, but we will also  specify the existing GB_0 network so that Ops Center can associate the right resources together.  The GB_0 acts as sort of a key to tie our new declaration to the old system already discovered.  Go to the Assets tab, select All Assets, and then in the Actions tab, select Add Asset.  Rather than going through a discovery this time, we will manually declare a new asset. When we declare it, we will give the hostname, IP address, system model that match those that have already been discovered.  Then, we will declare both GB_0 with its existing MAC and the new GB_4 with its MAC.  Remember that we collected the MAC for GB_4 when we created its device alias. After you declare the asset, you will see the new NIC in the connectivity tab for the asset.  You will notice that only the NICs you listed when you declared it are seen now.  If you want Ops Center to see all of the existing NICs as well as the additional one, declare them as well.  Add the other GB_1, GB_2, GB_3 links and their MACs just as you did GB_0 and GB_4.  Installing the OS  Once you have declared the asset, you can create an OS Provisioning profile for Solaris 11 in the same way that you did for Solaris 10.  The only difference from any other provisioning profile you might have created already is the network to use for installation.  Again, use GB_N/netN where N is the interface number you used for your device alias and in your declaration.  And away you go.  When the system boots from the network, the automated installer (AI) is able to see which system manifest to use, based on the new MAC that was associated, and the system gets installed. {0} ok {0} ok printenv network-boot-argumentsnetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok devalias net net                      /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0{0} ok devalias net4 net4                     /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok devalias net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok setenv network-boot-arguments host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cginetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok boot net - installBoot device: /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2  File and args: - install/pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2: 1000 Mbps link up<time unavailable> wanboot info: WAN boot messages->console<time unavailable> wanboot info: configuring /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2...SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.0 64-bitCopyright (c) 1983, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.Remounting root read/writeProbing for device nodes ...Preparing network image for useDownloading solaris.zlib--2012-02-17 15:10:17--  http://10.140.204.22:5555/var/js/AI/sparc//solaris.zlibConnecting to 10.140.204.22:5555... connected.HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OKLength: 126752256 (121M) [text/plain]Saving to: `/tmp/solaris.zlib'100%[======================================>] 126,752,256 28.6M/s   in 4.4s    2012-02-17 15:10:21 (27.3 MB/s) - `/tmp/solaris.zlib' saved [126752256/126752256] Conclusion So, why go to all of this trouble?  More and more, I find that customers are wiring their data center to only use higher speed networks - 10GbE only to the hosts.  Some customers are moving aggressively toward consolidated networks combining storage and network on CNA NICs.  All of this means that network-based provisioning cannot rely exclusively on the built-in network interfaces.  So, it's important to be able to provision a system using other than the built-in networks.  Turns out, that this is pretty straight-forward for both Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 and fits into the Ops Center deployment process quite nicely. Hopefully, you will be able to use this as you build out your own private cloud solutions with Ops Center.

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• BPEL 11.1.1.2 Certified for Prebuilt E-Business Suite 12.1.3 SOA Integrations

  - by Steven Chan

  A new certification was released simultaneously with the E-Business Suite 12.1.3 Maintenance Pack late last year:  the use of BPEL 11g Version 11.1.1.2 with E-Business Suite 12.1.3.  There are two major options for SOA-related integrations for the E-Business Suite:Custom integrations using the Oracle Application Server (SOA) Adapter for Oracle ApplicationsPrebuilt SOA integrations for E-Business Suite using BPEL Process ManagerFor more background about these two options, please see this article:BPEL 10.1.3.5 Certified for Prebuilt E-Business Suite 12 SOA Integrations

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• Convite: Manageability Partner Community

  - by pfolgado

  Oracle PartnerNetwork | Account | Feedback WELCOME TO THE NEW ORACLE EMEA MANAGEABILITY PARTNER COMMUNITY Dear partner You are receiving this message because you are a registered member of the Oracle Applications & Systems Management Partner Community in EMEA. With occasion of the announcement of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c we are revitalizing and rebranding our EMEA Applications & Systems Management Partner Community. To do this we have improved the community platform, for better and increased collaboration: The EMEA Applications & Systems Management Partner Community is now renamed to "Manageability Partner Community EMEA" We have created a Manageability Community blog and a Collaboration Workspace: The EMEA Manageability Partner Community blog is a public blog and we use it to provide quick and easy communication to the community members. (Please bookmark or subscribe to the RSS feeds). The EMEA Manageability Partner Community Collaborative Workspace is a restricted area that only community members can access. It contains materials from community events, sales kits, implementation experiences, reserved for community members. It also allows for partners to share content and collaborate with other community members. As a registered member of the community you have already been granted access to this restricted area. A dedicated team that manages the EMEA Manageability on a continuous basis. What do you have to do? All you have to do now is to bookmark the EMEA Manageability Partner Community blog page or subscribe to the blog's RSS feeds and use this as your central point of contact for Manageability information from Oracle. I look forward to develop a strong community in the Manageability area, where Oracle Manageability partners can share experiences and mutually benefit. Best regards, Javier Puerta Director Core Technology Partner Programs Alliances & Channels EMEA Phone: +34 916 312 41 Mobile: +34 609 062 373 Patrick Rood EMEA Partner Programs for Manageability Oracle EMEA Technology Phone: +31 306 627 969 Mobile: +31 611 954 277 Copyright © 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact PBC | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy

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• Fast Fashion Freshness

  - by David Dorf

  Fashion retailers such as H&M, Zara, and Wet Seal have perfected the fast fashion retailing model. The concept requires no replenishment in order to maintain assortment freshness and to create a sense of urgency for the consumer to purchase now. However, maintaining assortment freshness results in high product turnover, making markdown optimization a necessity. Wet Seal, for instance, needed to move from ad-hoc markdowns and dealing with surplus inventory to handling markdowns methodically across 8,000 SKUs with only 12-15 week lifecycle (from DC receipt to exit). By optimizing and automating markdowns, Wet Seal is reaching their goal of assortment freshness, which in turn increases sales. If you're interested in learning more, register for a free webinar occurring on May 13th featuring Join Daniel Ryu, Vice President of Planning and Allocation at Wet Seal. He'll be discussing how the fast fashion retailer maintains their goal of assortment freshness.

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• SQL Server 2012 - AlwaysOn

