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• Should use EXT4 or XFS to be able to 'sync'/backup to S3?

  - by Rafa

  It's my first message here, so bear with me... (I have already checked quite a few of the "Related Questions" suggested by the editor) Here's the setup, a brand new dedicated server (8GB RAM, some 140+ GB disk, Raid 1 via HW controller, 15000 RPM) it's a production web server (with MySQL in it, too, not just serving web requests); not a personal desktop computer or similar. Ubuntu Server 64bit 10.04 LTS We have an Amazon EC2+EBS setup with the EBS volume formatted as XFS for easily taking snapshots to S3, via AWS' console. We are now migrating to the dedicated server and I want to be able to backup our data to Amazon's S3. The main reason being the possibility of using the latest snapshot from an EC2 instance in case of hardware failure on the dedicated server. There are two approaches I am thinking of: do a "simple" file-based backup with rsync, dumping the database' and other files, and uploading to amazon via S3 API commands, or to an EC2 instance, or something. do a file-system "freeze" (using XFS) with the usual ebs/ec2 snapshot tool to take part of the file system, take a snapshot, and upload it to Amazon. Here's my question (or series of questions): Can I safely use XFS for the whole system as the main and only format on the dedicated server? If not, is it safe to use EXT4? Or should I use something else? would then be possible to make snapshots of the system to upload to Amazon? Is it possible/feasible/practical to do what I want to do, anyway? any recommendations? When searching around for S3/EBS/XFS, anything relevant to my problem is usually focused on taking snapshots of a XFS system that is already an EBS volume. My intention is to do it in a "real"/metal dedicated server. Update: I just saw this on Wikipedia: XFS does not provide direct support for snapshots, as it expects the snapshot process to be implemented by the volume manager. I had always assumed that I could choose 2 ways of doing snapshots: via LVM or via XFS (without LVM). After reading this, I realize these 2 options are more like it: With XFS: 1) do xfs_freeze; 2) copy the frozen files via, eg, rsync; 3) unfreeze xfs With LVM and XFS: 1) do xfs_freeze; 2) make a binary copy of the frozen fs via lvcreate and related commands; 3) unfreeze xfs; 4) somehow backup the LVM snapshot. Thanks a lot in advance, Let me know if I need to clarify something.

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• Sycronizing/deploying scripts across several systems

  - by otto

  I have a few time consuming tasks that I like to spread across several computers. These tasks require running an identical ruby or python script (or series of scripts that call each other) on each machine. The machines will a separate config file telling the script what portion of the task to complete. I want to figure out the best way to syncronize the scripts on these machines prior to running them. Up until now, I have been making changes to a copy of the script on a network share and then copying a fresh copy to each machine when I want to run it. But this is cumbersome and leaves a chance for error ( e.g missing a file on the copy or not clicking "copy and replace"). Lets assume the systems are standard windows machines that are not dedicated to this task and I don't need to run these scripts all the time (so I don't want a solution that runs 24/7 and always keeps them up to date, I'd prefer something that pushes/pulls on command). My thoughts on various options: Simple adaptation of my current workflow: Keep the originals on the network drive, but write a batch file that copies over the latest version of the scripts so everything is a one-click operation. Requires action on each system, but that's not the end of the world (since each one usually needs their configuration file changed slightly too). Put everything in a Mercurial/Git reposotory and pull a fresh copy onto each node. Going straight to the repo from each machine would guarantee a current version (and would have the fringe benefit of allowing edits to the script to be made from any machine). Cons would be that it requires VCS to be installed on each machine and there might be some pains dealing with authentication since I wouldn't use a public repo. Open up write access on a shared folder and write a script to use rsync (or similar) to push the changes out to all of the machines at once. This gets a current version on every machine (though you would have to change the script if you want to omit a machine or add a new one). Possible issue would be that each computer has to allow write access. Dropbox is a reasonable suggestion (and could work well) but I dont want to use an external service and I'd prefer not to have to have dropbox running 24/7 on systems that would normally not need it. Is there something simple that I am missing? Some tool designed expressly for doing this kind of thing? Otherwise I am leaning toward just tying all of the systems into Mercurial since, while it requires extra software, it is a little more robust than writing a batch file (e.g. if I split part of a script into a separate module, Mercurial will know what to do whereas I would have to add a line to the batch file).

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• What is the probable failure - no BSOD, no event log, monitors sleeping, force reboot required

  - by Tyler

  Every 3 to 15 days, my PC freezes. This typically happens when the computer is idle, I'm coming home from work, back from vacation, etc. It's never happened while using my computer. The monitors are in power save mode The Caps Lock light on the (wireless) keyboard doesn't work Ctrl-alt-del has no effect, mouse (wireless) has no effect The hardware reset button and single press of power putton have no effect Computer does not appear on the network No BSOD, no memory dump Event logs have no errors or indications of problems near the time of crash. Only messages after reboot indicating that there was a reboot without a clean shutdown. Windows is set to never put the computer to sleep (just the display) Here are the vital stats of the build: OS Windows 8 Pro 64-bit CPU Intel i5-2400 Mobo Intel BOXDP67DE Micro ATX GPU MSI N460GTX Cyclone768D5/OC RAM CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (2 x 4GB) CMX8GX3M2A1333C9 PSU SeaSonic X Series X650 Gold System Drive Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SSD Data Drive 2 x Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB in hardware RAID 1 Optical Lite-On DVD burner IHAS424-98 And here is the story of how the problem developed and what I've done to diagnose: January 2011, system built with Windows 7 64-bit, runs great. March 2011, Intel replaced the mobo because of the bad sata controllers. October 2012, upgrade to Windows 8 (problems start shortly after). January 2013, system freezes and causes network to fail for the whole house. Unplug the network cable and other devices and PCs can use the internet. Plug it back in, internet goes away for everyone. Reboot and everything is fine. March 2013, install Intel Gigabit CT PCI-E NIC, disable mobo nic in bios. Network strangeness goes away. Freezes are less frequent. Memtest shows no problems (20 passes). Early June 2013, replace Antec PSU with SeaSonic PSU. Mid June 2013, replace OCZ Vertex 2 SSD with Samsung SSD. Late June 2013, get frustrated and hope the community has some good ideas (I'm running out of budget to replace parts). My next plan of attack is setting "Turn off display" to Never and using a screen saver to see how that reacts on the next freeze. It makes me sad to waste power for up to 15 days though. Has anyone out there seen a problem like this? Any ideas on what kind of malfunction would act this way? Ideas of other diagnostic steps to take?

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• How to unmangle PDF format into a usable text or spreadsheet document?

