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  • Webcast - C-level Perspectives on How HR Can Take on a Bigger Role in Strategic Planning

    - by Scott Ewart
    The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), on behalf of IBM and Oracle, recently surveyed a number of C-level executives in North America and Western Europe to understand how HR can take on a bigger role in driving growth. The resulting reports highlight the actions senior HR leaders can take to place themselves at the heart of the debate on a company's strategic direction.In this session, IBM and Oracle HCM specialists will review the findings of the EIU research reports and provide guidance on how technology innovation can help to align talent strategies with long term business goals. Participants will gain an understanding of the following: Results of the Economist Intelligence Unit study around "Executive Perceptions of the HR Function" Differences in perspective between CEOs and CFOs Identify how the HR professional can take a bigger role in driving business growth Join us on Thursday, October 25 for a live webcast. Speakers:Gina Wells Global Oracle HCM LeaderIBM Global Business Services Michelle NewellSenior Director, HCM Applications MarketingOracle Register Here For the Webcast on Thursday, October 25.

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  • Extend Your Applications Your Way: Oracle OpenWorld Live Poll Results

    - by Applications User Experience
    Lydia Naylor, Oracle Applications User Experience Manager At OpenWorld 2012, I attended one of our team’s very exciting sessions: “Extend Your Applications, Your Way”. It was clear that customers were engaged by the topics presented. Not only did we see many heads enthusiastically nodding in agreement during the presentation, and witness a large crowd surround our speakers Killian Evers, Kristin Desmond and Greg Nerpouni afterwards, but we can prove it…with data! Figure 1. Killian Evers, Kristin Desmond, and Greg Nerpouni of Oracle at the OOW 2012 session. At the beginning of our OOW 2012 journey, Greg Nerpouni, Fusion HCM Principal Product Manager, told me he really wanted to get feedback from the audience on our extensibility direction. Initially, we were thinking of doing a group activity at the OOW UX labs events that we hold every year, but Greg was adamant- he wanted “real-time” feedback. So, after a little tinkering, we came up with a way to use an online survey tool, a simple QR code (Quick Response code: a matrix barcode that can include information like URLs and can be read by mobile device cameras), and the audience’s mobile devices to do just that. Figure 2. Actual QR Code for survey Prior to the session, we developed a short survey in Vovici (an online survey tool), with questions to gather feedback on certain points in the presentation, as well as demographic data from our participants. We used Vovici’s feature to generate a mobile HTML version of the survey. At the session, attendees accessed the survey by simply scanning a QR code or typing in a TinyURL (a shorthand web address that is easily accessible through mobile devices). Killian, Kristin and Greg paused at certain points during the session and asked participants to answer a few survey questions about what they just presented. Figure 3. Session survey deployed on a mobile phone The nice thing about Vovici’s survey tool is that you can see the data real-time as participants are responding to questions - so we knew during the session that not only was our direction on track but we were hitting the mark and fulfilling Greg’s request. We planned on showing the live polling results to the audience at the end of the presentation but it ran just a little over time, and we were gently nudged out of the room by the session attendants. We’ve included a quick summary below and this link to the full results for your enjoyment. Figure 4. Most important extensions to Fusion Applications So what did participants think of our direction for extensibility? A total of 94% agreed that it was an improvement upon their current process. The vast majority, 80%, concurred that the extensibility model accounts for the major roles involved: end user, business systems analyst and programmer. Attendees suggested a few supporting roles such as systems administrator, data architect and integrator. Customers and partners in the audience verified that Oracle‘s Fusion Composers allow them to make changes in the most common areas they need to: user interface, business processes, reporting and analytics. Integrations were also suggested. All top 10 things customers can do on a page rated highly in importance, with all but two getting an average rating above 4.4 on a 5 point scale. The kinds of layout changes our composers allow customers to make align well with customers’ needs. The most common were adding columns to a table (94%) and resizing regions and drag and drop content (both selected by 88% of participants). We want to thank the attendees of the session for allowing us another great opportunity to gather valuable feedback from our customers! If you didn’t have a chance to attend the session, we will provide a link to the OOW presentation when it becomes available.

