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• Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario   Conventional Structures   Columnstore   Δ SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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

  - by Kelseydh

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

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• Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Millennials

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Christine Mellon Much is said and written about the new generations of employees entering our workforce, as though they are a strange specimen, a mysterious life form to be “figured out,” accommodated and engaged – at a safe distance, of course.  At its worst, this talk takes a critical and disapproving tone, with baby boomer employees adamantly refusing to validate this new breed of worker, let alone determine how to help them succeed and achieve their potential.   The irony of our baby-boomer resentments and suspicions is that they belie the fact that we created the very vision that younger employees are striving to achieve.  From our frustrations with empty careers that did not fulfill us, from our opposition to “the man,” from our sharp memories of our parents’ toiling for 30 years just for the right to retire, from the simple desire not to live our lives in a state of invisibility, came the seeds of hope for something better. One characteristic of Millennial workers that grew from these seeds is the desire to experience as much as possible.  They are the “Experiential Employee”, with a passion for growing in diverse ways and expanding personal and professional horizons.  Rather than rooting themselves in a single company for a career, or even in a single career path, these employees are committed to building a broad portfolio of experiences and capabilities that will enable them to make a difference and to leave a mark of significance in the world.  How much richer is the organization that nurtures and leverages this inclination?  Our curmudgeonly ways must be surrendered and our focus redirected toward building the next generation of talent ecosystems, if we are to optimize what future generations have to offer.   Accelerating Professional Development In spite of our Boomer grumblings about Millennials’ “unrealistic” expectations, the truth is that we have a well-matched set of circumstances.  We have executives-in-waiting who want to learn quickly and a concurrent, urgent need to ramp up their development time, based on anticipated high levels of retirement in the next 10+ years.  Since we need to rapidly skill up these heirs to the corporate kingdom, isn’t it a fortunate coincidence that they are hungry to learn, develop and move fluidly throughout our organizations??  So our challenge now is to efficiently operationalize the wisdom we have acquired about effective learning and development.   We have already evolved from classroom-based models to diverse instructional methods.  The next step is to find the best approaches to help younger employees learn quickly and apply new learnings in an impactful way.   Creating temporary or even permanent functional partnerships among Millennial employees is one way to maximize outcomes.  This might take the form of 2 or more employees owning aspects of what once fell under a single role.  While one might argue this would mean duplication of resources, it could be a short term cost while employees come up to speed.  And the potential benefits would be numerous:  leveraging and validating the inherent sense of community of new generations, creating cross-functional skills with broad applicability, yielding additional perspectives and approaches to traditional work outcomes, and accelerating the performance curve for incumbents through Cooperative Learning (Johnson, D. and Johnson R., 1989, 1999).  This well-researched teaching strategy, where students support each other in the absorption and application of new information, has been shown to deliver faster, more efficient learning, and greater retention. Alternately, perhaps short term contracts with exiting retirees, or former retirees, to help facilitate the development of following generations may have merit.  Again, a short term cost, certainly.  However, the gains realized in shortening the learning curve, and strengthening engagement are substantial and lasting. Ultimately, there needs to be creative thinking applied for each organization on how to accelerate the capabilities of our future leaders in unique ways that mesh with current culture. The manner in which performance is evaluated must finally shift as well.  Employees will need to be assessed on how well they have developed key skills and capabilities vs. end-to-end mastery of functional positions they have no interest in keeping for an entire career. As we become more comfortable in placing greater and greater weight on competencies vs. tasks, we will realize increased organizational agility via this new generation of workers, which will be further enhanced by their natural flexibility and appetite for change. Revisiting Succession  For many years, organizations have failed to deliver desired succession planning outcomes.  According to CEB’s 2013 research, only 28% of current leaders were pre-identified in a succession plan. These disappointing results, along with the entrance of the experiential, Millennial employee into the workforce, may just provide the needed impetus for HR to reinvent succession processes.   We have recognized that the best professional development efforts are not always linear, and the time has come to fully adopt this philosophy in regard to succession as well.  Paths to specific organizational roles will not look the same for newer generations who seek out unique learning opportunities, without consideration of a singular career destination.  Rather than charting particular jobs as precursors for key positions, the experiences and skills behind what makes an incumbent successful must become essential in succession mapping.  And the multitude of ways in which those experiences and skills may be acquired must be factored into the process, along with the individual employee’s level of learning agility. While this may seem daunting, it is necessary and long overdue.  We have talked about the criticality of competency-based succession, however, we have not lived up to our own rhetoric.  Many Boomers have experienced the same frustration in our careers; knowing we are capable of shining in a particular role, but being denied the opportunity due to how our career history lined up, on paper, with documented job requirements.  These requirements usually emphasized past jobs/titles and specific tasks, versus capabilities, drive and willingness (let alone determination) to learn new things.  How satisfying would it be for us to leave a legacy where such narrow thinking no longer applies and potential is amplified? Realizing Diversity Another bloom from the seeds we Boomers have tried to plant over the past decades is a completely evolved view of diversity.  Millennial employees assume a diverse workforce, and are startled by anything less.  Their social tolerance, nurtured by wide and diverse networks, is unprecedented.  College graduates expect a similar landscape in the “real world” to what they experienced throughout their lives.  They appreciate and seek out divergent points of view and experiences without needing any persuasion.  The face of our U.S. workforce will likely see dramatic change as Millennials apply their fresh take on hiring and building strong teams, with an inherent sense of inclusion.  This wonderful aspect of the Millennial wave should be celebrated and strongly encouraged, as it is the fulfillment of our own aspirations. Future Perfect The Experiential Employee is operating more as a free agent than a long term player, and their commitment will essentially last as long as meaningful organizational culture and personal/professional opportunities keep their interest.  As Boomers, we have laid the foundation for this new, spirited employment attitude, and we should take pride in knowing that.  Generations to come will challenge organizations to excel in how they identify, manage and nurture talent. Let’s support and revel in the future that we’ve helped invent, rather than lament what we think has been lost.  After all, the future is always connected to the past.  And as so eloquently phrased by Antoine Lavoisier, French nobleman, chemist and politico:  “Nothing is Lost, Nothing is Created, and Everything is Transformed.” Christine has over 25 years of diverse HR experience.  She has held HR consulting and corporate roles, including CHRO positions for Echostar in Denver, a 6,000+ employee global engineering firm, and Aepona, a startup software firm, successfully acquired by Intel. Christine is a resource to Oracle clients, to assist in Human Capital Management strategy development and implementation, compensation practices, talent development initiatives, employee engagement, global HR management, and integrated HR systems and processes that support the full employee lifecycle. 

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; SpeedTrace Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  SpeedTrace is a relatively unknown profiler made a company called Ipcas. A single professional license does cost 449€+VAT. For the test I did use SpeedTrace 4.5 which is currently Beta. Although it is cheaper than dotTrace it has by far the most options to influence how profiling does work. First you need to create a tracing project which does configure tracing for one process type. You can start the application directly from the profiler or (much more interesting) it does attach to a specific process when it is started. For this you need to check “Trace the specified …” radio button and enter the process name in the “Process Name of the Trace” edit box. You can even selectively enable tracing for processes with a specific command line. Then you need to activate the trace project by pressing the Activate Project button and you are ready to start VS as usual. If you want to profile the next 10 VS instances that you start you can set the Number of Processes counter to e.g. 10. This is immensely helpful if you are trying to profile only the next 5 started processes. As you can see there are many more tabs which do allow to influence tracing in a much more sophisticated way. SpeedTrace is the only profiler which does not rely entirely on the profiling Api of .NET. Instead it does modify the IL code (instrumentation on the fly) to write tracing information to disc which can later be analyzed. This approach is not only very fast but it does give you unprecedented analysis capabilities. Once the traces are collected they do show up in your workspace where you can open the trace viewer. I do skip the other windows because this view is by far the most useful one. You can sort the methods not only by Wall Clock time but also by CPU consumption and wait time which none of the other products support in their views at the same time. If you want to optimize for CPU consumption sort by CPU time. If you want to find out where most time is spent you need Clock Total time and Clock Waiting. There you can directly see if the method did take long because it did wait on something or it did really execute stuff that did take so long. Once you have found a method you want to drill deeper you can double click on a method to get to the Caller/Callee view which is similar to the JetBrains Method Grid view. But this time you do see much more. In the middle is the clicked method. Above are the methods that call you and below are the methods that you do directly call. Normally you would then start digging deeper to find the end of the chain where the slow method worth optimizing is located. But there is a shortcut. You can press the magic   button to calculate the aggregation of all called methods. This is displayed in the lower left window where you can see each method call and how long it did take. There you can also sort to see if this call stack does only contain methods (e.g. WCF connect calls which you cannot make faster) not worth optimizing. YourKit has a similar feature where it is called Callees List. In the Functions tab you have in the context menu also many other useful analysis options One really outstanding feature is the View Call History Drilldown. When you select this one you get not a sum of all method invocations but a list with the duration of each method call. This is not surprising since SpeedTrace does use tracing to get its timings. There you can get many useful graphs how this method did behave over time. Did it become slower at some point in time or was only the first call slow? The diagrams and the list will tell you that. That is all fine but what should I do when one method call was slow? I want to see from where it was coming from. No problem select the method in the list hit F10 and you get the call stack. This is a life saver if you e.g. search for serialization problems. Today Serializers are used everywhere. You want to find out from where the 5s XmlSerializer.Deserialize call did come from? Hit F10 and you get the call stack which did invoke the 5s Deserialize call. The CPU timeline tab is also useful to find out where long pauses or excessive CPU consumption did happen. Click in the graph to get the Thread Stacks window where you can get a quick overview what all threads were doing at this time. This does look like the Stack Traces feature in YourKit. Only this time you get the last called method first which helps to quickly see what all threads were executing at this moment. YourKit does generate a rather long list which can be hard to go through when you have many threads. The thread list in the middle does not give you call stacks or anything like that but you see which methods were found most often executing code by the profiler which is a good indication for methods consuming most CPU time. This does sound too good to be true? I have not told you the best part yet. The best thing about this profiler is the staff behind it. When I do see a crash or some other odd behavior I send a mail to Ipcas and I do get usually the next day a mail that the problem has been fixed and a download link to the new version. The guys at Ipcas are even so helpful to log in to your machine via a Citrix Client to help you to get started profiling your actual application you want to profile. After a 2h telco I was converted from a hater to a believer of this tool. The fast response time might also have something to do with the fact that they are actively working on 4.5 to get out of the door. But still the support is by far the best I have encountered so far. The only downside is that you should instrument your assemblies including the .NET Framework to get most accurate numbers. You can profile without doing it but then you will see very high JIT times in your process which can severely affect the correctness of the measured timings. If you do not care about exact numbers you can also enable in the main UI in the Data Trace tab logging of method arguments of primitive types. If you need to know what files at which times were opened by your application you can find it out without a debugger. Since SpeedTrace does read huge trace files in its reader you should perhaps use a 64 bit machine to be able to analyze bigger traces as well. The memory consumption of the trace reader is too high for my taste. But they did promise for the next version to come up with something much improved.

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• Oracle OpenWorld 2013 – Wrap up by Sven Bernhardt