  - by Chuck

  Upon requesting some daily/hourly sales data from a coworker who is responsible for such requests, I was given a series of PDF files. The point of sale program that is used, for some reason, answers requests for this type of information in the form of PDF files. The issue: The PDF files look to be in a format that should easily be copy and pasted into a spreadsheet. There are three columns that look to be neatly organized across two pages. When copy/pasting the first page, all three columns from the PDF's first page are dumped into a single column consisting of the Date followed by the Hours for the transactions on that day. The end of this Date/Time information is followed by all of the Total Sales values that should be attached a Date and Time of the transaction. (NOTE: There are no duplicated Dates in the Date column, ie, Multiple transactions for a day only have one yyyy/mm/dd listed for the first row but not the following rows.) While it was a huge pain, it was possible to, in about four or five steps, get the single column of data broken out into three columns that matched the PDF. The second page of the PDF file, when attempting to copy/paste into a spreadsheet, creates a single column with the first third of the cells being the Dates from the PDF, the second third of the cells being the Hours of the transactions and the final third of the cells being filled with the Total Sales. After the copy/paste there is no way to figure out which Hours belong to which Dates or Total Sales due to the lack of the duplicated Dates in the Date column as mentioned above. My PDF-fu is next to non-existent. I've just now started to work with PDF editors and some www.convertmyPDFforfree.com websites, so far, with absolutely nothing remotely coming anywhere near usable output. (Both methods have so far done nothing but product blank documents.) Before I go back and pester my co-worker into figuring out a way to create a report in some other format than PDF, is there any method by which to take the data that looks to be formatted correctly in a PDF and copy/paste it into a spreadsheet that will look the same? I appreciate any help that can be made available. The sales data isn't so sensitive that I couldn't part with a bit to let somebody actually see what it is that needs to be dealt with, just let me know. The PDF's are less than 100kb each so sending them shouldn't be a burden to any interested party.

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• iTunes and Hulu Playback Choppy and Slow?

  - by Bart Silverstrim

  Specs: Windows XP, latest updates 1.7 ghz Pentium 4 1 gig ram DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 with 256 meg RAM OpenGL 2.1 The story: Okay, I had an older system laying around that I figured I would try turning into a mini-media system to connect to our TV. I put together a lot of older parts, got it into working order, etc. and hooked it up and voila'...slower, but usable system that displayed to the TV. It could run some things decently. I put in iTunes, it played video okay. Not great, but okay. Played Hulu and since we have a 1Mb download rate, the minimum for their site, there were some choppy moments when watching their shows, but I found that (sadly) changing resolution to 800x600 seemed to help with the issue when running full screen. I downloaded the application called Boxee and installed it. It wouldn't run; apparently the video card in the system supported OpenGL 1.2, and needed at least 1.4. I bought a cheap card, the 5200, with four times the memory in it and support for OpenGL 2.1. Installed, everything seemed fine. iTunes seemed to run fine, the video driver (PNY video card) came with OpenGL 2.1, and Boxee finally ran. I then upgraded to the latest drivers for the video card and ran the DirectX updater from MS. After that, the OpenGL Extension Viewer wouldn't run. It just stayed as an icon in the task bar. Also, any and all videos in iTunes stuttered and went out of sync horribly. Unwatchable. I tried watching Hulu video in Boxee, and it displayed video like it was a series of stills in a very bad powerpoint. Playing straightforward audio-only came through fine, no stutters no hiccups. I tried system restore to roll back updates to pre-directX updates (I thought that seemed to be the time that triggered the weird behavior), no joy. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the video drivers. I installed updated audio drivers (ensoniq audiopci), nothing helped. I finally wiped the drive last night and tried reinstalling everything and restoring my iTunes content via an import from a backup. Fresh install, no updater on the video card or directx. the problem was still there although I haven't tested Hulu, the iTunes player is still stuttering like crazy if I play video, fine if I play audio. I know the processor isn't high in heft, but with one gig of RAM and the fact that it seemed to do okay before I thought that the problem must be software related. Has anyone else run into this sort of issue and have a solution other than "buy a new computer"? What specs seem to work with video at the low end for you? Right now the system is of little use other than keeping my music library and iTunes apps synced with my iPod.

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• Windows 7 reboot and freezing, possible power problems?

  - by mikelbring

  My Gateway LX Series desktop is about 6-8 months old. When I bought it, it had Windows Vista. I then put the RC version of Windows 7 on it. About 3 months after I bought it, it would randomly start to reboot, actually just shut off. I monitored the temperature levels and they seemed normal. So I installed a fresh Windows 7 Ultimate OEM 64bit. It actually got worse and would reboot more frequently. I then contacted Gateway and they said my machine was built for Windows Vista (made me chuckle), and told me to update my BIOS. So I did, and it was fixed for a good couple months. Recently, it started to do it again. Now I noticed early on it was doing it most often, if not every time when I was either watching a flash video or playing a flash game. So I decided to download the drivers again and I also downloaded my motherboard drivers. Seemed to be okay. A week later it started doing it again. And now it's doing it even more frequently. Sometimes I would turn it on, login into Windows and *BAM!* it would shut off. Now I am at the point where I can hardly get it to turn on. It would freeze at the point where it says "Starting Windows", with the Windows logo. Sometimes it would say "Checking disk for consistency" or whatever and freeze there (not shut off, just freeze). I even got the prompt to launch startup repair. But that also freezes when it says starting Windows. It does not really freeze, just never loads up. I am kind of lost as to what's going on. I have a few ideas but nothing I want to pursue (graphics card? hard drive?). Another thing I did try was to boot into a live disk of Ubuntu and try to launch every program I could and get on the internet but I never got it to reboot. So it sounds like to me it's a Windows thing, but I have no idea. I am just stuck and would like to see if any one has any ideas or could lead me in the right direction.

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• Recovering damaged external hard disk by installing internally

  - by nfarshchi

  I had a 1TB Western Digital (My book series) 3.5" USB3. One day, the SATA to USB3 converter board was damaged and has not worked since. I decided to open the cover and use the HDD as an internal HDD. When I attached the HDD to my PC and booted up in Windows, it asked me which type of ????? I want to use "MBR or GBR" (I dont remember the exact question) I chose MBR and Windows gave me a 1TB empty Hard drive. I tried to recover with recover my files and some other recovery programs but no success. Some one told me that you should choosed GBR instead of MBR . How can I do that now? Another guy told me that the SATA to USB3 converter board is coded to save data on HDD and you can not use them internally without losing data, and I should find another SATA to USB3 board (exact same). It is impossible to find because they are not produced any more. Please help me to find a solution to bring back my data. UPDATE I have 1TB WD "Mybook" USB 3. the board that convert sata to usb3 was damaged. so when the HDD was in the box computer did not recognize it. I opened the box and remove HDD to use it internal. after connecting to my PC windows showed me one massage that I had two choice MBR or GPT I choosed MBR one and windows gave me 1TB empty new volume. I tried many recovery software to recover my data but no success. I brought it to one expert recovery company and they told me the converter board (SATA to USB3) make some encryption on data and with out that board you cannot recover any thing. so I bought another empty WD box and put the HDD inside but even after that also there is no file. I tried to recover again in this state but no success. so I have some unanswered question. does this converted boards make any password or encryption? if yes how can I solve it? does using many recovery programs affected my data? any suggestion or solution for bring back my data? I had use recovery programs such as : recover my files , EaseUS data recovery, easy recovery, test disk, Ontrack easy recovery . Note: when I was using test disk it asked me to choose which partition table I want to use. as it was I choose NTFS, does this made any change on data?