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  • nicstat update - version 1.92

    - by user12608033
    Another minor nicstat release is now available. Changes for Version 1.92, October 2012 Common Added "-M" option to change throughput statistics to Mbps (Megabits per second). Suggestion from Darren Todd. Fixed bugs with printing extended parseable format (-xp) Fixed man page's description of extended parseable output. Solaris Fixed memory leak associated with g_getif_list Add 2nd argument to dladm_open() for Solaris 11.1 Modify nicstat.sh to handle Solaris 11.1 Linux Modify nicstat.sh to see "x86_64" cputype as "i386". All Linux binaries are built as 32-bit, so we do not need to differentiate these two cpu types. Availability nicstat source and binaries are available from sourceforge. History For more history on nicstat, see my earlier entry

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  • Running & Managing Concurrent Queries in SQL Developer

    - by thatjeffsmith
    We’ve all been there – you’ve managed to write a query that takes longer than a few seconds to execute. Tuning aside, sometimes it takes longer than you want for a query to run. So what’s a SQL Developer user to do? I say, keep going! While you’re waiting for your query to finish, there’s no reason why you can’t continue on with your work. If you need to execute something else in a worksheet, there’s no reason to launch a 2nd or 3rd copy of SQL Developer. Just open an un-shared worksheet. Now while you’ve got 1 or more queries running, you can easily get yourself into a situation where you’re not sure what’s running where. Or maybe you want to cancel a query or just check how long something’s been running. Just open the Task Progress Panel If a query or task in SQL Developer takes more than 3-5 seconds, it will appear in the Task Progress panel. You can then watch the throbbers go back and forth while you sip your coffee/soda/Red Bull. Run a query, spawn a new worksheet, run another query, watch them in the Task Progress panel. Kudos and thanks to @leight0nn for helping me get the title of this post right If you’re looking for help in managing and monitoring sessions in general, check out this post.

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  • JCP wrap up of JavaOne and some news links

    - by heathervc
    A New article has been published on JCP.org covering the happenings surrounding JavaOne earlier this month, JCP Wrap-Up: Platform Evolution and JCP Enthusiasm. The JCP sessions from JavaOne are also now available from the JavaOne conference catalog: JCP.Next: Reinvigorating Java Standards Session ID: BOF6272 101 Ways to Improve Java: Why Developer Participation Matters Session ID: BOF6283 Meet the JCP Executive Committee Candidates Session ID: BOF6307 And a few links from around the web related to the JCP and JavaOne are below. Let us know if we've missed anything! 101 Ways to Improve Java - Why Developer Participation Matters (DZone) JavaOne 2012: 101 Ways to Improve Java (Java Code Geeks) JCP Ready for the Hard Stuff: Revising the JSPA (Application Development Trends) Oracle Hails Community Involvement in Java (v3.co.uk) JavaOne 2012 Recap Trip Report: Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne 2012

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  • Instructions on how to configure a WebLogic Cluster and use it with Oracle Http Server