  - by JuergenKress

  OOW 2013 is over and we’re heading home, so it is time to lean back and reflecting about the impressions we have from the conference. First of all: OOW was great! It was a pleasure to be a part of it. As already mentioned in our last blog article: It was the biggest OOW ever. Parallel to the conference the America’s Cup took place in San Francisco and the Oracle Team America won. Amazing job by the team and again congratulations from our side Back to the conference. The main topics for us are: Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c Adaptive Case management (ACM) Big Data Fast Data Cloud Mobile Below we will go a little more into detail, what are the key takeaways regarding the mentioned points: Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c During the five days at OOW, first details of the upcoming major release of Oracle SOA Suite 12c and Oracle BPM Suite 12c have been introduced. Some new key features are: Managed File Transfer (MFT) for transferring big files from a source to a target location Enhanced REST support by introducing a new REST binding Introduction of a generic cloud adapter, which can be used to connect to different cloud providers, like Salesforce Enhanced analytics with BAM, which has been totally reengineered (BAM Console now also runs in Firefox!) Introduction of templates (OSB pipelines, component templates, BPEL activities templates) EM as a single monitoring console OSB design-time integration into JDeveloper (Really great!) Enterprise modeling capabilities in BPM Composer These are only a few points from what is coming with 12c. We are really looking forward for the new realese to come out, because this seems to be really great stuff. The suite becomes more and more integrated. From 10g to 11g it was an evolution in terms of developing SOA-based applications. With 12c, Oracle continues it’s way – very impressive. Adaptive Case Management Another fantastic topic was Adaptive Case Management (ACM). The Oracle PMs did a great job especially at the demo grounds in showing the upcoming Case Management UI (will be available in 11g with the next BPM Suite MLR Patch), the roadmap and the differences between traditional business process modeling. They have been very busy during the conference because a lot of partners and customers have been interested Big Data Big Data is one of the current hype themes. Because of huge data amounts from different internal or external sources, the handling of these data becomes more and more challenging. Companies have a need for analyzing the data to optimize their business. The challenge is here: the amount of data is growing daily! To store and analyze the data efficiently, it is necessary to have a scalable and flexible infrastructure. Here it is important that hardware and software are engineered to work together. Therefore several new features of the Oracle Database 12c, like the new in-memory option, have been presented by Larry Ellison himself. From a hardware side new server machines like Fujitsu M10 or new processors, such as Oracle’s new M6-32 have been announced. The performance improvements, when using one of these hardware components in connection with the improved software solutions were really impressive. For more details about this, please take look at our previous blog post. Regarding Big Data, Oracle also introduced their Big Data architecture, which consists of: Oracle Big Data Appliance that is preconfigured with Hadoop Oracle Exdata which stores a huge amount of data efficently, to achieve optimal query performance Oracle Exalytics as a fast and scalable Business analytics system Analysis of the stored data can be performed using SQL, by streaming the data directly from Hadoop to an Oracle Database 12c. Alternatively the analysis can be directly implemented in Hadoop using “R”. In addition Oracle BI Tools can be used to analyze the data. Fast Data Fast Data is a complementary approach to Big Data. A huge amount of mostly unstructured data comes in via different channels with a high frequency. The analysis of these data streams is also important for companies, because the incoming data has to be analyzed regarding business-relevant patterns in real-time. Therefore these patterns must be identified efficiently and performant. To do so, in-memory grid solutions in combination with Oracle Coherence and Oracle Event Processing demonstrated very impressive how efficient real-time data processing can be. One example for Fast Data solutions that was shown during the OOW was the analysis of twitter streams regarding customer satisfaction. The feeds with negative words like “bad” or “worse” have been filtered and after a defined treshold has been reached in a certain timeframe, a business event was triggered. Cloud Another key trend in the IT market is of course Cloud Computing and what it means for companies and their businesses. Oracle announced their Cloud strategy and vision – companies can focus on their real business while all of the applications are available via Cloud. This also includes Oracle Database or Oracle Weblogic, so that companies can also build, deploy and run their own applications within the cloud. Three different approaches have been introduced: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Software as a Service (SaaS) Using the IaaS approach only the infrastructure components will be managed in the Cloud. Customers will be very flexible regarding memory, storage or number of CPUs because those parameters can be adjusted elastically. The PaaS approach means that besides the infrastructure also the platforms (such as databases or application servers) necessary for running applications will be provided within the Cloud. Here customers can also decide, if installation and management of these infrastructure components should be done by Oracle. The SaaS approach describes the most complete one, hence all applications a company uses are managed in the Cloud. Oracle is planning to provide all of their applications, like ERP systems or HR applications, as Cloud services. In conclusion this seems to be a very forward-thinking strategy, which opens up new possibilities for customers to manage their infrastructure and applications in a flexible, scalable and future-oriented manner. As you can see, our OOW days have been very very interresting. We collected many helpful informations for our projects. The new innovations presented at the confernce are great and being part of this was even greater! We are looking forward to next years’ conference! Links: http://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html http://thecattlecrew.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/first-impressions-from-oracle-open-world-2013 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 Mix Forum Technorati Tags: cattleCrew,Sven Bernhard,OOW2013,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Application Does Not Start in Windows 7

  - by Jim Fell

  I recently installed a new 60GB SSD as my primary hard drive and re-installed Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. I then installed SSD Fresh from Abelssoft to optimize Windows to run on the SSD. It seemed to install okay, but when I try to run the utility, its splash screen appears briefly before it quietly closes. No errors are displayed; the utility just fails to launch. I have run SSD Fresh on another SSD-equipped Windows 7 Pro x64 computer in the past without any problems. Does anyone know what might be preventing the program from running? I tried running sfc /scannow from the command line (with administrator privileges), shutting down the Spybot Resident, and disabling the firewall and virus scanner. I also tried running the tool as administrator; I even tried reinstalling it, running the installer as administrator. No luck. Every time I try to launch the program the Event Viewer logs this same set of errors: Error 4/2/2012 11:35:44 PM Application Error 1000 (100) Faulting application name: SSDFresh.exe, version: 1.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4f2a45d8 Faulting module name: unknown, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x00000000 Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x000007ff0016dbba Faulting process id: 0x994 Faulting application start time: 0x01cd11fd9fe978df Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\SSD Fresh\SSDFresh.exe Faulting module path: unknown Report Id: dfeed551-7df0-11e1-a2c7-002522c47ec0 Error 4/2/2012 11:35:43 PM .NET Runtime 1026 None Application: SSDFresh.exe Framework Version: v4.0.30319 Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception. Exception Info: System.NullReferenceException Stack: at AbBugReporter.BugForm.InitLanguage() at AbBugReporter.BugForm..ctor(AbFlexTrans.LanguageInfo, AbBugReporter.BugReportManager, Boolean) at AbBugReporter.BugReportManager.Show(System.Exception) at SSDFresh.App.App_DispatcherUnhandledException(System.Object, System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherUnhandledExceptionEventArgs) at System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.CatchException(System.Exception) at MS.Internal.Threading.ExceptionFilterHelper.TryCatchWhen(System.Object, System.Delegate, System.Object, Int32, System.Delegate) at System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.WrappedInvoke(System.Delegate, System.Object, Int32, System.Delegate) at System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.InvokeImpl(System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherPriority, System.TimeSpan, System.Delegate, System.Object, Int32) at MS.Win32.HwndSubclass.SubclassWndProc(IntPtr, Int32, IntPtr, IntPtr) at MS.Win32.UnsafeNativeMethods.DispatchMessage(System.Windows.Interop.MSG ByRef) at System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.PushFrameImpl(System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherFrame) at System.Windows.Application.RunInternal(System.Windows.Window) at System.Windows.Application.Run() at SSDFresh.App.Main() Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Activation context generation failed for "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\csc.exe".Error in manifest or policy file "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\csc.exe.Config" on line 0. Invalid Xml syntax. Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None Error 4/2/2012 11:35:39 PM SideBySide 59 None For those who are interested, here is my system configuration: ASRock M3A770DE AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard AMD Athlon II X3 455 Rana 3.3GHz Socket AM3 95W Triple-Core Desktop Processor ADX455WFGMBOX G.SKILL Value Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop Memory Model F3-10600CL9D-8GBNT Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe MKNSSDCR60GB-DX 2.5" 60GB SATA III Synchronous MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (Primary/Boot HD) Western Digital Caviar Blue RFHWD1600AAJS 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive (Secondary HD) Sony Optiarc CD/DVD Burner Black SATA Model AD-7261S-0B LightScribe Support RAIDMAX RX-850AE 850W ATX12V v2.3 / EPS12V SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply ASUS HD7850-DC2-2GD5 Radeon HD 7850 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card Asus ML228H 21.5" Full HD LED BackLight LED Monitor Slim Design (x3)

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• Nvidia drivers don't work with mainline kernel

  - by dutchie

  I want to try some of the new features in the btrfs filesystem, and to do that I need to use a newer kernel than is included in Ubuntu 12.04. To do that, I have installed linux-headers-3.4.0-030400_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_all.deb, linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_amd64.deb, and linux-image-3.4.0-030400-generic_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_amd64.deb from the mainline kernel download here. However, on rebooting into the 3.4 kernel, my desktop is stuck at a very low resolution and I cannot increase it to the full. This did happen when I first installed, but a simple install of the nvidia-current package got everything working nicely with my GTX570 card. There were appear to be some DKMS errors when I installed the kernel, and they indicated I should look at /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/make.log: josh@sirius:~/Downloads$ sudo dpkg -i linux-*.deb Selecting previously unselected package linux-headers-3.4.0-030400. (Reading database ... 309400 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking linux-headers-3.4.0-030400 (from linux-headers-3.4.0-030400_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_all.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic. Unpacking linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic (from linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_amd64.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package linux-image-3.4.0-030400-generic. Unpacking linux-image-3.4.0-030400-generic (from linux-image-3.4.0-030400-generic_3.4.0-030400.201205210521_amd64.deb) ... Done. Setting up linux-headers-3.4.0-030400 (3.4.0-030400.201205210521) ... Setting up linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic (3.4.0-030400.201205210521) ... Examining /etc/kernel/header_postinst.d. run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/header_postinst.d/dkms 3.4.0-030400-generic /boot/vmlinuz-3.4.0-030400-generic ERROR (dkms apport): kernel package linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic is not supported Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 3.4.0-030400-generic (x86_64) Consult /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/make.log for more information. Setting up linux-image-3.4.0-030400-generic (3.4.0-030400.201205210521) ... Running depmod. update-initramfs: deferring update (hook will be called later) Examining /etc/kernel/postinst.d. run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/dkms 3.4.0-030400-generic /boot/vmlinuz-3.4.0-030400-generic ERROR (dkms apport): kernel package linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic is not supported Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 3.4.0-030400-generic (x86_64) Consult /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/make.log for more information. run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools 3.4.0-030400-generic /boot/vmlinuz-3.4.0-030400-generic update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.4.0-030400-generic run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/pm-utils 3.4.0-030400-generic /boot/vmlinuz-3.4.0-030400-generic run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/update-notifier 3.4.0-030400-generic /boot/vmlinuz-3.4.0-030400-generic run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub 3.4.0-030400-generic /boot/vmlinuz-3.4.0-030400-generic Generating grub.cfg ... Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.4.0-030400-generic Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.4.0-030400-generic Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-24-generic Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-24-generic Found memtest86+ image: /memtest86+.bin Found Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (12.04) on /dev/sda1 Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda2 Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda3 done /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/make.log: DKMS make.log for nvidia-current-295.40 for kernel 3.4.0-030400-generic (x86_64) Thu Jun 7 00:58:39 BST 2012 NVIDIA: calling KBUILD... test -e include/generated/autoconf.h -a -e include/config/auto.conf || ( \ echo; \ echo " ERROR: Kernel configuration is invalid."; \ echo " include/generated/autoconf.h or include/config/auto.conf are missing.";\ echo " Run 'make oldconfig && make prepare' on kernel src to fix it."; \ echo; \ /bin/false) mkdir -p /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/.tmp_versions ; rm -f /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/.tmp_versions/* make -f scripts/Makefile.build obj=/var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build cc -Wp,-MD,/var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/.nv.o.d -nostdinc -isystem /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.6/include -I/usr/src/linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic/arch/x86/include -Iarch/x86/include/generated -Iinclude -include /usr/src/linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic/include/linux/kconfig.h -D__KERNEL__ -Wall -Wundef -Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -Werror-implicit-function-declaration -Wno-format-security -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -O2 -m64 -mtune=generic -mno-red-zone -mcmodel=kernel -funit-at-a-time -maccumulate-outgoing-args -fstack-protector -DCONFIG_AS_CFI=1 -DCONFIG_AS_CFI_SIGNAL_FRAME=1 -DCONFIG_AS_CFI_SECTIONS=1 -DCONFIG_AS_FXSAVEQ=1 -pipe -Wno-sign-compare -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -mno-sse -mno-mmx -mno-sse2 -mno-3dnow -mno-avx -Wframe-larger-than=1024 -Wno-unused-but-set-variable -fno-omit-frame-pointer -fno-optimize-sibling-calls -pg -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wno-pointer-sign -fno-strict-overflow -fconserve-stack -DCC_HAVE_ASM_GOTO -I/var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build -Wall -MD -Wsign-compare -Wno-cast-qual -Wno-error -D__KERNEL__ -DMODULE -DNVRM -DNV_VERSION_STRING=\"295.40\" -Wno-unused-function -Wuninitialized -mno-red-zone -mcmodel=kernel -UDEBUG -U_DEBUG -DNDEBUG -DMODULE -D"KBUILD_STR(s)=#s" -D"KBUILD_BASENAME=KBUILD_STR(nv)" -D"KBUILD_MODNAME=KBUILD_STR(nvidia)" -c -o /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/.tmp_nv.o /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/nv.c In file included from include/linux/kernel.h:19:0, from include/linux/sched.h:55, from include/linux/utsname.h:35, from /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/nv-linux.h:38, from /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/nv.c:13: include/linux/bitops.h: In function ‘hweight_long’: include/linux/bitops.h:66:41: warning: signed and unsigned type in conditional expression [-Wsign-compare] In file included from /usr/src/linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic/arch/x86/include/asm/uaccess.h:577:0, from include/linux/poll.h:14, from /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/nv-linux.h:97, from /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/nv.c:13: /usr/src/linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic/arch/x86/include/asm/uaccess_64.h: In function ‘copy_from_user’: /usr/src/linux-headers-3.4.0-030400-generic/arch/x86/include/asm/uaccess_64.h:53:6: warning: comparison between signed and unsigned integer expressions [-Wsign-compare] In file included from /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/nv.c:13:0: /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/nv-linux.h: At top level: /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/nv-linux.h:114:75: fatal error: asm/system.h: No such file or directory compilation terminated. make[3]: *** [/var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build/nv.o] Error 1 make[2]: *** [_module_/var/lib/dkms/nvidia-current/295.40/build] Error 2 NVIDIA: left KBUILD. nvidia.ko failed to build! make[1]: *** [module] Error 1 make: *** [module] Error 2

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• Augmenting your Social Efforts via Data as a Service (DaaS)

