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• IE9 not rendering box-shadow Elements inside of Table Cells

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ran into an annoying problem today with IE 9. Slowly updating some older sites with CSS 3 tags and for the most part IE9 does a reasonably decent job of working with the new CSS 3 features. Not all by a long shot but at least some of the more useful ones like border-radius and box-shadow are supported. Until today I was happy to see that IE supported box-shadow just fine, but I ran into a problem with some old markup that uses tables for its main layout sections. I found that inside of a table cell IE fails to render a box-shadow. Below are images from Chrome (left) and IE 9 (right) of the same content: The download and purchase images are rendered with: <a href="download.asp" style="display:block;margin: 10px;"><img src="../images/download.gif" class="boxshadow roundbox" /></a> where the .boxshadow and .roundbox styles look like this:.boxshadow { -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; } .roundbox { -moz-border-radius: 6px 6px 6px 6px; -webkit-border-radius: 6px; border-radius: 6px 6px 6px 6px; } And the Problem is… collapsed Table Borders Now normally these two styles work just fine in IE 9 when applied to elements. But the box-shadow doesn't work inside of this markup - because the parent container is a table cell.<td class="sidebar" style="border-collapse: collapse"> … <a href="download.asp" style="display:block;margin: 10px;"><img src="../images/download.gif" class="boxshadow roundbox" /></a> …</td> This HTML causes the image to not show a shadow. In actuality I'm not styling inline, but as part of my browser Reset I have the following in my master .css file:table { border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0; } which has the same effect as the inline style. border-collapse by default inherits from the parent and so the TD inherits from table and tr - so TD tags are effectively collapsed. You can check out a test document that demonstrates this behavior here in this CodePaste.net snippet or run it here. How to work around this Issue To get IE9 to render the shadows inside of the TD tag correctly, I can just change the style explicitly NOT to use border-collapse:<td class="sidebar" style="border-collapse: separate; border-width: 0;"> Or better yet (thanks to David's comment below), you can add the border-collapse: separate to the .boxshadow style like this:.boxshadow { -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; box-shadow: 3px 3px 5px #535353; border-collapse: separate; } With either of these approaches IE renders the shadows correctly. Do you really need border-collapse? Should you bother with border-collapse? I think so! Collapsed borders render flat as a single fat line if a border-width and border-color are assigned, while separated borders render a thin line with a bunch of weird white space around it or worse render a old skool 3D raised border which is terribly ugly as well. So as a matter of course in any app my browser Reset includes the above code to make sure all tables with borders render the same flat borders. As you probably know, IE has all sorts of rendering issues in tables and on backgrounds (opacity backgrounds or image backgrounds) most of which is caused by the way that IE internally uses ActiveX filters to apply these effects. Apparently collapsed borders are yet one more item that causes problems with rendering. There you have it. Another crappy failure in IE we have to check for now, just one more reason to hate Internet Explorer. Luckily this one has a reasonably easy workaround. I hope this helps out somebody and saves them the hour I spent trying to figure out what caused this problem in the first place. Resources Sample HTML document that demonstrates the behavior Run the Sample© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML  Internet Explorer   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up I

  - by Tim Dexter

  I was out in Yellowstone last week soaking up various wildlife and a bit too much rain ... good to be back until the 95F heat yesterday. Taking a little break from the Excel templates; the dev folks are planing an Excel patch in the next week or so that will add a mass of new functionality. At the risk of completely mis leading you I'm going to hang back a while. What I have written so far holds true and will continue to do so. This week, I have been mostly eating 'mapviewer' ... answers on a post card please, TV show and character. I had a request to show how BIP can call mapviewer and render a dynamic map in an output. So I hit the books and colleagues for some answers. Mapviewer is Oracle's geographic information system, hereby known as GIS. I use it a lot in our BIEE demos where the interaction with the maps is very impressive. Need a map of California and its congressional districts? I have contacts; Jerry and David with their little black box of maps. Once in my possession I can build highly interactive, clickable maps that allow the user to drill into more information using a very friendly interface driving BIEE content and navigation. But what about maps in BIP output? Bryan Wise, who has written some articles on this blog did some work a while back with the PL/SQL API interface. The extract for the report called a function that in turn called the mapviewer server, passing a set of mapping requirements, it then returned a URL to a cached copy of that map. Easy to then have BIP render that image. Thats still very doable. You need to install a couple of packages and then load the mapviewer java APIs into the database. Then you can write your function to the APIs. A little involved? Maybe, but the database is doing all the heavy lifting for you. I thought I would investigate another method for getting the maps back into BIP. There is a URL interface you can call, this involves building an XML message to be passed to the mapviewer server. It's pretty straightforward to use on the mapviewer side. On the BIP side things are little more tricksy. After some unexpected messing about I finally got the ubiquitous Hello World map to render using the URL method. Not the most exciting map in the world, lots of ocean and a rather long URL to get it to render. http://127.0.0.1:9704/mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22%20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E Notice all of the encoding in the URL string to handle the spaces, quotes, etc. All necessary to get BIP to make the call to the mapviewer server correctly without truncating the URL if it hits a real space rather than a %20. With that in mind constructing the URL was pretty simple. I'm not going to get into the content of the URL too much, for that you need to bone up on the mapviewer XML API. Check out the home page here and the documentation here. To make the template portable I used the standard CURRENT_SERVER_URL parameter from the BIP server and declared that in my template. <?param@begin:CURRENT_SERVER_URL;'myserver'?> Ignore the 'myserver', that was just a dummy value for testing at runtime it will resolve to: 'http://yourserver:port/xmlpserver' Not quite what we need as mapviewer has its own server path, in my case I needed 'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=' as the fixed path to the mapviewer request URL. A little concatenation and substringing later I came up with <?param@begin:mURL;concat(substring($CURRENT_SERVER_URL,1,22),'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=')?> Thats the basic URL that I can then build on. To get the Hello World map I need to add the following: <map_request title="Hello World" datasource="cagis" format="GIF_STREAM"/> Those angle brackets were the source of my headache, BIPs XSLT engine was attempting to process them rather than just pass them. Hok Min to the rescue ... again. I owe him lunch when I get out to HQ again! To solve the problem, I needed to escape all the characters and white space and then use native XSL to assign the string to a parameter. <xsl:param xdofo:ctx="begin"name="pXML">%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22 %20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E</xsl:param> I did not need to assign it to a parameter but I felt that if I were going to do anything more serious than Hello World like plotting points of interest on the map. I would need to dynamically build the URL, so using a set of parameters or variables that I then concatenated would be easier. Now I had the initial server string and the request all I then did was combine the two using a concat: concat($mURL,$pXML) Embedding that into an image tag: <fo:external-graphic src="url({concat($mURL,$pXML)})"/> and I was done. Notice the curly braces to get the concat evaluated prior to the image call. As you will see next time, building the XML message to go onto the URL can get quite complex but I have used it with some data. Ultimately, it would be easier to build an extension to BIP to handle the data to be plotted, it would then build the XML message, call mapviewer and return a URL to the map image for BIP to render. More on that next time ...

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• A Semantic Model For Html: TagBuilder and HtmlTags

  - by Ryan Ohs

  In this post I look into the code smell that is HTML literals and show how we can refactor these pesky strings into a friendlier and more maintainable model.   The Problem When I started writing MVC applications, I quickly realized that I built a lot of my HTML inside HtmlHelpers. As I did this, I ended up moving quite a bit of HTML into string literals inside my helper classes. As I wanted to add more attributes (such as classes) to my tags, I needed to keep adding overloads to my helpers. A good example of this end result is the default html helpers that come with the MVC framework. Too many overloads make me crazy! The problem with all these overloads is that they quickly muck up the API and nobody can remember exactly what order the parameters go in. I've seen many presenters (including members of the ASP.NET MVC team!) stumble before realizing that their view wasn't compiling because they needed one more null parameter in the call to Html.ActionLink(). What if instead of writing Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", null, new { @class = "navigation" }) we could do Html.LinkToAction("Edit").Text("Edit").AddClass("navigation") ? Wouldn't that be much easier to remember and understand?  We can do this if we introduce a semantic model for building our HTML.   What is a Semantic Model? According to Martin Folwer, "a semantic model is an in-memory representation, usually an object model, of the same subject that the domain specific language describes." In our case, the model would be a set of classes that know how to render HTML. By using a semantic model we can free ourselves from dealing with strings and instead output the HTML (typically via ToString()) once we've added all the elements and attributes we desire to the model. There are two primary semantic models available in ASP.NET MVC: MVC 2.0's TagBuilder and FubuMVC's HtmlTags.   TagBuilder TagBuilder is the html builder that is available in ASP.NET MVC 2.0. I'm not a huge fan but it gets the job done -- for simple jobs.  Here's an overview of how to use TagBuilder. See my Tips section below for a few comments on that example. The disadvantage of TagBuilder is that unless you wrap it up with our own classes, you still have to write the actual tag name over and over in your code. eg. new TagBuilder("div") instead of new DivTag(). I also think it's method names are a little too long. Why not have AddClass() instead of AddCssClass() or Text() instead of SetInnerText()? What those methods are doing should be pretty obvious even in the short form. I also don't like that it wants to generate an id attribute from your input instead of letting you set it yourself using external conventions. (See GenerateId() and IdAttributeDotReplacement)). Obviously these come from Microsoft's default approach to MVC but may not be optimal for all programmers.   HtmlTags HtmlTags is in my opinion the much better option for generating html in ASP.NET MVC. It was actually written as a part of FubuMVC but is available as a stand alone library. HtmlTags provides a much cleaner syntax for writing HTML. There are classes for most of the major tags and it's trivial to create additional ones by inheriting from HtmlTag. There are also methods on each tag for the common attributes. For instance, FormTag has an Action() method. The SelectTag class allows you to set the default option or first option independent from adding other options. With TagBuilder there isn't even an abstraction for building selects! The project is open source and always improving. I'll hopefully find time to submit some of my own enhancements soon.   Tips 1) It's best not to have insanely overloaded html helpers. Use fluent builders. 2) In html helpers, return the TagBuilder/tag itself (not a string!) so that you can continue to add attributes outside the helper; see my first sample above. 3) Create a static entry point into your builders. I created a static Tags class that gives me access all the HtmlTag classes I need. This way I don't clutter my code with "new" keywords. eg. Tags.Div returns a new DivTag instance. 4) If you find yourself doing something a lot, create an extension method for it. I created a Nest() extension method that reads much more fluently than the AddChildren() method. It also accepts a params array of tags so I can very easily nest many children.   I hope you have found this post helpful. Join me in my war against HTML literals! I’ll have some more samples of how I use HtmlTags in future posts.