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• Internet Pings but Does Not Load

  - by t3techcom18

  From what I've been seeing and been doing my research for the past two days, many people have been having the same issues throughout the years, however, this is the first time I've encountered this issue and many of the specific workarounds or fixes have not worked for me. I've been trying to work through this for 24 hours straight now, but to no avail so many thanks to those that can help. On Monday night, got home from work; surfing the internet for half an hour, everything was fine as always. Just after half an hour, my Internet got very sluggish and then it died completely. I thought it might have been the an update I just put through in terms of Windows Update that said was a critical update for MSE, as the same thing happened a few years ago. I did a System Restore to two different dates that were in the past two weeks, nothing. Uninstalled MSE and disabled Windows Defender and the Windows Firewall: Nothing. Reset IE Options, Reset Winsock, Dumping DNS, many of the other command prompt screens to reset items: Nothing. Reset the modem: Nothing. What DID work, however, was a ping test to Yahoo. The ping test worked, saying all four packets was recieved, yet nothing else popped up. LAN and CenturyLink said everything worked on their end and that everything was connected properly, as well as the speeds working fine. CenturyLink said in their notes that they thought Port 80 was blocked. I went and put in the Firewall to allow Port 80 but it didn't make any difference whatsoever. I remembered I had a spare modem laying around and I switched them up, both modem and the cords - nothing. I then hooked it up to my netbook to see if that would work, as it usually does - connection didn't work there either. Like I said, it's been about 24 hours now and this is increasingly frustrating, as I've tried all solutions (While browsing through 10 search results pages on my phone) suggested and still nothing. Any suggestions and tricks would be greatly appreciated! Here's my specs: Windows 7 32-bit Home Premium Intel Core 2 Duo 3.14 Ghz 4 GB Kingston DDR2 RAM eVGA nForce 750i SLI eVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti FPB ISP: CenturyLink No router Modem: CenturyLink 660 Series Hardwired connection PLEASE NOTE: This is the only computer I have (Like I said, the netbook solution didn't work), so downloading programs and such is not an option til I get to other computers somewhere else, like right now. Unless someone knows of a way of copying/pasting a file in Windows and then transferring said info to an Android smartphone, this is gunna take a while haha. Patience is requested.

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• Add Your Own Domain to Your WordPress.com Blog

  - by Matthew Guay

  Now that you’ve got a nice blog on WordPress.com, why not get your own domain to brand your site?  Here’s how you can easily register a new domain or move your existing domain to your WordPress site. By default, your free WordPress address is yourblog’sname.wordpress.com.  But whether this is a personal or a company blog, it can be nice to have your own domain to really brand your site and make it your own.  Or, if you already have another website and want to use WordPress as a blog for it, you could even add blog.yoursite.com or any other subdomain. Adding a domain to your WordPress.com is a paid upgrade; registering and mapping a new domain to your account costs $14.97 a year, while mapping a domain you already own to your WordPress blog costs $9.97 a year. Getting Started Login to your blog’s dashboard, click the arrow beside Upgrades in the sidebar, and select Domains. Enter the domain or subdomain you want to add to your site in the text box, and click Add domain to blog.   If you entered a new domain you want to register, WordPress will make sure the domain is available and then present you a registration form to register the domain.  Enter your information, and then click Register Domain.   Or, if you enter a domain that’s already registered, you will see the following prompt. If this domain is a domain you own, you can map it to WordPress.com.  Login to your domain registrar account and switch your nameserver to: NS1.WORDPRESS.COM NS2.WORDPRESS.COM NS3.WORDPRESS.COM Your DNS settings page for your domain may be different, depending on your registrar.  Here’s how our domain settings looked. Alternately, if you’re wanting to map a subdomain, such as blog.yoursite.com to your WordPress blog, create the following CNAME record on your domain register.  You may have to contact your domain registrar’s support to do this.  Substitute your subdomain, domain, and blog name when creating the record. subdomain.yourdomain.com. IN CNAME yourblog.wordpress.com. Once your settings are correct, click Try Again in your WordPress dashboard.  The DNS settings may take a while to update, but once WordPress can tell your DNS settings point to it, you will see the following confirmation screen.  Click Map Domain to add this domain to your WordPress blog. Now you’re ready to pay for your domain mapping or registration.  Depending on your purchase, the information and price shown may be different.  Here we’re mapping a domain we already have registered, so it costs $9.97.  Select your method of payment, enter your payment information or signin with your Paypal account, and continue as usual. Once your purchase is finished, you’ll be returned to the Domains page on WordPress.  Try going to your new domain, and make sure it opens your blog.  If it works, then click the bullet beside the new domain, and click Update Primary Domain.  Now, when people visit your WordPress site, they’ll see your new domain in the address bar.  You can still access your blog from your old yourname.wordpress.com address, but it will redirect to you new domain. Conclusion Having a personalized domain is a great way to make your blog more professional, while still taking advantage of the ease of use that WordPress.com offers.  And, if you have your own domain, you can easily move to your site traffic to a different hosting provider in the future if you need to.  The process is slightly complicated, but for $15/year we found this one of the best upgrades you could do to your WordPress.com blog. If you want to see an example of a site created with Wordpress, check out Matthew’s tech site techinch.com. And, if you’re just getting started with WordPress, check out our series on how to Start your WordPress.com blog, Personalize it, and Easily Post Content to it from anywhere. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogHow-To Geek SoftwareHow To Start Your Own Professional Blog with WordPressDisable Logon to Windows Computers When Not Connected to a DomainMake a Backup Copy of your Production Wordpress Blog on Ubuntu 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool Easily Create More Bookmark Toolbars in Firefox Filevo is a Cool File Hosting & Sharing Site Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule

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• SQL SERVER – Signal Wait Time Introduction with Simple Example – Wait Type – Day 2 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  In this post, let’s delve a bit more in depth regarding wait stats. The very first question: when do the wait stats occur? Here is the simple answer. When SQL Server is executing any task, and if for any reason it has to wait for resources to execute the task, this wait is recorded by SQL Server with the reason for the delay. Later on we can analyze these wait stats to understand the reason the task was delayed and maybe we can eliminate the wait for SQL Server. It is not always possible to remove the wait type 100%, but there are few suggestions that can help. Before we continue learning about wait types and wait stats, we need to understand three important milestones of the query life-cycle. Running - a query which is being executed on a CPU is called a running query. This query is responsible for CPU time. Runnable – a query which is ready to execute and waiting for its turn to run is called a runnable query. This query is responsible for Signal Wait time. (In other words, the query is ready to run but CPU is servicing another query). Suspended – a query which is waiting due to any reason (to know the reason, we are learning wait stats) to be converted to runnable is suspended query. This query is responsible for wait time. (In other words, this is the time we are trying to reduce). In simple words, query execution time is a summation of the query Executing CPU Time (Running) + Query Wait Time (Suspended) + Query Signal Wait Time (Runnable). Again, it may be possible a query goes to all these stats multiple times. Let us try to understand the whole thing with a simple analogy of a taxi and a passenger. Two friends, Tom and Danny, go to the mall together. When they leave the mall, they decide to take a taxi. Tom and Danny both stand in the line waiting for their turn to get into the taxi. This is the Signal Wait Time as they are ready to get into the taxi but the taxis are currently serving other customer and they have to wait for their turn. In other word they are in a runnable state. Now when it is their turn to get into the taxi, the taxi driver informs them he does not take credit cards and only cash is accepted. Neither Tom nor Danny have enough cash, they both cannot get into the vehicle. Tom waits outside in the queue and Danny goes to ATM to fetch the cash. During this time the taxi cannot wait, they have to let other passengers get into the taxi. As Tom and Danny both are outside in the queue, this is the Query Wait Time and they are in the suspended state. They cannot do anything till they get the cash. Once Danny gets the cash, they are both standing in the line again, creating one more Signal Wait Time. This time when their turn comes they can pay the taxi driver in cash and reach their destination. The time taken for the taxi to get from the mall to the destination is running time (CPU time) and the taxi is running. I hope this analogy is bit clear with the wait stats. You can check the Signalwait stats using following query of Glenn Berry. -- Signal Waits for instance SELECT CAST(100.0 * SUM(signal_wait_time_ms) / SUM (wait_time_ms) AS NUMERIC(20,2)) AS [%signal (cpu) waits], CAST(100.0 * SUM(wait_time_ms - signal_wait_time_ms) / SUM (wait_time_ms) AS NUMERIC(20,2)) AS [%resource waits] FROM sys.dm_os_wait_stats OPTION (RECOMPILE); Higher the Signal wait stats are not good for the system. Very high value indicates CPU pressure. In my experience, when systems are running smooth and without any glitch the Signal wait stat is lower than 20%. Again, this number can be debated (and it is from my experience and is not documented anywhere). In other words, lower is better and higher is not good for the system. In future articles we will discuss in detail the various wait types and wait stats and their resolution. Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DMV, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• March 21st Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, AJAX, Visual Studio, Silverlight

