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• Xen DomU on DRBD device: barrier errors

  - by Halfgaar

  I'm testing setting up a Xen DomU with a DRBD storage for easy failover. Most of the time, immediatly after booting the DomU, I get an IO error: [ 3.153370] EXT3-fs (xvda2): using internal journal [ 3.277115] ip_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team [ 3.336014] nf_conntrack version 0.5.0 (3899 buckets, 15596 max) [ 3.515604] init: failsafe main process (397) killed by TERM signal [ 3.801589] blkfront: barrier: write xvda2 op failed [ 3.801597] blkfront: xvda2: barrier or flush: disabled [ 3.801611] end_request: I/O error, dev xvda2, sector 52171168 [ 3.801630] end_request: I/O error, dev xvda2, sector 52171168 [ 3.801642] Buffer I/O error on device xvda2, logical block 6521396 [ 3.801652] lost page write due to I/O error on xvda2 [ 3.801755] Aborting journal on device xvda2. [ 3.804415] EXT3-fs (xvda2): error: ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal [ 3.804434] EXT3-fs (xvda2): error: remounting filesystem read-only [ 3.814754] journal commit I/O error [ 6.973831] init: udev-fallback-graphics main process (538) terminated with status 1 [ 6.992267] init: plymouth-splash main process (546) terminated with status 1 The manpage of drbdsetup says that LVM (which I use) doesn't support barriers (better known as tagged command queuing or native command queing), so I configured the drbd device not to use barriers. This can be seen in /proc/drbd (by "wo:f, meaning flush, the next method drbd chooses after barrier): 3: cs:Connected ro:Primary/Secondary ds:UpToDate/UpToDate C r---- ns:2160152 nr:520204 dw:2680344 dr:2678107 al:3549 bm:9183 lo:0 pe:0 ua:0 ap:0 ep:1 wo:f oos:0 And on the other host: 3: cs:Connected ro:Secondary/Primary ds:UpToDate/UpToDate C r---- ns:0 nr:2160152 dw:2160152 dr:0 al:0 bm:8052 lo:0 pe:0 ua:0 ap:0 ep:1 wo:f oos:0 I also enabled the option disable_sendpage, as per the drbd docs: cat /sys/module/drbd/parameters/disable_sendpage Y I also tried adding barriers=0 to fstab as mount option. Still it sometimes says: [ 58.603896] blkfront: barrier: write xvda2 op failed [ 58.603903] blkfront: xvda2: barrier or flush: disabled I don't even know if ext3 has a nobarrier option. And, because only one of my storage systems is battery backed, it would not be smart anyway. Why does it still compain about barriers when I disabled that? Both host are: Debian: 6.0.4 uname -a: Linux 2.6.32-5-xen-amd64 drbd: 8.3.7 Xen: 4.0.1 Guest: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS uname -a: Linux 3.2.0-24-generic pvops drbd resource: resource drbdvm { meta-disk internal; device /dev/drbd3; startup { # The timeout value when the last known state of the other side was available. 0 means infinite. wfc-timeout 0; # Timeout value when the last known state was disconnected. 0 means infinite. degr-wfc-timeout 180; } syncer { # This is recommended only for low-bandwidth lines, to only send those # blocks which really have changed. #csums-alg md5; # Set to about half your net speed rate 60M; # It seems that this option moved to the 'net' section in drbd 8.4. (later release than Debian has currently) verify-alg md5; } net { # The manpage says this is recommended only in pre-production (because of its performance), to determine # if your LAN card has a TCP checksum offloading bug. #data-integrity-alg md5; } disk { # Detach causes the device to work over-the-network-only after the # underlying disk fails. Detach is not default for historical reasons, but is # recommended by the docs. # However, the Debian defaults in drbd.conf suggest the machine will reboot in that event... on-io-error detach; # LVM doesn't support barriers, so disabling it. It will revert to flush. Check wo: in /proc/drbd. If you don't disable it, you get IO errors. no-disk-barrier; } on host1 { # universe is a VG disk /dev/universe/drbdvm-disk; address 10.0.0.1:7792; } on host2 { # universe is a VG disk /dev/universe/drbdvm-disk; address 10.0.0.2:7792; } } DomU cfg: bootloader = '/usr/lib/xen-default/bin/pygrub' vcpus = '2' memory = '512' # # Disk device(s). # root = '/dev/xvda2 ro' disk = [ 'phy:/dev/drbd3,xvda2,w', 'phy:/dev/universe/drbdvm-swap,xvda1,w', ] # # Hostname # name = 'drbdvm' # # Networking # # fake IP for posting vif = [ 'ip=1.2.3.4,mac=00:16:3E:22:A8:A7' ] # # Behaviour # on_poweroff = 'destroy' on_reboot = 'restart' on_crash = 'restart' In my test setup: the primary host's storage is 9650SE SATA-II RAID PCIe with battery. The secondary is software RAID1. Isn't DRBD+Xen widely used? With these problems, it's not going to work.

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• Movement prediction for non-shooters

  - by ShadowChaser

  I'm working on an isometric 2D game with moderate-scale multiplayer, approximately 20-30 players connected at once to a persistent server. I've had some difficulty getting a good movement prediction implementation in place. Physics/Movement The game doesn't have a true physics implementation, but uses the basic principles to implement movement. Rather than continually polling input, state changes (ie/ mouse down/up/move events) are used to change the state of the character entity the player is controlling. The player's direction (ie/ north-east) is combined with a constant speed and turned into a true 3D vector - the entity's velocity. In the main game loop, "Update" is called before "Draw". The update logic triggers a "physics update task" that tracks all entities with a non-zero velocity uses very basic integration to change the entities position. For example: entity.Position += entity.Velocity.Scale(ElapsedTime.Seconds) (where "Seconds" is a floating point value, but the same approach would work for millisecond integer values). The key point is that no interpolation is used for movement - the rudimentary physics engine has no concept of a "previous state" or "current state", only a position and velocity. State Change and Update Packets When the velocity of the character entity the player is controlling changes, a "move avatar" packet is sent to the server containing the entity's action type (stand, walk, run), direction (north-east), and current position. This is different from how 3D first person games work. In a 3D game the velocity (direction) can change frame to frame as the player moves around. Sending every state change would effectively transmit a packet per frame, which would be too expensive. Instead, 3D games seem to ignore state changes and send "state update" packets on a fixed interval - say, every 80-150ms. Since speed and direction updates occur much less frequently in my game, I can get away with sending every state change. Although all of the physics simulations occur at the same speed and are deterministic, latency is still an issue. For that reason, I send out routine position update packets (similar to a 3D game) but much less frequently - right now every 250ms, but I suspect with good prediction I can easily boost it towards 500ms. The biggest problem is that I've now deviated from the norm - all other documentation, guides, and samples online send routine updates and interpolate between the two states. It seems incompatible with my architecture, and I need to come up with a better movement prediction algorithm that is closer to a (very basic) "networked physics" architecture. The server then receives the packet and determines the players speed from it's movement type based on a script (Is the player able to run? Get the player's running speed). Once it has the speed, it combines it with the direction to get a vector - the entity's velocity. Some cheat detection and basic validation occurs, and the entity on the server side is updated with the current velocity, direction, and position. Basic throttling is also performed to prevent players from flooding the server with movement requests. After updating its own entity, the server broadcasts an "avatar position update" packet to all other players within range. The position update packet is used to update the client side physics simulations (world state) of the remote clients and perform prediction and lag compensation. Prediction and Lag Compensation As mentioned above, clients are authoritative for their own position. Except in cases of cheating or anomalies, the client's avatar will never be repositioned by the server. No extrapolation ("move now and correct later") is required for the client's avatar - what the player sees is correct. However, some sort of extrapolation or interpolation is required for all remote entities that are moving. Some sort of prediction and/or lag-compensation is clearly required within the client's local simulation / physics engine. Problems I've been struggling with various algorithms, and have a number of questions and problems: Should I be extrapolating, interpolating, or both? My "gut feeling" is that I should be using pure extrapolation based on velocity. State change is received by the client, client computes a "predicted" velocity that compensates for lag, and the regular physics system does the rest. However, it feels at odds to all other sample code and articles - they all seem to store a number of states and perform interpolation without a physics engine. When a packet arrives, I've tried interpolating the packet's position with the packet's velocity over a fixed time period (say, 200ms). I then take the difference between the interpolated position and the current "error" position to compute a new vector and place that on the entity instead of the velocity that was sent. However, the assumption is that another packet will arrive in that time interval, and it's incredibly difficult to "guess" when the next packet will arrive - especially since they don't all arrive on fixed intervals (ie/ state changes as well). Is the concept fundamentally flawed, or is it correct but needs some fixes / adjustments? What happens when a remote player stops? I can immediately stop the entity, but it will be positioned in the "wrong" spot until it moves again. If I estimate a vector or try to interpolate, I have an issue because I don't store the previous state - the physics engine has no way to say "you need to stop after you reach position X". It simply understands a velocity, nothing more complex. I'm reluctant to add the "packet movement state" information to the entities or physics engine, since it violates basic design principles and bleeds network code across the rest of the game engine. What should happen when entities collide? There are three scenarios - the controlling player collides locally, two entities collide on the server during a position update, or a remote entity update collides on the local client. In all cases I'm uncertain how to handle the collision - aside from cheating, both states are "correct" but at different time periods. In the case of a remote entity it doesn't make sense to draw it walking through a wall, so I perform collision detection on the local client and cause it to "stop". Based on point #2 above, I might compute a "corrected vector" that continually tries to move the entity "through the wall" which will never succeed - the remote avatar is stuck there until the error gets too high and it "snaps" into position. How do games work around this?

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• The Application Architecture Domain

  - by Michael Glas

  I have been spending a lot of time thinking about Application Architecture in the context of EA. More specifically, as an Enterprise Architect, what do I need to consider when looking at/defining/designing the Application Architecture Domain?There are several definitions of Application Architecture. TOGAF says “The objective here [in Application Architecture] is to define the major kinds of application system necessary to process the data and support the business”. FEA says the Application Architecture “Defines the applications needed to manage the data and support the business functions”.I agree with these definitions. They reflect what the Application Architecture domain does. However, they need to be decomposed to be practical.I find it useful to define a set of views into the Application Architecture domain. These views reflect what an EA needs to consider when working with/in the Applications Architecture domain. These viewpoints are, at a high level:Capability View: This view reflects how applications alignment with business capabilities. It is a super set of the following views when viewed in aggregate. By looking at the Application Architecture domain in terms of the business capabilities it supports, you get a good perspective on how those applications are directly supporting the business.Technology View: The technology view reflects the underlying technology that makes up the applications. Based on the number of rationalization activities I have seen (more specifically application rationalization), the phrase “complexity equals cost” drives the importance of the technology view, especially when attempting to reduce that complexity through standardization type activities. Some of the technology components to be considered are: Software: The application itself as well as the software the application relies on to function (web servers, application servers). Infrastructure: The underlying hardware and network components required by the application and supporting application software. Development: How the application is created and maintained. This encompasses development components that are part of the application itself (i.e. customizable functions), as well as bolt on development through web services, API’s, etc. The maintenance process itself also falls under this view. Integration: The interfaces that the application provides for integration as well as the integrations to other applications and data sources the application requires to function. Type: Reflects the kind of application (mash-up, 3 tiered, etc). (Note: functional type [CRM, HCM, etc.] are reflected under the capability view). Organization View: Organizations are comprised of people and those people use applications to do their jobs. Trying to define the application architecture domain without taking the organization that will use/fund/change it into consideration is like trying to design a car without thinking about who will drive it (i.e. you may end up building a formula 1 car for a family of 5 that is really looking for a minivan). This view reflects the people aspect of the application. It includes: Ownership: Who ‘owns’ the application? This will usually reflect primary funding and utilization but not always. Funding: Who funds both the acquisition/creation as well as the on-going maintenance (funding to create/change/operate)? Change: Who can/does request changes to the application and what process to the follow? Utilization: Who uses the application, how often do they use it, and how do they use it? Support: Which organization is responsible for the on-going support of the application? Information View: Whether or not you subscribe to the view that “information drives the enterprise”, it is a fact that information is critical. The management, creation, and organization of that information are primary functions of enterprise applications. This view reflects how the applications are tied to information (or at a higher level – how the Application Architecture domain relates to the Information Architecture domain). It includes: Access: The application is the mechanism by which end users access information. This could be through a primary application (i.e. CRM application), or through an information access type application (a BI application as an example). Creation: Applications create data in order to provide information to end-users. (I.e. an application creates an order to be used by an end-user as part of the fulfillment process). Consumption: Describes the data required by applications to function (i.e. a product id is required by a purchasing application to create an order. Application Service View: Organizations today are striving to be more agile. As an EA, I need to provide an architecture that supports this agility. One of the primary ways to achieve the required agility in the application architecture domain is through the use of ‘services’ (think SOA, web services, etc.). Whether it is through building applications from the ground up utilizing services, service enabling an existing application, or buying applications that are already ‘service enabled’, compartmentalizing application functions for re-use helps enable flexibility in the use of those applications in support of the required business agility. The applications service view consists of: Services: Here, I refer to the generic definition of a service “a set of related software functionalities that can be reused for different purposes, together with the policies that should control its usage”. Functions: The activities within an application that are not available / applicable for re-use. This view is helpful when identifying duplication functions between applications that are not service enabled. Delivery Model View: It is hard to talk about EA today without hearing the terms ‘cloud’ or shared services.  Organizations are looking at the ways their applications are delivered for several reasons, to reduce cost (both CAPEX and OPEX), to improve agility (time to market as an example), etc.  From an EA perspective, where/how an application is deployed has impacts on the overall enterprise architecture. From integration concerns to SLA requirements to security and compliance issues, the Enterprise Architect needs to factor in how applications are delivered when designing the Enterprise Architecture. This view reflects how applications are delivered to end-users. The delivery model view consists of different types of delivery mechanisms/deployment options for applications: Traditional: Reflects non-cloud type delivery options. The most prevalent consists of an application running on dedicated hardware (usually specific to an environment) for a single consumer. Private Cloud: The application runs on infrastructure provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers. Public Cloud: The application runs on infrastructure provisioned for open use by the general public. Hybrid: The application is deployed on two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability. While by no means comprehensive, I find that applying these views to the application domain gives a good understanding of what an EA needs to consider when effecting changes to the Application Architecture domain.Finally, the application architecture domain is one of several architecture domains that an EA must consider when developing an overall Enterprise Architecture. The Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework defines four Primary domains: Business Architecture, Application Architecture, Information Architecture, and Technology Architecture. Each domain links to the others either directly or indirectly at some point. Oracle links them at a high level as follows:Business Capabilities and/or Business Processes (Business Architecture), links to the Applications that enable the capability/process (Applications Architecture – COTS, Custom), links to the Information Assets managed/maintained by the Applications (Information Architecture), links to the technology infrastructure upon which all this runs (Technology Architecture - integration, security, BI/DW, DB infrastructure, deployment model). There are however, times when the EA needs to narrow focus to a particular domain for some period of time. These views help me to do just that.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #034

