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• Improve the Quality of ePub eBooks with Sigil

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to correct errors in your ePub formatted eBooks, or even split them into chapters and create a Table of Contents?  Here’s how you can with the free program Sigil. eBooks are increasingly popular with the rise of eBook readers and reading apps on mobile devices.  We recently showed you how to convert a PDF eBook to ePub format, but as you may have noticed, sometimes the converted file had some glitches or odd formatting.  Additionally, many of the many free ePub books available online from sources like the Project Guttenberg do not include a table of contents.  Sigil is a free application for Windows, OS X, and Linux that lets you edit ePub files, so let’s look at how you can use it to improve your eBooks. Note: Sigil took several moments to open files in our tests, and froze momentarily when we maximized the window.  Sigil is currently pre-release software in active development, so we would expect the bugs to be worked out in future versions.  As usual, only install if you’re comfortable testing pre-release software. Getting Started Download Sigil (link below), making sure to select the correct version for your computer.  Run the installer, and select your preferred setup language when prompted. After a moment the installer will appear; setup as normal. Launch Sigil when it’s finished installing.  It opens with a default blank ePub file, so you could actually start writing an eBook from scratch right here. Edit Your ePub eBooks Now you’re ready to edit your ePub books.  Click Open and browse to the file you want to edit. Now you can double-click any of the HTML or XHTML files on the left sidebar and edit them just like you would in Word. Or you can choose to view it in Code View and edit the actual HTML directly. The sidebar also gives you access to the other parts of the ePub file, such as Images and CSS styles. If your ePub file has a Table of Contents, you can edit it with Sigil as well.  Click Tools in the menu bar, and then select TOC Editor.  Strangely there is no way to create a new table of contents, but you can remove entries from existing one.   Convert TXT Files to ePub Many free eBooks online, especially older, out of copyright titles, are available in plain text format.  One problem with these files is that they usually use hard returns at the end of lines, so they don’t reflow to fill your screen efficiently. Sigil can easily convert these files to the more useful ePub format.  Open the text file in Sigil, and it will automatically reflow the text and convert it ePub.  As you can see in the screenshot below, the text in the eBook does not have hard line-breaks at the end of each line, and will be much more readable on mobile devices. Note that Sigil may take several moments opening the book, and may even become unresponsive while analyzing it.   Now you can edit your eBook, split it into chapters, or just save it as is.  Either way, make sure to select Save as to save your book as ePub format. Conclusion As mentioned before, Sigil seems to run slow at times, especially when editing large eBooks.  But it’s still a nice solution to edit and extend your ePub eBooks, and even convert plain text eBooks to the nicer ePub format.  Now you can make your eBooks work just like you want, and read them on your favorite device! If you feel comfortable editing HTML files, check out our article on how to edit ePub eBooks with your favorite HTML editor. Link Download Sigil from Google Code Download free ePub eBooks from Project Guttenberg Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Edit ePub eBooks with Your Favorite HTML EditorConvert a PDF eBook to ePub Format for Your iPad, iPhone, or eReaderRead Mobi eBooks on Kindle for PCFriday Fun: Watch HD Video Content with MeevidPreview and Purchase Ebooks with Kindle for PC TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer XPS file format & XPS Viewer Explained Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account

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• References about Game Engine Architecture in AAA Games

  - by sharethis

  Last weeks I focused on game engine architecture and learned a lot about different approaches like component based, data driven, and so on. I used them in test applications and understand their intention but none of them looks like the holy grail. So I wonder how major games in the industry ("AAA Games") solve different architecture problems. But I noticed that there are barely references about game engine architecture out there. Do you know any resources of game engine architecture of major game titles like Battlefield, Call of Duty, Crysis, Skyrim, and so on? Doesn't matter if it is an article of a game developer or a wiki page or an entire book. I read this related popular question: Good resources for learning about game architecture? But it is focused on learning books rather than approaches in the industry. Hopefully the breadth of our community can carry together certain useful informations! Thanks a lot! Edit: This question is focused but not restricted to first person games.

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• C++ : Lack of Standardization at the Binary Level

  - by Nawaz

  Why ISO/ANSI didn't standardize C++ at the binary level? There are many portability issues with C++, which is only because of lack of it's standardization at the binary level. Don Box writes, (quoting from his book Essential COM, chapter COM As A Better C++) C++ and Portability Once the decision is made to distribute a C++ class as a DLL, one is faced with one of the fundamental weaknesses of C++, that is, lack of standardization at the binary level. Although the ISO/ANSI C++ Draft Working Paper attempts to codify which programs will compile and what the semantic effects of running them will be, it makes no attempt to standardize the binary runtime model of C++. The first time this problem will become evident is when a client tries to link against the FastString DLL's import library from a C++ developement environment other than the one used to build the FastString DLL. Are there more benefits Or loss of this lack of binary standardization?

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• &ldquo;Napa&rdquo; Development Tools for SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013

  - by Sahil Malik

  SharePoint 2010 Training: more information One of the biggest issues in getting started with SharePoint development are the 2091097 steps you need to go through, and the heavy duty machine you need to invest in, to create a development environment for a SharePoint and Office developer. This is not unlike the fact that creating and running a production SharePoint farm can be extremely time-consuming. In my latest code-magazine article, I describe how you can use the “Napa” Development Tools for SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013. These are also described in my latest book, “SharePoint 2013 - Planet of the Apps”, which is now available on Lulu.com Read full article ....