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series. If you haven’t already, check out this month’s "Find a Hoster” page on the www.asp.net website to learn about great (and very inexpensive) ASP.NET hosting offers.  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET URL Routing in ASP.NET 4: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that talks about the new URL routing features coming to Web Forms applications with ASP.NET 4.  Also check out my previous blog post on this topic. Control of Web Control ClientID Values in ASP.NET 4: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how it is now easy to control the client “id” value emitted by server controls with ASP.NET 4. Web Deployment Made Awesome: Very nice MIX10 talk by Scott Hanselman on the new web deployment features coming with VS 2010, MSDeploy, and .NET 4.  Makes deploying web applications much, much easier. ASP.NET 4’s Browser Capabilities Support: Nice blog post by Stephen Walther that talks about the new browser definition capabilities support coming with ASP.NET 4. Integrating Twitter into an ASP.NET Website: Nice article by Scott Mitchell that demonstrates how to call and integrate Twitter from within your ASP.NET applications. Improving CSS with .LESS: Nice article by Scott Mitchell that describes how to optimize CSS using .LESS – a free, open source library. ASP.NET MVC Upgrading ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2: Eilon Lipton from the ASP.NET team has a nice post that describes how to easily upgrade your ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2.  He has an automated tool that makes this easy. Note that automated MVC upgrade support is also built-into VS 2010.  Use the tool in this blog post for updating existing MVC projects using VS 2008. Advanced ASP.NET MVC 2: Nice video talk by Brad Wilson of the ASP.NET MVC team.  In it he describes some of the more advanced features in ASP.NET MVC 2 and how to maximize your productivity with them. Dynamic Select Lists with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery: Michael Ceranski has a nice blog post that describes how to dynamically populate dropdownlists on the client using AJAX. AJAX Microsoft AJAX Minifier: We recently shipped an updated minifier utility that allows you to shrink/minify both JavaScript and CSS files – which can improve the performance of your web applications.  You can run this either manually as a command-line tool or now automatically integrate it using a Visual Studio build task.  You can download it for free here. Visual Studio VS 2010 Tip: Quickly Closing Documents: Nice blog post that describes some techniques for optimizing how windows are closed with the new VS 2010 IDE. Collpase to Definitions with Outlining: Nice tip from Zain on how to collapse your code editor to outline mode using Ctrl + M, Ctrl + O.  Also check out his post on copy/paste with outlining here. $299 VS 2010 Upgrade Offer for VS 2005/2008 Standard Users: Soma blogs about a nice VS 2010 upgrade offer you can take advantage of if you have VS 2005 or VS 2008 Standard editions.  For $299 you can upgrade to VS 2010 Professional edition. Dependency Graphics: Jason Zander (who runs the VS team) has a nice blog post that covers the new dependency graph support within VS 2010.  This makes it easier to visualize the dependencies within your application.  Also check out this video here. Layer Validation: Jason Zander has a nice blog post that talks about the new layer validation features in VS 2010.  This enables you to enforce cleaner layering within your projects and solutions.  VS 2010 Profiler Blog: The VS 2010 Profiler Team has their own blog and on it you can find a bunch of nice posts from the last few months that talk about a lot of the new features coming with VS 2010’s Profiler support.  Some really nice features coming. Silverlight Silverlight 4 Training Course: Nice free set of training courses from Microsoft that can help bring you up to speed on all of the new Silverlight 4 features and how to build applications with them.  Updated and current with the recently released Silverlight 4 RC build and tools. Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development: Nice blog post by Tim Heuer that summarizes how to get started building Windows Phone 7 applications using Silverlight.  Also check out my blog post from last week on how to build a Windows Phone 7 Twitter application using Silverlight. A Guide to What Has Changed with the Silverlight 4 RC: Nice summary post by Tim Heuer that describes all of the things that have changed between the Silverlight 4 Beta and the Silverlight 4 RC. Path Based Layout - Part 1 and Part 2: Christian Schormann has a nice blog post about a really cool new feature in Expression Blend 4 and Silverlight 4 called Path Layout. Also check out Andy Beaulieu’s blog post on this. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Security in OBIEE 11g, Part 2

  - by Rob Reynolds

  Continuing the series on OBIEE 11g, our guest blogger this week is Pravin Janardanam. Here is Part 2 of his overview of Security in OBIEE 11g. OBIEE 11g Security Overview, Part 2 by Pravin Janardanam In my previous blog on Security, I discussed the OBIEE 11g changes regarding Authentication mechanism, RPD protection and encryption. This blog will include a discussion about OBIEE 11g Authorization and other Security aspects. Authorization: Authorization in 10g was achieved using a combination of Users, Groups and association of privileges and object permissions to users and Groups. Two keys changes to Authorization in OBIEE 11g are: Application Roles Policies / Permission Groups Application Roles are introduced in OBIEE 11g. An application role is specific to the application. They can be mapped to other application roles defined in the same application scope and also to enterprise users or groups, and they are used in authorization decisions. Application roles in 11g take the place of Groups in 10g within OBIEE application. In OBIEE 10g, any changes to corporate LDAP groups require a corresponding change to Groups and their permission assignment. In OBIEE 11g, Application roles provide insulation between permission definitions and corporate LDAP Groups. Permissions are defined at Application Role level and changes to LDAP groups just require a reassignment of the Group to the Application Roles. Permissions and privileges are assigned to Application Roles and users in OBIEE 11g compared to Groups and Users in 10g. The diagram below shows the relationship between users, groups and application roles. Note that the Groups shown in the diagram refer to LDAP Groups (WebLogic Groups by default) and not OBIEE application Groups. The following screenshot compares the permission windows from Admin tool in 10g vs 11g. Note that the Groups in the OBIEE 10g are replaced with Application Roles in OBIEE 11g. The same is applicable to OBIEE web catalog objects.    The default Application Roles available after OBIEE 11g installation are BIAdministrator, BISystem, BIConsumer and BIAuthor. Application policies are the authorization policies that an application relies upon for controlling access to its resources. An Application Role is defined by the Application Policy. The following screenshot shows the policies defined for BIAdministrator and BISystem Roles. Note that the permission for impersonation is granted to BISystem Role. In OBIEE 10g, the permission to manage repositories and Impersonation were assigned to “Administrators” group with no control to separate these permissions in the Administrators group. Hence user “Administrator” also had the permission to impersonate. In OBI11g, BIAdministrator does not have the permission to impersonate. This gives more flexibility to have multiple users perform different administrative functions. Application Roles, Policies, association of Policies to application roles and association of users and groups to application roles are managed using Fusion Middleware Enterprise Manager (FMW EM). They reside in the policy store, identified by the system-jazn-data.xml file. The screenshots below show where they are created and managed in FMW EM. The following screenshot shows the assignment of WebLogic Groups to Application Roles. The following screenshot shows the assignment of Permissions to Application Roles (Application Policies). Note: Object level permission association to Applications Roles resides in the RPD for repository objects. Permissions and Privilege for web catalog objects resides in the OBIEE Web Catalog. Wherever Groups were used in the web catalog and RPD has been replaced with Application roles in OBIEE 11g. Following are the tools used in OBIEE 11g Security Administration: ·       Users and Groups are managed in Oracle WebLogic Administration console (by default). If WebLogic is integrated with other LDAP products, then Users and Groups needs to managed using the interface provide by the respective LDAP vendor – New in OBIEE 11g ·       Application Roles and Application Policies are managed in Oracle Enterprise Manager - Fusion Middleware Control – New in OBIEE 11g ·       Repository object permissions are managed in OBIEE Administration tool – Same as 10g but the assignment is to Application Roles instead of Groups ·       Presentation Services Catalog Permissions and Privileges are managed in OBI Application administration page - Same as 10g but the assignment is to Application Roles instead of Groups Credential Store: Credential Store is a single consolidated service provider to store and manage the application credentials securely. The credential store contains credentials that either user supplied or system generated. Credential store in OBIEE 10g is file based and is managed using cryptotools utility. In 11g, Credential store can be managed directly from the FMW Enterprise Manager and is stored in cwallet.sso file. By default, the Credential Store stores password for deployed RPDs, BI Publisher data sources and BISystem user. In addition, Credential store can be LDAP based but only Oracle Internet Directory is supported right now. As you can see OBIEE security is integrated with Oracle Fusion Middleware security architecture. This provides a common security framework for all components of Business Intelligence and Fusion Middleware applications.