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 UDF – User Defined Function to Strip HTML – Parse HTML – No Regular Expression The UDF used in the blog does fantastic task – it scans entire HTML text and removes all the HTML tags. It keeps only valid text data without HTML task. This is one of the quite commonly requested tasks many developers have to face everyday. De-fragmentation of Database at Operating System to Improve Performance Operating system skips MDF file while defragging the entire filesystem of the operating system. It is absolutely fine and there is no impact of the same on performance. Read the entire blog post for my conversation with our network engineers. Delay Function – WAITFOR clause – Delay Execution of Commands How do you delay execution of the commands in SQL Server – ofcourse by using WAITFOR keyword. In this blog post, I explain the same with the help of T-SQL script. Find Length of Text Field To measure the length of TEXT fields the function is DATALENGTH(textfield). Len will not work for text field. As of SQL Server 2005, developers should migrate all the text fields to VARCHAR(MAX) as that is the way forward. Retrieve Current Date Time in SQL Server CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, GETDATE(), {fn NOW()} There are three ways to retrieve the current datetime in SQL SERVER. CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, GETDATE(), {fn NOW()} Explanation and Comparison of NULLIF and ISNULL An interesting observation is NULLIF returns null if it comparison is successful, whereas ISNULL returns not null if its comparison is successful. In one way they are opposite to each other. Here is my question to you - How to create infinite loop using NULLIF and ISNULL? If this is even possible? 2008 Introduction to SERVERPROPERTY and example SERVERPROPERTY is a very interesting system function. It returns many of the system values. I use it very frequently to get different server values like Server Collation, Server Name etc. SQL Server Start Time We can use DMV to find out what is the start time of SQL Server in 2008 and later version. In this blog you can see how you can do the same. Find Current Identity of Table Many times we need to know what is the current identity of the column. I have found one of my developers using aggregated function MAX () to find the current identity. However, I prefer following DBCC command to figure out current identity. Create Check Constraint on Column Some time we just need to create a simple constraint over the table but I have noticed that developers do many different things to make table column follow rules than just creating constraint. I suggest constraint is a very useful concept and every SQL Developer should pay good attention to this subject. 2009 List Schema Name and Table Name for Database This is one of the blog post where I straight forward display script. One of the kind of blog posts, which I still love to read and write. Clustered Index on Separate Drive From Table Location A table devoid of primary key index is called heap, and here data is not arranged in a particular order, which gives rise to issues that adversely affect performance. Data must be stored in some kind of order. If we put clustered index on it then the order will be forced by that index and the data will be stored in that particular order. Understanding Table Hints with Examples Hints are options and strong suggestions specified for enforcement by the SQL Server query processor on DML statements. The hints override any execution plan the query optimizer might select for a query. 2010 Data Pages in Buffer Pool – Data Stored in Memory Cache One of my earlier year article, which I still read it many times and point developers to read it again. It is clear from the Resultset that when more than one index is used, datapages related to both or all of the indexes are stored in Memory Cache separately. TRANSACTION, DML and Schema Locks Can you create a situation where you can see Schema Lock? Well, this is a very simple question, however during the interview I notice over 50 candidates failed to come up with the scenario. In this blog post, I have demonstrated the situation where we can see the schema lock in database. 2011 Solution – Puzzle – Statistics are not updated but are Created Once In this example I have created following situation: Create Table Insert 1000 Records Check the Statistics Now insert 10 times more 10,000 indexes Check the Statistics – it will be NOT updated Auto Update Statistics and Auto Create Statistics for database is TRUE Now I have requested two things in the example 1) Why this is happening? 2) How to fix this issue? Selecting Domain from Email Address This is a straight to script blog post where I explain how to select only domain name from entire email address. Solution – Generating Zero Without using Any Numbers in T-SQL How to get zero digit without using any digit? This is indeed a very interesting question and the answer is even interesting. Try to come up with answer in next 10 minutes and if you can’t come up with the answer the blog post read this post for solution. 2012 Simple Explanation and Puzzle with SOUNDEX Function and DIFFERENCE Function In simple words - SOUNDEX converts an alphanumeric string to a four-character code to find similar-sounding words or names. DIFFERENCE function returns an integer value. The  integer returned is the number of characters in the SOUNDEX values that are the same. Read Only Files and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) I have come across a very interesting feature in SSMS related to “Read Only” files. I believe it is a little unknown feature as well so decided to write a blog about the same. Identifying Column Data Type of uniqueidentifier without Querying System Tables How do I know if any table has a uniqueidentifier column and what is its value without using any DMV or System Catalogues? Only information you know is the table name and you are allowed to return any kind of error if the table does not have uniqueidentifier column. Read the blog post to find the answer. Solution – User Not Able to See Any User Created Object in Tables – Security and Permissions Issue Interesting question – “When I try to connect to SQL Server, it lets me connect just fine as well let me open and explore the database. I noticed that I do not see any user created instances but when my colleague attempts to connect to the server, he is able to explore the database as well see all the user created tables and other objects. Can you help me fix it?” Importing CSV File Into Database – SQL in Sixty Seconds #018 – Video Here is interesting small 60 second video on how to import CSV file into Database. ColumnStore Index – Batch Mode vs Row Mode Here is the logic behind when Columnstore Index uses Batch Mode and when it uses Row Mode. A batch typically represents about 1000 rows of data. Batch mode processing also uses algorithms that are optimized for the multicore CPUs and increased memory throughput. Follow up – Usage of $rowguid and $IDENTITY This is an excellent follow up blog post of my earlier blog post where I explain where to use $rowguid and $identity.  If you do not know the difference between them, this is a blog with a script example. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant.  It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle();    jmp.f();  }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    for(int i=0; i<10; i++) {      System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory");    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite();    jmp.f();    System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError");  }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

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• The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant.  It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle();    jmp.f();  }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite {  private final int dataSize =      (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6);  public void f() {    {      byte[] data = new byte[dataSize];    }    for(int i=0; i<10; i++) {      System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory");    }    byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize];  }  public static void main(String[] args) {    JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite();    jmp.f();    System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError");  }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers.

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• New ways for backup, recovery and restore of Essbase Block Storage databases – part 2 by Bernhard Kinkel

  - by Alexandra Georgescu

  After discussing in the first part of this article new options in Essbase for the general backup and restore, this second part will deal with the also rather new feature of Transaction Logging and Replay, which was released in version 11.1, enhancing existing restore options. Tip: Transaction logging and replay cannot be used for aggregate storage databases. Please refer to the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Backup and Recovery Guide (rel. 11.1.2.1). Even if backups are done on a regular, frequent base, subsequent data entries, loads or calculations would not be reflected in a restored database. Activating Transaction Logging could fill that gap and provides you with an option to capture these post-backup transactions for later replay. The following table shows, which are the transactions that could be logged when Transaction Logging is enabled: In order to activate its usage, corresponding statements could be added to the Essbase.cfg file, using the TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION command. The complete syntax reads: TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION [ appname [ dbname]] LOGLOCATION NATIVE ?ENABLE | DISABLE Where appname and dbname are optional parameters giving you the chance in combination with the ENABLE or DISABLE command to set Transaction Logging for certain applications or databases or to exclude them from being logged. If only an appname is specified, the setting applies to all databases in that particular application. If appname and dbname are not defined, all applications and databases would be covered. LOGLOCATION specifies the directory to which the log is written, e.g. D:\temp\trlogs. This directory must already exist or needs to be created before using it for log information being written to it. NATIVE is a reserved keyword that shouldn’t be changed. The following example shows how to first enable logging on a more general level for all databases in the application Sample, followed by a disabling statement on a more granular level for only the Basic database in application Sample, hence excluding it from being logged. TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Hyperion/trlog/Sample NATIVE ENABLE TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Basic Hyperion/trlog/Sample NATIVE DISABLE Tip: After applying changes to the configuration file you must restart the Essbase server in order to initialize the settings. A maybe required replay of logged transactions after restoring a database can be done only by administrators. The following options are available: In Administration Services selecting Replay Transactions on the right-click menu on the database: Here you can select to replay transactions logged after the last replay request was originally executed or after the time of the last restored backup (whichever occurred later) or transactions logged after a specified time. Or you can replay transactions selectively based on a range of sequence IDs, which can be accessed using Display Transactions on the right-click menu on the database: These sequence ID s (0, 1, 2 … 7 in the screenshot below) are assigned to each logged transaction, indicating the order in which the transaction was performed. This helps to ensure the integrity of the restored data after a replay, as the replay of transactions is enforced in the same order in which they were originally performed. So for example a calculation originally run after a data load cannot be replayed before having replayed the data load first. After a transaction is replayed, you can replay only transactions with a greater sequence ID. For example, replaying the transaction with sequence ID of 4 includes all preceding transactions, while afterwards you can only replay transactions with a sequence ID of 5 or greater. Tip: After restoring a database from a backup you should always completely replay all logged transactions, which were executed after the backup, before executing new transactions. But not only the transaction information itself needs to be logged and stored in a specified directory as described above. During transaction logging, Essbase also creates archive copies of data load and rules files in the following default directory: ARBORPATH/app/appname/dbname/Replay These files are then used during the replay of a logged transaction. By default Essbase archives only data load and rules files for client data loads, but in order to specify the type of data to archive when logging transactions you can use the command TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE as an additional entry in the Essbase.cfg file. The syntax for the statement is: TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE [appname [dbname]] [OPTION] While to the [appname [dbname]] argument the same applies like before for TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION, the valid values for the OPTION argument are the following: Make the respective setting for which files copies should be logged, considering from which location transactions are usually taking place. Selecting the NONE option prevents Essbase from saving the respective files and the data load cannot be replayed. In this case you must first manually load the data before you can replay the transactions. Tip: If you use server or SQL data and the data and rules files are not archived in the Replay directory (for example, you did not use the SERVER or SERVER_CLIENT option), Essbase replays the data that is actually in the data source at the moment of the replay, which may or may not be the data that was originally loaded. You can find more detailed information in the following documents: Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Backup and Recovery Guide (rel. 11.1.2.1) Oracle Essbase Online Documentation (rel. 11.1.2.1)) Enterprise Performance Management System Documentation (including previous releases) Or on the Oracle Technology Network. If you are also interested in other new features and smart enhancements in Essbase or Hyperion Planning stay tuned for coming articles or check our training courses and web presentations. You can find general information about offerings for the Essbase and Planning curriculum or other Oracle-Hyperion products here; (please make sure to select your country/region at the top of this page) or in the OU Learning paths section, where Planning, Essbase and other Hyperion products can be found under the Fusion Middleware heading (again, please select the right country/region). Or drop me a note directly: [email protected]. About the Author: Bernhard Kinkel started working for Hyperion Solutions as a Presales Consultant and Consultant in 1998 and moved to Hyperion Education Services in 1999. He joined Oracle University in 2007 where he is a Principal Education Consultant. Based on these many years of working with Hyperion products he has detailed product knowledge across several versions. He delivers both classroom and live virtual courses. His areas of expertise are Oracle/Hyperion Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Web Analysis. Disclaimer: All methods and features mentioned in this article must be considered and tested carefully related to your environment, processes and requirements. As guidance please always refer to the available software documentation. This article does not recommend or advise any explicit action or change, hence the author cannot be held responsible for any consequences due to the use or implementation of these features.

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• The Internet of Things Is Really the Internet of People

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Mark Hurd - Originally Posted on LinkedIn As I speak with CEOs around the world, our conversations invariably come down to this central question: Can we change our corporate cultures and the ways we train and reward our people as rapidly as new technology is changing the work we do, the products we make and how we engage with customers? It’s a critical consideration given today’s pace of disruption, which already is straining traditional management models and HR strategies. Winning companies will bring innovation and vision to their employees and partners by attracting people who will thrive in this emerging world of relentless data, predictive analytics and unlimited what-if scenarios. So, where are we going to find employees who are as familiar with complex data as I am with orderly financial statements and business plans? I’m not just talking about high-end data scientists who most certainly will sit at or near the top of the new decision-making pyramid. Global organizations will need creative and motivated people who will devote their time to manipulating, reviewing, analyzing, sorting and reshaping data to drive business and delight customers. This might seem evident, but my conversations with business people across the globe indicate that only a small number of companies get it. In the past few years, executives have been busy keeping pace with seismic upheavals, including the rise of social customer engagement, the rapid acceleration of product-development cycles and the relentless move to mobile-first. But all of that, I think, is the start of an uphill climb to the top of a roller-coaster. Today, about 10 billion devices across the globe are connected to the Internet. In a couple of years, that number will probably double, and not because we will have bought 10 billion more computers, smart phones and tablets. This unprecedented explosion of Big Data is being triggered by the Internet of Things, which is another way of saying that the numerous intelligent devices touching our everyday lives are all becoming interconnected. Home appliances, food, industrial equipment, pets, pharmaceutical products, pallets, cars, luggage, packaged goods, athletic equipment, even clothing will be streaming data. Some data will provide important information about how to run our businesses and lead healthier lives. Much of it will be extraneous. How does a CEO cope with this unimaginable volume and velocity of data, much less harness it to excite and delight customers? Here are three things CEOs must do to tackle this challenge: 1) Take care of your employees, take care of your customers. Larry Ellison recently noted that the two most important priorities for any CEO today revolve around people: Taking care of your employees and taking care of your customers. Companies in today’s hypercompetitive business environment simply won’t be able to survive unless they’ve got world-class people at all levels of the organization. CEOs must demonstrate a commitment to employees by becoming champions for HR systems that empower every employee to fully understand his or her job, how it ties into the corporate framework, what’s expected of them, what training is available, and how they can use an embedded social network to communicate, collaborate and excel. Over the next several years, many of the world’s top industrialized economies will see a turnover in the workforce on an unprecedented scale. Across the United States, Europe, China and Japan, the “baby boomer” generation will be retiring and, by 2020, we’ll see turnovers in those regions ranging from 10 to 30 percent. How will companies replace all that brainpower, experience and know-how? How will CEOs perpetuate the best elements of their corporate cultures in the midst of this profound turnover? The challenge will be daunting, but it can be met with world-class HR technology. As companies begin replacing up to 30 percent of their workforce, they will need thousands of new types of data-native workers to exploit the Internet of Things in the service of the Internet of People. The shift in corporate mindset here can’t be overstated. The CEO has to be at the forefront of this new way of recruiting, training, motivating, aligning and developing truly 21-century talent. 2) Start thinking today about the Internet of People. Some forward-looking companies have begun pursuing the “democratization of data.” This allows more people within a company greater access to data that can help them make better decisions, move more quickly and keep pace with the changing interests and demands of their customers. As a result, we’ve seen organizations flatten out, growing numbers of well-informed people authorized to make decisions without corporate approval and a movement of engagement away from headquarters to the point of contact with the customer. These are profound changes, and I’m a huge proponent. As I think about what the next few years will bring as companies become deluged with unprecedented streams of data, I’m convinced that we’ll need dramatically different organizational structures, decision-making models, risk-management profiles and reward systems. For example, if a car company’s marketing department mines incoming data to determine that customers are shifting rapidly toward neon-green models, how many layers of approval, review, analysis and sign-off will be needed before the factory starts cranking out more neon-green cars? Will we continue to have organizations where too many people are empowered to say “No” and too few are allowed to say “Yes”? If so, how will those companies be able to compete in a world in which customers have more choices, instant access to more information and less loyalty than ever before? That’s why I think CEOs need to begin thinking about this problem right now, not in a year or two when competitors are already reshaping their organizations to match the marketplace’s new realities. 3) Partner with universities to help create a new type of highly skilled workers. Several years ago, universities introduced new undergraduate as well as graduate-level programs in analytics and informatics as the business need for deeper insights into the booming world of data began to explode. Today, as the growth rate of data continues to soar, we know that the Internet of Things will only intensify that growth. Moreover, as Big Data fuels insights that can be shaped into products and services that generate revenue, the demand for data scientists and data specialists will go on unabated. Beyond that top-level expertise, companies are going to need data-native thinkers at all levels of the organization. Where will this new type of worker come from? I think it’s incumbent on the business community to collaborate with universities to develop new curricula designed to turn out graduates who can capitalize on the data-driven world that the Internet of Things is surely going to create. These new workers will create opportunities to help their companies in fields as diverse as product design, customer service, marketing, manufacturing and distribution. They will become innovative leaders in fashioning an entirely new type of workforce and organizational structure optimized to fully exploit the Internet of Things so that it becomes a high-value enabler of the Internet of People. Mark Hurd is President of Oracle Corporation and a member of the company's Board of Directors. He joined Oracle in 2010, bringing more than 30 years of technology industry leadership, computer hardware expertise, and executive management experience to his role with the company. As President, Mr. Hurd oversees the corporate direction and strategy for Oracle's global field operations, including marketing, sales, consulting, alliances and channels, and support. He focuses on strategy, leadership, innovation, and customers.

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• MySQL for Excel 1.1.3 has been released

  - by Javier Treviño

  The MySQL Windows Experience Team is proud to announce the release of MySQL for Excel version 1.1.3, the  latest addition to the MySQL Installer for Windows. MySQL for Excel is an application plug-in enabling data analysts to very easily access and manipulate MySQL data within Microsoft Excel. It enables you to directly work with a MySQL database from within Microsoft Excel so you can easily do tasks such as: Importing MySQL Data into Excel Exporting Excel data directly into MySQL to a new or existing table Editing MySQL data directly within Excel MySQL for Excel is installed using the MySQL Installer for Windows. The MySQL installer comes in 2 versions   Full (150 MB) which includes a complete set of MySQL products with their binaries included in the download Web (1.5 MB - a network install) which will just pull MySQL for Excel over the web and install it when run.   You can download MySQL Installer from our official Downloads page at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/installer/. MySQL for Excel 1.1.3 introduces the following features:   Upon saving a Workbook containing Worksheets in Edit Mode, the user is asked if he wants to exit the Edit Mode on all Worksheets before their parent Workbook is saved so the Worksheets are saved unprotected, otherwise the Worksheets will remain protected and the users will be able to unprotect them later retrieving the passkeys from the application log after closing MySQL for Excel. Added background coloring to the column names header row of an Import Data operation to have the same look as the one in an Edit Data operation (i.e. gray-ish background). Connection passwords can be stored securely just like MySQL Workbench does and these secured passwords are shared with Workbench in the same way connections are. Changed the way the MySQL for Excel ribbon toggle button works, instead of just showing or hiding the add-in it actually opens and closes it. Added a connection test before any operation against the database (schema creation, data import, append, export or edition) so the operation dialog is not shown and a friendlier error message is shown.   Also this release contains the following bug fixes:   Added a check on every connection test for an expired password, if the password has been expired a dialog is now shown to the user to reset the password. Bug #17354118 - DON'T HANDLE EXPIRED PASSWORDS Added code to escape text values to be imported to an Excel worksheet that start with an equals sign so Excel does not treat those values as formulas that will fail evaluation. This is an option turned on by default that can be turned off by users if they wish to import values to be treated as Excel formulas. Bug #17354102 - ERROR IMPORTING TEXT VALUES TO EXCEL STARTING WITH AN EQUALS SIGN Added code to properly check the reason for a failing connection, if it's a failing password the user gets a dialog to retry the connection with a different password until the connection succeeds, a connection error not related to the password is thrown or the user cancels. If the failing connection is not related to a bad password an error message is shown to the users indicating the reason of the failure. Bug #16239007 - CONNECTIONS TO MYSQL SERVICES NOT RUNNING DISPLAY A WRONG PASSWORD ERROR MESSAGE Added global options dialog that can be accessed from the Schema Selection and DB Object Selection panels where the timeouts for the connection to the DB Server and for the query commands can be changed from their default values (15 seconds for the connection timeout and 30 seconds for the query timeout). MySQL Bug #68732, Bug #17191646 - QUERY TIMEOUT CANNOT BE ADJUSTED IN MYSQL FOR EXCEL Changed the Varchar(65,535) data type shown in the Export Data data type combo box to Text since the maximum row size is 65,535 bytes and any autodetected column data type with a length greater than 4,000 should be set to Text actually for the table to be created successfully. MySQL Bug #69779, Bug #17191633 - EXPORT FAILS FOR EXCEL FILES CONTAINING > 4000 CHARACTERS OF TEXT PER CELL Removed code that was replacing all spaces typed by the user in an overriden data type for a new column in an Export Data operation, also improved the data type detection code to flag as invalid data types with parenthesis but without any text inside or where the contents inside the parenthesis are not valid for the specific data type. Bug #17260260 - EXPORT DATA SET TYPE NOT WORKING WITH MEMBER VALUES CONTAINING SPACES Added support for the year data type with a length of 2 or 4 and a validation that valid values are integers between 1901-2155 (for 4-digit years) or between 0-99 (for 2-digit years). Bug #17259915 - EXPORT DATA YEAR DATA TYPE NOT RECOGNIZED IF DECLARED WITH A DISPLAY WIDTH) Fixed code for Export Data operations where users overrode the data type for columns typing Text in the data type combobox, which is a valid data type but was not recognized as such. Bug #17259490 - EXPORT DATA TEXT DATA TYPE NOT RECOGNIZED AS A VALID DATA TYPE Changed the location of the registry where the MySQL for Excel add-in is installed to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER so the add-in is accessible by all users and not only to the user that installed it. For this to work with Excel 2007 a hotfix may be required (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976477). MySQL Bug #68746, Bug #16675992 - EXCEL-ADD-IN IS ONLY INSTALLED FOR USER ACCOUNT THAT THE INSTALLATION RUNS UNDER Added support for Excel 2013 Single Document Interface, now that Excel 2013 creates 1 window per workbook also the Excel Add-In maintains an independent custom task pane in each window. MySQL Bug #68792, Bug #17272087 - MYSQL FOR EXCEL SIDEBAR DOES NOT APPEAR IN EXCEL 2013 (WITH WORKAROUND) Included the latest MySQL Utility with a code fix for the COM exception thrown when attempting to open Workbench in the Manage Connections window. Bug #17258966 - MYSQL WORKBENCH NOT OPENED BY CLICKING MANAGE CONNECTIONS HOTLABEL Fixed code for Append Data operations that was not applying a calculated automatic mapping correctly when the source and target tables had different number of columns, some columns with the same name but some of those lying on column indexes beyond the limit of the other source/target table. MySQL Bug #69220, Bug #17278349 - APPEND DOESN'T AUTOMATICALLY DETECT EXCEL COL HEADER WITH SAME NAME AS SQL FIELD Fixed some code for Edit Data operations that was escaping special characters twice (during edition in Excel and then upon sending the query to the MySQL server). MySQL Bug #68669, Bug #17271693 - A BACKSLASH IS INSERTED BEFORE AN APOSTROPHE EDITING TABLE WITH MYSQL FOR EXCEL Upgraded MySQL Utility with latest version that encapsulates dialog base classes and introduces more classes to handle Workbench connections, and removed these from the Excel project. Bug #16500331 - CAN'T DELETE CONNECTIONS CREATED WITHIN ADDIN You can access the MySQL for Excel documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-for-excel.html You can find our team’s blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows. You can also post questions on our MySQL for Excel forum found at http://forums.mysql.com/. Enjoy and thanks for the support!