  - by Claus Jandausch

  Ich war nicht nur irritiert, ich war sogar regelrecht schockiert - und für einen kurzen Moment sprachlos (was nur selten der Fall ist). Gerade eben hatte mich jemand gefragt "Wann Oracle denn etwas Vergleichbares wie AlwaysOn bieten würde - und ob überhaupt?" War ich hier im falschen Film gelandet? Ich konnte nicht anders, als meinen Unmut kundzutun und zu erklären, dass die Fragestellung normalerweise anders herum läuft. Zugegeben - es mag vielleicht strittige Punkte geben im Vergleich zwischen Oracle und SQL Server - bei denen nicht unbedingt immer Oracle die Nase vorn haben muss - aber das Thema Clustering für Hochverfügbarkeit (HA), Disaster Recovery (DR) und Skalierbarkeit gehört mit Sicherheit nicht dazu. Dieses Erlebnis hakte ich am Nachgang als Einzelfall ab, der so nie wieder vorkommen würde. Bis ich kurz darauf eines Besseren belehrt wurde und genau die selbe Frage erneut zu hören bekam. Diesmal sogar im Exadata-Umfeld und einem Oracle Stretch Cluster. Einmal ist keinmal, doch zweimal ist einmal zu viel... Getreu diesem alten Motto war mir klar, dass man das so nicht länger stehen lassen konnte. Ich habe keine Ahnung, wie die Microsoft Marketing Abteilung es geschafft hat, unter dem AlwaysOn Brading eine innovative Technologie vermuten zu lassen - aber sie hat ihren Job scheinbar gut gemacht. Doch abgesehen von einem guten Marketing, stellt sich natürlich die Frage, was wirklich dahinter steckt und wie sich das Ganze mit Oracle vergleichen lässt - und ob überhaupt? Damit wären wir wieder bei der ursprünglichen Frage angelangt.  So viel zum Hintergrund dieses Blogbeitrags - von meiner Antwort handelt der restliche Blog. "Windows was the God ..." Um den wahren Unterschied zwischen Oracle und Microsoft verstehen zu können, muss man zunächst das bedeutendste Microsoft Dogma kennen. Es lässt sich schlicht und einfach auf den Punkt bringen: "Alles muss auf Windows basieren." Die Überschrift dieses Absatzes ist kein von mir erfundener Ausspruch, sondern ein Zitat. Konkret stammt es aus einem längeren Artikel von Kurt Eichenwald in der Vanity Fair aus dem August 2012. Er lautet Microsoft's Lost Decade und sei jedem ans Herz gelegt, der die "Microsoft-Maschinerie" unter Steve Ballmer und einige ihrer Kuriositäten besser verstehen möchte. "YOU TALKING TO ME?" Microsoft C.E.O. Steve Ballmer bei seiner Keynote auf der 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas am 9. Januar   Manche Dinge in diesem Artikel mögen überspitzt dargestellt erscheinen - sind sie aber nicht. Vieles davon kannte ich bereits aus eigener Erfahrung und kann es nur bestätigen. Anderes hat sich mir erst so richtig erschlossen. Insbesondere die folgenden Passagen führten zum Aha-Erlebnis: “Windows was the god—everything had to work with Windows,” said Stone... “Every little thing you want to write has to build off of Windows (or other existing roducts),” one software engineer said. “It can be very confusing, …” Ich habe immer schon darauf hingewiesen, dass in einem SQL Server Failover Cluster die Microsoft Datenbank eigentlich nichts Nenneswertes zum Geschehen beiträgt, sondern sich voll und ganz auf das Windows Betriebssystem verlässt. Deshalb muss man auch die Windows Server Enterprise Edition installieren, soll ein Failover Cluster für den SQL Server eingerichtet werden. Denn hier werden die Cluster Services geliefert - nicht mit dem SQL Server. Er ist nur lediglich ein weiteres Server Produkt, für das Windows in Ausfallszenarien genutzt werden kann - so wie Microsoft Exchange beispielsweise, oder Microsoft SharePoint, oder irgendein anderes Server Produkt das auf Windows gehostet wird. Auch Oracle kann damit genutzt werden. Das Stichwort lautet hier: Oracle Failsafe. Nur - warum sollte man das tun, wenn gleichzeitig eine überlegene Technologie wie die Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) zur Verfügung steht, die dann auch keine Windows Enterprise Edition voraussetzen, da Oracle die eigene Clusterware liefert. Welche darüber hinaus für kürzere Failover-Zeiten sorgt, da diese Cluster-Technologie Datenbank-integriert ist und sich nicht auf "Dritte" verlässt. Wenn man sich also schon keine technischen Vorteile mit einem SQL Server Failover Cluster erkauft, sondern zusätzlich noch versteckte Lizenzkosten durch die Lizenzierung der Windows Server Enterprise Edition einhandelt, warum hat Microsoft dann in den vergangenen Jahren seit SQL Server 2000 nicht ebenfalls an einer neuen und innovativen Lösung gearbeitet, die mit Oracle RAC mithalten kann? Entwickler hat Microsoft genügend? Am Geld kann es auch nicht liegen? Lesen Sie einfach noch einmal die beiden obenstehenden Zitate und sie werden den Grund verstehen. Anders lässt es sich ja auch gar nicht mehr erklären, dass AlwaysOn aus zwei unterschiedlichen Technologien besteht, die beide jedoch wiederum auf dem Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) basieren. Denn daraus ergeben sich klare Nachteile - aber dazu später mehr. Um AlwaysOn zu verstehen, sollte man sich zunächst kurz in Erinnerung rufen, was Microsoft bisher an HA/DR (High Availability/Desaster Recovery) Lösungen für SQL Server zur Verfügung gestellt hat. Replikation Basiert auf logischer Replikation und Pubisher/Subscriber Architektur Transactional Replication Merge Replication Snapshot Replication Microsoft's Replikation ist vergleichbar mit Oracle GoldenGate. Oracle GoldenGate stellt jedoch die umfassendere Technologie dar und bietet High Performance. Log Shipping Microsoft's Log Shipping stellt eine einfache Technologie dar, die vergleichbar ist mit Oracle Managed Recovery in Oracle Version 7. Das Log Shipping besitzt folgende Merkmale: Transaction Log Backups werden von Primary nach Secondary/ies geschickt Einarbeitung (z.B. Restore) auf jedem Secondary individuell Optionale dritte Server Instanz (Monitor Server) für Überwachung und Alarm Log Restore Unterbrechung möglich für Read-Only Modus (Secondary) Keine Unterstützung von Automatic Failover Database Mirroring Microsoft's Database Mirroring wurde verfügbar mit SQL Server 2005, sah aus wie Oracle Data Guard in Oracle 9i, war funktional jedoch nicht so umfassend. Für ein HA/DR Paar besteht eine 1:1 Beziehung, um die produktive Datenbank (Principle DB) abzusichern. Auf der Standby Datenbank (Mirrored DB) werden alle Insert-, Update- und Delete-Operationen nachgezogen. Modi Synchron (High-Safety Modus) Asynchron (High-Performance Modus) Automatic Failover Unterstützt im High-Safety Modus (synchron) Witness Server vorausgesetzt     Zur Frage der Kontinuität Es stellt sich die Frage, wie es um diesen Technologien nun im Zusammenhang mit SQL Server 2012 bestellt ist. Unter Fanfaren seinerzeit eingeführt, war Database Mirroring das erklärte Mittel der Wahl. Ich bin kein Produkt Manager bei Microsoft und kann hierzu nur meine Meinung äußern, aber zieht man den SQL AlwaysOn Team Blog heran, so sieht es nicht gut aus für das Database Mirroring - zumindest nicht langfristig. "Does AlwaysOn Availability Group replace Database Mirroring going forward?” “The short answer is we recommend that you migrate from the mirroring configuration or even mirroring and log shipping configuration to using Availability Group. Database Mirroring will still be available in the Denali release but will be phased out over subsequent releases. Log Shipping will continue to be available in future releases.” Damit wären wir endlich beim eigentlichen Thema angelangt. Was ist eine sogenannte Availability Group und was genau hat es mit der vielversprechend klingenden Bezeichnung AlwaysOn auf sich?   SQL Server 2012 - AlwaysOn Zwei HA-Features verstekcne sich hinter dem “AlwaysOn”-Branding. Einmal das AlwaysOn Failover Clustering aka SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) - zum Anderen die AlwaysOn Availability Groups. Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) Entspricht ungefähr dem Stretch Cluster Konzept von Oracle Setzt auf Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) auf Bietet HA auf Instanz-Ebene AlwaysOn Availability Groups (Verfügbarkeitsgruppen) Ähnlich der Idee von Consistency Groups, wie in Storage-Level Replikations-Software von z.B. EMC SRDF Abhängigkeiten zu Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) Bietet HA auf Datenbank-Ebene   Hinweis: Verwechseln Sie nicht eine SQL Server Datenbank mit einer Oracle Datenbank. Und auch nicht eine Oracle Instanz mit einer SQL Server Instanz. Die gleichen Begriffe haben hier eine andere Bedeutung - nicht selten ein Grund, weshalb Oracle- und Microsoft DBAs schnell aneinander vorbei reden. Denken Sie bei einer SQL Server Datenbank eher an ein Oracle Schema, das kommt der Sache näher. So etwas wie die SQL Server Northwind Datenbank ist vergleichbar mit dem Oracle Scott Schema. Wenn Sie die genauen Unterschiede kennen möchten, finden Sie eine detaillierte Beschreibung in meinem Buch "Oracle10g Release 2 für Windows und .NET", erhältich bei Lehmanns, Amazon, etc.   Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) Wie man sieht, basieren beide AlwaysOn Technologien wiederum auf dem Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), um einerseits Hochverfügbarkeit auf Ebene der Instanz zu gewährleisten und andererseits auf der Datenbank-Ebene. Deshalb nun eine kurze Beschreibung der WSFC. Die WSFC sind ein mit dem Windows Betriebssystem geliefertes Infrastruktur-Feature, um HA für Server Anwendungen, wie Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, etc. zu bieten. So wie jeder andere Cluster, besteht ein WSFC Cluster aus einer Gruppe unabhängiger Server, die zusammenarbeiten, um die Verfügbarkeit einer Applikation oder eines Service zu erhöhen. Falls ein Cluster-Knoten oder -Service ausfällt, kann der auf diesem Knoten bisher gehostete Service automatisch oder manuell auf einen anderen im Cluster verfügbaren Knoten transferriert werden - was allgemein als Failover bekannt ist. Unter SQL Server 2012 verwenden sowohl die AlwaysOn Avalability Groups, als auch die AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances die WSFC als Plattformtechnologie, um Komponenten als WSFC Cluster-Ressourcen zu registrieren. Verwandte Ressourcen werden in eine Ressource Group zusammengefasst, die in Abhängigkeit zu anderen WSFC Cluster-Ressourcen gebracht werden kann. Der WSFC Cluster Service kann jetzt die Notwendigkeit zum Neustart der SQL Server Instanz erfassen oder einen automatischen Failover zu einem anderen Server-Knoten im WSFC Cluster auslösen.   Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) Eine SQL Server Failover Cluster Instanz (FCI) ist eine einzelne SQL Server Instanz, die in einem Failover Cluster betrieben wird, der aus mehreren Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) Knoten besteht und so HA (High Availability) auf Ebene der Instanz bietet. Unter Verwendung von Multi-Subnet FCI kann auch Remote DR (Disaster Recovery) unterstützt werden. Eine weitere Option für Remote DR besteht darin, eine unter FCI gehostete Datenbank in einer Availability Group zu betreiben. Hierzu später mehr. FCI und WSFC Basis FCI, das für lokale Hochverfügbarkeit der Instanzen genutzt wird, ähnelt der veralteten Architektur eines kalten Cluster (Aktiv-Passiv). Unter SQL Server 2008 wurde diese Technologie SQL Server 2008 Failover Clustering genannt. Sie nutzte den Windows Server Failover Cluster. In SQL Server 2012 hat Microsoft diese Basistechnologie unter der Bezeichnung AlwaysOn zusammengefasst. Es handelt sich aber nach wie vor um die klassische Aktiv-Passiv-Konfiguration. Der Ablauf im Failover-Fall ist wie folgt: Solange kein Hardware-oder System-Fehler auftritt, werden alle Dirty Pages im Buffer Cache auf Platte geschrieben Alle entsprechenden SQL Server Services (Dienste) in der Ressource Gruppe werden auf dem aktiven Knoten gestoppt Die Ownership der Ressource Gruppe wird auf einen anderen Knoten der FCI transferriert Der neue Owner (Besitzer) der Ressource Gruppe startet seine SQL Server Services (Dienste) Die Connection-Anforderungen einer Client-Applikation werden automatisch auf den neuen aktiven Knoten mit dem selben Virtuellen Network Namen (VNN) umgeleitet Abhängig vom Zeitpunkt des letzten Checkpoints, kann die Anzahl der Dirty Pages im Buffer Cache, die noch auf Platte geschrieben werden müssen, zu unvorhersehbar langen Failover-Zeiten führen. Um diese Anzahl zu drosseln, besitzt der SQL Server 2012 eine neue Fähigkeit, die Indirect Checkpoints genannt wird. Indirect Checkpoints ähnelt dem Fast-Start MTTR Target Feature der Oracle Datenbank, das bereits mit Oracle9i verfügbar war.   SQL Server Multi-Subnet Clustering Ein SQL Server Multi-Subnet Failover Cluster entspricht vom Konzept her einem Oracle RAC Stretch Cluster. Doch dies ist nur auf den ersten Blick der Fall. Im Gegensatz zu RAC ist in einem lokalen SQL Server Failover Cluster jeweils nur ein Knoten aktiv für eine Datenbank. Für die Datenreplikation zwischen geografisch entfernten Sites verlässt sich Microsoft auf 3rd Party Lösungen für das Storage Mirroring.     Die Verbesserung dieses Szenario mit einer SQL Server 2012 Implementierung besteht schlicht darin, dass eine VLAN-Konfiguration (Virtual Local Area Network) nun nicht mehr benötigt wird, so wie dies bisher der Fall war. Das folgende Diagramm stellt dar, wie der Ablauf mit SQL Server 2012 gehandhabt wird. In Site A und Site B wird HA jeweils durch einen lokalen Aktiv-Passiv-Cluster sichergestellt.     Besondere Aufmerksamkeit muss hier der Konfiguration und dem Tuning geschenkt werden, da ansonsten völlig inakzeptable Failover-Zeiten resultieren. Dies liegt darin begründet, weil die Downtime auf Client-Seite nun nicht mehr nur von der reinen Failover-Zeit abhängt, sondern zusätzlich von der Dauer der DNS Replikation zwischen den DNS Servern. (Rufen Sie sich in Erinnerung, dass wir gerade von Multi-Subnet Clustering sprechen). Außerdem ist zu berücksichtigen, wie schnell die Clients die aktualisierten DNS Informationen abfragen. Spezielle Konfigurationen für Node Heartbeat, HostRecordTTL (Host Record Time-to-Live) und Intersite Replication Frequeny für Active Directory Sites und Services werden notwendig. Default TTL für Windows Server 2008 R2: 20 Minuten Empfohlene Einstellung: 1 Minute DNS Update Replication Frequency in Windows Umgebung: 180 Minuten Empfohlene Einstellung: 15 Minuten (minimaler Wert)   Betrachtet man diese Werte, muss man feststellen, dass selbst eine optimale Konfiguration die rigiden SLAs (Service Level Agreements) heutiger geschäftskritischer Anwendungen für HA und DR nicht erfüllen kann. Denn dies impliziert eine auf der Client-Seite erlebte Failover-Zeit von insgesamt 16 Minuten. Hierzu ein Auszug aus der SQL Server 2012 Online Dokumentation: Cons: If a cross-subnet failover occurs, the client recovery time could be 15 minutes or longer, depending on your HostRecordTTL setting and the setting of your cross-site DNS/AD replication schedule.    Wir sind hier an einem Punkt unserer Überlegungen angelangt, an dem sich erklärt, weshalb ich zuvor das "Windows was the God ..." Zitat verwendet habe. Die unbedingte Abhängigkeit zu Windows wird zunehmend zum Problem, da sie die Komplexität einer Microsoft-basierenden Lösung erhöht, anstelle sie zu reduzieren. Und Komplexität ist das Letzte, was sich CIOs heutzutage wünschen.  Zur Ehrenrettung des SQL Server 2012 und AlwaysOn muss man sagen, dass derart lange Failover-Zeiten kein unbedingtes "Muss" darstellen, sondern ein "Kann". Doch auch ein "Kann" kann im unpassenden Moment unvorhersehbare und kostspielige Folgen haben. Die Unabsehbarkeit ist wiederum Ursache vieler an der Implementierung beteiligten Komponenten und deren Abhängigkeiten, wie beispielsweise drei Cluster-Lösungen (zwei von Microsoft, eine 3rd Party Lösung). Wie man die Sache auch dreht und wendet, kommt man an diesem Fakt also nicht vorbei - ganz unabhängig von der Dauer einer Downtime oder Failover-Zeiten. Im Gegensatz zu AlwaysOn und der hier vorgestellten Version eines Stretch-Clusters, vermeidet eine entsprechende Oracle Implementierung eine derartige Komplexität, hervorgerufen duch multiple Abhängigkeiten. Den Unterschied machen Datenbank-integrierte Mechanismen, wie Fast Application Notification (FAN) und Fast Connection Failover (FCF). Für Oracle MAA Konfigurationen (Maximum Availability Architecture) sind Inter-Site Failover-Zeiten im Bereich von Sekunden keine Seltenheit. Wenn Sie dem Link zur Oracle MAA folgen, finden Sie außerdem eine Reihe an Customer Case Studies. Auch dies ist ein wichtiges Unterscheidungsmerkmal zu AlwaysOn, denn die Oracle Technologie hat sich bereits zigfach in höchst kritischen Umgebungen bewährt.   Availability Groups (Verfügbarkeitsgruppen) Die sogenannten Availability Groups (Verfügbarkeitsgruppen) sind - neben FCI - der weitere Baustein von AlwaysOn.   Hinweis: Bevor wir uns näher damit beschäftigen, sollten Sie sich noch einmal ins Gedächtnis rufen, dass eine SQL Server Datenbank nicht die gleiche Bedeutung besitzt, wie eine Oracle Datenbank, sondern eher einem Oracle Schema entspricht. So etwas wie die SQL Server Northwind Datenbank ist vergleichbar mit dem Oracle Scott Schema.   Eine Verfügbarkeitsgruppe setzt sich zusammen aus einem Set mehrerer Benutzer-Datenbanken, die im Falle eines Failover gemeinsam als Gruppe behandelt werden. Eine Verfügbarkeitsgruppe unterstützt ein Set an primären Datenbanken (primäres Replikat) und einem bis vier Sets von entsprechenden sekundären Datenbanken (sekundäre Replikate).       