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is the 3rd in a series of posts on the value of leveraging social data across your enterprise by Oracle VP Product Development Don Springer and Oracle Cloud Data and Insight Service Sr. Director Product Management Niraj Deo. In this post, we will discuss the approach and value of integrating additional “public” data via a cloud-based Data-as-as-Service platform (or DaaS) to augment your Socially Enabled Big Data Analytics and CX Management. Let’s assume you have a functional Social-CRM platform in place. You are now successfully and continuously listening and learning from your customers and key constituents in Social Media, you are identifying relevant posts and following up with direct engagement where warranted (both 1:1, 1:community, 1:all), and you are starting to integrate signals for communication into your appropriate Customer Experience (CX) Management systems as well as insights for analysis in your business intelligence application. What is the next step? Augmenting Social Data with other Public Data for More Advanced Analytics When we say advanced analytics, we are talking about understanding causality and correlation from a wide variety, volume and velocity of data to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to achieve and optimize business value. And in some cases, to predict future performance to make appropriate course corrections and change the outcome to your advantage while you can. The data to acquire, process and analyze this is very nuanced: It can vary across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data It can span across content, profile, and communities of profiles data It is increasingly public, curated and user generated The key is not just getting the data, but making it value-added data and using it to help discover the insights to connect to and improve your KPIs. As we spend time working with our larger customers on advanced analytics, we have seen a need arise for more business applications to have the ability to ingest and use “quality” curated, social, transactional reference data and corresponding insights. The challenge for the enterprise has been getting this data inline into an easily accessible system and providing the contextual integration of the underlying data enriched with insights to be exported into the enterprise’s business applications. The following diagram shows the requirements for this next generation data and insights service or (DaaS): Some quick points on these requirements: Public Data, which in this context is about Common Business Entities, such as - Customers, Suppliers, Partners, Competitors (all are organizations) Contacts, Consumers, Employees (all are people) Products, Brands This data can be broadly categorized incrementally as - Base Utility data (address, industry classification) Public Master Reference data (trade style, hierarchy) Social/Web data (News, Feeds, Graph) Transactional Data generated by enterprise process, workflows etc. This Data has traits of high-volume, variety, velocity etc., and the technology needed to efficiently integrate this data for your needs includes - Change management of Public Reference Data across all categories Applied Big Data to extract statics as well as real-time insights Knowledge Diagnostics and Data Mining As you consider how to deploy this solution, many of our customers will be using an online “cloud” service that provides quality data and insights uniformly to all their necessary applications. In addition, they are requesting a service that is: Agile and Easy to Use: Applications integrated with the service can obtain data on-demand, quickly and simply Cost-effective: Pre-integrated into applications so customers don’t have to Has High Data Quality: Single point access to reference data for data quality and linkages to transactional, curated and social data Supports Data Governance: Becomes more manageable and cost-effective since control of data privacy and compliance can be enforced in a centralized place Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Just as the cloud has transformed and now offers a better path for how an enterprise manages its IT from their infrastructure, platform, and software (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), the next step is data (DaaS). Over the last 3 years, we have seen the market begin to offer a cloud-based data service and gain initial traction. On one side of the DaaS continuum, we see an “appliance” type of service that provides a single, reliable source of accurate business data plus social information about accounts, leads, contacts, etc. On the other side of the continuum we see more of an online market “exchange” approach where ISVs and Data Publishers can publish and sell premium datasets within the exchange, with the exchange providing a rich set of web interfaces to improve the ease of data integration. Why the difference? It depends on the provider’s philosophy on how fast the rate of commoditization of certain data types will occur. How do you decide the best approach? Our perspective, as shown in the diagram below, is that the enterprise should develop an elastic schema to support multi-domain applicability. This allows the enterprise to take the most flexible approach to harness the speed and breadth of public data to achieve value. The key tenet of the proposed approach is that an enterprise carefully federates common utility, master reference data end points, mobility considerations and content processing, so that they are pervasively available. One way you may already be familiar with this approach is in how you do Address Verification treatments for accounts, contacts etc. If you design and revise this service in such a way that it is also easily available to social analytic needs, you could extend this to launch geo-location based social use cases (marketing, sales etc.). Our fundamental belief is that value-added data achieved through enrichment with specialized algorithms, as well as applying business “know-how” to weight-factor KPIs based on innovative combinations across an ever-increasing variety, volume and velocity of data, will be where real value is achieved. Essentially, Data-as-a-Service becomes a single entry point for the ever-increasing richness and volume of public data, with enrichment and combined capabilities to extract and integrate the right data from the right sources with the right factoring at the right time for faster decision-making and action within your core business applications. As more data becomes available (and in many cases commoditized), this value-added data processing approach will provide you with ongoing competitive advantage. Let’s look at a quick example of creating a master reference relationship that could be used as an input for a variety of your already existing business applications. In phase 1, a simple master relationship is achieved between a company (e.g. General Motors) and a variety of car brands’ social insights. The reference data allows for easy sort, export and integration into a set of CRM use cases for analytics, sales and marketing CRM. In phase 2, as you create more data relationships (e.g. competitors, contacts, other brands) to have broader and deeper references (social profiles, social meta-data) for more use cases across CRM, HCM, SRM, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the amount of master reference relationships is constrained only by your imagination and the availability of quality curated data you have to work with. DaaS is just now emerging onto the marketplace as the next step in cloud transformation. For some of you, this may be the first you have heard about it. Let us know if you have questions, or perspectives. In the meantime, we will continue to share insights as we can.Photo: Erik Araujo, stock.xchng

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Ops Center Jump-Start for Partners

  - by Get_Specialized!

  Following the Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} announcement at Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo, Partners can check out these resources to further learn about Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Op Center and then use it to optimize your solution/services or offer new ones: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Product Documentation Oracle Technical Network Resources Online Learning Series for Partners in the OPN Enterprise Manager KnowledgeZone Whitepaper Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Making Infrastructure-as-a-Service in the Enterprise a Reality IDC report: Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Embraces the Cloud with Integrated Lifecycle Management Follow-up webcast April 12th  Total Cloud Control for Systems Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c is no extra charge and included in the support contract of Oracle Systems customers.To learn more see the Ops Center Everywhere Program And if you're not already a member, be sure and join the Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Enterprise Manager KnowledgeZone on the Oracle PartnerNetwork  Portal

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• Master-slave vs. peer-to-peer archictecture: benefits and problems

  - by Ashok_Ora

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Almost two decades ago, I was a member of a database development team that introduced adaptive locking. Locking, the most popular concurrency control technique in database systems, is pessimistic. Locking ensures that two or more conflicting operations on the same data item don’t “trample” on each other’s toes, resulting in data corruption. In a nutshell, here’s the issue we were trying to address. In everyday life, traffic lights serve the same purpose. They ensure that traffic flows smoothly and when everyone follows the rules, there are no accidents at intersections. As I mentioned earlier, the problem with typical locking protocols is that they are pessimistic. Regardless of whether there is another conflicting operation in the system or not, you have to hold a lock! Acquiring and releasing locks can be quite expensive, depending on how many objects the transaction touches. Every transaction has to pay this penalty. To use the earlier traffic light analogy, if you have ever waited at a red light in the middle of nowhere with no one on the road, wondering why you need to wait when there’s clearly no danger of a collision, you know what I mean. The adaptive locking scheme that we invented was able to minimize the number of locks that a transaction held, by detecting whether there were one or more transactions that needed conflicting eyou could get by without holding any lock at all. In many “well-behaved” workloads, there are few conflicts, so this optimization is a huge win. If, on the other hand, there are many concurrent, conflicting requests, the algorithm gracefully degrades to the “normal” behavior with minimal cost. We were able to reduce the number of lock requests per TPC-B transaction from 178 requests down to 2! Wow! This is a dramatic improvement in concurrency as well as transaction latency. The lesson from this exercise was that if you can identify the common scenario and optimize for that case so that only the uncommon scenarios are more expensive, you can make dramatic improvements in performance without sacrificing correctness. So how does this relate to the architecture and design of some of the modern NoSQL systems? NoSQL systems can be broadly classified as master-slave sharded, or peer-to-peer sharded systems. NoSQL systems with a peer-to-peer architecture have an interesting way of handling changes. Whenever an item is changed, the client (or an intermediary) propagates the changes synchronously or asynchronously to multiple copies (for availability) of the data. Since the change can be propagated asynchronously, during some interval in time, it will be the case that some copies have received the update, and others haven’t. What happens if someone tries to read the item during this interval? The client in a peer-to-peer system will fetch the same item from multiple copies and compare them to each other. If they’re all the same, then every copy that was queried has the same (and up-to-date) value of the data item, so all’s good. If not, then the system provides a mechanism to reconcile the discrepancy and to update stale copies. So what’s the problem with this? There are two major issues: First, IT’S HORRIBLY PESSIMISTIC because, in the common case, it is unlikely that the same data item will be updated and read from different locations at around the same time! For every read operation, you have to read from multiple copies. That’s a pretty expensive, especially if the data are stored in multiple geographically separate locations and network latencies are high. Second, if the copies are not all the same, the application has to reconcile the differences and propagate the correct value to the out-dated copies. This means that the application program has to handle discrepancies in the different versions of the data item and resolve the issue (which can further add to cost and operation latency). Resolving discrepancies is only one part of the problem. What if the same data item was updated independently on two different nodes (copies)? In that case, due to the asynchronous nature of change propagation, you might land up with different versions of the data item in different copies. In this case, the application program also has to resolve conflicts and then propagate the correct value to the copies that are out-dated or have incorrect versions. This can get really complicated. My hunch is that there are many peer-to-peer-based applications that don’t handle this correctly, and worse, don’t even know it. Imagine have 100s of millions of records in your database – how can you tell whether a particular data item is incorrect or out of date? And what price are you willing to pay for ensuring that the data can be trusted? Multiple network messages per read request? Discrepancy and conflict resolution logic in the application, and potentially, additional messages? All this overhead, when all you were trying to do was to read a data item. Wouldn’t it be simpler to avoid this problem in the first place? Master-slave architectures like the Oracle NoSQL Database handles this very elegantly. A change to a data item is always sent to the master copy. Consequently, the master copy always has the most current and authoritative version of the data item. The master is also responsible for propagating the change to the other copies (for availability and read scalability). Client drivers are aware of master copies and replicas, and client drivers are also aware of the “currency” of a replica. In other words, each NoSQL Database client knows how stale a replica is. This vastly simplifies the job of the application developer. If the application needs the most current version of the data item, the client driver will automatically route the request to the master copy. If the application is willing to tolerate some staleness of data (e.g. a version that is no more than 1 second out of date), the client can easily determine which replica (or set of replicas) can satisfy the request, and route the request to the most efficient copy. This results in a dramatic simplification in application logic and also minimizes network requests (the driver will only send the request to exactl the right replica, not many). So, back to my original point. A well designed and well architected system minimizes or eliminates unnecessary overhead and avoids pessimistic algorithms wherever possible in order to deliver a highly efficient and high performance system. If you’ve every programmed an Oracle NoSQL Database application, you’ll know the difference! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• CPU Utilization LAMP stack

  - by Max

  We've got an ec2 m2.4xlarge running Magento (centos 5.6, httpd 2.2, php 5.2.17 with eaccelerator 0.9.5.3, mysql 5.1.52). Right now we're getting a large traffic spike, and our top looks like this: top - 09:41:29 up 31 days, 1:12, 1 user, load average: 120.01, 129.03, 113.23 Tasks: 1190 total, 18 running, 1172 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 97.3%us, 1.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.5%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.4%st Mem: 71687720k total, 36898928k used, 34788792k free, 49692k buffers Swap: 880737784k total, 0k used, 880737784k free, 1586524k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2433 mysql 15 0 23.6g 4.5g 7112 S 564.7 6.6 33607:34 mysqld 24046 apache 16 0 411m 65m 28m S 26.4 0.1 0:09.05 httpd 24360 apache 15 0 410m 60m 25m S 26.4 0.1 0:03.65 httpd 24993 apache 16 0 410m 57m 21m S 26.1 0.1 0:01.41 httpd 24838 apache 16 0 428m 74m 20m S 24.8 0.1 0:02.37 httpd 24359 apache 16 0 411m 62m 26m R 22.3 0.1 0:08.12 httpd 23850 apache 15 0 411m 64m 27m S 16.8 0.1 0:14.54 httpd 25229 apache 16 0 404m 46m 17m R 10.2 0.1 0:00.71 httpd 14594 apache 15 0 404m 63m 34m S 8.4 0.1 1:10.26 httpd 24955 apache 16 0 404m 50m 21m R 8.4 0.1 0:01.66 httpd 24313 apache 16 0 399m 46m 22m R 8.1 0.1 0:02.30 httpd 25119 apache 16 0 411m 59m 23m S 6.8 0.1 0:01.45 httpd Questions: Would giving msyqld more memory help it cache queries and react faster? If so, how? Other than splitting mysql and php to separate servers (which we're about to do) is there anything else we could/should be doing? Thanks! UPDATE: Here's our my.cnf along with the output of mysqltuner. It looks like a cache problem. Thanks again! # cat /etc/my.cnf [client] port = **** socket = /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock [mysqld] datadir=/mnt/persistent/mysql port=**** socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock key_buffer = 512M max_allowed_packet = 64M table_cache = 1024 sort_buffer_size = 8M read_buffer_size = 4M read_rnd_buffer_size = 2M myisam_sort_buffer_size = 64M thread_cache_size = 128M tmp_table_size = 128M join_buffer_size = 1M query_cache_limit = 2M query_cache_size= 64M query_cache_type = 1 max_connections = 1000 thread_stack = 128K thread_concurrency = 48 log-bin=mysql-bin server-id = 1 wait_timeout = 300 innodb_data_home_dir = /mnt/persistent/mysql/ innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend innodb_buffer_pool_size = 20G innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M innodb_log_file_size = 64M innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50 innodb_thread_concurrency = 48 ft_min_word_len=3 [myisamchk] ft_min_word_len=3 key_buffer = 128M sort_buffer_size = 128M read_buffer = 2M write_buffer = 2M # ./mysqltuner.pl >> MySQLTuner 1.2.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.1.52-log [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: +Archive -BDB +Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in MyISAM tables: 2G (Tables: 26) [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 749M (Tables: 250) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 262 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 31d 2h 30m 38s (680M q [253.371 qps], 2M conn, TX: 4825B, RX: 236B) [--] Reads / Writes: 89% / 11% [--] Total buffers: 20.6G global + 15.1M per thread (1000 max threads) [OK] Maximum possible memory usage: 35.4G (51% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (35K/680M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 53% (537/1000) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 512.0M/457.2M [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (9B cached / 264K reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 42.3% (260M cached / 615M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 4384652 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (1K temp sorts / 38M sorts) [!!] Joins performed without indexes: 100404 [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 17% (7M on disk / 45M total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 99% (537 created / 2M connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 0% (1K open / 946K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 9% (453/5K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 99% (758M immediate / 758M locks) [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 749.3M/20.0G -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Adjust your join queries to always utilize indexes Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Variables to adjust: query_cache_size (> 64M) join_buffer_size (> 1.0M, or always use indexes with joins) table_cache (> 1024)