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• The Business of Winning Innovation: An Exclusive Blog Series

  - by Kerrie Foy

  "The Business of Winning Innovation” is a series of articles authored by Oracle Agile PLM experts on what it takes to make innovation a successful and lucrative competitive advantage. Our customers have proven Agile PLM applications to be enormously flexible and comprehensive, so we’ve launched this article series to showcase some of the most fascinating, value-packed use cases. In this article by Keith Colonna, we kick-off the series by taking a look at the science side of innovation within the Consumer Products industry and how PLM can help companies innovate faster, cheaper, smarter. This article will review how innovation has become the lifeline for growth within consumer products companies and how certain companies are “winning” by creating a competitive advantage for themselves by taking a more enterprise-wide,systematic approach to “innovation”.   Managing the Science of Innovation within the Consumer Products Industry By: Keith Colonna, Value Chain Solution Manager, Oracle The consumer products (CP) industry is very mature and competitive. Most companies within this industry have saturated North America (NA) with their products thus maximizing their NA growth potential. Future growth is expected to come from either expansion outside of North America and/or by way of new ideas and products. Innovation plays an integral role in both of these strategies, whether you’re innovating business processes or the products themselves, and may cause several challenges for the typical CP company, Becoming more innovative is both an art and a science. Most CP companies are very good at the art of coming up with new innovative ideas, but many struggle with perfecting the science aspect that involves the best practice processes that help companies quickly turn ideas into sellable products and services. Symptoms and Causes of Business Pain Struggles associated with the science of innovation show up in a variety of ways, like: · Establishing and storing innovative product ideas and data · Funneling these ideas to the chosen few · Time to market cycle time and on-time launch rates · Success rates, or how often the best idea gets chosen · Imperfect decision making (i.e. the ability to kill projects that are not projected to be winners) · Achieving financial goals · Return on R&D investment · Communicating internally and externally as more outsource partners are added globally · Knowing your new product pipeline and project status These challenges (and others) can be consolidated into three root causes: A lack of visibility Poor data with limited access The inability to truly collaborate enterprise-wide throughout your extended value chain Choose the Right Remedy Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions are uniquely designed to help companies solve these types challenges and their root causes. However, PLM solutions can vary widely in terms of configurability, functionality, time-to-value, etc. Business leaders should evaluate PLM solution in terms of their own business drivers and long-term vision to determine the right fit. Many of these solutions are point solutions that can help you cure only one or two business pains in the short term. Others have been designed to serve other industries with different needs. Then there are those solutions that demo well but are owned by companies that are either unable or unwilling to continuously improve their solution to stay abreast of the ever changing needs of the CP industry to grow through innovation. What the Right PLM Solution Should Do for You Based on more than twenty years working in the CP industry, I recommend investing in a single solution that can help you solve all of the issues associated with the science of innovation in a totally integrated fashion. By integration I mean the (1) integration of the all of the processes associated with the development, maintenance and delivery of your product data, and (2) the integration, or harmonization of this product data with other downstream sources, like ERP, product catalogues and the GS1 Global Data Synchronization Network (or GDSN, which is now a CP industry requirement for doing business with most retailers). The right PLM solution should help you: Increase Revenue. A best practice PLM solution should help a company grow its revenues by consolidating product development cycle-time and helping companies get new and improved products to market sooner. PLM should also eliminate many of the root causes for a product being returned, refused and/or reclaimed (which takes away from top-line growth) by creating an enterprise-wide, collaborative, workflow-driven environment. Reduce Costs. A strong PLM solution should help shave many unnecessary costs that companies typically take for granted. Rationalizing SKU’s, components (ingredients and packaging) and suppliers is a major opportunity at most companies that PLM should help address. A natural outcome of this rationalization is lower direct material spend and a reduction of inventory. Another cost cutting opportunity comes with PLM when it helps companies avoid certain costs associated with process inefficiencies that lead to scrap, rework, excess and obsolete inventory, poor end of life administration, higher cost of quality and regulatory and increased expediting. Mitigate Risk. Risks are the hardest to quantify but can be the most costly to a company. Food safety, recalls, line shutdowns, customer dissatisfaction and, worst of all, the potential tarnishing of your brands are a few of the debilitating risks that CP companies deal with on a daily basis. These risks are so uniquely severe that they require an enterprise PLM solution specifically designed for the CP industry that safeguards product information and processes while still allowing the art of innovation to flourish. Many CP companies have already created a winning advantage by leveraging a single, best practice PLM solution to establish an enterprise-wide, systematic approach to innovation. Oracle’s Answer for the Consumer Products Industry Oracle is dedicated to solving the growth and innovation challenges facing the CP industry. Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management for Process solution was originally developed with and for CP companies and is driven by a specialized development staff solely focused on maintaining and continuously improving the solution per the latest industry requirements. Agile PLM for Process helps CP companies handle all of the processes associated with managing the science of the innovation process, including: specification management, new product development/project and portfolio management, formulation optimization, supplier management, and quality and regulatory compliance to name a few. And as I mentioned earlier, integration is absolutely critical. Many Oracle CP customers, both with Oracle ERP systems and non-Oracle ERP systems, report benefits from Oracle’s Agile PLM for Process. In future articles we will explain in greater detail how both existing Oracle customers (like Gallo, Smuckers, Land-O-Lakes and Starbucks) and new Oracle customers (like ConAgra, Tyson, McDonalds and Heinz) have all realized the benefits of Agile PLM for Process and its integration to their ERP systems. More to Come Stay tuned for more articles in our blog series “The Business of Winning Innovation.” While we will also feature articles focused on other industries, look forward to more on how Agile PLM for Process addresses innovation challenges facing the CP industry. Additional topics include: Innovation Data Management (IDM), New Product Development (NPD), Product Quality Management (PQM), Menu Management,Private Label Management, and more! . Watch this video for more info about Agile PLM for Process

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• Oracle Flashback Technologies - Overview

  - by Sridhar_R-Oracle

  Oracle Flashback Technologies - IntroductionIn his May 29th 2014 blog, my colleague Joe Meeks introduced Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) and discussed both planned and unplanned outages. Let’s take a closer look at unplanned outages. These can be caused by physical failures (e.g., server, storage, network, file deletion, physical corruption, site failures) or by logical failures – cases where all components and files are physically available, but data is incorrect or corrupt. These logical failures are usually caused by human errors or application logic errors. This blog series focuses on these logical errors – what causes them and how to address and recover from them using Oracle Database Flashback. In this introductory blog post, I’ll provide an overview of the Oracle Database Flashback technologies and will discuss the features in detail in future blog posts. Let’s get started. We are all human beings (unless a machine is reading this), and making mistakes is a part of what we do…often what we do best!  We “fat finger”, we spill drinks on keyboards, unplug the wrong cables, etc.  In addition, many of us, in our lives as DBAs or developers, must have observed, caused, or corrected one or more of the following unpleasant events: Accidentally updated a table with wrong values !! Performed a batch update that went wrong - due to logical errors in the code !! Dropped a table !! How do DBAs typically recover from these types of errors? First, data needs to be restored and recovered to the point-in-time when the error occurred (incomplete or point-in-time recovery).  Moreover, depending on the type of fault, it’s possible that some services – or even the entire database – would have to be taken down during the recovery process.Apart from error conditions, there are other questions that need to be addressed as part of the investigation. For example, what did the data look like in the morning, prior to the error? What were the various changes to the row(s) between two timestamps? Who performed the transaction and how can it be reversed?  Oracle Database includes built-in Flashback technologies, with features that address these challenges and questions, and enable you to perform faster, easier, and convenient recovery from logical corruptions. HistoryFlashback Query, the first Flashback Technology, was introduced in Oracle 9i. It provides a simple, powerful and completely non-disruptive mechanism for data verification and recovery from logical errors, and enables users to view the state of data at a previous point in time.Flashback Technologies were further enhanced in Oracle 10g, to provide fast, easy recovery at the database, table, row, and even at a transaction level.Oracle Database 11g introduced an innovative method to manage and query long-term historical data with Flashback Data Archive. The 11g release also introduced Flashback Transaction, which provides an easy, one-step operation to back out a transaction. Oracle Database versions 11.2.0.2 and beyond further enhanced the performance of these features. Note that all the features listed here work without requiring any kind of restore operation.In addition, Flashback features are fully supported with the new multi-tenant capabilities introduced with Oracle Database 12c, Flashback Features Oracle Flashback Database enables point-in-time-recovery of the entire database without requiring a traditional restore and recovery operation. It rewinds the entire database to a specified point in time in the past by undoing all the changes that were made since that time.Oracle Flashback Table enables an entire table or a set of tables to be recovered to a point in time in the past.Oracle Flashback Drop enables accidentally dropped tables and all dependent objects to be restored.Oracle Flashback Query enables data to be viewed at a point-in-time in the past. This feature can be used to view and reconstruct data that was lost due to unintentional change(s) or deletion(s). This feature can also be used to build self-service error correction into applications, empowering end-users to undo and correct their errors.Oracle Flashback Version Query offers the ability to query the historical changes to data between two points in time or system change numbers (SCN) Oracle Flashback Transaction Query enables changes to be examined at the transaction level. This capability can be used to diagnose problems, perform analysis, audit transactions, and even revert the transaction by undoing SQLOracle Flashback Transaction is a procedure used to back-out a transaction and its dependent transactions.Flashback technologies eliminate the need for a traditional restore and recovery process to fix logical corruptions or make enquiries. Using these technologies, you can recover from the error in the same amount of time it took to generate the error. All the Flashback features can be accessed either via SQL command line (or) via Enterprise Manager.  Most of the Flashback technologies depend on the available UNDO to retrieve older data. The following table describes the various Flashback technologies: their purpose, dependencies and situations where each individual technology can be used.   Example Syntax Error investigation related:The purpose is to investigate what went wrong and what the values were at certain points in timeFlashback Queries  ( select .. as of SCN | Timestamp )   - Helps to see the value of a row/set of rows at a point in timeFlashback Version Queries  ( select .. versions between SCN | Timestamp and SCN | Timestamp)  - Helps determine how the value evolved between certain SCNs or between timestamps Flashback Transaction Queries (select .. XID=)   - Helps to understand how the transaction caused the changes.Error correction related:The purpose is to fix the error and correct the problems,Flashback Table  (flashback table .. to SCN | Timestamp)  - To rewind the table to a particular timestamp or SCN to reverse unwanted updates Flashback Drop (flashback table ..  to before drop )  - To undrop or undelete a table Flashback Database (flashback database to SCN  | Restore Point )  - This is the rewind button for Oracle databases. You can revert the entire database to a particular point in time. It is a fast way to perform a PITR (point-in-time recovery). Flashback Transaction (DBMS_FLASHBACK.TRANSACTION_BACKOUT(XID..))  - To reverse a transaction and its related transactions Advanced use cases Flashback technology is integrated into Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) and Oracle Data Guard. So, apart from the basic use cases mentioned above, the following use cases are addressed using Oracle Flashback. Block Media recovery by RMAN - to perform block level recovery Snapshot Standby - where the standby is temporarily converted to a read/write environment for testing, backup, or migration purposes Re-instate old primary in a Data Guard environment – this avoids the need to restore an old backup and perform a recovery to make it a new standby. Guaranteed Restore Points - to bring back the entire database to an older point-in-time in a guaranteed way. and so on..I hope this introductory overview helps you understand how Flashback features can be used to investigate and recover from logical errors.  As mentioned earlier, I will take a deeper-dive into to some of the critical Flashback features in my upcoming blogs and address common use cases.

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• T-SQL Tuesday #31 - Logging Tricks with CONTEXT_INFO

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Aaron Nelson [b | t], fellow Atlantan (the city in Georgia, not the famous sunken city, or the resort in the Bahamas) and covers the topic of logging (the recording of information, not the harvesting of trees) and maintains the fine T-SQL Tuesday tradition begun by Adam Machanic [b | t] (the SQL Server guru, not the guy who fixes cars, check the spelling again, there will be a quiz later). This is a trick I learned from Fernando Guerrero [b | t] waaaaaay back during the PASS Summit 2004 in sunny, hurricane-infested Orlando, during his session on Secret SQL Server (not sure if that's the correct title, and I haven't used parentheses in this paragraph yet).  CONTEXT_INFO is a neat little feature that's existed since SQL Server 2000 and perhaps even earlier.  It lets you assign data to the current session/connection, and maintains that data until you disconnect or change it.  In addition to the CONTEXT_INFO() function, you can also query the context_info column in sys.dm_exec_sessions, or even sysprocesses if you're still running SQL Server 2000, if you need to see it for another session. While you're limited to 128 bytes, one big advantage that CONTEXT_INFO has is that it's independent of any transactions.  If you've ever logged to a table in a transaction and then lost messages when it rolled back, you can understand how aggravating it can be.  CONTEXT_INFO also survives across multiple SQL batches (GO separators) in the same connection, so for those of you who were going to suggest "just log to a table variable, they don't get rolled back":  HA-HA, I GOT YOU!  Since GO starts a new batch all variable declarations are lost. Here's a simple example I recently used at work.  I had to test database mirroring configurations for disaster recovery scenarios and measure the network throughput.  I also needed to log how long it took for the script to run and include the mirror settings for the database in question.  I decided to use AdventureWorks as my database model, and Adam Machanic's Big Adventure script to provide a fairly large workload that's repeatable and easily scalable.  My test would consist of several copies of AdventureWorks running the Big Adventure script while I mirrored the databases (or not). Since Adam's script contains several batches, I decided CONTEXT_INFO would have to be used.  As it turns out, I only needed to grab the start time at the beginning, I could get the rest of the data at the end of the process.   The code is pretty small: declare @time binary(128)=cast(getdate() as binary(8)) set context_info @time   ... rest of Big Adventure code ...   go use master; insert mirror_test(server,role,partner,db,state,safety,start,duration) select @@servername, mirroring_role_desc, mirroring_partner_instance, db_name(database_id), mirroring_state_desc, mirroring_safety_level_desc, cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime), datediff(s,cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime),getdate()) from sys.database_mirroring where db_name(database_id) like 'Adv%';   I declared @time as a binary(128) since CONTEXT_INFO is defined that way.  I couldn't convert GETDATE() to binary(128) as it would pad the first 120 bytes as 0x00.  To keep the CAST functions simple and avoid using SUBSTRING, I decided to CAST GETDATE() as binary(8) and let SQL Server do the implicit conversion.  It's not the safest way perhaps, but it works on my machine. :) As I mentioned earlier, you can query system views for sessions and get their CONTEXT_INFO.  With a little boilerplate code this can be used to monitor long-running procedures, in case you need to kill a process, or are just curious  how long certain parts take.  In this example, I added code to Adam's Big Adventure script to set CONTEXT_INFO messages at strategic places I want to monitor.  (His code is in UPPERCASE as it was in the original, mine is all lowercase): declare @msg binary(128) set @msg=cast('Altering bigProduct.ProductID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ALTER COLUMN ProductID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg1 binary(128) set @msg1=cast('Adding pk_bigProduct Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg1 go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigProduct PRIMARY KEY (ProductID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg2 binary(128) set @msg2=cast('Altering bigTransactionHistory.TransactionID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg2 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ALTER COLUMN TransactionID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg3 binary(128) set @msg3=cast('Adding pk_bigTransactionHistory Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg3 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigTransactionHistory PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED(TransactionID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg4 binary(128) set @msg4=cast('Creating IX_ProductId_TransactionDate Index' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg4 go CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_ProductId_TransactionDate ON bigTransactionHistory(ProductId,TransactionDate) INCLUDE(Quantity,ActualCost) GO set context_info 0x0   This doesn't include the entire script, only those portions that altered a table or created an index.  One annoyance is that SET CONTEXT_INFO requires a literal or variable, you can't use an expression.  And since GO starts a new batch I need to declare a variable in each one.  And of course I have to use CAST because it won't implicitly convert varchar to binary.  And even though context_info is a nullable column, you can't SET CONTEXT_INFO NULL, so I have to use SET CONTEXT_INFO 0x0 to clear the message after the statement completes.  And if you're thinking of turning this into a UDF, you can't, although a stored procedure would work. So what does all this aggravation get you?  As the code runs, if I want to see which stage the session is at, I can run the following (assuming SPID 51 is the one I want): select CAST(context_info as varchar(128)) from sys.dm_exec_sessions where session_id=51   Since SQL Server 2005 introduced the new system and dynamic management views (DMVs) there's not as much need for tagging a session with these kinds of messages.  You can get the session start time and currently executing statement from them, and neatly presented if you use Adam's sp_whoisactive utility (and you absolutely should be using it).  Of course you can always use xp_cmdshell, a CLR function, or some other tricks to log information outside of a SQL transaction.  All the same, I've used this trick to monitor long-running reports at a previous job, and I still think CONTEXT_INFO is a great feature, especially if you're still using SQL Server 2000 or want to supplement your instrumentation.  If you'd like an exercise, consider adding the system time to the messages in the last example, and an automated job to query and parse it from the system tables.  That would let you track how long each statement ran without having to run Profiler. #TSQL2sDay