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• C# 5 Async, Part 1: Simplifying Asynchrony – That for which we await

  - by Reed

  Today’s announcement at PDC of the future directions C# is taking excite me greatly.  The new Visual Studio Async CTP is amazing.  Asynchronous code – code which frustrates and demoralizes even the most advanced of developers, is taking a huge leap forward in terms of usability.  This is handled by building on the Task functionality in .NET 4, as well as the addition of two new keywords being added to the C# language: async and await. This core of the new asynchronous functionality is built upon three key features.  First is the Task functionality in .NET 4, and based on Task and Task<TResult>.  While Task was intended to be the primary means of asynchronous programming with .NET 4, the .NET Framework was still based mainly on the Asynchronous Pattern and the Event-based Asynchronous Pattern. The .NET Framework added functionality and guidance for wrapping existing APIs into a Task based API, but the framework itself didn’t really adopt Task or Task<TResult> in any meaningful way.  The CTP shows that, going forward, this is changing. One of the three key new features coming in C# is actually a .NET Framework feature.  Nearly every asynchronous API in the .NET Framework has been wrapped into a new, Task-based method calls.  In the CTP, this is done via as external assembly (AsyncCtpLibrary.dll) which uses Extension Methods to wrap the existing APIs.  However, going forward, this will be handled directly within the Framework.  This will have a unifying effect throughout the .NET Framework.  This is the first building block of the new features for asynchronous programming: Going forward, all asynchronous operations will work via a method that returns Task or Task<TResult> The second key feature is the new async contextual keyword being added to the language.  The async keyword is used to declare an asynchronous function, which is a method that either returns void, a Task, or a Task<T>. Inside the asynchronous function, there must be at least one await expression.  This is a new C# keyword (await) that is used to automatically take a series of statements and break it up to potentially use discontinuous evaluation.  This is done by using await on any expression that evaluates to a Task or Task<T>. For example, suppose we want to download a webpage as a string.  There is a new method added to WebClient: Task<string> WebClient.DownloadStringTaskAsync(Uri).  Since this returns a Task<string> we can use it within an asynchronous function.  Suppose, for example, that we wanted to do something similar to my asynchronous Task example – download a web page asynchronously and check to see if it supports XHTML 1.0, then report this into a TextBox.  This could be done like so: private async void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { string url = "http://reedcopsey.com"; string content = await new WebClient().DownloadStringTaskAsync(url); this.textBox1.Text = string.Format("Page {0} supports XHTML 1.0: {1}", url, content.Contains("XHTML 1.0")); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Let’s walk through what’s happening here, step by step.  By adding the async contextual keyword to the method definition, we are able to use the await keyword on our WebClient.DownloadStringTaskAsync method call. When the user clicks this button, the new method (Task<string> WebClient.DownloadStringTaskAsync(string)) is called, which returns a Task<string>.  By adding the await keyword, the runtime will call this method that returns Task<string>, and execution will return to the caller at this point.  This means that our UI is not blocked while the webpage is downloaded.  Instead, the UI thread will “await” at this point, and let the WebClient do it’s thing asynchronously. When the WebClient finishes downloading the string, the user interface’s synchronization context will automatically be used to “pick up” where it left off, and the Task<string> returned from DownloadStringTaskAsync is automatically unwrapped and set into the content variable.  At this point, we can use that and set our text box content. There are a couple of key points here: Asynchronous functions are declared with the async keyword, and contain one or more await expressions In addition to the obvious benefits of shorter, simpler code – there are some subtle but tremendous benefits in this approach.  When the execution of this asynchronous function continues after the first await statement, the initial synchronization context is used to continue the execution of this function.  That means that we don’t have to explicitly marshal the call that sets textbox1.Text back to the UI thread – it’s handled automatically by the language and framework!  Exception handling around asynchronous method calls also just works. I’d recommend every C# developer take a look at the documentation on the new Asynchronous Programming for C# and Visual Basic page, download the Visual Studio Async CTP, and try it out.

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• JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g