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• Silverlight Cream for December 18, 2010 -- #1012

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Mark Monster, Kevin Dockx, Jeremy Likness(-2-,-3-), Timmy Kokke, Den Delimarsky, Mike Snow, Samuel Jack(-2-), and Renuka Prasad(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Trigger a Storyboard on ViewModel changes" Mark Monster WP7: "Microsoft Push Notification in Windows Phone 7" Renuka Prasad Shoutouts: SilverlightGal sent me the link to The Silverlight Dossier ... I think it's a pretty good start... additions I'd like to see are ways to submit to the various areas. Michael Crump put up a contest that runs from now to January 1st... Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!... pretty cool, Michael! If you visit WynApse.com, you'll see I have a subscription to LearnVisualStudio.net... and now they have posted a batch of WP7 videos... 64 of them to be exact... wow!: New video series From SilverlightCream.com: Trigger a Storyboard on ViewModel changes Mark Monster has a great post up about triggering Storyboard on ViewModel changes using the DataTrigger from Blend... cool stuff, and you can also do GoToStateAction or other actions or build yourowndang Trigger Action... fun awaits! ... sorry it took a while to post, Mark... been a tad overloaded here! Working with the Silverlight Rich Text Box control Kevin Dockx has had a post up for a while at SilverlightShow where he takes a good look at the RichText control and it's various capabilities, including source so you can give it a dance yourself. Lessons Learned in Personal Web Page Part 3: Custom Panel and Listbox Jeremy Likness's part 3 of his Personal Web Page lessons learned is covering the tres-cool 3D Panel he did... and he's got it all explained out... building from scratch via a custom panel and a Listbox control... A Silverlight MVVM Feed Reader from Scratch in 30 Minutes Jeremy Likness has a video tutorial showing building an MVVM/Silverlight feedreader in 30 minutes ... plus a couple mods that he noticed after the fact... beat that HTML5 :) Jounce Part 8: Raising Property Changed In Jeremy Likness's latest post, he has number 8 in his series on his MVVM platform, Jounce. This time he's explaining the property changed notification, has a very cool way of doing it, and some interesting comments from readers. Dependency Injection, MVVM, Ninject and Silverlight Timmy Kokke has a great tutorial up with associated demo project on Dependency Injection in MVVM and Silverlight. Some hidden features in the Windows Phone 7 emulator Den Delimarsky shows how to get some of the hidden features on your WP7 emulator like the Call History, Call Settings, and Details about the numbers. Playing sound effects on Windows Phone 7 Mike Snow's latest tip is playing sound effects on your WP7 ... a little bit of XNA here and there, and badabing, badaboom, you got sound! Day 3 of my “Build a Windows Phone 7 game in 3 days” Challenge Samuel Jack has a couple more posts up about his 'Build a WP7 game in 3 Days' challenge... first up is Day 3 from 8:50 to 22:30 ... wow... long day! ... but he's got something good going now... some good external links also Day 3.5 of my “Build a Windows Phone 7 game in 3 days” Challenge Samuel Jack's 3rd day ended with another half-day added on to put on some finishing touches... again, some good external links... and he finished with this Say hello to Simon Squared, my 3.5 day old WP7 Game Microsoft Push Notification in Windows Phone 7 Renuka Prasad has a bunch of material up that I've not been aware of (how did that happen, people??) ... here's the first of a couple of his posts on Code Project ... a very nice tutorial on the Push Notification process... great diagrams and external links. Windows Phone 7 – Toast Notification Using Windows Azure Cloud Service Renuka Prasad has another WP7 post on CodeProject... this one on Toast Notification... and he's using Azure and WCF all rolled into it as well... great diagrams, descriptions and all the code. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• 5 Things I Learned About the IT Labor Shortage

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  by Jim Lein | Sr. Principal Product Marketing Director | Oracle Midsize Programs | @JimLein 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:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} 5 Things I Learned About the IT Labor Shortage A gentle autumn breeze is nudging the last golden leaves off the aspen trees. It’s time to wrap up the series that I started back in April, “The Growing IT Labor Shortage: Are You Feeling It?” Even in a time of relatively high unemployment, labor shortages exist depending on many factors, including location, industry, IT requirements, and company size. According to Manpower Groups 2013 Talent Shortage Survey, 35% of hiring managers globally are having difficulty filling jobs. Their top three challenges in filling jobs are: 1. lack of technical competencies (hard skills) 2. Lack of available applicants 3. Lack of experience The same report listed Technicians as the most difficult position to fill in the United States For most companies, Human Capital and Talent Management have never been more strategic and they are striving for ways streamline processes, reduce turnover, and lower costs (see this Oracle whitepaper, “ Simplify Workforce Management and Increase Global Agility”). Everyone I spoke to—partner, customer, and Oracle experts—agreed that it can be extremely challenging to hire and retain IT talent in today’s labor market. And they generally agreed on the causes: a. IT is so pervasive that there are myriad moving parts requiring support and expertise, b. thus, it’s hard for university graduates to step in and contribute immediately without experience and specialization, c. big IT companies generally aren’t the talent incubators that they were in the freewheeling 90’s due to bottom line pressures that require hiring talent that can hit the ground running, and d. it’s often too expensive for resource-strapped midsize companies to invest the time and money required to get graduates up to speed. Here are my top lessons learned from my conversations with the experts. 1. A Better Title Would Have Been, “The Challenges of Finding and Retaining IT Talent That Matches Your Requirements” There are more applicants than jobs but it’s getting tougher and tougher to find individuals that perfectly fit each and every role. Top performing companies are increasingly looking to hire the “almost ready”, striving to keep their existing talent more engaged, and leveraging their employee’s social and professional networks to quickly narrow down candidate searches (here’s another whitepaper, “A Strategic Approach to Talent Management”). 2. Size Matters—But So Does Location Midsize companies must strive to build cultures that compete favorably with what large enterprises can offer, especially when they aren’t within commuting distance of IT talent strongholds. They can’t always match the compensation and benefits offered by large enterprises so it's paramount to offer candidates high quality of life and opportunities to build their resumes in alignment with their long term career aspirations. 3. Get By With a Little Help From Your Friends It doesn’t always make sense to invest time and money in training an employee on a task they will not perform frequently. Or get in a bidding war for talent with skills that are rare and in high demand. Many midsize companies are finding that it makes good economic sense to contract with partners for remote support rather than trying to divvy up each and every role amongst their lean staff. Internal staff can be assigned to roles that will have the highest positive impact on achieving organizational goals. 4. It’s Actually Both “What You Know” AND “Who You Know” If I was hiring someone today I would absolutely leverage the social and professional networks of my co-workers. Period. Most research shows that hiring in this manner is less expensive and time consuming AND produces better results. There is also some evidence that suggests new hires from employees’ networks have higher job performance and retention rates. 5. I Have New Respect for Recruiters and Hiring Managers My hats off to them—it’s not easy hiring and retaining top talent with today’s challenges. Check out the infographic, “A New Day: Taking HR from Chaos to Control”, on Oracle’s Human Capital Management solutions home page. You can also explore all of Oracle’s HCM solutions from that page based on your role. You can read all the posts in this series by clicking on the links in the right sidebar. Stay tuned…we’ll continue to post thought leadership on HCM and Talent Management topics.

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• Oracle WebCenter at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

  - by Brian Dirking

  We had a great week at the E20 Conference, presenting in four sessions – Andy MacMillan gave a session titled Today’s Successful Enterprises are Social Enterprises and was on a panel that Tony Byrne moderated; Christian Finn spoke on a panel on Unified Communications Unified Communications + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds?, Mark Bennett spoke on a panel on The Evolution of Talent Management. The key areas of focus this year were sentiment analysis, adoption and community building, the benefits of failure, and social’s role in process applications. Sentiment analysis. This was focused not on external audiences but more on employee sentiment. Tim Young showed his internal "NikoNiko" project, where employees use smilies to report their current mood. The result was a dashboard that showed the company mood by department. Since the goal is to improve productivity, people can see which departments are running into issues and try and address them. A company might otherwise wait until the end of the quarter financials to find out that there was a problem and product didn’t ship. This is a way to identify issues immediately. Tim is great – he had the crowd laughing as soon as he hit the stage, with his proposed hastag for his session: by making it 138 characters long, people couldn’t say much behind his back. And as I tweeted during his session, I loved his comment that complexity diffuses energy - it sounds like something Sun Tzu would say. Another example of employee sentiment analysis was CubeVibe. Founder and CEO Aaron Aycock, in his 3 minute pitch or die session talked about how engaged employees perform better. It was too bad he got gonged, he was just picking up speed, but CubeVibe did win the vote – congratulations to them. Internal adoption, community building, and involvement. On this topic I spoke to Terri Griffith, and she said there is some good work going on at University of Indiana regarding this, and hinted that she might be blogging about it in the near future. This area holds lots of interest for me. Amongst our customers, - CPAC stands out as an organization that has successfully built a community. So, I wonder - what are the building blocks? A strong leader? A common or unifying purpose? A certain level of engagement? I imagine someone has created an equation that says “for a community to grow at 30% per month, there must be an engagement level x to the square root of y, where x equals current community size, and y equals the expected growth rate, and the result is how many engagements the average user must contribute to maintain that growth.” Does anyone have a framework like that? The net result of everyone’s experience is that there is nothing to do but start early and fail often. Kevin Jones made this the focus of his keynote. He talked about the types of failure and what they mean. And he showed his famous kids at work video: Kevin’s blog also has this post: Social Business Failure #8: Workflow Integration. This is something that we’ve been working on at Oracle. Since so much of business is based in enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM (and since Oracle offers e-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, as well as Fusion Applications), it makes sense that the social capabilities of Oracle WebCenter is built right into these applications. There are two types of social collaboration – ad-hoc, and exception handling. When you are in a business process and encounter an exception, you immediately look for 1) the document that tells you how to handle it, or 2) the person who can tell you how to handle it. With WebCenter built into these processes, people either search their content management system, or engage in expertise location and conversation. The great thing is, THEY DON’T HAVE TO LEAVE THE APPLICATION TO DO IT. Oracle has built the social capabilities right into the applications and business processes. I don’t think enough folks were able to see that at the event, but I expect that over the next six months folks will become very aware of it. WebCenter also provides the ability to have ad-hoc collaboration, search, and expertise location that folks need when they are innovating or collaborating. We demonstrated Oracle Social Network. It’s built on our Oracle WebCenter product to provide social collaboration inside and outside of your company. When we showed it to people, there were a number of areas that they commented on that were different from the other products being shown at the conference: Screenshots from within the product Many authors working on documents simultaneously Flagging people for follow up Direct ability to call out to people Ability to see presence not just if someone is online, but which conversation they are actively in Great stuff, the conference was full of smart people that that we enjoy spending time with. We’ll keep up in the meantime, but we look forward to seeing you in Boston.

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• Whoosh: PASS Board Year 1, Q4

  - by Denise McInerney

  "Whoosh". That's the sound the last quarter of 2012 made as it rushed by. My first year on the PASS Board is complete, and the last three months of it were probably the busiest. PASS Summit 2012 Much of October was devoted to preparing for Summit. Every Board  member, HQ staffer and dozens of volunteers were busy in the run-up to our flagship event. It takes a lot of work to put on the Summit. The community meetings,  first-timers program, keynotes, sessions and that fabulous Community Appreciation party are the result of many hours of preparation. Virtual Chapters at the Summit With a lot of help from Karla Landrum, Michelle Nalliah, Lana Montgomery and others at HQ the VCs had a good presence at Summit. We started the week with a VC leaders meeting. I shared some information about the activities and growth during the first part of the year.   From January - September 2012: The number of VCs increased from 14 to 20 VC membership  grew from 55,200 to 80,100 Total attendance at VC meetings increased from 1,480 to 2,198 Been part of PASS Global Growth with language-based VC- including Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. We also heard from some VC leaders and volunteers. Ryan Adams (Performance VC) shared his tips for successful marketing of VC events. Amy Lewis (Business Intelligence VC) described how the BI chapter has expanded to support PASS' global growth by finding volunteers to organize events at times that are convenient for people in Europe and Australia. Felipe Ferreira (Portuguese language VC) described the experience of building a user group first in Brazil, then expanding to work with Portuguese-speaking data professionals around the world. Virtual Chapter leaders and volunteers were in evidence throughout Summit, beginning with the Welcome Reception. For the past several years VCs have had an organized presence at this event, signing up new members and advertising their meetings. Many VC leaders also spent time at the Community Zone. This new addition to the Summit proved to be a vibrant spot were new members and volunteers could network with others and find out how to start a chapter or host a SQL Saturday. Women In Technology 2012 was the 10th WIT Luncheon to be held at Summit. I was honored to be asked to be on the panel to discuss the topic "Where Have We Been and Where are We Going?" The PASS community has come a long way in our understanding of issues facing women in tech and our support of women in the organization. It was great to hear from panelists Stefanie Higgins and Kevin Kline who were there at the beginning as well as Kendra Little and Jen Stirrup who are part of the progress being made by women in our community today. Bylaw Changes The Board spent a good deal of time in 2012 discussing how to move our global growth initiatives forward. An important component of this is a proposed change to how the Board is elected with some seats representing geographic regions. At the end of December we voted on these proposed bylaw changes which have been published for review. The member review and feedback is open until February 8. I encourage all members to review these changes and send any feedback to [email protected]  In addition to reading the bylaws, I recommend reading Bill Graziano's blog post on the subject. Business Analytics Conference At Summit we announced a new event: the PASS Business Analytics Conference. The inaugural event will be April 10-12, 2013 in Chicago. The world of data is changing rapidly. More and more businesses want to extract value and insight from their data. Data professionals who provide these insights or enable others to do so are in demand. The BA Conference offers expert content on predictive analytics, data exploration and visualization, content delivery strategies and more. By holding this new event PASS is participating in important discussions happening in our industry, offering our members more educational value and reaching out to data professionals who are not currently part of our organization. New Year, New Portfolio In addition to my work with the Virtual Chapters I am also now responsible for the 24 Hours of PASS portfolio. Since the first 24HOP of 2013 is scheduled for January 30 we started the transition of the portfolio work from Rob Farley to me right after Summit. Work immediately started to secure speakers for the January event. We have also been evaluating webinar platforms that can be used for 24HOP as well as the Virtual Chapters. Next Up 24 Hours of PASS: Business Analytics Edition will be held on January 30. I'll be there and will moderate one or two sessions. The 24HOP topics are a sneak peek into the type of content that will be offered at the Business Analytics Conference. I hope to see some of you there. The Virtual Chapters have hit the ground running in 2013; many of them have events scheduled. The Application Development VC is getting restarted  and a new Business Analytics VC will be starting soon. Check out the lineup and join the VCs that interest you. And watch the Events page and Connector for announcements of upcoming meetings. At the end of January I will be attending a Board meeting in Seattle, and February 23 I will be at SQL Saturday #177 in Silicon Valley.

