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• SharePoint: Numeric/Integer Site Column (Field) Types

  - by CharlesLee

  What field type should you use when creating number based site columns as part of a SharePoint feature? Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides you with an extensible and flexible method of developing and deploying Site Columns and Content Types (both of which are required for most SharePoint projects requiring list or library based data storage) via the feature framework (more on this in my next full article.) However there is an interesting behaviour when working with a column or field which is required to hold a number, which I thought I would blog about today. When creating Site Columns in the browser you get a nice rich UI in order to choose the properties of this field: However when you are recreating this as a feature defined in CAML (Collaborative Application Mark-up Language), which is a type of XML (more on this in my article) then you do not get such a rich experience.  You would need to add something like this to the element manifest defined in your feature: <Field SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/3.0"        ID="{C272E927-3748-48db-8FC0-6C7B72A6D220}"        Group="My Site Columns"        Name="MyNumber"        DisplayName="My Number"        Type="Numeric"        Commas="FALSE"        Decimals="0"        Required="FALSE"        ReadOnly="FALSE"        Sealed="FALSE"        Hidden="FALSE" /> OK, its not as nice as the browser UI but I can deal with this. Hang on. Commas="FALSE" and yet for my number 1234 I get 1,234.  That is not what I wanted or expected.  What gives? The answer lies in the difference between a type of "Numeric" which is an implementation of the SPFieldNumber class and "Integer" which does not correspond to a given SPField class but rather represents a positive or negative integer.  The numeric type does not respect the settings of Commas or NegativeFormat (which defines how to display negative numbers.)  So we can set the Type to Integer and we are good to go.  Yes? Sadly no! You will notice at this point that if you deploy your site column into SharePoint something has gone wrong.  Your site column is not listed in the Site Column Gallery.  The deployment must have failed then?  But no, a quick look at the site columns via the API reveals that the column is there.  What new evil is this?  Unfortunately the base type for integer fields has this lovely attribute set on it: UserCreatable = FALSE So WSS 3.0 accordingly hides your field in the gallery as you cannot create fields of this type. However! You can use them in content types just like any other field (except not in the browser UI), and if you add them to the content type as part of your feature then they will show up in the UI as a field on that content type.  Most of the time you are not going to be too concerned that your site columns are not listed in the gallery as you will know that they are there and that they are still useable. So not as bad as you thought after all.  Just a little quirky.  But that is SharePoint for you.

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• Backup SQL Database Federation

  - by Herve Roggero

  One of the amazing features of Windows Azure SQL Database is the ability to create federations in order to scale your cloud databases. However until now, there were very few options available to backup federated databases. In this post I will show you how Enzo Cloud Backup can help you backup, and restore your federated database easily. You can restore federated databases in SQL Database, or even on SQL Server (as regular databases). Generally speaking, you will need to perform the following steps to backup and restore the federations of a SQL Database: Backup the federation root Backup the federation members Restore the federation root Restore the federation members These actions can be automated using: the built-in scheduler of Enzo Cloud Backup, the command-line utilities, or the .NET Cloud Backup API provided, giving you complete control on how you want to perform your backup and restore operations. Backing up federations Let’s look at the tool to backup federations. You can explore your existing federations by using the Enzo Cloud Backup application as shown below. As you can see, the federation root and the various federations available are shown in separate tabs for convenience. You would first need to backup the federation root (unless you intend to restore the federation member on a local SQL Server database and you don’t need what’s in the federation root). The steps are similar than those to backup a federation member, so let’s proceed to backing up a federation member. You can click on a specific federation member to view the database details by clicking at the tab that contains your federation member. You can see the size currently consumed and a summary of its content at the bottom of the screen. If you right-click on a specific range, you can choose to backup the federation member. This brings up a window with the details of the federation member already filled out for you, including the value of the member that is used to select the federation member. Notice that the list of Federations includes “Federation Root”, which is what you need to select to backup the federation root (you can also do that directly from the root database tab).  Once you provide at least one backup destination, you can begin the backup operation.  From this window, you can also schedule this operation as a job and perform this operation entirely in the cloud. You can also “filter” the connection, so that only the specific member value is backed up (this will backup all the global tables, and only the records for which the distribution value is the one specified). You can repeat this operation for every federation member in your federation. Restoring Federations Once backed up, you can restore your federations easily. Select the backup device using the tool, then select Restore. The following window will appear. From here you can create a new root database. You can also view the backup properties, showing you exactly which federations will be created. Under the Federations tab, you can select how the federations will be created. I chose to recreate the federations and let the tool perform all the SPLIT operations necessary to recreate the same number of federation members. Other options include to create the first federation member only, or not to create the federation members at all. Once the root database has been restored and the federation members have been created, you can restore the federation members you previously backed up. The screen below shows you how to restore a backup of a federation member into a specific federation member (the details of the federation member are provided to make it easier to identify). Conclusion This post gave you an overview on how to backup and restore federation roots and federation members. The backup operations can be setup once, then scheduled daily.

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• Oracle MAA Part 1: When One Size Does Not Fit All

  - by JoeMeeks

  The good news is that Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) best practices combined with Oracle Database 12c (see video) introduce first-in-the-industry database capabilities that truly make unplanned outages and planned maintenance transparent to users. The trouble with such good news is that Oracle’s enthusiasm in evangelizing its latest innovations may leave some to wonder if we’ve lost sight of the fact that not all database applications are created equal. Afterall, many databases don’t have the business requirements for high availability and data protection that require all of Oracle’s ‘stuff’. For many real world applications, a controlled amount of downtime and/or data loss is OK if it saves money and effort. Well, not to worry. Oracle knows that enterprises need solutions that address the full continuum of requirements for data protection and availability. Oracle MAA accomplishes this by defining four HA service level tiers: BRONZE, SILVER, GOLD and PLATINUM. The figure below shows the progression in service levels provided by each tier. Each tier uses a different MAA reference architecture to deploy the optimal set of Oracle HA capabilities that reliably achieve a given service level (SLA) at the lowest cost.  Each tier includes all of the capabilities of the previous tier and builds upon the architecture to handle an expanded fault domain. Bronze is appropriate for databases where simple restart or restore from backup is ‘HA enough’. Bronze is based upon a single instance Oracle Database with MAA best practices that use the many capabilities for data protection and HA included with every Oracle Enterprise Edition license. Oracle-optimized backups using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) provide data protection and are used to restore availability should an outage prevent the database from being able to restart. Silver provides an additional level of HA for databases that require minimal or zero downtime in the event of database instance or server failure as well as many types of planned maintenance. Silver adds clustering technology - either Oracle RAC or RAC One Node. RMAN provides database-optimized backups to protect data and restore availability should an outage prevent the cluster from being able to restart. Gold raises the game substantially for business critical applications that can’t accept vulnerability to single points-of-failure. Gold adds database-aware replication technologies, Active Data Guard and Oracle GoldenGate, which synchronize one or more replicas of the production database to provide real time data protection and availability. Database-aware replication greatly increases HA and data protection beyond what is possible with storage replication technologies. It also reduces cost while improving return on investment by actively utilizing all replicas at all times. Platinum introduces all of the sexy new Oracle Database 12c capabilities that Oracle staff will gush over with great enthusiasm. These capabilities include Application Continuity for reliable replay of in-flight transactions that masks outages from users; Active Data Guard Far Sync for zero data loss protection at any distance; new Oracle GoldenGate enhancements for zero downtime upgrades and migrations; and Global Data Services for automated service management and workload balancing in replicated database environments. Each of these technologies requires additional effort to implement. But they deliver substantial value for your most critical applications where downtime and data loss are not an option. The MAA reference architectures are inherently designed to address conflicting realities. On one hand, not every application has the same objectives for availability and data protection – the Not One Size Fits All title of this blog post. On the other hand, standard infrastructure is an operational requirement and a business necessity in order to reduce complexity and cost. MAA reference architectures address both realities by providing a standard infrastructure optimized for Oracle Database that enables you to dial-in the level of HA appropriate for different service level requirements. This makes it simple to move a database from one HA tier to the next should business requirements change, or from one hardware platform to another – whether it’s your favorite non-Oracle vendor or an Oracle Engineered System. Please stay tuned for additional blog posts in this series that dive into the details of each MAA reference architecture. Meanwhile, more information on Oracle HA solutions and the Maximum Availability Architecture can be found at: Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture - Webcast Maximize Availability with Oracle Database 12c - Technical White Paper

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• Asynchrony in C# 5 (Part I)

