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• How do software projects go over budget and under-deliver?

  - by Carlos

  I've come across this story quite a few times here in the UK: NHS Computer System Summary: We're spunking £12 Billion on some health software with barely anything working. I was sitting the office discussing this with my colleagues, and we had a little think about. From what I can see, all the NHS needs is a database + middle tier of drugs/hospitals/patients/prescriptions objects, and various GUIs for doctors and nurses to look at. You'd also need to think about security and scalability. And you'd need to sit around a hospital/pharmacy/GPs office for a bit to figure out what they need. But, all told, I'd say I could knock together something with that kind of structure in a couple of days, and maybe throw in a month or two to make it work in scale. * If I had a few million quid, I could probably hire some really excellent designers to make a maintainable codebase, and also buy appropriate hardware to run the system on. I hate to trivialize something that seems to have caused to much trouble, but to me it looks like just a big distributed CRUD + UI system. So how on earth did this project bloat to £12B without producing much useful software? As I don't think the software sounds so complicated, I can only imagine that something about how it was organised caused this mess. Is it outsourcing that's the problem? Is it not getting the software designers to understand the medical business that caused it? What are your experiences with projects gone over budget, under delivered? What are best practices for large projects? Have you ever worked on such a project? EDIT *This bit seemed to get a lot of attention. What I mean is I could probably do this for say, 30 users, spending a few tens of thousands of pounds. I'm not including stuff I don't know about the medical industry and government, but I think most people who've been around programming are familiar with that kind of database/front end kind of design. My point is the NHS project looks like a BIG version of this, with bells and whistles, notably security. But surely a budget millions of times larger than mine could provide this?

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• Drawing isometric map in canvas / javascript

  - by Dave

  I have a problem with my map design for my tiles. I set player position which is meant to be the middle tile that the canvas is looking at. How ever the calculation to put them in x:y pixel location is completely messed up for me and i don't know how to fix it. This is what i tried: var offset_x = 0; //used for scrolling on x var offset_y = 0; //used for scrolling on y var prev_mousex = 0; //for movePos function var prev_mousey = 0; //for movePos function function movePos(e){ if (prev_mousex === 0 && prev_mousey === 0) { prev_mousex = e.pageX; prev_mousey = e.pageY; } offset_x = offset_x + (e.pageX - prev_mousex); offset_y = offset_y + (e.pageY - prev_mousey); prev_mousex = e.pageX; prev_mousey = e.pageY; run = true; } player_posx = 5; player_posy = 55; ct = 19; for (i = (player_posx-ct); i < (player_posx+ct); i++){ //horizontal for (j=(player_posy-ct); j < (player_posy+ct); j++){ // vertical //img[0] is 64by64 but the graphic is 64by32 the rest is alpha space var x = (i-j)*(img[0].height/2) + (canvas.width/2)-(img[0].width/2); var y = (i+j)*(img[0].height/4); var abposx = x - offset_x; var abposy = y - offset_y; ctx.drawImage(img[0],abposx,abposy); } } Now based on these numbers the first render-able tile is I = 0 & J = 36. As numbers in the negative are not in the array. But for I=0 and J= 36 the position it calculates is : -1120 : 592 Does any one know how to center it to canvas view properly?

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• Using machine learning to aim mirrors in a solar array?

  - by Buttons840

  I've been thinking about solar collectors where several independent mirrors to focus the light on a solar collector, similar to the following design from Energy Innovations. Because there will be flaws in the assembly of this solar array, I am proceeding with the following assumptions (or lack thereof): The software knows the "position" of each mirror, but doesn't know how this position relates to the real world or to other mirrors. This will account for poor mirror calibration or other environmental factors which may effect one mirror but not the others. If a mirror moves 10 units in one direction, and then 10 units in the opposite direction, it will end up where it originally started. I would like to use machine learning to position the mirrors correctly and focus the light on the collector. I expect I would approach this as an optimization problem, optimizing the mirror positions to maximize the heat inside the collector and the power output. The problem is finding a small target in a noisy high-dimensional space (considering each mirror has 2 axis of rotation). Some of the problems I anticipate are: cloudy days, even if you stumble upon the perfect mirror alignment, it might be cloudy at the time noisy sensor data the sun is a moving target, it moves along a path, and follows a different path every day - although you could calculate the exact position of the sun at any time, you wouldn't know how that position relates to your mirrors My question isn't about the solar array, but possible machine learning techniques that would help in this "small target in a noisy high dimensional-space" problem. I mentioned the solar array because it was the catalyst for this question and a good example. What machine learning techniques can find such a small target in a noisy high-dimensional space? EDIT: A few additional thoughts: Yes, you can calculate the suns position in the real world, but you don't know how the mirrors position is related to the real world (unless you've learned it somehow). You might know the suns azimuth is 220 degrees, and the suns elevation is 60 degrees, and you might know a mirror is at position (-20, 42); now tell me, is that mirror correctly aligned with the sun? You don't know. Lets assume you have some very sophisticated heat measurements, and you know "with this heat level, there must be 2 mirrors correctly aligned". Now the question is, which two mirrors (out of 25 or more) are correctly aligned? One solution I considered was to approximate the correct "alignment function" using a neural network which would take the suns azimuth and elevation as input and output a large array with 2 values for each mirror which correspond to the 2 axis of each mirror. I'm not sure what the best training method is though.

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• viable part-time career in IT/programming?

  - by Rider

  Hi, I'd like to ask for some career advice from you people. Is there a viable job/career that can be done in programming/IT for the long term? Right now, I am thinking about website (PHP?) developer path. My background: I have a degree in computer science and have been a programmer/system analyst for almost 10 years. Lately I took a big break from programming and studied for a B.arch. degree (yes architecture), only to discover that architecture offers zero (0) jobs where I'm from, for 3 years already (and no, I am not going to move and the grass in not greener in other places). I have never been particularly interested in programming, in fact I was bored by it. But I was always quite good at both programming and system analysis, and very valued by practically all my employers. On the other hand, I have never been valued or offered a good job in any other field (although I can do many things, like design, architecture, translations, documentation, teaching, etc etc.) I guess the human component has been always more important for me in programming jobs - I value all the good people I worked with, but not projects. However, I have about zero skills or desire to be a project manager. I also have close to zero skills for selling myself. I like it best when I can do "my thing", have my niche, have an ownership of some project. Right now my career perspective is to do part time programming and to part time teach yoga. I have already started the yoga teaching part. Do you think that part time programming is viable? And what niche works best for that? I have considered web development, QA, or software development in a company like I did before. However, my fear is that when you do programming part-time, you get the most boring coding work, only to see your colleagues move to more interesting projects and up their respective career ladders. I also fear that part-timers are not especially needed either. And, since I don't share much enthusiasm at programming, I'd rather not be around young programmers boiling with geeky enthusiasm about coding, but rather QA mindset with people from different backgrounds and life paths might work better for me. Thanks for any advice, --Rider