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• Effectiveness and Efficiency

  - by Daniel Moth

  In the professional environment, i.e. at work, I am always seeking personal growth and to be challenged. The result is that my assignments, my work list, my tasks, my goals, my commitments, my [insert whatever word resonates with you] keep growing (in scope and desired impact). Which in turn means I have to keep finding new ways to deliver more value, while not falling into the trap of working more hours. To do that I continuously evaluate both my effectiveness and my efficiency. EFFECTIVENESS The first thing I check is my effectiveness: Am I doing the right things? Am I focusing too much on unimportant things? Am I spending more time doing stuff that is important to my team/org/division/business/company, or am I spending it on stuff that is important to me and that I enjoy doing? Am I valuing activities that maybe I have outgrown and should be delegated to others who are at a stage I have surpassed (in Microsoft speak: is the work I am doing level appropriate or am I still operating at the previous level)? Notice how the answers to those questions change over time and due to certain events, so I have to remind myself to revisit them frequently. Events that force me to re-examine them are: change of role, change of team/org/etc, change of direction of team/org/etc, re-org, new hires on the team that take on some of the work I did, personal promotion, change of manager... and if none of those events has occurred since the last annual review, I ask myself those at each annual review anyway. If you think you are not being effective at work, make a list of the stuff that you do and start tracking where your time goes. In parallel, have a discussion with your manager about where they think your time should go. Ultimately your time is finite and hence it is your most precious investment, don't waste it. If your management doesn't value as highly what you spend your time on, then either convince your management, or stop spending your time on it, or find different management: Lead, Follow, or get out of the way! That's my view on effectiveness. You have to fix that before moving to being efficient, or you may end up being very efficient at stuff that nobody wants you to be doing in the first place. For example, you may be spending your time writing blog posts and becoming better and faster at it all the time. If your manager thinks that is not even part of your job description, you are wasting your time to satisfy your inner desires. Nobody can help you with your effectiveness other than your management chain and your management peers - they are the judges of it. EFFICIENCY The second thing I check is my efficiency: Am I doing things right? For me, doing things right means that I deliver the same quality of work faster [than what I used to, and than my peers, and than expected of me]. The result is that I can achieve more [than what I used to, and than my peers, and than expected of me]. Notice how the efficiency goal is a more portable one. If, by whatever criteria, you think you are the best at [insert your own skill here], this can change at two events: because you have new colleagues (who are potentially better than your older ones), and it can change with a change of manager (who has potentially higher expectations). That's about it. Once you are efficient at something, you carry that with you... All you need to really be doing here is, when taking on new kinds of work that you haven't done before, try a few approaches and devise a system so that you can become efficient at this new activity too... Just keep "collecting" stuff that you are efficient at. If you think you are not being efficient at something, break it down: What are the steps you take to complete that task? How long do you spend on each step? Talk to others about what steps they take, to see if you can optimize some steps away or trade them for better steps, or just learn how to complete a step faster. Have a system for every task you take so that you can have repeatable success. That's my view on efficiency. You have to fix it so that you can free up time to do more. When you plan a route from A to B - all else being equal - you try to get there as fast as possible so why would you not want to do that with your everyday work? For example, imagine you are inefficient at processing email: You spend more time than necessary dealing with email, and you still end up with dropped email threads and with slower response times than others. How can you improve? Talk to someone that you think is good at this, understand their system (e.g. here is my email processing system) and come up with one that works for you. Parting Thoughts Are you considered, by your colleagues and manager, an effective and efficient person at your workplace? If you are, what would you change if you were asked by your management to do the job of two people? Seriously, think about that! Your immediate reaction may be "that is not possible", but it actually is. You just have to re-assess what things that were previously important will now stop being important, by discussing them with your management and reaching agreement on relative priorities. For example, stuff that was previously on your plate may now have to be delegated or dropped. Where you thought you were efficient, maybe now you have to find an even faster path to completion, perhaps keeping in mind that Perfect is the Enemy of “Good Enough”. My personal experience (from both observing others and from my own reflection) is that when folks are struggling to keep up at work it is because of two reasons: They are investing energy in stuff that they enjoy doing which the business regards as having a lower priority than a lot of other things on their plate. They are completing tasks to a level of higher quality than what is required (due to personal pride) missing the big picture which almost always mandates completing three tasks at good enough quality than knocking only one of them out of the park while the other two come in late or not at all. There is a lot of content on the web, so I strongly encourage you to use your favorite search engine to read other views on effectiveness and efficiency (Bing, Google). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Blogging locally and globally–my experience

  - by DigiMortal

  In Baltic MVP Summit 2011 there was discussion about having two blogs - one for local and another for global audience – and how to publish once written information in these blogs. There are many ways how to optimize your blogging activities if you have more than one audience and here you can find my experiences, best practices and advices about this topic. My two blogs I have to working blogs: this one here technology and programming blog for local market My local blog is almost five years old and it makes it one of the oldest company blogs in Estonia. It is still active and I write there as much as I have time for it. This blog here is active since September 2007, so it is about 3.5 years old right now. Both of these blogs are  my major hits in my MVP carrier and they have very good web statistics too. My local blog My local blog is about programming, web and technology. It has way wider target audience then this blog here has. By example, in my local blog I blog also about local events, cool new concept phones, different webs providing some interesting services etc. But local guys can find there also my postings about how to solve one or another programming problem and postings about Microsoft technologies I am playing with. This far my local blog has a lot of readers for such a small country that Estonia is. This blog has made me a lot of cool contacts and I have had there a lot of interesting discussions about different technical topics. Why I started this blog? Living in small country is different than living in big country. In small country you have less people and therefore smaller audience so you have to target more than one technical topic to find enough readers. In a same time you are still interested in your main topics and you want to reach to more people who are sharing same interests with you. Practically one day y will grow out from local market and you go global. This is how this blog was born. Was it worth to create, promote and mess with it? Every second I have put on my time to this blog has been worth of it. Thanks to this blog I have found new good friends and without them I think it is more boring to work on different problems and solutions. Defining target audiences One thing you should always do when having more than one blog is defining target audiences. If you are just technomaniac interested in sharing your stuff and make some new friends and have something to write to your MVP nomination form then you don’t have to go through complex targeting process. You can do it simple way and same effectively. Here is how I defined target audiences to my blogs: local blog – reader of my local blog is IT professional, software developer, technology innovator or just some guy who is interested in technology,   this blog – reader of this blog is experienced professional software developer who works on Microsoft technologies or software developer who is open minded and open to new technologies and interesting solutions to development problems. You can see how local blog – due to small market with less people – has wider definition for audience while this blog is heavily targeted to Microsoft technologies and specially to software development. On practical side these decisions are also made well I think because it is very hard to build up popular common IT blog. On global level it is better to target some specific niche and find readers who are professionals on your favorite topics. Thanks to this blog I have found new friends who are professional developers and I am very happy about all the discussions I have had with them. Publishing content to different blogs My local blog and this blog have some overlapping topics like .NET, databases and SEO. Due to this overlapping there is question: when I write posting to my local blog then should I have to publish same thing in my global blog? And if I write something to my global blog then should I publish same thing also in my local blog? Well, it really depends on the definition of your target audiences. If they match then of course it is good idea to translate you post and publish it also to another blog. But if you have different audiences then you may need to modify your posting before publishing it. The questions you have to answer are: is target audience interested in this topic? is target audience expecting more specific and deeper handling of this topic or are they expecting more general handling of topic? is the problem you are discussing actual for target audience or not? You have to answer these questions and after that make your decision. If you need to modify your original posting then take some time and do it. Provide quality to all your readers because they will respect you if you respect them. Cross-posting and referencing It is tempting to save time that preparing some blog post takes and if you have are done with posting in one blog it may seem like good idea to make short posting to another blog and add reference to first one where topic is discussed longer. Well, don’t do it – all your readers expect good quality content from you and jumping from one blog post to another is disturbing for them. Of course, there is problem with differences between target audiences. You may have wider target audience and some people may be interested in more specific handling of topic. In this case feel free to refer your blog you are writing in english. This is not working very well in opposite direction because almost all my global blog readers understand english but not estonian. By example, estonian language is complex one and online translating tools make very poor translations from estonian language. This is why I don’t even plan to publish postings here that refer to my local blog for more information. I am keeping these two blogs as two different worlds and if there is posting that fits well to both blogs I will write my posting to one blog and then answer previous three questions before posting same thing to another blog. Conclusion Growing out of your local market is not anything mysterious if you are living in small country. As it is harder to find people there who are interested in same topics with you then sooner or later you will start finding these new contacts from global audience. Global audience is bigger and to be visible there you must provide high quality content to your audience. It is something you will learn over time and you will learn every day something new when you are posting to your global blog. You may ask: if global blog is much more complex thing to do then is it worth to do at all? My answer is: yes, do it for sure. It is not easy thing to do when you start but if you work on your global blog and improve it over time you will get over all obstacles pretty soon. Just don’t forget one thing – content is king and your readers expect high quality from you.

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• File server share access intermittent/slow/machine unstable: win2k8r2

  - by Jack B.

  I have a file server running Win2k8R2 on an older HP DL380G4. It has nothing set up on it other than file sharing. All drivers/firmware/updates installed. The file server is used as a dump for a bunch of test machines - so essentially a lot of small files are being written to it. It was working fine until it started showing the following symptoms: Shares became either very slow/intermittent or could not access them at all. Logging in the the server, you could use it like normal but windows would start freezing and eventually you had to hard reboot it because nothing was responsive. After rebooting, it would work fine for 20min-2hours and then degrade into this broken state again. Some info after investigation: HP Raid Config utility shows the Raid array as functioning properly (RAID5 btw). Event log shows a bunch of DoS attacks from the test machines, saying it has disconnected the connection a. AFAIK (not part of my job) the test machines haven't changed the way they log information to this server or the amount of them hasn't increased. b. Nothing is infected, this server was scanned fully, and the test machines are re-imaged almost daily. Nothing in performance monitor shows as anything being pegged at maximum (CPU/HD/Network/RAM) I installed MS Network Monitor and it is showing a lot of traffic The server was using one gigabit Ethernet connection, I connected the second one as well with the same results. Forgot to add - one of the commonly written to dirs on the share has over 16k subdirs in it, with a crapton of small files within those dirs. Some of the OS instability was slow access to the drive which has this directory - perfmon doesn't show much activity on the HD though so I'm not sure if this crowded dir is the cause. Here is one important fact: I ran into this issue 2-3 months ago, couldn't figure it out, but I had a spare identical machine so I swapped them out (thought it was related to the machine), and now I have the same issue. Also, the computer will be stable if I turn off file sharing. So is the server just getting DoS'd by the test machines? I've never dealt with such an issue. Is instability in the server's OS common when getting DoS'd? Is there anything I can do to confirm this before telling the owners of the test machines to optimize their traffic? (I'm not sure what they'll be able to do). Is there something within Win2k8R2 that can balance the traffic across the two NICs? Any help would be appreciated. Update: Another thought - the drive with the share is RAID5 across 6 SCSI320 300GB HDs. They are near full capacity about 100GB from 1TB left. Could the amount of tiny files could be causing some weirdness with the parity in this array? I think I've read something about this in the past but I'm no expert on RAID.