  - by javarg

  I’ve been playing around with the new Async CTP preview available for download from Microsoft. It’s amazing how language trends are influencing the evolution of Microsoft’s developing platform. Much effort is being done at language level today than previous versions of .NET. In these post series I’ll review some major features contained in this release: Asynchronous functions TPL Dataflow Task based asynchronous Pattern Part I: Asynchronous Functions This is a mean of expressing asynchronous operations. This kind of functions must return void or Task/Task<> (functions returning void let us implement Fire & Forget asynchronous operations). The two new keywords introduced are async and await. async: marks a function as asynchronous, indicating that some part of its execution may take place some time later (after the method call has returned). Thus, all async functions must include some kind of asynchronous operations. This keyword on its own does not make a function asynchronous thought, its nature depends on its implementation. await: allows us to define operations inside a function that will be awaited for continuation (more on this later). Async function sample: Async/Await Sample async void ShowDateTimeAsync() {     while (true)     {         var client = new ServiceReference1.Service1Client();         var dt = await client.GetDateTimeTaskAsync();         Console.WriteLine("Current DateTime is: {0}", dt);         await TaskEx.Delay(1000);     } } The previous sample is a typical usage scenario for these new features. Suppose we query some external Web Service to get data (in this case the current DateTime) and we do so at regular intervals in order to refresh user’s UI. Note the async and await functions working together. The ShowDateTimeAsync method indicate its asynchronous nature to the caller using the keyword async (that it may complete after returning control to its caller). The await keyword indicates the flow control of the method will continue executing asynchronously after client.GetDateTimeTaskAsync returns. The latter is the most important thing to understand about the behavior of this method and how this actually works. The flow control of the method will be reconstructed after any asynchronous operation completes (specified with the keyword await). This reconstruction of flow control is the real magic behind the scene and it is done by C#/VB compilers. Note how we didn’t use any of the regular existing async patterns and we’ve defined the method very much like a synchronous one. Now, compare the following code snippet  in contrast to the previuous async/await: Traditional UI Async void ComplicatedShowDateTime() {     var client = new ServiceReference1.Service1Client();     client.GetDateTimeCompleted += (s, e) =>     {         Console.WriteLine("Current DateTime is: {0}", e.Result);         client.GetDateTimeAsync();     };     client.GetDateTimeAsync(); } The previous implementation is somehow similar to the first shown, but more complicated. Note how the while loop is implemented as a chained callback to the same method (client.GetDateTimeAsync) inside the event handler (please, do not do this in your own application, this is just an example).  How it works? Using an state workflow (or jump table actually), the compiler expands our code and create the necessary steps to execute it, resuming pending operations after any asynchronous one. The intention of the new Async/Await pattern is to let us think and code as we normally do when designing and algorithm. It also allows us to preserve the logical flow control of the program (without using any tricky coding patterns to accomplish this). The compiler will then create the necessary workflow to execute operations as the happen in time.

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• Tuple - .NET 4.0 new feature

  - by nmarun

  Something I hit while playing with .net 4.0 – Tuple. MSDN says ‘Provides static methods for creating tuple objects.’ and the example below is: 1: var primes = Tuple.Create(2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19); Honestly, I’m still not sure with what intention MS provided us with this feature, but the moment I saw this, I said to myself – I could use it instead of anonymous types. In order to put this to test, I created an XML file: 1: <Activities> 2: <Activity id="1" name="Learn Tuples" eventDate="4/1/2010" /> 3: <Activity id="2" name="Finish Project" eventDate="4/29/2010" /> 4: <Activity id="3" name="Attend Birthday" eventDate="4/17/2010" /> 5: <Activity id="4" name="Pay bills" eventDate="4/12/2010" /> 6: </Activities> In my console application, I read this file and let’s say I want to pull all the attributes of the node with id value of 1. Now, I have two ways – either define a class/struct that has these three properties and use in the LINQ query or create an anonymous type on the fly. But if we go the .NET 4.0 way, we can do this using Tuples as well. Let’s see the code I’ve written below: 1: var myActivity = (from activity in loaded.Descendants("Activity") 2:       where (int)activity.Attribute("id") == 1 3:       select Tuple.Create( 4: int.Parse(activity.Attribute("id").Value), 5: activity.Attribute("name").Value, 6: DateTime.Parse(activity.Attribute("eventDate").Value))).FirstOrDefault(); Line 3 is where I’m using a Tuple.Create to define my return type. There are three ‘items’ (that’s what the elements are called) in ‘myActivity’ type.. aptly declared as Item1, Item2, Item3. So there you go, you have another way of creating anonymous types. Just out of curiosity, wanted to see what the type actually looked like. So I did a: 1: Console.WriteLine(myActivity.GetType().FullName); and the return was (formatted for better readability): "System.Tuple`3[                            [System.Int32, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089],                            [System.String, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089],                            [System.DateTime, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089]                           ]" The `3 specifies the number of items in the tuple. The other interesting thing about the tuple is that it knows the data type of the elements it’s holding. This is shown in the above snippet and also when you hover over myActivity.Item1, it shows the type as an int, Item2 as string and Item3 as DateTime. So you can safely do: 1: int id = myActivity.Item1; 2: string name = myActivity.Item2; 3: DateTime eventDate = myActivity.Item3; Wow.. all I can say is: HAIL 4.0.. HAIL 4.0.. HAIL 4.0

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• Unable to Sign in to the Microsoft Online Services Signin application from Windows 7 client located behind ISA firewall

  - by Ravindra Pamidi

  A while ago i helped a customer troubleshoot authentication problem with Microsoft Online Services Signin application.  This customer was evaluating Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) and was having trouble using the single sign on application behind ISA 2004 firewall.The network structure is fairly simple with single Windows 2003 Active Directory domain and Windows 7 clients. On a successful logon to the Microsoft Online Services Signin application, this application provides single signon functionality to all of Microsoft online services in the BPOS package. Symptoms:When trying to signin it fails with error "The service is currently unavailable. Please try again later. If problems continue, contact your service administrator". If ISA 2004 firewall is removed from the picture the authentication succeeds.Troubleshooting: Enabled ISA Server firewall logging along with Microsoft Network Monitor tool on the Windows 7 Client while reproducing the issue. Analysis of the ISA Server Firewall logs and Microsoft Network capture revealed that the Microsoft Online Services Sign In application when sending request to ISA Server does not send the domain credentials and as a result ISA Server responds with an error code of HTTP 407 Proxy authentication required listing out the supported authentication mechanisms.  The application in question is expected to send the credentials of the domain user in response to this request. However in this case, it fails to send the logged on user's domain credentials. Bit of researching on the Internet revealed that The "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application by default does not support Outbound Internet Proxy authentication. In order for it to send the logged on user's domain credentials we had to make  changes to its configuration file "SignIn.exe.config" located under "Program Files\Microsoft Online Services\Sign In" folder. Step by Step details to configure the configuration file are documented on Microsoft TechNet website given below.  Configure your outbound authenticating proxy serverhttp://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/helphowto/cc54100d-d149-45a9-8e96-f248ecb1b596.htm After the above problem was addressed we were still not able to use the "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application and it failed with the same error.  Analysis of another network capture revealed that the application in question is now sending the required credentials and the connection seems to terminate at a later stage. Enabled verbose logging for the "Microsoft Online Services Sign In" application and then reproduced the problem. Analysis of the logs revealed a time difference between the local client and Microsoft Online services server of around seven minutes which is above the acceptable time skew of five minutes. Excerpt from Microsoft Online Services Sign In application verbose log:  1/26/2012 1:57:51 PM Verbose SingleSignOn.GetSSOGenericInterface SSO Interface URL: https://signinservice.apac.microsoftonline.com/ssoservice/UID1/26/2012 1:57:52 PM Exception SSOSignIn.SignIn The security timestamp is invalid because its creation time ('2012-01-26T08:34:52.767Z') is in the future. Current time is '2012-01-26T08:27:52.987Z' and allowed clock skew is '00:05:00'.1/26/2012 1:57:52 PM Exception SSOSignIn.SignIn  Although the Windows 7 Clients successfully synchronized time to the domain controller for the domain, the domain controller was not configured to synchronize time with external NTP servers. This caused a gradual drift in time on the network thus resulting in the above issue. Reconfigured the domain controller holding the PDC FSMO role to synchronize time with external time source ( time.nist.gov ) and edited the system policy on the ISA server firewall to allow NTP traffic to time.nist.gov Configure the time source for the forest:Windows Time Servicehttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794937(WS.10).aspx Forced synchronization of Windows time using the command w32tm /resync on the domain controller and later on the clients each of which had corrected the seven minutes difference. This resolved the problem with logon to Microsoft Online Services Sign In.