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• Chrome Apps Office Hours: Storage API Deep Dive

  Chrome Apps Office Hours: Storage API Deep Dive Ask and vote for questions at: goo.gl Join us next week as we take a deeper dive into the new storage APIs available to Chrome Packaged Apps. We've invited Eric Bidelman, author of the HTML5 File System API book to join Paul Kinlan, Paul Lewis, Pete LePage and Renato Dias for our weekly Chrome Apps Office Hours in which we will pick apart some of the sample Chrome Apps and explain how we've used the storage APIs and why we made the decisions we did. From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 0 0 ratings Time: 00:00 More in Science & Technology

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• Master Data Management and Cloud Computing

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Cloud Computing is all the rage these days. There are many reasons why this is so. But like its predecessor, Service Oriented Architecture, it can fall on hard times if the underlying data is left unmanaged. Master Data Management is the perfect Cloud companion. It can materially increase the chances for successful Cloud initiatives. In this blog, I'll review the nature of the Cloud and show how MDM fits in.   Here's the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cloud definition: •          Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.   Cloud architectures have three main layers: applications or Software as a Service (SaaS), Platforms as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SaaS generally refers to applications that are delivered to end-users over the Internet. Oracle CRM On Demand is an example of a SaaS application. Today there are hundreds of SaaS providers covering a wide variety of applications including Salesforce.com, Workday, and Netsuite. Oracle MDM applications are located in this layer of Oracle's On Demand enterprise Cloud platform. We call it Master Data as a Service (MDaaS). PaaS generally refers to an application deployment platform delivered as a service. They are often built on a grid computing architecture and include database and middleware. Oracle Fusion Middleware is in this category and includes the SOA and Data Integration products used to connect SaaS applications including MDM. Finally, IaaS generally refers to computing hardware (servers, storage and network) delivered as a service.  This typically includes the associated software as well: operating systems, virtualization, clustering, etc.    Cloud Computing benefits are compelling for a large number of organizations. These include significant cost savings, increased flexibility, and fast deployments. Cost advantages include paying for just what you use. This is especially critical for organizations with variable or seasonal usage. Companies don't have to invest to support peak computing periods. Costs are also more predictable and controllable. Increased agility includes access to the latest technology and experts without making significant up front investments.   While Cloud Computing is certainly very alluring with a clear value proposition, it is not without its challenges. An IDC survey of 244 IT executives/CIOs and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues identified a number of issues:   Security - 74% identified security as an issue involving data privacy and resource access control. Integration - 61% found that it is hard to integrate Cloud Apps with in-house applications. Operational Costs - 50% are worried that On Demand will actually cost more given the impact of poor data quality on the rest of the enterprise. Compliance - 49% felt that compliance with required regulatory, legal and general industry requirements (such as PCI, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley) would be a major issue. When control is lost, the ability of a provider to directly manage how and where data is deployed, used and destroyed is negatively impacted.  There are others, but I singled out these four top issues because Master Data Management, properly incorporated into a Cloud Computing infrastructure, can significantly ameliorate all of these problems. Cloud Computing can literally rain raw data across the enterprise.   According to fellow blogger, Mike Ferguson, "the fracturing of data caused by the adoption of cloud computing raises the importance of MDM in keeping disparate data synchronized."   David Linthicum, CTO Blue Mountain Labs blogs that "the lack of MDM will become more of an issue as cloud computing rises. We're moving from complex federated on-premise systems, to complex federated on-premise and cloud-delivered systems."    Left unmanaged, non-standard, inconsistent, ungoverned data with questionable quality can pollute analytical systems, increase operational costs, and reduce the ROI in Cloud and On-Premise applications. As cloud computing becomes more relevant, and more data, applications, services, and processes are moved out to cloud computing platforms, the need for MDM becomes ever more important. Oracle's MDM suite is designed to deal with all four of the above Cloud issues listed in the IDC survey.   Security - MDM manages all master data attribute privacy and resource access control issues. Integration - MDM pre-integrates Cloud Apps with each other and with On Premise applications at the data level. Operational Costs - MDM significantly reduces operational costs by increasing data quality, thereby improving enterprise business processes efficiency. Compliance - MDM, with its built in Data Governance capabilities, insures that the data is governed according to organizational standards. This facilitates rapid and accurate reporting for compliance purposes. Oracle MDM creates governed high quality master data. A unified cleansed and standardized data view is produced. The Oracle Customer Hub creates a single view of the customer. The Oracle Product Hub creates high quality product data designed to support all go-to-market processes. Oracle Supplier Hub dramatically reduces the chances of 'supplier exceptions'. Oracle Site Hub masters locations. And Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management masters financial reference data and manages enterprise hierarchies across operational areas from ERP to EPM and CRM to SCM. Oracle Fusion Middleware connects Cloud and On Premise applications to MDM Hubs and brings high quality master data to your enterprise business processes.   An independent analyst once said "Poor data quality is like dirt on the windshield. You may be able to drive for a long time with slowly degrading vision, but at some point, you either have to stop and clear the windshield or risk everything."  Cloud Computing has the potential to significantly degrade data quality across the enterprise over time. Deploying a Master Data Management solution prior to or in conjunction with a move to the Cloud can insure that the data flowing into the enterprise from the Cloud is clean and governed. This will in turn insure that expected returns on the investment in Cloud Computing will be realized.       Oracle MDM has proven its metal in this area and has the customers to back that up. In fact, I will be hosting a webcast on Tuesday, April 10th at 10 am PT with one of our top Cloud customers, the Church Pension Group. They have moved all mainline applications to a hosted model and use Oracle MDM to insure the master data is managed and cleansed before it is propagated to other cloud and internal systems. I invite you join Martin Hossfeld, VP, IT Operations, and Danette Patterson, Enterprise Data Manager as they review business drivers for MDM and hosted applications, how they did it, the benefits achieved, and lessons learned. You can register for this free webcast here.  Hope to see you there.