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• Top ten things that don't make sense in The Walking Dead

  - by iamjames

  For those of you that don't know, The Walking Dead is a popular American TV show on AMC about a group of people trying to survive in a zombie-filled world.Here's the top ten eleven things that don't make sense on the show (and have never been explained) 1)  They never visit stores.  No Walmarts, Kmarts, Targets, shopping malls, pawn shops, gas stations, etc.  You'd think that would be the first place you'd visit for supplies, but they never have.  Not once.  There was a tiny corner store they visited in a small town, and while many products were already gone they did find several useful items.  2)  They never raid houses.  Why not?  One would imagine that they would want to search houses for useful items, but they don't.3)  They don't use 2 way radios.  Modern 2-way radios have a 36-mile range.  That's probably best possible range, but even if the range is only 10% of that, 3.6 miles, that's still more than enough for most situations, for the occasional "hey zombies attacking can you give me a hand?" or "there's zombies walking by stay inside until they leave" or "remember to pick up milk at the store love mom".  And yes they would need batteries or recharging, but they have been using gas-powered generators on the show and I'm sure a car charger would work.4)  They use gas-guzzling vehicles.  Every vehicle they have is from the 80s or 90s except for the new Kia SUV there for product placement.  Why?  They should all be driving new small SUVs or hybrids.  Visit a dealership and steal more fuel-efficient vehicles, because while the Walmart's might be empty from people raiding them for supplies, I'm sure most people weren't thinking "Gee, I should go car shopping" when the infection hit5)  They drive a motorcycle.  Seriously?  Let's find the least protective vehicle and drive that.  And while motorcycles get reasonable gas mileage, 5 people in a SUV gets better gas mileage per person than 5 people all driving motorcycles so it doesn't make economical sense either.6)  They drive loud vehicles.  The motorcycle used is commonly referred to as a chopper and is about as loud as a motorcycle can get.  The zombies are attracted to loud noise, so wouldn't it make more sense to drive vehicles that makes less sound?  Because as soon as you stop the bike and get off you're surrounded by zombies that heard you coming.  And it's not just the bike, the ~1980s Chevy SUV in the show is also very loud.7)  They never run out of food.  Seems like that would be a almost daily struggle, keeping enough food available for about a dozen people, yet I've never seen them visit a grocery store or local convenience store to stock up.8)  They don't carry swords, machetes, clubs, etc.  Let's face it, biting is not a very effective means of attack.  It's good for animals because they have fangs and little else, but humans have been finding better ways of killing each other since forever.  So why doesn't everyone on the show carry a sword or machete or at least a baseball bat?  Anything is better than wasting valuable bullets all the time.  Sure, dozen zombies approaching?  Shoot them.  One zombie approaching?  Save the bullet, cut off it's head.  9)  They do not wear protective clothing.  Human teeth are not exactly the sharpest teeth in the animal kingdom.  The leather shoes your dog ripped to shreds within minutes would probably take you days to bite through.  So why do they walk around half-naked?  Yes I know it's hot in Atlanta, but you'd think they'd at least have some tough leather coats or something for protection.  Maybe put a few small vent holes in the fabric if it's really hot.  Or better:  make your own chainmail.  Chainmail was used for thousands of years for protection from swords and is still used by scuba divers for protection from sharks.  If swords and sharks can't puncture it, human teeth don't stand a chance.  10)  They don't build barricades or dig trenches around properties.  In Season 2 they stayed at a farm in the middle of no where.  While being far away from people is a great way to stay far away from zombies, it would still make sense to build some sort of defenses.  Hordes of zombies would knock down almost any fence, but what about a trench or moat?  Maybe something not too wide so it can be jumped over easily but a zombie would fall into because I haven't seen too many jumping zombies on the show.  11)  They don't live in a mall or tall office building.  A mall would be perfect.  They have large security gates designed to keep even hundreds of people from breaking in and offer lots of supplies and food.  They're usually hundreds of thousands of square feet and fully enclosed, one could probably live their entire life happily in a mall.  Tall office building with on-site cafeteria would be another good choice.  They also usually offer good security and office furniture could be pushed out of the windows to crush approaching zombies, and the cafeteria is usually stocked to provide food for hundreds or thousands of office workers so food wouldn't be a problem for a long time. So there you have it, eleven things that don't make sense in The Walking Dead.  Have any of your own you'd like to add or were one of these things covered in the show?  Let me know in the comments.

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• JDK bug migration: components and subcomponents

  - by darcy

  One subtask of the JDK migration from the legacy bug tracking system to JIRA was reclassifying bugs from a three-level taxonomy in the legacy system, (product, category, subcategory), to a fundamentally two-level scheme in our customized JIRA instance, (component, subcomponent). In the JDK JIRA system, there is technically a third project-level classification, but by design a large majority of JDK-related bugs were migrated into a single "JDK" project. In the end, over 450 legacy subcategories were simplified into about 120 subcomponents in JIRA. The 120 subcomponents are distributed among 17 components. A rule of thumb used was that a subcategory had to have at least 50 bugs in it for it to be retained. Below is a listing the component / subcomponent classification of the JDK JIRA project along with some notes and guidance on which OpenJDK email addresses cover different areas. Eventually, a separate incidents project to host new issues filed at bugs.sun.com will use a slightly simplified version of this scheme. The preponderance of bugs and subcomponents for the JDK are in library-related areas, with components named foo-libs and subcomponents primarily named after packages. While there was an overall condensation of subcomponents in the migration, in some cases long-standing informal divisions in core libraries based on naming conventions in the description were promoted to formal subcomponents. For example, hundreds of bugs in the java.util subcomponent whose descriptions started with "(coll)" were moved into java.util:collections. Likewise, java.lang bugs starting with "(reflect)" and "(proxy)" were moved into java.lang:reflect. client-libs (Predominantly discussed on 2d-dev and awt-dev and swing-dev.) 2d demo java.awt java.awt:i18n java.beans (See beans-dev.) javax.accessibility javax.imageio javax.sound (See sound-dev.) javax.swing core-libs (See core-libs-dev.) java.io java.io:serialization java.lang java.lang.invoke java.lang:class_loading java.lang:reflect java.math java.net java.nio (Discussed on nio-dev.) java.nio.charsets java.rmi java.sql java.sql:bridge java.text java.util java.util.concurrent java.util.jar java.util.logging java.util.regex java.util:collections java.util:i18n javax.annotation.processing javax.lang.model javax.naming (JNDI) javax.script javax.script:javascript javax.sql org.openjdk.jigsaw (See jigsaw-dev.) security-libs (See security-dev.) java.security javax.crypto (JCE: includes SunJCE/MSCAPI/UCRYPTO/ECC) javax.crypto:pkcs11 (JCE: PKCS11 only) javax.net.ssl (JSSE, includes javax.security.cert) javax.security javax.smartcardio javax.xml.crypto org.ietf.jgss org.ietf.jgss:krb5 other-libs corba corba:idl corba:orb corba:rmi-iiop javadb other (When no other subcomponent is more appropriate; use judiciously.) Most of the subcomponents in the xml component are related to jaxp. xml jax-ws jaxb javax.xml.parsers (JAXP) javax.xml.stream (JAXP) javax.xml.transform (JAXP) javax.xml.validation (JAXP) javax.xml.xpath (JAXP) jaxp (JAXP) org.w3c.dom (JAXP) org.xml.sax (JAXP) For OpenJDK, most JVM-related bugs are connected to the HotSpot Java virtual machine. hotspot (See hotspot-dev.) build compiler (See hotspot-compiler-dev.) gc (garbage collection, see hotspot-gc-dev.) jfr (Java Flight Recorder) jni (Java Native Interface) jvmti (JVM Tool Interface) mvm (Multi-Tasking Virtual Machine) runtime (See hotspot-runtime-dev.) svc (Servicability) test core-svc (See serviceability-dev.) debugger java.lang.instrument java.lang.management javax.management tools The full JDK bug database contains entries related to legacy virtual machines that predate HotSpot as well as retired APIs. vm-legacy jit (Sun Exact VM) jit_symantec (Symantec VM, before Exact VM) jvmdi (JVM Debug Interface ) jvmpi (JVM Profiler Interface ) runtime (Exact VM Runtime) Notable command line tools in the $JDK/bin directory have corresponding subcomponents. tools appletviewer apt (See compiler-dev.) hprof jar javac (See compiler-dev.) javadoc(tool) (See compiler-dev.) javah (See compiler-dev.) javap (See compiler-dev.) jconsole launcher updaters (Timezone updaters, etc.) visualvm Some aspects of JDK infrastructure directly affect JDK Hg repositories, but other do not. infrastructure build (See build-dev and build-infra-dev.) licensing (Covers updates to the third party readme, licenses, and similar files.) release_eng (Release engineering) staging (Staging of web pages related to JDK releases.) The specification subcomponent encompasses the formal language and virtual machine specifications. specification language (The Java Language Specification) vm (The Java Virtual Machine Specification) The code for the deploy and install areas is not currently included in OpenJDK. deploy deployment_toolkit plugin webstart install auto_update install servicetags In the JDK, there are a number of cross-cutting concerns whose organization is essentially orthogonal to other areas. Since these areas generally have dedicated teams working on them, it is easier to find bugs of interest if these bugs are grouped first by their cross-cutting component rather than by the affected technology. docs doclet guides hotspot release_notes tools tutorial embedded build hotspot libraries globalization locale-data translation performance hotspot libraries The list of subcomponents will no doubt grow over time, but my inclination is to resist that growth since the addition of each subcomponent makes the system as a whole more complicated and harder to use. When the system gets closer to being externalized, I plan to post more blog entries describing recommended use of various custom fields in the JDK project.

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• .NET 4: &ldquo;Slim&rdquo;-style performance boost!

