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  • Now Available: Profit November 2012

    - by user462779
    The November 2012 issue of Profit is now available. In the five years I've worked on Profit, there has been measurable interest in content related to project management. Stories featuring project management as a key component have resulted in extra clicks, likes, and RTs (for you Twitter users) from our readers. I've chatted about this with Oracle customers, partners, and experts and received an assortment of ideas about why this might be. This issue of Profit is a bit of a culmination of those conversations, and the trends that are driving interest in project management best practices. Also, two online developments for Profit: check out my newly relaunched blog, Editor's Notebook, at blogs.oracle.com/profit, where readers can get a peek at the development of each issue of Profit as it happens. We've also launched a new LinkedIn group for our social media-inclined readers. In this issue: Three Keys to Project Management What can organizations with world-class project management teach the rest of us? Strong Medicine Gilead Sciences simplifies business processes to establish a foundation for continued growth. Architects of Reform Enterprise architecture plays an essential role in establishing Oregon as a leader in healthcare reform. Answering the Call Turkcell CIO Ilker Kuruoz finds IT-powered growth and innovation to be the calling card for success. Projected Results Sound project management practices and technology can have an immediate impact on the bottom line. Preparing for Impact Plans for dealing with enterprise information will define the big data winners. Is one issue of Profit not enough to get you through to February? Visit the Profit archives, or follow @OracleProfit on Twitter for a daily dose of enterprise technology news from Profit.

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  • Friday Tips #6, Part 2

    - by Chris Kawalek
    Here is a question about updating Oracle VM: Question: How can I perform Oracle VM 3 server updates from Oracle VM Manager? Answer by Gregory King, Principal Best Practices Consultant, Oracle VM Product Management: Server Update Manager is a built-in feature of the Oracle VM Manager. Basically, Server Update Manager automatically configures YUM updates on all the Oracle VM Servers, pointing each to our Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) update channel for Oracle VM. The servers periodically check with our Oracle YUM repository and notify the Oracle VM Manager that an update is available for each server. Actual server updates must be triggered by the Oracle VM administrator – they are not executed automatically. At this point, you can use the Oracle VM Manager to put a server into maintenance mode which live migrates all the running Oracle VM Guests to other Oracle VM Servers in the server pool. Once all the Oracle VM Guests have been migrated, the Oracle VM administrator can trigger the update on the server. The entire process is documented in the Installation and Upgrade Guide of Oracle VM Documentation so I won’t spend time detailing the steps. However, configuring the Server Update Manager is exceedingly simple. Simply navigate to the Tools and Resources tab in the Oracle VM Manager, select the link for Server Update Manager and ensure the following values are added to the text boxes as shown in the illustration below: YUM Base URL: http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleVM/OVM3/latest/x86_64 YUM GPG Key: file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle Every server in the pool will be automatically configured for YUM updates once you choose the Apply button. Many thanks to Greg and Rick for providing the answers to this week's questions. If you want to ask us something, hit up Twitter and use hashtag #AskOracleVirtualization. See you next week! -Chris 

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  • Oracle E-Business Suite is Helping to Save Lives at the National Marrow Donor Program

    - by Di Seghposs
    To improve the management of its life-saving operations, the National Marrow Donor Program recently modernized its financial and procurement operations by upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.   As the global leader in bone marrow and umbilical cord blood transplants, the NMDP manages a complex ecosystem of donor, patient, hospital, and biological data. “Maintaining accurate data and having an efficient matching process is essential, particularly as our global database of bone marrow patients grows and donor lists expand,” says Bruce Schmaltz, director of finance/controller. “We rely on the Oracle E-Business Suite to ensure our procurement and financial management processes meet the highest standards, enabling our growing non-profit to work swiftly and efficiently to help improve and save lives.” As the non-profit organization and its registry grew larger, NMDP needed a modern platform to store and integrate its financial information and complicated procurement process. It selected Oracle E-Business Suite for its ability to fit seamlessly into NMDP’s enterprise architecture. NMDP initially implemented Oracle E-Business Suite release 12 by leveraging Oracle Business Accelerators, which are rapid implementation tools and templates that help reduce implementation time and costs. With Oracle Financial Management and Oracle Procurement, NMDP has streamlined back-office processes and integrated its procure-to-pay business processes by leveraging industry leading accounts payable, accounts receivable, and general ledger modules. NMDP is currently rolling out Oracle Hyperion Performance Management applications and plans to implement Oracle Order Management and Oracle Advanced Pricing by the end of 2012. Read more details about NMDP’s modernization efforts.  For more updates on Oracle Financial Management Solutions, view our November 2012 Oracle Information InDepth Financial Management newsletter. Subscribe Now. 