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• SQL SERVER – Planned and Unplanned Availablity Group Failovers – Notes from the Field #031

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Note from Pinal]: This is a new episode of Notes from the Fields series. AlwaysOn is a very complex subject and not everyone knows many things about this. The matter of the fact is there is very little information available on this subject online and not everyone knows everything about this. This is why when a very common question related to AlwaysOn comes, people get confused. In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert John Sterrett (Group Principal at Linchpin People) explains a very common issue DBAs and Developer faces in their career and is related to Planned and Unplanned Availablity Group Failovers. Linchpin People are database coaches and wellness experts for a data driven world. Read the experience of John in his own words. Whenever a disaster occurs it will be a stressful scenario regardless of how small or big the disaster is. This gets multiplied when it is your first time working with newer technology or the first time you are going through a disaster without a proper run book. Today, were going to help you establish a run book for creating a planned failover with availability groups. To make today’s session simple were going to have two instances of SQL Server 2012 included in an availability group and walk through the steps of doing an unplanned failover.  We will focus on using the user interface and T-SQL to complete the failovers. We are going to use a two replica Availability Group where each replica is in another location. Therefore, we will be covering Asynchronous (non automatic failover) the following is a breakdown of our availability group utilized today. Seeing the following screen might be scary the first time you come across an unplanned failover.  It looks like our test database used in this Availability Group is not functional and it currently isn’t. The database status is not synchronizing which makes sense because the primary replica went down so it couldn’t synchronize. With that said, we can still failover and make it functional while we troubleshoot why we lost our primary replica. To start we are going to right click on the availability group that needs to be restarted and select failover. This will bring up the following wizard, which will walk you through several steps needed to complete the failover using the graphical user interface provided with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). You are going to see warning messages simply because we are in Asynchronous commit mode and can not guarantee ‘no data loss’ when we do failover. Just incase you missed it; you get another screen warning you about potential data loss because we are in Asynchronous mode. Next we get to connect to the specific replica we want to become the primary replica after the failover occurs. In our case, we only have two replicas so this is trivial. In order to failover, it’s required to connect to the replica that will become primary.  The following screen shows that the connection has been made successfully. Next, you will see the final summary screen. Once again, this reminds you that the failover action will cause data loss as were using Asynchronous commit mode due to the distance between instances used for disaster recovery. Finally, once the failover is completed you will see the following screen. If you followed along this long you might be wondering what T-SQL scripts are generated for clicking through all the sections of the wizard. If you have used Database Mirroring in the past you might be surprised.  It’s not too different, which makes sense because the data is being replicated via SQL Server endpoints just like the good old database mirroring. Now were going to take a look at how to do a failover with just T-SQL. First, were going to need to open a new query window and run our query in SQLCMD mode. Just incase you haven’t used SQLCMD mode before we will show you how to enable it below. Now you can run the following statement. Notice, we connect to the replica we want to become primary after failover and specify to force failover to allow data loss. We can use the following script to failback over when our primary instance comes back online. -- YOU MUST EXECUTE THE FOLLOWING SCRIPT IN SQLCMD MODE. :Connect SQL2012PROD1 ALTER AVAILABILITY GROUP [AGSQL2] FORCE_FAILOVER_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS; GO Are your servers running at optimal speed or are you facing any SQL Server Performance Problems? If you want to get started with the help of experts read more over here: Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• WCF/ADO.NET Data Services - Could not load type 'System.Data.Services.Providers.IDataServiceUpdatePr

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). When you try accessing ListData.svc, do you get the following error? Could not load type 'System.Data.Services.Providers.IDataServiceUpdateProvider' from assembly 'System.Data.Services, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'. Well, if you followed the instructions in Chapter 1 of my book to build your VM, you wouldn’t run into the above issue. But if you do, you need to install  -   For Windows Vista and Windows 2008 - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4B710B89-8576-46CF-A4BF-331A9306D555&displaylang=en For Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=79d7f6f8-d6e9-4b8c-8640-17f89452148e&displaylang=en Remember to: a) Install the x64 version, and b) Do an IISReset before trying again. Comment on the article ....

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• APress Deal of the Day 13/August/2014 - Pro ASP.NET MVC 4

  - by TATWORTH

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2014/08/13/apress-deal-of-the-day-13august2014---pro-asp.net-mvc.aspxToday’s $10 Deal of the Day from APress at http://www.apress.com/9781430242369 is Pro ASP.NET MVC 4. Adam Freeman is an excellent author and I recommend this book to all my readers. “The ASP.NET MVC 4 Framework is the latest evolution of Microsoft’s ASP.NET web platform. It provides a high-productivity programming model that promotes cleaner code architecture, test-driven development, and powerful extensibility, combined with all the benefits of ASP.NET.”

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• OS Analytics - Deep Dive Into Your OS