  - by Vitus

  RTM version of .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 is available, and now we can do some test with it. Parallel Extensions is one of the most valuable part of .NET 4.0. It’s a set of good tools for easily consuming multicore hardware power. And it also contains some “upgraded” sync primitives – Slim-version. For example, it include updated variant of widely known ManualResetEvent. For people, who don’t know about it: you can sync concurrency execution of some pieces of code with this sync primitive. Instance of ManualResetEvent can be in 2 states: signaled and non-signaled. Transition between it possible by Set() and Reset() methods call. Some shortly explanation: Thread 1 Thread 2 Time mre.Reset(); mre.WaitOne(); //code execution 0 //wating //code execution 1 //wating //code execution 2 //wating //code execution 3 //wating mre.Set(); 4 //code execution //… 5 Upgraded version of this primitive is ManualResetEventSlim. The idea in decreasing performance cost in case, when only 1 thread use it. Main concept in the “hybrid sync schema”, which can be done as following:   internal sealed class SimpleHybridLock : IDisposable { private Int32 m_waiters = 0; private AutoResetEvent m_waiterLock = new AutoResetEvent(false);   public void Enter() { if (Interlocked.Increment(ref m_waiters) == 1) return; m_waiterLock.WaitOne(); }   public void Leave() { if (Interlocked.Decrement(ref m_waiters) == 0) return; m_waiterLock.Set(); }   public void Dispose() { m_waiterLock.Dispose(); } } It’s a sample from Jeffry Richter’s book “CLR via C#”, 3rd edition. Primitive SimpleHybridLock have two public methods: Enter() and Leave(). You can put your concurrency-critical code between calls of these methods, and it would executed in only one thread at the moment. Code is really simple: first thread, called Enter(), increase counter. Second thread also increase counter, and suspend while m_waiterLock is not signaled. So, if we don’t have concurrent access to our lock, “heavy” methods WaitOne() and Set() will not called. It’s can give some performance bonus. ManualResetEvent use the similar idea. Of course, it have more “smart” technics inside, like a checking of recursive calls, and so on. I want to know a real difference between classic ManualResetEvent realization, and new –Slim. I wrote a simple “benchmark”: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { ManualResetEventSlim mres = new ManualResetEventSlim(false); ManualResetEventSlim mres2 = new ManualResetEventSlim(false);   ManualResetEvent mre = new ManualResetEvent(false);   long total = 0; int COUNT = 50;   for (int i = 0; i < COUNT; i++) { mres2.Reset(); Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();   ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem((obj) => { //Method(mres, true); Method2(mre, true); mres2.Set(); }); //Method(mres, false); Method2(mre, false);   mres2.Wait(); sw.Stop();   Console.WriteLine("Pass {0}: {1} ms", i, sw.ElapsedMilliseconds); total += sw.ElapsedMilliseconds; }   Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("==============================="); Console.WriteLine("Done in average=" + total / (double)COUNT); Console.ReadLine(); }   private static void Method(ManualResetEventSlim mre, bool value) { for (int i = 0; i < 9000000; i++) { if (value) { mre.Set(); } else { mre.Reset(); } } }   private static void Method2(ManualResetEvent mre, bool value) { for (int i = 0; i < 9000000; i++) { if (value) { mre.Set(); } else { mre.Reset(); } } } } I use 2 concurrent thread (the main thread and one from thread pool) for setting and resetting ManualResetEvents, and try to run test COUNT times, and calculate average execution time. Here is the results (I get it on my dual core notebook with T7250 CPU and Windows 7 x64): ManualResetEvent ManualResetEventSlim Difference is obvious and serious – in 10 times! So, I think preferable way is using ManualResetEventSlim, because not always on calling Set() and Reset() will be called “heavy” methods for working with Windows kernel-mode objects. It’s a small and nice improvement! ;)

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• Architect Day: Boston - Agenda Update

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Here's the latest information on the session schedule and content for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Boston, MA on September 12, 2012. Registration is open, but seating is limited. When: September 12, 2012 8:30am – 5:00pm Where: Boston Marriott Burlington One Burlington Mall Road Burlington, MA 01803 Register now Agenda Time Session Title Room 8:30 am - 9:00 am Registration and Continental Breakfast Salon E Foyer 9:00 am - 9:15 am Welcome and Opening Comments | Bob Rhubart Salon E 9:15 am - 10:00 am Engineered Systems: Oracle's Vision for the Future | Ralf Dossmann Oracle's Exadata and Exalogic are impressive products in their own right. But working in combination they deliver unparalleled transaction processing performance with up to a 30x increase over existing legacy systems, with the lowest cost of ownership over a 3 or 5 year basis than any other hardware. In this session you'll learn how to leverage Oracle's Engineered Systems within your enterprise to deliver record-breaking performance at the lowest TCO. Salon E 10:00 am - 10:30 am Securing Public and Private Clouds | Anton Nielsen Long before the term "Cloud Computing" existed, Oracle technologies supported and promoted the concept. Centralized data with remote users has been at the core of these technologies for decades. The public cloud, and extending private clouds to the internet, though, has added security challenges never imagined decades ago. This presentation will examine a real life security breach and introduce architecture, technologies and policies to secure public and private clouds.  Salon E 10:30 am - 10:45 am Break 10:45 am - 11:30 am Breakout Sessions (pick one) Cloud Computing - Making IT Simple | Scott Mattoon The road to Cloud Computing is not without a few bumps. This session will help to smooth out your journey by tackling some of the potential complications. We'll examine whether standardization is a prerequisite for the Cloud. We'll look at why refactoring isn't just for application code. We'll check out deployable entities and their simplification via higher levels of abstraction. And we'll close out the session with a look at engineered systems and modular clouds. Salon E Innovations in Grid Computing with Oracle Coherence | Rob Misek Learn how Coherence can increase the availability, scalability and performance of your existing applications with its advanced low-latency data-grid technologies. Also hear some interesting industry-specific use cases that customers had implemented and how Oracle is integrating Coherence into its Enterprise Java stack. Salon C 11:30 am - 12:15 pm Breakout Sessions (pick one) Enterprise Strategy for Cloud Security | Dave Chappelle Security is high on the list of concerns for many organizations as they evaluate their cloud computing options. This session will examine security in the context of the various forms of cloud computing. We'll consider technical and non-technical aspects of security, and discuss several strategies for cloud computing, from both the consumer and producer perspectives. Salon E Oracle Enterprise Manager | Avi Huber Much more than a DB management tool, Oracle Enterprise Manager provides management and monitoring coverage for the entire Oracle stack, and beyond. This session will concentrate on the middleware management functionality in OEM, starting with Real User Experience monitoring, through AppServer management, and into deep-dive Java diagnostics. We’ll discuss Business Driven Application Management (BDAM) and the benefits of top-down monitoring. Lastly, we’ll demonstrate how to trace a specific user experience problem, through a multitier SOA application, to its root cause, deep in the JVM. Salon C 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm Lunch Salon E Foyer 1:15 pm - 2:00 pm Panel Discussion - Q&A with session speakers Salon E 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm Breakout Sessions (pick one) Oracle Cloud Reference Architecture | Anbu Krishnaswamy Cloud initiatives are beginning to dominate enterprise IT roadmaps. Successful adoption of Cloud and the subsequent governance challenges warrant a Cloud reference architecture that is applied consistently across the enterprise. This presentation will answer the important questions: What exactly is a Cloud, why you need it, what changes it will bring to the enterprise, and what are the key capabilities of a Cloud infrastructure are - using Oracle's Cloud Reference Architecture, which is part of the IT Strategies from Oracle (ITSO) Cloud Enterprise Technology Strategy (ETS). Salon E 21st Century SOA | Peter Belknap Service Oriented Architecture has evolved from concept to reality in the last decade. The right methodology coupled with mature SOA technologies has helped customers demonstrate success in both innovation and ROI. In this session you will learn how Oracle SOA Suite's orchestration, virtualization, and governance capabilities provide the infrastructure to run mission critical business and system applications. And we'll take a special look at the convergence of SOA & BPM using Oracle's Unified technology stack. Salon C 2:45 pm - 3:00 pm Break 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Roundtable Discussion Salon E 4:00 pm - 4:15 pm Closing Comments & Readouts from Roundtables Salon E 4:15 pm - 5:00 pm Networking / Reception Salon E Foyer Note: Session schedule and content subject to change.

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• MDM for Tax Authorities

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  In last week’s MDM blog, we discussed MDM in the Public Sector. I want to continue that thread. After all, no industry faces tougher data quality problems than governmental organizations, and few industries suffer more significant down side consequences to poor operations than local, state and federal governments. One key challenge area is taxation. Tax Authorities face a multitude of IT challenges. Firstly, the data used in tax calculations is increasing in volume and complexity. They must improve service by introducing multi-channel contact centers and self-service capabilities. Security concerns necessitate increasingly sophisticated data protection procedures. And cost constraints are driving Tax Authorities to rely on off-the-shelf software for many of their functional areas. Compounding these issues is the fact that the IT architectures in operation at most revenue and collections agencies are very complex. They typically include multiple, disparate operational and analytical systems across which the sum total of data about individual constituents is fragmented. To make matters more complicated, taxation is not carried out by a single jurisdiction, and often sources of income including employers, investments and other sources of taxable income and deductions must also be tracked and shared among tax authorities. Collectively, these systems are involved in tax assessment and collections, risk analysis, scoring, tracking, auditing and investigation case management. The Problem of Constituent Data Management The infrastructure described above makes it very difficult to create a consolidated representation of a given party. Differing formats and data models mean that a constituent may be represented in one way in one system and in a different way in another. Individual records are frequently inaccurate, incomplete, out of date and/or inconsistent with other records relating to the same constituent. When constituent data must be aggregated and scored, information within each system must be rationalized and normalized so the agency can produce a constituent information file (CIF) that provides a single source of truth about that party. If information about that constituent changes, each system in turn must be updated. There have been many attempts to solve this problem with technology: from consolidating transactional systems to conducting manual systems integration projects and superimposing layers of business intelligence and analytics. All these approaches can be successful in solving a portion of the problem at a specific point in time, but without an enterprise perspective, anything gained is quickly lost again. Oracle Constituent Data Mastering for Tax Authorities: A Single View of the Constituent Oracle has a flexible and long-term solution to the problem of securely integrating and managing constituent data. The Oracle Solution for mastering Constituent Data for Tax Authorities is based on two core product offerings: Oracle Customer Hub and – optionally – Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA). Customer Hub is a master data management (MDM) product that centralizes, de-duplicates, and enriches constituent data. It unifies fragmented information without disrupting existing business processes or IT investments. Role based data access and privacy rules guarantee maximum security and privacy. Data is continuously and automatically synchronized with all source systems. With the Oracle Customer Hub managing the master constituent identity, every department can capture transaction activity against the same record, improving reporting accuracy, employee productivity, reliability of constituent analytics, and day-to-day constituent relationships. Oracle Application Integration Architecture provides a collection of core pre-built processes to support out of the box Master Data Governance across Oracle Customer Hub, Siebel CRM, and Oracle E-Business Suite. It also provides a framework to enable MDM integrations with other Oracle and non-Oracle applications. Oracle AIA removes some of the key inhibitors to implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) by providing a pre-built SOA-based middleware foundation as well as industry-optimized service oriented applications, all built around a SOA governance model that encourages effective design and reuse. I encourage you to read Oracle Solution for Mastering Constituents Data for Public Sector – Tax Authorities by Roberto Negro. It is an outstanding whitepaper that describes how the Oracle MDM solution allows you to create a unified, reconciled source of high-quality constituent data and gain an accurate single view of each constituent. This foundation enables you to lower the costs associated with data quality and integration and create a tax organization that is efficient, secure and constituent-centric. Also, don’t forget the upcoming webcast on Thursday, February 10th: Deliver Improved Services to Citizens at Lower Cost to your Organization Our Guest Speaker is Ruben Spekle, from Capgemini. He will also provide insight into Public Sector Master Data Management and Case Management implementations including one that was executed for a Dutch Government Agency. If you are interested in how governmental organizations from around the world are using MDM to advance their cause, click here to register for the webcast.