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  • PeopleSoft and PeopleTools at Oracle OpenWorld 2012

    - by PeopleTools Strategy
    From Jeff Robbins PeopleTools 8.52 Gregory Sawyer October 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Oracle Open World is once again just around the corner.  This is a huge event for Oracle with thousands of individual sessions that cover all sorts of topics.  Here’s a link to a note from Paco Aubrejuan about PeopleSoft’s plans for this year’s conference: [link: http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/utilities/pfst-oow12-letter-1841052.pdf] Each year, PeopleTools sessions prove to be among the highest rated and best attended sessions of the conference. Once again we’ve put together a broad program of sessions and a great Hands on Lab, so be sure to use the Open World Schedule Builder to pre-register for the sessions you think will be of greatest value to you: [link: https://www.oracle.com/webapps/token/scheduler] Highlights of our program include: · Customer success with PeopleTools 8.52 · Great new features of the upcoming PeopleTools 8.53 · PeopleSoft’s new mobile solutions · Innovative technologies for your PeopleSoft system: Integration, User Experience, Lifecycle Management and more We’re excited about all that we have planned and look forward to seeing you there.  Stop by the DEMOGrounds to ask questions, see new features or just say hello. See you all there Jeff

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  • How to disable an "always there" program if it isn't in the processes list?

    - by rumtscho
    I have Crashplan and it is constantly running in the background and making backups every 15 minutes. It caused some problems with the backup target folders, so I want it to be inactive while I am making changes to these folders. I started the application itself, but could not find some kind of "Pause" button. So I decided to just stop its process. I first tried the lazy way - the system monitor in the Gnome panel has a "Processes" tab - but didn't find it listed there. Then I did a sudo ps -A and read through the whole list. I don't recognize everything on the list (many process names are self-explaining, like evolution-alarm, but I don't recognize others like phy0) but there was nothing which sounded even remotely like crashplan. But I know that there must have been a process belonging to Crashplan running at this time, because the main Crashplan window was open when I ran the command. Do you have any advice how to stop this thing from running? The best solution would involve temporary preventing it from loading on boot too, since I may need to reboot while doing the maintenance there.

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  • Session Tracking - Advantages and Disadvantages

    I use to work for a major internet company that sold Dental Plans to customers through their large customer-driven websiteto consumers. They start tracking their users as soon as they hit their web servers, and then they log everything they can about the user. There are a lot of benefits for using session tracking for both the user and the website. Users can benefit from session tracking due to the fact that a website can retain pertaining information for the user so that they do not have to re-enter the same information repeatedly. In addition, websites can hold specific items in a cart for each user so that they can pay for all of their  items at once when they are ready to complete their purchases. Websites can also benefit from session tracking because they can determine where a specific user came from and which advertising partner gave them a sale. This information is very useful when deciding on where to spend an advertising budget. There is only one real disadvantage when it comes to session tracking, Users can not really control what is actually tracked by a website. Yes, they can disable cookies and this will help, but that means that no tracking can be done at all. Most sites require users to have cookies enabled in order for users to make purchases or login to their accounts.  