  - by Eran_Steiner

  Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides a feature called "OS Analytics". This feature allows you to get a better understanding of how the Operating System is being utilized. You can research the historical usage as well as real time data. This post will show how you can benefit from OS Analytics and how it works behind the scenes. We will have a call to discuss this blog - please join us!Date: Thursday, November 1, 2012Time: 11:00 am, Eastern Daylight Time (New York, GMT-04:00)1. Go to https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/j.php?ED=209833067&UID=1512092402&PW=NY2JhMmFjMmFh&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D2. If requested, enter your name and email address.3. If a password is required, enter the meeting password: oracle1234. Click "Join". To join the teleconference:Call-in toll-free number:       1-866-682-4770  (US/Canada)      Other countries:                https://oracle.intercallonline.com/portlets/scheduling/viewNumbers/viewNumber.do?ownerNumber=5931260&audioType=RP&viewGa=true&ga=ONConference Code:       7629343#Security code:            7777# Here is quick summary of what you can do with OS Analytics in Ops Center: View historical charts and real time value of CPU, memory, network and disk utilization Find the top CPU and Memory processes in real time or at a certain historical day Determine proper monitoring thresholds based on historical data View Solaris services status details Drill down into a process details View the busiest zones if applicable Where to start To start with OS Analytics, choose the OS asset in the tree and click the Analytics tab. You can see the CPU utilization, Memory utilization and Network utilization, along with the current real time top 5 processes in each category (click the image to see a larger version):  In the above screen, you can click each of the top 5 processes to see a more detailed view of that process. Here is an example of one of the processes: One of the cool things is that you can see the process tree for this process along with some port binding and open file descriptors. On Solaris machines with zones, you get an extra level of tabs, allowing you to get more information on the different zones: This is a good way to see the busiest zones. For example, one zone may not take a lot of CPU but it can consume a lot of memory, or perhaps network bandwidth. To see the detailed Analytics for each of the zones, simply click each of the zones in the tree and go to its Analytics tab. Next, click the "Processes" tab to see real time information of all the processes on the machine: An interesting column is the "Target" column. If you configured Ops Center to work with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, then the two products will talk to each other and Ops Center will display the correlated target from Cloud Control in this table. If you are only using Ops Center - this column will remain empty. Next, if you view a Solaris machine, you will have a "Services" tab: By default, all services will be displayed, but you can choose to display only certain states, for example, those in maintenance or the degraded ones. You can highlight a service and choose to view the details, where you can see the Dependencies, Dependents and also the location of the service log file (not shown in the picture as you need to scroll down to see the log file). The "Threshold" tab is particularly helpful - you can view historical trends of different monitored values and based on the graph - determine what the monitoring values should be: You can ask Ops Center to suggest monitoring levels based on the historical values or you can set your own. The different colors in the graph represent the current set levels: Red for critical, Yellow for warning and Blue for Information, allowing you to quickly see how they're positioned against real data. It's important to note that when looking at longer periods, Ops Center smooths out the data and uses averages. So when looking at values such as CPU Usage, try shorter time frames which are more detailed, such as one hour or one day. Applying new monitoring values When first applying new values to monitored attributes - a popup will come up asking if it's OK to get you out of the current Monitoring Policy. This is OK if you want to either have custom monitoring for a specific machine, or if you want to use this current machine as a "Gold image" and extract a Monitoring Policy from it. You can later apply the new Monitoring Policy to other machines and also set it as a default Monitoring Profile. Once you're done with applying the different monitoring values, you can review and change them in the "Monitoring" tab. You can also click the "Extract a Monitoring Policy" in the actions pane on the right to save all the new values to a new Monitoring Policy, which can then be found under "Plan Management" -> "Monitoring Policies". Visiting the past Under the "History" tab you can "go back in time". This is very helpful when you know that a machine was busy a few hours ago (perhaps in the middle of the night?), but you were not around to take a look at it in real time. Here's a view into yesterday's data on one of the machines: You can see an interesting CPU spike happening at around 3:30 am along with some memory use. In the bottom table you can see the top 5 CPU and Memory consumers at the requested time. Very quickly you can see that this spike is related to the Solaris 11 IPS repository synchronization process using the "pkgrecv" command. The "time machine" doesn't stop here - you can also view historical data to determine which of the zones was the busiest at a given time: Under the hood The data collected is stored on each of the agents under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/historical/ An "os.zip" file exists for the main OS. Inside you will find many small text files, named after the Epoch time stamp in which they were taken If you have any zones, there will be a file called "guests.zip" containing the same small files for all the zones, as well as a folder with the name of the zone along with "os.zip" in it If this is the Enterprise Controller or the Proxy Controller, you will have folders called "proxy" and "sat" in which you will find the "os.zip" for that controller The actual script collecting the data can be viewed for debugging purposes as well: On Linux, the location is: /opt/sun/xvmoc/private/os_analytics/collect On Solaris, the location is /opt/SUNWxvmoc/private/os_analytics/collect If you would like to redirect all the standard error into a file for debugging, touch the following file and the output will go into it: # touch /tmp/.collect.stderr   The temporary data is collected under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/.collectdb until it is zipped. If you would like to review the properties for the Analytics, you can view those per each agent in /opt/sun/n1gc/lib/XVM.properties. Find the section "Analytics configurable properties for OS and VSC" to view the Analytics specific values. I hope you find this helpful! Please post questions in the comments below. Eran Steiner

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• Going into Web Development without a C.S. Degree - Suggestions

  - by Klaint Cokeman

  I plan on seeking a career in web development and I'm about two semesters away from graduating with a CIS degree. Although I'm very satisfied with my choice of degree, I'm concerned that I may be lacking knowledge in a few areas because of not majoring in computer science. The programming side of things is no problem for me, I'm just wondering to what extent data structures/theory/etc. might benefit me to learn over spending more time with hands-on programming... and also what aspects of C.S. would be most appropriate to look into you would think would be most applicable to web development. In short, I'd like to expand my horizons a little bit. I'd very much appreciate and advice/suggestions/book or tutorial recommendations, etc. Thanks.

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• when to use a scaled/enterprise agile software development framework and when to let agile processes 'emerge'?

  - by SHC

  There are quite a few enterprise agile software development frameworks available: Scott Ambler: Disciplined Agile Delivery Dean Leffingwell: Scaled Agile Framework Alan Shalloway: Enterprise Agile Book Craig Larman: Scaling Lean and Agile Barry Boehm: Balancing Agility and Discipline Brian Wernham: Agile Project Management in Government - DSDM I've also spoken with people that state that your enterprise agile processes should just 'emerge' and that you shouldn't need or use a framework because they constrain you. Question 1: When should one choose an enterprise agile software development framework, and when should one just let their agile processes 'emerge'. Question 2: If choosing an enterprise agile software development framework, how does one select the appropriate framework to use for their organisation? Please provide evidence of your experience or research when answering questions rather than just presenting opinions.

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• BASIC on Ubuntu

  - by Tim Lytle

  Was asked by a new Ubuntu user - who also wants to learn about programming - what he could use to run BASIC code. He was working through a BASIC book before trying out Ubuntu, and he'd like to continue without having to switch back to Windows. It looks like there are a few BASIC packages in the standard repositories, as well as projects like Mono which may include some kind of BASIC support. What would be a good recommendation from the standard repositories - or from a deb package - for someone learning the basics of BASIC and new to Ubuntu?