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• CIO's Corner: Achieving a Balance

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Rick Beers Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware All too often, a CIO is unfairly characterized as either technology-focused or business-focused; as more concerned with either infrastructure performance or business excellence. It seems to me that this completely misses the point. I have long thought that a CIO has probably the most complex C-level position in an enterprise, one that requires an artful balance among four entirely different constituencies, often with competing values and needs. How a CIO balances these is the single largest determinant of success. I was reminded of this while reading the excellent interview of Mark Hurd by CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo in a recent issue of USATODAY (Bartiromo: Oracle's Hurd is in tech sweet spot). The interview covers topics such as Big Data, Leadership and Oracle’s growth strategy. But the topic that really got my interest, and reminded me of the need for balance, was on IT spending trends, in which Mark Hurd observed, “…budgets are tight. What most of our customers have today is both an austerity plan to save money and at the same time a plan to reapply that money to innovation. There isn't a customer we have that doesn't have an austerity plan and an innovation plan.” In an era of economic uncertainty, and an accelerating pace of business change, this is probably the toughest balance a CIO must achieve. Yet for far too many IT organizations, operating costs consume over 75% of their budgets, leaving precious little for innovation and investment in business-critical technology programs. I have found that many CIO’s are trapped by their enterprise systems platforms, which were originally architected for Standardization, Compliance and tightly integrated linear Workflows. Yes, these traits are still required for specific reasons and cannot be compromised. But they are no longer enough. New demands are emerging: the explosion in the volume and diversity of Data, the Consumerization of IT, the rise of Social Media, and the need for continual Business Process Reengineering. These were simply not the design criteria for Enterprise 1.0 and attempting to leverage them with current systems platforms results in an escalation in complexity and a resulting increase in operating costs for many IT organizations. This is the cost vs investment trap and what most constrains CIO’s from achieving the balance they need. But there is a way out of this trap. Enterprise 2.0 represents an entirely new enterprise systems architecture, one that is ‘Business-Centric’ rather than ‘ERP Centric’, which defined the architecture of Enterprise 1.0. Oracle’s best in class suite of Fusion Middleware Products enables a layered approach to enterprise systems architectures that provides the balance that an enterprise needs. The most exciting part of all this? The bottom two layers are focused upon reducing costs and the upper two layers provide business value and innovation. Finally, the Balance a CIO needs.  Additional Information Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• Coordinate based travel through multi-line path over elapsed time

  - by Chris

  I have implemented A* Path finding to decide the course of a sprite through multiple waypoints. I have done this for point A to point B locations but am having trouble with multiple waypoints, because on slower devices when the FPS slows and the sprite travels PAST a waypoint I am lost as to the math to switch directions at the proper place. EDIT: To clarify my path finding code is separate in a game thread, this onUpdate method lives in a sprite like class which happens in the UI thread for sprite updating. To be even more clear the path is only updated when objects block the map, at any given point the current path could change but that should not affect the design of the algorithm if I am not mistaken. I do believe all components involved are well designed and accurate, aside from this piece :- ) Here is the scenario: public void onUpdate(float pSecondsElapsed) { // this could be 4x speed, so on slow devices the travel moved between // frames could be very large. What happens with my original algorithm // is it will start actually doing circles around the next waypoint.. pSecondsElapsed *= SomeSpeedModificationValue; final int spriteCurrentX = this.getX(); final int spriteCurrentY = this.getY(); // getCoords contains a large array of the coordinates to each waypoint. // A waypoint is a destination on the map, defined by tile column/row. The // path finder converts these waypoints to X,Y coords. // // I.E: // Given a set of waypoints of 0,0 to 12,23 to 23, 0 on a 23x23 tile map, each tile // being 32x32 pixels. This would translate in the path finder to this: // -> 0,0 to 12,23 // Coord : x=16 y=16 // Coord : x=16 y=48 // Coord : x=16 y=80 // ... // Coord : x=336 y=688 // Coord : x=336 y=720 // Coord : x=368 y=720 // // -> 12,23 to 23,0 -NOTE This direction change gives me trouble specifically // Coord : x=400 y=752 // Coord : x=400 y=720 // Coord : x=400 y=688 // ... // Coord : x=688 y=16 // Coord : x=688 y=0 // Coord : x=720 y=0 // // The current update index, the index specifies the coordinate that you see above // I.E. final int[] coords = getCoords( 2 ); -> x=16 y=80 final int[] coords = getCoords( ... ); // now I have the coords, how do I detect where to set the position? The tricky part // for me is when a direction changes, how do I calculate based on the elapsed time // how far to go up the new direction... I just can't wrap my head around this. this.setPosition(newX, newY); }

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• Bug in Delphi XE RegularExpressions Unit