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  • Balancing dependency injection with public API design

    - by kolektiv
    I've been contemplating how to balance testable design using dependency injection with providing simple fixed public API. My dilemma is: people would want to do something like var server = new Server(){ ... } and not have to worry about creating the many dependencies and graph of dependencies that a Server(,,,,,,) may have. While developing, I don't worry too much, as I use an IoC/DI framework to handle all that (I'm not using the lifecycle management aspects of any container, which would complicate things further). Now, the dependencies are unlikely to be re-implemented. Componentisation in this case is almost purely for testability (and decent design!) rather than creating seams for extension, etc. People will 99.999% of the time wish to use a default configuration. So. I could hardcode the dependencies. Don't want to do that, we lose our testing! I could provide a default constructor with hard-coded dependencies and one which takes dependencies. That's... messy, and likely to be confusing, but viable. I could make the dependency receiving constructor internal and make my unit tests a friend assembly (assuming C#), which tidies the public API but leaves a nasty hidden trap lurking for maintenance. Having two constructors which are implicitly connected rather than explicitly would be bad design in general in my book. At the moment that's about the least evil I can think of. Opinions? Wisdom?

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  • With Slick, how to change the resolution during gameplay?

    - by TheLima
    I am developing a tile-based strategy game using Java and the Slick API. So far so good, but I've come to a standstill on my options menu. I have plans for the user to be able to change the resolution during gameplay (it is pretty common, after all). I can already change to fullscreen and back to windowed, this was pretty simple... //"fullScreenOption" is a checkbox-like button. if (fullScreenOption.isMouseOver(mouseX, mouseY)) { if (input.isMouseButtonDown(Input.MOUSE_LEFT_BUTTON)) { fullScreenOption.state = !fullScreenOption.state; container.setFullscreen(fullScreenOption.state); } } But the container class (Implemented by Slick, not me), contrary to my previous beliefs, does not seem to have any resolution-change functions! And that's pretty much the situation...I know it's possible, but i don't know how to do it, nor what is the class responsible! The AppGameContainer class, used on the very start of the game's initialization, is the only place with any functions for changing the display-mode that I've found so far, but it's only used at the very start, and i haven't found a way to travel back to it from my options menu. //This is my implementation of it... public static void main(String[] args) throws SlickException { AppGameContainer app = new AppGameContainer(new Main()); // app.setTargetFrameRate(60); app.setVSync(true); app.setDisplayMode(800, 600, false); app.start(); } I can define it as a static global on the Main, but it's probably a (very) bad way to do it...

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  • A Great Work : ADF Architecture TV

    - by mustafakaya
    I would like to information about Oracle ADF Product Management's great work ; ADF Architecture TV. This channel has various subjects such as before start a new ADF or any software project what will you need or how can you select team member's skills, or how to implement and design an ADF projects etc. When developing with a new technology, one of the challenges for technical staff is to both learn the features of the technology and how to implement them, and also consider the broader concepts of design, engineering and architecture. Many an IT project has come undone because IT staff have been focused on the nitty gritty details of writing software, rather than looking at the "bigger picture" of how it will all go together. Oracle's "ADF Architecture TV" plans to address this issue by focusing on architectural issues and developer guidelines for writing ADF software solutions. The goal, to give ADF developers an understanding of the decisions you need to build a successful ADF application, potential architectural blueprints to choose from when putting the ADF application together, and potential best practices to take back to your development team.  You can click here for ADF Architecture TV. 

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  • Work Execution in EAM

    - by Annemarie Provisero
    ADVISOR WEBCAST: Work Execution in EAM PRODUCT FAMILY: Manufacturing Enterprise Asset Management July 5, 2011 at 8 am PT, 9 am MT, 11 am ET The purpose of this webcast is to discuss EAM Work Order Management. This one-hour session is ideal for Functional Users, System Administrators, Database Administrators, and Customers with a basic knowledge of EAM and who raise or manage work orders and related processes. During this webcast, Zar will cover the various types of work orders and look at all the related activities associated with work orders including: setup, operations, tasks, work order transactions, relationship and planning. TOPICS WILL INCLUDE: Work Order Types (Routine, Planned Maintenance, Rebuild, Easy) Work Order statuses and other important setups Operations and Tasks Relationships Work Order Transactions Work Order Planning A short, live demonstration (only if applicable) and question and answer period will be included. Oracle Advisor Webcasts are dedicated to building your awareness around our products and services. This session does not replace offerings from Oracle Global Support Services. Click here to register for this session ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The above webcast is a service of the E-Business Suite Communities in My Oracle Support. For more information on other webcasts, please reference the Oracle Advisor Webcast Schedule.Click here to visit the E-Business Communities in My Oracle Support Note that all links require access to My Oracle Support.