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• LightFish, Adam Bien's lightweight telemetry application

  - by alexismp

  Adam Bien (Java Champion, JavaEE expert, book author, etc...), has been a GlassFish enthusiast for a while and he proves it again with his new open source project - LightFish, a lightweight monitoring and visualization application for GlassFish. Adam has a short intro and screencast about this standalone WAR application. The tool uses the new JavaEE 6 self-described JDBC connection and the GlassFish-bundled Derby database to provide drag-and-drop install. At runtime, once monitoring is enabled, calls to the RESTful admin API for GlassFish are emitted from a JavaFX dashboard plotting in real-time telemetry data on charts and graphs, including data for "Paranormal Activity". Check it out!

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• F# for the C# Programmer

  - by mbcrump

  Are you a C# Programmer and can’t make it past a day without seeing or hearing someone mention F#?  Today, I’m going to walk you through your first F# application and give you a brief introduction to the language. Sit back this will only take about 20 minutes. Introduction Microsoft's F# programming language is a functional language for the .NET framework that was originally developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge by Don Syme. In October 2007, the senior vice president of the developer division at Microsoft announced that F# was being officially productized to become a fully supported .NET language and professional developers were hired to create a team of around ten people to build the product version. In September 2008, Microsoft released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP), an official beta release, of the F# distribution . In December 2008, Microsoft announced that the success of this CTP had encouraged them to escalate F# and it is now will now be shipped as one of the core languages in Visual Studio 2010 , alongside C++, C# 4.0 and VB. The F# programming language incorporates many state-of-the-art features from programming language research and ossifies them in an industrial strength implementation that promises to revolutionize interactive, parallel and concurrent programming. Advantages of F# F# is the world's first language to combine all of the following features: Type inference: types are inferred by the compiler and generic definitions are created automatically. Algebraic data types: a succinct way to represent trees. Pattern matching: a comprehensible and efficient way to dissect data structures. Active patterns: pattern matching over foreign data structures. Interactive sessions: as easy to use as Python and Mathematica. High performance JIT compilation to native code: as fast as C#. Rich data structures: lists and arrays built into the language with syntactic support. Functional programming: first-class functions and tail calls. Expressive static type system: finds bugs during compilation and provides machine-verified documentation. Sequence expressions: interrogate huge data sets efficiently. Asynchronous workflows: syntactic support for monadic style concurrent programming with cancellations. Industrial-strength IDE support: multithreaded debugging, and graphical throwback of inferred types and documentation. Commerce friendly design and a viable commercial market. Lets try a short program in C# then F# to understand the differences. Using C#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: Sample Program. using System;   namespace ConsoleApplication9 {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {             var a = 2;             Console.WriteLine(a);             Console.ReadLine();         }     } } A breeze right? 14 Lines of code. We could have condensed it a bit by removing the “using” statment and tossing the namespace. But this is the typical C# program. Using F#: Create a variable and output the value to the console window: To start, open Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2008. Note: If using VS2008, then please download the SDK first before getting started. If you are using VS2010 then you are already setup and ready to go. So, click File-> New Project –> Other Languages –> Visual F# –> Windows –> F# Application. You will get the screen below. Go ahead and enter a name and click OK. Now, you will notice that the Solution Explorer contains the following: Double click the Program.fs and enter the following information. Hit F5 and it should run successfully. Sample Program. open System let a = 2        Console.WriteLine a As Shown below: Hmm, what? F# did the same thing in 3 lines of code. Show me the interactive evaluation that I keep hearing about. The F# development environment for Visual Studio 2010 provides two different modes of execution for F# code: Batch compilation to a .NET executable or DLL. (This was accomplished above). Interactive evaluation. (Demo is below) The interactive session provides a > prompt, requires a double semicolon ;; identifier at the end of a code snippet to force evaluation, and returns the names (if any) and types of resulting definitions and values. To access the F# prompt, in VS2010 Goto View –> Other Window then F# Interactive. Once you have the interactive window type in the following expression: 2+3;; as shown in the screenshot below: I hope this guide helps you get started with the language, please check out the following books for further information. F# Books for further reading   Foundations of F# Author: Robert Pickering An introduction to functional programming with F#. Including many samples, this book walks through the features of the F# language and libraries, and covers many of the .NET Framework features which can be leveraged with F#.       Functional Programming for the Real World: With Examples in F# and C# Authors: Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet An introduction to functional programming for existing C# developers written by Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet. This book explains the core principles using both C# and F#, shows how to use functional ideas when designing .NET applications and presents practical examples such as design of domain specific language, development of multi-core applications and programming of reactive applications.

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• Building KPIs to monitor your business Its not really about the Technology