Es können jedoch nicht alle SQL Server Datenbanken einer AlwaysOn Verfügbarkeitsgruppe zugeordnet werden. Der SQL Server Spezialist Michael Otey zählt in seinem SQL Server Pro Artikel folgende Anforderungen auf: Verfügbarkeitsgruppen müssen mit Benutzer-Datenbanken erstellt werden. System-Datenbanken können nicht verwendet werden Die Datenbanken müssen sich im Read-Write Modus befinden. Read-Only Datenbanken werden nicht unterstützt Die Datenbanken in einer Verfügbarkeitsgruppe müssen Multiuser Datenbanken sein Sie dürfen nicht das AUTO_CLOSE Feature verwenden Sie müssen das Full Recovery Modell nutzen und es muss ein vollständiges Backup vorhanden sein Eine gegebene Datenbank kann sich nur in einer einzigen Verfügbarkeitsgruppe befinden und diese Datenbank düerfen nicht für Database Mirroring konfiguriert sein Microsoft empfiehl außerdem, dass der Verzeichnispfad einer Datenbank auf dem primären und sekundären Server identisch sein sollte Wie man sieht, eignen sich Verfügbarkeitsgruppen nicht, um HA und DR vollständig abzubilden. Die Unterscheidung zwischen der Instanzen-Ebene (FCI) und Datenbank-Ebene (Availability Groups) ist von hoher Bedeutung. Vor kurzem wurde mir gesagt, dass man mit den Verfügbarkeitsgruppen auf Shared Storage verzichten könne und dadurch Kosten spart. So weit so gut ... Man kann natürlich eine Installation rein mit Verfügbarkeitsgruppen und ohne FCI durchführen - aber man sollte sich dann darüber bewusst sein, was man dadurch alles nicht abgesichert hat - und dies wiederum für Desaster Recovery (DR) und SLAs (Service Level Agreements) bedeutet. Kurzum, um die Kombination aus beiden AlwaysOn Produkten und der damit verbundene Komplexität kommt man wohl in der Praxis nicht herum.    Availability Groups und WSFC AlwaysOn hängt von Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) ab, um die aktuellen Rollen der Verfügbarkeitsreplikate einer Verfügbarkeitsgruppe zu überwachen und zu verwalten, und darüber zu entscheiden, wie ein Failover-Ereignis die Verfügbarkeitsreplikate betrifft. Das folgende Diagramm zeigt de Beziehung zwischen Verfügbarkeitsgruppen und WSFC:   Der Verfügbarkeitsmodus ist eine Eigenschaft jedes Verfügbarkeitsreplikats. Synychron und Asynchron können also gemischt werden: Availability Modus (Verfügbarkeitsmodus) Asynchroner Commit-Modus Primäres replikat schließt Transaktionen ohne Warten auf Sekundäres Synchroner Commit-Modus Primäres Replikat wartet auf Commit von sekundärem Replikat Failover Typen Automatic Manual Forced (mit möglichem Datenverlust) Synchroner Commit-Modus Geplanter, manueller Failover ohne Datenverlust Automatischer Failover ohne Datenverlust Asynchroner Commit-Modus Nur Forced, manueller Failover mit möglichem Datenverlust   Der SQL Server kennt keinen separaten Switchover Begriff wie in Oracle Data Guard. Für SQL Server werden alle Role Transitions als Failover bezeichnet. Tatsächlich unterstützt der SQL Server keinen Switchover für asynchrone Verbindungen. Es gibt nur die Form des Forced Failover mit möglichem Datenverlust. Eine ähnliche Fähigkeit wie der Switchover unter Oracle Data Guard ist so nicht gegeben.   SQL Sever FCI mit Availability Groups (Verfügbarkeitsgruppen) Neben den Verfügbarkeitsgruppen kann eine zweite Failover-Ebene eingerichtet werden, indem SQL Server FCI (auf Shared Storage) mit WSFC implementiert wird. Ein Verfügbarkeitesreplikat kann dann auf einer Standalone Instanz gehostet werden, oder einer FCI Instanz. Zum Verständnis: Die Verfügbarkeitsgruppen selbst benötigen kein Shared Storage. Diese Kombination kann verwendet werden für lokale HA auf Ebene der Instanz und DR auf Datenbank-Ebene durch Verfügbarkeitsgruppen. Das folgende Diagramm zeigt dieses Szenario:   Achtung! Hier handelt es sich nicht um ein Pendant zu Oracle RAC plus Data Guard, auch wenn das Bild diesen Eindruck vielleicht vermitteln mag - denn alle sekundären Knoten im FCI sind rein passiv. Es existiert außerdem eine weitere und ernsthafte Einschränkung: SQL Server Failover Cluster Instanzen (FCI) unterstützen nicht das automatische AlwaysOn Failover für Verfügbarkeitsgruppen. Jedes unter FCI gehostete Verfügbarkeitsreplikat kann nur für manuelles Failover konfiguriert werden.   Lesbare Sekundäre Replikate Ein oder mehrere Verfügbarkeitsreplikate in einer Verfügbarkeitsgruppe können für den lesenden Zugriff konfiguriert werden, wenn sie als sekundäres Replikat laufen. Dies ähnelt Oracle Active Data Guard, jedoch gibt es Einschränkungen. Alle Abfragen gegen die sekundäre Datenbank werden automatisch auf das Snapshot Isolation Level abgebildet. Es handelt sich dabei um eine Versionierung der Rows. Microsoft versuchte hiermit die Oracle MVRC (Multi Version Read Consistency) nachzustellen. Tatsächlich muss man die SQL Server Snapshot Isolation eher mit Oracle Flashback vergleichen. Bei der Implementierung des Snapshot Isolation Levels handelt sich um ein nachträglich aufgesetztes Feature und nicht um einen inhärenten Teil des Datenbank-Kernels, wie im Falle Oracle. (Ich werde hierzu in Kürze einen weiteren Blogbeitrag verfassen, wenn ich mich mit der neuen SQL Server 2012 Core Lizenzierung beschäftige.) Für die Praxis entstehen aus der Abbildung auf das Snapshot Isolation Level ernsthafte Restriktionen, derer man sich für den Betrieb in der Praxis bereits vorab bewusst sein sollte: Sollte auf der primären Datenbank eine aktive Transaktion zu dem Zeitpunkt existieren, wenn ein lesbares sekundäres Replikat in die Verfügbarkeitsgruppe aufgenommen wird, werden die Row-Versionen auf der korrespondierenden sekundären Datenbank nicht sofort vollständig verfügbar sein. Eine aktive Transaktion auf dem primären Replikat muss zuerst abgeschlossen (Commit oder Rollback) und dieser Transaktions-Record auf dem sekundären Replikat verarbeitet werden. Bis dahin ist das Isolation Level Mapping auf der sekundären Datenbank unvollständig und Abfragen sind temporär geblockt. Microsoft sagt dazu: "This is needed to guarantee that row versions are available on the secondary replica before executing the query under snapshot isolation as all isolation levels are implicitly mapped to snapshot isolation." (SQL Storage Engine Blog: AlwaysOn: I just enabled Readable Secondary but my query is blocked?)  Grundlegend bedeutet dies, dass ein aktives lesbares Replikat nicht in die Verfügbarkeitsgruppe aufgenommen werden kann, ohne das primäre Replikat vorübergehend stillzulegen. Da Leseoperationen auf das Snapshot Isolation Transaction Level abgebildet werden, kann die Bereinigung von Ghost Records auf dem primären Replikat durch Transaktionen auf einem oder mehreren sekundären Replikaten geblockt werden - z.B. durch eine lang laufende Abfrage auf dem sekundären Replikat. Diese Bereinigung wird auch blockiert, wenn die Verbindung zum sekundären Replikat abbricht oder der Datenaustausch unterbrochen wird. Auch die Log Truncation wird in diesem Zustant verhindert. Wenn dieser Zustand längere Zeit anhält, empfiehlt Microsoft das sekundäre Replikat aus der Verfügbarkeitsgruppe herauszunehmen - was ein ernsthaftes Downtime-Problem darstellt. Die Read-Only Workload auf den sekundären Replikaten kann eingehende DDL Änderungen blockieren. Obwohl die Leseoperationen aufgrund der Row-Versionierung keine Shared Locks halten, führen diese Operatioen zu Sch-S Locks (Schemastabilitätssperren). DDL-Änderungen durch Redo-Operationen können dadurch blockiert werden. Falls DDL aufgrund konkurrierender Lese-Workload blockiert wird und der Schwellenwert für 'Recovery Interval' (eine SQL Server Konfigurationsoption) überschritten wird, generiert der SQL Server das Ereignis sqlserver.lock_redo_blocked, welches Microsoft zum Kill der blockierenden Leser empfiehlt. Auf die Verfügbarkeit der Anwendung wird hierbei keinerlei Rücksicht genommen.   Keine dieser Einschränkungen existiert mit Oracle Active Data Guard.   Backups auf sekundären Replikaten  Über die sekundären Replikate können Backups (BACKUP DATABASE via Transact-SQL) nur als copy-only Backups einer vollständigen Datenbank, Dateien und Dateigruppen erstellt werden. Das Erstellen inkrementeller Backups ist nicht unterstützt, was ein ernsthafter Rückstand ist gegenüber der Backup-Unterstützung physikalischer Standbys unter Oracle Data Guard. Hinweis: Ein möglicher Workaround via Snapshots, bleibt ein Workaround. Eine weitere Einschränkung dieses Features gegenüber Oracle Data Guard besteht darin, dass das Backup eines sekundären Replikats nicht ausgeführt werden kann, wenn es nicht mit dem primären Replikat kommunizieren kann. Darüber hinaus muss das sekundäre Replikat synchronisiert sein oder sich in der Synchronisation befinden, um das Beackup auf dem sekundären Replikat erstellen zu können.   Vergleich von Microsoft AlwaysOn mit der Oracle MAA Ich komme wieder zurück auf die Eingangs erwähnte, mehrfach an mich gestellte Frage "Wann denn - und ob überhaupt - Oracle etwas Vergleichbares wie AlwaysOn bieten würde?" und meine damit verbundene (kurze) Irritation. Wenn Sie diesen Blogbeitrag bis hierher gelesen haben, dann kennen Sie jetzt meine darauf gegebene Antwort. Der eine oder andere Punkt traf dabei nicht immer auf Jeden zu, was auch nicht der tiefere Sinn und Zweck meiner Antwort war. Wenn beispielsweise kein Multi-Subnet mit im Spiel ist, sind alle diesbezüglichen Kritikpunkte zunächst obsolet. Was aber nicht bedeutet, dass sie nicht bereits morgen schon wieder zum Thema werden könnten (Sag niemals "Nie"). In manch anderes Fettnäpfchen tritt man wiederum nicht unbedingt in einer Testumgebung, sondern erst im laufenden Betrieb. Erst recht nicht dann, wenn man sich potenzieller Probleme nicht bewusst ist und keine dedizierten Tests startet. Und wer AlwaysOn erfolgreich positionieren möchte, wird auch gar kein Interesse daran haben, auf mögliche Schwachstellen und den besagten Teufel im Detail aufmerksam zu machen. Das ist keine Unterstellung - es ist nur menschlich. Außerdem ist es verständlich, dass man sich in erster Linie darauf konzentriert "was geht" und "was gut läuft", anstelle auf das "was zu Problemen führen kann" oder "nicht funktioniert". Wer will schon der Miesepeter sein? Für mich selbst gesprochen, kann ich nur sagen, dass ich lieber vorab von allen möglichen Einschränkungen wissen möchte, anstelle sie dann nach einer kurzen Zeit der heilen Welt schmerzhaft am eigenen Leib erfahren zu müssen. Ich bin davon überzeugt, dass es Ihnen nicht anders geht. Nachfolgend deshalb eine Zusammenfassung all jener Punkte, die ich im Vergleich zur Oracle MAA (Maximum Availability Architecture) als unbedingt Erwähnenswert betrachte, falls man eine Evaluierung von Microsoft AlwaysOn in Betracht zieht. 1. AlwaysOn ist eine komplexe Technologie Der SQL Server AlwaysOn Stack ist zusammengesetzt aus drei verschiedenen Technlogien: Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) SQL Server Availability Groups (Verfügbarkeitsgruppen) Man kann eine derartige Lösung nicht als nahtlos bezeichnen, wofür auch die vielen von Microsoft dargestellten Einschränkungen sprechen. Während sich frühere SQL Server Versionen in Richtung eigener HA/DR Technologien entwickelten (wie Database Mirroring), empfiehlt Microsoft nun die Migration. Doch weshalb dieser Schwenk? Er führt nicht zu einem konsisten und robusten Angebot an HA/DR Technologie für geschäftskritische Umgebungen.  Liegt die Antwort in meiner These begründet, nach der "Windows was the God ..." noch immer gilt und man die Nachteile der allzu engen Kopplung mit Windows nicht sehen möchte? Entscheiden Sie selbst ... 2. Failover Cluster Instanzen - Kein RAC-Pendant Die SQL Server und Windows Server Clustering Technologie basiert noch immer auf dem veralteten Aktiv-Passiv Modell und führt zu einer Verschwendung von Systemressourcen. In einer Betrachtung von lediglich zwei Knoten erschließt sich auf Anhieb noch nicht der volle Mehrwert eines Aktiv-Aktiv Clusters (wie den Real Application Clusters), wie er von Oracle bereits vor zehn Jahren entwickelt wurde. Doch kennt man die Vorzüge der Skalierbarkeit durch einfaches Hinzufügen weiterer Cluster-Knoten, die dann alle gemeinsam als ein einziges logisches System zusammenarbeiten, versteht man was hinter dem Motto "Pay-as-you-Grow" steckt. In einem Aktiv-Aktiv Cluster geht es zwar auch um Hochverfügbarkeit - und ein Failover erfolgt zudem schneller, als in einem Aktiv-Passiv Modell - aber es geht eben nicht nur darum. An dieser Stelle sei darauf hingewiesen, dass die Oracle 11g Standard Edition bereits die Nutzung von Oracle RAC bis zu vier Sockets kostenfrei beinhaltet. Möchten Sie dazu Windows nutzen, benötigen Sie keine Windows Server Enterprise Edition, da Oracle 11g die eigene Clusterware liefert. Sie kommen in den Genuss von Hochverfügbarkeit und Skalierbarkeit und können dazu die günstigere Windows Server Standard Edition nutzen. 3. SQL Server Multi-Subnet Clustering - Abhängigkeit zu 3rd Party Storage Mirroring  Die SQL Server Multi-Subnet Clustering Architektur unterstützt den Aufbau eines Stretch Clusters, basiert dabei aber auf dem Aktiv-Passiv Modell. Das eigentlich Problematische ist jedoch, dass man sich zur Absicherung der Datenbank auf 3rd Party Storage Mirroring Technologie verlässt, ohne Integration zwischen dem Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) und der darunterliegenden Mirroring Technologie. Wenn nun im Cluster ein Failover auf Instanzen-Ebene erfolgt, existiert keine Koordination mit einem möglichen Failover auf Ebene des Storage-Array. 4. Availability Groups (Verfügbarkeitsgruppen) - Vier, oder doch nur Zwei? Ein primäres Replikat erlaubt bis zu vier sekundäre Replikate innerhalb einer Verfügbarkeitsgruppe, jedoch nur zwei im Synchronen Commit Modus. Während dies zwar einen Vorteil gegenüber dem stringenten 1:1 Modell unter Database Mirroring darstellt, fällt der SQL Server 2012 damit immer noch weiter zurück hinter Oracle Data Guard mit bis zu 30 direkten Stanbdy Zielen - und vielen weiteren durch kaskadierende Ziele möglichen. Damit eignet sich Oracle Active Data Guard auch für die Bereitstellung einer Reader-Farm Skalierbarkeit für Internet-basierende Unternehmen. Mit AwaysOn Verfügbarkeitsgruppen ist dies nicht möglich. 5. Availability Groups (Verfügbarkeitsgruppen) - kein asynchrones Switchover  Die Technologie der Verfügbarkeitsgruppen wird auch als geeignetes Mittel für administrative Aufgaben positioniert - wie Upgrades oder Wartungsarbeiten. Man muss sich jedoch einem gravierendem Defizit bewusst sein: Im asynchronen Verfügbarkeitsmodus besteht die einzige Möglichkeit für Role Transition im Forced Failover mit Datenverlust! Um den Verlust von Daten durch geplante Wartungsarbeiten zu vermeiden, muss man den synchronen Verfügbarkeitsmodus konfigurieren, was jedoch ernstzunehmende Auswirkungen auf WAN Deployments nach sich zieht. Spinnt man diesen Gedanken zu Ende, kommt man zu dem Schluss, dass die Technologie der Verfügbarkeitsgruppen für geplante Wartungsarbeiten in einem derartigen Umfeld nicht effektiv genutzt werden kann. 6. Automatisches Failover - Nicht immer möglich Sowohl die SQL Server FCI, als auch Verfügbarkeitsgruppen unterstützen automatisches Failover. Möchte man diese jedoch kombinieren, wird das Ergebnis kein automatisches Failover sein. Denn ihr Zusammentreffen im Failover-Fall führt zu Race Conditions (Wettlaufsituationen), weshalb diese Konfiguration nicht länger das automatische Failover zu einem Replikat in einer Verfügbarkeitsgruppe erlaubt. Auch hier bestätigt sich wieder die tiefere Problematik von AlwaysOn, mit einer Zusammensetzung aus unterschiedlichen Technologien und der Abhängigkeit zu Windows. 7. Problematische RTO (Recovery Time Objective) Microsoft postioniert die SQL Server Multi-Subnet Clustering Architektur als brauchbare HA/DR Architektur. Bedenkt man jedoch die Problematik im Zusammenhang mit DNS Replikation und den möglichen langen Wartezeiten auf Client-Seite von bis zu 16 Minuten, sind strenge RTO Anforderungen (Recovery Time Objectives) nicht erfüllbar. Im Gegensatz zu Oracle besitzt der SQL Server keine Datenbank-integrierten Technologien, wie Oracle Fast Application Notification (FAN) oder Oracle Fast Connection Failover (FCF). 8. Problematische RPO (Recovery Point Objective) SQL Server ermöglicht Forced Failover (erzwungenes Failover), bietet jedoch keine Möglichkeit zur automatischen Übertragung der letzten Datenbits von einem alten zu einem neuen primären Replikat, wenn der Verfügbarkeitsmodus asynchron war. Oracle Data Guard hingegen bietet diese Unterstützung durch das Flush Redo Feature. Dies sichert "Zero Data Loss" und beste RPO auch in erzwungenen Failover-Situationen. 9. Lesbare Sekundäre Replikate mit Einschränkungen Aufgrund des Snapshot Isolation Transaction Level für lesbare sekundäre Replikate, besitzen diese Einschränkungen mit Auswirkung auf die primäre Datenbank. Die Bereinigung von Ghost Records auf der primären Datenbank, wird beeinflusst von lang laufenden Abfragen auf der lesabaren sekundären Datenbank. Die lesbare sekundäre Datenbank kann nicht in die Verfügbarkeitsgruppe aufgenommen werden, wenn es aktive Transaktionen auf der primären Datenbank gibt. Zusätzlich können DLL Änderungen auf der primären Datenbank durch Abfragen auf der sekundären blockiert werden. Und imkrementelle Backups werden hier nicht unterstützt.   Keine dieser Restriktionen existiert unter Oracle Data Guard.