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  • Is it possible to have multiple subdomains point to the same Blogger blog?

    - by cclark
    For our application we want to have a status page which is hosted outside of the rest of our infrastructure so in case there are issues in our data center we can post updates for our users and our users will be able to access them. We registered a blog on Blogger and set it up with xyzstatus.blogspot.com and status.xyz.com. Everything seems to work fine. We need to perform some maintenance at our datacenter which will sever all connectivity so we're unable to have a redirect using nginx or apache. We'd like to do this with a short TTL CNAME DNS entry. Ideally www.xyz.com and app.xyz.com could be CNAMEd to status.xyz.com. When I setup the CNAME and go to that URL I get a Google broken robot 404 page. I figure I must need to let Google know it should associate traffic to www.xyz.com and app.xyz.com to the blog served up by status.xyz.com. But I can't see anywhere to do this in Blogger. Does anyone know if this is possible?

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  • OBIEE 11.1.1.6.5 Bundle Patch released Oct 2012

    - by user554629
    October  2012 OBIEE 11.1.1.6.5 Bundle Patch released Bundle patches are collection of controlled, well tested critical bug fixes for a specific product  which may include security contents and occasionally minor enhancements. These are cumulative in nature meaning the latest bundle patch in a particular series would include the contents of the previous bundle patches released.  A suite bundle patch is an aggregation of multiple product  bundle patches that are part of a product suite. For OBIEE on 11.1.1.6.0, we plan to run a monthly bundle patch cadence. 11.1.1.6.5 bundle patch- available for download from  My Oracle Support . - is cumulative, so it includes everything from previous updates- available for supported platforms ( Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HPUX-IA ) Navigate to https://support.oracle.com and login- Knowledge Base tab  Select a product line [ Business Intelligence ]  Select a Task [ Patching and Maintenance ]  Click Search- Oct 23, 2012, OBIEE 11g: Required and Recommended Patches and Patch Sets, ID 1488475.1- 11.1.1.6.5 Published 19th October 2012 Note: The 11.1.1.6 versions on top of 11.1.1.6.0 are not upgrades, they are opatch fixes.  This is not an upgrade process like from OBIEE 10g to 11g, or from OBIEE 11.1.1.5 to 11.1.1.6.  It is much safer than applying any one-off fixes, which are not regression tested.  You will be more successful using 11.1.1.6.5.  

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  • SOA Suite 11g Purging Guide

    - by ShawnBailey
    We now have a single source of truth concerning Purging in My Oracle Support. The material is contained within the SOA 11g Infrastructure Database: Installation, Maintenance and Administration Guide under the 'Purging' tab. All of the previous purge related content for 11g is now deprecated and many of the documents will redirect to this Guide while others simply contain a disclaimer. What does the Guide contain? Summary Overview of Purging. What it does and why it's important Specific information on each release of 11g Available patches for each release of 11g and recommendations How to run the different purge scripts Tips on improving performance How to begin troubleshooting problems with the process How to identify orphaned records Useful reference information Here are a couple of screen shots to help with navigation: Guide Landing Page: (click image for full view) Select the 'Purging' tab: (click image for full view) The left menu contains the following options: Alternative: Database Partitioning What to do on 11gR1 GA (11.1.1.1) What to do on PS1 (11.1.1.2) What to do on PS2 (11.1.1.3) What to do on PS3 (11.1.1.4) What to do on PS4 (11.1.1.5) Overview of PS5 (11.1.1.6) Purging Step by Step Performance Tips Troubleshooting Purge Orphaned Records Reference This resource goes hand in hand with the excellent documents SOA 11g Database Growth Management Strategy and Start Small, Grow Fast available on OTN. The latest product documentation can be found here.