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• Explaining Explain Plan Notes for Auto DOP

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  I've recently gotten some questions around "why do I not see a parallel plan" while Auto DOP is on (I think)...? It is probably worthwhile to quickly go over some of the ways to find out what Auto DOP was thinking. In general, there is no need to go tracing sessions and look under the hood. The thing to start with is to do an explain plan on your statement and to look at the parameter settings on the system. Parameter Settings to Look At First and foremost, make sure that parallel_degree_policy = AUTO. If you have that parameter set to LIMITED you will not have queuing and we will only do the auto magic if your objects are set to default parallel (so no degree specified). Next you want to look at the value of parallel_degree_limit. It is typically set to CPU, which in default settings equates to the Default DOP of the system. If you are testing Auto DOP itself and the impact it has on performance you may want to leave it at this CPU setting. If you are running concurrent statements you may want to give this some more thoughts. See here for more information. In general, do stick with either CPU or with a specific number. For now avoid the IO setting as I've seen some mixed results with that... In 11.2.0.2 you should also check that IO Calibrate has been run. Best to simply do a: SQL> select * from V$IO_CALIBRATION_STATUS; STATUS        CALIBRATION_TIME ------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- READY         04-JAN-11 10.04.13.104 AM You should see that your IO Calibrate is READY and therefore Auto DOP is ready. In any case, if you did not run the IO Calibrate step you will get the following note in the explain plan: Note -----    - automatic DOP: skipped because of IO calibrate statistics are missing One more note on calibrate_io, if you do not have asynchronous IO enabled you will see:  ERROR at line 1: ORA-56708: Could not find any datafiles with asynchronous i/o capability ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_RMIN", line 463 ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER", line 1296 ORA-06512: at line 7 While this is changed in some fixes to the calibrate procedure, you should really consider switching asynchronous IO on for your data warehouse. Explain Plan Explanation To see the notes that are shown and explained here (and the above little snippet ) you can use a simple explain plan mechanism. There should  be no need to add +parallel etc. explain plan for <statement> SELECT PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT FROM TABLE(DBMS_XPLAN.DISPLAY()); Auto DOP The note structure displaying why Auto DOP did not work (with the exception noted above on IO Calibrate) is like this: Automatic degree of parallelism is disabled: <reason> These are the reason codes: Parameter -  parallel_degree_policy = manual which will not allow Auto DOP to kick in  Hint - One of the following hints are used NOPARALLEL, PARALLEL(1), PARALLEL(MANUAL) Outline - A SQL outline of an older version (before 11.2) is used SQL property restriction - The statement type does not allow for parallel processing Rule-based mode - Instead of the Cost Based Optimizer the system is using the RBO Recursive SQL statement - The statement type does not allow for parallel processing pq disabled/pdml disabled/pddl disabled - For some reason (alter session?) parallelism is disabled Limited mode but no parallel objects referenced - your parallel_degree_policy = LIMITED and no objects in the statement are decorated with the default PARALLEL degree. In most cases all objects have a specific degree in which case Auto DOP will honor that degree. Parallel Degree Limited When Auto DOP does it works you may see the cap you imposed with parallel_degree_limit showing up in the note section of the explain plan: Note -----    - automatic DOP: Computed Degree of Parallelism is 16 because of degree limit This is an obvious indication that your are being capped for this statement. There is one quite interesting one that happens when you are being capped at DOP = 1. First of you get a serial plan and the note changes slightly in that it does not indicate it is being capped (we hope to update the note at some point in time to be more specific). It right now looks like this: Note -----    - automatic DOP: Computed Degree of Parallelism is 1 Dynamic Sampling With 11.2.0.2 you will start seeing another interesting change in parallel plans, and since we are talking about the note section here, I figured we throw this in for good measure. If we deem the parallel (!) statement complex enough, we will enact dynamic sampling on your query. This happens as long as you did not change the default for dynamic sampling on the system. The note looks like this: Note ----- - dynamic sampling used for this statement (level=5)

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• Java2Days 2012 Trip Report

  - by reza_rahman

  Java2Days 2012 was held in beautiful Sofia, Bulgaria on October 25-26. For those of you not familiar with it, this is the third installment of the premier Java conference for the Balkan region. It is an excellent effort by admirable husband and wife team Emo Abadjiev and Iva Abadjieva as well as the rest of the Java2Days team including Yoana Ivanova and Nadia Kostova. Thanks to their hard work, the conference continues to grow vigorously with almost a thousand enthusiastic, bright young people attending this year and no less than three tracks on Java, the Cloud and Mobile. The conference is a true gem in this region of the world and I am very proud to have been a part of it again, along with the other world class speakers the event rightfully attracts. It was my honor to present the first talk of the conference. It was a full-house session on Java EE 7 and 8 titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond". The talk was primarily along the same lines as Arun Gupta's JavaOne 2012 technical keynote. I covered the changes in JMS 2, the Java API for WebSocket (JSR 356), the Java API for JSON Processing (JSON-P), JAX-RS 2, JCache, JPA 2.1, JTA 1.2, JSF 2.2, Java Batch, Bean Validation 1.1 and the rest of the APIs in Java EE 7. I also briefly talked about the possible contents of Java EE 8. My stretch goal was to gather some feedback on some open issues in the Java EE EG (more on that soon) but I ran out of time in the short format forty-five minute session. The talk was received well and I had some pretty good discussions afterwards. The slides for the talk are here: JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond from reza_rahman To my delight, the Java2Days folks were very interested in my domain-driven design/Java EE 6 talk (titled "Domain Driven Design with Java EE 6"). I've had this talk in my inventory for a long time now but it always gets overridden by less theoretical talks on APIs, tools, etc. The talk has three parts -- a brief overview of DDD theory, mapping DDD to Java EE and actual running DDD code in Java EE 6/GlassFish. For the demo, I converted the well-known DDD sample application (http://dddsample.sourceforge.net/) written mostly in Spring 2 and Hibernate 2 to Java EE 6. My eventual plan is to make the code available via a top level java.net project. Even despite the broad topic and time constraints, the talk went very well. It was a full house, the Q & A was excellent and one of the other speakers even told me they thought this was the best talk of the conference! The slides for the talk are here: Domain Driven Design with Java EE 6 from Reza Rahman The code examples are available here: https://blogs.oracle.com/reza/resource/dddsample.zip for now, as a simple zip file. Give me a shout if you would like to get it up and running. It was also a great honor to present the last session of the conference. It was a talk on the Java API for WebSocket/JSR 356 titled "Building HTML5/WebSocket Applications with JSR 356 and GlassFish". The talk is based on Danny Coward's JavaOne 2012 talk. The talk covers the basic of WebSocket, the JSR 356 API and a simple demo using Tyrus/GlassFish. The talk went very well and there were some very good questions afterwards. The slides for the talk are here: Building HTML5/WebSocket Applications with GlassFish and JSR 356 from Reza Rahman The code samples are available here: https://blogs.oracle.com/arungupta/resource/totd183-HelloWebSocket.zip. You'll need the latest promoted GlassFish 4 build to run the code. Give me a shout if you need help. Besides presenting my talks, I got to attend some great sessions on OSGi, HTML5, cloud, agile and Java 8. I got an invite to speak at the Macedonia JUG when possible. Victor Grazi of InfoQ wrote about my sessions and Java2Days here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/11/Java2DaysConference. Stoyan Rachev was very kind to blog about my sessions here: http://www.stoyanr.com/2012/11/java2days-2012-java-ee.html. I definitely enjoyed Java2Days 2012 and hope to be part of the conference next year!

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• OpenSSL Versions in Solaris

  - by darrenm

  Those of you have have installed Solaris 11 or have read some of the blogs by my colleagues will have noticed Solaris 11 includes OpenSSL 1.0.0, this is a different version to what we have in Solaris 10.  I hope the following explains why that is and how it fits with the expectations on binary compatibility between Solaris releases. Solaris 10 was the first release where we included OpenSSL libraries and headers (part of it was actually statically linked into the SSH client/server in Solaris 9).  At time we were building and releasing Solaris 10 the current train of OpenSSL was 0.9.7.  The OpenSSL libraries at that time were known to not always be completely API and ABI (binary) compatible between releases (some times even in the lettered patch releases) though mostly if you stuck with the documented high level APIs you would be fine.   For this reason OpenSSL was classified as a 'Volatile' interface and in Solaris 10 Volatile interfaces were not part of the default library search path which is why the OpenSSL libraries live in /usr/sfw/lib on Solaris 10.  Okay, but what does Volatile mean ? Quoting from the attributes(5) man page description of Volatile (which was called External in older taxonomy): Volatile interfaces can change at any time and for any reason. The Volatile interface stability level allows Sun pro- ducts to quickly track a fluid, rapidly evolving specif- ication. In many cases, this is preferred to providing additional stability to the interface, as it may better meet the expectations of the consumer. The most common application of this taxonomy level is to interfaces that are controlled by a body other than Sun, but unlike specifications controlled by standards bodies or Free or Open Source Software (FOSS) communities which value interface compatibility, it can not be asserted that an incompatible change to the interface specifica- tion would be exceedingly rare. It may also be applied to FOSS controlled software where it is deemed more important to track the community with minimal latency than to provide stability to our customers. It also common to apply the Volatile classification level to interfaces in the process of being defined by trusted or widely accepted organization. These are generically referred to as draft standards. An "IETF Internet draft" is a well understood example of a specification under development. Volatile can also be applied to experimental interfaces. No assertion is made regarding either source or binary compatibility of Volatile interfaces between any two releases, including patches. Applications containing these interfaces might fail to function properly in any future release. Note that last paragraph!  OpenSSL is only one example of the many interfaces in Solaris that are classified as Volatile.  At the other end of the scale we have Committed (Stable in Solaris 10 terminology) interfaces, these include things like the POSIX APIs or Solaris specific APIs that we have no intention of changing in an incompatible way.  There are also Private interfaces and things we declare as Not-an-Interface (eg command output not intended for scripting against only to be read by humans). Even if we had declared OpenSSL as a Committed/Stable interface in Solaris 10 there are allowed exceptions, again quoting from attributes(5): 4. An interface specification which isn't controlled by Sun has been changed incompatibly and the vast majority of interface consumers expect the newer interface. 5. Not making the incompatible change would be incomprehensible to our customers. In our opinion and that of our large and small customers keeping up with the OpenSSL community is important, and certainly both of the above cases apply. Our policy for dealing with OpenSSL on Solaris 10 was to stay at 0.9.7 and add fixes for security vulnerabilities (the version string includes the CVE numbers of fixed vulnerabilities relevant to that release train).  The last release of OpenSSL 0.9.7 delivered by the upstream community was more than 4 years ago in Feb 2007. Now lets roll forward to just before the release of Solaris 11 Express in 2010. By that point in time the current OpenSSL release was 0.9.8 with the 1.0.0 release known to be coming soon.  Two significant changes to OpenSSL were made between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 Express.  First in Solaris 11 Express (and Solaris 11) we removed the requirement that Volatile libraries be placed in /usr/sfw/lib, that means OpenSSL is now in /usr/lib, secondly we upgraded it to the then current version stream of OpenSSL (0.9.8) as was expected by our customers. In between Solaris 11 Express in 2010 and the release of Solaris 11 in 2011 the OpenSSL community released version 1.0.0.  This was a huge milestone for a long standing and highly respected open source project.  It would have been highly negligent of Solaris not to include OpenSSL 1.0.0e in the Solaris 11 release. It is the latest best supported and best performing version.     In fact Solaris 11 isn't 'just' OpenSSL 1.0.0 but we have added our SPARC T4 engine and the AES-NI engine to support the on chip crypto acceleration. This gives us 4.3x better AES performance than OpenSSL 0.9.8 running on AIX on an IBM POWER7. We are now working with the OpenSSL community to determine how best to integrate the SPARC T4 changes into the mainline OpenSSL.  The OpenSSL 'pkcs11' engine we delivered in Solaris 10 to support the CA-6000 card and the SPARC T1/T2/T3 hardware is still included in Solaris 11. When OpenSSL 1.0.1 and 1.1.0 come out we will asses what is best for Solaris customers. It might be upgrade or it might be parallel delivery of more than one version stream.  At this time Solaris 11 still classifies OpenSSL as a Volatile interface, it is our hope that we will be able at some point in a future release to give it a higher interface stability level. Happy crypting! and thank-you OpenSSL community for all the work you have done that helps Solaris.