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• Start small, grow fast your SOA footprint by Edwin Biemond, Ronald van Luttikhuizen and Demed L’Her

  - by JuergenKress

  A set of pragmatic best practices for deploying a simple and sound SOA footprint that can grow with business demand. The paper contains details about Administrative considerations & Infrastructure considerations & Development considerations& Architectural considerations.  Edwin Biemond Ronald van Luttikhuizen Demed L’Her We are very interested to publish papers jointly with our partner community. Here is a list of possible SOA whitepapers that I am very interested in seeing published (note that the list is not exhaustive and I welcome any other topic you would like to volunteer). The format for these whitepapers would ideally be a 5 to 12 pages document, possibly with a companion sample (to be hosted on http://java.net/projects/oraclesoasuite11g ). It is not a marketing stuff. We will get them published on OTN, with proper credits and use social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to promote them. For information, the "quickstart guide" was downloaded more than 11,000 titles over just 2 months, following a similar approach. These papers are a great way to get exposure and build your resume. We would prefer if we could get 2 people to collaborate on these papers (ideally 1 partner or customer and 1 oracle person). This guarantees some level of peer review and gives greater legitimacy to the paper. If you are Interested? Please contact Demed L’Her Thank you! SOA Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Start small grow fast,Edwin Biemond,Ronald van Luttikhuizen,Demed L’Her,SOA Suite,Oracle,OTN,SOA Partner Community,Jürgen Kress

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• Open the LOV of af:inputListOfValues with a double click

  - by frank.nimphius

  To open the LOV popup of an af:inputListOfValues component in ADF Faces, you either click the magnifier icon to the right of the input field or tab onto the icon and press the Enter key. If you want to open the same dialog in response to a user double click into the LOV input field, JavaScript is a friend. For this solution, I assume you created an editable table or input form that is based on a View Object that contains at least one attribute that has a model driven list of values defined. The Default List Type is should be set to Input Text with List of Values so that when the form or table gets created, the attribute is rendered by the af:inputListOfValues component. To implement the use case, drag a Client Listener component from the Operations accordion in the Component Palette and drop it onto the af:inputListOfValues component in the page. In the opened Insert Client Listener dialog, define the Method as handleLovOnDblclickand choose dblClick in the select list for the Type attribute. Add the following code snippet to the page source directly below the af:document tag. <af:document id="d1">      <af:resource type="javascript">     function handleLovOnDblclick(evt){             var lovComp = evt.getSource();             if (lovComp instanceof AdfRichInputListOfValues &&          lovComp.getReadOnly()==false){           AdfLaunchPopupEvent.queue(lovComp,true);        }     }      </af:resource> The JavaScript function is called whenever the user clicks into the LOV field. It gets the source component reference from the event object that is passed into the function and verifies the LOV component is not read only. It then queues the launch event for the LOV popup to open. The page source for the LOV component is shown below: <af:inputListOfValues id="departmentIdId" … >   <f:validator binding="…"/>   …  <af:clientListener method="handleLovOnDblclick" type="dblClick"/> </af:inputListOfValues>

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• The Importance of a Security Assessment - by Michael Terra, Oracle

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  Today's Blog was written by Michael Terra, who was the Subject Matter Expert for the recently announced Oracle Online Security Assessment. You can take the Online Assessment here: Take the Online Assessment Over the past decade, IT Security has become a recognized and respected Business discipline.  Several factors have contributed to IT Security becoming a core business and organizational enabler including, but not limited to, increased external threats and increased regulatory pressure. Security is also viewed as a key enabler for strategic corporate activities such as mergers and acquisitions.Now, the challenge for senior security professionals is to develop an ongoing dialogue within their organizations about the importance of information security and how it can impact their organization's strategic objectives/mission. The importance of conducting regular “Security Assessments” across the IT and physical infrastructure has become increasingly important. Security standards and frameworks, such as the international standard ISO 27001, are increasingly being adopted by organizations and their business partners as proof of their security posture and “Security Assessments” are a great way to ensure a continued alignment to these frameworks.Oracle offers a number of different security assessment covering a broad range of technologies. Some of these are short engagements conducted for free with our strategic customers and partners. Others are longer term paid engagements delivered by Oracle Consulting Services or one of our partners. The goal of a security assessment, (also known as a security audit or security review), is to ensure that necessary security controls are integrated into the design and implementation of a project, application or technology.  A properly completed security assessment should provide documentation outlining any security gaps that exist in an infrastructure and the associated risks for those gaps. With that knowledge, an organization can choose to either mitigate, transfer, avoid or accept the risk. One example of an Oracle offering is a Security Readiness Assessment:The Oracle Security Readiness Assessment is a practical security architecture review focused on aligning an organization’s enterprise security architecture to their business principals and strategic objectives. The service will establish a multi-phase security architecture roadmap focused on supporting new and existing business initiatives.Offering OverviewThe Security Readiness Assessment will: Define an organization’s current security posture and provide a roadmap to a desired future state architecture by mapping  security solutions to business goals Incorporate commonly accepted security architecture concepts to streamline an organization’s security vision from strategy to implementation Define the people, process and technology implications of the desired future state architecture The objective is to deliver cohesive, best practice security architectures spanning multiple domains that are unique and specific to the context of your organization. Offering DetailsThe Oracle Security Readiness Assessment is a multi-stage process with a dedicated Oracle Security team supporting your organization.  During the course of this free engagement, the team will focus on the following: Review your current business operating model and supporting IT security structures and processes Partner with your organization to establish a future state security architecture leveraging Oracle’s reference architectures, capability maps, and best practices Provide guidance and recommendations on governance practices for the rollout and adoption of your future state security architecture Create an initial business case for the adoption of the future state security architecture If you are interested in finding out more, ask your Sales Consultant or Account Manager for details.

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• Solaris 11.1: Changes to included FOSS packages