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• Boost your infrastructure with Coherence into the Cloud

  - by Nino Guarnacci

  Authors: Nino Guarnacci & Francesco Scarano,  at this URL could be found the original article:  http://blogs.oracle.com/slc/coherence_into_the_cloud_boost. Thinking about the enterprise cloud, come to mind many possible configurations and new opportunities in enterprise environments. Various customers needs that serve as guides to this new trend are often very different, but almost always united by two main objectives: Elasticity of infrastructure both Hardware and Software Investments related to the progressive needs of the current infrastructure Characteristics of innovation and economy. A concrete use case that I worked on recently demanded the fulfillment of two basic requirements of economy and innovation.The client had the need to manage a variety of data cache, which can process complex queries and parallel computational operations, maintaining the caches in a consistent state on different server instances, on which the application was installed.In addition, the customer was looking for a solution that would allow him to manage the likely situations in load peak during certain times of the year.For this reason, the customer requires a replication site, on which convey part of the requests during periods of peak; the desire was, however, to prevent the immobilization of investments in owned hardware-software architectures; so, to respond to this need, it was requested to seek a solution based on Cloud technologies and architectures already offered by the market. Coherence can already now address the requirements of large cache between different nodes in the cluster, providing further technology to search and parallel computing, with the simultaneous use of all hardware infrastructure resources. Moreover, thanks to the functionality of "Push Replication", which can replicate and update the information contained in the cache, even to a site hosted in the cloud, it is satisfied the need to make resilient infrastructure that can be based also on nodes temporarily housed in the Cloud architectures. There are different types of configurations that can be realized using the functionality "Push-Replication" of Coherence. Configurations can be either: Active - Passive  Hub and Spoke Active - Active Multi Master Centralized Replication Whereas the architecture of this particular project consists of two sites (Site 1 and Site Cloud), between which only Site 1 is enabled to write into the cache, it was decided to adopt an Active-Passive Configuration type (Hub and Spoke). If, however, the requirement should change over time, it will be particularly easy to change this configuration in an Active-Active configuration type. Although very simple, the small sample in this post, inspired by the specific project is effective, to better understand the features and capabilities of Coherence and its configurations. Let's create two distinct coherence cluster, located at miles apart, on two different domain contexts, one of them "hosted" at home (on-premise) and the other one hosted by any cloud provider on the network (or just the same laptop to test it :)). These two clusters, which we call Site 1 and Site Cloud, will contain the necessary information, so a simple client can insert data only into the Site 1. On both sites will be subscribed a listener, who listens to the variations of specific objects within the various caches. To implement these features, you need 4 simple classes: CachedResponse.java Represents the POJO class that will be inserted into the cache, and fulfills the task of containing useful information about the hypothetical links navigation ResponseSimulatorHelper.java Represents a link simulator, which has the task of randomly creating objects of type CachedResponse that will be added into the caches CacheCommands.java Represents the model of our example, because it is responsible for receiving instructions from the controller and performing basic operations against the cache, such as insert, delete, update, listening, objects within the cache Shell.java It is our controller, which give commands to be executed within the cache of the two Sites So, summarily, we execute the java class "Shell", asking it to put into the cache 100 objects of type "CachedResponse" through the java class "CacheCommands", then the simulator "ResponseSimulatorHelper" will randomly create new instances of objects "CachedResponse ". Finally, the Shell class will listen to for events occurring within the cache on the Site Cloud, while insertions and deletions are performed on Site 1. Now, we realize the two configurations of two respective sites / cluster: Site 1 and Site Cloud.For the Site 1 we define a cache of type "distributed" with features of "read and write", using the cache class store for the "push replication", a functionality offered by the project "incubator" of Oracle Coherence.For the "Site Cloud" we expect even the definition of “distributed” cache type with tcp proxy feature enabled, so it can receive updates from Site 1.  Coherence Cache Config XML file for "storage node" on "Site 1" site1-prod-cache-config.xml Coherence Cache Config XML file for "storage node" on "Site Cloud" site2-prod-cache-config.xml For two clients "Shell" which will connect respectively to the two clusters we have provided two easy access configurations.  Coherence Cache Config XML file for Shell on "Site 1" site1-shell-prod-cache-config.xml Coherence Cache Config XML file for Shell on "Site Cloud" site2-shell-prod-cache-config.xml Now, we just have to get everything and run our tests. To start at least one "storage" node (which holds the data) for the "Cloud Site", we can run the standard class  provided OOTB by Oracle Coherence com.tangosol.net.DefaultCacheServer with the following parameters and values:-Xmx128m-Xms64m-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dtangosol.coherence.management=all -Dtangosol.coherence.management.remote=true -Dtangosol.coherence.distributed.localstorage=true -Dtangosol.coherence.cacheconfig=config/site2-prod-cache-config.xml-Dtangosol.coherence.clusterport=9002-Dtangosol.coherence.site=SiteCloud To start at least one "storage" node (which holds the data) for the "Site 1", we can perform again the standard class provided by Coherence  com.tangosol.net.DefaultCacheServer with the following parameters and values:-Xmx128m-Xms64m-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dtangosol.coherence.management=all -Dtangosol.coherence.management.remote=true -Dtangosol.coherence.distributed.localstorage=true -Dtangosol.coherence.cacheconfig=config/site1-prod-cache-config.xml-Dtangosol.coherence.clusterport=9001-Dtangosol.coherence.site=Site1 Then, we start the first client "Shell" for the "Cloud Site", launching the java class it.javac.Shell  using these parameters and values: -Xmx64m-Xms64m-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dtangosol.coherence.management=all -Dtangosol.coherence.management.remote=true -Dtangosol.coherence.distributed.localstorage=false -Dtangosol.coherence.cacheconfig=config/site2-shell-prod-cache-config.xml-Dtangosol.coherence.clusterport=9002-Dtangosol.coherence.site=SiteCloud Finally, we start the second client "Shell" for the "Site 1", re-launching a new instance of class  it.javac.Shell  using  the following parameters and values: -Xmx64m-Xms64m-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dtangosol.coherence.management=all -Dtangosol.coherence.management.remote=true -Dtangosol.coherence.distributed.localstorage=false -Dtangosol.coherence.cacheconfig=config/site1-shell-prod-cache-config.xml-Dtangosol.coherence.clusterport=9001-Dtangosol.coherence.site=Site1  And now, let’s execute some tests to validate and better understand our configuration. TEST 1The purpose of this test is to load the objects into the "Site 1" cache and seeing how many objects are cached on the "Site Cloud". Within the "Shell" launched with parameters to access the "Site 1", let’s write and run the command: load test/100 Within the "Shell" launched with parameters to access the "Site Cloud" let’s write and run the command: size passive-cache Expected result If all is OK, the first "Shell" has uploaded 100 objects into a cache named "test"; consequently the "push-replication" functionality has updated the "Site Cloud" by sending the 100 objects to the second cluster where they will have been posted into a respective cache, which we named "passive-cache". TEST 2The purpose of this test is to listen to deleting and adding events happening on the "Site 1" and that are replicated within the cache on "Cloud Site". In the "Shell" launched with parameters to access the "Site Cloud" let’s write and run the command: listen passive-cache/name like '%' or a "cohql" query, with your preferred parameters In the "Shell" launched with parameters to access the "Site 1" let’s write and run the following commands: load test/10 load test2/20 delete test/50 Expected result If all is OK, the "Shell" to Site Cloud let us to listen to all the add and delete events within the cache "cache-passive", whose objects satisfy the query condition "name like '%' " (ie, every objects in the cache; you could change the tests and create different queries).Through the Shell to "Site 1" we launched the commands to add and to delete objects on different caches (test and test2). With the "Shell" running on "Site Cloud" we got the evidence (displayed or printed, or in a log file) that its cache has been filled with events and related objects generated by commands executed from the" Shell "on" Site 1 ", thanks to "push-replication" feature.  Other tests can be performed, such as, for example, the subscription to the events on the "Site 1" too, using different "cohql" queries, changing the cache configuration,  to effectively demonstrate both the potentiality and  the versatility produced by these different configurations, even in the cloud, as in our case. More information on how to configure Coherence "Push Replication" can be found in the Oracle Coherence Incubator project documentation at the following link: http://coherence.oracle.com/display/INC10/Home More information on Oracle Coherence "In Memory Data Grid" can be found at the following link: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/coherence/overview/index.html To download and execute the whole sources and configurations of the example explained in the above post,  click here to download them; After download the last available version of the Push-Replication Pattern library implementation from the Oracle Coherence Incubator site, and download also the related and required version of Oracle Coherence. For simplicity the required .jarS to execute the example (that can be found into the Push-Replication-Pattern  download and Coherence Distribution download) are: activemq-core-5.3.1.jar activemq-protobuf-1.0.jar aopalliance-1.0.jar coherence-commandpattern-2.8.4.32329.jar coherence-common-2.2.0.32329.jar coherence-eventdistributionpattern-1.2.0.32329.jar coherence-functorpattern-1.5.4.32329.jar coherence-messagingpattern-2.8.4.32329.jar coherence-processingpattern-1.4.4.32329.jar coherence-pushreplicationpattern-4.0.4.32329.jar coherence-rest.jar coherence.jar commons-logging-1.1.jar commons-logging-api-1.1.jar commons-net-2.0.jar geronimo-j2ee-management_1.0_spec-1.0.jar geronimo-jms_1.1_spec-1.1.1.jar http.jar jackson-all-1.8.1.jar je.jar jersey-core-1.8.jar jersey-json-1.8.jar jersey-server-1.8.jar jl1.0.jar kahadb-5.3.1.jar miglayout-3.6.3.jar org.osgi.core-4.1.0.jar spring-beans-2.5.6.jar spring-context-2.5.6.jar spring-core-2.5.6.jar spring-osgi-core-1.2.1.jar spring-osgi-io-1.2.1.jar At this URL could be found the original article: http://blogs.oracle.com/slc/coherence_into_the_cloud_boost Authors: Nino Guarnacci & Francesco Scarano

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• Creating a Training Lab on Windows Azure

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/17/153149.aspxThis week we are preparing for a training course that Alan Smith will be running for the support teams at one of my customers around Windows Azure. In order to facilitate the training lab we have a few prerequisites we need to handle. One of the biggest ones is that although the support team all have MSDN accounts the local desktops they work on are not ideal for running most of the labs as we want to give them some additional developer background training around Azure. Some recent Azure announcements really help us in this area: MSDN software can now be used on Azure VM You don't pay for Azure VM's when they are no longer used  Since the support team only have limited experience of Windows Azure and the organisation also have an Enterprise Agreement we decided it would be best value for money to spin up a training lab in a subscription on the EA and then we can turn the machines off when we are done. At the same time we would be able to spin them back up when the users need to do some additional lab work once the training course is completed. In order to achieve this I wanted to create a powershell script which would setup my training lab. The aim was to create 18 VM's which would be based on a prebuilt template with Visual Studio and the Azure development tools. The script I used is described below The Start & Variables The below text will setup the powershell environment and some variables which I will use elsewhere in the script. It will also import the Azure Powershell cmdlets. You can see below that I will need to download my publisher settings file and know some details from my Azure account. At this point I will assume you have a basic understanding of Azure & Powershell so already know how to do this. Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestrictedcls $startTime = get-dateImport-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell\Azure\Azure.psd1"# Azure Publisher Settings $azurePublisherSettings = '<Your settings file>.publishsettings'  # Subscription Details $subscriptionName = "<Your subscription name>" $defaultStorageAccount = "<Your default storage account>"  # Affinity Group Details $affinityGroup = '<Your affinity group>' $dataCenter = 'West Europe' # From Get-AzureLocation  # VM Details $baseVMName = 'TRN' $adminUserName = '<Your admin username>' $password = '<Your admin password>' $size = 'Medium' $vmTemplate = '<The name of your VM template image>' $rdpFilePath = '<File path to save RDP files to>' $machineSettingsPath = '<File path to save machine info to>'    Functions In the next section of the script I have some functions which are used to perform certain actions. The first is called CreateVM. This will do the following actions: If the VM already exists it will be deleted Create the cloud service Create the VM from the template I have created Add an endpoint so we can RDP to them all over the same port Download the RDP file so there is a short cut the trainees can easily access the machine via Write settings for the machine to a log file  function CreateVM($machineNo) { # Specify a name for the new VM $machineName = "$baseVMName-$machineNo" Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName"       # Get the Azure VM Image      $myImage = Get-AzureVMImage $vmTemplate   #If the VM already exists delete and re-create it $existingVm = Get-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName if($existingVm -ne $null) { Write-Host "VM already exists so deleting it" Remove-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName }   "Creating Service" $serviceName = "bupa-azure-train-$machineName" Remove-AzureService -Force -ServiceName $serviceName New-AzureService -Location $dataCenter -ServiceName $serviceName   Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName" New-AzureQuickVM -Windows -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -ImageName $myImage.ImageName -InstanceSize $size -AdminUsername $adminUserName -Password $password  Write-Host "Updating the RDP endpoint for $machineName" Get-AzureVM -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName ` | Add-AzureEndpoint -Name RDP -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 3389 -PublicPort 550 ` | Update-AzureVM    Write-Host "Get the RDP File for machine $machineName" $machineRDPFilePath = "$rdpFilePath\$machineName.rdp" Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -LocalPath "$machineRDPFilePath"   WriteMachineSettings "$machineName" "$serviceName" }    The delete machine settings function is used to delete the log file before we start re-running the process.  function DeleteMachineSettings() { Write-Host "Deleting the machine settings output file" [System.IO.File]::Delete("$machineSettingsPath"); }    The write machine settings function will get the VM and then record its details to the log file. The importance of the log file is that I can easily provide the information for all of the VM's to our infrastructure team to be able to configure access to all of the VM's    function WriteMachineSettings([string]$vmName, [string]$vmServiceName) { Write-Host "Writing to the machine settings output file"   $vm = Get-AzureVM -name $vmName -ServiceName $vmServiceName $vmEndpoint = Get-AzureEndpoint -VM $vm -Name RDP   $sb = new-object System.Text.StringBuilder $sb.Append("Service Name: "); $sb.Append($vm.ServiceName); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("VM: "); $sb.Append($vm.Name); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("RDP Public Port: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Port); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("Public DNS: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Vip); $sb.AppendLine(""); [System.IO.File]::AppendAllText($machineSettingsPath, $sb.ToString());  } # end functions    Rest of Script In the rest of the script it is really just the bit that orchestrates the actions we want to happen. It will load the publisher settings, select the Azure subscription and then loop around the CreateVM function and create 16 VM's  Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile $azurePublisherSettings Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName -CurrentStorageAccount $defaultStorageAccount Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName  DeleteMachineSettings    "Starting creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" $numberOfVMs = 16  for ($index=1; $index -le $numberOfVMs; $index++) { $vmNo = "$index" CreateVM($vmNo); }    "Finished creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" # Give it a Minute Start-Sleep -s 60  $endTime = get-date "Script run time " + ($endTime - $startTime)    Conclusion As you can see there is nothing too fancy about this script but in our case of creating a small isolated training lab which is not connected to our corporate network then we can easily use this to provision the lab. Im sure if this is of use to anyone you can easily modify it to do other things with the lab environment too. A couple of points to note are that there are some soft limits in Azure about the number of cores and services your subscription can use. You may need to contact the Azure support team to be able to increase this limit. In terms of the real business value of this approach, it was not possible to use the existing desktops to do the training on, and getting some internal virtual machines would have been relatively expensive and time consuming for our ops team to do. With the Azure option we are able to spin these machines up for a temporary period during the training course and then throw them away when we are done. We expect the costing of this test lab to be very small, especially considering we have EA pricing. As a ball park I think my 18 lab VM training environment will cost in the region of $80 per day on our EA. This is a fraction of the cost of the creation of a single VM on premise.