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  • How to start and maintain an after-work project

    - by Sam
    I work as a full time developer. My workplace, however, is very limiting in the technologies and programming languages I can use. All of the work is done in C++. It is clear that C++ is rapidly losing (or maybe already lost) its leading position. (please don't flame me, I have years and years of C++ experience, and I love this language, I am merely stating a fact). I have a few ideas for java/android projects as well as a project I would like to implement in C#. I see this as a way for me to stay current with the job market's trends and I hope that it will help me find my next job in a more up to date area. So here's the problem, my normal workday is 10-11 hours, after finishing with the kids and house chores I get about 1-2.5 hours before I am too tired to think much less code. at that point I am going to bed frustrated, disappointed with myself for not being able to stick with my plans, and then I wake up the next morning to do it all again. I have a few hours more during the weekends but clearly I would need to do something different if I want to reach any of my goals. Is there any way for me to make better use of the time I have? Did any of you guys have a similar problem, and had succefully resolved it?

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  • Constituent Experience Counts In Public Sector

    - by Michael Seback
      Businesses and government organizations are operating in an era of the empowered customer where service  and communication channels are challenged every day.  Consumers in the private sector have high expectations from purchasing gifts online, reading reviews on social sites, and expecting the companies they do business with to know and reward them.   In the Public Sector, constituents also expect government organizations to provide consistent and timely service across agencies and touch points.  Examples include requesting critical city services, applying for social assistance or reviewing insurance plans for a health insurance exchange. If an individual does not receive the services they need at the right time and place, it can create a dire situation – involving housing, food or healthcare assistance. Government organizations need to deliver a fast, reliable and personalized experience to constituents. Look at a few recent statistics from a Government focused survey: How do you define good customer service? 70 % improved services, 48% shortest time to provide information, 44% shortest time to resolve complaints What are ways/opportunities to improve customer service? 69% increased collaboration across agencies and 41% increased customer service channels Are you using data collected to make informed decisionsto improve customer service efforts? 39% data collection is limited, not used to improve decision making Source: Re-Imagining Customer Service in Government, 2012 Click here to see the highlights.  Would you like to get started – read Eight Steps to great constituent experiences for government.

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  • Why should I use MSBuild instead of Visual Studio Solution files?

    - by Sid
    We're using TeamCity for continuous integration and it's building our releases via the solution file (.sln). I've used Makefiles in the past for various systems but never msbuild (which I've heard is sorta like Makefiles + XML mashup). I've seen many posts on how to use msbuild directly instead of the solution files but I don't see a very clear answer on why to do it. So, why should we bother migrating from solution files to an MSBuild 'makefile'? We do have a a couple of releases that differ by a #define (featurized builds) but for the most part everything works. The bigger concern is that now we'd have to maintain two systems when adding projects/source code. UPDATE: Can folks shed light on the lifecycle and interplay of the following three components? The Visual Studio .sln file The many project level .csproj files (which I understand an "sub" msbuild scripts) The custom msbuild script Is it safe to say that the .sln and .csproj are consumed/maintained as usual from within the Visual Studio IDE GUI while the custom msbuild script is hand-written and usually consumes the already existing individual .csproj "as-is"? That's one way I can see reduce overlap/duplicate in maintenance... Would appreciate some light on this from other folks' operational experience

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for October 23, 2013

    - by OTN ArchBeat
    Virtual Dev Day: Oracle ADF Development - Web, Mobile, and Beyond This free virtual event includes technical sessions that range from introductory to deep dive, covering Oracle ADF and Oracle ADF Mobile. Multiple tracks cover every interest and every level and include live online Q&A for answers to your technical questions. Register now! Americas: Tuesday, November 19, 9am-1pm PT / 12pm-4pm ET / 1pm-5pm BRT APAC: Thursday, November 21, 10am–1:30pm IST (India) / 12:30pm–4pm SGT (Singapore) / 3:30pm–7pm AESDT EMEA: Tuesday, November 26, 9am-1pm GMT / 1pm-5pm GST/ 2:30pm-6:30pm IST A Roadmap for SOA Development and Delivery | Mark Nelson Do you know the way to S-O-A? Mark Nelson does. His latest blog post, part of an ongoing series, will help to keep you from getting lost along the way. Updated ODI Statement of Direction | Robert Schweighardt Heads up Oracle Data Integrator fans! A new product statement of direction document is available, offering "an overview of the strategic product plans for Oracle’s data integration products for bulk data movement and transformation, specifically Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) and Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB)." Java-Powered Robot Named NAO Wows Crowds | Tori Wieldt Java community manager Tori Wieldt interviews a robot and human. Nordic OTN Tour 2013 | Lonneke Dikmans Oracle ACE Director Lonneke Dikmans checks in from the Stockholm leg of the Nordic OTN Tour for 2013, sponsored by the Danish Oracle User Group and featuring fellow ACE Directors Tim Hall and Sten Vesterli, plus local speakers at various stops. Lonneke's post include the slides from three of the presentations. Thought for the Day "Some people approach every problem with an open mouth." — Adlai E. Stevenson23rd Vice President of the United States (October 23, 1835 – June 14, 1914) Source: brainyquote.com