  - by alanc

  Besides the documentation changes I mentioned last time, another place you can see Solaris 11.1 changes before upgrading is in the online package repository, now that the 11.1 packages have been published to http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/, as the “0.175.1.0.0.24.2” branch. (Oracle Solaris Package Versioning explains what each field in that version string means.) When you’re ready to upgrade to the packages from either this repo, or the support repository, you’ll want to first read How to Update to Oracle Solaris 11.1 Using the Image Packaging System by Pete Dennis, as there are a couple issues you will need to be aware of to do that upgrade, several of which are due to changes in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) packages included with Solaris, as I’ll explain in a bit. Solaris 11 can update more readily than Solaris 10 In the Solaris 10 and older update models, the way the updates were built constrained what changes we could make in those releases. To change an existing SVR4 package in those releases, we created a Solaris Patch, which applied to a given version of the SVR4 package and replaced, added or deleted files in it. These patches were released via the support websites (originally SunSolve, now My Oracle Support) for applying to existing Solaris 10 installations, and were also merged into the install images for the next Solaris 10 update release. (This Solaris Patches blog post from Gerry Haskins dives deeper into that subject.) Some of the restrictions of this model were that package refactoring, changes to package dependencies, and even just changing the package version number, were difficult to do in this hybrid patch/OS update model. For instance, when Solaris 10 first shipped, it had the Xorg server from X11R6.8. Over the first couple years of update releases we were able to keep it up to date by replacing, adding, & removing files as necessary, taking it all the way up to Xorg server release 1.3 (new version numbering begun after the X11R7 split of the X11 tree into separate modules gave each module its own version). But if you run pkginfo on the SUNWxorg-server package, you’ll see it still displayed a version number of 6.8, confusing users as to which version was actually included. We stopped upgrading the Xorg server releases in Solaris 10 after 1.3, as later versions added new dependencies, such as HAL, D-Bus, and libpciaccess, which were very difficult to manage in this patching model. (We later got libpciaccess to work, but HAL & D-Bus would have been much harder due to the greater dependency tree underneath those.) Similarly, every time the GNOME team looked into upgrading Solaris 10 past GNOME 2.6, they found these constraints made it so difficult it wasn’t worthwhile, and eventually GNOME’s dependencies had changed enough it was completely infeasible. Fortunately, this worked out for both the X11 & GNOME teams, with our management making the business decision to concentrate on the “Nevada” branch for desktop users - first as Solaris Express Desktop Edition, and later as OpenSolaris, so we didn’t have to fight to try to make the package updates fit into these tight constraints. Meanwhile, the team designing the new packaging system for Solaris 11 was seeing us struggle with these problems, and making this much easier to manage for both the development teams and our users was one of their big goals for the IPS design they were working on. Now that we’ve reached the first update release to Solaris 11, we can start to see the fruits of their labors, with more FOSS updates in 11.1 than we had in many Solaris 10 update releases, keeping software more up to date with the upstream communities. Of course, just because we can more easily update now, doesn’t always mean we should or will do so, it just removes the package system limitations from forcing the decision for us. So while we’ve upgraded the X Window System in the 11.1 release from X11R7.6 to 7.7, the Solaris GNOME team decided it was not the right time to try to make the jump from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, though they did update some individual components of the desktop, especially those with security fixes like Firefox. In other parts of the system, decisions as to what to update were prioritized based on how they affected other projects, or what customer requests we’d gotten for them. So with all that background in place, what packages did we actually update or add between Solaris 11.0 and 11.1? Core OS Functionality One of the FOSS changes with the biggest impact in this release is the upgrade from Grub Legacy (0.97) to Grub 2 (1.99) for the x64 platform boot loader. This is the cause of one of the upgrade quirks, since to go from Solaris 11.0 to 11.1 on x64 systems, you first need to update the Boot Environment tools (such as beadm) to a new version that can handle boot environments that use the Grub2 boot loader. System administrators can find the details they need to know about the new Grub in the Administering the GRand Unified Bootloader chapter of the Booting and Shutting Down Oracle Solaris 11.1 Systems guide. This change was necessary to be able to support new hardware coming into the x64 marketplace, including systems using UEFI firmware or booting off disk drives larger than 2 terabytes. For both platforms, Solaris 11.1 adds rsyslog as an optional alternative to the traditional syslogd, and OpenSCAP for checking security configuration settings are compliant with site policies. Note that the support repo actually has newer versions of BIND & fetchmail than the 11.1 release, as some late breaking critical fixes came through from the community upstream releases after the Solaris 11.1 release was frozen, and made their way to the support repository. These are responsible for the other big upgrade quirk in this release, in which to upgrade a system which already installed those versions from the support repo, you need to either wait for those packages to make their way to the 11.1 branch of the support repo, or follow the steps in the aforementioned upgrade walkthrough to let the package system know it's okay to temporarily downgrade those. Developer Stack While Solaris 11.0 included Python 2.7, many of the bundled python modules weren’t packaged for it yet, limiting its usability. For 11.1, many more of the python modules include 2.7 versions (enough that I filtered them out of the below table, but you can always search on the package repository server for them. For other language runtimes and development tools, 11.1 expands the use of IPS mediated links to choose which version of a package is the default when the packages are designed to allow multiple versions to install side by side. For instance, in Solaris 11.0, GNU automake 1.9 and 1.10 were provided, and developers had to run them as either automake-1.9 or automake-1.10. In Solaris 11.1, when automake 1.11 was added, also added was a /usr/bin/automake mediated link, which points to the automake-1.11 program by default, but can be changed to another version by running the pkg set-mediator command. Mediated links were also used for the Java runtime & development kits in 11.1, changing the default versions to the Java 7 releases (the 1.7.0.x package versions), while allowing admins to switch links such as /usr/bin/javac back to Java 6 if they need to for their site, to deal with Java 7 compatibility or other issues, without having to update each usage to use the full versioned /usr/jdk/jdk1.6.0_35/bin/javac paths for every invocation. Desktop Stack As I mentioned before, we upgraded from X11R7.6 to X11R7.7, since a pleasant coincidence made the X.Org release dates line up nicely with our feature & code freeze dates for this release. (Or perhaps it wasn’t so coincidental, after all, one of the benefits of being the person making the release is being able to decide what schedule is most convenient for you, and this one worked well for me.) For the table below, I’ve skipped listing the packages in which we use the X11 “katamari” version for the Solaris package version (mainly packages combining elements of multiple upstream modules with independent version numbers), since they just all changed from 7.6 to 7.7. In the graphics drivers, we worked with Intel to update the Intel Integrated Graphics Processor support to support 3D graphics and kernel mode setting on the Ivy Bridge chipsets, and updated Nvidia’s non-FOSS graphics driver from 280.13 to 295.20. Higher up in the desktop stack, PulseAudio was added for audio support, and liblouis for Braille support, and the GNOME applications were built to use them. The Mozilla applications, Firefox & Thunderbird moved to the current Extended Support Release (ESR) versions, 10.x for each, to bring up-to-date security fixes without having to be on Mozilla’s agressive 6 week feature cycle release train. Detailed list of changes This table shows most of the changes to the FOSS packages between Solaris 11.0 and 11.1. As noted above, some were excluded for clarity, or to reduce noise and duplication. All the FOSS packages which didn't change the version number in their packaging info are not included, even if they had updates to fix bugs, security holes, or add support for new hardware or new features of Solaris. Package11.011.1 archiver/unrar 3.8.5 4.1.4 audio/sox 14.3.0 14.3.2 backup/rdiff-backup 1.2.1 1.3.3 communication/im/pidgin 2.10.0 2.10.5 compress/gzip 1.3.5 1.4 compress/xz not included 5.0.1 database/sqlite-3 3.7.6.3 3.7.11 desktop/remote-desktop/tigervnc 1.0.90 1.1.0 desktop/window-manager/xcompmgr 1.1.5 1.1.6 desktop/xscreensaver 5.12 5.15 developer/build/autoconf 2.63 2.68 developer/build/autoconf/xorg-macros 1.15.0 1.17 developer/build/automake-111 not included 1.11.2 developer/build/cmake 2.6.2 2.8.6 developer/build/gnu-make 3.81 3.82 developer/build/imake 1.0.4 1.0.5 developer/build/libtool 1.5.22 2.4.2 developer/build/makedepend 1.0.3 1.0.4 developer/documentation-tool/doxygen 1.5.7.1 1.7.6.1 developer/gnu-binutils 2.19 2.21.1 developer/java/jdepend not included 2.9 developer/java/jdk-6 1.6.0.26 1.6.0.35 developer/java/jdk-7 1.7.0.0 1.7.0.7 developer/java/jpackage-utils not included 1.7.5 developer/java/junit 4.5 4.10 developer/lexer/jflex not included 1.4.1 developer/parser/byaccj not included 1.14 developer/parser/java_cup not included 0.10 developer/quilt 0.47 0.60 developer/versioning/git 1.7.3.2 1.7.9.2 developer/versioning/mercurial 1.8.4 2.2.1 developer/versioning/subversion 1.6.16 1.7.5 diagnostic/constype 1.0.3 1.0.4 diagnostic/nmap 5.21 5.51 diagnostic/scanpci 0.12.1 0.13.1 diagnostic/wireshark 1.4.8 1.8.2 diagnostic/xload 1.1.0 1.1.1 editor/gnu-emacs 23.1 23.4 editor/vim 7.3.254 7.3.600 file/lndir 1.0.2 1.0.3 image/editor/bitmap 1.0.5 1.0.6 image/gnuplot 4.4.0 4.6.0 image/library/libexif 0.6.19 0.6.21 image/library/libpng 1.4.8 1.4.11 image/library/librsvg 2.26.3 2.34.1 image/xcursorgen 1.0.4 1.0.5 library/audio/pulseaudio not included 1.1 library/cacao 2.3.0.0 2.3.1.0 library/expat 2.0.1 2.1.0 library/gc 7.1 7.2 library/graphics/pixman 0.22.0 0.24.4 library/guile 1.8.4 1.8.6 library/java/javadb 10.5.3.0 10.6.2.1 library/java/subversion 1.6.16 1.7.5 library/json-c not included 0.9 library/libedit not included 3.0 library/libee not included 0.3.2 library/libestr not included 0.1.2 library/libevent 1.3.5 1.4.14.2 library/liblouis not included 2.1.1 library/liblouisxml not included 2.1.0 library/libtecla 1.6.0 1.6.1 library/libtool/libltdl 1.5.22 2.4.2 library/nspr 4.8.8 4.8.9 library/openldap 2.4.25 2.4.30 library/pcre 7.8 8.21 library/perl-5/subversion 1.6.16 1.7.5 library/python-2/jsonrpclib not included 0.1.3 library/python-2/lxml 2.1.2 2.3.3 library/python-2/nose not included 1.1.2 library/python-2/pyopenssl not included 0.11 library/python-2/subversion 1.6.16 1.7.5 library/python-2/tkinter-26 2.6.4 2.6.8 library/python-2/tkinter-27 2.7.1 2.7.3 library/security/nss 4.12.10 4.13.1 library/security/openssl 1.0.0.5 (1.0.0e) 1.0.0.10 (1.0.0j) mail/thunderbird 6.0 10.0.6 network/dns/bind 9.6.3.4.3 9.6.3.7.2 package/pkgbuild not included 1.3.104 print/filter/enscript not included 1.6.4 print/filter/gutenprint 5.2.4 5.2.7 print/lp/filter/foomatic-rip 3.0.2 4.0.15 runtime/java/jre-6 1.6.0.26 1.6.0.35 runtime/java/jre-7 1.7.0.0 1.7.0.7 runtime/perl-512 5.12.3 5.12.4 runtime/python-26 2.6.4 2.6.8 runtime/python-27 2.7.1 2.7.3 runtime/ruby-18 1.8.7.334 1.8.7.357 runtime/tcl-8/tcl-sqlite-3 3.7.6.3 3.7.11 security/compliance/openscap not included 0.8.1 security/nss-utilities 4.12.10 4.13.1 security/sudo 1.8.1.2 1.8.4.5 service/network/dhcp/isc-dhcp 4.1 4.1.0.6 service/network/dns/bind 9.6.3.4.3 9.6.3.7.2 service/network/ftp (ProFTPD) 1.3.3.0.5 1.3.3.0.7 service/network/samba 3.5.10 3.6.6 shell/conflict 0.2004.9.1 0.2010.6.27 shell/pipe-viewer 1.1.4 1.2.0 shell/zsh 4.3.12 4.3.17 system/boot/grub 0.97 1.99 system/font/truetype/liberation 1.4 1.7.2 system/library/freetype-2 2.4.6 2.4.9 system/library/libnet 1.1.2.1 1.1.5 system/management/cim/pegasus 2.9.1 2.11.0 system/management/ipmitool 1.8.10 1.8.11 system/management/wbem/wbemcli 1.3.7 1.3.9.1 system/network/routing/quagga 0.99.8 0.99.19 system/rsyslog not included 6.2.0 terminal/luit 1.1.0 1.1.1 text/convmv 1.14 1.15 text/gawk 3.1.5 3.1.8 text/gnu-grep 2.5.4 2.10 web/browser/firefox 6.0.2 10.0.6 web/browser/links 1.0 1.0.3 web/java-servlet/tomcat 6.0.33 6.0.35 web/php-53 not included 5.3.14 web/php-53/extension/php-apc not included 3.1.9 web/php-53/extension/php-idn not included 0.2.0 web/php-53/extension/php-memcache not included 3.0.6 web/php-53/extension/php-mysql not included 5.3.14 web/php-53/extension/php-pear not included 5.3.14 web/php-53/extension/php-suhosin not included 0.9.33 web/php-53/extension/php-tcpwrap not included 1.1.3 web/php-53/extension/php-xdebug not included 2.2.0 web/php-common not included 11.1 web/proxy/squid 3.1.8 3.1.18 web/server/apache-22 2.2.20 2.2.22 web/server/apache-22/module/apache-sed 2.2.20 2.2.22 web/server/apache-22/module/apache-wsgi not included 3.3 x11/diagnostic/xev 1.1.0 1.2.0 x11/diagnostic/xscope 1.3 1.3.1 x11/documentation/xorg-docs 1.6 1.7 x11/keyboard/xkbcomp 1.2.3 1.2.4 x11/library/libdmx 1.1.1 1.1.2 x11/library/libdrm 2.4.25 2.4.32 x11/library/libfontenc 1.1.0 1.1.1 x11/library/libfs 1.0.3 1.0.4 x11/library/libice 1.0.7 1.0.8 x11/library/libsm 1.2.0 1.2.1 x11/library/libx11 1.4.4 1.5.0 x11/library/libxau 1.0.6 1.0.7 x11/library/libxcb 1.7 1.8.1 x11/library/libxcursor 1.1.12 1.1.13 x11/library/libxdmcp 1.1.0 1.1.1 x11/library/libxext 1.3.0 1.3.1 x11/library/libxfixes 4.0.5 5.0 x11/library/libxfont 1.4.4 1.4.5 x11/library/libxft 2.2.0 2.3.1 x11/library/libxi 1.4.3 1.6.1 x11/library/libxinerama 1.1.1 1.1.2 x11/library/libxkbfile 1.0.7 1.0.8 x11/library/libxmu 1.1.0 1.1.1 x11/library/libxmuu 1.1.0 1.1.1 x11/library/libxpm 3.5.9 3.5.10 x11/library/libxrender 0.9.6 0.9.7 x11/library/libxres 1.0.5 1.0.6 x11/library/libxscrnsaver 1.2.1 1.2.2 x11/library/libxtst 1.2.0 1.2.1 x11/library/libxv 1.0.6 1.0.7 x11/library/libxvmc 1.0.6 1.0.7 x11/library/libxxf86vm 1.1.1 1.1.2 x11/library/mesa 7.10.2 7.11.2 x11/library/toolkit/libxaw7 1.0.9 1.0.11 x11/library/toolkit/libxt 1.0.9 1.1.3 x11/library/xtrans 1.2.6 1.2.7 x11/oclock 1.0.2 1.0.3 x11/server/xdmx 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/server/xephyr 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/server/xorg 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-input-keyboard 1.6.0 1.6.1 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-input-mouse 1.7.1 1.7.2 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-input-synaptics 1.4.1 1.6.2 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-input-vmmouse 12.7.0 12.8.0 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-ast 0.91.10 0.93.10 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-ati 6.14.1 6.14.4 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-cirrus 1.3.2 1.4.0 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-dummy 0.3.4 0.3.5 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-intel 2.10.0 2.18.0 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-mach64 6.9.0 6.9.1 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-mga 1.4.13 1.5.0 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-openchrome 0.2.904 0.2.905 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-r128 6.8.1 6.8.2 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-trident 1.3.4 1.3.5 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-vesa 2.3.0 2.3.1 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-vmware 11.0.3 12.0.2 x11/server/xserver-common 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/server/xvfb 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/server/xvnc 1.0.90 1.1.0 x11/session/sessreg 1.0.6 1.0.7 x11/session/xauth 1.0.6 1.0.7 x11/session/xinit 1.3.1 1.3.2 x11/transset 0.9.1 1.0.0 x11/trusted/trusted-xorg 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/x11-window-dump 1.0.4 1.0.5 x11/xclipboard 1.1.1 1.1.2 x11/xclock 1.0.5 1.0.6 x11/xfd 1.1.0 1.1.1 x11/xfontsel 1.0.3 1.0.4 x11/xfs 1.1.1 1.1.2 P.S. To get the version numbers for this table, I ran a quick perl script over the output from: % pkg contents -H -r -t depend -a type=incorporate -o fmri \ `pkg contents -H -r -t depend -a type=incorporate -o fmri [email protected],5.11-0.175.1.0.0.24` \ | sort /tmp/11.1 % pkg contents -H -r -t depend -a type=incorporate -o fmri \ `pkg contents -H -r -t depend -a type=incorporate -o fmri [email protected],5.11-0.175.0.0.0.2` \ | sort /tmp/11.0