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• Fresh Ubuntu Install - Grub not loading

  - by Ryan Sharp

  System Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit Windows 7 SP1 Samsung 64GB SSD - OS' Samsung 1TB HDD - Games, /Home, Swap WD 300'ishGB HDD - Backup Okay, so I'm very frustrated, so please excuse me if I miss anything out as my head is clouded by anger and impatience, etc. I'll try me best, though. First of all, I'll explain how I got to my predicament. I finally got my new SSD. I firstly installed Windows, which completed without a hitch. Afterwards, I tried to install Ubuntu, which failed several times due to problems irrelevant to this question, but I mention this to explain my frustrations, sorry. Anyway, I finally installed Ubuntu. However, I chose the 'bootloader' to be installed on the same partition as where I was installing the Ubuntu Root partition, as that was what I believed to be the best choice. It was of my thinking that it was supposed to go on the same partition and on the SSD, which is my OS drive, though with my problem, it apparently was wrong. So I tried to fix it by checking guides and following their directions, but seemed to have messed it up even more. Here is what I receive after I use the fdisk -l command: (I also added explanations for which I used each partition for) Disk /dev/sda: 64.0 GB, 64023257088 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7783 cylinders, total 125045424 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x324971d1 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 208896 48957439 24374272 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 48959486 125044735 38042625 5 Extended /dev/sda5 48959488 125044735 38042624 83 Linux sda1 --/ Windows Recovery sda2 --/ Windows 7 sda3/5 --/ Ubuntu root [ / ] Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xc0ee6a69 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1024208894 1953523711 464657409 5 Extended /dev/sdb3 * 2048 1024206847 512102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sdb5 1024208896 1939851263 457821184 83 Linux /dev/sdb6 1939853312 1953523711 6835200 82 Linux swap / Solaris sdb3 --/ Partition for Steam games, etc. sdb5 --/ Ubuntu Home [ /home ] sdb6 --/ Ubuntu Swap Partition table entries are not in disk order Disk /dev/sdc: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x292eee23 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 2048 625141759 312569856 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT sdc1 --/ Generic backup I also used a Boot Script that other users suggested, so that I can give more details on my partitions and also where Grub is located... ============================= Boot Info Summary: =============================== => Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos5)/boot/grub on this drive. => Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos5)/boot/grub on this drive. => Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdc. Now that is weird... Why would Grub2 be installed on both my SSD and HDD? Even weirder is why is Windows on the MBR of my backup hard drive? Nothing I did should have done that... Anyway, here is the entire Output from that script... PASTEBIN So, to summarize what I need: How can I fix my setup so grub loads on startup? How can I clean my partitions to remove unnecessary grubs? What did I do wrong so that I don't do something so daft again? Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you can help me. I've been trying to have a successful setup since Friday, and I'm almost at the point that I'm really tempted to throw my computer out the window due to my frustration.

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• PASS Summit 2012: keynote and Mobile BI announcements #sqlpass

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Today at PASS Summit 2012 there have been several announcements during the keynote. Moreover, other news have not been highlighted in the keynote but are equally if not more important for the BI community. Let’s start from the big news in the keynote (other details on SQL Server Blog): Hekaton: this is the codename for in-memory OLTP technology that will appear (I suppose) in the next release of the SQL Server relational engine. The improvement in performance and scalability is impressive and it enables new scenarios. I’m curious to see whether it can be used also to improve ETL performance and how it differs from using SSD technology. Updates on Columnstore: In the next major release of SQL Server the columnstore indexes will be updatable and it will be possible to create a clustered index with Columnstore index. This is really a great news for near real-time reporting needs! Polybase: in 2013 it will debut SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), which will include the Polybase technology. By using Polybase a single T-SQL query will run queries across relational data and Hadoop data. A single query language for both. Sounds really interesting for using BigData in a more integrated way with existing relational databases. And, of course, to load a data warehouse using BigData, which is the ultimate goal that we all BI Pro have, right? SQL Server 2012 SP1: the Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2012 is available now and it enable the use of PowerPivot for SharePoint and Power View on a SharePoint 2013 installation with Excel 2013. Power View works with Multidimensional cube: the long-awaited feature of being able to use PowerPivot with Multidimensional cubes has been shown by Amir Netz in an amazing demonstration during the keynote. The interesting thing is that the data model behind was based on a many-to-many relationship (something that is not fully supported by Power View with Tabular models). Another interesting aspect is that it is Analysis Services 2012 that supports DAX queries run on a Multidimensional model, enabling the use of any future tool generating DAX queries on top of a Multidimensional model. There are still no info about availability by now, but this is *not* included in SQL Server 2012 SP1. So what about Mobile BI? Well, even if not announced during the keynote, there is a dedicated session on this topic and there are very important news in this area: iOS, Android and Microsoft mobile platforms: the commitment is to get data exploration and visualization capabilities working within June 2013. This should impact at least Power View and SharePoint/Excel Services. This is the type of UI experience we are all waiting for, in order to satisfy the requests coming from users and customers. The important news here is that native applications will be available for both iOS and Windows 8 so it seems that Android will be supported initially only through the web. Unfortunately we haven’t seen any demo, so it’s not clear what will be the offline navigation experience (and whether there will be one). But at least we know that Microsoft is working on native applications in this area. I’m not too surprised that HTML5 is not the magic bullet for all the platforms. The next PASS Business Analytics conference in 2013 seems a good place to see this in action, even if I hope we don’t have to wait other six months before seeing some demo of native BI applications on mobile platforms! Viewing Reporting Services reports on iPad is supported starting with SQL Server 2012 SP1, which has been released today. This is another good reason to install SP1 on SQL Server 2012. If you are at PASS Summit 2012, come and join me, Alberto Ferrari and Chris Webb at our book signing event tomorrow, Thursday 8 2012, at the bookstore between 12:00pm and 12:30pm, or follow one of our sessions!

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• Why do I need two Instances in Windows Azure?

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) means that there are various components you can use in it to solve a problem: Compute “Roles” - Computers running an OS and optionally IIS - you can have more than one "Instance" of a given Role Storage - Blobs, Tables and Queues for Storage Other Services - Things like the Service Bus, Azure Connection Services, SQL Azure and Caching It’s important to understand that some of these services are Stateless and others maintain State. Stateless means (at least in this case) that a system might disappear from one physical location and appear elsewhere. You can think of this as a cashier at the front of a store. If you’re in line, a cashier might take his break, and another person might replace him. As long as the order proceeds, you as the customer aren’t really affected except for the few seconds it takes to change them out. The cashier function in this example is stateless. The Compute Role Instances in Windows Azure are Stateless. To upgrade hardware, because of a fault or many other reasons, a Compute Role's Instance might stop on one physical server, and another will pick it up. This is done through the controlling fabric that Windows Azure uses to manage the systems. It’s important to note that storage in Azure does maintain State. Your data will not simply disappear - it is maintained - in fact, it’s maintained three times in a single datacenter and all those copies are replicated to another for safety. Going back to our example, storage is similar to the cash register itself. Even though a cashier leaves, the record of your payment is maintained. So if a Compute Role Instance can disappear and re-appear, the things running on that first Instance would stop working. If you wrote your code in a Stateless way, then another Role Instance simply re-starts that transaction and keeps working, just like the other cashier in the example. But if you only have one Instance of a Role, then when the Role Instance is re-started, or when you need to upgrade your own code, you can face downtime, since there’s only one. That means you should deploy at least two of each Role Instance not only for scale to handle load, but so that the first “cashier” has someone to replace them when they disappear. It’s not just a good idea - to gain the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for our uptime in Azure it’s a requirement. We point this out right in the Management Portal when you deploy the application: (Click to enlarge) When you deploy a Role Instance you can also set the “Upgrade Domain”. Placing Roles on separate Upgrade Domains means that you have a continuous service whenever you upgrade (more on upgrades in another post) - the process looks like this for two Roles. This example covers the scenario for upgrade, so you have four roles total - One Web and one Worker running the "older" code, and one of each running the new code. In all those Roles you want at least two instances, and this example shows that you're covered for High Availability and upgrade paths: The take-away is this - always plan for forward-facing Roles to have at least two copies. For Worker Roles that do background processing, there are ways to architect around this number, but it does affect the SLA if you have only one.