    - by Laurent Goldsztejn
    On October 17th I delivered a webcast on WebLogic Clustering that included a demo with Apache as the proxy server.  I realized that many steps are needed to set up the configuration I used during the demo.  The purpose of this article is to go through these steps to show how quickly and easily one can define a new cluster and then proxy requests via an Oracle Http Server (OHS). The domain configuration wizard offers the option to create a cluster.  The administration console or WLST, the Weblogic scripting tool can also be used to define a new cluster.  It can be created at any time but the servers that will participate in it cannot be in a running state. Cluster Creation using the configuration wizard Network and architecture requirements need to be considered while choosing between unicast and multicast. Multicast Vs. Unicast with WebLogic Clustering is of great help to make the best decision between the two messaging modes.  In addition, Configure Cluster offers details on each single field displayed above. After this initial configuration page, individual servers could be assigned to this newly created cluster although servers can be added later to the cluster.  What is not recommended is for the Admin server to participate in a cluster as the main purpose of the Admin server is to perform the bulk of the processing for the domain.  Servers need to stop before being assigned to a cluster.  There is also no minimum number of servers that have to participate in the cluster. At this point the configuration should be done and the cluster created successfully.  This can easily be verified from the console. Each clustered managed server can be launched to join the cluster.   At startup the following messages should be logged for each clustered managed server: <Notice> <WeblogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to STARTING> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000197> <Listening for announcements from cluster using messaging_mode cluster messaging> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000133> <Waiting to synchronize with other running members of cluster_name>  It's time to try sending requests to the cluster and we will do this with the help of Oracle Http Server to play the role of a proxy server to demonstrate load balancing.  Proxy Server configuration  The first step is to download Weblogic Server Web Server Plugin that will enhance the web server by handling requests aimed at being sent to the Weblogic cluster.  For our test Oracle Http Server (OHS) will be used.  However plug-ins are also available for Apache Http server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Oracle iPlanet Webserver or even WebLogic Server with the HttpClusterServlet. Once OHS is installed on the system, the configuration file, mod_wl_ohs.conf, will need to be altered to include Weblogic proxy specifics. First of all, add the following directive to instruct Apache to load the Weblogic shared object module extracted from the plugins file just downloaded. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl_ohs.so and then create an IfModule directive to encapsulate the following location block so that proxy will be enabled by path (each request including /wls will be directed directly to the WebLogic Cluster).  You could also proxy requests by MIME type using MatchExpression in the Location block. <IfModule weblogic_module> <Location /wls>    SetHandler weblogic-handler    PathTrim /wls    WebLogicCluster MS1_URL:port,MS2_URL:port    Debug ON    WLLogFile        c:/tmp/global_proxy.log     WLTempDir        "c:/myTemp"    DebugConfigInfo  On </Location> </IfModule> SetHandler specifies the handler for the plug-in module  PathTrim will instruct the plug-in to trim /w ls from the URL before forwarding the request to the cluster. The list of WebLogic Servers defined in WeblogicCluster could contain a mixed set of clustered and single servers.  However, the dynamic list returned for this parameter will only contain valid clustered servers and may contain more servers if not all clustered servers are listed in WeblogicCluster. Testing proxy and load balancing It's time to start OHS web server which should at this point be configured correctly to proxy requests to the clustered servers.  By default round-robin is the load balancing strategy set by WebLogic. Testing the load balancing can be easily done by disabling cookies on your browser given that a request containing a cookie attempts to connect to the primary server. If that attempt fails, the plug-in attempts to make a connection to the next available server in the list in a round-robin fashion.  With cookies enabled, you could use two different browsers to test the load balancing with a JSP page that contains the following: <%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" language="java"  %>  <%  String path = request.getContextPath();   String getProtocol=request.getScheme();   String getDomain=request.getServerName();   String getPort=Integer.toString(request.getLocalPort());   String getPath = getProtocol+"://"+getDomain+":"+getPort+path+"/"; %> <html> <body> Receiving Server <%=getPath%> </body> </html>  Assuming that you name the JSP page Test.jsp and the webapp that contains it TestApp, your browsers should open the following URL: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp  Each browser should connect to a different clustered server and this simple JSP should confirm that.  The webapp that contains the JSP needs to be deployed to the cluster. You can also verify that the load is correctly balanced by looking at the proxy log file.  Each request generates a set of log entries that starts with : timestamp ================New Request: Each request is associated with a primary server and a secondary server if one is available.  For our test request, the following entries should appear in the log as well:Using Uri /wls/TestApp/Test.jsp After trimming path: '/TestApp/Test.jsp' The final request string is '/TestApp/Test.jsp' If an exception occurs, it should also be logged in the proxy log file with the prefix:timestamp *******Exception type   WeblogicBridgeConfig DebugConfigInfo enables runtime statistics and the production of configuration information.  For security purposes, this parameter should be turned off in production. http://webserver_host:port/path/xyz.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig will display a proxy bridge page detailing the plugin configuration followed by runtime statistics which could help in diagnosing issues along with the analyzing of the proxy log file.  In our example the url would be: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig  Here is how the top section of the screen can look like: The bottom part of the page contains runtime statistics, here is a snippet of it (unrelated with the previous JSP example).   This entire plugin configuration should be very similar with other web servers, what varies is the name of the proxy server configuration file. So, as you can see, it only takes a few minutes to configure a Weblogic cluster and get servers to join it. 

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  • Oracle Leader in Transportation Management

    - by John Murphy
    Oracle Named a Leader in the Transportation Management Systems Market by Leading Analyst Firm Redwood Shores, Calif. – October 15, 2012 News Facts Gartner, Inc. has placed Oracle Transportation Management in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2012 report, “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems (TMS).” (1) Gartner Magic Quadrants position vendors within a particular market segment based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute on that vision. According to the report, “Multiple subcomponents make up a comprehensive TMS across planning (for example, load consolidation, routing, mode selection and carrier selection) and execution (for example, tendering loads to carriers, shipment track and trace, and freight audit and payment).” Built on modern, flexible, Internet based architecture, Oracle Transportation Management is a global transportation and logistics operations system that allows companies to minimize cost, optimize service levels, support sustainability initiatives, and create flexible business process automation within their transportation and logistics networks. With a share of 26% of worldwide software revenue for 2011, Oracle is also number one in TMS vendor share according to Gartner’s report, “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016.” (2) Supporting Quote “Shippers and logistics service providers face increasingly complex challenges as they try to reduce costs, secure capacity and improve overall freight efficiency,” said Derek Gittoes, vice president, logistics product strategy, Oracle. “We believe our high standing in both Gartner reports is a reflection of Oracle’s commitment to addressing these challenges by delivering the industry’s broadest and deepest transportation management platform. With a flexible and modern platform, we are able to support customers with both basic transportation needs, as well as those with highly complex logistics requirements.” Supporting Resources Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016 Oracle Transportation Management (1) Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems,” by C. Dwight Klappich, August 23, 2012 (2) Gartner, Inc., “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016,” by Chad Eschinger and C. Dwight Klappich, September 24, 2012. About Oracle Applications Over 65,000 customers worldwide rely on Oracle's complete, open and integrated enterprise applications to achieve superior results. Oracle provides a secure path for customers to benefit from the latest technology advances that improve the customer software experience and drive better business performance. Oracle Applications Unlimited is Oracle's commitment to customer choice through continuous investment and innovation in current applications offerings. Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications build upon that commitment, and are designed to work with and evolve Oracle's Applications Unlimited offerings. Oracle's lifetime support policy helps ensure customers will continue to have a choice in upgrade paths, based on their enterprise needs. For more information on the latest Oracle Applications releases go towww.oracle.com/applications About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. Trademarks Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. ###   Karen [email protected] Simon JonesBlanc & [email protected]