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• FOUR questions to ask if you are implementing DATABASE-AS-A-SERVICE

  - by Sudip Datta

  During my ongoing tenure at Oracle, I have met all types of DBAs. Happy DBAs, unhappy DBAs, proud DBAs, risk-loving DBAs, cautious DBAs. These days, as Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) becomes more mainstream, I find some complacent DBAs who are basking in their achievement of having implemented DBaaS. Some others, however, are not that happy. They grudgingly complain that they did not have much of a say in the implementation, they simply had to follow what their cloud architects (mostly infrastructure admins) offered them. In most cases it would be a database wrapped inside a VM that would be labeled as “Database as a Service”. In other cases, it would be existing brute-force automation simply exposed in a portal. As much as I think that there is more to DBaaS than those approaches and often get tempted to propose Enterprise Manager 12c, I try to be objective. Neither do I want to dampen the spirit of the happy ones, nor do I want to stoke the pain of the unhappy ones. As I mentioned in my previous post, I don’t deny vanilla automation could be useful. I like virtualization too for what it has helped us accomplish in terms of resource management, but we need to scrutinize its merit on a case-by-case basis and apply it meaningfully. For DBAs who either claim to have implemented DBaaS or are planning to do so, I simply want to provide four key questions to ponder about: 1. Does it make life easier for your end users? Database-as-a-Service can have several types of end users. Junior DBAs, QA Engineers, Developers- each having their own skillset. The objective of DBaaS is to make their life simple, so that they can focus on their core responsibilities without having to worry about additional stuff. For example, if you are a Developer using Oracle Application Express (APEX), you want to deal with schema, objects and PL/SQL code and not with datafiles or listener configuration. If you are a QA Engineer needing database copies for functional testing, you do not want to deal with underlying operating system patching and compliance issues. The question to ask, therefore, is, whether DBaaS makes life easier for those users. It is often convenient to give them VM shells to deal with a la Amazon EC2 IaaS, but is that what they really want? Is it a productive use of a developer's time if he needs to apply RPM errata to his Linux operating system. Asking him to keep the underlying operating system current is like making a guest responsible for a restaurant's decor. 2. Does it make life easier for your administrators? Cloud, in general, is supposed to free administrators from attending to mundane tasks like provisioning services for every single end user request. It is supposed to enable a readily consumable platform and enforce standardization in the process. For example, if a Service Catalog exposes DBaaS of specific database versions and configurations, it, by its very nature, enforces certain discipline and standardization within the IT environment. What if, instead of specific database configurations, cloud allowed each end user to create databases of their liking resulting in hundreds of version and patch levels and thousands of individual databases. Therefore the right question to ask is whether the unwanted consequence of DBaaS is OS and database sprawl. And if so, who is responsible for tracking them, backing them up, administering them? Studies have shown that these administrative overheads increase exponentially with new targets, and it could result in a management nightmare. That leads us to our next question. 3. Does it satisfy your Security Officers and Compliance Auditors? Compliance Auditors need to know who did what and when. They also want the cloud platform to be secure, so that end users have little freedom in tampering with it. Dealing with VM sprawl is not the easiest of challenges, let alone dealing with them as they keep getting reconfigured and moved around. This leads to the proverbial needle in the haystack problem, and all it needs is one needle to cause a serious compliance issue in the enterprise. Bottomline is, flexibility and agility should not come at the expense of compliance and it is very important to get the balance right. Can we have security and isolation without creating compliance challenges? Instead of a ‘one size fits all approach’ i.e. OS level isolation, can we think smartly about database isolation or schema based isolation? This is where the appropriate resource modeling needs to be applied. The usual systems management vendors out there with heterogeneous common-denominator approach have compromised on these semantics. If you follow Enterprise Manager’s DBaaS solution, you will see that we have considered different models, not precluding virtualization, for different customer use cases. The judgment to use virtual assemblies versus databases on physical RAC versus Schema-as-a-Service in a single database, should be governed by the need of the applications and not by putting compliance considerations in the backburner. 4. Does it satisfy your CIO? Finally, does it satisfy your higher ups? As the sponsor of cloud initiative, the CIO is expected to lead an IT transformation project, not merely a run-of-the-mill IT operations. Simply virtualizing server resources and delivering them through self-service is a good start, but hardly transformational. CIOs may appreciate the instant benefit from server consolidation, but studies have revealed that the ROI from consolidation would flatten out at 20-25%. The question would be: what next? As we go higher up in the stack, the need to virtualize, segregate and optimize shifts to those layers that are more palpable to the business users. As Sushil Kumar noted in his blog post, " the most important thing to note here is the enterprise private cloud is not just an IT project, rather it is a business initiative to create an IT setup that is more aligned with the needs of today's dynamic and highly competitive business environment." Business users could not care less about infrastructure consolidation or virtualization - they care about business agility and service level assurance. Last but not the least, lot of CIOs get miffed if we ask them to throw away their existing hardware investments for implementing DBaaS. In Oracle, we always emphasize on freedom of choosing a platform; hence Enterprise Manager’s DBaaS solution is platform neutral. It can work on any Operating System (that the agent is certified on) Oracle’s hardware as well as 3rd party hardware. As a parting note, I urge you to remember these 4 questions. Remember that your satisfaction as an implementer lies in the satisfaction of others.

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• Are you reporting Visual Studio 2012 issues to Microsoft correctly?

  - by Tarun Arora

  Issues you may run into while using Visual Studio need to be reported to the Microsoft Product Team via the Microsoft connect site. The Microsoft team then tries to reproduce the issue using the details provided by you. If the information you provide isn’t sufficient to reproduce the issue the team tries to contact you for specifics, this not only increases the cycle time to resolution but the lack of communication also results in issues not being resolved. So, when I report an issue one part of me tells me to include as much detail about the issue as I can clubbing screen shots, repo steps, system information, visual studio version information,… the other half tells me this is so time consuming, leave it for now and come back to fill all these details later. Reporting a bug but not including the supporting information is an invitation to excuses like …     Microsoft has absolutely changed this experience for VS 2012. The Microsoft Visual Studio Feedback tool is designed to simplify the process of providing feedback and reporting issues to Microsoft that you may encounter while using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012. Note – The Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Feedback client currently only works for VS 2012 and not any other versions of Visual Studio. Setting up the Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Feedback client Open Visual Studio, from the Tools menu select Extension and Updates. In the Extension and Updates window, click Online from the left pane and search using the text ‘feedback’, download and Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Feedback Tool by following the instructions from the wizard. Note - Restarting Visual Studio after the install is a must! How to report a bug for Visual Studio 2012? Click on the Help menu and choose Report a Bug You should see an icon Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Feedback Tool come up in the system tray icon area You’ll need to accept the Privacy statement. You have the option of reporting the feedback as private or public. Microsoft works with several Partners, MVP’s and Vendors who get access to early bits of Microsoft products for valuation. This is where it becomes essential to report the feedback privately. I would choose the Public option otherwise. After all if it’s out there in the public, others can discover and add to it easily. You now have the option to report a new issue or add to an existing issue. Should you choose to add to an existing issue you should have the feedback ID of the issue available. This can be obtained from the Microsoft Connect site. For now I am going to focus on reporting a new feedback privately. Filling out the feedback details You will notice that VsInfo.xml and DxDiagOutput.txt are automatically attached as you enter this screen (more on that later).  Feedback Type Choose the feedback type from (Performance, Hang, Crash, Other) Note – The record button will only be enabled once you have enabled once you have chosen the feedback type, Bug-repro recording is not available for Windows Server 2008.     Effective Title and Description Enter a title that helps us differentiate the bug when it appears in a list, so that we can group it with any related bugs, assign it to a developer more effectively, and resolve it more quickly. Example: Imagine that you are submitting a bug because you tried to install Service Pack 1 and got a message that Visual Studio is not installed even though it is. Helpful:  Installed Visual Studio version not detected during Service Pack 1 setup. Not helpful:  Service Pack 1 problem. Tip: Write the problem description first, and then distil it to create a title. Example Description: Helpful: When I run Service Pack 1 Setup, I get the message "No Visual Studio version is detected" even though I have Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual C++ 2010 Express installed on my machine. Even though I uninstalled both editions, and then first reinstalled Ultimate and then Express, I still get the message. Record: Becoming a first class citizen Often a repro report is invaluable to describe and decipher the issue. Please use this feature to send actionable feedback. The record repro feature works differently depending on the feedback type you selected. Please find below details for each recording option. You can start recording simply by selecting a feedback type, and clicking on the “Record” button. When "Performance" is the bug type: When the Microsoft Visual Studio trace recorder starts, perform the actions that show the performance problem you want to report and then click on the "Stop Recording" button as soon as you experience the performance problem. Because the tool optimizes trace collection, you can run it for as long as it takes to show the problem, up to two hours. Note that, you need to stop recording as soon as the performance issue occurs, because the tool captures only the last couple minutes of your actions to optimize the trace collection. After you stop the recording, the tool takes up to two minutes to assemble the data and attach an ETLTrace.zip file to your bug report. The data includes information about Windows events and the Visual Studio code path. Note that, running the Microsoft Visual Studio trace recorder requires elevated user privilege. When "Crash" is the bug type: When the dialog box appears, select the running Visual Studio instance for which you want to show the steps that cause a crash. When the crash occurs, click on the "Stop Record" button. After you do this, two files are attached to your bug report - an AutomaticCrashDump.zip file that contains information about the crash and a ReproSteps.zip file that shows the repro steps. Repro steps are captured by Windows Problem Steps Recorder. Note that, you can pause the recording, and resume later, or for a specific step, you can add additional comments. When "Hang" is the bug type: The process for recording the steps that cause a hang resembles the one for crashes. The difference is, you can even collect a dump file after the VS hangs; start the VSFT either from the system tray or by starting a new instance of VS, select "Hang" as feedback type and click on the "Record" button. You will be prompted which VS to collect dump about, select the VS instance that hanged. VSFT collects a dump file regarding the hang, called MiniDump.zip, and attaches to your bug report. When "Other" is the bug type: When the problem step recorder starts, perform the actions that show the issue you want to report and then choose the "Stop” button. You can pause the recording, and resume later, or for a specific step, you can add additional comments. Once you’re done, ReproSteps.zip is added to your bug report. Pre-attached files It is essential for Microsoft to know what version of the the product are you currently using and what is the current configuration of your system. Note – The total size of all attachments in a bug report cannot exceed 2 GB, and every uncompressed attachment must be smaller than 512 MB. We recommend that you assemble all of your attachments, compress them together into a .zip file, and then attach the .zip file. Taking a screenshot Associate a screen shot by clicking the Take screenshot button, choose either the entire desktop, the specific monitor (useful if you are working in a multi monitor configuration) or the specific window in question. And finally … click Submit If you need further help, more details can be found here. You can view your feedback online by using the following URL “">https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/SearchResults.aspx?SearchQuery=<feedbackId>” Happy bug logging

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• File server share access intermittent/slow/machine unstable: win2k8r2

  - by Jack B.

  I have a file server running Win2k8R2 on an older HP DL380G4. It has nothing set up on it other than file sharing. All drivers/firmware/updates installed. The file server is used as a dump for a bunch of test machines - so essentially a lot of small files are being written to it. It was working fine until it started showing the following symptoms: Shares became either very slow/intermittent or could not access them at all. Logging in the the server, you could use it like normal but windows would start freezing and eventually you had to hard reboot it because nothing was responsive. After rebooting, it would work fine for 20min-2hours and then degrade into this broken state again. Some info after investigation: HP Raid Config utility shows the Raid array as functioning properly (RAID5 btw). Event log shows a bunch of DoS attacks from the test machines, saying it has disconnected the connection a. AFAIK (not part of my job) the test machines haven't changed the way they log information to this server or the amount of them hasn't increased. b. Nothing is infected, this server was scanned fully, and the test machines are re-imaged almost daily. Nothing in performance monitor shows as anything being pegged at maximum (CPU/HD/Network/RAM) I installed MS Network Monitor and it is showing a lot of traffic The server was using one gigabit Ethernet connection, I connected the second one as well with the same results. Forgot to add - one of the commonly written to dirs on the share has over 16k subdirs in it, with a crapton of small files within those dirs. Some of the OS instability was slow access to the drive which has this directory - perfmon doesn't show much activity on the HD though so I'm not sure if this crowded dir is the cause. Here is one important fact: I ran into this issue 2-3 months ago, couldn't figure it out, but I had a spare identical machine so I swapped them out (thought it was related to the machine), and now I have the same issue. Also, the computer will be stable if I turn off file sharing. So is the server just getting DoS'd by the test machines? I've never dealt with such an issue. Is instability in the server's OS common when getting DoS'd? Is there anything I can do to confirm this before telling the owners of the test machines to optimize their traffic? (I'm not sure what they'll be able to do). Is there something within Win2k8R2 that can balance the traffic across the two NICs? Any help would be appreciated. Update: Another thought - the drive with the share is RAID5 across 6 SCSI320 300GB HDs. They are near full capacity about 100GB from 1TB left. Could the amount of tiny files could be causing some weirdness with the parity in this array? I think I've read something about this in the past but I'm no expert on RAID.

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• File server share access intermittent/slow/machine unstable: win2kr2

  - by Jack B.

  I have a file server running Win2k8R2 on an older HP DL380G4. It has nothing set up on it other than file sharing. All drivers/firmware/updates installed. The file server is used as a dump for a bunch of test machines - so essentially a lot of small files are being written to it. It was working fine until it started showing the following symptoms: Shares became either very slow/intermittent or could not access them at all. Logging in the the server, you could use it like normal but windows would start freezing and eventually you had to hard reboot it because nothing was responsive. After rebooting, it would work fine for 20min-2hours and then degrade into this broken state again. Some info after investigation: HP Raid Config utility shows the Raid array as functioning properly (RAID5 btw). Event log shows a bunch of DoS attacks from the test machines, saying it has disconnected the connection a. AFAIK (not part of my job) the test machines haven't changed the way they log information to this server or the amount of them hasn't increased. b. Nothing is infected, this server was scanned fully, and the test machines are re-imaged almost daily. Nothing in performance monitor shows as anything being pegged at maximum (CPU/HD/Network/RAM) I installed MS Network Monitor and it is showing a lot of traffic The server was using one gigabit Ethernet connection, I connected the second one as well with the same results. Forgot to add - one of the commonly written to dirs on the share has over 16k subdirs in it, with a crapton of small files within those dirs. Some of the OS instability was slow access to the drive which has this directory - perfmon doesn't show much activity on the HD though so I'm not sure if this crowded dir is the cause. Here is one important fact: I ran into this issue 2-3 months ago, couldn't figure it out, but I had a spare identical machine so I swapped them out (thought it was related to the machine), and now I have the same issue. Also, the computer will be stable if I turn off file sharing. So is the server just getting DoS'd by the test machines? I've never dealt with such an issue. Is instability in the server's OS common when getting DoS'd? Is there anything I can do to confirm this before telling the owners of the test machines to optimize their traffic? (I'm not sure what they'll be able to do). Is there something within Win2k8R2 that can balance the traffic across the two NICs? Any help would be appreciated. Update: Another thought - the drive with the share is RAID5 across 6 SCSI320 300GB HDs. They are near full capacity about 100GB from 1TB left. Could the amount of tiny files could be causing some weirdness with the parity in this array? I think I've read something about this in the past but I'm no expert on RAID.