  When I have discussions with people about Business Intelligence, one of the questions the inevitably come up is about building KPIs and how to accomplish that. From a technical level the concept of a KPI is very simple, almost too simple in that it is like the tip of an iceberg floating above the water. The key to that iceberg is not really the tip, but the mass of the iceberg that is hidden beneath the surface upon which the tip sits. The analogy of the iceberg is not meant to indicate that the foundation of the KPI is overly difficult or complex. The disparity in size in meant to indicate that the larger thing that needs to be defined is not the technical tip, but the underlying business definition of what the KPI means. From a technical perspective the KPI consists of primarily the following items: Actual Value This is the actual value data point that is being measured. An example would be something like the amount of sales. Target Value This is the target goal for the KPI. This is a number that can be measured against Actual Value. An example would be $10,000 in monthly sales. Target Indicator Range This is the definition of ranges that define what type of indicator the user will see comparing the Actual Value to the Target Value. Most often this is defined by stoplight, but can be any indicator that is going to show a status in a quick fashion to the user. Typically this would be something like: Red Light = Actual Value more than 5% below target; Yellow Light = Within 5% of target either direction; Green Light = More than 5% higher than Target Value Status\Trend Indicator This is an optional attribute of a KPI that is typically used to show some kind of trend. The vast majority of these indicators are used to show some type of progress against a previous period. As an example, the status indicator might be used to show how the monthly sales compare to last month. With this type of indicator there needs to be not only a definition of what the ranges are for your status indictor, but then also what value the number needs to be compared against. So now we have an idea of what data points a KPI consists of from a technical perspective lets talk a bit about tools. As you can see technically there is not a whole lot to them and the choice of technology is not as important as the definition of the KPIs, which we will get to in a minute. There are many different types of tools in the Microsoft BI stack that you can use to expose your KPI to the business. These include Performance Point, SharePoint, Excel, and SQL Reporting Services. There are pluses and minuses to each technology and the right technology is based a lot on your goals and how you want to deliver the information to the users. Additionally, there are other non-Microsoft tools that can be used to expose KPI indicators to your business users. Regardless of the technology used as your front end, the heavy lifting of KPI is in the business definition of the values and benchmarks for that KPI. The discussion about KPIs is very dependent on the history of an organization and how much they are exposed to the attributes of a KPI. Often times when discussing KPIs with a business contact who has not been exposed to KPIs the discussion tends to also be a session educating the business user about what a KPI is and what goes into the definition of a KPI. The majority of times the business user has an idea of what their actual values are and they have been tracking those numbers for some time, generally in Excel and all manually. So they will know the amount of sales last month along with sales two years ago in the same month. Where the conversation tends to get stuck is when you start discussing what the target value should be. The actual value is answering the What and How much questions. When you are talking about the Target values you are asking the question Is this number good or bad. Typically, the user will know whether or not the value is good or bad, but most of the time they are not able to quantify what is good or bad. Their response is usually something like I just know. Because they have been watching the sales quantity for years now, they can tell you that a 5% decrease in sales this month might actually be a good thing, maybe because the salespeople are all waiting until next month when the new versions come out. It can sometimes be very hard to break the business people of this habit. One of the fears generally is that the status indicator is not subjective. Thus, in the scenario above, the business user is going to be fearful that their boss, just looking at a negative red indicator, is going to haul them out to the woodshed for a bad month. But, on the flip side, if all you are displaying is the amount of sales, only a person with knowledge of last month sales and the target amount for this month would have any idea if $10,000 in sales is good or not. Here is where a key point about KPIs needs to be communicated to both the business user and any user who might be viewing the results of that KPI. The KPI is just one tool that is used to report on business performance. The KPI is meant as a quick indicator of one business statistic. It is not meant to tell the entire story. It does not answer the question Why. Its primary purpose is to objectively and quickly expose an area of the business that might warrant more review. There is always going to be the need to do further analysis on any potential negative or neutral KPI. So, hopefully, once you have convinced your business user to come up with some target numbers and ranges for status indicators, you then need to take the next step and help them answer the Why question. The main question here to ask is, Okay, you see the indicator and you need to discover why the number is what is, where do you go?. The answer is usually a combination of sources. A sales manager might have some of the following items at their disposal (Marketing report showing a decrease in the promotional discounts for the month, Pricing Report showing the reduction of prices of older models, an Inventory Report showing the discontinuation of a particular product line, or a memo showing the ending of a large affiliate partnership. The answers to the question Why are never as simple as a single indicator value. Bring able to quickly get to this information is all about designing how a user accesses the KPIs and then also how easily they can get to the additional information they need. This is where a Dashboard mentality can come in handy. For example, the business user can have a dashboard that shows their KPIs, but also has links to some of the common reports that they run regarding Sales Data. The users boss may have the same KPIs on their dashboard, but instead of links to individual reports they are going to have a link to a status report that was created by the user that pulls together all the data about the KPI in a summary format the users boss can review. So some of the key things to think about when building or evaluating KPIs for your organization: Technology should not be the driving factor KPIs are of little value without some indicator for whether a value is good, bad or neutral. KPIs only give an answer to the Is this number good\bad? question Make sure the ability to drill into the Why of a KPI is close at hand and relevant to the user who is viewing the KPI. The KPI is a key business tool when defined properly to help monitor business performance across the enterprise in an objective and consistent manner. At times it might feel like the process of defining the business aspects of a KPI can sometimes be arduous, the payoff in the end can far outweigh the costs. Some of the benefits of going through this process are a better understanding of the key metrics for an organization and the measure of those metrics and a consistent snapshot of business performance that can be utilized across the organization. And I think that these are benefits to any organization regardless of the technology or the implementation.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Pricing options at O’Reilly

  - by Nick Harrison

  I was browsing through the new options for books on O'Reilly and Associates and noticed something kind of cool    If you buy the print edition of a book, you can get the ebook for just a couple dollars more.  This is pure genius marketing. I may question whether or not I want the ebook at 20 or the print copy at 25, but to get them both for 28, well that's a no brainer.  This is actually a strategy examined at great depth in Predictably Rational In all honesty, $20 is probably over priced for the ebook, but $3 if you are already buying the print edition is actually a pretty good deal  .

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• What I&rsquo;m Up To: November 2012

  - by Brian T. Jackett

  This is a short personal post to let any regular readers know what I’m up to (and why I’ll be in reduced blogging mode for a bit). Writing 2 chapters for a SharePoint 2013 book (more to announce closer to publish date) Doing research, proof of concepts, and testing for above said writing Developing a SharePoint PowerShell diagnostic script to clean up issues found by the Health Analyzer Prepping for teaching SharePoint 2013 content to customers    There are some other community and personal commitments taking up my time (in addition to normal work responsibilities).  Since the number of hours in a day is limited to 24 hours I’m making a late addition to my goals for 2012 for the year of learning and adopting more personal productivity practices.  Before the end of this year I’ll be posting a couple that I’ve already adopted that are working well for me.  Scott Hanselman posted a great video recently that sparked me down this path.  I highly recommend you watch.   “It’s not what you read it’s what you ignore” video – Scott Hanselman http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsNotWhatYouReadItsWhatYouIgnoreVideoOfScottHanselmansPersonalProductivityTips.aspx         -Frog Out

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• It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary but not that Far to Yak about Apps

  - by linda.fishman.hoyle

  I wanted to let everyone know that my blog URL will be moving to http://blogs.oracle.com/lindafishman/. I will focus my future writings to be about the upgrade and adoption strategies of Oracle E-Business Suite customers. To give you a little preview, here is a link to a book of 60 customers who are live on E-Business Suite Release 12 and 12.1. We have thousands of customers live on Release 12.x and are feverishly trying to write as many stories as we can so those of you who are thinking about upgrading, putting a business case together to move from another ERP application to E-Business Suite or for small and midsize companies who want a better understanding of the benefits E-Business Suite provides organizations of your size, this will be the place to go. See you at the new site! Linda

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• How can I store spell & items using a std::vector implementation?