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  • SOA PS5 Bundle Patch 4 and OSB PS5 Bundle Patch 1

    - by ShawnBailey
    Announcing the Availability of SOA Suite 11g PS5 Bundled Patch 4 and OSB PS5 Bundle Patch 1 These Bundled Patches contain a number of high impact fixes for PS5 and are recommended for anyone currently using this release. Please review the list of included fixes in the readmes and if you are running with any SOA or OSB patches not included in the Bundled Patches please request for Support to create a one-off on top of the appropriate Bundled Patch. The patches can be downloaded from My Oracle Support. 'Patches & Updates' - Enter '14406487' (SOA) or '14389126' (OSB) and click 'Search'. Further information on specific included fixes can also be found in the following documents on MOS: SOA 11g: Bundle Patch Reference, Doc ID 1485949.1 OSB 11g: Bundle Patch Reference, Doc ID 1499170.1

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  • Smarter Ways to Unlock Your Unused Contingency Budgets

    - by Melissa Centurio Lopes
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Cash flow is becoming increasingly important in the current economy; senior executives are looking for smarter ways of unlocking unused funds for new or ongoing capital expenditure projects. With project contingency budgets on average equaling 10 percent of overall costs, are you confident that you can release this cash without risking existing investments or the health of your overall project portfolio? This is the central question posed in a new report from the EPPM board, Hedging Your Bets? Optimizing Investment Opportunities for Great Cash Flow. The board is Oracle’s international steering committee, which brings together senior figures from leading organizations to discuss the critical role of enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM). C-Level Visibility Will Unlock Funds In addition to exploring how unlocking your contingency funds enables you to augment your cash flow (without resorting to expensive borrowing), the report offers a number of suggestions on how this can be done in a risk-free way, including Building an effective governance framework that shows the demonstrable value of every project within the portfolio Undertaking contingency planning risk assessments that give you complete portfolio wide visibility into all risk factors Establishing executive ownership of the portfolio to promote a more realistic appreciation of the risk levels inherent in the portfolio Creating a chief risk officer role that can review consolidated contingencies and risks so they are not considered in isolation The overriding message behind the report—and the work carried out by the EPPM board—is the need for increased C-level visibility across the entire enterprise project portfolio to enable better business decisions. Read the complete report in English, Chinese, German, or French. Read more in the October Edition of the quarterly Information InDepth EPPM Newsletter

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  • Oracle ADF Mobile is Now Available!

    - by Michelle Kimihira
    We are happy to announce availability of Oracle ADF Mobile, part of Oracle ADF (Application Development Framework). Oracle ADF is an HTML5 & Java-based framework that enables developers to build and deploy to iOS and Android devices from one application code base. By using open standards like HTML5 for a cross-platform consistent interface and Java for the application logic, companies can readily leverage existing skill and resources to develop mobile applications for iOS and Android.  There’s no need to learn a new platform specific programming language for each device.  With Oracle ADF Mobile -  you simply write once, deploy to many! Read the press release here.     On Wednesday, we will be featuring a blog on developing mobile applications and exploring the different options: Web, Native, or Hybrid. Additional Information Blog: ADF Blog Product Information on OTN: ADF Mobile Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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  • ADF Mobile Released!!