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• Self-signed certificates for a known community

  - by costlow

  Recently announced changes scheduled for Java 7 update 51 (January 2014) have established that the default security slider will require code signatures and the Permissions Manifest attribute. Code signatures are a common practice recommended in the industry because they help determine that the code your computer will run is the same code that the publisher created. This post is written to help users that need to use self-signed certificates without involving a public Certificate Authority. The role of self-signed certificates within a known community You may still use self-signed certificates within a known community. The difference between self-signed and purchased-from-CA is that your users must import your self-signed certificate to indicate that it is valid, whereas Certificate Authorities are already trusted by default. This works for known communities where people will trust that my certificate is mine, but does not scale widely where I cannot actually contact or know the systems that will need to trust my certificate. Public Certificate Authorities are widely trusted already because they abide by many different requirements and frequent checks. An example would be students in a university class sharing their public certificates on a mailing list or web page, employees publishing on the intranet, or a system administrator rolling certificates out to end-users. Managed machines help this because you can automate the rollout, but they are not required -- the major point simply that people will trust and import your certificate. How to distribute self-signed certificates for a known community There are several steps required to distribute a self-signed certificate to users so that they will properly trust it. These steps are: Creating a public/private key pair for signing. Exporting your public certificate for others Importing your certificate onto machines that should trust you Verify work on a different machine Creating a public/private key pair for signing Having a public/private key pair will give you the ability both to sign items yourself and issue a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) to a certificate authority. Create your public/private key pair by following the instructions for creating key pairs.Every Certificate Authority that I looked at provided similar instructions, but for the sake of cohesiveness I will include the commands that I used here: Generate the key pair.keytool -genkeypair -alias erikcostlow -keyalg EC -keysize 571 -validity 730 -keystore javakeystore_keepsecret.jks Provide a good password for this file. The alias "erikcostlow" is my name and therefore easy to remember. Substitute your name of something like "mykey." The sigalg of EC (Elliptical Curve) and keysize of 571 will give your key a good strong lifetime. All keys are set to expire. Two years or 730 days is a reasonable compromise between not-long-enough and too-long. Most public Certificate Authorities will sign something for one to five years. You will be placing your keys in javakeystore_keepsecret.jks -- this file will contain private keys and therefore should not be shared. If someone else gets these private keys, they can impersonate your signature. Please be cautious about automated cloud backup systems and private key stores. Answer all the questions. It is important to provide good answers because you will stick with them for the "-validity" days that you specified above.What is your first and last name?  [Unknown]:  First LastWhat is the name of your organizational unit?  [Unknown]:  Line of BusinessWhat is the name of your organization?  [Unknown]:  MyCompanyWhat is the name of your City or Locality?  [Unknown]:  City NameWhat is the name of your State or Province?  [Unknown]:  CAWhat is the two-letter country code for this unit?  [Unknown]:  USIs CN=First Last, OU=Line of Business, O=MyCompany, L=City, ST=CA, C=US correct?  [no]:  yesEnter key password for <erikcostlow>        (RETURN if same as keystore password): Verify your work:keytool -list -keystore javakeystore_keepsecret.jksYou should see your new key pair. Exporting your public certificate for others Public Key Infrastructure relies on two simple concepts: the public key may be made public and the private key must be private. By exporting your public certificate, you are able to share it with others who can then import the certificate to trust you. keytool -exportcert -keystore javakeystore_keepsecret.jks -alias erikcostlow -file erikcostlow.cer To verify this, you can open the .cer file by double-clicking it on most operating systems. It should show the information that you entered during the creation prompts. This is the file that you will share with others. They will use this certificate to prove that artifacts signed by this certificate came from you. If you do not manage machines directly, place the certificate file on an area that people within the known community should trust, such as an intranet page. Import the certificate onto machines that should trust you In order to trust the certificate, people within your known network must import your certificate into their keystores. The first step is to verify that the certificate is actually yours, which can be done through any band: email, phone, in-person, etc. Known networks can usually do this Determine the right keystore: For an individual user looking to trust another, the correct file is within that user’s directory.e.g. USER_HOME\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\Deployment\security\trusted.certs For system-wide installations, Java’s Certificate Authorities are in JAVA_HOMEe.g. C:\Program Files\Java\jre8\lib\security\cacerts File paths for Mac and Linux are included in the link above. Follow the instructions to import the certificate into the keystore. keytool -importcert -keystore THEKEYSTOREFROMABOVE -alias erikcostlow -file erikcostlow.cer In this case, I am still using my name for the alias because it’s easy for me to remember. You may also use an alias of your company name. Scaling distribution of the import The easiest way to apply your certificate across many machines is to just push the .certs or cacerts file onto them. When doing this, watch out for any changes that people would have made to this file on their machines. Trusted.certs: When publishing into user directories, your file will overwrite any keys that the user has added since last update. CACerts: It is best to re-run the import command with each installation rather than just overwriting the file. If you just keep the same cacerts file between upgrades, you will overwrite any CAs that have been added or removed. By re-importing, you stay up to date with changes. Verify work on a different machine Verification is a way of checking on the client machine to ensure that it properly trusts signed artifacts after you have added your signing certificate. Many people have started using deployment rule sets. You can validate the deployment rule set by: Create and sign the deployment rule set on the computer that holds the private key. Copy the deployment rule set on to the different machine where you have imported the signing certificate. Verify that the Java Control Panel’s security tab shows your deployment rule set. Verifying an individual JAR file or multiple JAR files You can test a certificate chain by using the jarsigner command. jarsigner -verify filename.jar If the output does not say "jar verified" then run the following command to see why: jarsigner -verify -verbose -certs filename.jar Check the output for the term “CertPath not validated.”

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, January 08, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, January 08, 2011Popular ReleasesExtended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.3.0: What's in the 1.3.0 Release?BusyIndicator ButtonSpinner ChildWindow ColorPicker - Updated (Breaking Changes) DateTimeUpDown - New Control Magnifier - New Control MaskedTextBox - New Control MessageBox NumericUpDown RichTextBox RichTextBoxFormatBar - Updated .NET 3.5 binaries and SourcePlease note: The Extended WPF Toolkit 3.5 is dependent on .NET Framework 3.5 and the WPFToolkit. You must install .NET Framework 3.5 and the WPFToolkit in order to use any features in the To...sNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9d: added elementclient coordinate catcher to catch coordinates select a target (ingame) i.e. your char, npc or monster than click the button and coordinates+direction will be transfered to the selected row in the table corrected labels from Rot to Direction (because it is a vector)AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.2: Implemented the Auto Updater Fix: Your settings will no longer be cleared with new releases of AutoLoL The mastery Editor and Browser now have their own tabs instead of nested tabs The Browser tab will only show the masteries matching ALL filters instead of just one Added a 'Browse' button in the Mastery Editor tab to open the Masteries Directory The Browser tab now shows a message when there are no mastery files in the Masteries Directory Fix: Fixed the Save As dialog again, for ...Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter: 2.1 latest stable: V2.1 is stable, and is in maintenance mode. This is v2.1.1.25. It is a bug-fix release. There are no new features. 28629 29172 28722 27626 28074 29164 27659 27900 many documentation updates and fixes proper x64 build environment. This release includes x64 binaries in zip form, but no x64 MSI file. You'll have to manually install x64 servers, following the instructions in the documentation.StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14980.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the correct path ...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.1: New release with bug fixes and updates for performance.SSH.NET Library: 2011.1.6: Fixes CommandTimeout default value is fixed to infinite. Port Forwarding feature improvements Memory leaks fixes New Features Add ErrorOccurred event to handle errors that occurred on different thread New and improve SFTP features SftpFile now has more attributes and some operations Most standard operations now available Allow specify encoding for command execution KeyboardInteractiveConnectionInfo class added for "keyboard-interactive" authentication. Add ability to specify bo....NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.03: Added lot's of new extensions and new projects for MVC and Entity Framework. object.FindTypeByRecursion Int32.InRange String.RemoveAllSpecialCharacters String.IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IsNotEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IfEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.ToUpperFirstLetter String.GetBytes String.ToTitleCase String.ToPlural DateTime.GetDaysInYear DateTime.GetPeriodOfDay IEnumberable.RemoveAll IEnumberable.Distinct ICollection.RemoveAll IList.Join IList.Match IList.Cast Array.IsNullOrEmpty Array.W...VidCoder: 0.8.0: Added x64 version. Made the audio output preview more detailed and accurate. If the chosen encoder or mixdown is incompatible with the source, the fallback that will be used is displayed. Added "Auto" to the audio mixdown choices. Reworked non-anamorphic size calculation to work better with non-standard pixel aspect ratios and cropping. Reworked Custom anamorphic to be more intuitive and allow display width to be set automatically (Thanks, Statick). Allowing higher bitrates for 6-ch....NET Voice Recorder: Auto-Tune Release: This is the source code and binaries to accompany the article on the Coding 4 Fun website. It is the Auto Tuner release of the .NET Voice Recorder application.BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.2.0: - Simulation Log is now automatically disabled and hidden when running 10 or more iterations - Hit and Expertise are now entered by Rating, and include option for a Racial Expertise bonus - Added option for boss to use a periodic magic ability (Dragon Breath) - Added option for boss to periodically Enrage, gaining a Damage/Attack Speed buffEnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.9 BETA: 2.2.9 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in the Gobl...xUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7 Beta: xUnit.net release 1.7 betaBuild #1533 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision)...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: New feature - Added Windows Phone 7 project New feature - Added dynamic support to LINQ to JSON New feature - Added dynamic support to serializer New feature - Added INotifyCollectionChanged to JContainer in .NET 4 build New feature - Added ReadAsDateTimeOffset to JsonReader New feature - Added ReadAsDecimal to JsonReader New feature - Added covariance to IJEnumerable type parameter New feature - Added XmlSerializer style Specified property support New feature - Added ...DbDocument: DbDoc Initial Version: DbDoc Initial versionASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.2: Atomic CMS 2.1.2 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide N2 CMS: 2.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) All-round improvements and bugfixes File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open the proj...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 0.1.11.10: IMPORTANT CHANGESThis release changes the way some WURFL capabilities and attributes are exposed to .NET developers. If you cast MobileCapabilities to return some values then please read the Release Note before implementing this release. The following code snippet can be used to access any WURFL capability. For instance, if the device is a tablet: string capability = Request.Browser["is_tablet"]; SummaryNew attributes have been added to the redirect section: originalUrlAsQueryString If se...Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 1.0: - Norwegian translation - French translation - German translation - WBFS dump for analysis - Scalable full HQ cover - Support for log file - Load game images improved - Support for image splitting - Diff for images after transfer - Support for scrubbing modes - Search functionality for log - Recurse depth for Files/Load - Show progress while downloading game cover - Supports more databases for cover download - Game cover loading routines improvedBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.0: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.0 instructions. To get started, be sure to check out our installatio...New Projects2011 Scripting Games: Track Changes for the 2011 Scripting Games to be hosted on PoshCode by the Microsoft Scripting Guys and the PowerShell community. ADO.NET Unit Testable Repository Generator: Generates a strongly-typed Object Context and POCO Entities from your EDMX file. Additionally a Repository and an abstract Unit Test for the Repository is created (with a mock for the ObjectContext and mock for the ObjectSets). Bases on the "ADO.NET C# POCO Entity Generator".AshpazKhone: ???AVAilable Rooms: AVAilable Rooms Can be used to show and book rooms on an exchange serverContentManager: Content Manger for SAP Kpro exports the data pool of a content-server by PHIOS-Lists (txt-files) into local binary files. Afterwards this files can be imported in a SAP content-repository . The whole List of the PHIOS Keys can also be downloaded an splitted in practical units.CSLauncher: CSLauncher is a small application providing a launching interface similar to Counter Strike's weapons selection menu. You can organize your favorite applications in CSLauncher in the order you wish, then launch them by remembering their numbers.DbMetadata: A simple lightweight library used to retrieve database metadata.DotNetSiemensPLCToolBoxLibrary: DotNetSiemensPLCToolBoxLibrary A Library for working with Siemens Step5 and Step7 Projects, connecting to S5 or S7 PLC's.EmptyX: EmptyX is a game developped with c# and xna for the XNA CHALLENGE in AlgeriaERASMUS: Erasmus šitFaceDeBouc: Simplebook, le nouveau Facebook CPE! Technlogies .NET Serveur: - BDD SQLServer - Logique métier - Web services Clients: - client lourd WPF - client léger ASP.NETFunction resolver: Application using .NET Expression trees to resolve a function for a set of numbersMLRobotic: Programme de gestion MLRobotic 2011 Sissa ProjectMS CRM Multiple Attachment Download Application: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 currently does not have a built in way for CRM Administrators to Export multiple attachments from the database and store it on a local directory on the Server or the local PC. This application allows you to do so.Open Data Publisher: Open Data Publisher is a C# MVC application that allows you to quickly and easily publish data from SQL Server tables and views using the OData protocol, and present data from OData and static sources to the public for download and exploration.OttawaZagreb1: Test projectPrague: ????? ?? ???? ??????PSSplunk: PSSplunk is a set of Powershell cmdlets that use the RESTFUL API provided by www.splunk.com The goal is provide access to all of Splunks configuration and search features from the CLI without having to have Splunk installed locally.Reactive C#: Reactive language extensions for C#SemanaWebcasts: Projeto para semana de webcasts.Steward: Personal StewardSVNUG.Tracker: SVNUG.Tracker is an example task tracking application used as a presentation project for the Sangamon Valley .NET User Group (svnug.com). The purpose of SVNUG.Tracker is to be a common problem domain for exercising new .NET technology. SVNUG.Tracker is written in C# 4.The Silverlight Cookbook - A Reference Application for Silverlight 4 LOB Apps: The Silverlight Cookbook is a .NET example application that demonstrates how to build a full-blown line-of-business app using the reference architecture explained at: http://www.dennisdoomen.net/search/label/Silverlight Vkontakte Wpf Client: This is a simple client for social network Vkontakte. It can send message to your friends, download audio files or play it,list user video. Also you can view user status and change yours.Windows Phone Multilingual Keyboard: Multilingual keyboard for Windows Phone 7WPF Controls & MVVM Practices: WPF Controls contains various controls that can be used in applications. Currently Featured * FilteredListBox (filter and selected items notification) * IsDirty functionality for a ViewModel model

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 21, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 21, 2010Popular ReleasesSQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQL Monitor 3.0 alpha 7: 1. added script save/load in user query window 2. fixed problem with connection dialog when choosing windows auth but still ask for user name 3. auto open user table when double click one table node 4. improved alert message, added log only methodOpen NFe: Open NFe 2.0 (Beta): Última versão antes da versão final a ser lançada nos próximos dias.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.6 ALPHA: 2.2.6 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Fixing up some r...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.18: Silverlight, OAuth, 100% Twitter API coverage, streaming, extensibility via Raw Queries, and added documentation. Bug fixes.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4.3: Helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: Improvements for confirm, popup, popup form RenderView controller extension the user experience for crud in live demo has been substantially improved + added search all the features are shown in the live demoGanttPlanner: GanttPlanner V1.0: GanttPlanner V1.0 include GanttPlanner.dll and also a Demo application.N2 CMS: 2.1 release candidate 3: * Web platform installer support available N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) A bunch of bugs were fixed File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the templ...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 6: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 6 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Preview 5 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numer...Team Foundation Server Administration Tool: 2.1: TFS Administration Tool 2.1, is the first version of the TFS Administration Tool which is built on top of the Team Foundation Server 2010 object model. TFS Administration Tool 2.1 can be installed on machines that are running either Team Explorer 2010, or Team Foundation Server 2010.Hacker Passwords: HackerPasswords.zip: Source code, executable and documentationSubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.3: - Added .srt FileAssociation & Win7 ShowRecentCategory feature. - Applied UnifiedYeKe to fix Persian search problems. - Reduced file size of Persian subtitles for uploading @OSDB.Facebook C# SDK: 4.1.0: - Lots of bug fixes - Removed Dynamic Runtime Language dependencies from non-dynamic platforms. - Samples included in release for ASP.NET, MVC, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WPF, WinForms, and one Visual Basic Sample - Changed internal serialization to use Json.net - BREAKING CHANGE: Canvas Session is no longer support. Use Signed Request instead. Canvas Session has been deprecated by Facebook. - BREAKING CHANGE: Some renames and changes with Authorizer, CanvasAuthorizer, and Authorization ac...NuGet (formerly NuPack): NuGet 1.0 build 11217.102: Note: this release is slightly newer than RC1, and fixes a couple issues relating to updating packages to newer versions. NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. This new build targets the newer feed (h...WCF Community Site: WCF Web APIs 10.12.17: Welcome to the second release of WCF Web APIs on codeplex Here is what is new in this release. WCF Support for jQuery - create WCF web services that are easy to consume from JavaScript clients, in particular jQuery. Better support for using JsonValue as dynamic Support for JsonValue change notification events for databinding and other purposes Support for going between JsonValue and CLR types WCF HTTP - create HTTP / REST based web services. This is a minor release which contains fixe...LiveChat Starter Kit: LCSK v1.0: This is a working version of the LCSK for Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET MVC 3 (using Razor View Engine). this is still provider based (with 1 provider Sql) and this is still using WebService and Windows Forms operator console. The solution is cleaner, with an installer to create tables etc. You can also install it via nuget (Install-Package lcsk) Let me know your feedbackOrchard Project: Orchard 0.9: Orchard Release Notes Build: 0.9.253 Published: 12/16/2010 How to Install OrchardTo install the Orchard tech preview using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard-Using-Web-PI.ashx Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. --OR-- Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.0.9.253.zip file. The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents of the Orch...DotSpatial: DotSpatial 12-15-2010: This release contains a few minor bug fixes and hopefully the GDAL libraries for the 3.5 x86 build actually built to the correct directory this time.DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01 Beta: This is the initial Beta of DotNetNuke 5.6.1. See the DotNetNuke Roadmap a full list of changes in this release.MSBuild Extension Pack: December 2010: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack December 2010 release provides a collection of over 380 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GU...Silverlight Contrib: Silverlight Contrib 2010.1.0: 2010.1.0 New FeaturesCompatibility Release for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010New Projectsaqq2: aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2aqq2Cameleon CMS: Caméléon, le CMS open-source le plus simple d'utilisation sur le marché.Dail Emulator: Dail Emulator is a software that emulates the server software of Aeonsofts game FlyFF. Specifically made for the now defunct version 6 of the game.Dmitry Lyalin's WP7 Sample Application: A project where im putting all my public samples in a single WP7 client test applicationElixir: DotNetNuke module test framework. Use this DLL to write concise, to-the-point tests for your modules that can target multiple DNN platforms and multiple browsers.FlightTableEditor: This edits the Flight and Healing Tables of Pokémon Fire Red and Pokémon Leaf Green.Genetico UNLaM: Algoritmo Genetico UNLaMHelpCentral HelpDesk Ticket Application: An open-ended framework and client for a helpdesk ticket application and bug tracker. Built to be as extensible and available as possible, the central system is a WCF webservice which can be accessed by any client application.Import Media for Umbraco: This package allows you to import multiple or large files that have been uploaded to the server via FTP or other means. A new media item is created in the media tree and the media is moved from the upload location to the new directory for the media item.LargeCMS full sample (How to call CryptMsg API in streaming mode): LargeCms implements SignedLargeCMS and EnvelopedLargeCMS classes, my own version of .NET SignedCms and EnvelopedCMS to work with large data. It shows a way to call CryptMsg API in streaming mode to overcome the limitations of current .NET classesLinq.Autocompiler: Adds runtime, on demand compilation of Linq queries (in Linq to SQL), which creates CompiledQuery instances and stores them in a cache. Mathetris: it's a game.MonoWiimote: Managed c# library for using Wii Remote device under Mono/Linux enviroment. It requires libcwiimote-0.4 (sudo apt-get install libcwiimote-0.4).Movie Captor: Concorrendo no Desafio .NETNSpotifyLib: A .NET library contains wrapper classes for the Spotify Metadata API. http://developer.spotify.com/en/metadata-api/overview/ This library supports searching for artists, albums and tracks by using the Spotify Metadata API. In the future I'll add support for Lookups as well.Silverhawk: It's developed in C# programming language.SimpleSpy: Detecting object handle on cursor move and get its information. Basically this is a bare bone program for detecting object handle at cursor and add your own logic to detect for further information. SunburnJitter: JitterSunburn contains helper classes and methods to use the jitter physics engine easier in your sunburn projects. Simple component based shapes will provide easy editing in editor. It's developed in C#.Sunrod: Sunrod is a .NET wrapper for the Obsidian Portal API.TouchStack - A MonoTouch ServiceStack.NET client: TouchStack makes it easier for MonoTouch developers to consume Web services created and exposed by the brilliant ServiceStack.NET webservice framework. TouchStack is written in C# and uses the MonoTouch library.VNTViewer: Viewer for notes/memos (VNT files)VpNet: Official .NET Wrapper for Virtual Paradise.xlGUI: Streamlet GUI Framework