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• Development Quirk From ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation

  - by jkauffman

  The Problem I got a compilation error in my ASP.NET MVC3 project that tested my sanity today. (As always, names are changed to protect the innocent) The type or namespace name 'FishViewModel' does not exist in the namespace 'Company.Product.Application.Models' (are you missing an assembly reference?) Sure looks easy! There must be something in the project referring to a FishViewModel. The Confusing Part The first thing I noticed was the that error was occuring in a folder clearly not in my project and in files that I definitely had not created: %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\(versionNumber)\Temporary ASP.NET Files\ App_Web_mezpfjae.1.cs I also ascertained these facts, each of which made me more confused than the last: Rebuild and Clean had no effect. No controllers in the project ever returned a ViewResult using FishViewModel. No views in the project defined that they use FishViewModel. Searching across all files included in the project for “FishViewModel” provided no results. The build server did not report a problem. The Solution The problem stemmed from a file that was not included in the project but still present on the file system: (By the way, if you don’t know this trick already, there is a toolbar button in the Solution Explorer window to “Show All Files” which allows you to see files all files in the file system) In my situation, I was working on the mission-critical Fish view before abandoning the feature. Instead of deleting the file, I excluded it from the project. However, this was a bad move. It caused the build failure, and in order to fix the error, this file must be deleted. By the way, this file was not in source control, so the build server did not have it. This explains why my build server did not report a problem for me. The Explanation So, what’s going on? This file isn’t even a part of the project, so why is it failing the build? This is a behavior of the ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation. This is the same process that occurs when deploying a webpage; ASP.NET compiles the web application’s code. When this occurs on a production server, it has to do so without the .csproj file (which isn’t usually deployed, if you’ve taken your time to do a deployment cleanly). This process has merely the file system available to identify what to compile. So, back in the world of developing the webpage in visual studio on my developer box, I run into the situation because the same process is occuring there. This is true even though I have more files on my machine than will actually get deployed. I can’t help but think that this error could be attributed back to the real culprit file (Fish.cshtml, rather than the temporary files) with some work, but at least the error had enough information in it to narrow it down. The Conclusion I had previously been accustomed to the idea that for c# projects, the .csproj file always “defines” the build behavior. This investigation has taught me that I’ll need to shift my thinking a bit to remember that the file system has the final say when it comes to web applications, even on the developer’s machine!

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• Reducing Deadlocks - not a DBA issue ?

  - by steveh99999

   As a DBA, I'm involved on an almost daily basis troubleshooting 'SQL Server' performance issues. Often, this troubleshooting soon veers away from a 'its a SQL Server issue' to instead become a wider application/database design/coding issue.One common perception with SQL Server is that deadlocking is an application design issue - and is fixed by recoding...  I see this reinforced by MCP-type questions/scenarios where the answer to prevent deadlocking is simply to change the order in code in which tables are accessed....Whilst this is correct, I do think this has led to a situation where many 'operational' or 'production support' DBAs, when faced with a deadlock, are happy to throw the issue over to developers without analysing the issue further....A couple of 'war stories' on deadlocks which I think are interesting :- Case One , I had an issue recently on a third-party application that I support on SQL 2008.  This particular third-party application has an unusual support agreement where the customer is allowed to change the index design on the third-party provided database.  However, we are not allowed to alter application code or modify table structure..This third-party application is also known to encounter occasional deadlocks – indeed, I have documentation from the vendor that up to 50 deadlocks per day is not unusual !So, as a DBA I have to support an application which in my opinion has too many deadlocks - but, I cannot influence the design of the tables or stored procedures for the application. This should be the classic - blame the third-party developers scenario, and hope this issue gets addressed in a future application release - ie we could wait years for this to be resolved and implemented in our production environment...But, as DBAs  can change the index layout, is there anything I could do still to reduce the deadlocks in the application ?I initially used SQL traceflag 1222 to write deadlock detection output to the SQL Errorlog – using this I was able to identify one table heavily involved in the deadlocks.When I examined the table definition, I was surprised to see it was a heap – ie no clustered index existed on the table.Using SQL profiler to see locking behaviour and plan for the query involved in the deadlock, I was able to confirm a table scan was being performed.By creating an appropriate clustered index - it was possible to produce a more efficient plan and locking behaviour.So, less locks, held for less time = less possibility of deadlocks. I'm still unhappy about the overall number of deadlocks on this system - but that's something to be discussed further with the vendor.Case Two,  a system which hadn't changed for months suddenly started seeing deadlocks on a regular basis. I love the 'nothing's changed' scenario, as it gives me the opportunity to appear wise and say 'nothings changed on this system, except the data'.. This particular deadlock occurred on a table which had been growing rapidly. By using DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS - the DBA team were able to see that the deadlocks seemed to be occurring shortly after auto-update stats had regenerated the table statistics using it's default sampling behaviour.As a quick fix, we were able to schedule a nightly UPDATE STATISTICS WITH FULLSCAN on the table involved in the deadlock - thus, greatly reducing the potential for stats to be updated via auto_update_stats, consequently reducing the potential for a bad plan to be generated based on an unrepresentative sample of the data. This reduced the possibility of a deadlock occurring.  Not a perfect solution by any means, but quick, easy to implement, and needed no application code changes. This fix gave us some 'breathing space'  to properly fix the code during the next scheduled application release.   The moral of this post - don't dismiss deadlocks as issues that can only be fixed by developers...

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• Efficiently separating Read/Compute/Write steps for concurrent processing of entities in Entity/Component systems

  - by TravisG

  Setup I have an entity-component architecture where Entities can have a set of attributes (which are pure data with no behavior) and there exist systems that run the entity logic which act on that data. Essentially, in somewhat pseudo-code: Entity { id; map<id_type, Attribute> attributes; } System { update(); vector<Entity> entities; } A system that just moves along all entities at a constant rate might be MovementSystem extends System { update() { for each entity in entities position = entity.attributes["position"]; position += vec3(1,1,1); } } Essentially, I'm trying to parallelise update() as efficiently as possible. This can be done by running entire systems in parallel, or by giving each update() of one system a couple of components so different threads can execute the update of the same system, but for a different subset of entities registered with that system. Problem In reality, these systems sometimes require that entities interact(/read/write data from/to) each other, sometimes within the same system (e.g. an AI system that reads state from other entities surrounding the current processed entity), but sometimes between different systems that depend on each other (i.e. a movement system that requires data from a system that processes user input). Now, when trying to parallelize the update phases of entity/component systems, the phases in which data (components/attributes) from Entities are read and used to compute something, and the phase where the modified data is written back to entities need to be separated in order to avoid data races. Otherwise the only way (not taking into account just "critical section"ing everything) to avoid them is to serialize parts of the update process that depend on other parts. This seems ugly. To me it would seem more elegant to be able to (ideally) have all processing running in parallel, where a system may read data from all entities as it wishes, but doesn't write modifications to that data back until some later point. The fact that this is even possible is based on the assumption that modification write-backs are usually very small in complexity, and don't require much performance, whereas computations are very expensive (relatively). So the overhead added by a delayed-write phase might be evened out by more efficient updating of entities (by having threads work more % of the time instead of waiting). A concrete example of this might be a system that updates physics. The system needs to both read and write a lot of data to and from entities. Optimally, there would be a system in place where all available threads update a subset of all entities registered with the physics system. In the case of the physics system this isn't trivially possible because of race conditions. So without a workaround, we would have to find other systems to run in parallel (which don't modify the same data as the physics system), other wise the remaining threads are waiting and wasting time. However, that has disadvantages Practically, the L3 cache is pretty much always better utilized when updating a large system with multiple threads, as opposed to multiple systems at once, which all act on different sets of data. Finding and assembling other systems to run in parallel can be extremely time consuming to design well enough to optimize performance. Sometimes, it might even not be possible at all because a system just depends on data that is touched by all other systems. Solution? In my thinking, a possible solution would be a system where reading/updating and writing of data is separated, so that in one expensive phase, systems only read data and compute what they need to compute, and then in a separate, performance-wise cheap, write phase, attributes of entities that needed to be modified are finally written back to the entities. The Question How might such a system be implemented to achieve optimal performance, as well as making programmer life easier? What are the implementation details of such a system and what might have to be changed in the existing EC-architecture to accommodate this solution?

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• Consumer Oriented Search In Oracle Endeca Information Discovery – Part 1