  - by Vladimir Marenus

  I'm following along with a book from GameInstitute right now, and it's asking me to: Allow the player to buy and carry healing potions and potions of fireball. You can add an Item array (after you define the item class) to the Player class for storing them, or use a std::vector to store them. I think I would like to use the std::vector implementation, because that seems to confuse me less than making an item class, but I am unsure how to do so. I've heard from many people that vectors are great ways to store dynamic values (such as items, weapons, etc), but I've not seen it used.

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• Friday Fun: Daisy in Wonderland

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you suffering the effects of another grinding week at work? Then it is time for you to relax for a little bit and have some fun! In this week’s game you get to engage in inter-dimensional travel as you help Daisy try to return home Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Create Your Own Custom ASCII Art from Any Image How To Process Camera Raw Without Paying for Adobe Photoshop How Do You Block Annoying Text Message (SMS) Spam? How to Use and Master the Notoriously Difficult Pen Tool in Photoshop HTG Explains: What Are the Differences Between All Those Audio Formats? How To Use Layer Masks and Vector Masks to Remove Complex Backgrounds in Photoshop Bring Summer Back to Your Desktop with the LandscapeTheme for Chrome and Iron The Prospector – Home Dash Extension Creates a Whole New Browsing Experience in Firefox KinEmote Links Kinect to Windows Why Nobody Reads Web Site Privacy Policies [Infographic] Asian Temple in the Snow Wallpaper 10 Weird Gaming Records from the Guinness Book

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• How do I prove or disprove "god" objects are wrong?

  - by honestduane

  Problem Summary: Long story short, I inherited a code base and an development team I am not allowed to replace and the use of God Objects is a big issue. Going forward, I want to have us re-factor things but I am getting push-back from the teams who want to do everything with God Objects "because its easier" and this means I would not be allowed to re-factor. I pushed back citing my years of dev experience, that I'm the new boss who was hired to know these things, etc, and so did the third party offshore companies account sales rep, and this is now at the executive level and my meeting is tomorrow and I want to go in with a lot of technical ammo to advocate best practices because I feel it will be cheaper in the long run (And I personally feel that is what the third party is worried about) for the company. My issue is from a technical level, I know its good long term but I'm having trouble with the ultra short term and 6 months term, and while its something I "know" I cant prove it with references and cited resources outside of one person (Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob), as that is what I am being asked to do as I have been told having data from one person and only one person (Robert C Martin) is not good enough of an argument. Question: What are some resources I can cite directly (Title, year published, page number, quote) by well known experts in the field that explicitly say this use of "God" Objects/Classes/Systems is bad (or good, since we are looking for the most technically valid solution)? Research I have already done: I have a number of books here and I have searched their indexes for the use of the words "god object" and "god class". I found that oddly its almost never used and the copy of the GoF book I have for example, never uses it (At least according to the index in front of me) but I have found it in 2 books per the below, but I want more I can use. I checked the Wikipedia page for "God Object" and its currently a stub with little reference links so although I personally agree with that it says, It doesn't have much I can use in an environment where personal experience is not considered valid. The book cited is also considered too old to be valid by the people I am debating these technical points with as the argument they are making is that "it was once thought to be bad but nobody could prove it, and now modern software says "god" objects are good to use". I personally believe that this statement is incorrect, but I want to prove the truth, whatever it is. In Robert C Martin's "Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#" (ISBN: 0-13-185725-8, hardcover) where on page 266 it states "Everybody knows that god classes are a bad idea. We don't want to concentrate all the intelligence of a system into a single object or a single function. One of the goals of OOD is the partitioning and distribution of behavior into many classes and many function." -- And then goes on to say sometimes its better to use God Classes anyway sometimes (Citing micro-controllers as an example). In Robert C Martin's "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" page 136 (And only this page) talks about the "God class" and calls it out as a prime example of a violation of the "classes should be small" rule he uses to promote the Single Responsibility Principle" starting on on page 138. The problem I have is all my references and citations come from the same person (Robert C. Martin), and am from the same single person/source. I am being told that because he is just one guy, my desire to not use "God Classes" is invalid and not accepted as a standard best practice in the software industry. Is this true? Am I doing things wrong from a technical perspective by trying to keep to the teaching of Uncle Bob? God Objects and Object Oriented Programming and Design: The more I think of this the more I think this is more something you learn when you study OOP and its never explicitly called out; Its implicit to good design is my thinking (Feel free to correct me, please, as I want to learn), The problem is I "know" this, but but not everybody does, so in this case its not considered a valid argument because I am effectively calling it out as universal truth when in fact most people are statistically ignorant of it since statistically most people are not programmers. Conclusion: I am at a loss on what to search for to get the best additional results to cite, since they are making a technical claim and I want to know the truth and be able to prove it with citations like a real engineer/scientist, even if I am biased against god objects due to my personal experience with code that used them. Any assistance or citations would be deeply appreciated.

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• Speaking at SQLRelay. Will you be there?