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• Silverlight Cream for March 24, 2010 -- #819

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Nokola, Tim Heuer, Christian Schormann, Brad Abrams, David Kelley, Phil Middlemiss, Michael Klucher, Brandon Watson, Kunal Chowdhury, Jacek Ciereszko, and Unni. Shoutouts: Michael Klucher has a short post up For Love of the Game (Development)…, where he's looking for some input from the developer community. Shawn Hargreaves has a link post up of all the Windows Phone MIX10 presentations Chris Cavanagh has a Soft-Body Physics for Windows Phone 7 post up that goes along with one he did 1-1/2 years ago! Jeff Weber posted An Open Letter To Microsoft Regarding The Silverlight Game Development Community Pete Brown posted his MIX10 Recap ... lots of information, and discussion of what he was up to ... I liked the Trivia app Pete... glad to hear that was yours :) I've changed my mind and added a WP7 tag to SilverlightCream. I'll straighten out all the Mobile plus Silverlight links to point at the WP7 tab hopefully tonight. From SilverlightCream.com: EasyPainter Source Pack 3: Adorners, Mouse Cursors and Frames Nokola has been busy with EasyPainter adding in Custom, Extensible Mouse Cursors and Customizable Adorners with extensible adorner frames, and best of all... all with source code! Simulate Geo Location in Silverlight Windows Phone 7 emulator Among the things we don't have in our WP7 emulators is Geo Location... Tim Heuer comes to the rescue with a simulator for it... too cool, Tim! Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part II Christian Schormann is back with Part 2 of his tutorial sequence on the new Path Layout. Really good info and definitely cool presentations of the control. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing OData Services Brad Abrams continues his series with a post on exposing OData services. This looks like a great tutorial on the topic... will probably resolve some questions I've been having :) No Silverlight and Preloader Experience(ish) - in 10 seconds... David Kelley exposes the code he uses on his site, designed to be friendly to Silverlight and non-Silverlight users alike. Merged Dictionaries of Style Resources and Blend Phil Middlemiss has a nice article up on Merged Dictionaries and using multiple resource dictionaries that the app chooses, but also be compatible with Prism and Blend while not eating your system resources out of house and home. XNA Game Studio and Windows Phone Emulator Compatibility Michael Klucher has a definitive post up about getting your XNA and system up-to-speed for WP7... a must-read if you've been running any of the other XNA drops. Windows Phone 7 301 Redirect Bug Brandon Watson reports a 301 Redirect bug on WP7 ... see the code and how he got it, then follow along as he explains all the debug paths he took and what the resolution (?) really is :) Silverlight 4: How to use the new Printing API? Kunal Chowdhury has a tutorial up on printing with Silverlight 4 RC... from the project layout to printing and then printing a smaller section... all good Printing problem in Silverlight 4.0 RC - loading images in code behind Jacek Ciereszko also is writing about printing, and in his case he had problems with loading an image dynamically and printing it... plus he provides a solution to the 'blank page' problem. ToolboxExampleAttribute - a new extension point in Blend 4 (and a few other extensibility related changes) Unni has an article up about Expression Blend 4's new ToolboxExampleAttribute which allow you to have multiple examples of the same type resulting in different XAML produced. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone    MIX10

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• New Rules of Retail

  - by David Dorf

  I've been on vacation and preparing for Crosstalk, so its been a while since I've posted. I've seen the agenda, and I can assure you Crosstalk will be lots of fun. In addition to hearing from lots of retailers, we'll also be doing a little bowling and racing on the track. I'll be around for the sessions, the ORUG meetings, and our Customer Advisory Board so please be sure to say hello. I also just completed a white paper based on a previous blog posting which in turn was based on learnings from reading What Would Google Do? For each of Jarvis' ten rules, I discuss the concept in the context of retail and provide real-world examples. No mention of products or sales pitches at all. You can download the paper here. It will put you in the right frame of mind for hearing Jeff Jarvis speak at Crosstalk. For those that can't make it, I'll post some highlights afterwards.

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• Connecting to DB2 from SSIS

  - by Christopher House

  The project I'm currently working on involves moving various pieces of data from a legacy DB2 environment to some SQL Server and flat file locations.  Most of the data flows are real time, so they were a natural fit for the client's MQSeries on their iSeries servers and BizTalk to handle the messaging.  Some of the data flows, however, are daily batch type transmissions.  For the daily batch transmissions, it was decided that we'd use SSIS to pull the data direct from DB2 to either a SQL Server or flat file.  I'm not at all an SSIS guy, I've done a bit here and there, but mainly for situations were we needed to move data from a dev environment to QA, mostly informal stuff like that.  And, as much as I'm not an SSIS guy, I'm even less a DB2/iSeries guy.  Prior to this engagement, my knowledge of DB2 was limited to the fact that it's an IBM product and that it was probably a DBMS flatform (that's what the DB in DB2 means, right?).   One of my first goals when I came onto this project was to develop of POC SSIS package to pull some data from DB2 and dump it to a flat file.  It sounded like a pretty straight forward task.  As always, the devil is in the details.  Configuring the DB2 connection manager took a bit of trial and error.  As such, I thought I'd post my experiences here in hopes that they might save someone the efforts I went through.  That being said, please keep in mind, as I pointed out, I'm not at all a DB2 guy, so my terminology and explanations may not be 100% spot on. Before you get started, you need to figure out how you're going to connect to DB2.  From the research I did, it looks like there are a few options.  IBM has both an OLE DB and .Net data provider which can be found here.  I installed their client access tools and tried to use both the .Net and OLE DB providers but I received an error message from both when attempting to connect to the iSeries that indicated I needed a license for a product called DB2 Connect.  I inquired with one of my client's iSeries resources about a license for this product and it appears they didn't have one, so that meant the IBM drivers were out.  The other option that I found quite a bit of discussion around was Microsoft's OLE DB Provider for DB2.  This driver is part of the feature pack for SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition and can be downloaded here. As it turns out, I already had Microsoft's driver installed on my dev VM, which stuck me as odd since I hadn't installed it.  I discovered that the driver is installed with the BizTalk adapter pack for host systems, which was also installed on my VM.  However, it looks like the version used by the adapter pack is newer than the version provided in the SQL Server feature pack.   Once you get the driver installed, create a connection manager in your package just like you normally would and select the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for DB2 from the list of available drivers. After you select the driver, you'll need to enter in your host name, login credentials and initial catalog. A couple of things to note here.  First, the Initial catalog needs to be the same as your host name.  Not sure why that is, but trust me, it just does.  Second, for credentials, in my environment, we're using what the client's iSeries people refer to as "profiles".  I guess this is similar to SQL auth in the SQL Server world.  In other words, they've given me a username and password for connecting to DB, so I've entered it here. Next, click the Data Links button.  On the Data Links screen, enter your package collection on the first tab. Package collection is one of those DB2 concepts I'm still trying to figure out.  From the little bit I've read, packages are used to control SQL compilation and each DB2 connection needs one.  The package collection, I believe, controls where your package is created.  One of the iSeries folks I've been working with told me that I should always use QGPL for my package collection, as QGPL is "general purpose" and doesn't require any additional authority. Next click the ellipsis next to the Network drop-down.  Here you'll want to enter your host name again. Again, not sure why you need to do this, but trust me, my connection wouldn't work until I entered my hostname here. Finally, go to the Advanced tab, select your DBMS platform and check Process binary as character. My environment is DB2 on the iSeries and iSeries is the replacement for AS/400, so I selected DB2/AS400 for my platform.  Process binary as character was necessary to handle some of the DB2 data types.  I had a few columns that showed all their data as "System.Byte[]".  Checking Process binary as character resolved this. At this point, you should be good to go.  You can go back to the Connection tab on the Data Links dialog to perform a couple of tests to validate your configuration.  The Test Connection button is obvious, this just verifies you can connect to the host using the configuration data you've entered.  The Packages button will attempt to connect to the host and create the packages required to execute queries. This isn't meant to be a comprehensive look SSIS and DB2, these are just some of the notes I've come up with since I've started working with DB2 and SSIS.  I'm sure as I continue developing my packages, I'll find more quirks and will post them here.

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• SQL Azure Reporting Limited CTP Arrived

  - by Shaun

  It’s about 3 months later when I registered the SQL Azure Reporting CTP on the Microsoft Connect after TechED 2010 China. Today when I checked my mailbox I found that the SQL Azure team had just accepted my request and sent the activation code over to me. So let’s have a look on the new SQL Azure Reporting.   Concept The SQL Azure Reporting provides cloud-based reporting as a service, built on SQL Server Reporting Services and SQL Azure technologies. Cloud-based reporting solutions such as SQL Azure Reporting provide many benefits, including rapid provisioning, cost-effective scalability, high availability, and reduced management overhead for report servers; and secure access, viewing, and management of reports. By using the SQL Azure Reporting service, we can do: Embed the Visual Studio Report Viewer ADO.NET Ajax control or Windows Form control to view the reports deployed on SQL Azure Reporting Service in our web or desktop application. Leverage the SQL Azure Reporting SOAP API to manage and retrieve the report content from any kinds of application. Use the SQL Azure Reporting Service Portal to navigate and view the reports deployed on the cloud. Since the SQL Azure Reporting was built based on the SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Service, we can use any tools we are familiar with, such as the SQL Server Integration Studio, Visual Studio Report Viewer. The SQL Azure Reporting Service runs as a remote SQL Server Reporting Service just on the cloud rather than on a server besides us.   Establish a New SQL Azure Reporting Let’s move to the windows azure deveploer portal and click the Reporting item from the left side navigation bar. If you don’t have the activation code you can click the Sign Up button to send a requirement to the Microsoft Connect. Since I already recieved the received code mail I clicked the Provision button. Then after agree the terms of the service I will select the subscription for where my SQL Azure Reporting CTP should be provisioned. In this case I selected my free Windows Azure Pass subscription. Then the final step, paste the activation code and enter the password of our SQL Azure Reporting Service. The user name of the SQL Azure Reporting will be generated by SQL Azure automatically. After a while the new SQL Azure Reporting Server will be shown on our developer portal. The Reporting Service URL and the user name will be shown as well. We can reset the password from the toolbar button.   Deploy Report to SQL Azure Reporting If you are familiar with SQL Server Reporting Service you will find this part will be very similar with what you know and what you did before. Firstly we open the SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio and create a new Report Server Project. Then we will create a shared data source where the report data will be retrieved from. This data source can be SQL Azure but we can use local SQL Server or other database if it opens the port up. In this case we use a SQL Azure database located in the same data center of our reporting service. In the Credentials tab page we entered the user name and password to this SQL Azure database. The SQL Azure Reporting CTP only available at the North US Data Center now so that the related SQL Server and hosted service might be better to select the same data center to avoid the external data transfer fee. Then we create a very simple report, just retrieve all records from a table named Members and have a table in the report to list them. In the data source selection step we choose the shared data source we created before, then enter the T-SQL to select all records from the Member table, then put all fields into the table columns. The report will be like this as following In order to deploy the report onto the SQL Azure Reporting Service we need to update the project property. Right click the project node from the solution explorer and select the property item. In the Target Server URL item we will specify the reporting server URL of our SQL Azure Reporting. We can go back to the developer portal and select the reporting node from the left side, then copy the Web Service URL and paste here. But notice that we need to append “/reportserver” after pasted. Then just click the Deploy menu item in the context menu of the project, the Visual Studio will compile the report and then upload to the reporting service accordingly. In this step we will be prompted to input the user name and password of our SQL Azure Reporting Service. We can get the user name from the developer portal, just next to the Web Service URL in the SQL Azure Reporting page. And the password is the one we specified when created the reporting service. After about one minute the report will be deployed succeed.   View the Report in Browser SQL Azure Reporting allows us to view the reports which deployed on the cloud from a standard browser. We copied the Web Service URL from the reporting service main page and appended “/reportserver” in HTTPS protocol then we will have the SQL Azure Reporting Service login page. After entered the user name and password of the SQL Azure Reporting Service we can see the directories and reports listed. Click the report will launch the Report Viewer to render the report.   View Report in a Web Role with the Report Viewer The ASP.NET and Windows Form Report Viewer works well with the SQL Azure Reporting Service as well. We can create a ASP.NET Web Role and added the Report Viewer control in the default page. What we need to change to the report viewer are Change the Processing Mode to Remote. Specify the Report Server URL under the Server Remote category to the URL of the SQL Azure Reporting Web Service URL with “/reportserver” appended. Specify the Report Path to the report which we want to display. The report name should NOT include the extension name. For example my report was in the SqlAzureReportingTest project and named MemberList.rdl then the report path should be /SqlAzureReportingTest/MemberList. And the next one is to specify the SQL Azure Reporting Credentials. We can use the following class to wrap the report server credential. 1: private class ReportServerCredentials : IReportServerCredentials 2: { 3: private string _userName; 4: private string _password; 5: private string _domain; 6:  7: public ReportServerCredentials(string userName, string password, string domain) 8: { 9: _userName = userName; 10: _password = password; 11: _domain = domain; 12: } 13:  14: public WindowsIdentity ImpersonationUser 15: { 16: get 17: { 18: return null; 19: } 20: } 21:  22: public ICredentials NetworkCredentials 23: { 24: get 25: { 26: return null; 27: } 28: } 29:  30: public bool GetFormsCredentials(out Cookie authCookie, out string user, out string password, out string authority) 31: { 32: authCookie = null; 33: user = _userName; 34: password = _password; 35: authority = _domain; 36: return true; 37: } 38: } And then in the Page_Load method, pass it to the report viewer. 1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: ReportViewer1.ServerReport.ReportServerCredentials = new ReportServerCredentials( 4: "<user name>", 5: "<password>", 6: "<sql azure reporting web service url>"); 7: } Finally deploy it to Windows Azure and enjoy the report.   Summary In this post I introduced the SQL Azure Reporting CTP which had just available. Likes other features in Windows Azure, the SQL Azure Reporting is very similar with the SQL Server Reporting. As you can see in this post we can use the existing and familiar tools to build and deploy the reports and display them on a website. But the SQL Azure Reporting is just in the CTP stage which means It is free. There’s no support for it. Only available at the North US Data Center. You can get more information about the SQL Azure Reporting CTP from the links following SQL Azure Reporting Limited CTP at MSDN SQL Azure Reporting Samples at TechNet Wiki You can download the solutions and the projects used in this post here.   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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• New Whitepaper: Advanced Compression 11gR1 Benchmarks with EBS 12