  - by Bob Zurek

  Information Discovery, a core capability of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, enables business users to rapidly search, discover and navigate through a wide variety of big data including structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. One of the key capabilities, among many, that differentiate our solution from others in the Information Discovery market is our deep support for search across this growing amount of varied big data. Our method and approach is very different than classic simple keyword search that is found in may information discovery solutions. In this first part of a series on the topic of search, I will walk you through many of the key capabilities that go beyond the simple search box that you might experience in products where search was clearly an afterthought or attempt to catch up to our core capabilities in this area. Lets explore. The core data management solution of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is the Endeca Server, a hybrid search-analytical database that his highly scalable and column-oriented in nature. We will talk in more technical detail about the capabilities of the Endeca Server in future blog posts as this post is intended to give you a feel for the deep search capabilities that are an integral part of the Endeca Server. The Endeca Server provides best-of-breed search features aw well as a new class of features that are the first to be designed around the requirement to bridge structured, semi-structured and unstructured big data. Some of the key features of search include type a heads, automatic alphanumeric spell corrections, positional search, Booleans, wildcarding, natural language, and category search and query classification dialogs. This is just a subset of the advanced search capabilities found in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. Search is an important feature that makes it possible for business users to explore on the diverse data sets the Endeca Server can hold at any one time. The search capabilities in the Endeca server differ from other Information Discovery products with simple “search boxes” in the following ways: The Endeca Server Supports Exploratory Search.  Enterprise data frequently requires the user to explore content through an ad hoc dialog, with guidance that helps them succeed. This has implications for how to design search features. Traditional search doesn’t assume a dialog, and so it uses relevance ranking to get its best guess to the top of the results list. It calculates many relevance factors for each query, like word frequency, distance, and meaning, and then reduces those many factors to a single score based on a proprietary “black box” formula. But how can a business users, searching, act on the information that the document is say only 38.1% relevant? In contrast, exploratory search gives users the opportunity to clarify what is relevant to them through refinements and summaries. This approach has received consumer endorsement through popular ecommerce sites where guided navigation across a broad range of products has helped consumers better discover choices that meet their, sometimes undetermined requirements. This same model exists in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. In fact, the Endeca Server powers many of the most popular e-commerce sites in the world. The Endeca Server Supports Cascading Relevance. Traditional approaches of search reduce many relevance weights to a single score. This means that if a result with a good title match gets a similar score to one with an exact phrase match, they’ll appear next to each other in a list. But a user can’t deduce from their score why each got it’s ranking, even though that information could be valuable. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery takes a different approach. The Endeca Server stratifies results by a primary relevance strategy, and then breaks ties within a strata by ordering them with a secondary strategy, and so on. Application managers get the explicit means to compose these strategies based on their knowledge of their own domain. This approach gives both business users and managers a deterministic way to set and understand relevance. Now that you have an understanding of two of the core search capabilities in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, our next blog post on this topic will discuss more advanced features including set search, second-order relevance as well as an understanding of faceted search mechanisms that include queries and filters.  

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• Sitting Pretty

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk IT Pro newsletter'DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed' I dislike the term 'avatar', when used to describe a portrait photograph. An avatar, in the sense of a picture, is merely the depiction of one's role-play alter-ego, often a ridiculous bronze-age deity. However, professional image is important. The choice and creation of online photos has an effect on the way your message is received and it is important to get that right. It is fine to use that photo of you after ten lagers on holiday in an Ibiza nightclub, but what works on Facebook looks hilarious on LinkedIn. My splendid photograph that I use online was done by a professional photographer at great expense and I've never had the slightest twinge of regret when I remember how much I paid for it. It is me, but a more pensive and dignified edition, oozing trust and wisdom. One gasps at the magical skill that a professional photographer can conjure up, without digital manipulation, to make the best of a derisory noggin (ed: slang for a head). Even if he had offered to depict me as a semi-naked, muscle-bound, sword-wielding hero, I'd have demurred. No, any professional person needs a carefully cultivated image that looks right. I'd never thought of using that profile shot, though I couldn't help noticing the photographer flinch slightly when he first caught sight of my face. There is a problem with using an avatar. The use of a single image doesn't express the appropriate emotion. At the moment, it is weird to see someone with a laughing portrait writing something solemn. A neutral cast to the face, somewhat like a passport photo, is probably the best compromise. Actually, the same is true of a working life in IT. One of the first skills I learned was not to laugh at managers, but, instead, to develop a facial expression that promoted a sense of keenness, energy and respect. Every profession has its own preferred facial cast. A neighbour of mine has the natural gift of a face that displays barely repressed grief. Though he is characteristically cheerful, he earns a remarkable income as a pallbearer. DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed. With an appropriate avatar, you could do away with a lot of the need for 'smilies' to give clues as to the meaning of what you've written on forums and blogs. If you had a set of avatars, showing the full gamut of human emotions expressible in writing: Rage, fear, reproach, joy, ebullience, apprehension, exasperation, dissembly, irony, pathos, euphoria, remorse and so on. It would be quite a drop-down list on forums, but given the vast prairies of space on the average hard drive, who cares? It would cut down on the number of spats in Forums just as long as one picks the right avatar. As an unreconstructed geek, I find it hard to admit to the value of image in the workplace, but it is true. Just as we use professionals to tidy up and order our CVs and job applications, we should employ experts to enhance our professional image. After all you don't perform surgery or dentistry on yourself do you?

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• OPN Specialized Latest News (15th November)

  - by swalker

  HELPING YOU TO SPECIALIZE WebCenter Implementation Specialist Exam Preparation Webcasts: WebCenter Content And WebCenter Portal Oracle Partner Network would like to invite you to Refresh Courses for WebCenter Content and WebCenter Portal, to help partners to prepare for the WebCenter Implementation Specialist EXAMS. This is a 3 hours intensive refresher partner-only training session, providing attendees with an overview of WebCenter Content and WebCenter Portal functions and related topics. After the refresher part you will be able to take the relevant Implementation Specialist EXAM depending on your personal focus. NOTE: This is only suitable for experienced WebCenter Content or WebCenter Portal practitioners Who should attend? Partner Consultants who want to become an Oracle WebCenter Content or a WebCenter Portal Certified Implementation Specialist or both, that will help them to differentiate themselves in front of customers and support their Companies to become Specialized. Webcast Details: Click here to read more... Specialized Partners Only! New Service to Promote Your Events The Partner Event Publisher has just been made available to all specialized partners in EMEA.  Partners now have the opportunity to publish their events to the Oracle.com/events site and spread the word on their upcoming live in-person and/or live webcast events. Click here to read more information and watch a short video demo. VADs Get Specialized Effective November 1, 2011 , VADs, with a valid Value Added Distributor Agreement will no longer be required to meet customer reference requirements outlined in the business criteria section in order to become specialized. VADs must continue meet all other business and competency criteria set forth in the applicable Knowledge Zone prior to specialization approval. New Certification Pillar Axiom 600 Storage System Your opportunity to take the Pillar Axiom 600 Storage System Essentials (1Z0-581) Exam is vailable now in beta. Pass the exam so you can become a Pillar Axiom 600 Storage Systems Implementation Specialist! Free vouchers are available for Oracle Partners! If you would like to receive a free Beta exam voucher, please send your request to [email protected] and include your name, business email address, company, and the Exam name Pillar Axiom 600 Storage System Essentials Beta exam. New Certification Available: Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2 Essentials (1Z0-562) is a solution designed to help you meet market windows and regulatory deadlines while enjoying a low total cost of ownership and a high return on investment. Take the exam now to become an  Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2 Essentials Implementation Specialists. MEASURING YOUR SUCCESS We had 1674 Specialized Partners covering 5364 Specializations. Please note that due to OPN contract renewals at any given point in time there are valid Specialized Partners and Specializations which are temporarily not captured in the total statistics. An incremental 1961 individuals were accredited as Implementation Specialists giving an EMEA cumulative total of 9598 Implementation Specialists 26 ISVs obtained one or more Ready's, for a total of 53 Ready's Don't forget! You can submit your own press releases to Oracle! Every time you achieve specialization we'd like to support you getting the message out! Press guidelines and a submission link can be found on the OPN Portal here.

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• The gestures of Windows 8 (Consumer preview): part 2, More about Search

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  This is part 2 of a multipart blog post about the gestures and shortcuts in Windows 8 consumer preview. Part 1 can be found here! More about the Search charm In the first installment of this series, we talked about the charms and mentioned a few gestures to display the Search charm. Search is a very central and powerful feature in Windows 8, and allows you to search in Apps, Settings, Files and within Metro applications that support the Search contract. There are a few cool features around the Search, and especially the applications associated to it. I already mentioned the keyboard shortcuts you can use: Win-C shows the Charms bar (same as swiping from the right bevel towards the center of the screen). Win-Q open the Search fly out with Apps preselected. Win-W open the Search fly out with Settings preselected. Win-F open the Search fly out with Files preselected. Searching in Metro apps In addition to these three search domains, you can also search a Metro app, as long as it supports the Search contract (check this Build video to learn more about the Search contract). These apps show up in the Search flyout as shown here: Notice the list of apps below the Files button? That’s what we are talking about. First of all, the list order changes when you search in some applications. For instance, in the image above, I had used the Store with the Search charm. This is why the store shows up as the first app. I am not 100% what algorithm is used here (sorting according to number of searches is my guess), but try it out and try to figure it out Applications that have never been searched are sorted alphabetically. Does it mean we will see cool app names like ___AAA_MyCoolApp? I certainly hope not!! Pinning You can also pin often used apps to the Search flyout. To pin an app with the mouse, right click on it in the Search flyout and select Pin from the context menu. With the keyboard, use the arrow keys to go down to the selected app, and then open the context menu. With the finger, simply tap and hold until you see a semi transparent rectangle indicating that the context menu will be shown, then release. The context menu opens up and you can select Pin. Pin context menu Pinned apps Unpinning, Hiding Using the same technique as for pinning here above, you can also unpin a pinned application. Finally, you can also choose to hide an app from the Search flyout altogether. This is a convenient way to clean up and make it easy to find stuff. Note: At this point, I am not sure how to re-add a hidden app to the Search flyout. If anyone knows, please mention it in the comments, thanks! Reordering You can also reorder pinned apps. To do this, with the finger, tap, hold and pull the app to the side, then pull it vertically to reorder it. You can also reorder with the mouse, simply by clicking on an app and pulling it vertically to the place you want to put it. I don’t think there is a way to do that with the keyboard though. That’s it for now More gestures will follow in a next installment! Have fun with Windows 8   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Something about Property Management or &hellip; the understanding of SharePoint Admins/roles ?!?