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  • In the Aggregate: How Will We Maintain Legacy Systems? [closed]

    - by Jim G.
    NEW YORK - With a blast that made skyscrapers tremble, an 83-year-old steam pipe sent a powerful message that the miles of tubes, wires and iron beneath New York and other U.S. cities are getting older and could become dangerously unstable. July 2007 Story About a Burst Steam Pipe in Manhattan We've heard about software rot and technical debt. And we've heard from the likes of: "Uncle Bob" Martin - Who warned us about "the consequences of making a mess". Michael C. Feathers - Who gave us guidance for 'Working Effectively With Legacy Code'. So certainly the software engineering community is aware of these issues. But I feel like our aggregate society does not appreciate how these issues can plague working systems and applications. As Steve McConnell notes: ...Unlike financial debt, technical debt is much less visible, and so people have an easier time ignoring it. If this is true, and I believe that it is, then I fear that governments and businesses may defer regular maintenance and fortification against hackers until it is too late. [Much like NYC and the steam pipes.] My Question: Is there a way that we can avoid the software equivalent of NYC and the steam pipes?

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  • You may be tempted by IaaS, but you should PaaS on that or your database cloud journey will be a short one

    - by B R Clouse
    Before we examine Consolidation, the next step in the journey to cloud, let's take a short detour to address a critical choice you will face at the outset of your journey: whether to deploy your databases in virtual machines or not. A common misconception we've encountered is the belief that moving to cloud computing can be accomplished by simply hosting one's current operating environment as-is within virtual machines, and then stacking those VMs together in a consolidated environment.  This solution is often described as "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS) because the building block for deployments is a VM, which behaves like a full complement of infrastructure.  This approach is easy to understand and may feel like a good first step, but it won't take your databases very far in the journey to cloud computing.  In fact, if you follow the IaaS fork in the road, your journey will end quickly, without realizing the full benefits of cloud computing.  The better option to is to rationalize the deployment stack so that VMs are needed only for exceptional cases.  By settling on a standard operating system and patch level, you create an infrastructure that potentially all of your databases can share.  Now, the building block will be database instances or possibly schemas within databases.  These components are the platforms on which you will deploy workloads, hence this is known as "Platform as a Service" (PaaS). PaaS opens the door to higher degrees of consolidation than IaaS, because with PaaS you will not need to accommodate the footprint (operating system, hypervisor, processes, ...) that each VM brings with it.  You will also reduce your maintenance overheard if you move forward without the VMs and their O/Ses to patch and monitor.  So while IaaS simply shuffles complex and varied environments into VMs,  PaaS actually reduces complexity by rationalizing to the small possible set of components.  Now we're ready to look at the consolidation options that PaaS provides -- in our next blog posting.

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  • I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?