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• Java JRE 1.7.0_60 Certified with Oracle E-Business Suite

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  Java Runtime Environment 7u60 (a.k.a. JRE 7u60-b19) and later updates on the JRE 7 codeline are now certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12.0, 12.1, and 12.2 for Windows-based desktop clients. Effects of new support dates on Java upgrades for EBS environments Support dates for the E-Business Suite and Java have changed.  Please review the sections below for more details: What does this mean for Oracle E-Business Suite users? Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JRE 7 for Windows desktop clients? Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JDK 7 for EBS application tier servers? All JRE 6 and 7 releases are certified with EBS upon release Our standard policy is that all E-Business Suite customers can apply all JRE updates to end-user desktops from JRE 1.6.0_03 and later updates on the 1.6 codeline, and from JRE 7u10 and later updates on the JRE 7 codeline.  We test all new JRE 1.6 and JRE 7 releases in parallel with the JRE development process, so all new JRE 1.6 and 7 releases are considered certified with the E-Business Suite on the same day that they're released by our Java team.  You do not need to wait for a certification announcement before applying new JRE 1.6 or JRE 7 releases to your EBS users' desktops. What's new in JRE 1.7.0_60? JDK 7u60 contains IANA time zone data version 2014b. For more information, refer to Timezone Data Versions in the JRE Software. It is strongly recommended that all customers upgrade to this release.  Details about update in this release are listed in the release notes. 32-bit and 64-bit versions certified This certification includes both the 32-bit and 64-bit JRE versions for various Windows operating systems. See the respective Recommended Browser documentation for your EBS release for details. Where are the official patch requirements documented? All patches required for ensuring full compatibility of the E-Business Suite with JRE 7 are documented in these Notes: For EBS 11i: Deploying Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) for Windows Clients in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i (Note 290807.1) Upgrading Developer 6i with Oracle E-Business Suite 11i (Note 125767.1) For EBS 12.0, 12.1, 12.2 Deploying Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) for Windows Clients in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Note 393931.1) Upgrading OracleAS 10g Forms and Reports in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Note 437878.1) EBS + Discoverer 11g Users JRE 1.7.0_60 is certified for Discoverer 11g in E-Business Suite environments with the following minimum requirements: Discoverer (11g) 11.1.1.6 plus Patch 13877486 and later  Reference: How To Find Oracle BI Discoverer 10g and 11g Certification Information (Document 233047.1) Worried about the 'mismanaged session cookie' issue? No need to worry -- it's fixed.  To recap: JRE releases 1.6.0_18 through 1.6.0_22 had issues with mismanaging session cookies that affected some users in some circumstances. The fix for those issues was first included in JRE 1.6.0_23. These fixes will carry forward and continue to be fixed in all future JRE releases on the JRE 6 and 7 codelines.  In other words, if you wish to avoid the mismanaged session cookie issue, you should apply any release after JRE 1.6.0_22 on the JRE 6 codeline, and JRE 7u10 and later JRE 7 codeline updates. Implications of Java 6 End of Public Updates for EBS Users The Support Roadmap for Oracle Java is published here: Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap The latest updates to that page (as of Sept. 19, 2012) state (emphasis added): Java SE 6 End of Public Updates Notice After February 2013, Oracle will no longer post updates of Java SE 6 to its public download sites. Existing Java SE 6 downloads already posted as of February 2013 will remain accessible in the Java Archive on Oracle Technology Network. Developers and end-users are encouraged to update to more recent Java SE versions that remain available for public download. For enterprise customers, who need continued access to critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6 or older versions, long term support is available through Oracle Java SE Support . What does this mean for Oracle E-Business Suite users? EBS users fall under the category of "enterprise users" above.  Java is an integral part of the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, so EBS users will continue to receive Java SE 6 updates from February 2013 to the end of Java SE 6 Extended Support in June 2017. In other words, nothing changes for EBS users after February 2013.  EBS users will continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for Java SE 6 until the end of Java SE 6 Extended Support in June 2017. How can EBS customers obtain Java 6 updates after the public end-of-life? EBS customers can download Java 6 patches from My Oracle Support.  For a complete list of all Java SE patch numbers, see: All Java SE Downloads on MOS (Note 1439822.1) Both JDK and JRE packages are contained in a single combined download after 6u45.  Download the "JDK" package for both the desktop client JRE and the server-side JDK package.  Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JRE 7 for Windows desktop clients? This upgrade is highly recommended but remains optional while Java 6 is covered by Extended Support. Updates will be delivered via My Oracle Support, where you can continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for JRE 6 desktop clients.  Java 6 is covered by Extended Support until June 2017.  All E-Business Suite customers must upgrade to JRE 7 by June 2017. Coexistence of JRE 6 and JRE 7 on Windows desktops The upgrade to JRE 7 is highly recommended for EBS users, but some users may need to run both JRE 6 and 7 on their Windows desktops for reasons unrelated to the E-Business Suite. Most EBS configurations with IE and Firefox use non-static versioning by default. JRE 7 will be invoked instead of JRE 6 if both are installed on a Windows desktop. For more details, see "Appendix B: Static vs. Non-static Versioning and Set Up Options" in Notes 290807.1 and 393931.1. Applying Updates to JRE 6 and JRE 7 to Windows desktops Auto-update will keep JRE 7 up-to-date for Windows users with JRE 7 installed. Auto-update will only keep JRE 7 up-to-date for Windows users with both JRE 6 and 7 installed.  JRE 6 users are strongly encouraged to apply the latest Critical Patch Updates as soon as possible after each release. The Jave SE CPUs will be available via My Oracle Support.  EBS users can find more information about JRE 6 and 7 updates here: Information Center: Installation & Configuration for Oracle Java SE (Note 1412103.2) The dates for future Java SE CPUs can be found on the Critical Patch Updates, Security Alerts and Third Party Bulletin.  An RSS feed is available on that site for those who would like to be kept up-to-date. What do Mac users need? Mac users running Mac OS X 10.9 can run JRE 7 plug-ins.  See this article: EBS Release 12 Certified with Mac OS X 10.9 with Safari 7 and JRE 7 Will EBS users be forced to upgrade to JDK 7 for EBS application tier servers? JRE is used for desktop clients.  JDK is used for application tier servers JDK upgrades for E-Business Suite application tier servers are highly recommended but currently remain optional while Java 6 is covered by Extended Support. Updates will be delivered via My Oracle Support, where you can continue to receive critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general maintenance for JDK 6 for application tier servers.  Java SE 6 is covered by Extended Support until June 2017.  All EBS customers with application tier servers on Windows, Solaris, and Linux must upgrade to JDK 7 by June 2017. EBS customers running their application tier servers on other operating systems should check with their respective vendors for the support dates for those platforms. JDK 7 is certified with E-Business Suite 12.  See: Java (JDK) 7 Certified for E-Business Suite 12.0 and 12.1 Servers Java (JDK) 7 Certified with E-Business Suite 12.2 Servers References Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 11i (Metalink Note 285218.1) Upgrading Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) with Oracle Applications 11i for Windows Clients (Metalink Note 290807.1) Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 12 (MetaLink Note 389422.1) Upgrading JRE Plugin with Oracle Applications R12 (MetaLink Note 393931.1) Related Articles Mismanaged Session Cookie Issue Fixed for EBS in JRE 1.6.0_23 Roundup: Oracle JInitiator 1.3 Desupported for EBS Customers in July 2009

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives Part 2 - Jumpstarting your IAM program with R2

  - by Tanu Sood

  Identity and access management (IAM) isn’t a new concept. Over the past decade, companies have begun to address identity management through a variety of solutions that have primarily focused on provisioning. . The new age workforce is converging at a rapid pace with ever increasing demand to use diverse portfolio of applications and systems to interact and interface with their peers in the industry and customers alike. Oracle has taken a significant leap with their release of Identity and Access Management 11gR2 towards enabling this global workforce to conduct their business in a secure, efficient and effective manner. As companies deal with IAM business drivers, it becomes immediately apparent that holistic, rather than piecemeal, approaches better address their needs. When planning an enterprise-wide IAM solution, the first step is to create a common framework that serves as the foundation on which to build the cost, compliance and business process efficiencies. As a leading industry practice, IAM should be established on a foundation of accurate data for identity management, making this data available in a uniform manner to downstream applications and processes. Mature organizations are looking beyond IAM’s basic benefits to harness more advanced capabilities in user lifecycle management. For any organization looking to embark on an IAM initiative, consider the following use cases in managing and administering user access. Expanding the Enterprise Provisioning Footprint Almost all organizations have some helpdesk resources tied up in handling access requests from users, a distraction from their core job of handling problem tickets. This dependency has mushroomed from the traditional acceptance of provisioning solutions integrating and addressing only a portion of applications in the heterogeneous landscape Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) 11gR2 solves this problem by offering integration with third party ticketing systems as “disconnected applications”. It allows for the existing business processes to be seamlessly integrated into the system and tracked throughout its lifecycle. With minimal effort and analysis, an organization can begin integrating OIM with groups or applications that are involved with manually intensive access provisioning and de-provisioning activities. This aspect of OIM allows organizations to on-board applications and associated business processes quickly using out of box templates and frameworks. This is especially important for organizations looking to fold in users and resources from mergers and acquisitions. Simplifying Access Requests Organizations looking to implement access request solutions often find it challenging to get their users to accept and adopt the new processes.. So, how do we improve the user experience, make it intuitive and personalized and yet simplify the user access process? With R2, OIM helps organizations alleviate the challenge by placing the most used functionality front and centre in the new user request interface. Roles, application accounts, and entitlements can all be found in the same interface as catalog items, giving business users a single location to go to whenever they need to initiate, approve or track a request. Furthermore, if a particular item is not relevant to a user’s job function or area inside the organization, it can be hidden so as to not overwhelm or confuse the user with superfluous options. The ability to customize the user interface to suit your needs helps in exercising the business rules effectively and avoiding access proliferation within the organization. Saving Time with Templates A typical use case that is most beneficial to business users is flexibility to place, edit, and withdraw requests based on changing circumstances and business needs. With OIM R2, multiple catalog items can now be added and removed from the shopping cart, an ecommerce paradigm that many users are already familiar with. This feature can be especially useful when setting up a large number of new employees or granting existing department or group access to a newly integrated application. Additionally, users can create their own shopping cart templates in order to complete subsequent requests more quickly. This feature saves the user from having to search for and select items all over again if a request is similar to a previous one. Advanced Delegated Administration A key feature of any provisioning solution should be to empower each business unit in managing their own access requests. By bringing administration closer to the user, you improve user productivity, enable efficiency and alleviate the administration overhead. To do so requires a federated services model so that the business units capable of shouldering the onus of user life cycle management of their business users can be enabled to do so. OIM 11gR2 offers advanced administrative options for creating, managing and controlling business logic and workflows through easy to use administrative interface and tools that can be exposed to delegated business administrators. For example, these business administrators can establish or modify how certain requests and operations should be handled within their business unit based on a number of attributes ranging from the type of request or the risk level of the individual items requested. Closed-Loop Remediation Security continues to be a major concern for most organizations. Identity management solutions bolster security by ensuring only the right users have the right access to the right resources. To prevent unauthorized access and where it already exists, the ability to detect and remediate it, are key requirements of an enterprise-grade proven solution. But the challenge with most solutions today is that some of this information still exists in silos. And when changes are made to systems directly, not all information is captured. With R2, oracle is offering a comprehensive Identity Governance solution that our customer organizations are leveraging for closed loop remediation that allows for an automated way for administrators to revoke unauthorized access. The change is automatically captured and the action noted for continued management. Conclusion While implementing provisioning solutions, it is important to keep the near term and the long term goals in mind. The provisioning solution should always be a part of a larger security and identity management program but with the ability to seamlessly integrate not only with the company’s infrastructure but also have the ability to leverage the information, business models compiled and used by the other identity management solutions. This allows organizations to reduce the cost of ownership, close security gaps and leverage the existing infrastructure. And having done so a multiple clients’ sites, this is the approach we recommend. In our next post, we will take a journey through our experiences of advising clients looking to upgrade to R2 from a previous version or migrating from a different solution. Meet the Writers:   Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL). Jenny (Xiao) Zhang is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  She has consulted across multiple industries including financial services, entertainment and retail. Jenny has three years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which she has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past one and a half years.