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• Interview with Geoff Bones, developer on SQL Storage Compress

  - by red(at)work

  How did you come to be working at Red Gate? I've been working at Red Gate for nine months; before that I had been at a multinational engineering company. A number of my colleagues had left to work at Red Gate and spoke very highly of it, but I was happy in my role and thought, 'It can't be that great there, surely? They'll be back!' Then one day I visited to catch up them over lunch in the Red Gate canteen. I was so impressed with what I found there, that, three days later, I'd applied for a role as a developer. And how did you get into software development? My first job out of university was working as a systems programmer on IBM mainframes. This was quite a while ago: there was a lot of assembler and loading programs from tape drives and that kind of stuff. I learned a lot about how computers work, and this stood me in good stead when I moved over the development in the 90s. What's the best thing about working as a developer at Red Gate? Where should I start? One of the great things as a developer at Red Gate is the useful feedback and close contact we have with the people who use our products, either directly at trade shows and other events or through information coming through the product managers. The company's whole ethos is built around assisting the user, and this is in big contrast to my previous development roles. We aim to produce tools that people really want to use, that they enjoy using, and, as a developer, this is a great thing to aim for and a great feeling when we get it right. At Red Gate we also try to cut out the things that distract and stop us doing our jobs. As a developer, this means that I can focus on the code and the product I'm working on, knowing that others are doing a first-class job of making sure that the builds are running smoothly and that I'm getting great feedback from the testers. We keep our process light and effective, as we want to produce great software more than we want to produce great audit trails. Tell us a bit about the products you are currently working on. You mean HyperBac? First let me explain a bit about what HyperBac is. At heart it's a compression and encryption technology, but with a few added features that open up a wealth of really exciting possibilities. Right now we have the HyperBac technology in just three products: SQL HyperBac, SQL Virtual Restore and SQL Storage Compress, but we're only starting to develop what it can do. My personal favourite is SQL Virtual Restore; for example, I love the way you can use it to run independent test databases that are all backed by a single compressed backup. I don't think the market yet realises the kind of things you do once you are using these products. On the other hand, the benefits of SQL Storage Compress are straightforward: run your databases but use only 20% of the disk space. Databases are getting larger and larger, and, as they do, so does your ROI. What's a typical day for you? My days are pretty varied. We have our daily team stand-up meeting and then sometimes I will work alone on a current issue, or I'll be pair programming with one of my colleagues. From time to time we give half a day up to future planning with the team, when we look at the long and short term aims for the product and working out the development priorities. I also get to go to conferences and events, which is unusual for a development role and gives me the chance to meet and talk to our customers directly. Have you noticed anything different about developing tools for DBAs rather than other IT kinds of user? It seems to me that DBAs are quite independent minded; they know exactly what the problem they are facing is, and often have a solution in mind before they begin to look for what's on the market. This means that they're likely to cherry-pick tools from a range of vendors, picking the ones that are the best fit for them and that disrupt their environments the least. When I've met with DBAs, I've often been very impressed at their ability to summarise their set up, the issues, the obstacles they face when implementing a tool and their plans for their environment. It's easier to develop products for this audience as they give such a detailed overview of their needs, and I feel I understand their problems.

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• Goto for the Java Programming Language

  - by darcy

  Work on JDK 8 is well-underway, but we thought this late-breaking JEP for another language change for the platform couldn't wait another day before being published. Title: Goto for the Java Programming Language Author: Joseph D. Darcy Organization: Oracle. Created: 2012/04/01 Type: Feature State: Funded Exposure: Open Component: core/lang Scope: SE JSR: 901 MR Discussion: compiler dash dev at openjdk dot java dot net Start: 2012/Q2 Effort: XS Duration: S Template: 1.0 Reviewed-by: Duke Endorsed-by: Edsger Dijkstra Funded-by: Blue Sun Corporation Summary Provide the benefits of the time-testing goto control structure to Java programs. The Java language has a history of adding new control structures over time, the assert statement in 1.4, the enhanced for-loop in 1.5,and try-with-resources in 7. Having support for goto is long-overdue and simple to implement since the JVM already has goto instructions. Success Metrics The goto statement will allow inefficient and verbose recursive algorithms and explicit loops to be replaced with more compact code. The effort will be a success if at least twenty five percent of the JDK's explicit loops are replaced with goto's. Coordination with IDE vendors is expected to help facilitate this goal. Motivation The goto construct offers numerous benefits to the Java platform, from increased expressiveness, to more compact code, to providing new programming paradigms to appeal to a broader demographic. In JDK 8, there is a renewed focus on using the Java platform on embedded devices with more modest resources than desktop or server environments. In such contexts, static and dynamic memory footprint is a concern. One significant component of footprint is the code attribute of class files and certain classes of important algorithms can be expressed more compactly using goto than using other constructs, saving footprint. For example, to implement state machines recursively, some parties have asked for the JVM to support tail calls, that is, to perform a complex transformation with security implications to turn a method call into a goto. Such complicated machinery should not be assumed for an embedded context. A better solution is just to expose to the programmer the desired functionality, goto. The web has familiarized users with a model of traversing links among different HTML pages in a free-form fashion with some state being maintained on the side, such as login credentials, to effect behavior. This is exactly the programming model of goto and code. While in the past this has been derided as leading to "spaghetti code," spaghetti is a tasty and nutritious meal for programmers, unlike quiche. The invokedynamic instruction added by JSR 292 exposes the JVM's linkage operation to programmers. This is a low-level operation that can be leveraged by sophisticated programmers. Likewise, goto is a also a low-level operation that should not be hidden from programmers who can use more efficient idioms. Some may object that goto was consciously excluded from the original design of Java as one of the removed feature from C and C++. However, the designers of the Java programming languages have revisited these removals before. The enum construct was also left out only to be added in JDK 5 and multiple inheritance was left out, only to be added back by the virtual extension method methods of Project Lambda. As a living language, the needs of the growing Java community today should be used to judge what features are needed in the platform tomorrow; the language should not be forever bound by the decisions of the past. Description From its initial version, the JVM has had two instructions for unconditional transfer of control within a method, goto (0xa7) and goto_w (0xc8). The goto_w instruction is used for larger jumps. All versions of the Java language have supported labeled statements; however, only the break and continue statements were able to specify a particular label as a target with the onerous restriction that the label must be lexically enclosing. The grammar addition for the goto statement is: GotoStatement: goto Identifier ; The new goto statement similar to break except that the target label can be anywhere inside the method and the identifier is mandatory. The compiler simply translates the goto statement into one of the JVM goto instructions targeting the right offset in the method. Therefore, adding the goto statement to the platform is only a small effort since existing compiler and JVM functionality is reused. Other language changes to support goto include obvious updates to definite assignment analysis, reachability analysis, and exception analysis. Possible future extensions include a computed goto as found in gcc, which would replace the identifier in the goto statement with an expression having the type of a label. Testing Since goto will be implemented using largely existing facilities, only light levels of testing are needed. Impact Compatibility: Since goto is already a keyword, there are no source compatibility implications. Performance/scalability: Performance will improve with more compact code. JVMs already need to handle irreducible flow graphs since goto is a VM instruction.

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• Wildcards!

  - by Tim Dexter

  Yes, its been a while, Im sorry, mumble, mumble ... no excuses. Well other than its been, as my son would say 'hecka busy.' On a brighter note I see Kan has been posting some cool stuff in my absence, long may he continue! I received a question today asking about using a wildcard in a template, something like: <?if:INVOICE = 'MLP*'?> where * is the wildcard Well that particular try does not work but you can do it without building your own wildcard function. XSL, the underpinning language of the RTF templates, has some useful string functions - you can find them listed here. I used the starts-with function to achieve a simple wildcard scenario but the contains can be used in conjunction with some of the others to build something more sophisticated. Assume I have a a list of friends and the amounts of money they owe me ... Im very generous and my interest rates a pretty competitive :0) <ROWSET> <ROW> <NAME>Andy</NAME> <AMT>100</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Andrew</NAME> <AMT>60</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Aaron</NAME> <AMT>50</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Alice</NAME> <AMT>40</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Bob</NAME> <AMT>10</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Bill</NAME> <AMT>100</AMT> </ROW> Now, listing my friends is easy enough <for-each:ROW> <NAME> <AMT> <end for-each> but lets say I just want to see all my friends beginning with 'A'. To do that I can use an XPATH expression to filter the data and tack it on to the for-each expression. This is more efficient that using an 'if' statement just inside the for-each. <?for-each:ROW[starts-with(NAME,'A')]?> will find me all the A's. The square braces denote the start of the XPATH expression. starts-with is the function Im calling and Im passing the value I want to check i.e. NAME and the string Im looking for. Just substitute in the characters you are looking for. You can of course use the function in a if statement too. <?if:starts-with(NAME,'A')?><?attribute@incontext:color;'red'?><?end if?> Notice I removed the square braces, this will highlight text red if the name begins with an 'A' You can even use the function to do conditional calculations: <?sum (AMT[starts-with(../NAME,'A')])?> Sum only the amounts where the name begins with an 'A' Notice the square braces are back, its a function we want to apply to the AMT field. Also notice that we need to use ../NAME. The AMT and NAME elements are at the same level in the tree, so when we are at the AMT level we need the ../ to go up a level to then come back down to test the NAME value. I have built out the above functions in a sample template here. Huge prizes for the first person to come up with a 'true' wildcard solution i.e. if NAME like '*im*exter* demand cash now!