  - by Enrique Lima

  When I talk about SharePoint, for some reason it comes to my mind as if it were property management and all the tasks associated with it. So, imagine you have a lot ( a piece of land of sorts), you then decide there is something you want to do with it.  So, you make the choice of having a building built.  Now, in order to go forward with your plan, you need to check what the rules/regulations are.  Has is it been zoned residential, commercial, industrial … you get the idea.  This to me sounds like Governance.  The what am I to do given a defined set of rules. We keep on moving forward based on those rules.  And with this we start the process of building, the building process takes us to survey the land, identify what our boundaries are.  And as we go along we start getting the idea in our head as to what we will do as far as the building goes.  We identify the essentials of the building, basic services and such.  All in all, we plan.  And as with many things we do, we like solid foundations.  What a solid foundation looks like will depend on where and what we build.  The way buildings are built depends in many ways in being able to foresee the potential for natural disasters or to try to leverage the lay of the land.  Sound familiar?  We have done our Requirements Gathering. We have the building in place, we have followed the zoning rules, we have implemented services.  But we need someone to manage the building, now we move on to the human side of the story.  We want to establish a means to normalcy in the building, someone that can be the monitoring agent as to the “what’s going on?” of it.  This person will be tasked with making sure all basic services are functional, that measures are taken if there is an issue and so on.  Enter the Farm Administrator. In a way, we establish an extension of the rules to make sure the building and the apartments/offices build follow a standard set of rules too. Now, in turn you will have people leasing or buying the apartments/offices, they will be the keepers of that space.  So, now we are building sites, we have moved from having the building (farm) ready, to leasing/selling offices/apartments (site collections).  There will be someone assuming responsibility for those offices, that person will authorize or be informed about activities and also who not only gets a code into the building, but perhaps a key to the office.  Enter Site Collection Administrator.  And then perhaps we move on to the person that would be responsible for specifics within the office, for example a Human Resources Manager or Coordinator.  They will have specific control and knowledge about people.  A facilities coordinator, and so on.  I would translate that into Site Administrators. With that said then, we identify the following: Role Name Responsibility (but not limited to) Farm Administrator Infrastructure Site Collection Admin Policies for Content, Hierarchy, Recycle Bin, Security and Access Site Owner (Site Admin) Security and Access, Training, Guidance, Manage Templates All in all there are different levels of responsibility to be handled, but it is very important to understand what they are and what they mean. Here is a link to very well laid out explanation on this … http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/08/11/site-managers-and-end-user-expectations-roles-and-responsibilities/

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• Where should you put constants and why?

  - by Tim Meyer

  In our mostly large applications, we usually have a only few locations for constants: One class for GUI and internal contstants (Tab Page titles, Group Box titles, calculation factors, enumerations) One class for database tables and columns (this part is generated code) plus readable names for them (manually assigned) One class for application messages (logging, message boxes etc) The constants are usually separated into different structs in those classes. In our C++ applications, the constants are only defined in the .h file and the values are assigned in the .cpp file. One of the advantages is that all strings etc are in one central place and everybody knows where to find them when something must be changed. This is especially something project managers seem to like as people come and go and this way everybody can change such trivial things without having to dig into the application's structure. Also, you can easily change the title of similar Group Boxes / Tab Pages etc at once. Another aspect is that you can just print that class and give it to a non-programmer who can check if the captions are intuitive, and if messages to the user are too detailed or too confusing etc. However, I see certain disadvantages: Every single class is tightly coupled to the constants classes Adding/Removing/Renaming/Moving a constant requires recompilation of at least 90% of the application (Note: Changing the value doesn't, at least for C++). In one of our C++ projects with 1500 classes, this means around 7 minutes of compilation time (using precompiled headers; without them it's around 50 minutes) plus around 10 minutes of linking against certain static libraries. Building a speed optimized release through the Visual Studio Compiler takes up to 3 hours. I don't know if the huge amount of class relations is the source but it might as well be. You get driven into temporarily hard-coding strings straight into code because you want to test something very quickly and don't want to wait 15 minutes just for that test (and probably every subsequent one). Everybody knows what happens to the "I will fix that later"-thoughts. Reusing a class in another project isn't always that easy (mainly due to other tight couplings, but the constants handling doesn't make it easier.) Where would you store constants like that? Also what arguments would you bring in order to convince your project manager that there are better concepts which also comply with the advantages listed above? Feel free to give a C++-specific or independent answer. PS: I know this question is kind of subjective but I honestly don't know of any better place than this site for this kind of question. Update on this project I have news on the compile time thing: Following Caleb's and gbjbaanb's posts, I split my constants file into several other files when I had time. I also eventually split my project into several libraries which was now possible much easier. Compiling this in release mode showed that the auto-generated file which contains the database definitions (table, column names and more - more than 8000 symbols) and builds up certain hashes caused the huge compile times in release mode. Deactivating MSVC's optimizer for the library which contains the DB constants now allowed us to reduce the total compile time of your Project (several applications) in release mode from up to 8 hours to less than one hour! We have yet to find out why MSVC has such a hard time optimizing these files, but for now this change relieves a lot of pressure as we no longer have to rely on nightly builds only. That fact - and other benefits, such as less tight coupling, better reuseability etc - also showed that spending time splitting up the "constants" wasn't such a bad idea after all ;-)

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• How to retrieve Sharepoint data from a Windows Forms Application.

  - by Michael M. Bangoy

  In this demo I'm going to demonstrate how to retrieve Sharepoint data and display it on a Windows Forms Application. 1. Open Visual Studio 2010 and create a new Project. 2. In the project template select Windows Forms Application. 3. In order to communicate with Sharepoint from a Windows Forms Application we need to add the 2 Sharepoint Client DLL located in c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI. 4. Select the Microsoft.Sharepoint.Client.dll and Microsoft.Sharepoint.Client.Runtime.dll. That's it we're ready to write our codes. Note: In this example I've added to controls on the form, the controls are Button, TextBox, Label and DataGridView. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Data.Objects; using System.Drawing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Security; using System.Windows.Forms; using SP = Microsoft.SharePoint.Client; namespace ClientObjectModel { public partial class Form1 : Form { // declare string url of the Sharepoint site string _context = "theurlofyoursharepointsite"; public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); } private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { } private void getsitetitle() {    SP.ClientContext context = new SP.ClientContext(_context);    SP.Web _site = context.Web;    context.Load(_site);    context.ExecuteQuery();    txttitle.Text = _site.Title;    context.Dispose(); } private void loadlist() { using (SP.ClientContext _clientcontext = new SP.ClientContext(_context)) {    SP.Web _web = _clientcontext.Web;    SP.ListCollection _lists = _clientcontext.Web.Lists;    _clientcontext.Load(_lists);    _clientcontext.ExecuteQuery();    DataTable dt = new DataTable();    DataColumn column;    DataRow row;    column = new DataColumn();    column.DataType = Type.GetType("System.String");    column.ColumnName = "List Title";    dt.Columns.Add(column);    foreach (SP.List listitem in _lists)    {       row = dt.NewRow();       row["List Title"] = listitem.Title;       dt.Rows.Add(row);    }       dataGridView1.DataSource = dt;    } private void cmdload_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { getsitetitle(); loadlist(); } } That's it. Running the application and clicking the Load Button will retrieve the Title of the Sharepoint site and display it on the TextBox and also it will retrieve ALL of the Sharepoint List on that site and populate the DataGridView with the List Title. Hope this helps. Thank you.