  - by John-Brown.Evans

  JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g ol{margin:0;padding:0} .c5{vertical-align:top;width:156pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:0pt 2pt 0pt 2pt} .c7{list-style-type:disc;margin:0;padding:0} .c4{background-color:#ffffff} .c14{color:#1155cc;text-decoration:underline} .c6{height:11pt;text-align:center} .c13{color:inherit;text-decoration:inherit} .c3{padding-left:0pt;margin-left:36pt} .c0{border-collapse:collapse} .c12{text-align:center} .c1{direction:ltr} .c8{background-color:#f3f3f3} .c2{line-height:1.0} .c11{font-style:italic} .c10{height:11pt} .c9{font-weight:bold} .title{padding-top:24pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#000000;font-size:36pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:6pt}.subtitle{padding-top:18pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666666;font-style:italic;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Georgia";padding-bottom:4pt} li{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial"} p{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;margin:0;font-family:"Arial"} h1{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h2{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-size:14pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h3{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h4{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-style:italic;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial";padding-bottom:0pt} h5{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h6{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666;font-style:italic;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";padding-bottom:0pt} This example shows the steps to create a simple JMS queue in WebLogic Server 11g for testing purposes. For example, to use with the two sample programs QueueSend.java and QueueReceive.java which will be shown in later examples. Additional, detailed information on JMS can be found in the following Oracle documentation: Oracle® Fusion Middleware Configuring and Managing JMS for Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1 (10.3.6) Part Number E13738-06 http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/web.1111/e13738/toc.htm 1. Introduction and Definitions A JMS queue in Weblogic Server is associated with a number of additional resources: JMS Server A JMS server acts as a management container for resources within JMS modules. Some of its responsibilities include the maintenance of persistence and state of messages and subscribers. A JMS server is required in order to create a JMS module. JMS Module A JMS module is a definition which contains JMS resources such as queues and topics. A JMS module is required in order to create a JMS queue. Subdeployment JMS modules are targeted to one or more WLS instances or a cluster. Resources within a JMS module, such as queues and topics are also targeted to a JMS server or WLS server instances. A subdeployment is a grouping of targets. It is also known as advanced targeting. Connection Factory A connection factory is a resource that enables JMS clients to create connections to JMS destinations. JMS Queue A JMS queue (as opposed to a JMS topic) is a point-to-point destination type. A message is written to a specific queue or received from a specific queue. The objects used in this example are: Object Name Type JNDI Name TestJMSServer JMS Server TestJMSModule JMS Module TestSubDeployment Subdeployment TestConnectionFactory Connection Factory jms/TestConnectionFactory TestJMSQueue JMS Queue jms/TestJMSQueue 2. Configuration Steps The following steps are done in the WebLogic Server Console, beginning with the left-hand navigation menu. 2.1 Create a JMS Server Services > Messaging > JMS Servers Select New Name: TestJMSServer Persistent Store: (none) Target: soa_server1  (or choose an available server) Finish The JMS server should now be visible in the list with Health OK. 2.2 Create a JMS Module Services > Messaging > JMS Modules Select New Name: TestJMSModule Leave the other options empty Targets: soa_server1  (or choose the same one as the JMS server)Press Next Leave “Would you like to add resources to this JMS system module” unchecked and  press Finish . 2.3 Create a SubDeployment A subdeployment is not necessary for the JMS queue to work, but it allows you to easily target subcomponents of the JMS module to a single target or group of targets. We will use the subdeployment in this example to target the following connection factory and JMS queue to the JMS server we created earlier. Services > Messaging > JMS Modules Select TestJMSModule Select the Subdeployments  tab and New Subdeployment Name: TestSubdeployment Press Next Here you can select the target(s) for the subdeployment. You can choose either Servers (i.e. WebLogic managed servers, such as the soa_server1) or JMS Servers such as the JMS Server created earlier. As the purpose of our subdeployment in this example is to target a specific JMS server, we will choose the JMS Server option. Select the TestJMSServer created earlier Press Finish 2.4  Create a Connection Factory Services > Messaging > JMS Modules Select TestJMSModule  and press New Select Connection Factory  and Next Name: TestConnectionFactory JNDI Name: jms/TestConnectionFactory Leave the other values at default On the Targets page, select the Advanced Targeting  button and select TestSubdeployment Press Finish The connection factory should be listed on the following page with TestSubdeployment and TestJMSServer as the target. 2.5 Create a JMS Queue Services > Messaging > JMS Modules Select TestJMSModule  and press New Select Queue and Next Name: TestJMSQueueJNDI Name: jms/TestJMSQueueTemplate: NonePress Next Subdeployments: TestSubdeployment Finish The TestJMSQueue should be listed on the following page with TestSubdeployment and TestJMSServer. Confirm the resources for the TestJMSModule. Using the Domain Structure tree, navigate to soa_domain > Services > Messaging > JMS Modules then select TestJMSModule You should see the following resources The JMS queue is now complete and can be accessed using the JNDI names jms/TestConnectionFactory andjms/TestJMSQueue. In the following blog post in this series, I will show you how to write a message to this queue, using the WebLogic sample Java program QueueSend.java.

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• SQL SERVER – Single Wait Time Introduction with Simple Example – Wait Type – Day 2 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  In this post, let’s delve a bit more in depth regarding wait stats. The very first question: when do the wait stats occur? Here is the simple answer. When SQL Server is executing any task, and if for any reason it has to wait for resources to execute the task, this wait is recorded by SQL Server with the reason for the delay. Later on we can analyze these wait stats to understand the reason the task was delayed and maybe we can eliminate the wait for SQL Server. It is not always possible to remove the wait type 100%, but there are few suggestions that can help. Before we continue learning about wait types and wait stats, we need to understand three important milestones of the query life-cycle. Running - a query which is being executed on a CPU is called a running query. This query is responsible for CPU time. Runnable – a query which is ready to execute and waiting for its turn to run is called a runnable query. This query is responsible for Single Wait time. (In other words, the query is ready to run but CPU is servicing another query). Suspended – a query which is waiting due to any reason (to know the reason, we are learning wait stats) to be converted to runnable is suspended query. This query is responsible for wait time. (In other words, this is the time we are trying to reduce). In simple words, query execution time is a summation of the query Executing CPU Time (Running) + Query Wait Time (Suspended) + Query Single Wait Time (Runnable). Again, it may be possible a query goes to all these stats multiple times. Let us try to understand the whole thing with a simple analogy of a taxi and a passenger. Two friends, Tom and Danny, go to the mall together. When they leave the mall, they decide to take a taxi. Tom and Danny both stand in the line waiting for their turn to get into the taxi. This is the Signal Wait Time as they are ready to get into the taxi but the taxis are currently serving other customer and they have to wait for their turn. In other word they are in a runnable state. Now when it is their turn to get into the taxi, the taxi driver informs them he does not take credit cards and only cash is accepted. Neither Tom nor Danny have enough cash, they both cannot get into the vehicle. Tom waits outside in the queue and Danny goes to ATM to fetch the cash. During this time the taxi cannot wait, they have to let other passengers get into the taxi. As Tom and Danny both are outside in the queue, this is the Query Wait Time and they are in the suspended state. They cannot do anything till they get the cash. Once Danny gets the cash, they are both standing in the line again, creating one more Single Wait Time. This time when their turn comes they can pay the taxi driver in cash and reach their destination. The time taken for the taxi to get from the mall to the destination is running time (CPU time) and the taxi is running. I hope this analogy is bit clear with the wait stats. You can check the single wait stats using following query of Glenn Berry. -- Signal Waits for instance SELECT CAST(100.0 * SUM(signal_wait_time_ms) / SUM (wait_time_ms) AS NUMERIC(20,2)) AS [%signal (cpu) waits], CAST(100.0 * SUM(wait_time_ms - signal_wait_time_ms) / SUM (wait_time_ms) AS NUMERIC(20,2)) AS [%resource waits] FROM sys.dm_os_wait_stats OPTION (RECOMPILE); Higher the single wait stats are not good for the system. Very high value indicates CPU pressure. In my experience, when systems are running smooth and without any glitch the single wait stat is lower than 20%. Again, this number can be debated (and it is from my experience and is not documented anywhere). In other words, lower is better and higher is not good for the system. In future articles we will discuss in detail the various wait types and wait stats and their resolution. Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DMV, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• SQLAuthority News – A Successful Community TechDays at Ahmedabad – December 11, 2010