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• need assistance with my.cnf - 1500% CPU usage

  - by Alan Long

  I'm running into a few issues with our new database server. It is a HP G8 with 2 INTEL XEON E5-2650 processors and 32GB of ram. This server is dedicated as a MySQL server (5.1.69) for our intranet portal. I have been having issues with this server staying alive - I notice high CPU usage during certain times of day (8% ~ 1500%+) and see very low memory usage (7 ~ 15%) based on using the 'top' command. When the CPU usage passes 1000%, that is when the app usually dies. I'm trying to see what I'm doing wrong with the config file, hopefully one of the experts can chime in and let me know what they think. See below for my.cnf file: [mysqld] default-storage-engine=InnoDB datadir=/var/lib/mysql socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock #user=mysql large-pages # Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks symbolic-links=0 max_connections=275 tmp_table_size=1G key_buffer_size=384M key_buffer=384M thread_cache_size=1024 long_query_time=5 low_priority_updates=1 max_heap_table_size=1G myisam_sort_buffer_size=8M concurrent_insert=2 table_cache=1024 sort_buffer_size=8M read_buffer_size=5M read_rnd_buffer_size=6M join_buffer_size=16M table_definition_cache=6k open_files_limit=8k slow_query_log #skip-name-resolve # Innodb Settings innodb_buffer_pool_size=18G innodb_thread_concurrency=0 innodb_log_file_size=1G innodb_log_buffer_size=16M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2 innodb_lock_wait_timeout=50 innodb_file_per_table #innodb_buffer_pool_instances=4 #eliminating double buffering innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT flush_time=86400 innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=40M #innodb_io_capacity = 5000 #innodb_read_io_threads = 64 #innodb_write_io_threads = 64 # increase until threads_created doesnt grow anymore thread_cache=1024 query_cache_type=1 query_cache_limit=4M query_cache_size=256M # Try number of CPU's*2 for thread_concurrency thread_concurrency = 0 wait_timeout = 1800 connect_timeout = 10 interactive_timeout = 60 [mysqldump] max_allowed_packet=32M [mysqld_safe] log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid log-slow-queries=/var/log/mysql/slow-queries.log long_query_time = 1 log-queries-not-using-indexes we connect to one database with 75 tables, the largest table has 1,150,000 entries and the second largest has 128,036 entries. I have also verified that our PHP queries are optimized as best as possible. Reference - MySQLtuner: >> MySQLTuner 1.2.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.1.69-log [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: -Archive -BDB -Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 420M (Tables: 75) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 75 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [!!] User '[email protected]' has no password set. -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 1h 14m 50s (8M q [1K qps], 705 conn, TX: 6B, RX: 892M) [--] Reads / Writes: 68% / 32% [--] Total buffers: 19.7G global + 35.2M per thread (275 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 29.1G (93% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (472/8M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 66% (183/275) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 384.0M/91.0K [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (173 cached / 0 reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 96.2% (7M cached / 7M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 553614 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (3 temp sorts / 1K sorts) [!!] Temporary tables created on disk: 49% (3K on disk / 7K total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 74% (183 created / 705 connections) [OK] Table cache hit rate: 97% (231 open / 238 opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 0% (17/8K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (432K immediate / 432K locks) [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 420.9M/18.0G -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Increasing the query_cache size over 128M may reduce performance Temporary table size is already large - reduce result set size Reduce your SELECT DISTINCT queries without LIMIT clauses Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 256M) [see warning above] Thanks in advanced for your help!

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• Improving SAS multipath to JBOD performance on Linux

  - by user36825

  Hello all I'm trying to optimize a storage setup on some Sun hardware with Linux. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. We have the following hardware: Sun Blade X6270 2* LSISAS1068E SAS controllers 2* Sun J4400 JBODs with 1 TB disks (24 disks per JBOD) Fedora Core 12 2.6.33 release kernel from FC13 (also tried with latest 2.6.31 kernel from FC12, same results) Here's the datasheet for the SAS hardware: http://www.sun.com/storage/storage_networking/hba/sas/PCIe.pdf It's using PCI Express 1.0a, 8x lanes. With a bandwidth of 250 MB/sec per lane, we should be able to do 2000 MB/sec per SAS controller. Each controller can do 3 Gb/sec per port and has two 4 port PHYs. We connect both PHYs from a controller to a JBOD. So between the JBOD and the controller we have 2 PHYs * 4 SAS ports * 3 Gb/sec = 24 Gb/sec of bandwidth, which is more than the PCI Express bandwidth. With write caching enabled and when doing big writes, each disk can sustain about 80 MB/sec (near the start of the disk). With 24 disks, that means we should be able to do 1920 MB/sec per JBOD. multipath { rr_min_io 100 uid 0 path_grouping_policy multibus failback manual path_selector "round-robin 0" rr_weight priorities alias somealias no_path_retry queue mode 0644 gid 0 wwid somewwid } I tried values of 50, 100, 1000 for rr_min_io, but it doesn't seem to make much difference. Along with varying rr_min_io I tried adding some delay between starting the dd's to prevent all of them writing over the same PHY at the same time, but this didn't make any difference, so I think the I/O's are getting properly spread out. According to /proc/interrupts, the SAS controllers are using a "IR-IO-APIC-fasteoi" interrupt scheme. For some reason only core #0 in the machine is handling these interrupts. I can improve performance slightly by assigning a separate core to handle the interrupts for each SAS controller: echo 2 /proc/irq/24/smp_affinity echo 4 /proc/irq/26/smp_affinity Using dd to write to the disk generates "Function call interrupts" (no idea what these are), which are handled by core #4, so I keep other processes off this core too. I run 48 dd's (one for each disk), assigning them to cores not dealing with interrupts like so: taskset -c somecore dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/mpathx oflag=direct bs=128M oflag=direct prevents any kind of buffer cache from getting involved. None of my cores seem maxed out. The cores dealing with interrupts are mostly idle and all the other cores are waiting on I/O as one would expect. Cpu0 : 0.0%us, 1.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 91.2%id, 7.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 : 0.0%us, 0.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 93.0%id, 0.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 6.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu2 : 0.0%us, 0.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 94.4%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 4.8%si, 0.0%st Cpu3 : 0.0%us, 7.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.3%id, 56.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu4 : 0.0%us, 1.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 85.7%id, 4.9%wa, 0.0%hi, 8.1%si, 0.0%st Cpu5 : 0.1%us, 5.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.2%id, 58.3%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu6 : 0.0%us, 5.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.3%id, 58.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu7 : 0.0%us, 5.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.3%id, 58.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu8 : 0.1%us, 8.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 27.2%id, 64.4%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu9 : 0.1%us, 7.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.2%id, 55.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu10 : 0.0%us, 7.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.2%id, 56.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu11 : 0.0%us, 7.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.3%id, 56.4%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu12 : 0.0%us, 5.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 33.1%id, 61.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu13 : 0.1%us, 5.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.1%id, 58.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu14 : 0.0%us, 4.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.4%id, 58.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu15 : 0.1%us, 5.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.5%id, 58.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Given all this, the throughput reported by running "dstat 10" is in the range of 2200-2300 MB/sec. Given the math above I would expect something in the range of 2*1920 ~= 3600+ MB/sec. Does anybody have any idea where my missing bandwidth went? Thanks!

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• Fix Problems Upgrading Office 2010 Beta to RTM (Final) Release

  - by Mysticgeek

  There are several scenarios where you may run into trouble uninstalling the 2010 Beta and trying to install the RTM (final) release. Today we’ll cover the problems we ran into, and how to fix them. You would think upgrading from the Office 2010 Beta to the final release would be an easy process. Unfortunately, it’s not always that simple. In fact, we ran into three different scenarios where the install wasn’t smooth whatsoever. If you currently have the 2010 Beta installed, you have to remove it before you can install the RTM.  Here we’ll take a look at three different troublesome install scenarios we ran into, and how we fixed each one. Important Note: Before proceeding with any of these steps, make sure and backup your Outlook .pst files! Scenario 1 – Uninstall Office 2010 Beta & Fix Install Errors In this first scenario we have Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta 32-bit installed on a Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit system. First try to uninstall the Office 2010 Beta by going into Control Panel and selecting Programs and Features. Scroll down to Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, right-click it and select Uninstall. Click Yes when the confirmation dialog box comes up. Wait while Office 2010 Beta uninstalls…the amount of time it takes will vary from system to system. To complete the uninstall process, a reboot is required. Fixing Setup Errors The problem is when you start the installation of the 2010 RTM… You get the following setup error even though you uninstalled the 2010 Beta. The problem is there are leftover Office apps or stand alone Office products. So, we need a utility that will clean them up for us.   Windows Installer Clean Up Utility Download and install the Clean Up Utility (link Below) following the defaults. After it’s installed you’ll find it in Start \ All Programs \ Windows Install Clean Up …go ahead and launch the utility. Now go through and remove all Office Programs or addins that you find in the list. Make sure you are just deleting Office apps and not something you need like Java for example. If you’re not sure what something is, doing a quick Google search should help you out. For instance we had the Office labs Ribbon Hero installed… just highlight and click Remove. Remove anything that has something to do with Office…then reboot your machine. Now, you should be able to begin the installation of Office 2010 RTM (Final) Release without any errors. If you do get an error during the install process, like this one telling us we have old version of Groove Server… Navigate to C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft (where username is the computer name) and delete any existing MS Office folders. Then try the install again, this solved the problem in our first scenario. Scenario 2 – Not Being Able to Uninstall 2010 Beta from Programs and Features In this next scenario we have Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta 32-bit installed on a Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit system. Another problem we ran into is not being able to uninstall the 2010 Beta from Programs and Features. When you go in to uninstall it, nothing happens. If you run into this problem, we again need to download and install the Windows Installer Clean Up Utility (link below) and manually uninstall the Beta. When you launch it, scroll down to Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 (Beta), highlight it and click Remove.   Click OK to the Warning Dialog box… If you see any other Office 2010, 2007, or 2003 entries you can hold the “Shift” key and highlight them all…then click Remove and click OK to the warning dialog. Now we need to delete some Registry settings. Click on Start and type regedit into the Search box and hit Enter. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office and delete the folder. Then navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office and delete those keys as well. Now go into C:\Program Files and find any of these three folders…Microsoft Office, OfficeUpdate, or OfficeUpdate14…you might find one, two or all three. Either way just rename the folders with “_OLD” (without quotes) at the end. Then go into C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft and delete any existing MS Office folders. Where in this example we have office, Office Labs, One Note…etc. Now we want to delete the contents of the Temp folder. Click on Start and type %temp% into the Search box and hit Enter. Use the key combination “Ctrl+A” to select all the files in this folder, then right-click and click Delete, or simply hit the Delete key. If you have some files that won’t delete, just skip them as they shouldn’t affect the Office install. Then empty the Recycle Bin and restart your machine. When you get back from the restart launch the Office 2010 RTM installer and you should be good to go with installation. Because we uninstalled the Office 2010 Beta manually, you may have some lingering blank icons that you’ll need to clean up. Scenario –3 Uninstall 2007 and Install 2010 32-Bit on x64 Windows 7 For this final scenario we are uninstalling Office Professional 2007 and installing Office Professional Plus 2010 32-Bit edition on a Windows Ultimate 64-bit computer. This machine actually had Office 2010 Beta 64-bit installed at one point also, it’s since been removed, and 2007 was reinstalled.  Go into Programs and Settings and uninstall Microsoft Office Professional 2007. Click Yes to the dialog box asking if you’re sure you want to uninstall it… Then wait while Office 2007 is uninstalled. The amount of time it takes will vary between systems. A restart is required to complete the process… Again we need to call upon the Windows Installer Clean Up Utility. Go through and delete any left over Office 2007 and 2010 entries. Click OK to the warning dialog that comes up. After that’s complete, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office and delete the folder. Then navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office and delete those keys as well. We still need to go into C:\Users\ username\AppData\ Local\ Microsoft (where username is the computer name) and delete any Office folders. In this example we have Outlook Connector, Office, and Outlook to delete. Now let’s delete the contents of the Temp folder by typing %temp% into the Search box in the Start Menu. Then delete all of the files and folders in the Temp directory. If you have some files that won’t delete, just skip them as they shouldn’t affect the Office install. Then empty the Recycle Bin and restart your machine. If you try to install the 2010 RTM at this point you might be able to begin the install, but may get the following Error 1402 message. To solve this issue, we opened the command prompt and ran the following: secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose After the command completes, kick off the Office 2010 (Final) RTM 32-bit edition. This solved the issue and Office 2010 installed successfully.   Conclusion Except for the final scenario, we found using the Windows Installer Clean Up Utility to come in very handy. Using that along with deleting a couple folders and registry settings did the trick. In the last one, we had to get a bit more geeky and use some command line magic, but it got the job done. After some extensive testing in our labs, the only time the upgrade to the RTM went smoothly was when we had a clean Vista or Windows 7 system with a fresh install of the 2010 beta only. However, chances are you went from 2003 or 2007 to the free 2010 Beta. You might also have addins or other Office products installed, so there are going to be a lot of different office files scattered throughout your PC. If that’s the case, you may run into the issues we covered here. These are a few scenarios where we got errors and were not able to install Office 2010 after removing the beta. There could be other problems, and if any of you have experienced different issues or have more good suggestions, leave a comment and let us know! Link Download Windows Installer Clean Up Utility Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Remove Office 2010 Beta and Reinstall Office 2007How to Upgrade the Windows 7 RC to RTM (Final Release)Upgrading Ubuntu from Dapper to Edgy with Update ManagerDisable Office 2010 Beta Send-a-Smile from StartupAdd or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 Suite TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle ! Find That Elusive Icon with FindIcons