  - by Jan Goyvaerts

  Using the new RegularExpressions unit in Delphi XE, you can iterate over all the matches that a regex finds in a string like this: procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); var RegEx: TRegEx; Match: TMatch; begin RegEx := TRegex.Create('\w+'); Match := RegEx.Match('One two three four'); while Match.Success do begin Memo1.Lines.Add(Match.Value); Match := Match.NextMatch; end end; Or you could save yourself two lines of code by using the static TRegEx.Match call: procedure TForm1.Button2Click(Sender: TObject); var Match: TMatch; begin Match := TRegEx.Match('One two three four', '\w+'); while Match.Success do begin Memo1.Lines.Add(Match.Value); Match := Match.NextMatch; end end; Unfortunately, due to a bug in the RegularExpressions unit, the static call doesn’t work. Depending on your exact code, you may get fewer matches or blank matches than you should, or your application may crash with an access violation. The RegularExpressions unit defines TRegEx and TMatch as records. That way you don’t have to explicitly create and destroy them. Internally, TRegEx uses TPerlRegEx to do the heavy lifting. TPerlRegEx is a class that needs to be created and destroyed like any other class. If you look at the TRegEx source code, you’ll notice that it uses an interface to destroy the TPerlRegEx instance when TRegEx goes out of scope. Interfaces are reference counted in Delphi, making them usable for automatic memory management. The bug is that TMatch and TGroupCollection also need the TPerlRegEx instance to do their work. TRegEx passes its TPerlRegEx instance to TMatch and TGroupCollection, but it does not pass the instance of the interface that is responsible for destroying TPerlRegEx. This is not a problem in our first code sample. TRegEx stays in scope until we’re done with TMatch. The interface is destroyed when Button1Click exits. In the second code sample, the static TRegEx.Match call creates a local variable of type TRegEx. This local variable goes out of scope when TRegEx.Match returns. Thus the reference count on the interface reaches zero and TPerlRegEx is destroyed when TRegEx.Match returns. When we call MatchAgain the TMatch record tries to use a TPerlRegEx instance that has already been destroyed. To fix this bug, delete or rename the two RegularExpressions.dcu files and copy RegularExpressions.pas into your source code folder. Make these changes to both the TMatch and TGroupCollection records in this unit: Declare FNotifier: IInterface; in the private section. Add the parameter ANotifier: IInterface; to the Create constructor. Assign FNotifier := ANotifier; in the constructor’s implementation. You also need to add the ANotifier: IInterface; parameter to the TMatchCollection.Create constructor. Now try to compile some code that uses the RegularExpressions unit. The compiler will flag all calls to TMatch.Create, TGroupCollection.Create and TMatchCollection.Create. Fix them by adding the ANotifier or FNotifier parameter, depending on whether ARegEx or FRegEx is being passed. With these fixes, the TPerlRegEx instance won’t be destroyed until the last TRegEx, TMatch, or TGroupCollection that uses it goes out of scope or is used with a different regular expression.

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• One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

  - by Bob Rhubart

  One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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• One Week To Go: OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing

  - by Bob Rhubart

  One week remains until OTN Architect Day: Cloud Computing kicks of at the spectacular Oracle HQ campus in Redwood Shores, CA. The event is free, and there is still time to register. When: Tuesday July 9, 2013 8:30am - 12:30pm Where: Oracle Conference Center350 Oracle Pkwy Redwood City, CA 94065 Register now. It's free! Here's the latest update to the event agenda: 8:30am - 9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00am - 9:45am Keynote 21st Century IT | Dr. James Baty VP, Global Enterprise Architecture Program, Oracle Imagine a time long, long ago. A time when servers were certified and dedicated to specific applications, when anything posted on an enterprise web site was from restricted, approved channels, and when we tried to limit the growth of 'dirty' data and storage. Today, applications are services running in the muti-tenant hybrid cloud. Companies beg their customers to tweet them, friend them, and publicly rate their products. And constantly analyzing a deluge of Internet, social and sensor data is the key to creating the next super-successful product, or capturing an evil terrorist. The old IT architecture was planned, dedicated, stable, controlled, with separate and well-defined roles. The new architecture is shared, dynamic, continuous, XaaS, DevOps. This keynote session describes the challenges and opportunities that the new business / IT paradigms present to the IT architecture and architects. 9:45am - 10:30am Technical Session Oracle Cloud: A Case Study in Building a Cloud | Anbu Krishnaswami Enterprise Architect, Oracle Building a Cloud can be challenging thanks to the complex requirements unique to Cloud computing and the massive scale typically associated with Cloud. Cloud providers can take an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach and build a cloud on virtualized commodity hardware, or they can take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) path, a service-oriented approach based on pre-configured, integrated, engineered systems. This presentation uses the Oracle Cloud itself as a case study in the use of engineered systems, demonstrating how the technical design of engineered systems is leveraged for building PaaS and SaaS Cloud services and a Cloud management infrastructure. The presentation will also explore the principles, patterns, best practices, and architecture views provided in Oracle's Cloud reference architecture. 10:30 am -10:45 am Break 10:45am-11:30am Technical Session Database as a Service | Markus Michalewicz Senior Principal Product Manager Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) New applications are now commonly built in a Cloud model, where the database is consumed as a service, and many established business processes are beginning to migrate to database as a service (DBaaS). This adoption of DBaaS is made possible by the availability of new capabilities in the database that enable resource pooling, dynamic resource management, model-based provisioning, metered use, and effective quality-of-service controls. This session will examine the catalog of database services at a large commercial bank to understand how these capabilities are enabling DBaaS for a wide range of needs within the enterprise. 11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Q&A Dr. James Baty, Anbu Krishnaswami, and Markus Michalewicz respond to audience questions. Registration is free, but seating is limited, so register now.

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• C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism

  - by Daniel Moth

  At AMD's Fusion conference Herb Sutter announced in his keynote session a technology that our team has been working on that we call C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) and during the keynote I showed a brief demo of an app built with our technology. After the keynote, I go deeper into the technology in my breakout session. If you read both those abstracts, you'll get some information about what C++ AMP is, without being too explicit since we published the abstracts before the technology was announced. You can find the official online announcement at Soma's blog post. Here, I just wanted to capture the key points about C++ AMP that can serve as an introduction and an FAQ. So, in no particular order… C++ AMP lowers the barrier to entry for heterogeneous hardware programmability and brings performance to the mainstream, without sacrificing developer productivity or solution portability. is designed not only to help you address today's massively parallel hardware (i.e. GPUs and APUs), but it also future proofs your code investments with a forward looking design. is part of Visual C++. You don't need to use a different compiler or learn different syntax. is modern C++. Not C or some other derivative. is integrated and supported fully in Visual Studio vNext. Editing, building, debugging, profiling and all the other goodness of Visual Studio work well with C++ AMP. provides an STL-like library as part of the existing concurrency namespace and delivered in the new amp.h header file. makes it extremely easy to work with large multi-dimensional data on heterogeneous hardware; in a manner that exposes parallelization. introduces only one core C++ language extension. builds on DirectX (and DirectCompute in particular) which offers a great hardware abstraction layer that is ubiquitous and reliable. The architecture is such, that this point can be thought of as an implementation detail that does not surface to the API layer. Stay tuned on my blog for more over the coming months where I will switch from just talking about C++ AMP to showing you how to use the API with code examples… Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• A Facelift for Fusion