  - by pinaldave

  We recently had one of the best community events in Ahmedabad. We were fortunate that we had SQL Experts from around the world to have presented at this event. This gathering was very special because besides Jacob Sebastian and myself, we had two other speakers traveling all the way from Florida (Rushabh Mehta) and Bangalore (Vinod Kumar).There were a total of nearly 170 attendees and the event was blast. Here are the details of the event. Pinal Dave Presenting at Community Tech Days On the day of the event, it seemed to be the coldest day in Ahmedabad but I was glad to see hundreds of people waiting for the doors to be opened some hours before. We started the day with hot coffee and cookies. Yes, food first; and it was right after my keynote. I could clearly see that the coffee did some magic right away; the hall was almost full after the coffee break. Jacob Sebastian Presenting at Community Tech Days Jacob Sebastian, an SQL Server MVP and a close friend of mine, had an unusual job of surprising everybody with an innovative topic accompanied with lots of question-and-answer portions. That’s definitely one thing to love Jacob, that is, the novelty of the subject. His presentation was entitled “Best Database Practices for the .Net”; it really created magic on the crowd. Pinal Dave Presenting at Community Tech Days Next to Jacob Sebastian, I presented “Best Database Practices for the SharePoint”. It was really fun to present Database with the perspective of the database itself. The main highlight of my presentation was when I talked about how one can speed up the database performance by 40% for SharePoint in just 40 seconds. It was fun because the most important thing was to convince people to use the recommendation as soon as they walk out of the session. It was really amusing and the response of the participants was remarkable. Pinal Dave Presenting at Community Tech Days My session was followed by the most-awaited session of the day: that of Rushabh Mehta. He is an international BI expert who traveled all the way from Florida to present “Self Service BI” session. This session was funny and truly interesting. In fact, no one knew BI could be this much entertaining and fascinating. Rushabh has an appealing style of presenting the session; he instantly got very much interaction from the audience. Rushabh Mehta Presenting at Community Tech Days We had a networking lunch break in-between, when we talked about many various topics. It is always interesting to get in touch with the Community and feel a part of it. I had a wonderful time during the break. Vinod Kumar Presenting at Community Tech Days After lunch was apparently the most difficult session for the presenter as during this time, many people started to fall sleep and get dizzy. This spot was requested by Microsoft SQL Server Evangelist Vinod Kumar himself. During our discussion he suggested that if he gets this slot he would make sure people are up and more interactive than during the morning session. Just like always, this session was one of the best sessions ever. Vinod is true to his word as he presented the subject of “Time Management for Developer”. This session was the biggest hit in the event because the subject was instilled in the mind of every participant. Vinod Kumar Presenting at Community Tech Days Vinod’s session was followed by his own small session. Due to “insistent public demand”, he presented an interesting subject, “Tricks and Tips of SQL Server“. In 20 minutes he has done another awesome job and all attendees wanted more of the tricks. Just as usual he promised to do that next time for us. Vinod’s session was succeeded by Prabhjot Singh Bakshi’s session. He presented an appealing Silverlight concept. Just the same, he did a great job and people cheered him. Prabhjot Presenting at Community Tech Days We had a special invited speaker, Dhananjay Kumar, traveling all the way from Pune. He always supports our cause to help the Community in empowering participants. He presented the topic about Win7 Mobile and SharePoint integration. This was something many did not even expect to be possible. Kudos to Dhananjay for doing a great job. Dhananjay Kumar Presenting at Community Tech Days All in all, this event was one of the best in the Community Tech Days series in Ahmedabad. We were fortunate that legends from the all over the world were present here to present to the Community. I’d say never underestimate the power of the Community and its influence over the direction of the technology. Vinod Kumar Presenting trophy to Pinal Dave Vinod Kumar Presenting trophy to Pinal Dave This event was a very special gathering to me personally because of your support to the vibrant Community. The following awards were won for last year’s performance: Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group (President: Jacob Sebastian; Leader: Pinal Dave) – Best Tier 2 User Group Best Development Community Individual Contributor – Pinal Dave Speakers I was very glad to receive the award for our entire Community. Attendees at Community Tech Days I want to say thanks to Rushabh Mehta, Vinod Kumar and Dhananjay Kumar for visiting the city and presenting various technology topics in Community Tech Days. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: MVP, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• Developer Training – Various Options for Maximum Benefit – Part 4

  - by pinaldave

  Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 If you have been reading this series, by now you are aware of all the pros and cons that can come along with training.  We’ve asked and answered hard questions, and investigated them “whys” and “hows” of training.  Now it is time to talk about all the different kinds of training that are out there! On Job Training The most common type of training is on the job training.  Everyone receives this kind of education – even experts who come in to consult have to be taught where the printer, pens, and copy machines are.  If you are thinking about more concrete topics, though, on the job training can be some of the easiest to come across.  Picture this: someone in the company whom you really admire is hard at work on a project.  You come up to them and ask to help them out – if they are a busy developer, the odds are that they will say “yes, please!”   If you phrase your question as an offer of help, you can receive training without ever putting someone in the awkward position of acting as a mentor.  However, some people may want the task of being a mentor.  It can never hurt to ask.  Most people will be more than willing to pass their knowledge along. Extreme Programming If your company and coworkers are willing, you can even investigate Extreme Programming.  This is a type of programming that allows small teams to quickly develop code and products that are released with almost immediate user feedback.  You can find more information at http://www.extremeprogramming.org/.  If this is something your company could use, suggest it to your supervisor.  Even if they say no, it will make it clear that you are a go-getter who is interested in new and exciting projects.  If the answer is yes, then you have the opportunity to get some of the best on the job training around. In Person Training Click on Image to Enlarge When you say the word “training,” most people’s minds go back to the classroom, an image they are familiar with.  While training doesn’t always have to be in a traditional setting, because it is so familiar it can also be the most valuable type of training.  There are many ways to get training through a live instructor.  Some companies may be willing to send a representative to you, where employees will get training, sometimes food and coffee, and a live instructor who can answer questions immediately.  Sometimes these trainers are also able to do consultations at the same time, which can invaluable to a company.  If you are the one to asks your supervisor for a training session that can also be turned into a consultation, you may stick in their minds as an incredibly dedicated employee.  If you can’t find a representative, local colleges can also be a good resource for free or cheap classes – or they may have representatives coming who are willing to take on a few more students. Benefits of On Demand Developer Training Of course, you can often get the best of all these types of training with online or On Demand training.  You can get the benefit of a live instructor who is willing to answer questions (although in this case, usually through e-mail or other online venues), there are often real-world examples to follow along – like on the job training – and best of all you can learn whenever you have the time or need.  Did a problem with your server come up at midnight when all your supervisors are safe at home and probably in bed?  No problem!  On Demand training is especially useful if you need to slow down, pause, or rewind a training session.  Not even a real-life instructor can do that! When I was writing this blog post, I felt that each of the subject, which I have covered can be blog posts of itself. However, I wanted to keep the the blog post concise and so touch based on three major training aspects 1) On Job Training 2) In Person Training and 3) Online training. Here is the question for you – is there any other kind of training methods available, which are effective and one should consider it? If yes, what are those, I may write a follow up blog post on the same subject next week. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Seriously, It’s Time to Get Your Content Act Together