    - by kmote
    I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice. I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 years cobbling together a vast code base. (It was written in a virtually obsolete language: G2 -- think Pascal with graphics). The program itself is a physical model of a complex chemical processing plant; the team that wrote it have incredibly deep domain knowledge but little or no formal training in programming fundamentals. They've recently learned some hard lessons about the consequences of non-existant configuration management. Their maintenance efforts are also greatly hampered by the vast accumulation of undocumented "sludge" in the code itself. I will spare you the "politics" of the situation (there's always politics!), but suffice to say, there is not a consensus of opinion about what is needed for the path ahead. They have asked me to begin presenting to the team some of the principles of modern software development. They want me to introduce some of the industry-standard practices and strategies regarding coding conventions, lifecycle management, high-level design patterns, and source control. Frankly, it's a fairly daunting task and I'm not sure where to begin. Initially, I'm inclined to tutor them in some of the central concepts of The Pragmatic Programmer, or Fowler's Refactoring ("Code Smells", etc). I also hope to introduce a number of Agile methodologies. But ultimately, to be effective, I think I'm going to need to hone in on 5-7 core fundamentals; in other words, what are the most important principles or practices that they can realistically start implementing that will give them the most "bang for the buck". So that's my question: What would you include in your list of the most effective strategies to help straighten out the spaghetti (and prevent it in the future)?

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  • Disaster Recovery Example

    Previously, I use to work for a small internet company that sells dental plans online. Our primary focus concerning disaster prevention and recovery is on our corporate website and private intranet site. We had a multiphase disaster recovery plan that includes data redundancy, load balancing, and off-site monitoring. Data redundancy is a key aspect of our disaster recovery plan. The first phase of this is to replicate our data to multiple database servers and schedule daily backups of the databases that are stored off site. The next phase is the file replication of data amongst our web servers that are also backed up daily by our collocation. In addition to the files located on the server, files are also stored locally on development machines, and again backed up using version control software. Load balancing is another key aspect of our disaster recovery plan. Load balancing offers many benefits for our system, better performance, load distribution and increased availability. With our servers behind a load balancer our system has the ability to accept multiple requests simultaneously because the load is split between multiple servers. Plus if one server is slow or experiencing a failure the traffic is diverted amongst the other servers connected to the load balancer allowing the server to get back online. The final key to our disaster recovery plan is off-site monitoring that notifies all IT staff of any outages or errors on the main website encountered by the monitor. Messages are sent by email, voicemail, and SMS. According to Disasterrecovery.org, disaster recovery planning is the way companies successfully manage crises with minimal cost and effort and maximum speed compared to others that are forced to make decision out of desperation when disasters occur. In addition Sun Guard stated in 2009 that the first step in disaster recovery planning is to analyze company risks and factor in fixed costs for things like hardware, software, staffing and utilities, as well as indirect costs, such as floor space, power protection, physical and information security, and management. Also availability requirements need to be determined per application and system as well as the strategies for recovery.

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  • What is a 'good number' of exceptions to implement for my library?

    - by Fuzz
    I've always wondered how many different exception classes I should implement and throw for various pieces of my software. My particular development is usually C++/C#/Java related, but I believe this is a question for all languages. I want to understand what is a good number of different exceptions to throw, and what the developer community expect of a good library. The trade-offs I see include: More exception classes can allow very fine grain levels of error handling for API users (prone to user configuration or data errors, or files not being found) More exception classes allows error specific information to be embedded in the exception, rather than just a string message or error code More exception classes can mean more code maintenance More exception classes can mean the API is less approachable to users The scenarios I wish to understand exception usage in include: During 'configuration' stage, which might include loading files or setting parameters During an 'operation' type phase where the library might be running tasks and doing some work, perhaps in another thread Other patterns of error reporting without using exceptions, or less exceptions (as a comparison) might include: Less exceptions, but embedding an error code that can be used as a lookup Returning error codes and flags directly from functions (sometimes not possible from threads) Implemented an event or callback system upon error (avoids stack unwinding) As developers, what do you prefer to see? If there are MANY exceptions, do you bother error handling them separately anyway? Do you have a preference for error handling types depending on the stage of operation?