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• Revisiting ANTS Performance Profiler 7.4

  - by James Michael Hare

  Last year, I did a small review on the ANTS Performance Profiler 6.3, now that it’s a year later and a major version number higher, I thought I’d revisit the review and revise my last post. This post will take the same examples as the original post and update them to show what’s new in version 7.4 of the profiler. Background A performance profiler’s main job is to keep track of how much time is typically spent in each unit of code. This helps when we have a program that is not running at the performance we expect, and we want to know where the program is experiencing issues. There are many profilers out there of varying capabilities. Red Gate’s typically seem to be the very easy to “jump in” and get started with very little training required. So let’s dig into the Performance Profiler. I’ve constructed a very crude program with some obvious inefficiencies. It’s a simple program that generates random order numbers (or really could be any unique identifier), adds it to a list, sorts the list, then finds the max and min number in the list. Ignore the fact it’s very contrived and obviously inefficient, we just want to use it as an example to show off the tool: 1: // our test program 2: public static class Program 3: { 4: // the number of iterations to perform 5: private static int _iterations = 1000000; 6: 7: // The main method that controls it all 8: public static void Main() 9: { 10: var list = new List<string>(); 11: 12: for (int i = 0; i < _iterations; i++) 13: { 14: var x = GetNextId(); 15: 16: AddToList(list, x); 17: 18: var highLow = GetHighLow(list); 19: 20: if ((i % 1000) == 0) 21: { 22: Console.WriteLine("{0} - High: {1}, Low: {2}", i, highLow.Item1, highLow.Item2); 23: Console.Out.Flush(); 24: } 25: } 26: } 27: 28: // gets the next order id to process (random for us) 29: public static string GetNextId() 30: { 31: var random = new Random(); 32: var num = random.Next(1000000, 9999999); 33: return num.ToString(); 34: } 35: 36: // add it to our list - very inefficiently! 37: public static void AddToList(List<string> list, string item) 38: { 39: list.Add(item); 40: list.Sort(); 41: } 42: 43: // get high and low of order id range - very inefficiently! 44: public static Tuple<int,int> GetHighLow(List<string> list) 45: { 46: return Tuple.Create(list.Max(s => Convert.ToInt32(s)), list.Min(s => Convert.ToInt32(s))); 47: } 48: } So let’s run it through the profiler and see what happens! Visual Studio Integration First, let’s look at how the ANTS profilers integrate with Visual Studio’s menu system. Once you install the ANTS profilers, you will get an ANTS menu item with several options: Notice that you can either Profile Performance or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler. These sound similar but achieve two slightly different actions: Profile Performance: this immediately launches the profiler with all defaults selected to profile the active project in Visual Studio. Launch ANTS Performance Profiler: this launches the profiler much the same way as starting it from the Start Menu. The profiler will pre-populate the application and path information, but allow you to change the settings before beginning the profile run. So really, the main difference is that Profile Performance immediately begins profiling with the default selections, where Launch ANTS Performance Profiler allows you to change the defaults and attach to an already-running application. Let’s Fire it Up! So when you fire up ANTS either via Start Menu or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler menu in Visual Studio, you are presented with a very simple dialog to get you started: Notice you can choose from many different options for application type. You can profile executables, services, web applications, or just attach to a running process. In fact, in version 7.4 we see two new options added: ASP.NET Web Application (IIS Express) SharePoint web application (IIS) So this gives us an additional way to profile ASP.NET applications and the ability to profile SharePoint applications as well. You can also choose your level of detail in the Profiling Mode drop down. If you choose Line-Level and method-level timings detail, you will get a lot more detail on the method durations, but this will also slow down profiling somewhat. If you really need the profiler to be as unintrusive as possible, you can change it to Sample method-level timings. This is performing very light profiling, where basically the profiler collects timings of a method by examining the call-stack at given intervals. Which method you choose depends a lot on how much detail you need to find the issue and how sensitive your program issues are to timing. So for our example, let’s just go with the line and method timing detail. So, we check that all the options are correct (if you launch from VS2010, the executable and path are filled in already), and fire it up by clicking the [Start Profiling] button. Profiling the Application Once you start profiling the application, you will see a real-time graph of CPU usage that will indicate how much your application is using the CPU(s) on your system. During this time, you can select segments of the graph and bookmark them, giving them mnemonic names. This can be useful if you want to compare performance in one part of the run to another part of the run. Notice that once you select a block, it will give you the call tree breakdown for that selection only, and the relative performance of those calls. Once you feel you have collected enough information, you can click [Stop Profiling] to stop the application run and information collection and begin a more thorough analysis. Analyzing Method Timings So now that we’ve halted the run, we can look around the GUI and see what we can see. By default, the times are shown in terms of percentage of time of the total run of the application, though you can change it in the View menu item to milliseconds, ticks, or seconds as well. This won’t affect the percentages of methods, it only affects what units the times are shown. Notice also that the major hotspot seems to be in a method without source, ANTS Profiler will filter these out by default, but you can right-click on the line and remove the filter to see more detail. This proves especially handy when a bottleneck is due to a method in the BCL. So now that we’ve removed the filter, we see a bit more detail: In addition, ANTS Performance Profiler gives you the ability to decompile the methods without source so that you can dive even deeper, though typically this isn’t necessary for our purposes. When looking at timings, there are generally two types of timings for each method call: Time: This is the time spent ONLY in this method, not including calls this method makes to other methods. Time With Children: This is the total of time spent in both this method AND including calls this method makes to other methods. In other words, the Time tells you how much work is being done exclusively in this method, and the Time With Children tells you how much work is being done inclusively in this method and everything it calls. You can also choose to display the methods in a tree or in a grid. The tree view is the default and it shows the method calls arranged in terms of the tree representing all method calls and the parent method that called them, etc. This is useful for when you find a hot-spot method, you can see who is calling it to determine if the problem is the method itself, or if it is being called too many times. The grid method represents each method only once with its totals and is useful for quickly seeing what method is the trouble spot. In addition, you can choose to display Methods with source which are generally the methods you wrote (as opposed to native or BCL code), or Any Method which shows not only your methods, but also native calls, JIT overhead, synchronization waits, etc. So these are just two ways of viewing the same data, and you’re free to choose the organization that best suits what information you are after. Analyzing Method Source If we look at the timings above, we see that our AddToList() method (and in particular, it’s call to the List<T>.Sort() method in the BCL) is the hot-spot in this analysis. If ANTS sees a method that is consuming the most time, it will flag it as a hot-spot to help call out potential areas of concern. This doesn’t mean the other statistics aren’t meaningful, but that the hot-spot is most likely going to be your biggest bang-for-the-buck to concentrate on. So let’s select the AddToList() method, and see what it shows in the source window below: Notice the source breakout in the bottom pane when you select a method (from either tree or grid view). This shows you the timings in this method per line of code. This gives you a major indicator of where the trouble-spot in this method is. So in this case, we see that performing a Sort() on the List<T> after every Add() is killing our performance! Of course, this was a very contrived, duh moment, but you’d be surprised how many performance issues become duh moments. Note that this one line is taking up 86% of the execution time of this application! If we eliminate this bottleneck, we should see drastic improvement in the performance. So to fix this, if we still wanted to maintain the List<T> we’d have many options, including: delay Sort() until after all Add() methods, using a SortedSet, SortedList, or SortedDictionary depending on which is most appropriate, or forgoing the sorting all together and using a Dictionary. Rinse, Repeat! So let’s just change all instances of List<string> to SortedSet<string> and run this again through the profiler: Now we see the AddToList() method is no longer our hot-spot, but now the Max() and Min() calls are! This is good because we’ve eliminated one hot-spot and now we can try to correct this one as well. As before, we can then optimize this part of the code (possibly by taking advantage of the fact the list is now sorted and returning the first and last elements). We can then rinse and repeat this process until we have eliminated as many bottlenecks as possible. Calls by Web Request Another feature that was added recently is the ability to view .NET methods grouped by the HTTP requests that caused them to run. This can be helpful in determining which pages, web services, etc. are causing hot spots in your web applications. Summary If you like the other ANTS tools, you’ll like the ANTS Performance Profiler as well. It is extremely easy to use with very little product knowledge required to get up and running. There are profilers built into the higher product lines of Visual Studio, of course, which are also powerful and easy to use. But for quickly jumping in and finding hot spots rapidly, Red Gate’s Performance Profiler 7.4 is an excellent choice. Technorati Tags: Influencers,ANTS,Performance Profiler,Profiler

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• Java: micro-optimizing array manipulation

  - by Martin Wiboe

  Hello all, I am trying to make a Java port of a simple feed-forward neural network. This obviously involves lots of numeric calculations, so I am trying to optimize my central loop as much as possible. The results should be correct within the limits of the float data type. My current code looks as follows (error handling & initialization removed): /** * Simple implementation of a feedforward neural network. The network supports * including a bias neuron with a constant output of 1.0 and weighted synapses * to hidden and output layers. * * @author Martin Wiboe */ public class FeedForwardNetwork { private final int outputNeurons; // No of neurons in output layer private final int inputNeurons; // No of neurons in input layer private int largestLayerNeurons; // No of neurons in largest layer private final int numberLayers; // No of layers private final int[] neuronCounts; // Neuron count in each layer, 0 is input // layer. private final float[][][] fWeights; // Weights between neurons. // fWeight[fromLayer][fromNeuron][toNeuron] // is the weight from fromNeuron in // fromLayer to toNeuron in layer // fromLayer+1. private float[][] neuronOutput; // Temporary storage of output from previous layer public float[] compute(float[] input) { // Copy input values to input layer output for (int i = 0; i < inputNeurons; i++) { neuronOutput[0][i] = input[i]; } // Loop through layers for (int layer = 1; layer < numberLayers; layer++) { // Loop over neurons in the layer and determine weighted input sum for (int neuron = 0; neuron < neuronCounts[layer]; neuron++) { // Bias neuron is the last neuron in the previous layer int biasNeuron = neuronCounts[layer - 1]; // Get weighted input from bias neuron - output is always 1.0 float activation = 1.0F * fWeights[layer - 1][biasNeuron][neuron]; // Get weighted inputs from rest of neurons in previous layer for (int inputNeuron = 0; inputNeuron < biasNeuron; inputNeuron++) { activation += neuronOutput[layer-1][inputNeuron] * fWeights[layer - 1][inputNeuron][neuron]; } // Store neuron output for next round of computation neuronOutput[layer][neuron] = sigmoid(activation); } } // Return output from network = output from last layer float[] result = new float[outputNeurons]; for (int i = 0; i < outputNeurons; i++) result[i] = neuronOutput[numberLayers - 1][i]; return result; } private final static float sigmoid(final float input) { return (float) (1.0F / (1.0F + Math.exp(-1.0F * input))); } } I am running the JVM with the -server option, and as of now my code is between 25% and 50% slower than similar C code. What can I do to improve this situation? Thank you, Martin Wiboe