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• How to automate a monitoring system for ETL runs

  - by Jeffrey McDaniel

  Upon completion of the Primavera ETL process there are a few ways to determine if the process finished successfully.  First, in the <installation directory>\log folder,  there is a staretlprocess.log and staretl.html files. These files will give the output results of the ETL run. The staretl.html file will give a detailed summary of each step of the process, its run time, and its status. The .log file, based on the logging level set in the Configuration tool, can give extensive information about the ETL process. The log file can be used as a validation for process completion.  To automate the monitoring of these log files, perform the following steps: 1. Write a custom application to parse through the log file and search for [ERROR] . In most cases,  a major [ERROR] could cause the ETL process to fail. Searching the log and finding this value is worthy of an alert. 2. Determine the total number of steps in the ETL process, and validate that the log file recorded and entry for the final step.  For example validate that your log file contains an entry for Step 39/39 (could be different based on the version you are running). If there is no Step 39/39, then either the process is taking longer than expected or it didn't make it to the end.  Either way this would be a good cause for an alert. 3. Check the last line in the log file. The last line of the log file should contain an indication that the ETL run completed successfully. For example, the last line of a log file will say (results could be different based on Reporting Database versions):   [INFO] (Message) Finished Writing Report 4. You could write an Ant script to execute the ETL process and have it set to - failonerror="true" - and from there send results to an external tool to monitor the jobs, send to email, or send to database. With each ETL run, the log file appends to the existing log file by default. Because of this behavior, I would recommend renaming the existing log files before running a new ETL process. By doing this,  only log entries for the currently running ETL process is recorded in the new log files. Based on these log entries, alerts can be setup to notify the administrator or DBA. Another way to determine if the ETL process has completed successfully is to monitor the etl_processmaster table.  Depending on the Reporting Database version this could be in the Stage or Star databases. As of Reporting Database 2.2 and higher this would be in the Star database.  The etl_processmaster table records entries for the ETL run along with a Start and Finish time.  If the ETl process has failed the Finish date should be null. This table can be queried at a time when ETL process is expected to be finished and if null send an alert.  These are just some options. There are additional ways this can be accomplished based around these two areas - log files or database. Here is an additional query to gather more information about your ETL run (connect as Staruser): SELECT SYSDATE,test_script,decode(loc, 0, PROCESSNAME, trim(SUBSTR(PROCESSNAME, loc+1))) PROCESSNAME ,duration duration from ( select (e.endtime - b.starttime) * 1440 duration, to_char(b.starttime, 'hh24:mi:ss') starttime, to_char(e.endtime, 'hh24:mi:ss') endtime,  b.PROCESSNAME, instr(b.PROCESSNAME, ']') loc, b.infotype test_script from ( select processid, infodate starttime, PROCESSNAME, INFOMSG, INFOTYPE from etl_processinfo  where processid = (select max(PROCESSID) from etl_processinfo) and infotype = 'BEGIN' ) b  inner Join ( select processid, infodate endtime, PROCESSNAME, INFOMSG, INFOTYPE from etl_processinfo  where processid = (select max(PROCESSID) from etl_processinfo) and infotype = 'END' ) e on b.processid = e.processid  and b.PROCESSNAME = e.PROCESSNAME order by b.starttime)

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• MPI Cluster Debugger launch integration in VS2010

  Let's assume that you have all the HPC bits installed and that you have existing MPI code (or you created a "Hello World" project using the MPI project template). Of course, you create a single MPI application and at runtime it will correspond to multiple processes (of the same app) launched on multiple nodes (i.e. machines) on the cluster. So how do you debug such a situation by simply hitting the familiar "F5" keystroke (i.e. Debug - Start Debugging)?WATCH IT INSTEAD OF READING ABOUT ITIf you can't bear to read through all the details below, just watch this 19-minute screencast explaining this VS2010 feature. Alternatively, or even additionally, keep on reading.REQUIREMENTWhen you debug an MPI application, you would want the copying of resources from your client machine (where Visual Studio is installed) to each compute node (where Windows HPC Server is installed) to take place automatically for you. 'Resources' in the previous sentence includes your application binary, plus any binary or data dependencies it may have, plus PDBs if needed, plus the debug CRT of the correct bitness, plus msvsmon for remote debugging to work. You would also want, after copying is complete, to have your app and msvsmon launched and attached so that you can hit breakpoints back in Visual Studio on your client machine. All these thing that you would want are delivered in VS2010.STEPS TO F51. In your MPI project where you have placed a breakpoint go to Project Properties - Configuration Properties - Debugging. Ensure the "Debugger to launch" combo box value is set to MPI Cluster Debugger.2. There are a whole bunch of properties here and typically you can ignore all of them except one: Run Environment. By default it is set to run 1 process on your local machine and if you change the number after that to, for example, 4 it will launch 4 processes of your app on your local machine.You want this to run on your cluster though, so go to the dropdown arrow at the end of the Run Environment cell and open it to expose the "Edit Hpc node" menu which opens the Node Selector dialog:In this dialog you can enter (or pick from a list) the cluster head node name and then the number of processes you want to execute on the cluster and then hit OK and… you are done.3. Press F5 and watch your breakpoint get hit (after giving it some time for copying, remote execution, attachment and symbol resolution to take place).GOING DEEPERIn the MPI Cluster Debugger project properties above, you can see many additional properties to the Run Environment. They are all optional, but you may want to understand them in order to fine tune your cluster debugging. Read all about each one of these on the MSDN page Configuration Properties for the MPI Cluster Debugger.In the Node Selector dialog above you can see more options than just the Head Node name and Number of Process to run. They should be self-explanatory but I also cover them in depth in my screencast showing you an example of why you would choose to schedule processes per core versus per node. You can also read about these options on MSDN as part of the page How to: Configure and Launch the MPI Cluster Debugger.To read through an example that touches on MPI project creation, project properties, node selector, and also usage of MPI with OpenMP plus MPI with PPL, read the MSDN page Walkthrough: Launching the MPI Cluster Debugger in Visual Studio 2010.Happy MPI debugging! Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Type of computer for a developer on the road

  - by nabucosound

  Hi developers: I am planning to be traveling through eurasia and asia (russia, china, korea, japan, south east asia...) for a while and, although there are plenty of marvelous things to see and to do, I must keep on working :(. I am a python developer, dedicated mainly to web projects. I use django, sqlite3, browsers, and ocassionaly (only if I have no choice) I install postgres, mysql, apache or any other servers commonly used in the internets. I do my coding on vim, use ssh to connect, lftp to transfer files, IRC, grep/ack... So I spend most of my time in the terminal shells. But I also use IM or Skype to communicate with my clients and peers, as well as some other software (that after all is not mandatory for my day-to-day work). I currently work with a Macbook Pro (3 years old now) and so far I am very happy with the performance. But I don't want to carry it if I am going to be "on transit" for long time, it is simply huge and heavy for what I am planning to load in my rather small backpack (while traveling, less is more, you know). So here I am reading all kind of opinions about netbooks, because at first sight this is the kind of computer I thought I had to choose. I am going to use Linux for it, Microsoft is not my cup of tea and Mac is not available for them, unless I were to buy a Macbook air, something that I won't do because if I am robbed or rain/dust/truck loaders break it I would burst in tears. I am concerned about wifi performance and connectivity, I am going to use one of those linux distros/tools to hack/test on "open" networks (if you know what I mean) in case I am not in a place with real free wifi access and I find myself in an emergency. CPU speed should be acceptable, but since I don't plan to run Photoshop or expensive IDEs, I guess most of the time I won't be overloading the machine. Apart from this, maybe (surely) I am missing other features to consider. With that said (sorry about the length) here it comes my question, raised from a deep ignorance regarding the wars betweeb betbooks vs notebooks (I assume tablet PCs are not for programming yet): If I buy a netbook will I have to throw it away after 1 month on the road and buy a notebook? Or will I be OK? Thanks! Hector Update I have received great feedback so far! I would like to insist on the fact that I will be traveling through many different countries and scenarios. I am sure that while in Japan I will be more than fine with anything related to technology, connectivity, etc. But consider that I will be, for example, on a train through Russia (transsiberian) and will cross Mongolia as well. I will stay in friends' places sometimes, but most of the time I will have to work from hostel rooms, trains, buses, beaches (hey this last one doesn't sound too bad hehe!). I think some of your answers guys seem to focus on the geek part but loose the point of this "on the road" fact. I am very aware and agree that netbooks suck compared to notebooks, but what I am trying to do here is to find a balance and discover your experiences with netbooks to see first hand if a netbook will be a fail in the mid-long term of the trip for my purposes. So I have resumed the main concepts expressed here on this small list, in no particular order: keyboard/touchpad feel: I use vim so no need of moving mouse pointers that much, unless I am browsing the web, but intensive use of keyboard screen real state: again, terminal work for most of the time battery life: I think something very important weight/size: also very important looks not worth stealing it, don't give a shit if it is lost/stolen/broken: this may depend on kind of person, your economy, etc. Also to prevent losing work, I will upload EVERYTHING to the cloud whenever I'll have a chance. wifi: don't want to discover my wifi is one of those that cannot deal with half the routers on this planet or has poor connectivity. Thanks again for your answers and comments!