  - by jamiet

  SQL Relay (#sqlrelay) is fast approaching and I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you a little about it.SQL Relay is a 5-day tour around the UK that is taking in five Server Server user groups, each one comprising a full day of SQL Server related learnings. The dates and venues are:21st May, Edinburgh22nd May, Manchester23rd May, Birmingham24th May, Bristol30th May, LondonClick on the appropriate link to see the full agenda and to book your spot.SQL Relay features some of this country's most prominent SQL Server speakers including Chris Webb, Tony Rogerson, Andrew Fryer, Martin Bell, Allan Mitchell, Steve Shaw, Gordon Meyer, Satya Jayanty, Chris Testa O'Neill, Duncan Sutcliffe, Rob Carrol, me and SQL Server UK Product Manager Morris Novello so I really encourage you to go - you have my word it'll be an informative and, more importantly, enjoyable day out from your regular 9-to-5.I am presenting my session "A Lap Around the SSIS Catalog" at Edinburgh and Manchester so if you're going, I hope to see you there.@Jamiet

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• Is context inheritance, as shown by Head First Design Patterns' Duck example, irrelevant to strategy pattern?

  - by Korey Hinton

  In Head First Design Patterns it teaches the strategy pattern by using a Duck example where different subclasses of Duck can be assigned a particular behavior at runtime. From my understanding the purpose of the strategy pattern is to change an object's behavior at runtime. Emphasis on "an" meaning one. Could I further simplify this example by just having a Duck class (no derived classes)? Then when implementing one duck object it can be assigned different behaviors based on certain circumstances that aren't dependent on its own object type. For example: FlyBehavior changes based on the weather or QuackBehavior changes based on the time of day or how hungry a duck is. Would my example above constitute the strategy pattern as well? Is context inheritance (Duck) irrelevant to the strategy pattern or is that the reason for the strategy pattern? Here is the UML diagram from the Head First book:

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• SQL SERVER – SQL in Sixty Seconds – 5 Videos from Joes 2 Pros Series – SQL Exam Prep Series 70-433

  - by pinaldave

  Joes 2 Pros SQL Server Learning series is indeed fun. Joes 2 Pros series is written for beginners and who wants to build expertise for SQL Server programming and development from fundamental. In the beginning of the series author Rick Morelan is not shy to explain the simplest concept of how to open SQL Server Management Studio. Honestly the book starts with that much basic but as it progresses further Rick discussing about various advanced concepts from query tuning to Core Architecture. This five part series is written with keeping SQL Server Exam 70-433. Instead of just focusing on what will be there in exam, this series is focusing on learning the important concepts thoroughly. This book no way take short cut to explain any concepts and at times, will go beyond the topic at length. The best part is that all the books has many companion videos explaining the concepts and videos. Every Wednesday I like to post a video which explains something in quick few seconds. Today we will go over five videos which I posted in my earlier posts related to Joes 2 Pros series. Introduction to XML Data Type Methods – SQL in Sixty Seconds #015 The XML data type was first introduced with SQL Server 2005. This data type continues with SQL Server 2008 where expanded XML features are available, most notably is the power of the XQuery language to analyze and query the values contained in your XML instance. There are five XML data type methods available in SQL Server 2008: query() – Used to extract XML fragments from an XML data type. value() – Used to extract a single value from an XML document. exist() – Used to determine if a specified node exists. Returns 1 if yes and 0 if no. modify() – Updates XML data in an XML data type. node() – Shreds XML data into multiple rows (not covered in this blog post). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Error Actions – SQL in Sixty Seconds #014 Most people believe that when SQL Server encounters an error severity level 11 or higher the remaining SQL statements will not get executed. In addition, people also believe that if any error severity level of 11 or higher is hit inside an explicit transaction, then the whole statement will fail as a unit. While both of these beliefs are true 99% of the time, they are not true in all cases. It is these outlying cases that frequently cause unexpected results in your SQL code. To understand how to achieve consistent results you need to know the four ways SQL Error Actions can react to error severity levels 11-16: Statement Termination – The statement with the procedure fails but the code keeps on running to the next statement. Transactions are not affected. Scope Abortion – The current procedure, function or batch is aborted and the next calling scope keeps running. That is, if Stored Procedure A calls B and C, and B fails, then nothing in B runs but A continues to call C. @@Error is set but the procedure does not have a return value. Batch Termination – The entire client call is terminated. XACT_ABORT – (ON = The entire client call is terminated.) or (OFF = SQL Server will choose how to handle all errors.) [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Basics of a Query Hint – SQL in Sixty Seconds #013 Query hints specify that the indicated hints should be used throughout the query. Query hints affect all operators in the statement and are implemented using the OPTION clause. Cautionary Note: Because the SQL Server Query Optimizer typically selects the best execution plan for a query, it is highly recommended that hints be used as a last resort for experienced developers and database administrators to achieve the desired results. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to Hierarchical Query – SQL in Sixty Seconds #012 A CTE can be thought of as a temporary result set and are similar to a derived table in that it is not stored as an object and lasts only for the duration of the query. A CTE is generally considered to be more readable than a derived table and does not require the extra effort of declaring a Temp Table while providing the same benefits to the user. However; a CTE is more powerful than a derived table as it can also be self-referencing, or even referenced multiple times in the same query. A recursive CTE requires four elements in order to work properly: Anchor query (runs once and the results ‘seed’ the Recursive query) Recursive query (runs multiple times and is the criteria for the remaining results) UNION ALL statement to bind the Anchor and Recursive queries together. INNER JOIN statement to bind the Recursive query to the results of the CTE. [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Introduction to SQL Server Security – SQL in Sixty Seconds #011 Let’s get some basic definitions down first. Take the workplace example where “Tom” needs “Read” access to the “Financial Folder”. What are the Securable, Principal, and Permissions from that last sentence? A Securable is a resource that someone might want to access (like the Financial Folder). A Principal is anything that might want to gain access to the securable (like Tom). A Permission is the level of access a principal has to a securable (like Read). [Detailed Blog Post] | [Quiz with Answer] Please leave a comment explain which one was your favorite video as that will help me understand what works and what needs improvement. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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