    - by Denis T
    ADFmfAnnounce We are pleased to announce the general availability of the newest version of Oracle’s ADF Mobile framework. This new framework provides the much anticipated on-device capabilities that the latest mobile applications require.  Feature Highlights Java - Oracle brings a Java VM embedded with each application so you can develop all your business logic in the platform neutral language you know and love! (Yes, even iOS!) JDBC - Since we give you Java, we also provide JDBC along with a SQLite driver and engine that also supports encryption out of the box. Multi-Platform - Truly develop your application only once and deploy to multiple platforms. iOS and Android platforms are supported for both phone and tablet. Flexible - You can decide how to implement the UI: (a) Use existing server-based UI framework like JSF. (b) Use your own favorite HTML5 framework like JQuery. (c) Use our declarative HTML5 component set provided with the framework. ADF Mobile XML or AMX for short, provides all the normal input and layout controls you expect and we also add charts/maps/gauges along with it to provide a very comprehensive UI controls. You can also mix and match any of the three for ultimate flexibility! Device Feature Access - You can get access to device features from either Java or JavaScript to invoke features like camera, GPS, email, SMS, contacts, etc. Secure - ADF Mobile provides integrated security that works with your server back-end as well. Whether you’re using remote URLs, local HTML or AMX, you can secure any/all of your features with a single consistent login page. Since we also give you SQLite encryption, we are assured that your data is safe. Rapid - Using the same development techniques that ADF developers are already used to, you can quickly create mobile applications without ever learning another language! Architecture ADF Mobile is a “hybrid” architecture that employs a natively built “container” on each platform that hosts a number of browser windows that are used to display the application content. We add the Java VM as a natively built library to the container for business logic.   How To Get Started ADF Mobile is an extension to the recently released JDeveloper version 11.1.2.3.0. Simple get the latest JDeveloper from Oracle Technology Network and use the Check for Updates feature to get the ADF Mobile extension. Note: ADF Mobile does not require developers to learn any other languages or frameworks but to build/deploy to iOS, you must be on an Apple MacintoshTM and have Xcode installed. To build/deploy to Android™ you must have the Android SDK installed.

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  • 3 Performance Presentations from SAE added to the portal

    - by uwes
    The following three presentation have been added to eSTEP portal: Oracle's Systems Performance Oct 2012 Update Oracle Leads the Way on Realistic Sizing Oracle's Performance: Oracle SPARC SuperCluster All presentations are created by Brad Carlile, Sr. Director Strategic Applications Engineering, SAE. How to get to the presentations: URL: http://launch.oracle.com/ Email Address: <provide your email address>Access URL/Page Token: eSTEP_2011To get access push Agree button on the left side of the page. Click on eSTEP Download (tab band on the top) ---> presentations at right hand side or Click on Miscellaneous (menu on left hand side) ---> presentations at right hand side

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  • MySQL Cluster 7.3 - Join This Week's Webinar to Learn What's New

    - by Mat Keep
    The first Development Milestone and Early Access releases of MySQL Cluster 7.3 were announced just several weeks ago. To provide more detail and demonstrate the new features, Andrew Morgan and I will be hosting a live webinar this coming Thursday 25th October at 0900 Pacific Time / 16.00 UTC Even if you can't make the live webinar, it is still worth registering for the event as you will receive a notification when the replay will be available, to view on-demand at your convenience In the webinar, we will discuss the enhancements being previewed as part of MySQL Cluster 7.3, including: - Foreign Key Constraints: Yes, we've looked into the future and decided Foreign Keys are it ;-) You can read more about the implementation of Foreign Keys in MySQL Cluster 7.3 here - Node.js NoSQL API: Allowing web, mobile and cloud services to query and receive results sets from MySQL Cluster, natively in JavaScript, enables developers to seamlessly couple high performance, distributed applications with a high performance, distributed, persistence layer delivering 99.999% availability. You can study the Node.js / MySQL Cluster tutorial here - Auto-Installer: This new web-based GUI makes it simple for DevOps teams to quickly configure and provision highly optimized MySQL Cluster deployments on-premise or in the cloud You can view a YouTube tutorial on the MySQL Cluster Auto-Installer here  So we have a lot to cover in our 45 minute session. It will be time well spent if you want to know more about the future direction of MySQL Cluster and how it can help you innovate faster, with greater simplicity. Registration is open 

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  • Stairway to XML: Level 4 - Querying XML Data

    You can extract a subset of data from an XML instance by using the query() method, and you can use the value() method to retrieve individual element and attribute values from an XML instance. SQL Monitor v3 is even more powerfulUse custom metrics to monitor and alert on data that's most important for your environment, easily imported from our custom metrics site. Find out more.

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  • Another Marketing Conference, part two – the afternoon