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  It's simple. It's modern. It was the buzz at OpenWorld in San Francisco. See what the UX team has been up to and what customers are going to love. At OpenWorld 2012, the Oracle Applications User Experience (UX) team unveiled the new face of Fusion Applications. You might have seen it in sessions presented by Chris Leone, Anthony Lye, Jeremy Ashley and others or you may have gotten a look on the demogrounds. Why are we delivering a new face for Fusion Applications? "Because," says Ashley, vice president of the Oracle Applications User Experience team, "we want to provide a simple, modern, productive way for users to complete their top quick-entry tasks. The idea is to provide a clear, productive user experience that is backed by the full functionality of Fusion Applications." The first release of the new face of Fusion focuses on three types of users. It provides a fully functional gateway to Fusion Applications for: ·         New and casual users who need quick access to self-service tasks ·         Professional users who need fast access to quick-entry, high-volume tasks ·         Users who are looking for a way to quickly brand their portal for employees The new face of Fusion allows users to move easily from navigation to action, Ashley said, and it has been designed for any device -- Mac, PC, iPad, Android, SmartBoard -- in the browser. How Did We Build It? The new face of Fusion essentially is a custom shell, developed by the Apps UX team, and a set of page templates that embodies a simple design aesthetic. It's repeatable, providing consistency across its pages, and the need for training is little to zero. More specifically, the new face of Fusion has been built on ADF. The Applications UX team created pages in JDeveloper using local tasks flows bound to existing view objects. Three new components were commissioned from ADF and existing Fusion components were re-skinned to deliver a simple, modern user experience. It really is that simple - and to prove that point, we've been sharing our new face of Fusion story on several Oracle channels such as this one. If you want to learn more, check OpenWorld presentation on the Fusion Learning Center.

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• Games at Work Part 2: Gamification and Enterprise Applications

  - by ultan o'broin

  Gamification and Enterprise Applications In part 1 of this article, we explored why people are motivated to play games so much. Now, let's think about what that means for Oracle applications user experience. (Even the coffee is gamified. Acknowledgement @noelruane. Check out the Guardian article Dublin's Frothing with Tech Fever. Game development is big business in Ireland too.) Applying game dynamics (gamification) effectively in the enterprise applications space to reflect business objectives is now a hot user experience topic. Consider, for example, how such dynamics could solve applications users’ problems such as: Becoming familiar or expert with an application or process Building loyalty, customer satisfaction, and branding relationships Collaborating effectively and populating content in the community Completing tasks or solving problems on time Encouraging teamwork to achieve goals Improving data accuracy and completeness of entry Locating and managing the correct resources or information Managing changes and exceptions Setting and reaching targets, quotas, or objectives Games’ Incentives, Motivation, and Behavior I asked Julian Orr, Senior Usability Engineer, in the Oracle Fusion Applications CRM User Experience (UX) team for his thoughts on what potential gamification might offer Oracle Fusion Applications. Julian pointed to the powerful incentives offered by games as the starting place: “The biggest potential for gamification in enterprise apps is as an intrinsic motivator. Mechanisms include fun, social interaction, teamwork, primal wiring, adrenaline, financial, closed-loop feedback, locus of control, flow state, and so on. But we need to know what works best for a given work situation.” For example, in CRM service applications, we might look at the motivations of typical service applications users (see figure 1) and then determine how we can 'gamify' these motivations with techniques to optimize the desired work behavior for the role (see figure 2). Description of Figure 1 Description of Figure 2 Involving Our Users Online game players are skilled collaborators as well as problem solvers. Erika Webb (@erikanollwebb), Oracle Fusion Applications UX Manager, has run gamification events for Oracle, including one on collaboration and gamification in Oracle online communities that involved Oracle customers and partners. Read more... However, let’s be clear: gamifying a user interface that’s poorly designed is merely putting the lipstick of gamification on the pig of work. Gamification cannot replace good design and killer content based on understanding how applications users really work and what motivates them. So, Let the Games Begin! Gamification has tremendous potential for the enterprise application user experience. The Oracle Fusion Applications UX team is innovating fast and hard in this area, researching with our users how gamification can make work more satisfying and enterprises more productive. If you’re interested in knowing more about our gamification research, sign up for more information or check out how your company can get involved through the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Your thoughts? Find those comments.

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• Creating a Strong Bridge to the Post PC World

  - by Webgui

  Moving from location to location requires strong roads.  When crossing a barrier though, like a body of water or valley, we are required to build a strong bridge to get us from point A to point B in a way that is fast, safe, and easy.Yet we are not talking here about driving a car or riding a bus.  As we in the computing world are evidencing the move to the post-PC era, modernizing and migrating legacy applications to harness the power of HTML5 web, cloud and mobile is one of the most difficult challenges enterprises have faced.  Constant technological changes have weakened the business value of legacy systems, which have been developed over the years through huge investments.  There are several risks of course in this move.  Do you choose to simply rewrite code of legacy apps and transform them to HTML5 one by one?  This is quite expensive (according to research firm Gartner, the cost is $6 - $26 per line of code).  Of course, the pace of the rewriting process is very slow – around 170 lines per day for each developer – which slows down business productivity in a world in which no organization can afford to fall behind.  Other questions include whether the new cloud-based apps will have the same functionality as the trusted applications that worked for you for years.  How will the user experience be affected?  And of course, what about data security?  So we are faced with the challenge of building a sturdy bridge to stabilize our move in order to allow us to confidently and easily move our legacy applications into the post-PC era.   We at Gizmox are excited to release the first downloadable Community Technology Preview (CTP) of our Instant CloudMove Transposition Studio.Developers: To download the tool, and try it out for yourself, please visit http://www.visualwebgui.com/download.aspx.The CTP is the first and only tool-based solution allowing any Microsoft Visual Studio developer to extend VB6 and .NET enterprise client/server applications into HTML5 web, cloud and mobile applications, including the ability to upgrade their code and UI while doing so.   It is the only solution to fully replicate enterprise desktop applications behavior in the post-PC era.  With Instant CloudMove, the transposed application is available on any mobile or tablet device, browser and across any client operating system. Moreover, the extended application logic and data remains on the server behind the fire-wall and therefore the application’s front end is secured-by-design.   We would love for you to try out the tool for yourselves and let us know what you think.  How are you finding the move?