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• Java EE 7 Roadmap

  - by Linda DeMichiel

  The Java EE 6 Platform, released in December 2009, has seen great uptake from the community with its POJO-based programming model, lightweight Web Profile, and extension points. There are now 13 Java EE 6 compliant appserver implementations today! When we announced the Java EE 7 JSR back in early 2011, our plans were that we would release it by Q4 2012. This target date was slightly over three years after the release of Java EE 6, but at the same time it meant that we had less than two years to complete a fairly comprehensive agenda — to continue to invest in significant enhancements in simplification, usability, and functionality in updated versions of the JSRs that are currently part of the platform; to introduce new JSRs that reflect emerging needs in the community; and to add support for use in cloud environments. We have since announced a minor adjustment in our dates (to the spring of 2013) in order to accommodate the inclusion of JSRs of importance to the community, such as Web Sockets and JSON-P. At this point, however, we have to make a choice. Despite our best intentions, our progress has been slow on the cloud side of our agenda. Partially this has been due to a lack of maturity in the space for provisioning, multi-tenancy, elasticity, and the deployment of applications in the cloud. And partially it is due to our conservative approach in trying to get things "right" in view of limited industry experience in the cloud area when we started this work. Because of this, we believe that providing solid support for standardized PaaS-based programming and multi-tenancy would delay the release of Java EE 7 until the spring of 2014 — that is, two years from now and over a year behind schedule. In our opinion, that is way too long. We have therefore proposed to the Java EE 7 Expert Group that we adjust our course of action — namely, stick to our current target release dates, and defer the remaining aspects of our agenda for PaaS enablement and multi-tenancy support to Java EE 8. Of course, we continue to believe that Java EE is well-suited for use in the cloud, although such use might not be quite ready for full standardization. Even today, without Java EE 7, Java EE vendors such as Oracle, Red Hat, IBM, and CloudBees have begun to offer the ability to run Java EE applications in the cloud. Deferring the remaining cloud-oriented aspects of our agenda has several important advantages: It allows Java EE Platform vendors to gain more experience with their implementations in this area and thus helps us avoid risks entailed by trying to standardize prematurely in an emerging area. It means that the community won't need to wait longer for those features that are ready at the cost of those features that need more time. Because we have already laid some of the infrastructure for cloud support in Java EE 7, including resource definition metadata, improved security configuration, JPA schema generation, etc., it will allow us to expedite a Java EE 8 release. We therefore plan to target the Java EE 8 Platform release for the spring of 2015. This shift in the scope of Java EE 7 allows us to better retain our focus on enhancements in simplification and usability and to deliver on schedule those features that have been most requested by developers. These include the support for HTML 5 in the form of Web Sockets and JSON-P; the simplified JMS 2.0 APIs; improved Managed Bean alignment, including transactional interceptors; the JAX-RS 2.0 client API; support for method-level validation; a much more comprehensive expression language; and more. We feel strongly that this is the right thing to do, and we hope that you will support us in this proposed direction.

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• AI to move custom-shaped spaceships (shape affecting movement behaviour)

  - by kaoD

  I'm designing a networked turn based 3D-6DOF space fleet combat strategy game which relies heavily on ship customization. Let me explain the game a bit, since you need to know a bit about it to set the question. What I aim for is the ability to create your own fleet of ships with custom shapes and attached modules (propellers, tractor beams...) which would give advantages and disadvantages to each ship, so you have lots of different fleet distributions. E.g., long ship with two propellers at the side would let the ship spin around that plane easily, bigger ships would move slowly unless you place lots of propellers at the back (therefore spending more "construction" points and energy when moving, and it will only move fast towards that direction.) I plan to balance all the game around this feature. The game would revolve around two phases: orders and combat phase. During the orders phase, you command the different ships. When all players finish the order phase, the combat phase begins and the ship orders get resolved in real-time for some time, then the action pauses and there's a new orders phase. The problem comes when I think about player input. To move a ship, you need to turn on or off different propellers if you want to steer, travel forward, brake, rotate in place... These propellers don't have to work at their whole power, so you can achieve more movement combinations with less propellers. I think this approach is a bit boring. The player doesn't want to fiddle with motors or anything, you just want to MOVE and KILL. The way I intend the player to give orders to these ships is by a destination and a rotation, and then the AI would calculate the correct propeller power to achive that movement and rotation. Propulsion doesn't have to be the same throught the entire turn calculation (after the orders have been given) so it would be cool if the ships reacted as they move, adjusting the power of the propellers for their needs dynamically, but it may be too hard to implement and it's not really needed for the game to work. In both cases, how would that AI decide which propellers to activate for the best (or at least not worst) trajectory to be achieved? I though about some approaches: Learning AI: The ship types would learn about their movement by trial and error, adjusting their behaviour with more uses, and finally becoming "smart". I don't want to get involved THAT far in AI coding, and I think it can be frustrating for the player (even if you can let it learn without playing.) Pre-calculated timestep movement: Upon ship creation, ALL possible movements are calculated for each propeller configuration and power for a given delta-time. Memory intensive, ugly, bad. Pre-calculated trajectories: The same as above but not for each delta-time but the whole trajectory, which would then be fitted as much as possible. Requires a fixed propeller configuration for the whole combat phase and is still memory intensive, ugly and bad. Continuous brute forcing: The AI continously checks ALL possible propeller configurations throughout the entire combat phase, precalculates a few time steps and decides which is the best one based on that. Con: what's good now might not be that good later, and it's too CPU intensive, ugly, and bad too. Single brute forcing: Same as above, but only brute forcing at the beginning of the simulation, so it needs constant propeller configuration throughout the entire combat phase. Coninuous angle check: This is not a full movement method, but maybe a way to discard "stupid" propeller configurations. Given the current propeller's normal vector and the final one, you can approximate the power needed for the propeller based on the angle. You must do this continuously throughout the whole combat phase. I figured this one out recently so I didn't put in too much thought. A priori, it has the "what's good now might not be that good later" drawback too, and it doesn't care about the other propellers which may act together to make a better propelling configuration. I'm really stuck here. Any ideas?

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• Rotating WebLogic Server logs to avoid large files using WLST.

  - by adejuanc

  By default, when WebLogic Server instances are started in development mode, the server automatically renames (rotates) its local server log file as SERVER_NAME.log.n.  For the remainder of the server session, log messages accumulate in SERVER_NAME.log until the file grows to a size of 500 kilobytes.Each time the server log file reaches this size, the server renames the log file and creates a new SERVER_NAME.log to store new messages. By default, the rotated log files are numbered in order of creation filenamennnnn, where filename is the name configured for the log file. You can configure a server instance to include a time and date stamp in the file name of rotated log files; for example, server-name-%yyyy%-%mm%-%dd%-%hh%-%mm%.log.By default, when server instances are started in production mode, the server rotates its server log file whenever the file grows to 5000 kilobytes in size. It does not rotate the local server log file when the server is started. For more information about changing the mode in which a server starts, see Change to production mode in the Administration Console Online Help.You can change these default settings for log file rotation. For example, you can change the file size at which the server rotates the log file or you can configure a server to rotate log files based on a time interval. You can also specify the maximum number of rotated files that can accumulate. After the number of log files reaches this number, subsequent file rotations delete the oldest log file and create a new log file with the latest suffix.  Note: WebLogic Server sets a threshold size limit of 500 MB before it forces a hard rotation to prevent excessive log file growth. To Rotate via WLST : #invoke WLSTC:\>java weblogic.WLST#connect WLST to an Administration Serverawls:/offline> connect('username','password')#navigate to the ServerRuntime MBean hierarchywls:/mydomain/serverConfig> serverRuntime()wls:/mydomain/serverRuntime>ls()#navigate to the server LogRuntimeMBeanwls:/mydomain/serverRuntime> cd('LogRuntime/myserver')wls:/mydomain/serverRuntime/LogRuntime/myserver> ls()-r-- Name myserver-r-- Type LogRuntime-r-x forceLogRotation java.lang.Void :#force the immediate rotation of the server log filewls:/mydomain/serverRuntime/LogRuntime/myserver> cmo.forceLogRotation()wls:/mydomain/serverRuntime/LogRuntime/myserver> The server immediately rotates the file and prints the following message: <Mar 2, 2012 3:23:01 PM EST> <Info> <Log Management> <BEA-170017> <The log file C:\diablodomain\servers\myserver\logs\myserver.log will be rotated. Reopen the log file if tailing has stopped. This can happen on some platforms like Windows.><Mar 2, 2012 3:23:01 PM EST> <Info> <Log Management> <BEA-170018> <The log file has been rotated to C:\diablodomain\servers\myserver\logs\myserver.log00001. Log messages will continue to be logged in C:\diablodomain\servers\myserver\logs\myserver.log.> To specify the Location of the archived Log Files The following command specifies the directory location for the archived log files using the -Dweblogic.log.LogFileRotationDir Java startup option: java -Dweblogic.log.LogFileRotationDir=c:\foo-Dweblogic.management.username=installadministrator-Dweblogic.management.password=installadministrator weblogic.Server For more information read the following documentation ; Using the WebLogic Scripting Tool http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13222_01/wls/docs103/config_scripting/using_WLST.html Configuring WebLogic Logging Services http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12840_01/wls/docs103/logging/config_logs.html

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