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, December 09, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, December 09, 2010Popular ReleasesAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.4.3: AutoLoL now supports importing the build pages from Mobafire.com as well! Just insert the url to the build and voila. (For example: http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/unforgivens-guide-how-to-build-a-successful-mordekaiser-24061) Stable release of AutoChat (It is still recommended to use with caution and to read the documentation) It is now possible to associate *.lolm files with AutoLoL to quickly open them The selected spells are now displayed in the masteries tab for qu...SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.2: - Added auto insertion of RLE (RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING) Unicode character for the RTL languages. - Fixed delete rows issue.PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7: This is a final stable release of PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7. This is a minor incremental release that contains all the functionality available in 53121 plus additional features listed below: Improved detection logic for existing PHP installations. Now PHP Manager detects the location to php.ini file in accordance to the PHP specifications Configuring date.timezone. PHP Manager can automatically set the date.timezone directive which is required to be set starting from PHP 5.3 Ability to ...Algorithmia: Algorithmia 1.1: Algorithmia v1.1, released on December 8th, 2010.SuperSocket, an extensible socket application framework: SuperSocket 1.0 SP1: Fixed bugs: fixed a potential bug that the running state hadn't been updated after socket server stopped fixed a synchronization issue when clearing timeout session fixed a bug in ArraySegmentList fixed a bug on getting configuration valueCslaGenFork: CslaGenFork 4.0 CTP 2: The version is 4.0.1 CTP2 and was released 2010 December 7 and includes the following files: CslaGenFork 4.0.1-2010-12-07 Setup.msi Templates-2010-10-07.zip For getting started instructions, refer to How to section. Overview of the changes Since CTP1 there were 53 work items closed (28 features, 24 issues and 1 task). During this 60 days a lot of work has been done on several areas. First the stereotypes: EditableRoot is OK EditableChild is OK EditableRootCollection is OK Editable...Windows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: WF AppFabric Caching Activity Pack 0.1: This release includes a set of AppFabric Caching Activities that allow you to use Windows Server AppFabric Caching with WF4. Video endpoint.tv - New WF4 Caching Activities for Windows Server AppFabric ActivitiesDataCacheAdd DataCacheGet DataCachePut DataCacheGet DataCacheRemove WaitForCacheBulkNotification WaitForCacheNotification WaitForFailureNotification WaitForItemNotification WaitForRegionNotification Unit TestsUnit tests are included in the source. Be sure to star...My Web Pages Starter Kit: 1.3.1 Production Release (Security HOTFIX): Due to a critical security issue, it's strongly advised to update the My Web Pages Starter Kit to this version. Possible attackers could misuse the image upload to transmit any type of file to the website. If you already have a running version of My Web Pages Starter Kit 1.3.0, you can just replace the ftb.imagegallery.aspx file in the root directory with the one attached to this release.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.0 ALPHA: 2.2.0 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a. at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Updated En...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: popup WhiteSpaceFilterAttribute tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6nopCommerce. ASP.NET open source shopping cart: nopCommerce 1.90: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 4: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numerous fixes reported by preview users Preview 3 ChangesNumerous fixes and improvements to core engine Twitter API coverage: a...Aura: Aura Preview 1: Rewritten from scratch. This release supports getting color only from icon of foreground window.MBG Extensions Library: MBG.Extensions_v1.3: MBG.Extensions Collections.CollectionExtensions - AddIfNew - RemoveRange (Moved From ListExtensions to here, where it should have been) Collections.EnumerableExtensions - ToCommaSeparatedList has been replaced by: Join() and ToValueSeparatedList Join is for a single line of values. ToValueSeparatedList is generally for collection and will separate each entity in the collection by a new line character - ToQueue - ToStack Core.ByteExtensions - TripleDESDecrypt Core.DateTimeExtension...myCollections: Version 1.2: New in version 1.2: Big performance improvement. New Design (Added Outlook style View, New detail view, New Groub By...) Added Sort by Media Added Manage Movie Studio Zoom preference is now saved. Media name are now editable. Added Portuguese version You can now Hide details panel Add support for FLAC tags You can now imports books from BibTex Xml file BugFixingmytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta: mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta web Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.4, MVC3 RC WARNING For run and debug mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src download and ...Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.3 Beta: - Added keyboard navigation support with access keys - Shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-A are now supported(where the browser permits it) - The PopupMenuSeparator is now completely based on the PopupMenuItem class - Moved item manipulation code to a partial class in PopupMenuItemsControl.cs - Moved menu management and keyboard navigation code to the new PopupMenuManager class - Simplified the layout by removing the RootGrid element(all content is now placed in OverlayCanvas and is accessed by the new ...MiniTwitter: 1.62: MiniTwitter 1.62 ???? ?? ??????????????????????????????????????? 140 ?????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????? ?? ??????????????????????????????????Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (December 2010): The release is targetted for stable daily use. With improved performance and enhanced compatibility with several latest PHP open source applications; it makes this release perfect replacement of your old PHP runtime. Changes made within this release include following and much more: Performance improvements based on real-world applications experience. We determined biggest bottlenecks and we found and removed overheads causing performance problems in many PHP applications. Reimplemented nat...Chronos WPF: Chronos v2.0 Beta 3: Release notes: Updated introduction document. Updated Visual Studio 2010 Extension (vsix) package. Added horizontal scrolling to the main window TaskBar. Added new styles for ListView, ListViewItem, GridViewColumnHeader, ... Added a new WindowViewModel class (allowing to fetch data). Added a new Navigate method (with several overloads) to the NavigationViewModel class (protected). Reimplemented Task usage for the WorkspaceViewModel.OnDelete method. Removed the reflection effect...New Projects:WinK: WinK Project1000 bornes: This project is the adaptation of the famous French card game 1000 bornes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mille_Bornes) There will be 3 types of clients: - Windows Application (WPF) - Internet Application (ASP.NET, Ajax) - Silverlight Application It's developed in C#.AutomaTones: BDSA Project 2010. Team Anders is developing an application that uses automatons to generate music.EIRENE: UnknownFinal: TDD driven analize of avalable tdd frameworks ect.HomeGrown Database Project tools: A set of tools that can be used to deploy Visual Studio SQL Databse and Server Projects. Developed using Visual Basic .Net 4.0mcssolution: no summaryMobile-enabled ASP.NET Web Forms / MVC application samples: Code samples for the whitepaper "Add mobile pages to your ASP.NET Web Forms / MVC application" linked from http://asp.net/mobileMSDI Projects: www.msdi.cnObject TreeView Visualizer: This is a Helper Library for easy Access to Visual a Object to an treeview. Nice feature to display data, if an error happen. One Place To Rule Them All: Desktop system to manage basics system functions in 3d environmant. Optra also provide community support and easy transfer data and setups between varius devices using xmpp protocol and OpenFire jabber server.Performance Data Suite: The Performance Data Suite will help you to monitor, analyze and optimize your server infrastructure. There will be predefined sets of data collections(e.g. MySQL, Apache, IIS) but it will also help you to create collections on your own.Secure Group Communication in AdHoc Networks: Secure Group Communication in AdHoc Networksimweb: simweb - is a research project which own by GCR and all its copyright belong to GCR. You can download the code for reference only but not able to be commercial without a fees.starLiGHT.Engine: starLiGHT.Engine is a set of libraries for indie game developers using XNA. It is in development for some years now as a closed source project. Now I will release some (most) parts as Open Source (dual licensing).UMC? ???? .NET ??? ?? ???? ???: ???(Junil, Um)? ???? .NET ???? ?? ?? ???? ??? ???.University of Ottawa tour for WP7: This is a Windows Phone 7 tour guide app for the University of Ottawa. vutpp for VS2010: C++ UnitTest Gui Addin????: ????

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• Recover Data Like a Forensics Expert Using an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  There are lots of utilities to recover deleted files, but what if you can’t boot up your computer, or the whole drive has been formatted? We’ll show you some tools that will dig deep and recover the most elusive deleted files, or even whole hard drive partitions. We’ve shown you simple ways to recover accidentally deleted files, even a simple method that can be done from an Ubuntu Live CD, but for hard disks that have been heavily corrupted, those methods aren’t going to cut it. In this article, we’ll examine four tools that can recover data from the most messed up hard drives, regardless of whether they were formatted for a Windows, Linux, or Mac computer, or even if the partition table is wiped out entirely. Note: These tools cannot recover data that has been overwritten on a hard disk. Whether a deleted file has been overwritten depends on many factors – the quicker you realize that you want to recover a file, the more likely you will be able to do so. Our setup To show these tools, we’ve set up a small 1 GB hard drive, with half of the space partitioned as ext2, a file system used in Linux, and half the space partitioned as FAT32, a file system used in older Windows systems. We stored ten random pictures on each hard drive. We then wiped the partition table from the hard drive by deleting the partitions in GParted. Is our data lost forever? Installing the tools All of the tools we’re going to use are in Ubuntu’s universe repository. To enable the repository, open Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System in the top-left, then Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Click on Settings > Repositories and add a check in the box labelled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click Close, and then in the main Synaptic Package Manager window, click the Reload button. Once the package list has reloaded, and the search index rebuilt, search for and mark for installation one or all of the following packages: testdisk, foremost, and scalpel. Testdisk includes TestDisk, which can recover lost partitions and repair boot sectors, and PhotoRec, which can recover many different types of files from tons of different file systems. Foremost, originally developed by the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations, recovers files based on their headers and other internal structures. Foremost operates on hard drives or drive image files generated by various tools. Finally, scalpel performs the same functions as foremost, but is focused on enhanced performance and lower memory usage. Scalpel may run better if you have an older machine with less RAM. Recover hard drive partitions If you can’t mount your hard drive, then its partition table might be corrupted. Before you start trying to recover your important files, it may be possible to recover one or more partitions on your drive, recovering all of your files with one step. Testdisk is the tool for the job. Start it by opening a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and typing in: sudo testdisk If you’d like, you can create a log file, though it won’t affect how much data you recover. Once you make your choice, you’re greeted with a list of the storage media on your machine. You should be able to identify the hard drive you want to recover partitions from by its size and label. TestDisk asks you select the type of partition table to search for. In most cases (ext2/3, NTFS, FAT32, etc.) you should select Intel and press Enter. Highlight Analyse and press enter. In our case, our small hard drive has previously been formatted as NTFS. Amazingly, TestDisk finds this partition, though it is unable to recover it. It also finds the two partitions we just deleted. We are able to change their attributes, or add more partitions, but we’ll just recover them by pressing Enter. If TestDisk hasn’t found all of your partitions, you can try doing a deeper search by selecting that option with the left and right arrow keys. We only had these two partitions, so we’ll recover them by selecting Write and pressing Enter. Testdisk informs us that we will have to reboot. Note: If your Ubuntu Live CD is not persistent, then when you reboot you will have to reinstall any tools that you installed earlier. After restarting, both of our partitions are back to their original states, pictures and all. Recover files of certain types For the following examples, we deleted the 10 pictures from both partitions and then reformatted them. PhotoRec Of the three tools we’ll show, PhotoRec is the most user-friendly, despite being a console-based utility. To start recovering files, open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in: sudo photorec To begin, you are asked to select a storage device to search. You should be able to identify the right device by its size and label. Select the right device, and then hit Enter. PhotoRec asks you select the type of partition to search. In most cases (ext2/3, NTFS, FAT, etc.) you should select Intel and press Enter. You are given a list of the partitions on your selected hard drive. If you want to recover all of the files on a partition, then select Search and hit enter. However, this process can be very slow, and in our case we only want to search for pictures files, so instead we use the right arrow key to select File Opt and press Enter. PhotoRec can recover many different types of files, and deselecting each one would take a long time. Instead, we press “s” to clear all of the selections, and then find the appropriate file types – jpg, gif, and png – and select them by pressing the right arrow key. Once we’ve selected these three, we press “b” to save these selections. Press enter to return to the list of hard drive partitions. We want to search both of our partitions, so we highlight “No partition” and “Search” and then press Enter. PhotoRec prompts for a location to store the recovered files. If you have a different healthy hard drive, then we recommend storing the recovered files there. Since we’re not recovering very much, we’ll store it on the Ubuntu Live CD’s desktop. Note: Do not recover files to the hard drive you’re recovering from. PhotoRec is able to recover the 20 pictures from the partitions on our hard drive! A quick look in the recup_dir.1 directory that it creates confirms that PhotoRec has recovered all of our pictures, save for the file names. Foremost Foremost is a command-line program with no interactive interface like PhotoRec, but offers a number of command-line options to get as much data out of your had drive as possible. For a full list of options that can be tweaked via the command line, open up a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in: foremost –h In our case, the command line options that we are going to use are: -t, a comma-separated list of types of files to search for. In our case, this is “jpeg,png,gif”. -v, enabling verbose-mode, giving us more information about what foremost is doing. -o, the output folder to store recovered files in. In our case, we created a directory called “foremost” on the desktop. -i, the input that will be searched for files. This can be a disk image in several different formats; however, we will use a hard disk, /dev/sda. Our foremost invocation is: sudo foremost –t jpeg,png,gif –o foremost –v –i /dev/sda Your invocation will differ depending on what you’re searching for and where you’re searching for it. Foremost is able to recover 17 of the 20 files stored on the hard drive. Looking at the files, we can confirm that these files were recovered relatively well, though we can see some errors in the thumbnail for 00622449.jpg. Part of this may be due to the ext2 filesystem. Foremost recommends using the –d command-line option for Linux file systems like ext2. We’ll run foremost again, adding the –d command-line option to our foremost invocation: sudo foremost –t jpeg,png,gif –d –o foremost –v –i /dev/sda This time, foremost is able to recover all 20 images! A final look at the pictures reveals that the pictures were recovered with no problems. Scalpel Scalpel is another powerful program that, like Foremost, is heavily configurable. Unlike Foremost, Scalpel requires you to edit a configuration file before attempting any data recovery. Any text editor will do, but we’ll use gedit to change the configuration file. In a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), type in: sudo gedit /etc/scalpel/scalpel.conf scalpel.conf contains information about a number of different file types. Scroll through this file and uncomment lines that start with a file type that you want to recover (i.e. remove the “#” character at the start of those lines). Save the file and close it. Return to the terminal window. Scalpel also has a ton of command-line options that can help you search quickly and effectively; however, we’ll just define the input device (/dev/sda) and the output folder (a folder called “scalpel” that we created on the desktop). Our invocation is: sudo scalpel /dev/sda –o scalpel Scalpel is able to recover 18 of our 20 files. A quick look at the files scalpel recovered reveals that most of our files were recovered successfully, though there were some problems (e.g. 00000012.jpg). Conclusion In our quick toy example, TestDisk was able to recover two deleted partitions, and PhotoRec and Foremost were able to recover all 20 deleted images. Scalpel recovered most of the files, but it’s very likely that playing with the command-line options for scalpel would have enabled us to recover all 20 images. These tools are lifesavers when something goes wrong with your hard drive. If your data is on the hard drive somewhere, then one of these tools will track it down! 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