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• Telesharp – An Application Repository for .NET applications

  - by cibrax

  A year ago, we released SO-Aware as our first product in Tellago Studios. SO-Aware represented a new way to manage web services and all the related artifacts like configuration, tests or monitoring data in the Microsoft stack. It was based on the idea of using a lightweight SOA governance approach with a central repository exposed through RESTful services. At that point, we thought the same idea could be extended to enterprise applications in general by providing a generic repository for many of the runtime or design time artifacts generated during the development like configuration, application description or topology (a high level view of the components that made up a system), logging information or binaries. It took us several months to give a form to that idea and implement it as a product, but it is finally here and I am very proud to announce the release today under the name of “TeleSharp”. Telesharp provides in a nutshell the following features, 1. Configure your application topology in a central repository. Application topology in this context means that you can decompose your application and describe it in terms of components and how they interact each other. For example, you can tell that the CRM system is made up of a couple of WCF services and a ASP.NET MVC front end. 2. Centralize configuration for your applications and components.  You can import existing .NET configuration sections into the repository and associate them to the different components. In addition, environment overrides are supported for the configuration sections. We provide tooling and extensions in Visual Studio for managing all the configuration, and a set of powershell commands for automating the configuration deployment. 3. Browse all the assemblies and types remotely in your application servers in a web browser using an interface similar to any of the existing .NET reflection tools. You can easily determine this way whether the server is running the correct version of your applications. 4. Centralize logging and exception management into the repository. You get different reports and a pivot viewer experience for browsing all the different logging information generated by your applications. In addition, TeleSharp provides different providers for pushing the logging information to the central repository using well-known frameworks like ELMAH, Log4Net, EntLib or even Windows ETW.  The central repository itself is implemented as a set of OData services that any application can easily consume using regular Http. You can read more details in this introductory post If you think this product can be a good fit in your organization, you can request a trial version in our Tellago Studios website.

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• Introducing Agile development after traditional project inception

  - by Riggy

  About a year and a half ago, I entered a workplace that claimed to do Agile development. What I learned was that this place has adopted several agile practices (such as daily standups, sprint plannings and sprint reviews) but none of the principles (just in time / just good enough mentality, exposing failure early, rich communication). I've now been tasked with making the team more agile and I've been assured that I have complete buy-in from the devs and the business team. As a pilot program, they've given me a project that just completed 15 months of requirements gathering, has a 110 page Analysis & Design document (to be considered as "written in stone"), and where I have no access to the end users (only to the committee made up of the users' managers who won't actually be using the product). I started small, giving them a list of expected deliverables for the first 5 sprints (leaving the future sprints undefined), a list of goals for the first sprint, and I dissected the A&D doc to get enough user stories to meet the first sprint's goals. Since then, they've asked why we don't have all the requirements for all the sprints, why I haven't started working on stuff for the third sprint (which they consider more important but is based off of the deliverables of the first 2 sprints) and are pressing for even more documentation that my entire IT team considers busy-work or un-related to us (such as writing the user manual up-front, documenting all the data fields from all the sprints up front, and more "up-front" work). This has been pretty rough for me as a new project manager, but there are improvements I have effectively implemented such as scrumban for story management, pair programming, and having the business give us customer acceptance tests up front (as part of the requirements documentation). So my questions are: What can I do to more effectively introduce change to a resistant business? Are there other practices that I can introduce on the IT side to help show the business the benefits of agile? The burden of documentation is strangling us - the business still sees it as a risk management strategy instead of as a risk. What can we do to alleviate their documentation concerns and demands (specifically the quantity of documentation and their need for all of it up front)? We are in a separate building from our business, about 3 blocks away and they refuse to have their people on the project co-habitate b/c that person "won't be able to work on their other projects while they're at our building." They expect us to always go over there and to bundle our questions so that we can ask them all at once and not waste that person's time with "constant interruptions." What can we do to get richer communication from them? Any additional advice would also be appreciated. Thanks!

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• Token based Authentication and Claims for Restful Services

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  WIF as it exists today is optimized for web applications (passive/WS-Federation) and SOAP based services (active/WS-Trust). While there is limited support for WCF WebServiceHost based services (for standard credential types like Windows and Basic), there is no ready to use plumbing for RESTful services that do authentication based on tokens. This is not an oversight from the WIF team, but the REST services security world is currently rapidly changing – and that’s by design. There are a number of intermediate solutions, emerging protocols and token types, as well as some already deprecated ones. So it didn’t make sense to bake that into the core feature set of WIF. But after all, the F in WIF stands for Foundation. So just like the WIF APIs integrate tokens and claims into other hosts, this is also (easily) possible with RESTful services. Here’s how. HTTP Services and Authentication Unlike SOAP services, in the REST world there is no (over) specified security framework like WS-Security. Instead standard HTTP means are used to transmit credentials and SSL is used to secure the transport and data in transit. For most cases the HTTP Authorize header is used to transmit the security token (this can be as simple as a username/password up to issued tokens of some sort). The Authorize header consists of the actual credential (consider this opaque from a transport perspective) as well as a scheme. The scheme is some string that gives the service a hint what type of credential was used (e.g. Basic for basic authentication credentials). HTTP also includes a way to advertise the right credential type back to the client, for this the WWW-Authenticate response header is used. So for token based authentication, the service would simply need to read the incoming Authorization header, extract the token, parse and validate it. After the token has been validated, you also typically want some sort of client identity representation based on the incoming token. This is regardless of how technology-wise the actual service was built. In ASP.NET (MVC) you could use an HttpModule or an ActionFilter. In (todays) WCF, you would use the ServiceAuthorizationManager infrastructure. The nice thing about using WCF’ native extensibility points is that you get self-hosting for free. This is where WIF comes into play. WIF has ready to use infrastructure built-in that just need to be plugged into the corresponding hosting environment: Representation of identity based on claims. This is a very natural way of translating a security token (and again I mean this in the widest sense – could be also a username/password) into something our applications can work with. Infrastructure to convert tokens into claims (called security token handler) Claims transformation Claims-based authorization So much for the theory. In the next post I will show you how to implement that for WCF – including full source code and samples. (Wanna learn more about federation, WIF, claims, tokens etc.? Click here.)

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• SQL Authority News – FalafelCON 2014: 2 days with the Best Developers in the World

  - by Pinal Dave

  I love presenting at various forums on various technologies. I am extremely excited that I got invited to speak at Falafel Conference 2014 in San Francisco. I will present two technology sessions on SQL Server. If you are into web development or if you just want to attend a conference with the best of the industry speakers, this may be the right conference for you. What set apart this conference from other conference is technology presented as well as speakers. Usually one has to attend very expensive and high scale event when they have to hear good speakers. At this conference, you will find quite a many industry legends are available to present on the bleeding edge technology. Here are few of the reasons why I believe you should attend this conference: Choose from four tracks covering Web, Mobile development and testing, Sitefinity, and Automated Testing, or attend sessions from all four! Learn from the best developers and testers in the business in an intimate setting. Surround yourself with your peers and the opportunity to network Learn about the latest platforms and technologies including Kendo UI, AngularJS, ASP.NET MVC, WebAPI, and more! Here are the details for the sessions which I am going to present at Falafel Conference. Secrets of SQL Server: Database Worst Practices Abstract: Chances are you have heard, or even uttered, this expression. This demo-oriented session will show many examples where database professionals were dumbfounded by their own mistakes, and could even bring back memories of your own early DBA days. The goal of this session is to expose the small details that can be dangerous to the production environment and SQL Server as a whole, as well as talk about worst practices and how to avoid them. Shedding light on some of these perils and the tricks to avoid them may even save your current job. After attending this session, Developers will only need 60 seconds to improve performance of their database server in their SharePoint implementation. We will have a quiz during the session to keep the conversation alive. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Additionally, all attendees of the session will have access to learning material presented in the session. The Unsung Hero Abstract: Slow Running Queries are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame the SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, however the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how Indexes has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Server, and Indexing tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Register Now! I have learned from the Falafel Team that they are running out of tickets and soon they will close the registration.  For next 10 days the price for the registration is only USD 149. Trust me, you can’t get such a world class training and networking opportunity at such a low price. Click to Register Here! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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• CAM v2.0 ships – all new foundation version