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• A Gentle Introduction to NuGet

  - by Joe Mayo

  Not too long ago, Microsoft released, NuGet, an automated package manager for Visual Studio.  NuGet makes it easy to download and install assemblies, and their references, into a Visual Studio project.  These assemblies, which I loosely refer to as packages, are often open source, and include projects such as LINQ to Twitter. In this post, I'll explain how to get started in using NuGet with your projects to include: installng NuGet, installing/uninstalling LINQ to Twitter via console command, and installing/uninstalling LINQ to Twitter via graphical reference menu. Installing NuGet The first step you'll need to take is to install NuGet.  Visit the NuGet site, at http://nuget.org/, click on the Install NuGet button, and download the NuGet.Tools.vsix installation file, shown below. Each browser is different (i.e. FireFox, Chrome, IE, etc), so you might see options to run right away, save to a location, or access to the file through the browser's download manager.  Regardless of how you receive the NuGet installer, execute the downloaded NuGet.Tools.vsix to install Nuget into visual Studio. The NuGet Footprint When you open visual Studio, observe that there is a new menu option on the Tools menu, titled Library Package Manager; This is where you use NuGet.  There are two menu options, from the Library Package Manager Menu that you can use: Package Manager Console and Package Manager Settings.  I won't discuss Package Manager Settings in this post, except to give you a general idea that, as one of a set of capabilities, it manages the path to the NuGet server, which is already set for you. Another menu, added by the NuGet installer, is Add Library Package Reference, found by opening the context menu for either a Solution Explorer project or a project's References folder or via the Project menu.  I'll discuss how to use this later in the post. The following discussion is concerned with the other menu option, Package Manager Console, which allows you to manage NuGet packages. Gettng a NuGet Package Selecting Tools -> Library Package Manager -> Package Manager Console opens the Package Manager Console.  As you can see, below, the Package Manager Console is text-based and you'll need to type in commands to work with packages. In this post, I'll explain how to use the Package Manager Console to install LINQ to Twitter, but there are many more commands, explained in the NuGet Package Manager Console Commands documentation.  To install LINQ to Twitter, open your current project where you want LINQ to Twitter installed, and type the following at the PM> prompt: Install-Package linqtotwitter If all works well, you'll receive a confirmation message, similar to the following, after a brief pause: Successfully installed 'linqtotwitter 2.0.20'. Successfully added 'linqtotwitter 2.0.20' to NuGetInstall. Also, observe that a reference to the LinqToTwitter.dll assembly was added to your current project. Uninstalling a NuGet Package I won't be so bold as to assume that you would only want to use LINQ to Twitter because there are other Twitter libraries available; I recommend Twitterizer if you don't care for LINQ to Twitter.  So, you might want to use the following command at the PM> prompt to remove LINQ to Twitter from your project: Uninstall-Package linqtotwitter After a brief pause, you'll see a confirmation message similar to the following: Successfully removed 'linqtotwitter 2.0.20' from NuGetInstall. Also, observe that the LinqToTwitter.dll assembly no longer appears in your project references list. Sometimes using the Package Manager Console is required for more sophisticated scenarios.  However, LINQ to Twitter doesn't have any dependencies and is a very simple install, so you can use another method of installing graphically, which I'll show you next. Graphical Installations As explained earlier, clicking Add Library Package Reference, from the context menu for either a Solution Explorer project or a project's References folder or via the Project menu opens the Add Library Package Reference window. This window will allow you to add a reference a NuGet package in your project. To the left of the window are a few accordian folders to help you find packages that are either on-line or already installed.  Just like the previous section, I'll assume you are installing LINQ to Twitter for the first time, so you would select the Online folder and click All.  After waiting for package descriptions to download, you'll notice that there are too many to scroll through in a short period of time, over 900 as I write this.  Therefore, use the search box located at the top right corner of the window and type LINQ to Twitter as I've done in the previous figure. You'll see LINQ to Twitter appear in the list. Click the Install button on the LINQ to Twitter entry. If the installation was successful, you'll see a message box display and disappear quickly (or maybe not if your machine is very fast or you blink at that moment). Then you'll see a reference to the LinqToTwitter.dll assembly in your project's references list. Note: While running this demo, I ran into an issue where VS had created a file lock on an installation folder without releasing it, causing an error with "packagename already exists. Skipping..." and then an error describing that it couldn't write to a destination folder.  I resolved the problem by closing and reopening VS. If you open the Add a Library Package Reference window again, you'll see LINQ to Twitter listed in the Recent packages folder. Summary You can install NuGet via the on-line home page with a click of a button.  Nuget provides two ways to work with packages, via console or graphical window.  While the graphical window is easiest, the console window is more powerful. You can now quickly add project references to many available packages via the NuGet service. Joe

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• Introducing jLight &ndash; Talking to the DOM using Silverlight and jQuery.

  - by Timmy Kokke

  Introduction With the recent news about Silverlight on the Windows Phone and all the great Out-Of-Browser features in the upcoming Silverlight 4 you almost forget Silverlight is a browser plugin. It most often runs in a web browser and often as a control. In many cases you need to communicate with the browser to get information about textboxes, events or details about the browser itself. To do this you can use JavaScript from Silverlight. Although Silverlight works the same on every browser, JavaScript does not and it won’t be long before problems arise. To overcome differences in browser I like to use jQuery. The only downside of doing this is that there’s a lot more code needed that you would normally use when you write jQuery in JavaScript. Lately, I had to catch changes is the browser scrollbar and act to the new position. I also had to move the scrollbar when the user dragged around in the Silverlight application. With jQuery it was peanuts to get and set the right attributes, but I found that I had to write a lot of code on Silverlight side.  With a few refactoring I had a separated out the plumbing into a new class and could call only a few methods on that to get the same thing done. The idea for jLight was born. jLight vs. jQuery The main purpose of jLight is to take the ease of use of jQuery and bring it into Silverlight for handling DOM interaction. For example, to change the text color of a DIV to red, in jQuery you would write: jQuery("div").css("color","red"); In jLight the same thing looks like so: jQuery.Select("div").Css("color","red");   Another example. To change the offset in of the last SPAN you could write this in jQuery : jQuery("span:last").offset({left : 10, top : 100});   In jLight this would do the same: jQuery.Select("span:last").Offset(new {left = 10, top = 100 });   Callbacks Nothing too special so far. To get the same thing done using the “normal” HtmlPage.Window.Eval, it wouldn’t require too much effort. But to wire up a handler for events from the browser it’s a whole different story. Normally you need to register ScriptMembers, ScriptableTypes or write some code in JavaScript. jLight takes care of the plumbing and provide you with an simple interface in the same way jQuery would. If you would like to handle the scroll event of the BODY of your html page, you’ll have to bind the event using jQuery and have a function call back to a registered function in Silverlight. In the example below I assume there’s a method “SomeMethod” and it is registered as a ScriptableObject as “RegisteredFromSilverlight” from Silverlight.   jQuery("body:first").scroll(function() { var sl = document.getElementbyId("SilverlightControl"); sl.content.RegisteredFromSilverlight.SomeMethod($(this)); });       Using jLight  in Silverlight the code would be even simpler. The registration of RegisteredFromSilverlight  as ScriptableObject can be omitted.  Besides that, you don’t have to write any JavaScript or evaluate strings with JavaScript.   jQuery.Select("body:first").scroll(SomeMethod);   Lambdas Using a lambda in Silverlight can make it even simpler.  Each is the jQuery equivalent of foreach in C#. It calls a function for every element found by jQuery. In this example all INPUT elements of the text type are selected. The FromObject method is used to create a jQueryObject from an object containing a ScriptObject. The Val method from jQuery is used to get the value of the INPUT elements.   jQuery.Select("input:text").Each((element, index) => { textBox1.Text += jQueryObject.FromObject(element).Val(); return null; });   Ajax One thing jQuery is often used for is making Ajax calls. Making calls to services to external services can be done from Silverlight, but as easy as using jQuery. As an example I would like to show how jLight does this. Below is the entire code behind. It searches my name on twitter and shows the result. This example can be found in the source of the project. The GetJson method passes a Silverlight JsonValue to a callback. This callback instantiates Twit objects and adds them to a ListBox called TwitList.   public partial class DemoPage2 : UserControl { public DemoPage2() { InitializeComponent(); jQuery.Load(); }   private void CallButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { jQuery.GetJson("http://search.twitter.com/search.json?lang=en&q=sorskoot", Done); }   private void Done(JsonValue arg) { var tweets = new List<Twit>(); foreach (JsonObject result in arg["results"]) { tweets.Add(new Twit() { Text = (string)result["text"], Image = (string)result["profile_image_url"], User = (string)result["from_user"] } ); } TwitList.ItemsSource = tweets; } }   public class Twit { public string User { get; set; } public string Image { get; set; } public string Text { get; set; } }   Conclusion Although jLight is still in development it can be used already.There isn’t much documentation yet, but if you know jQuery jLight isn’t very hard to use.  If you would like to try it, please let me know what you think and report any problems you run in to. jLight can be found at:   http://jlight.codeplex.com

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• SQL SERVER – Curious Case of Disappearing Rows – ON UPDATE CASCADE and ON DELETE CASCADE – Part 1 of 2

  - by pinaldave

  Social media has created an Always Connected World for us. Recently I enrolled myself to learn new technologies as a student. I had decided to focus on learning and decided not to stay connected on the internet while I am in the learning session. On the second day of the event after the learning was over, I noticed lots of notification from my friend on my various social media handle. He had connected with me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube as well SMS, WhatsApp on the phone, Skype messages and not to forget with a few emails. I right away called him up. The problem was very unique – let us hear the problem in his own words. “Pinal – we are in big trouble we are not able to figure out what is going on. Our product details table is continuously loosing rows. Lots of rows have disappeared since morning and we are unable to find why the rows are getting deleted. We have made sure that there is no DELETE command executed on the table as well. The matter of the fact, we have removed every single place the code which is referencing the table. We have done so many crazy things out of desperation but no luck. The rows are continuously deleted in a random pattern. Do you think we have problems with intrusion or virus?” After describing the problems he had pasted few rants about why I was not available during the day. I think it will be not smart to post those exact words here (due to many reasons). Well, my immediate reaction was to get online with him. His problem was unique to him and his team was all out to fix the issue since morning. As he said he has done quite a lot out in desperation. I started asking questions from audit, policy management and profiling the data. Very soon I realize that I think this problem was not as advanced as it looked. There was no intrusion, SQL Injection or virus issue. Well, long story short first - It was a very simple issue of foreign key created with ON UPDATE CASCADE and ON DELETE CASCADE.  CASCADE allows deletions or updates of key values to cascade through the tables defined to have foreign key relationships that can be traced back to the table on which the modification is performed. ON DELETE CASCADE specifies that if an attempt is made to delete a row with a key referenced by foreign keys in existing rows in other tables, all rows containing those foreign keys are also deleted. ON UPDATE CASCADE specifies that if an attempt is made to update a key value in a row, where the key value is referenced by foreign keys in existing rows in other tables, all of the foreign key values are also updated to the new value specified for the key. (Reference: BOL) In simple words – due to ON DELETE CASCASE whenever is specified when the data from Table A is deleted and if it is referenced in another table using foreign key it will be deleted as well. In my friend’s case, they had two tables, Products and ProductDetails. They had created foreign key referential integrity of the product id between the table. Now the as fall was up they were updating their catalogue. When they were updating the catalogue they were deleting products which are no more available. As the changes were cascading the corresponding rows were also deleted from another table. This is CORRECT. The matter of the fact, there is no error or anything and SQL Server is behaving how it should be behaving. The problem was in the understanding and inappropriate implementations of business logic.  What they needed was Product Master Table, Current Product Catalogue, and Product Order Details History tables. However, they were using only two tables and without proper understanding the relation between them was build using foreign keys. If there were only two table, they should have used soft delete which will not actually delete the record but just hide it from the original product table. This workaround could have got them saved from cascading delete issues. I will be writing a detailed post on the design implications etc in my future post as in above three lines I cannot cover every issue related to designing and it is also not the scope of the blog post. More about designing in future blog posts. Once they learn their mistake, they were happy as there was no intrusion but trust me sometime we are our own enemy and this is a great example of it. In tomorrow’s blog post we will go over their code and workarounds. Feel free to share your opinions, experiences and comments. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Sun Ray Hardware Last Order Dates & Extension of Premier Support for Desktop Virtualization Software