    - by Roger Hart
    In my previous post, I’ve covered the morning sessions at AMC2012. Here’s the rest of the write-up. I’ve skipped Charles Nixon’s session which was a blend of funky futurism and professional development advice, but you can see his slides here. I’ve also skipped the Google presentation, as it was a little thin on insight. 6 – Brand ambassadors: Getting universal buy in across the organisation, Vanessa Northam Slides are here This was the strongest enforcement of the idea that brand and campaign values need to be delivered throughout the organization if they’re going to work. Vanessa runs internal communications at e-on, and shared her experience of using internal comms to align an organization and thereby get the most out of a campaign. She views the purpose of internal comms as: “…to help leaders, to communicate the purpose and future of an organization, and support change.” This (and culture) primes front line staff, which creates customer experience and spreads brand. You ensure a whole organization knows what’s going on with both internal and external comms. If everybody is aligned and informed, if everybody can clearly articulate your brand and campaign goals, then you can turn everybody into an advocate. Alignment is a powerful tool for delivering a consistent experience and message. The pathological counter example is the one in which a marketing message goes out, which creates inbound customer contacts that front line contact staff haven’t been briefed to handle. The NatWest campaign was again mentioned in this context. The good example was e-on’s cheaper tariff campaign. Building a groundswell of internal excitement, and even running an internal launch meant everyone could contribute to a good customer experience. They found that meter readers were excited – not a group they’d considered as obvious in providing customer experience. But they were a group that has a lot of face-to-face contact with customers, and often were asked questions they may not have been briefed to answer. Being able to communicate a simple new message made it easier for them, and also let them become a sales and marketing asset to the organization. 7 – Goodbye Internet, Hello Outernet: the rise and rise of augmented reality, Matt Mills I wasn’t going to write this up, because it was essentially a sales demo for Aurasma. But the technology does merit some discussion. Basically, it replaces QR codes with visual recognition, and provides a simple-looking back end for attaching content. It’s quite sexy. But here’s my beef with it: QR codes had a clear visual language – when you saw one you knew what it was and what to do with it. They were clunky, but they had the “getting started” problem solved out of the box once you knew what you were looking at. However, they fail because QR code reading isn’t native to the platform. You needed an app, which meant you needed to know to download one. Consequentially, you can’t use QR codes with and ubiquity, or depend on them. This means marketers, content providers, etc, never pushed them, and they remained and awkward oddity, a minority sport. Aurasma half solves problem two, and re-introduces problem one, making it potentially half as useful as a QR code. It’s free, and you can apparently build it into your own apps. Add to that the likelihood of it becoming native to the platform if it takes off, and it may have legs. I guess we’ll see. 8 – We all need to code, Helen Mayor Great title – good point. If there was anybody in the room who didn’t at least know basic HTML, and if Helen’s presentation inspired them to learn, that’s fantastic. However, this was a half hour sales pitch for a basic coding training course. Beyond advocating coding skills it contained no useful content. Marketers may also like to consider some of these resources if they’re looking to learn code: Code Academy – free interactive tutorials Treehouse – learn web design, web dev, or app dev WebPlatform.org – tutorials and documentation for web tech  11 – Understanding our inner creativity, Margaret Boden This session was the most theoretical and probably least actionable of the day. It also held my attention utterly. Margaret spoke fluently, fascinatingly, without slides, on the subject of types of creativity and how they work. It was splendid. Yes, it raised a wry smile whenever she spoke of “the content of advertisements” and gave an example from 1970s TV ads, but even without the attempt to meet the conference’s theme this would have been thoroughly engaging. There are, Margaret suggested, three types of creativity: Combinatorial creativity The most common form, and consisting of synthesising ideas from existing and familiar concepts and tropes. Exploratory creativity Less common, this involves exploring the limits and quirks of a particular constraint or style. Transformational creativity This is uncommon, and arises from finding a way to do something that the existing rules would hold to be impossible. In essence, this involves breaking one of the constraints that exploratory creativity is composed from. Combinatorial creativity, she suggested, is particularly important for attaching favourable ideas to existing things. As such is it probably worth developing for marketing. Exploratory creativity may then come into play in something like developing and optimising an idea or campaign that now has momentum. Transformational creativity exists at the edges of this exploration. She suggested that products may often be transformational, but that marketing seemed unlikely to in her experience. This made me wonder about Listerine. Crucially, transformational creativity is characterised by there being some element of continuity with the strictures of previous thinking. Once it has happened, there may be  move from a revolutionary instance into an explored style. Again, from a marketing perspective, this seems to chime well with the thinking in Youngme Moon’s book: Different Talking about the birth of Modernism is visual art, Margaret pointed out that transformational creativity has historically risked a backlash, demanding what is essentially an education of the market. This is best accomplished by referring back to the continuities with the past in order to make the new familiar. Thoughts The afternoon is harder to sum up than the morning. It felt less concrete, and was troubled by a short run of poor presentations in the middle. Mainly, I found myself wrestling with the internal comms issue. It’s one of those things that seems astonishingly obvious in hindsight, but any campaign – particularly any large one – is doomed if the people involved can’t believe in it. We’ve run things here that haven’t gone so well, of course we have; who hasn’t? I’m not going to air any laundry, but people not being informed (much less aligned) feels like a common factor. It’s tough though. Managing and anticipating information needs across an organization of any size can’t be easy. Even the simple things like ensuring sales and support departments know what’s in a product release, and what messages go with it are easy to botch. The thing I like about framing this as a brand and campaign advocacy problem is that it makes it likely to get addressed. Better is always sexier than less-worse. Any technical communicator who’s ever felt crowded out by a content strategist or marketing copywriter  knows this – increasing revenue gets a seat at the table far more readily than reducing support costs, even if the financial impact is identical. So that’s it from AMC. The big thought-provokers were social buying behaviour and eliciting behaviour change, and the value of internal communications in ensuring successful campaigns and continuity of customer experience. I’ll be chewing over that for a while, and I’d definitely return next year.      