  - by drrwebber

  The latest release of the CAM editor toolset is now available on Sourceforge.net – search NIEM. In this all new version the support from Oracle has enabled a transformation of the editor underpinning Java framework and results in 3x performance improvement and 50% better memory utilization. The result of nearly six months of improvements are catalogued in the release notes. http://sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor/files/CAM%20Editor/Releases/2.0/CAM_Editor_2-0_Release_Notes.pdf/download However here I’d like to talk about the strategic vision and highlight specific new go to features that make a difference for exchange schema designers and with a focus on the NIEM community. So why is this a foundation version? Basically the new drag and drop designer tool allows you to tailor your own dictionary collection of components and then simply select and position those into your resulting exchange structure. This is true global reuse enabled from a canonical domain dictionary collection. So instead of grappling with XSD Schema syntax, or UML model nuances – this is straightforward direct WYSIWYG visual engineering – using familiar sets of business components. Then the toolkit writes the complex XSD Schema for you, along with test samples, documentation, XMI/UML models, Mindmaps and more. So how do you get a set of business components? The toolkit allows you to harvest these from existing schema collections or enterprise data models, or as in the case of NIEM, existing domain dictionary collections. I’ve been using this for the latest IEEE/OASIS/NIST initiative on a Common Data Format (CDF) for elections management systems. So you can download those from OASIS and see how this can transform how you build actual business exchanges – improving the quality, consistency and usability – and dramatically allowing automated generation of artifacts you only dreamed of before – such as a model of your entire major exchange collection components. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=election So what we have here is a foundation version – setting the scene and the basis for changing how people can generate and manage information exchanges. A foundation built using the OASIS CAM standard combined with aspects of the NIEM Naming and Design Rules and the UN/CEFACT Core Components specifications and emerging work on OASIS CIQ name and address and ANSI/ISO code list schema. We still have a raft of work to do to integrate this into SOA best practices and extend the dictionary capabilities to assist true community development. Answering questions such as: - How good is my canonical component collection? - How much reuse is really occurring? - What inconsistencies and extensions are there in the dictionary components? Expect us to begin tackling these areas now that the foundation is in place. The immediate need is to develop training and self-start materials – so we will be focusing there for the next couple of months and especially leading up to the IJIS industry event in July in New Jersey, and the NIEM NTE event in August in Philadelphia. http://sourceforge.net/projects/camprocessor

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• Incomplete upgrade 12.04 to 12.10

  - by David

  Everything was running smoothly. Everything had been downloaded from Internet, packages had been installed and a prompt asked for some obsolete programs/files to be removed or kept. After that the computer crashed and and to manually force a shutdown. I turned it on again and surprise I was on 12.10! Still the upgrade was not finished! How can I properly finish that upgrade? Here's the output I got in the command line after following posted instructions: i astrill - Astrill VPN client software i dayjournal - Simple, minimal, digital journal. i gambas2-gb-form - A gambas native form component i gambas2-gb-gtk - The Gambas gtk component i gambas2-gb-gtk-ext - The Gambas extended gtk GUI component i gambas2-gb-gui - The graphical toolkit selector component i gambas2-gb-qt - The Gambas Qt GUI component i gambas2-gb-settings - Gambas utilities class i A gambas2-runtime - The Gambas runtime i google-chrome-stable - The web browser from Google i google-talkplugin - Google Talk Plugin i indicator-keylock - Indicator for Lock Keys i indicator-ubuntuone - Indicator for Ubuntu One synchronization s i A language-pack-kde-zh-hans - KDE translation updates for language Simpl i language-pack-kde-zh-hans-base - KDE translations for language Simplified C i libapt-inst1.4 - deb package format runtime library idA libattica0.3 - a Qt library that implements the Open Coll idA libbabl-0.0-0 - Dynamic, any to any, pixel format conversi idA libboost-filesystem1.46.1 - filesystem operations (portable paths, ite idA libboost-program-options1.46.1 - program options library for C++ idA libboost-python1.46.1 - Boost.Python Library idA libboost-regex1.46.1 - regular expression library for C++ i libboost-serialization1.46.1 - serialization library for C++ idA libboost-signals1.46.1 - managed signals and slots library for C++ idA libboost-system1.46.1 - Operating system (e.g. diagnostics support idA libboost-thread1.46.1 - portable C++ multi-threading i libcamel-1.2-29 - Evolution MIME message handling library i libcmis-0.2-0 - CMIS protocol client library i libcupsdriver1 - Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - Driver l i libdconf0 - simple configuration storage system - runt i libdvdcss2 - Simple foundation for reading DVDs - runti i libebackend-1.2-1 - Utility library for evolution data servers i libecal-1.2-10 - Client library for evolution calendars i libedata-cal-1.2-13 - Backend library for evolution calendars i libedataserver-1.2-15 - Utility library for evolution data servers i libexiv2-11 - EXIF/IPTC metadata manipulation library i libgdu-gtk0 - GTK+ standard dialog library for libgdu i libgdu0 - GObject based Disk Utility Library idA libgegl-0.0-0 - Generic Graphics Library idA libglew1.5 - The OpenGL Extension Wrangler - runtime en i libglew1.6 - OpenGL Extension Wrangler - runtime enviro i libglewmx1.6 - OpenGL Extension Wrangler - runtime enviro i libgnome-bluetooth8 - GNOME Bluetooth tools - support library i libgnomekbd7 - GNOME library to manage keyboard configura idA libgsoap1 - Runtime libraries for gSOAP i libgweather-3-0 - GWeather shared library i libimobiledevice2 - Library for communicating with the iPhone i libkdcraw20 - RAW picture decoding library i libkexiv2-10 - Qt like interface for the libexiv2 library i libkipi8 - library for apps that want to use kipi-plu i libkpathsea5 - TeX Live: path search library for TeX (run i libmagickcore4 - low-level image manipulation library i libmagickwand4 - image manipulation library i libmarblewidget13 - Marble globe widget library idA libmusicbrainz4-3 - Library to access the MusicBrainz.org data i libnepomukdatamanagement4 - Basic Nepomuk data manipulation interface i libnux-2.0-0 - Visual rendering toolkit for real-time app i libnux-2.0-common - Visual rendering toolkit for real-time app i libpoppler19 - PDF rendering library i libqt3-mt - Qt GUI Library (Threaded runtime version), i librhythmbox-core5 - support library for the rhythmbox music pl i libusbmuxd1 - USB multiplexor daemon for iPhone and iPod i libutouch-evemu1 - KernelInput Event Device Emulation Library i libutouch-frame1 - Touch Frame Library i libutouch-geis1 - Gesture engine interface support i libutouch-grail1 - Gesture Recognition And Instantiation Libr idA libx264-120 - x264 video coding library i libyajl1 - Yet Another JSON Library i linux-headers-3.2.0-29 - Header files related to Linux kernel versi i linux-headers-3.2.0-29-generic - Linux kernel headers for version 3.2.0 on i linux-image-3.2.0-29-generic - Linux kernel image for version 3.2.0 on 64 i mplayerthumbs - video thumbnail generator using mplayer i myunity - Unity configurator i A openoffice.org-calc - office productivity suite -- spreadsheet i A openoffice.org-writer - office productivity suite -- word processo i python-brlapi - Python bindings for BrlAPI i python-louis - Python bindings for liblouis i rts-bpp-dkms - rts-bpp driver in DKMS format. i system76-driver - Universal driver for System76 computers. i systemconfigurator - Unified Configuration API for Linux Instal i systemimager-client - Utilities for creating an image and upgrad i systemimager-common - Utilities and libraries common to both the i systemimager-initrd-template-am - SystemImager initrd template for amd64 cli i touchpad-indicator - An indicator for the touchpad i ubuntu-tweak - Ubuntu Tweak i A unity-lens-utilities - Unity Utilities lens i A unity-scope-calculator - Calculator engine i unity-scope-cities - Cities engine i unity-scope-rottentomatoes - Unity Scope Rottentomatoes