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• Premature-Optimization and Performance Anxiety

  - by James Michael Hare

  While writing my post analyzing the new .NET 4 ConcurrentDictionary class (here), I fell into one of the classic blunders that I myself always love to warn about.  After analyzing the differences of time between a Dictionary with locking versus the new ConcurrentDictionary class, I noted that the ConcurrentDictionary was faster with read-heavy multi-threaded operations.  Then, I made the classic blunder of thinking that because the original Dictionary with locking was faster for those write-heavy uses, it was the best choice for those types of tasks.  In short, I fell into the premature-optimization anti-pattern. Basically, the premature-optimization anti-pattern is when a developer is coding very early for a perceived (whether rightly-or-wrongly) performance gain and sacrificing good design and maintainability in the process.  At best, the performance gains are usually negligible and at worst, can either negatively impact performance, or can degrade maintainability so much that time to market suffers or the code becomes very fragile due to the complexity. Keep in mind the distinction above.  I'm not talking about valid performance decisions.  There are decisions one should make when designing and writing an application that are valid performance decisions.  Examples of this are knowing the best data structures for a given situation (Dictionary versus List, for example) and choosing performance algorithms (linear search vs. binary search).  But these in my mind are macro optimizations.  The error is not in deciding to use a better data structure or algorithm, the anti-pattern as stated above is when you attempt to over-optimize early on in such a way that it sacrifices maintainability. In my case, I was actually considering trading the safety and maintainability gains of the ConcurrentDictionary (no locking required) for a slight performance gain by using the Dictionary with locking.  This would have been a mistake as I would be trading maintainability (ConcurrentDictionary requires no locking which helps readability) and safety (ConcurrentDictionary is safe for iteration even while being modified and you don't risk the developer locking incorrectly) -- and I fell for it even when I knew to watch out for it.  I think in my case, and it may be true for others as well, a large part of it was due to the time I was trained as a developer.  I began college in in the 90s when C and C++ was king and hardware speed and memory were still relatively priceless commodities and not to be squandered.  In those days, using a long instead of a short could waste precious resources, and as such, we were taught to try to minimize space and favor performance.  This is why in many cases such early code-bases were very hard to maintain.  I don't know how many times I heard back then to avoid too many function calls because of the overhead -- and in fact just last year I heard a new hire in the company where I work declare that she didn't want to refactor a long method because of function call overhead.  Now back then, that may have been a valid concern, but with today's modern hardware even if you're calling a trivial method in an extremely tight loop (which chances are the JIT compiler would optimize anyway) the results of removing method calls to speed up performance are negligible for the great majority of applications.  Now, obviously, there are those coding applications where speed is absolutely king (for example drivers, computer games, operating systems) where such sacrifices may be made.  But I would strongly advice against such optimization because of it's cost.  Many folks that are performing an optimization think it's always a win-win.  That they're simply adding speed to the application, what could possibly be wrong with that?  What they don't realize is the cost of their choice.  For every piece of straight-forward code that you obfuscate with performance enhancements, you risk the introduction of bugs in the long term technical debt of the application.  It will become so fragile over time that maintenance will become a nightmare.  I've seen such applications in places I have worked.  There are times I've seen applications where the designer was so obsessed with performance that they even designed their own memory management system for their application to try to squeeze out every ounce of performance.  Unfortunately, the application stability often suffers as a result and it is very difficult for anyone other than the original designer to maintain. I've even seen this recently where I heard a C++ developer bemoaning that in VS2010 the iterators are about twice as slow as they used to be because Microsoft added range checking (probably as part of the 0x standard implementation).  To me this was almost a joke.  Twice as slow sounds bad, but it almost never as bad as you think -- especially if you're gaining safety.  The only time twice is really that much slower is when once was too slow to begin with.  Think about it.  2 minutes is slow as a response time because 1 minute is slow.  But if an iterator takes 1 microsecond to move one position and a new, safer iterator takes 2 microseconds, this is trivial!  The only way you'd ever really notice this would be in iterating a collection just for the sake of iterating (i.e. no other operations).  To my mind, the added safety makes the extra time worth it. Always favor safety and maintainability when you can.  I know it can be a hard habit to break, especially if you started out your career early or in a language such as C where they are very performance conscious.  But in reality, these type of micro-optimizations only end up hurting you in the long run. Remember the two laws of optimization.  I'm not sure where I first heard these, but they are so true: For beginners: Do not optimize. For experts: Do not optimize yet. This is so true.  If you're a beginner, resist the urge to optimize at all costs.  And if you are an expert, delay that decision.  As long as you have chosen the right data structures and algorithms for your task, your performance will probably be more than sufficient.  Chances are it will be network, database, or disk hits that will be your slow-down, not your code.  As they say, 98% of your code's bottleneck is in 2% of your code so premature-optimization may add maintenance and safety debt that won't have any measurable impact.  Instead, code for maintainability and safety, and then, and only then, when you find a true bottleneck, then you should go back and optimize further.

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• Taking web sites offline for demonstration

  While working in software development in general, and in web development for a couple of customers it is quite common that it is necessary to provide a test bed where the client is able to get an image, or better said, a feeling for the visions and ideas you are talking about. Usually here at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. we set up a demo web site on one of our staging servers, and provide credentials to the customer to access and review our progress and work ad hoc. This gives us the highest flexibility on both sides, as the test bed is simply online and available 24/7. We can update the structure, the UI and data at any time, and the client is able to view it as it suits best for her/him. Limited or lack of online connectivity But what is going to happen when your client is not capable to be online - no matter for what reasons; here are some more obvious ones: No internet connection (permanently or temporarily) Expensive connection, ie. mobile data package, stay at a hotel, etc. Presentation devices at an exhibition, ie. using tablets or iPads Being abroad for a certain time, and only occasionally online No network coverage, especially on mobile Bad infrastructure, like ie. in Third World countries Providing a catalogue on CD or USB pen drive Anyway, it doesn't matter really. We should be able to provide a solution for the circumstances of our customers. Presentation during an exhibition Recently, we had the following request from a customer: Is it possible to let us have a desktop version of ResortWork.co.uk that we can use for demo purposes at the forthcoming Ski Shows? It would allow us to let stand visitors browse the sites on an iPad to view jobs and training directory course listings. Yes, sure we can do that. Eventually, you might think why don't they simply use 3G enabled iPads for that purpose? As stated above, there might be several reasons for that - low coverage, expensive data packages, etc. Anyway, it is not a question on how to circumvent the request but to deliver a solution to that. Possible solutions... or not? We already did offline websites earlier, and even established complete mirrors of one or two web sites on our systems. There are actually several possibilities to handle this kind of request, and it mainly depends on the system or device where the offline site should be available on. Here, it is clearly expressed that we have to address this on an Apple iPad, well actually, I think that they'd like to use multiple devices during their exhibitions. Following is an overview of possible solutions depending on the technology or device in use, and how it can be done: Replication of source files and database The above mentioned web site is running on ASP.NET, IIS and SQL Server. In case that a laptop or slate runs a Windows OS, the easiest way would be to take a snapshot of the source files and database, and transfer them as local installation to those Windows machines. This approach would be fully operational on the local machine. Saving pages for offline usage This is actually a quite tedious job but still practicable for small web sites Tool based approach to 'harvest' the web site There quite some tools in the wild that could handle this job, namely wget, httrack, web copier, etc. Screenshots bundled as PDF document Not really... ;-) Creating screencast or video Simply navigate through your website and record your desktop session. Actually, we are using this kind of approach to track down difficult problems in order to see and understand exactly what the user was doing to cause an error. Of course, this list isn't complete and I'd love to get more of your ideas in the comments section below the article. Preparations for offline browsing The original website is dynamically and data-driven by ASP.NET, and looks like this: As we have to put the result onto iPads we are going to choose the tool-based approach to 'download' the whole web site for offline usage. Again, depending on the complexity of your web site you might have to check which of the applications produces the best results for you. My usual choice is to use wget but in this case, we run into problems related to the rewriting of hyperlinks. As a consequence of that we opted for using HTTrack. HTTrack comes in different flavours, like console application but also as either GUI (WinHTTrack on Windows) or Web client (WebHTTrack on Linux/Unix/BSD). Here's a brief description taken from the original website about HTTrack: HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. And there is an extensive documentation for all options and switches online. General recommendation is to go through the HTTrack Users Guide By Fred Cohen. It covers all the initial steps you need to get up and running. Be aware that it will take quite some time to get all the necessary resources down to your machine. Actually, for our customer we run the tool directly on their web server to avoid unnecessary traffic and bandwidth. After a couple of runs and some additional fine-tuning - explicit inclusion or exclusion of various external linked web sites - we finally had a more or less complete offline version available. A very handsome feature of HTTrack is the error/warning log after completing the download. It contains some detailed information about errors that appeared on the pages and the links within the pages that have been processed. Error: "Bad Request" (400) at link www.resortwork.co.uk/job-details_Ski_hire:tech_or_mgr_or_driver_37854.aspx (from www.resortwork.co.uk/Jobs_A_to_Z.aspx)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/images/applynow.png (from www.247recruit.net/css/global.css)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/activate.html (from www.247recruit.net/247recruit_tefl_jobs_network.html) In our situation, we took the records of HTTP 400/404 errors and passed them to the web development department. Improvements are to be expected soon. ;-) Quality assurance on the full-featured desktop Unfortunately, the generated output of HTTrack was still incomplete but luckily there were only images missing. Being directly on the web server we simply copied the missing images from the original source folder into our offline version. After that, we created an archive and transferred the file securely to our local workspace for further review and checks. From that point on, it wasn't necessary to get any more files from the original web server, and we could focus ourselves completely on the process of browsing and navigating through the offline version to isolate visual differences and functional problems. As said, the original web site runs on ASP.NET Web Forms and uses Postback calls for interaction like search, pagination and partly for navigation. This is the main field of improving the offline experience. Of course, same as for standard web development it is advised to test with various browsers, and strangely we discovered that the offline version looked pretty good on Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but not in Internet Explorer. A quick look at the HTML source shed some light on this, and there are conditional CSS inclusions based on the user agent. HTTrack is not acting as Internet Explorer and so we didn't have the necessary overrides for this browser. Not problematic after all in our case, but you might have to pay attention to this and get the IE-specific files explicitly. And while having a view at the source code, we also found out that HTTrack actually modifies the generated HTML output. In several occasions we discovered that <div> elements were converted into <table> constructs for no obvious reason; even nested structures. Search 'e'nd destroy - sed (or Notepad++) to the rescue During our intensive root cause analysis for a couple of HTML/CSS problems that needed some extra attention it is very helpful to be familiar with any editor that allows search and replace over multiple files like, ie. sed - stream editor for filtering and transforming text on Linux or my personal favourite Notepad++ on Windows. This allowed us to quickly fix a lot of anchors with onclick attributes and Javascript code that was addressed to ASP.NET files instead of their generated HTML counterparts, like so: grep -lr -e '.aspx' * | xargs sed -e 's/.aspx/.html?/g' The additional question mark after the HTML extension helps to separate the query string from the actual target and solved all our missing hyperlinks very fast. The same can be done in Notepad++ on Windows, too. Just use the 'Replace in files' feature and you are settled. Especially, in combination with Regular Expressions (regex). Landscape of browsers Okay, after several runs of HTML/CSS code analysis, searching and replacing some strings in a pool of more than 4.000 files, we finally had a very good match of an offline browsing experience in Firefox and Chrome on Linux. Next, we transferred that modified set of files to a Windows 8 machine for review on Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer 7 to 10, and a Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.7 to check the output on Safari and again on Chrome. Besides IE, for reasons already mentioned above, the results were identical. And last but not least it was about to check web site on tablets. Please continue to read on the following articles: Taking web sites offline for demonstration on Galaxy Tablet Taking web sites offline for demonstration on iPad

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• IIS7 FTP Setup - An error occured during the authentication process. 530 End Login failed

  - by robmzd

  I'm having a problem very similar to IIS 7.5 FTP IIS Manager Users Login Fail (530) on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard. I have created an FTP site and IIS Manager user but am having trouble logging in. I could really do with getting this working with the IIS Manager user rather than by creating a new system user since I'm fairly restricted with those accounts. Here is the output when connecting locally through command prompt: C:\Windows\system32>ftp localhost Connected to MYSERVER. 220 Microsoft FTP Service User (MYSERVER:(none)): MyFtpLogin 331 Password required for MyFtpLogin. Password: *** 530-User cannot log in. Win32 error: Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. Error details: An error occured during the authentication process. 530 End Login failed. I have followed the guide to configure ftp with iis manager authentication in iis 7 and Adding FTP Publishing to a Web Site in IIS 7 Things I have done and checked: The FTP Service is installed (along with FTP Extensibility). Local Service and Network Service have been given access to the site folder Permission has been given to the config files Granted read/write permissions to the FTP Root folder The Management Service is installed and running Enable remote connections is ticked with 'Windows credentials or IIS manager credentials' selected The IIS Manager User has been added to the server (root connection in the IIS connections branch) The new FTP site has been added IIS Manager Authentication has been added to the FTP authentication providers The IIS Manager user has been added to the IIS Manager Permissions list for the site Added Read/Write permissions for the user in the FTP Authorization Rules Here's a section of the applicationHost config file associated with the FTP site <site name="MySite" id="8"> <application path="/" applicationPool="MyAppPool"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="D:\Websites\MySite" /> </application> <bindings> <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:80:www.mydomain.co.uk" /> <binding protocol="ftp" bindingInformation="*:21:www.mydomain.co.uk" /> </bindings> <ftpServer> <security> <ssl controlChannelPolicy="SslAllow" dataChannelPolicy="SslAllow" /> <authentication> <basicAuthentication enabled="true" /> <customAuthentication> <providers> <add name="IisManagerAuth" enabled="true" /> </providers> </customAuthentication> </authentication> </security> </ftpServer> </site> ... <location path="MySite"> <system.ftpServer> <security> <authorization> <add accessType="Allow" users="MyFtpLogin" permissions="Read, Write" /> </authorization> </security> </system.ftpServer> </location> If I connect to the Site (not FTP) from my local IIS Manager using the same IIS Manager account details then it connects fine, I can browse files and change settings as I would locally (though I don't seem to have an option to upload files). Trying to connect via FTP though either through the browser or FileZilla etc... gives me: Status: Resolving address of www.mydomain.co.uk Status: Connecting to 123.456.12.123:21... Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message... Response: 220 Microsoft FTP Service Command: USER MyFtpLogin Response: 331 Password required for MyFtpLogin. Command: PASS ********* Response: 530 User cannot log in. Error: Critical error Error: Could not connect to server I have tried collecting etw traces for ftp sessions, in the logs I get a FailBasicLogon followed by a FailCustomLogon, but no other info: FailBasicLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | ErrorCode=0x8007052E StartCustomLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | LogonProvider=IisManagerAuth StartCallProvider SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | provider=IisManagerAuth EndCallProvider SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} EndCustomLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} FailCustomLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | ErrorCode=0x8007052E FailFtpCommand SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | ReturnValue=0x8007052E | SubStatus=ERROR_DURING_AUTHENTICATION In the normal FTP logs I just get: 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 ControlChannelOpened - - 0 0 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 USER MyFtpLogin 331 0 0 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 PASS *** 530 1326 41 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 ControlChannelClosed - - 0 0 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - If anyone has any ideas than I would be very grateful to hear them. Many thanks.

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• Summit Time!

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  Boy, how time flies!  I can hardly believe that the 2011 PASS Summit is just one week away.  Maybe it snuck up on me because it’s a few weeks earlier than last year.  Whatever the cause, I am really looking forward to next week.  The PASS Summit is the largest SQL Server conference in the world and a fantastic networking opportunity thrown in for no additional charge.  Here are a few thoughts to help you maximize the week. Networking As Karen Lopez (blog | @DataChick) mentioned in her presentation for the Professional Development Virtual Chapter just a couple of weeks ago, “Don’t wait until you need a new job to start networking.”  You should always be working on your professional network.  Some people, especially technical-minded people, get confused by the term networking.  The first image that used to pop into my head was the image of some guy standing, awkwardly, off to the side of a cocktail party, trying to shmooze those around him.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  If you’re good at that sort of thing, and you can strike up a conversation with some stranger and learn all about them in 5 minutes, and walk away with your next business deal all but approved by the lawyers, then congratulations.  But if you’re not, and most of us are not, I have two suggestions for you.  First, register for Don Gabor’s 2-hour session on Tuesday at the Summit called Networking to Build Business Contacts.  Don is a master at small talk, and at teaching others, and in just those two short hours will help you with important tips about breaking the ice, remembering names, and smooth transitions into and out of conversations.  Then go put that great training to work right away at the Tuesday night Welcome Reception and meet some new people; which is really my second suggestion…just meet a few new people.  You see, “networking” is about meeting new people and being friendly without trying to “work it” to get something out of the relationship at this point.  In fact, Don will tell you that a better way to build the connection with someone is to look for some way that you can help them, not how they can help you. There are a ton of opportunities as long as you follow this one key point: Don’t stay in your hotel!  At the least, get out and go to the free events such as the Tuesday night Welcome Reception, the Wednesday night Exhibitor Reception, and the Thursday night Community Appreciation Party.  All three of these are perfect opportunities to meet other professionals with a similar job or interest as you, and you never know how that may help you out in the future.  Maybe you just meet someone to say HI to at breakfast the next day instead of eating alone.  Or maybe you cross paths several times throughout the Summit and compare notes on different sessions you attended.  And you just might make new friends that you look forward to seeing year after year at the Summit.  Who knows, it might even turn out that you have some specific experience that will help out that other person a few months’ from now when they run into the same challenge that you just overcame, or vice-versa.  But the point is, if you don’t get out and meet people, you’ll never have the chance for anything else to happen in the future. One more tip for shy attendees of the Summit…if you can’t bring yourself to strike up conversation with strangers at these events, then at the least, after you sit through a good session that helps you out, go up to the speaker and introduce yourself and thank them for taking the time and effort to put together their presentation.  Ideally, when you do this, tell them WHY it was beneficial to you (e.g. “Now I have a new idea of how to tackle a problem back at the office.”)  I know you think the speakers are all full of confidence and are always receiving a ton of accolades and applause, but you’re wrong.  Most of them will be very happy to hear first-hand that all the work they put into getting ready for their presentation is paying off for somebody. Training With over 170 technical sessions at the Summit, training is what it’s all about, and the training is fantastic!  Of course there are the big-name trainers like Paul Randall, Kimberly Tripp, Kalen Delaney, Itzik Ben-Gan and several others, but I am always impressed by the quality of the training put on by so many other “regular” members of the SQL Server community.  It is amazing how you don’t have to be a published author or otherwise recognized as an “expert” in an area in order to make a big impact on others just by sharing your personal experience and lessons learned.  I would rather hear the story of, and lessons learned from, “some guy or gal” who has actually been through an issue and came out the other side, than I would a trained professor who is speaking just from theory or an intellectual understanding of a topic. In addition to the three full days of regular sessions, there are also two days of pre-conference intensive training available.  There is an extra cost to this, but it is a fantastic opportunity.  Think about it…you’re already coming to this area for training, so why not extend your stay a little bit and get some in-depth training on a particular topic or two?  I did this for the first time last year.  I attended one day of extra training and it was well worth the time and money.  One of the best reasons for it is that I am extremely busy at home with my regular job and family, that it was hard to carve out the time to learn about the topic on my own.  It worked out so well last year that I am doubling up and doing two days or “pre-cons” this year. And then there are the DVDs.  I think these are another great option.  I used the online schedule builder to get ready and have an idea of which sessions I want to attend and when they are (much better than trying to figure this out at the last minute every day).  But the problem that I have run into (seems this happens every year) is that nearly every session block has two different sessions that I would like to attend.  And some of them have three!  ACK!  That won’t work!  What is a guy supposed to do?  Well, one option is to purchase the DVDs which are recordings of the audio and projected images from each session so you can continue to attend sessions long after the Summit is officially over.  Yes, many (possibly all) of these also get posted online and attendees can access those for no extra charge, but those are not necessarily all available as quickly as the DVD recording are, and the DVDs are often more convenient than downloading, especially if you want to share the training with someone who was not able to attend in person. Remember, I don’t make any money or get any other benefit if you buy the DVDs or from anything else that I have recommended here.  These are just my own thoughts, trying to help out based on my experiences from the 8 or so Summits I have attended.  There is nothing like the Summit.  It is an awesome experience, fantastic training, and a whole lot of fun which is just compounded if you’ll take advantage of the first part of this article and make some new friends along the way.