  - by Steven Chan

  In my opinion, if there's any reason to upgrade an E-Business Suite environment to the 11gR1 or 11gR2 database, it's the Advanced Compression database option.  Oracle Advanced Compression was introduced in Oracle Database 11g, and allows you to compress structured data (numbers, characters) as well as unstructured data (documents, spreadsheets, XML and other files).  It provides enhanced compression for database backups and also includes network compression for faster synchronization with standby databases.In other words, the promise of Advanced Compression is that it can make your E-Business Suite database smaller and faster.  But how well does it actually deliver on that promise?Apps 12 + Advanced Compression Benchmarks now availableThree of my colleagues, Uday Moogala, Lester Gutierrez, and Andy Tremayne, have been benchmarking Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 with Advanced Compression 11gR1.  They've just released a detailed whitepaper with their benchmarking results and recommendations.This whitepaper is available in two locations:Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 with Oracle Database 11g Advanced Compression (Note 1110648.1) (requires My Oracle Support access)Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 with Oracle Database 11g Advanced Compression (Applications Benchmark website, PDF, 500K)

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• MSMQ messages using HTTP just won't get delivered

  - by John Breakwell

  I'm starting off the blog with a discussion of an unusual problem that has hit a couple of my customers this month. It's not a problem you'd expect to bump into and the solution is potentially painful. Scenario You want to make use of the HTTP protocol to send MSMQ messages from one machine to another. You have installed HTTP support for MSMQ and have addressed your messages correctly but they will not leave the outgoing queue. There is no configuration for HTTP support - setup has already done all that for you (although you may want to check the most recent "Installation of the MSMQ HTTP Support Subcomponent" section of MSMQINST.LOG to see if anything DID go wrong) - so you can't tweak anything. Restarting services and servers makes no difference - the messages just will not get delivered. The problem is documented and resolved by Knowledgebase article 916699 "The message may not be delivered when you use the HTTP protocol to send a message to a server that is running Message Queuing 3.0". It is unlikely that you would be able to resolve the problem without the assistance of PSS because there are no messages that can be seen to assist you and only access to the source code exposes the root cause. As this communication is over HTTP, the IIS logs would be a good place to start. POST entries are logged which show that connectivity is working and message delivery is being attempted: #Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0 #Version: 1.0 #Date: 2006-09-12 12:11:29 #Fields: date time s-sitename s-ip cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port cs-username c-ip cs(User-Agent) sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status 2006-09-12 12:12:12 W3SVC1 10.1.17.219 POST /msmq/private$/test - 80 - 10.2.200.3 - 200 0 0 If you capture the traffic with Network Monitor you can see the POST being sent to the server but you also see a response being returned to the client: HTTP: Response to Client; HTTP/1.1; Status Code = 500 - Internal Server Error "Internal Server Error" means we can probably stop looking at IIS and instead focus on the Message Queuing ISAPI extension (Mqise.dll). MSMQ 3.0 (Windows XP and Windows Server 2003) comes with error logging enabled by default but the log files are in binary format - MSMQ 2.0 generated logging in plain text. The symbolic information needed for formatting the files is not currently publicly available so log files have to be sent in to Microsoft PSS.  Although this does mean raising a support case, formatting the log files to text and returning them to the customer shouldn't take long. Obviously the engineer analyses them for you - I just want to point out that you can see the logging output in text format if you want it. The important entries in the log for this problem are: [7]b48.928 09/12/2006-13:20:44.552 [mqise GetNetBiosNameFromIPAddr] ERROR:Failed to get the NetBios name from the DNS name, error = 0xea [7]b48.928 09/12/2006-13:20:44.552 [mqise RPCToServer] ERROR:RPC call R_ProcessHTTPRequest failed, error code = 1702(RPC_S_INVALID_BINDING) which allow a Microsoft escalation engineer to check the MQISE source code to see what is going wrong. This problem according to the article occurs when the extension tries to bind to the local MSMQ service after the extension receives a POST request that contains an MSMQ message. MSMQ resolves the server name by using the DNS host name but the extension cannot bind to the service because the buffer that MSMQ uses to resolve the server name is too small - server names that are exactly 15 characters long will not fit. RPC exception 0x6a6 (RPC_S_INVALID_BINDING) occurs in the W3wp.exe process but the exception is handled and so you do not receive an error message. The workaround is to rename the MSMQ server to something less than 15 characters. If the problem has only just been noticed in a production environment - an application may have been modified to get through a newly-implemented firewall, for example - then renaming is going to be an issue. Other applications may need to be reinstalled or modified if server names are hard-coded or stored in the registry. The renaming may also break a company naming convention where the name is built up from something like location+department+number. If you want to learn more about MSMQ logging then check out Chapter 15 of the MSMQ FAQ. In fact, even if you DON'T want to learn anything about MSMQ logging you should read the FAQ anyway as there is a huge amount of useful information on known issues and the like.

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• I have Oracle SQL Developer Installed, Now What?

  - by thatjeffsmith

  If you’re here because you downloaded a copy of Oracle SQL Developer and now you need help connecting to a database, then you’re in the right place. I’ll show you what you need to get up and going so you can finish your homework, teach yourself Oracle database, or get ready for that job interview. You’ll need about 30 minutes to set everything up…and about 5 years to become proficient with Oracle Oracle Database come with SQL Developer but SQL Developer doesn’t include a database If you install Oracle database, it includes a copy of SQL Developer. If you’re running that copy of SQL Developer, please take a second to upgrade now, as it is WAY out of date. But I’m here to talk to the folks that have downloaded SQL Developer and want to know what to do next. You’ve got it running. You see this ‘Connection’ dialog, and… Where am I connecting to, and who as? You NEED a database Installing SQL Developer does not give you a database. So you’re going to need to install Oracle and create a database, or connect to a database that is already up and running somewhere. Basically you need to know the following: where is this database, what’s it called, and what port is the listener running on? The Default Connection properties in SQL Developer These default settings CAN work, but ONLY if you have installed Oracle Database Express Edition (XE). Localhost is a network alias for 127.0.0.1 which is an IP address that maps to the ‘local’ machine, or the machine you are reading this blog post on. The listener is a service that runs on the server and handles connections for the databases on that machine. You can run a database without a listener and you can run a listener without a database, but you can’t connect to a database on a different server unless both that database and listener are up and running. Each listener ‘listens’ on one or more ports, you need to know the port number for each connection. The default port is 1521, but 1522 is often pretty common. I know all of this sounds very complicated Oracle is a very sophisticated piece of software. It’s not analogous to downloading a mobile phone app and and using it 10 seconds later. It’s not like installing Office/Access either – it requires services, environment setup, kernel tweaks, etc. However. Normally an administrator will setup and install Oracle, create the database, and configure the listener for everyone else to use. They’ll often also setup the connection details for everyone via a ‘TNSNAMES.ORA’ file. This file contains a list of database connection details for folks to browse – kind of like an Oracle database phoneboook. If someone has given you a TNSNAMES.ORA file, or setup your machine to have access to a TNSNAMES file, then you can just switch to the ‘TNS’ connection type, and use the dropdown to select the database you want to connect to. Then you don’t have to worry about the server names, database names, and the port numbers. ORCL – that sounds promising! ORCL is the default SID when creating a new database with the Database Creation Assistant (DBCA). It’s just me, and I need help! No administrator, no database, no nothing. What do you do? You have a few options: Buy a copy of Oracle and download, install, and create a database Download and install XE (FREE!) Download, import, and run our Developer Days Hands-on-Lab (FREE!) If you’re a student (or anyone else) with little to no experience with Oracle, then I recommend the third option. Oracle Technology Network Developer Day: Hands-on Database Application Development Lab The OTN lab runs on a A Virtual Box image which contains: 11gR2 Enterprise Edition copy of Oracle a database and listener running for you to connect to lots of demo data for you to play with SQL Developer installed and ready to connect Some browser based labs you can step through to learn Oracle You download the image, you download and install Virtual Box (also FREE!), then you IMPORT the image you previously downloaded. You then ‘Start’ the image. It will boot a copy of Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL), start your database, and all that jazz. You can then start up and run SQL Developer inside the image OR you can connect to the database running on the image using the copy of SQL Developer you installed on your host machine. Setup Port Forwarding to Make It Easy to Connect From Your Host When you start the image, it will be assigned an IP address. Depending on what network adapter you select in the image preferences, you may get something that can get out to the internet from your image, something your host machine can see and connect to, or something that kind of just lives out there in a vacuum. You want to avoid the ‘vacuum’ option – unless you’re OK with running SQL Developer inside the Linux image. Open the Virtual Box image properties and go to the Networking options. We’re going to setup port forwarding. This will tell your machine that anything that happens on port 1521 (the default Oracle Listener port), should just go to the image’s port 1521. So I can connect to ‘localhost’ and it will magically get transferred to the image that is running. Oracle Virtual Box Port Forwarding 1521 listener database Now You Just Need a Username and Password The default passwords on this image are all ‘oracle’ – so you can connect as SYS, HR, or whatever – just use ‘oracle’ as the password. The Linux passowrds are all ‘oracle’ too, so you can login as ‘root’ or as ‘oracle’ in the Linux desktop. Connect! Connect as HR to your Oracle database running on the OTN Developer Days Virtual Box image If you’re connecting to someone else’s database, you need to ask the person that manages that environment to create for you an account. Don’t try to ‘guess’ or ‘figure out’ what the username and password is. Introduce yourself, explain your situation, and ask kindly for access. This is your first test – can you connect? I know it’s hard to get started with Oracle. There are however many things we offer to make this easier. You’ll need to do a bit of RTM first though. Once you know what’s required, you will be much more likely to succeed. Of course, if you need help, you know where to find me

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• Oracle Linux Training Calendar

  - by Antoinette O'Sullivan

  The Oracle Linux System Administrator Curriculum is designed to provide you with the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively administer an Oracle Linux environment. These classes will help you prepare to install, configure, and manage your enterprise Linux environment as well as prepare you for the Oracle Linux Certification. You can take these courses as a: Live-Virtual event: Following the instructor-led classes from your own desk - no travel required. There is an extensive list of events on the schedule to suit different timezones. See full list on http://oracle.com/education/linux. In-Class event: Travel to an education center to take these classes. Below is a sample of in-class events on the schedule: Unix and Linux Essentials: This 3-day class is for those new to the linux operating system. You learn to manage files & directories from the command line, perform remote connections, file transfers & more.  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Nairobi, Kenya  3 December 2012  English  Riyadh, Saudia Arabia  5 January 2013  English  Cape Town, South Africa  9 January 2013  English  Durban, South Africa  9 January 2013  English  Johannesburg, South Africa  9 January 2013  English  Woodmead, South Africa  15 July 2013  English  Denver, United States  23 January 2013  English  Columbia, United States  2 January 2013  English  East Lansing, United States  9 January 2013  English  Roseville, United States  1 April 2013  English  Morrisville, United States  11 February 2013  English  Jakarta, Indonesia  26 December 2012  English  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia  29 January 2013  English  Auckland, New Zealand  12 December 2012  English  Makati City, Philippines  14 January 2013  English  Singapore  13 February 2013  English  North Sydney, Australia  4 February 2013  English  Brisbane, Australia  29 April 2013  English  Melbourne, Australia  29 January 2013  English Oracle Linux System Administration: This 5 day course covers a broad range of Oracle Linux system administration tasks, from installing the operating system to preparing the system for Oracle Database. The course also provides an extensive hands-on experience for key system administration tasks. You will gain comprehensive skills in installing, configuring, and managing an Oracle Linux system as well as insight into ULN, Ksplice and UEK.  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Brussels, Belgium  26 November 2012  English  Windhof, Luxembourg  17 December 2012  English  Utrecht, Netherlands  11 February 2013  Dutch  Warsaw, Poland  25 February 2013  Polish  Gabarone, Botswana  22 April 2013  English  Nairobi, Kenya  10 December 2012  English  Johannesburg, South Africa  11 March 2013  English  Belmont, CA, United States  11 February 2013  English  Irvine, CA, United States  25 March 2013  English  Roseville, MN, United States  26 November 2013  English  Irving, TX, United States  14 January 2013  English  Jakarta, Indonesia  3 December 2012  English  Singapore  26 November 2012  English  Canberra, Australia  21 January 2013  English  Sydney, Australia  21 January 2013  English  Melbourne, Australia  11 February 2013  English To test your Oracle Linux System Administration skills, take the Oracle Linux 6 Implementation Essentials Certification Exam. For more information on the Oracle Linux Curriculum or to express interest in additional events, go to http://oracle.com/education/linux.