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• Why CoffeeScript is tough to maintain

  - by Renso

  I recently started trying out CoffeeScript only to find out that it caused more headaches. The abstraction level of jQuery was perfect, it did not dictate to coders how to design their code, it just works. However, I recently posted a request to the CoffeeScript team to consider introducing curly braces to help with more complex code to control the flow of logic. For example a if-then-else with many nested levels can be near impossible to debug without tracing through it when using CoffeeScript. Also with IDEs like Visual Studio, regular JavaScript intellicense and auto-formatting make it easy to appropriate indent nested levels without any work on the part of the developer and reading it is not that hard, especially with some extensions that show vertical lines in the code editor to help see what is nested within what part of the code.However with CoffeeScript that is not the case. The samples given in the CoffeeScript web site are of course just simple examples to explain the features and one gets excited pretty quick over the powerful shortcuts. I tried to convert a piece of JavaScript over to CoffeeScript and gave up since you need to first of all remove ALL non CoffeeScript coding constructs for it to even compile. However js2coffee can help with that. However to keep track of nested levels became something that was simply not manageable using CoffeeScript.Furthermore, any coding language that controls the flow of logic by indentation is extremely dangerous for obvious reasons. I liked CoffeeScript a lot, but the fact that the logical flow of the code is controlled by how much you indent code, spaces or tabs, is not reliable as there is no way the programmer has an easy way of knowing what parts of the code will get hit when the code spans a page.When I suggested introducing curly braces in CoffeeScript the team, one contributor advised me that my code needs to be re-designed! Needless to say that is absurd. When I included a piece of the code he asked my if it was legacy code. It's like saying to a Java programmer, sorry you cannot use Java because we don't agree with how you write your code.jashkenas from the CoffeeScript blog gave some great suggestions and made the point that introducing curly braces would be very problematic for them as they use them to denote objects. Makes sense, but I would still love to see some way to replace code flow control with spaces and indentation to something more concrete and human readable.

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• SQL SERVER – Last Two Days to Get FREE Book – Joes 2 Pros Certification 70-433

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier this week we announced that we will be giving away FREE SQL Wait Stats book to everybody who will get SQL Server Joes 2 Pros Combo Kit. We had a fantastic response to the contest. We got an overwhelming response to the offer. We knew there would be a great response but we want to honestly say thank you to all of you for making it happen. Rick and I want to make sure that we express our special thanks to all of you who are reading our books. The offer is still on and there are two more days to avail this offer. We want to make sure that everybody who buys our most selling combo kits, we will send our other most popular SQL Wait Stats book. Please read all the details of the offer here. The books are great resources for anyone who wants to learn SQL Server from fundamentals and eventually go on the certification path of 70-433. Exam 70-433 contains following important subject and the book covers the subject of fundamental. If you are taking the exam or not taking the exam – this book is for every SQL Developer to learn the subject from fundamentals.  Create and alter tables. Create and alter views. Create and alter indexes. Create and modify constraints. Implement data types. Implement partitioning solutions. Create and alter stored procedures. Create and alter user-defined functions (UDFs). Create and alter DML triggers. Create and alter DDL triggers. Create and deploy CLR-based objects. Implement error handling. Manage transactions. Query data by using SELECT statements. Modify data by using INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements. Return data by using the OUTPUT clause. Modify data by using MERGE statements. Implement aggregate queries. Combine datasets. INTERSECT, EXCEPT Implement subqueries. Implement CTE (common table expression) queries. Apply ranking functions. Control execution plans. Manage international considerations. Integrate Database Mail. Implement full-text search. Implement scripts by using Windows PowerShell and SQL Server Management Objects (SMOs). Implement Service Broker solutions. Track data changes. Data capture Retrieve relational data as XML. Transform XML data into relational data. Manage XML data. Capture execution plans. Collect output from the Database Engine Tuning Advisor. Collect information from system metadata. Availability of Book USA - Amazon | India - Flipkart | Indiaplaza Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Is Infiniband going to get squeezed by iWARP and external QPI?