  - by Adam Hawley

  In light of the recent announcement  to end new feature development for Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software (VDI), Oracle Sun Ray Software (SRS), Oracle Virtual Desktop Client (OVDC) Software, and Oracle Sun Ray Client hardware (3, 3i, and 3 Plus), there have been questions and concerns regarding what this means in terms of customers with new or existing deployments.  The following updates clarify some of these commonly asked questions. Extension of Premier Support for Software Though there will be no new feature additions to these products, customers will have access to maintenance update releases for Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Sun Ray Software, including Oracle Virtual Desktop Client and Sun Ray Operating Software (SROS) until Premier Support Ends.  To ensure that customer investments for these products are protected, Oracle  Premier Support for these products has been extended by 3 years to following dates: Sun Ray Software - November 2017 Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure - March 2017 Note that OVDC support is also extended to the above dates since OVDC is licensed by default as part the SRS and VDI products.   As a reminder, this only affects the products listed above.  Oracle Secure Global Desktop and Oracle VM VirtualBox will continue to be enhanced with new features from time-to-time and, as a result, they are not affected by the changes detailed in this message. The extension of support means that customers under a support contract will still be able to file service requests through Oracle Support, and Oracle will continue to provide the utmost level of support to our customers as expected,  until the published Premier Support end date.  Following the end of Premier Support, Sustaining Support remains an 'indefinite' period of time.   Sun Ray 3 Series Clients - Last Order Dates For Sun Ray Client hardware, customers can continue to purchase Sun Ray Client devices until the following last order dates: Product Marketing Part Number Last Order Date Last Ship Date Sun Ray 3 Plus TC3-P0Z-00, TC3-PTZ-00 (TAA) September 13, 2013 February 28, 2014 Sun Ray 3 Client TC3-00Z-00 February 28, 2014 August 31, 2014 Sun Ray 3i Client TC3-I0Z-00 February 28, 2014 August 31, 2014 Payflex Smart Cards X1403A-N, X1404A-N February 28, 2014 August 31, 2014 Note the difference in the Last Order Date for the Sun Ray 3 Plus (September 13, 2013) compared to the other products that have a Last Order Date of February 28, 2014. The rapidly approaching date for Sun Ray 3 Plus is due to a supplier phasing-out production of a key component of the 3 Plus.   Given September 13 is unfortunately quite soon, we strongly encourage you to place your last time buy as soon as possible to maximize Oracle's ability fulfill your order. Keep in mind you can schedule shipments to be delivered as late as the end of February 2014, but the last day to order is September 13, 2013. Customers wishing to purchase other models - Sun Ray 3 Clients and/or Sun Ray 3i Clients - have additional time (until February 28, 2014) to assess their needs and to allow fulfillment of last time orders.  Please note that availability of supply cannot be absolutely guaranteed up to the last order dates and we strongly recommend placing last time buys as early as possible.  Warranty replacements for Sun Ray Client hardware for customers covered by Oracle Hardware Systems Support contracts will be available beyond last order dates, per Oracle's policy found on Oracle.com here.  Per that policy, Oracle intends to provide replacement hardware for up to 5 years beyond the last ship date, but hardware may not be available beyond the 5 year period after the last ship date for reasons beyond Oracle's control. In any case, by design, Sun Ray Clients have an extremely long lifespan  and mean time between failures (MTBF) - much longer than PCs, and over the years we have continued to see first- and second generations of Sun Rays still in daily use.  This is no different for the Sun Ray 3, 3i, and 3 Plus.   Because of this, and in addition to Oracle's continued support for SRS, VDI, and SROS, Sun Ray and Oracle VDI deployments can continue to expand and exist as a viable solution for some time in the future. Continued Availability of Product Licenses and Support Oracle will continue to offer all existing software licenses, and software and hardware support including: Product licenses and Premier Support for Sun Ray Software and Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Premier Support for Operating Systems (for Sun Ray Operating Software maintenance upgrades/support)  Premier Support for Systems (for Sun Ray Operating Software maintenance upgrades/support and hardware warranty) Support renewals For More Information For more information, please refer to the following documents for specific dates and policies associated with the support of these products: Document 1478170.1 - Oracle Desktop Virtualization Software and Hardware Lifetime Support Schedule Document 1450710.1 - Sun Ray Client Hardware Lifetime schedule Document 1568808.1 - Document Support Policies for Discontinued Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Sun Ray Software and Hardware and Oracle Virtual Desktop Client Development For Sales Orders and Questions Please contact your Oracle Sales Representative or Saurabh Vijay ([email protected])

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• How to Save Hundreds or Thousands of Dollars on Cell Phone Service

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Cell phone contracts are bad. You get a seemingly cheap phone up front, but you more than pay for the cost of the phone over two years. Prepaid phone plans are surging in North America for a reason. Prepaid phone plans will be cheaper and more flexible than traditional contracts with big carriers for many people. However much you use your phone, there’s a good chance you can save money with a prepaid service. No More Contracts Here’s how cell phone service typically works in North America: You get a subsidized phone for “free”, $99, or $199. You sign up for a two-year contract and more than pay back the cost of that phone over the length of the contract. This is similar to leasing something or purchasing it on a credit card and paying it back over two years — you spend less up front, but you’re paying more in the long run. But this isn’t the only option. You could opt for a cheaper prepaid service that doesn’t lock you into a contract. If you don’t use your phone much, you could just pay for what you use and avoid the hefty cell phone bills. If you use your phone a lot, you could get a cheaper plan, too. Now, this certainly isn’t for everyone. If you want the latest iPhone or Galaxy smartphone every two years and require a 4G data connection, prepaid services may not be for you. On the other hand, if you don’t need the latest phone, you can save money here. You can also save a huge amount of money if you don’t use your phone much. Phone Options When you choose your prepaid or contract-free service, you’ll often be able to purchase a phone from them. You’ll generally be able to find dirt-cheap dumbphones and the cheapest, slowest Android phones for not very much money. If you are able to buy a top-of-the-line smartphone, you’ll have to pay the full, unsubsidized price. That’s $649 for either an iPhone 5S or Samsung Galaxy S4. Whatever phones the service provider offers, you could always buy a phone elsewhere — for example, you could buy an unsubsidized iPhone direct from Apple and then take it to your cell phone service of choice. Most services will allow you to get a SIM card and pop it into your existing phone rather than purchasing a phone. If you can get a hand-me-down smartphone, you can often save quite a bit of money. For example, you may have a family member upgrading from an iPhone 4S to an iPhone 5S. You could take their phone to a prepaid carrier and have a nicer phone on a cheap cell phone plan. If you brought an old smartphone to a big carrier like AT&T or Verizon, they wouldn’t give you a discount on your monthly plan. You’d have to pay the same amount of money every month as if you had gotten a subsidized phone. Google’s Nexus phones are also great options for people looking to buy smartphones and pay up-front. Google’s Nexus 4 offered a modern, almost top-of-the-line Android smartphone experience at $299 or $349 when it came out last year. Google will soon be releasing the Nexus 5 and it’s expected to be priced at $349. That’s certainly a lot more than a cheap phone, but it’s a fairly high-end smartphone at almost half the price of an iPhone 5S or Galaxy S4. Nexus phones can be purchased online from Google’s Play Store. Service Options When choosing a service, you need to consider what you actually use. If you’re someone who only uses your phone rarely, you can get plans that will allow you to pay as little as a few dollars per month. If you’re someone who’s usually in range of Wi-Fi, you may not need much data at all. If you want a plan with unlimited talk, texting, and data usage, you can get it for much cheaper than you’d pay on a major carrier like AT&T. The options here range from pay-as-you-go plans, like the ones offered by T-Mobile, which allow you to put a certain amount of money in and only drain that balance when you actually use minutes, texts, or data. If you only make a few calls and send a few texts per month, you’d only pay a few bucks. On the other end, Walmart’s Straight Talk service is a popular option that offers unlimited talk, texting, and data at $45 per month. Which service is right for you depends on a lot of things, including your usage and what each network’s coverage is like in your area. You’ll want to do some research of your own before choosing a service. Prepaid services also offer you even more flexibility after you choose one. If you’re not happy or a better deal comes along, you can switch — you’re not locked into your service for two years and you won’t pay an early termination fee. Image Credit: Intel Free Press on Flickr, Jon Fingas on Flickr, John Karakatsanis on Flickr, kendalkinggroup on Flickr     

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• Alternative Grid Layout for Silverlight suggestion

  - by brainbox

  I've proposed a suggestion to create alternative grid layout for Silverlight. Please vote for it if also faced the same problems. As i write before current Silverlight Grid Layout breakes best practices of HTML and Adobe Flex Grid layouts. Current defention based approach have following disadvantages that makes xaml coding very hard: 1. It is very hard to create new row. In that case you should rewriteall Grid.Row and Grid.Columns for all rows inserted below.2. Defenitions are static by their nature and because of it, it isimpossible to use grid for dynamic forms. Currently even in toolkit DataFormMicrosoft is using StackPanel. But StackPanel is not designed for multicolumn layout that have dataform. Here is a sample code of AdobeFlex datagrid, which incorporates bestpractices of HTML. <mx:Grid id="myGrid">        <!-- Define Row 1. -->       <mx:GridRow id="row1">           <!-- Define the first cell of Row 1. -->           <mx:GridItem>               <mx:Button label="Button 1"/>           </mx:GridItem>           <!-- Define the second cell of Row 1. -->           <mx:GridItem>               <mx:Button label="2"/>           </mx:GridItem>           <!-- Define the third cell of Row 1. -->           <mx:GridItem>               <mx:Button label="Button 3"/>           </mx:GridItem>       </mx:GridRow>        <!-- Define Row 2. -->       <mx:GridRow id="row2">           <!-- Define a single cell to span three columns of Row 2. -->           <mx:GridItem colSpan="3" horizontalAlign="center">               <mx:Button label="Long-Named Button 4"/>           </mx:GridItem>       </mx:GridRow>        <!-- Define Row 3. -->       <mx:GridRow id="row3">           <!-- Define an empty first cell of Row 3. -->           <mx:GridItem/>           <!-- Define a cell to span columns 2 and 3 of Row 3. -->           <mx:GridItem colSpan="2" horizontalAlign="center">               <mx:Button label="Button 5"/>           </mx:GridItem>       </mx:GridRow>    </mx:Grid>

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• Example: Controlling randomizer using code contracts

  - by DigiMortal

  One cool addition to Visual Studio 2010 is support for code contracts. Code contracts make sure that all conditions under what method is supposed to run correctly are met. Those who are familiar with unit tests will find code contracts easy to use. In this posting I will show you simple example about static contract checking (example solution is included). To try out code contracts you need at least Visual Studio 2010 Standard Edition. Also you need code contracts package. You can download package from DevLabs Code Contracts page. NB! Speakers, you can use the example solution in your presentations as long as you mention me and this blog in your sessions. Solution has readme.txt file that gives you steps to go through when presenting solution in sessions. This blog posting is companion posting for Visual Studio solution referred below. As an example let’s look at the following class. public class Randomizer {     public static int GetRandomFromRange(int min, int max)     {         var rnd = new Random();         return rnd.Next(min, max);     }       public static int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max)     {         Contract.Requires(min < max, "Min must be less than max");           var rnd = new Random();         return rnd.Next(min, max);     } } GetRandomFromRange() method returns results without any checking. GetRandomFromRangeContracted() uses one code contract that makes sure that minimum value is less than maximum value. Now let’s run the following code. class Program {     static void Main(string[] args)     {         var random1 = Randomizer.GetRandomFromRange(0, 9);         Console.WriteLine("Random 1: " + random1);           var random2 = Randomizer.GetRandomFromRange(1, 1);         Console.WriteLine("Random 2: " + random2);           var random3 = Randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(5, 5);         Console.WriteLine("Random 3: " + random3);           Console.WriteLine(" ");         Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit ...");         Console.ReadKey();     } } As we have not turned on support for code contracts the code runs without any problems and we get no warnings by Visual Studio that something is wrong. Now let’s turn on static checking for code contracts. As you can see then code still compiles without any errors but Visual Studio warns you about possible problems with contracts. Click on image to see it at original size.  When we open Error list and run our application we get the following output to errors list. Note that these messages are not shown immediately. There is little delay between application starting and appearance of these messages. So wait couple of seconds before going out of your mind. Click on image to see it at original size.  If you look at these warnings you can see that warnings show you illegal calls and also contracts against what they are going. Third warning points to GetRandomFromRange() method and shows that there should be also problem that can be detected by contract. Download Code Contracts example VS2010 solution | 30KB

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