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• 2 Days of Share &amp; Point

  - by Mark Rackley

  Groovy man… SharePoint Saturday Ozarks is back for 2010, bigger and better than before. Join us for a far out time and learn more about SharePoint in one day than you could in a year from the man… Yes! SharePoint Saturday Ozarks is back! SharePoint Saturday Ozarks is the largest SharePoint conference in Arkansas, Southern Missouri, and the very north east tip of Oklahoma. Last year we had a great turn out with 20 speakers, 5 MVPs, and attendees coming from Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, Ohio, Alabama, Michigan, and Washington. Hey Man… what’s SharePoint Saturday anyway? Sounds like a conspiracy man… Not to worry, SharePoint Saturday is not an arm of the government bent on mind control or any attempt what-so-ever to bring you down man. SharePoint Saturday is grass roots effort started by Michael Lotter (http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/pages/about.aspx). It is a FREE one day event where the best SharePoint speakers gather to present their love, hatred, and frustrations of SharePoint to those lucky individuals who attend. Lessons are learned, contacts are made, prizes are won, food is eaten, assorted beverages are consumed until wee hours of the morning. SharePoint Saturday started with just a few sporadic one day events here and there. However, over the past year SharePoint Saturday has exploded and it’s hard to find a weekend where there is NOT a SharePoint Saturday event happing in some corner of the globe. There are even occasions where there are two SharePoint Saturdays on the same day! Many people are pleasantly surprised at the caliber of speakers at these SharePoint Saturday events. For the most part, these speakers are more eloquent, practiced, and practical than those speakers you find at the major multi-day conferences. These guys aren’t even paid to speak.. they do it out of love man… SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2009 Alumni We had a star studded cast last year with many returning this year! Just check out the fun that they had… John Ferringer – Admin rockstar… I can still sense the awesomeness   SharePoint poster children Mike Watson & Laura Rogers     Lori Gowin spreading the SharePoint Love Eric Shupps is a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll       Cathy Dew, Sean McDonough, and JD Wade relaxing between gigs Actually, you can see real photos from last year’s SharePoint Saturday ozarks here:  picasaweb.google.com/mrackley/SharePointSaturdayOzarks#    What’s new for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2010 SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2010 will totally blow your mind man. We’re getting the band back to together with many returning speakers and few new faces. Joel Oleson will be speaking this year, maybe he’ll grace us with his song stylings. Sadly, once again, Andrew Connell will not be able to attend SharePoint Saturday Ozarks, however he did feel the need to show his support in his own way. Prizes this year currently include books, software, a Zune HD, and much more! Wait Man… You said 2 days? I thought it was a one day event? Correct you are my herbal smelling friend… SharePoint Saturday Ozarks 2010 will spread the love an additional day this year. The first day will be all about the SharePoint love, on day 2 we will be taking a leisurely float down the Buffalo National River for those interested in a truly unique experience (no banjos allowed please).   Here are the details: WHAT 4 – 5 hour float down the Buffalo National River WHEN & WHERE Sunday June 13th. We will be leaving at 10am from the Parking Lot of: Gordon’s Motel & Canoe Rental Old Highway 7 Jasper, AR 72641 (870) 446-5252 Jasper is about 30 minutes south of Harrison, AR on Highway 7 South. You are responsible for bumming a ride to/from Gordon’s Motel, but they will be shuttling us to/from the river and providing canoes and a boxed lunch. WHAT ELSE? The float trip is dependent on the weather of course, we won’t be floating down the river in a thunderstorm, however I planned SPS Ozarks around a time of year ideal for floating. We aren’t talking class 5 rapids here, you don’t need any real skill, but you need to be okay with possibly tipping your canoe over once or twice. You can bring your own assorted beverages with you, but glass containers are not allowed on the river. I suggest a small cooler with extra snacks and drinks. Also bring clothing you can get wet in (these SharePoint people can get ornery). HOW DO I SIGN UP? When you register for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks, you will have the option to also sign up for the float trip. Seats are limited though! If you do not intend to go, please do not take someone else’s place.  The cost for the float trip will be about $35 dollars per person (which you are responsible for unless we find a sponsor). The price includes shuttle to/from river, canoe, life jackets, paddles, and boxed lunch. Far out man… how do I register??? You can register for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks by going to http://spsozarks.eventbrite.com/ We are limited to 200 people for the conference and 50 people for the float trip, so register today before we are sold out. Lodging for SharePoint Saturday Ozarks will once again take place at the Hotel Seville: Annex Suites are available for $103.20 This is So Groovy.. How can I help? I’m glad you asked! We are still looking for a few sponsors and one or two more speakers. If you are interested please let me know!  You can find out more information at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ozarks Hey… wait a minute…. what exactly IS SharePoint man??? Come to SharePoint Saturday Ozarks and find out!!  See you guys there!

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• First round playing with Memcached

  - by Shaun

  To be honest I have not been very interested in the caching before I’m going to a project which would be using the multi-site deployment and high connection and concurrency and very sensitive to the user experience. That means we must cache the output data for better performance. After looked for the Internet I finally focused on the Memcached. What’s the Memcached? I think the description on its main site gives us a very good and simple explanation. Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering. Memcached is simple yet powerful. Its simple design promotes quick deployment, ease of development, and solves many problems facing large data caches. Its API is available for most popular languages. The original Memcached was built on *nix system are is being widely used in the PHP world. Although it’s not a problem to use the Memcached installed on *nix system there are some windows version available fortunately. Since we are WISC (Windows – IIS – SQL Server – C#, which on the opposite of LAMP) it would be much easier for us to use the Memcached on Windows rather than *nix. I’m using the Memcached Win X64 version provided by NorthScale. There are also the x86 version and other operation system version.   Install Memcached Unpack the Memcached file to a folder on the machine you want it to be installed, we can see that there are only 3 files and the main file should be the “memcached.exe”. Memcached would be run on the server as a service. To install the service just open a command windows and navigate to the folder which contains the “memcached.exe”, let’s say “C:\Memcached\”, and then type “memcached.exe -d install”. If you are using Windows Vista and Windows 7 system please be execute the command through the administrator role. Right-click the command item in the start menu and use “Run as Administrator”, otherwise the Memcached would not be able to be installed successfully. Once installed successful we can type “memcached.exe -d start” to launch the service. Now it’s ready to be used. The default port of Memcached is 11211 but you can change it through the command argument. You can find the help by typing “memcached -h”.   Using Memcached Memcahed has many good and ready-to-use providers for vary program language. After compared and reviewed I chose the Memcached Providers. It’s built based on another 3rd party Memcached client named enyim.com Memcached Client. The Memcached Providers is very simple to set/get the cached objects through the Memcached servers and easy to be configured through the application configuration file (aka web.config and app.config). Let’s create a console application for the demonstration and add the 3 DLL files from the package of the Memcached Providers to the project reference. Then we need to add the configuration for the Memcached server. Create an App.config file and firstly add the section on top of it. Here we need three sections: the section for Memcached Providers, for enyim.com Memcached client and the log4net. 1: <configSections> 2: <section name="cacheProvider" 3: type="MemcachedProviders.Cache.CacheProviderSection, MemcachedProviders" 4: allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" 5: restartOnExternalChanges="true"/> 6: <sectionGroup name="enyim.com"> 7: <section name="memcached" 8: type="Enyim.Caching.Configuration.MemcachedClientSection, Enyim.Caching"/> 9: </sectionGroup> 10: <section name="log4net" 11: type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler,log4net"/> 12: </configSections> Then we will add the configuration for 3 of them in the App.config file. The Memcached server information would be defined under the enyim.com section since it will be responsible for connect to the Memcached server. Assuming I installed the Memcached on two servers with the default port, the configuration would be like this. 1: <enyim.com> 2: <memcached> 3: <servers> 4: <!-- put your own server(s) here--> 5: <add address="192.168.0.149" port="11211"/> 6: <add address="10.10.20.67" port="11211"/> 7: </servers> 8: <socketPool minPoolSize="10" maxPoolSize="100" connectionTimeout="00:00:10" deadTimeout="00:02:00"/> 9: </memcached> 10: </enyim.com> Memcached supports the multi-deployment which means you can install the Memcached on the servers as many as you need. The protocol of the Memcached responsible for routing the cached objects into the proper server. So it’s very easy to scale-out your system by Memcached. And then define the Memcached Providers configuration. The defaultExpireTime indicates how long the objected cached in the Memcached would be expired, the default value is 2000 ms. 1: <cacheProvider defaultProvider="MemcachedCacheProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MemcachedCacheProvider" 4: type="MemcachedProviders.Cache.MemcachedCacheProvider, MemcachedProviders" 5: keySuffix="_MySuffix_" 6: defaultExpireTime="2000"/> 7: </providers> 8: </cacheProvider> The last configuration would be the log4net. 1: <log4net> 2: <!-- Define some output appenders --> 3: <appender name="ConsoleAppender" type="log4net.Appender.ConsoleAppender"> 4: <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout"> 5: <conversionPattern value="%date [%thread] %-5level %logger [%property{NDC}] - %message%newline"/> 6: </layout> 7: </appender> 8: <!--<threshold value="OFF" />--> 9: <!-- Setup the root category, add the appenders and set the default priority --> 10: <root> 11: <priority value="WARN"/> 12: <appender-ref ref="ConsoleAppender"> 13: <filter type="log4net.Filter.LevelRangeFilter"> 14: <levelMin value="WARN"/> 15: <levelMax value="FATAL"/> 16: </filter> 17: </appender-ref> 18: </root> 19: </log4net>   Get, Set and Remove the Cached Objects Once we finished the configuration it would be very simple to consume the Memcached servers. The Memcached Providers gives us a static class named DistCache that can be used to operate the Memcached servers. Get<T>: Retrieve the cached object from the Memcached servers. If failed it will return null or the default value. Add: Add an object with a unique key into the Memcached servers. Assuming that we have an operation that retrieve the email from the name which is time consuming. This is the operation that should be cached. The method would be like this. I utilized Thread.Sleep to simulate the long-time operation. 1: static string GetEmailByNameSlowly(string name) 2: { 3: Thread.Sleep(2000); 4: return name + "@ethos.com.cn"; 5: } Then in the real retrieving method we will firstly check whether the name, email information had been searched previously and cached. If yes we will just return them from the Memcached, otherwise we will invoke the slowly method to retrieve it and then cached. 1: static string GetEmailByName(string name) 2: { 3: var email = DistCache.Get<string>(name); 4: if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(email)) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("==> The name/email not be in memcached so need slow loading. (name = {0})==>", name); 7: email = GetEmailByNameSlowly(name); 8: DistCache.Add(name, email); 9: } 10: else 11: { 12: Console.WriteLine("==> The name/email had been in memcached. (name = {0})==>", name); 13: } 14: return email; 15: } Finally let’s finished the calling method and execute. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var name = string.Empty; 4: while (name != "q") 5: { 6: Console.Write("==> Please enter the name to find the email: "); 7: name = Console.ReadLine(); 8:  9: var email = GetEmailByName(name); 10: Console.WriteLine("==> The email of {0} is {1}.", name, email); 11: } 12: } The first time I entered “ziyanxu” it takes about 2 seconds to get the email since there’s nothing cached. But the next time I entered “ziyanxu” it returned very quickly from the Memcached.   Summary In this post I explained a bit on why we need cache, what’s Memcached and how to use it through the C# application. The example is fairly simple but hopefully demonstrated on how to use it. Memcached is very easy and simple to be used since it gives you the full opportunity to consider what, when and how to cache the objects. And when using Memcached you don’t need to consider the cache servers. The Memcached would be like a huge object pool in front of you. The next step I’m thinking now are: What kind of data should be cached? And how to determined the key? How to implement the cache as a layer on top of the business layer so that the application will not notice that the cache is there. How to implement the cache by AOP so that the business logic no need to consider the cache. I will investigate on them in the future and will share my thoughts and results.   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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