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  • How to make the switch to C++11?

    - by Overv
    I've been programming in C++ for a while now, but mostly thinks centered around the low-level features of C++. By that I mean mostly working with pointers and raw arrays. I think this behavior is known as using C++ as C with classes despite me only having tried C recently for the first time. I was pleasantly surprised how languages like C# and Java hide these details away in convenient standard library classes like Dictionaries and Lists. I'm aware that the C++ standard library has many convenience containers like vectors, maps and strings as well and C++11 only adds to this by having std:: array and ranged loops. How do I best learn to make use of these modern language features and which are suitable for which moments? Is it correct that software engineering in C++ nowadays I'd mostly free of manual memory management? Lastly, which compiler should I use to make the most of the new standard? Visual Studio has excellent debugging tools, but even VS2012 seems to have terrible C++11 support.

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  • JS framework with conditionally loaded fragments

    - by kjs3
    I'm doing a single-page, responsive, mobile first design. I found this article about conditionally loaded fragments but am wondering what the different js frameworks have build-in to handle this? I'm imagining the mobile version with a list view fragment that transitions to a show view fragment. A larger portal could just show both fragments and change the show fragment when items in the list are clicked. I'd love thoughts on what is available from the various frameworks, not an argument. Ember?, Angular?, etc. Maybe I'm missing it, but I'm not seeing the responsive fragments issue brought up in the various demos I've found so far.

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  • What is JavaScript, really?

    - by Lord Loh.
    All this started when I was looking for a way to test my webpage for JavaScript conformance like the W3C HTML Validator. I have not found one yet. So let me know if you know of any... I looked for the official JavaScript page and find ECMA Script. These people have standardized a scripting language (I do not feel like calling it JavaScript anymore!) and called it ECMA-262 (Wikipedia). Their latest work is Edition 5.1 JavaScript was developed my Mozilla Corporation and their last stable version is 1.8.5 (see this) which is based on the ECMA's edition 5.1 The Wikipedia page linked mentions dialects. Mozilla's JavaScript 1.8.5 is listed as a dialect along with JScript 9 (IE) and JavaScript (Chrome's V8[Wiki]) and a lot others. Am I to understand that JavaScript 1.8.5 is a derivative of the ECMA-262 and SpiderMonkey[Wiki] is an engine that runs it? And Chrome has its own dialect and V8 engine is the program that runs it? With all these dialects based off ECMA-262, what I can no longer understand is "What is JavaScript"? Are there any truly cross browser scripting languages? Do the various implementers come together to agree on the dialect cross compatibility? Is this effort ECMA?

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  • Need help for array when no checkbox is selected [closed]

    - by darlene
    Hi guys I have created a form that has checkboxes, the code works great when a checkbox is selcted however when no checkboxes are selected I get errors such as "Undefined index: onemon in and Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach()" Please help:) FORM 1. Had a cold, fever or headache? input type="checkbox" name="onemon[]" value="q1" if(isset($_GET['onemon']) && $_GET['onemon']= "q1") 2. Had dental extractions or teeth cleaning? input type="checkbox" name="onemon[]" value="q2" if(isset($_GET['onemon']) && $_GET['onemon']= "q2") 3. Had minor outpatient sugery? input type="checkbox" name="onemon[]" value="q3" if(isset($_GET['onemon']) && $_GET['onemon']= "q3") 4. Had any vaccines? input type="checkbox" name="onemon[]" value="q4" if(isset($_GET['onemon']) && $_GET['onemon']= "q4") PHP $date = date('Y-m-d'); $onemon = $_POST ['onemon']; { $con = mysql_connect("localhost","root","") or die ("Could not connect to DB Server"); $db_selected = mysql_select_db("nbtsdb", $con) or die("Could not locate the DB"); // You have to loop through the array of checked box values ... $ques=""; foreach($onemon as $entry){ $ques .= $entry.","; } //$addPersonalSql holds the insert SQL query string $query = "INSERT INTO defferal(defid, intdate, onemonth) VALUES('','$date','$ques')"; $addMemberSql = $query or die ("Unable to Insert Data into defferal Table"); mysql_query($addMemberSql); }

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  • Needs management tool for .java files

    - by Chris Okyen
    When I open the src file in the project folder in Package Explorer in Eclipse, it says the following: Error retrieving content description for resource '/GuiAdd/src/GuiAdd.Java.' Now, the directories of the source projects shown in Eclipse Package explorer doesn't always have the source file to link to, causing this message. I need a way to sync the folders in the correct directory without overwriting the newest ones. Some source files I project files of the root which the Package explorer links to may be the correct versions but other source files in the root may not have the latest source or any source. I am not using svn/git or other depository programs.