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  • How to Reap Anticipated ROI in Large-Scale Capital Projects

    - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP
    Only a small fraction of companies in asset-intensive industries reliably achieve expected ROI for major capital projects 90 percent of the time, according to a new industry study. In addition, 12 percent of companies see expected ROIs in less than half of their capital projects. The problem: no matter how sophisticated and far-reaching the planning processes are, many organizations struggle to manage risks or reap the expected value from major capital investments. The data is part of the larger survey of companies in oil and gas, mining and metals, chemicals, and utilities industries. The results appear in Prepare for the Unexpected: Investment Planning in Asset-Intensive Industries, a comprehensive new report sponsored by Oracle and developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Analysts say the shortcomings in large-scale, long-duration capital-investments projects often stem from immature capital-planning processes. The poor decisions that result can lead to significant financial losses and disappointing project benefits, which are particularly harmful to organizations during economic downturns. The report highlights three other important findings. Teaming the right data and people doesn’t guarantee that ROI goals will be achieved. Despite involving cross-functional teams and looking at all the pertinent data, executives are still failing to identify risks and deliver bottom-line results on capital projects. Effective processes are the missing link. Project-planning processes are weakest when it comes to risk management and predicting costs and ROI. Organizations participating in the study said they fail to achieve expected ROI because they regularly experience unexpected events that derail schedules and inflate budgets. But executives believe that using more-robust risk management and project planning strategies will help avoid delays, improve ROI, and more accurately predict the long-term cost of initiatives. Planning for unexpected events is a key to success. External factors, such as changing market conditions and evolving government policies are difficult to forecast precisely, so organizations need to build flexibility into project plans to make it easier to adapt to the changes. The report outlines a series of steps executives can take to address these shortcomings and improve their capital-planning processes. Read the full report or take the benchmarking survey and find out how your organization compares.

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  • Develop in trunk and then branch off, or in release branch and then merge back?

    - by Torben Gundtofte-Bruun
    Say that we've decided on following a "release-based" branching strategy, so we'll have a branch for each release, and we can add maintenance updates as sub-branches from those. Does it matter whether we: develop and stabilize a new release in the trunk and then "save" that state in a new release branch; or first create that release branch and only merge into the trunk when the branch is stable? I find the former to be easier to deal with (less merging necessary), especially when we don't develop on multiple upcoming releases at the same time. Under normal circumstances we would all be working on the trunk, and only work on released branches if there are bugs to fix. What is the trunk actually used for in the latter approach? It seems to be almost obsolete, because I could create a future release branch based on the most recent released branch rather than from the trunk. Details based on comment below: Our product consists of a base platform and a number of modules on top; each is developed and even distributed separately from each other. Most team members work on several of these areas, so there's partial overlap between people. We generally work only on 1 future release and not at all on existing releases. One or two might work on a bugfix for an existing release for short periods of time. Our work isn't compiled and it's a mix of Unix shell scripts, XML configuration files, SQL packages, and more -- so there's no way to have push-button builds that can be tested. That's done manually, which is a bit laborious. A release cycle is typically half a year or more for the base platform; often 1 month for the modules.

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  • Java Magazine: Developer Tools and More

    - by Tori Wieldt
    The May/June issue of Java Magazine explores the tools and techniques that can help you bring your ideas to fruition and make you more productive. In “Seven Open Source Tools for Java Deployment,” Bruno Souza and Edson Yanaga present a set of tools that you can use now to drastically improve the deployment process on projects big or small—enabling you and your team to focus on building better and more-innovative software in a less stressful environment. We explore the future of application development tools at Oracle in our interview with Oracle’s Chris Tonas, who discusses plans for NetBeans IDE 9, Oracle’s support for Eclipse, and key trends in the software development space. For more on NetBeans IDE, don’t miss “Quick and Easy Conversion to Java SE 8 with NetBeans IDE 8” and “Build with NetBeans IDE, Deploy to Oracle Java Cloud Service.” We also give you insight into Scrum, an iterative and incremental agile process, with a tour of a development team’s Scrum sprint. Find out if Scrum will work for your team. Other article topics include mastering binaries in Maven-based projects, creating sophisticated applications with HTML5 and JSF, and learning to program with BlueJ. At the end of the day, tools don’t make great code—you do. What tools are vital to your development process? How are you innovating today? Let us know. Send a tweet to @oraclejavamag. The next big thing is always just around the corner—maybe it’s even an idea that’s percolating in *your* brain. Get started today with this issue of Java Magazine. Java Magazine is a FREE, bi-monthly, online publication. It includes technical articles on the Java language and platform; Java innovations and innovators; JUG and JCP news; Java events; links to online Java communities; and videos and multimedia demos. Subscriptions are free, registration required.

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