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• EM12c Release 4: Database as a Service Enhancements

  - by Adeesh Fulay

  Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.4 (or simply put EM12c R4) is the latest update to the product. As previous versions, this release provides tons of enhancements and bug fixes, attributing to improved stability and quality. One of the areas that is most exciting and has seen tremendous growth in the last few years is that of Database as a Service. EM12c R4 provides a significant update to Database as a Service. The key themes are: Comprehensive Database Service Catalog (includes single instance, RAC, and Data Guard) Additional Storage Options for Snap Clone (includes support for Database feature CloneDB) Improved Rapid Start Kits Extensible Metering and Chargeback Miscellaneous Enhancements 1. Comprehensive Database Service Catalog Before we get deep into implementation of a service catalog, lets first understand what it is and what benefits it provides. Per ITIL, a service catalog is an exhaustive list of IT services that an organization provides or offers to its employees or customers. Service catalogs have been widely popular in the space of cloud computing, primarily as the medium to provide standardized and pre-approved service definitions. There is already some good collateral out there that talks about Oracle database service catalogs. The two whitepapers i recommend reading are: Service Catalogs: Defining Standardized Database Service High Availability Best Practices for Database Consolidation: The Foundation for Database as a Service [Oracle MAA] EM12c comes with an out-of-the-box service catalog and self service portal since release 1. For the customers, it provides the following benefits: Present a collection of standardized database service definitions, Define standardized pools of hardware and software for provisioning, Role based access to cater to different class of users, Automated procedures to provision the predefined database definitions, Setup chargeback plans based on service tiers and database configuration sizes, etc Starting Release 4, the scope of services offered via the service catalog has been expanded to include databases with varying levels of availability - Single Instance (SI) or Real Application Clusters (RAC) databases with multiple data guard based standby databases. Some salient points of the data guard integration: Standby pools can now be defined across different datacenters or within the same datacenter as the primary (this helps in modelling the concept of near and far DR sites) The standby databases can be single instance, RAC, or RAC One Node databases Multiple standby databases can be provisioned, where the maximum limit is determined by the version of database software The standby databases can be in either mount or read only (requires active data guard option) mode All database versions 10g to 12c supported (as certified with EM 12c) All 3 protection modes can be used - Maximum availability, performance, security Log apply can be set to sync or async along with the required apply lag The different service levels or service tiers are popularly represented using metals - Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and so on. The Oracle MAA whitepaper (referenced above) calls out the various service tiers as defined by Oracle's best practices, but customers can choose any logical combinations from the table below:  Primary  Standby [1 or more]  EM 12cR4  SI  -  SI  SI  RAC -  RAC SI  RAC RAC  RON -  RON RON where RON = RAC One Node is supported via custom post-scripts in the service template A sample service catalog would look like the image below. Here we have defined 4 service levels, which have been deployed across 2 data centers, and have 3 standardized sizes. Again, it is important to note that this is just an example to get the creative juices flowing. I imagine each customer would come up with their own catalog based on the application requirements, their RTO/RPO goals, and the product licenses they own. In the screenwatch titled 'Build Service Catalog using EM12c DBaaS', I walk through the complete steps required to setup this sample service catalog in EM12c. 2. Additional Storage Options for Snap Clone In my previous blog posts, i have described the snap clone feature in detail. Essentially, it provides a storage agnostic, self service, rapid, and space efficient approach to solving your data cloning problems. The net benefit is that you get incredible amounts of storage savings (on average 90%) all while cloning databases in a matter of minutes. Space and Time, two things enterprises would love to save on. This feature has been designed with the goal of providing data cloning capabilities while protecting your existing investments in server, storage, and software. With this in mind, we have pursued with the dual solution approach of Hardware and Software. In the hardware approach, we connect directly to your storage appliances and perform all low level actions required to rapidly clone your databases. While in the software approach, we use an intermediate software layer to talk to any storage vendor or any storage configuration to perform the same low level actions. Thus delivering the benefits of database thin cloning, without requiring you to drastically changing the infrastructure or IT's operating style. In release 4, we expand the scope of options supported by snap clone with the addition of database CloneDB. While CloneDB is not a new feature, it was first introduced in 11.2.0.2 patchset, it has over the years become more stable and mature. CloneDB leverages a combination of Direct NFS (or dNFS) feature of the database, RMAN image copies, sparse files, and copy-on-write technology to create thin clones of databases from existing backups in a matter of minutes. It essentially has all the traits that we want to present to our customers via the snap clone feature. For more information on cloneDB, i highly recommend reading the following sources: Blog by Tim Hall: Direct NFS (DNFS) CloneDB in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Oracle OpenWorld Presentation by Cern: Efficient Database Cloning using Direct NFS and CloneDB The advantages of the new CloneDB integration with EM12c Snap Clone are: Space and time savings Ease of setup - no additional software is required other than the Oracle database binary Works on all platforms Reduce the dependence on storage administrators Cloning process fully orchestrated by EM12c, and delivered to developers/DBAs/QA Testers via the self service portal Uses dNFS to delivers better performance, availability, and scalability over kernel NFS Complete lifecycle of the clones managed by EM12c - performance, configuration, etc 3. Improved Rapid Start Kits DBaaS deployments tend to be complex and its setup requires a series of steps. These steps are typically performed across different users and different UIs. The Rapid Start Kit provides a single command solution to setup Database as a Service (DBaaS) and Pluggable Database as a Service (PDBaaS). One command creates all the Cloud artifacts like Roles, Administrators, Credentials, Database Profiles, PaaS Infrastructure Zone, Database Pools and Service Templates. Once the Rapid Start Kit has been successfully executed, requests can be made to provision databases and PDBs from the self service portal. Rapid start kit can create complex topologies involving multiple zones, pools and service templates. It also supports standby databases and use of RMAN image backups. The Rapid Start Kit in reality is a simple emcli script which takes a bunch of xml files as input and executes the complete automation in a matter of seconds. On a full rack Exadata, it took only 40 seconds to setup PDBaaS end-to-end. This kit works for both Oracle's engineered systems like Exadata, SuperCluster, etc and also on commodity hardware. One can draw parallel to the Exadata One Command script, which again takes a bunch of inputs from the administrators and then runs a simple script that configures everything from network to provisioning the DB software. Steps to use the kit: The kit can be found under the SSA plug-in directory on the OMS: EM_BASE/oracle/MW/plugins/oracle.sysman.ssa.oms.plugin_12.1.0.8.0/dbaas/setup It can be run from this default location or from any server which has emcli client installed For most scenarios, you would use the script dbaas/setup/database_cloud_setup.py For Exadata, special integration is provided to reduce the number of inputs even further. The script to use for this scenario would be dbaas/setup/exadata_cloud_setup.py The database_cloud_setup.py script takes two inputs: Cloud boundary xml: This file defines the cloud topology in terms of the zones and pools along with host names, oracle home locations or container database names that would be used as infrastructure for provisioning database services. This file is optional in case of Exadata, as the boundary is well know via the Exadata system target available in EM. Input xml: This file captures inputs for users, roles, profiles, service templates, etc. Essentially, all inputs required to define the DB services and other settings of the self service portal. Once all the xml files have been prepared, invoke the script as follows for PDBaaS: emcli @database_cloud_setup.py -pdbaas -cloud_boundary=/tmp/my_boundary.xml -cloud_input=/tmp/pdb_inputs.xml          The script will prompt for passwords a few times for key users like sysman, cloud admin, SSA admin, etc. Once complete, you can simply log into EM as the self service user and request for databases from the portal. More information available in the Rapid Start Kit chapter in Cloud Administration Guide.  4. Extensible Metering and Chargeback  Last but not the least, Metering and Chargeback in release 4 has been made extensible in all possible regards. The new extensibility features allow customer, partners, system integrators, etc to : Extend chargeback to any target type managed in EM Promote any metric in EM as a chargeback entity Extend list of charge items via metric or configuration extensions Model abstract entities like no. of backup requests, job executions, support requests, etc  A slew of emcli verbs have also been added that allows administrators to create, edit, delete, import/export charge plans, and assign cost centers all via the command line. More information available in the Chargeback API chapter in Cloud Administration Guide. 5. Miscellaneous Enhancements There are other miscellaneous, yet important, enhancements that are worth a mention. These mostly have been asked by customers like you. These are: Custom naming of DB Services Self service users can provide custom names for DB SID, DB service, schemas, and tablespaces Every custom name is validated for uniqueness in EM 'Create like' of Service Templates Now creating variants of a service template is only a click away. This would be vital when you publish service templates to represent different database sizes or service levels. Profile viewer View the details of a profile like datafile, control files, snapshot ids, export/import files, etc prior to its selection in the service template Cleanup automation - for failed and successful requests Single emcli command to cleanup all remnant artifacts of a failed request Cleanup can be performed on a per request bases or by the entire pool As an extension, you can also delete successful requests Improved delete user workflow Allows administrators to reassign cloud resources to another user or delete all of them Support for multiple tablespaces for schema as a service In addition to multiple schemas, user can also specify multiple tablespaces per request I hope this was a good introduction to the new Database as a Service enhancements in EM12c R4. I encourage you to explore many of these new and existing features and give us feedback. Good luck! References: Cloud Management Page on OTN Cloud Administration Guide [Documentation] -- Adeesh Fulay (@adeeshf)

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, September 12, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, September 12, 2012Popular ReleasesActive Forums for DotNetNuke CMS: Active Forums 05.00.00 RC2: Active Forums 05.00.00 RC2SSIS Compressed File Source and Destination Components: Compressed File Souce and Destination Components: Initial Beta ReleaseArduino for Visual Studio: Arduino 1.x for Visual Studio 2012, 2010 and 2008: Register for the visualmicro.com forum for more news and updates Version 1209.10 includes support for VS2012 and minor fixes for the Arduino debugger beta test team. Version 1208.19 is considered stable for visual studio 2010 and 2008. If you are upgrading from an older release of Visual Micro and encounter a problem then uninstall "Visual Micro for Arduino" using "Control Panel>Add and Remove Programs" and then run the install again. Key Features of 1209.10 Support for Visual Studio 2...Bookmark Collector: 01.01.00: This release has the follow new features and updates: Enhanced the ContentItem integration Changed the format of how ContentItem content is saved Implemented core JSON methods from the API Fully documented the source code Please Note: This module was originally written as a proof of concept for how to create a simple module using the Christoc module templates, and using the ContentItems API instead of a DAL. Minimum Requirements DotNetNuke v06.02.03 or newer .Net Framework v3.5 SP1...Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell: Script Explorer Reference Implementation(s): This download contains Source Code and Documentation for Script Explorer DB Reference Implementation. You can create your own provider and use it in Script Explorer. Refer to the documentation for more information. The source code is provided "as is" without any warranty. Read the Readme.txt file in the SourceCode.Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.5): This new version includes: - Fixed the "resource limit" bug caused by Facebook - Bug fixes To use the new graph data provider, do the following: Unzip the Zip file into the "PlugIns" folder that can be found in the NodeXL installation folder (i.e "C:\Program Files\Social Media Research Foundation\NodeXL Excel Template\PlugIns") Open NodeXL template and you can access the new importer from the "Import" menuAcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v4.1: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??...Move Mouse: Move Mouse 2.5.2: FIXED - Minor fixes and improvements.MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 2.3: Added The new release is compatible with Mvc4 RTM. Support for handling Time Zones in dates. Specifically added helper methods to convert to UTC or local time all DateTimes contained in a model received by a controller, and helper methods to handle date only fileds. This together with a detailed documentation on how TimeZones are handled in all situations by the Asp.net Mvc framework, will contribute to mitigate the nightmare of dates and timezones. Multiple Templates, and more options to...DNN Metro7 style Skin package: Metro7 style Skin for DotNetNuke 06.02.00: Maintenance Release Changes on Metro7 06.02.00 Fixed width and height on the jQuery popup for the Editor. Navigation Provider changed to DDR menu Added menu files and scripts Changed skins to Doctype HTML Changed manifest to dnn6 manifest file Changed License to HTML view Fixed issue on Metro7/PinkTitle.ascx with double registering of the Actions Changed source folder structure and start folder, so the project works with the default DNN structure on developing Added VS 20...Xenta Framework - extensible enterprise n-tier application framework: Xenta Framework 1.9.0: Release Notes Imporved framework architecture Improved the framework security More import/export formats and operations New WebPortal application which includes forum, new, blog, catalog, etc. UIs Improved WebAdmin app. Reports, navigation and search Perfomance optimization Improve Xenta.Catalog domain More plugin interfaces and plugin implementations Refactoring Windows Azure support and much more... Package Guide Source Code - package contains the source code Binaries...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 9: New feature - Added JsonValueConverter New feature - Set a property's DefaultValueHandling to Ignore when EmitDefaultValue from DataMemberAttribute is false Fix - Fixed DefaultValueHandling.Ignore not igoring default values of non-nullable properties Fix - Fixed DefaultValueHandling.Populate error with non-nullable properties Fix - Fixed error when writing JSON for a JProperty with no value Fix - Fixed error when calling ToList on empty JObjects and JArrays Fix - Fixed losing deci...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.66: Just going to bite the bullet and rip off the band-aid... SEMI-BREAKING CHANGE! Well, it's a BREAKING change to those who already adjusted their projects to use the previous breaking change's ill-conceived renamed DLLs (versions 4.61-4.65). For those who had not adapted and were still stuck in this-doesn't-work-please-fix-me mode, this is more like a fixing change. The previous breaking change just broke too many people, I'm sorry to say. Renaming the DLL from AjaxMin.dll to AjaxMinLibrary.dl...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 07.00.00 CTP (Not for Production Use): NOTE: New Minimum Requirementshttp://www.dotnetnuke.com/Portals/25/Blog/Files/1/3418/Windows-Live-Writer-1426fd8a58ef_902C-MinimumVersionSupport_2.png Simplified InstallerThe first thing you will notice is that the installer has been updated. Not only have we updated the look and feel, but we also simplified the overall install process. You shouldn’t have to click through a series of screens in order to just get your website running. With the 7.0 installer we have taken an approach that a...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.2: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6.1: In addition to fixing a number of bugs that beta testers reported, this release includes the following new features for Tabular models in SQL 2012: New Features: Tabular Display Folders Tabular Translations Editor Tabular Sync Descriptions Fixed Issues: Biml issues 32849 fixing bug in Tabular Actions Editor Form where you type in an invalid action name which is a reserved word like CON or which is a duplicate name to another action 32695 - fixing bug in SSAS Sync Descriptions whe...Code Snippets for Windows Store Apps: Code Snippets for Windows Store Apps: First release of our snippets! For more information: Installation List of SnippetsUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.9.0: Whats newThe media section has been overhauled to support HTML5 uploads, just drag and drop files in, even multiple files are supported on any HTML5 capable browser. The folder content overview is also much improved allowing you to filter it and perform common actions on your media items. The Rich Text Editor’s “Media” button now uses an embedder based on the open oEmbed standard (if you’re upgrading, enable the media button in the Rich Text Editor datatype settings and set TidyEditorConten...WordMat: WordMat v. 1.02: This version was used for the 2012 exam.menu4web: menu4web 0.4.1 - javascript menu for web sites: This release is for those who believe that global variables are evil. menu4web has been wrapped into m4w singleton object. Added "Vertical Tabs" example which illustrates object notation.New Projects[ITFA GROUP] CODE GENER: Code Gener is a tool to help programmers and system builders in building applications. ANPR MX: ANPR MX is a simple Automatic Plate Recognition (ANPR) library for the North American average plate size based on C# and OpenCV. BatteryStatus: show battery level on status bar on an android deviceCode Snippets for Windows Store Apps: Code Snippets for Windows Store apps is a collection of around 60 IntelliSense Code Snippets for Visual Basic, C#, C++, and JavaScript developers.Cube2d: cube2dDiscover_U_Server: Discover_U_ServerExeLauncher: Make PATH recursiveExpression Evaluator + aggregate functions support: Simple library for expressions evaluation that supports variables in expression and aggregative functions to parse and evaluate expression against tabular data.FancyGrid: A custom datagrid for WPF with support for real-time filtering, multisort, and themes. Compatible with MVVM and normal WPF binding.langben: ??????????????，?????????????，??，???????，?????，???????，?????????????????????????。 ???? •????????（SOA） •????????????????? •?????????????? •??IE 6、IE 8+?FirefMakeTracks Gadgeteer GPS Module Driver: This project is the driver for the Gadgeteer compatible MakeTracks GPS module developed by Eric Hall and other members of the tinyclr.com community.MyCloud: heheOVS: OVS est un projet d'analyse et de traitement de signaux Vidéo sur IP avec remontées d'informations sur consultables sur des terminaux mobilesPMS: Project Management System for HSUScenario4: testSharePoint 2010 Syntax Highlighting: This project allows users to apply syntax highlighting to code snippits via the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon UI.SharePoint CRM: CRM/Project Management Site template for both SharePoint 2010 Enterprise and Office 365 Enterprise tennantsSharePoint PowerShell Wizard: The SharePoint PowerShell Wizards provides a tool to help generate and support some of the PowerShell scripts needed to recreate aspects of your farm.Shindo's Race System: Shindo's Race System is a plugin for SA:MP Dedicated Server 0.3e.Test MVC application: Test project - please ignore!weber: Weber is a private browser, it tries to prevent the user from being tracked by the advertisers and traffic monitoring sites. Hence it is severely impaired. Try!xuebin: web site

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