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  • What to do when there are no logical user stories but separate development tasks?

    - by Alex. S.
    We need to generate a release in 3 weeks, and for the planning we are doing today we don't have coherent logical user stories from the backlog tasks. Is valid to match say each development task is equivalent to an user story? Methodologically what is the correct way of handling this?, because anyway we are going to have standup meetings and we are going to control the progress of the project against those development tasks. For example, we have things like: . Adapt ETL to process numeric lists . Adjust licensing component . Remove DTC and so on. So, for the planning poker and iteration planning is valid to use those tasks? if not, what is the alternative?

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  • What are different ways to reduce latency between a server and a web application? [closed]

    - by jjoensuu
    this is a question about a web application that provides SOAP web services. For the sake of this question, this web app is hosted on a server SERVER B which is located in California. We have an automated, scheduled, process running on a server SERVER A, located in New York. This scheduled process is supposed to send SOAP messages to SERVER B every so often, but this process typically dies soon after starting. We have now been told by the vendor that reason why the process dies is because of the latency between SERVER A and SERVER B. The data traffic is routed through many diffent public networks. There is no dedicated line between SERVER A and SERVER B. As a result I have been asked to look into ways to reduce the latency between SERVER A and SERVER B. So I wanted to ask, what are the different ways to reduce latency in a situation like this? For example, would it help to switch from HTTPS to some other secure protocol? (the thought here is that perhaps some other alternative would require fewer handshakes than HTTPS). Or would a VPN help? If a VPN would reduce the latency, how would it do that? NOTE: I am not looking for an explicit answer that would work in my specific situation. I am more like looking just for a simple list of what technologies could be used for this. I will still have to evaluate the technologies and discuss them internally with others, so the list would just be a starting point. Here I am assuming that there exists very few ways to reduce latency between two servers that communicate across public networks using HTTPS. Feel free to correct me if this assumption is wrong and please ask if there is a need for specific information. NOTE 2: A list of technologies is a specific answer to the question I stated in the title. NOTE 3: Its rather dumb to close this question when it is after all about me looking for information and furthermore this information can clearly be useful for others. Anyway luckily there are other sites where I can ask around. StackExchange seems to attached to their own philosophical principles. Many thanks

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  • What is a good site to use for scheduling 20+ developers and 10 projects? (resource planning) [closed]

    - by b-ryce
    I have around 20 developers and 10 or so active projects. Then I get asked if my team can take on more work, and who is going to free up when. Currently we are using a spreadsheet to keep track :( I've been digging around for a few hours and haven't found anything that meets my requirements, which are: Web based Schedule a developer's time over a period of days/weeks/months Be able to see at a glance which developer has extra capacity Quickly see when the group could take on another large project I don't mind paying for the software (It does NOT need to be free) Two projects which look close are http://www.ganttic.com/tour and http://resourceguruapp.com/ What else are people using? Anyone have the perfect solution

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  • Ways to ensure unique instances of a class?

    - by Peanut
    I'm looking for different ways to ensure that each instance of a given class is a uniquely identifiable instance. For example, I have a Name class with the field name. Once I have a Name object with name initialised to John Smith I don't want to be able to instantiate a different Name object also with the name as John Smith, or if instantiation does take place I want a reference to the orginal object to be passed back rather than a new object. I'm aware that one way of doing this is to have a static factory that holds a Map of all the current Name objects and the factory checks that an object with John Smith as the name doesn't already exist before passing back a reference to a Name object. Another way I could think of off the top of my head is having a static Map in the Name class and when the constructor is called throwing an exception if the value passed in for name is already in use in another object, however I'm aware throwing exceptions in a constructor is generally a bad idea. Are there other ways of achieving this?

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  • Is there a recommended order to take the Oracle Java EE certification exams?

    - by Karl
    I recently passed the Oracle Certified Professional, Java SE 6 Programmer examination. Now, my boss would like me to take "the next step" to broaden my competence. I tried to explain that there is no equivalent Java EE 6 Programmer examination, but a number of different exams, such as Web Services, Web Components, and Enterprise JavaBeans. Is there a recommended path to follow for the various Oracle certifications in the Enterprise Edition of Java? Is it logical to take some exams prior to taking others because the content builds upon previous knowledge or are they all independent?

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