  - by andy.grover

  The Inquirer certainly thinks so.However, I'm not so sure it makes sense to compare Infiniband to an as-yet-unannounced optical external QPI. QPI is currently a processor interconnect. CPUs, RAM, and devices connected by it are conceptually part of the same machine -- they run a single OS, for example. They are both "networks" or "fabrics" but they have very different design trade-offs.Another widely-used bus in the system is closer to Infiniband than QPI -- PCI Express. Isn't it more likely that PCIe could take on IB? There are companies already who have solutions that use external PCI Express for cluster interconnect, but these have not gained significant market share. Why would QPI, a technology whose sweet spot is even further from Infiniband's than PCIe, be able to challenge Infiniband? It's hard to speculate without much information, but right now it doesn't seem likely to me.The other prediction made in the article is that Intel's 10GbE iWARP card could squeeze IB on the low end, due to its greater compatibility and lower cost.It's definitely never a good idea to bet against Ethernet when it comes to mass-market, commodity networking. Ethernet will win. 10GbE will win. But, there are now two competing ways to implement the low-latency RDMA Verbs interface on top of Ethernet. iWARP is essentially RDMA over TCP/IP over Ethernet. The new alternative is IBoE (Infiniband over Ethernet, aka RoCEE, aka "Rocky"). This encapsulates the IB packet protocol directly in the Ethernet frame. It loses the layer 3 routability of iWARP, but better maintains software compatibility with existing apps that use IB, and is simpler to implement in both software and hardware. iWARP has a substantial head start, but I believe that IBoE silicon will eventually be cheaper, and more likely to be implemented in commodity Ethernet hardware.I think IBoE is going to take low-end market share from traditional IB, but I think this is a situation IB hardware vendors have no problem accepting. Commoditized IBoE NICs invite greater use of RDMA features, and when higher performance is needed, customers can upgrade to "real" IB, maintaining IB's justification for higher prices. (IB max interconnect speeds have historically been 2-4x higher than Ethernet, and I don't see that changing.)(ObDisclosure: My current employer now sells IB hardware. I previously also worked at Intel. My opinions are my own, duh.)

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• Common SOA Problems by C2B2

  - by JuergenKress

  SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture and has only really come together as a concrete approach in the last 15 years or so, although the concepts involved have been around for longer. Oracle SOA Suite is based around the Service Component Architecture (SCA) devised by the Open SOA collaboration of companies including Oracle and IBM. SCA, as used in SOA suite, is designed as a way to crystallise the concepts of SOA into a standard which ensures that SOA principles like the separation of application and business logic are maintained. Orchestration or Integration? A common thing to see with many people who are beginning to either build a new SOA based infrastructure, or move an old system to be service oriented, is confusion in the purpose of SOA technologies like BPEL and enterprise service buses. For a lot of problems, orchestration tools like BPEL or integration tools like an ESB will both do the job and achieve the right objectives; however it’s important to remember that, although a hammer can be used to drive a screw into wood, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Service Integration is the act of connecting components together at a low level, which usually results in a single external endpoint for you to expose to your customers or other teams within your organisation – a simple product ordering system, for example, might integrate a stock checking service and a payment processing service. Process Orchestration, however, is generally a higher level approach whereby the (often externally exposed) service endpoints are brought together to track an end-to-end business process. This might include the earlier example of a product ordering service and couple it with a business rules service and human task to handle edge-cases. A good (but not exhaustive) rule-of-thumb is that integrations performed by an ESB will usually be real-time, whereas process orchestration in a SOA composite might comprise processes which take a certain amount of time to complete, or have to wait pending manual intervention. BPEL vs BPMN For some, with pre-existing SOA or business process projects, this decision is effectively already made. For those embarking on new projects it’s certainly an important consideration for those using Oracle SOA software since, due to the components included in SOA Suite and BPM Suite, the choice of which to buy is determined by what they offer. Oracle SOA suite has no BPMN engine, whereas BPM suite has both a BPMN and a BPEL engine. SOA suite has the ESB component “Mediator”, whereas BPM suite has none. Decisions must be made, therefore, on whether just one or both process modelling languages are to be used. The wrong decision could be costly further down the line. Design for performance: Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM 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 Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: C2B2,SOA best practice,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Should custom data elements be stored as XML or database entries?

  - by meteorainer

  There are a ton of questions like this, but they are mostly very generalized, so I'd like to get some views on my specific usage. General: I'm building a new project on my own in Django. It's focus will be on small businesses. I'd like to make it somewhat customizble for my clients so they can add to their customer/invoice/employee/whatever items. My models would reflect boilerplate items that all ModelX might have. For example: first name last name email address ... Then my user's would be able to add fields for whatever data they might like. I'm still in design phase and am building this myself, so I've got some options. Working on... Right now the 'extra items' models have a FK to the generic model (Customer and CustomerDataPoints for example). All values in the extra data points are stored as char and will be coerced/parced into their actual format at view building. In this build the user could theoretically add whatever values they want, group them in sets and generally access them at will from the views relavent to that model. Pros: Low storage overhead, very extensible, searchable Cons: More sql joins My other option is to use some type of markup, or key-value pairing stored directly onto the boilerplate models. This coul essentially just be any low-overhead method weather XML or literal strings. The view and form generated from the stored data would be taking control of validation and reoganizing on updates. Then it would just dump the data back in as a char/blob/whatever. Something like: <datapoint type='char' value='something' required='true' /> <datapoint type='date' value='01/01/2001' required='false' /> ... Pros: No joins needed, Updates for validation and views are decoupled from data Cons: Much higher storage overhead, limited capacity to search on extra content So my question is: If you didn't live in the contraints impose by your company what method would you use? Why? What benefits or pitfalls do you see down the road for me as a small business trying to help other small businesses? Just to clarify, I am not asking about custom UI elements, those I can handle with forms and template snippets. I'm asking primarily about data storage and retreival of non standardized data relative to a boilerplate model.

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• MySQL Connect - Save The Date!

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Oracle today announced that it will hold the MySQL Connect Conference on September 29 and 30 in San Francisco! You can read the Press Release here. MySQL Connect will be jam-packed with technical sessions, hands-on labs and Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions delivered by MySQL community members, users, customers and MySQL engineers from Oracle. The event is a unique opportunity to learn about the latest MySQL features, discuss product roadmaps, and connect directly with the engineers behind the latest MySQL code. The conference will include six tracks: Performance and Scalability, High Availability, Cloud Computing, Architecture and Design, Database Administration, and Application Development. The call for papers will open on April 16, 2012 for approximately three weeks. MySQL users and community members are encouraged to submit session proposals. Start thinking about your proposals! Registration will also open on April 16. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }p.pressBullet, li.pressBullet, div.pressBullet { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; text-indent: -18pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }

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