  - by Mike Stiles

  Branded content, content marketing, social content, brand journalism, we’re seeing those terms more and more. Why? The technology tools are coming together. We should know. We can gather big data, crunch it, listen to the public, moderate, respond, get to know the customer intimately, know what they like, know what they want, we can target, distribute, amplify, measure engagement and reaction, modify strategy and even automate a great deal of all that. An amazing machine, a sleek, smooth-running engine has been built such that all the parts can interact and work together to deliver peak performance and maximum output. But that engine isn’t going anywhere without any gas. Content is the gas. Yes, we curate other people’s content. We can siphon their gas. There’s tech to help with that too. But as for the creation of original, worthwhile content made for a specific audience, our audience, machines can’t do that…at least not yet. Curated content is great. But somebody has to originate the content for it to be curated and shared. And since the need for good, curated content is obviously large and the desire to share is there, it’s a winning proposition for a brand to be a consistent producer of original content. And yet, it feels like content is an issue we’re avoiding. There’s a reluctance to build a massive pipeline if you have no idea what you’re going to run through it. The C-suite often doesn’t know what content is, that it’s different from ads, where to get it, who makes it, how long it should be, what the point of it is if there’s no hard sell of the product, what it costs, how to use it, how to measure it, how to make sure it’s good, or how to make sure it will keep flowing. It could be the reason many brands aren’t pulling the trigger on socially enabling the enterprise. And that’s a shame, because there are a lot of creative, daring, experimental, uniquely talented entertainers and journalists chomping at the bit to execute content for brands. But for many corporate executives, content is “weird,” and the people who make it are even weirder. The content side of the equation is human. It’s art, but art that can be informed by data. The natural inclination is for brands to turn to their agencies for such creative endeavors. But agencies are falling into one of two categories. They’re failing to transition from ads to content. In “Content Era, What’s the Role of Agencies?” Alexander Jutkowitz says agencies were made for one-hit campaigns, not ongoing content. Or, they’re ready and capable but can’t get clients to do the right things. Agencies have to make money, even if it means continuing to do the wrong things because that’s all the client will agree to. So what we wind up with in the pipeline is advertising, marketing-heavy content, content that was obviously created or spearheaded by non-creative executives, random & inconsistent content, copy written for SEO bots, and other completely uninteresting nightmares. Frank Rose, author of “The Art of Immersion,” writes, “Content without story and excitement is noise pollution.” In the old days, you made an ad and inserted it into shows made by people who knew what they were doing. You could bask in that show’s success and leverage their audience. Now, you are tasked with attracting, amassing and holding your own audience. You may just want to make, advertise and sell your widgets. But now there’s a war on for a precious commodity, attention. People are busy. They have filters to keep uninteresting and irrelevant things out. They value their time and expect value back when they give it up. Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, says, "Your customers don't care about you, your products, your services…they care about themselves, their wants and their needs." Is it worth getting serious about content and doing it right? 61% of consumers feel better about a company that delivers custom content (Custom Content Council). Interesting content is one of the top 3 reasons people follow brands on social (Content+). 78% of consumers think organizations that provide custom content want to build good relationships with them (TMG Custom Media). On the B2B side, 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company info in a series of articles vs. an ad. So what’s the hang-up? Cited barriers to content marketing are lack of human resources (42%) and lack of budget (35%). 54% of brands don’t have a single on-site, dedicated content creator. And only 38% of brands have a content marketing strategy. Tech has built the biggest, most incredible stage for brands that’s ever been built. Putting something on that stage is your responsibility. Do a bad show, or no show at all, and you’ll be the beautiful, talented actress that never got discovered. @mikestilesPhoto: Gabriella Fabbri, stock.xchng

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• Convert Video and Remove Commercials in Windows 7 Media Center with MCEBuddy 1.1

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Today look at MCEBuddy for Windows 7 Media Center. This handy app automatically takes your recorded TV files and converts them to MP4, AVI, WMV, or MPEG format. It even has the option to cut out those annoying commercials during the conversion process. Installation and Configuration Download and extract MCE Buddy. (Download link below) Run the setup.exe file and take all the default settings.   Open MCEBuddy Configuration by going to Start > All Programs > MCEBuddy > MCEBuddy Configuration.   Video Paths The MCEBuddy application is comprised of a single window. The first step you’ll want to take is to define your Source and Destination paths. The “Source” will most likely be your Recorded TV directory. The Destination should NOT be the same as the Source folder. Note: The Recorded TV directory in Windows 7 Media Center will only display and play WTV & DVR-MS files. To watch the converted MP4, AVI, WMV, or MPEG files in Windows Media Center you’ll need to add them to your Video Library or Movie Library. Video Conversion Next, choose your preferred format for conversion from the “Convert to” drop down list. The default is MP4 with the H.264 codec. You’ll find a wide variety of formats. The first set of conversion options in the drop down list will resize the video to 720 pixels wide. The next two sections maintain the original size, and the final section is for a variety of portable devices.   Next, you’ll see a group of check boxes below the “Convert to” drop down list. The Commercial Skipping option will cut the commercials while converting the file. Sort By Series will create a sub-folder in your Destination folder for each TV show. Delete Original will delete the WTV file after conversion is complete. (This option is not recommended unless you are sure your files are converting properly and you no longer need the WTV file.) Start Minimized is ideal if you want to run MCEBuddy on Windows startup. Note: MCEBuddy installs and uses Comskip for commercial cutting by default. However, if you have ShowAnalyzer installed, it will use that application instead. Advanced Options To choose a specific time of day to perform the conversions, click the checkbox under the “Advanced Options,” and select the starting and ending times for conversion. For example, convert between 2 hours and 5 hours would be between 2 am and 5am. If you want MCEBuddy to constantly look for and immediately convert new recordings, leave the box unchecked.   The “Video age” option lets you choose a specific number of days to wait before performing the conversion. This can be useful if you want to watch the recordings first and delete those you don’t wish to convert. You can also choose the “Sub Directories” if you’d like MCEBuddy to convert files that are in a sub-folder in your “Source” directory. Second Conversion As you might expect, this option allows MCEBuddy to perform a second conversion of your file. This can be useful if you want to use your first conversion to create a higher quality MP4 or AVI file for playback on a larger screen, and a second one for a portable device such as Zune or iPhone. The same options from the first conversion are also available for the second. You’ll want to choose a separate Destination folder for the second conversion.   Start and Monitor Progress To start converting your video files, simply press the “Start” button at the bottom. You’ll be able to follow the progress in the “Current Activity” section. When all the video files have finished converting, or there are no current files to convert, MCEBuddy will display a “Started – Idle” status. Click “Stop” if you don’t want MCEBuddy to continue scanning for new files.   Conclusion MCEBuddy 1.1 will convert all WTV files in it’s source folder. If you want to pick and choose which recordings to convert, you may want to define a source folder different than the Recorded TV folder and then just copy or move the files you wish to convert into the new source folder. The conversion process does take a good bit of time. If you choose the commercial skipping and second conversion options it can take several hours to fully convert one TV recording. Overall, MCEBuddy makes a nice Media Center addition for those that want to save some space with smaller size files, convert Recorded TV files for their portable device, or automatically remove commercials. If you’re looking for a different method to skip commercials check out our post on how to skip commercials in Windows 7 Media Center. Download MCEBuddy 1.1 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)How To Skip Commercials in Windows 7 Media CenterHow To Convert Video Files to MP3 with VLCStartup Customizations for Media Center in Windows 7Add Folders to the Movie Library in Windows 7 Media Center 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher Automate Tasks in Linux with Crontab Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam

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• ASP.NET MVC 3: Razor’s @: and <text> syntax

  - by ScottGu

  This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features: New @model keyword in Razor (Oct 19th) Layouts with Razor (Oct 22nd) Server-Side Comments with Razor (Nov 12th) Razor’s @: and <text> syntax (today) In today’s post I’m going to discuss two useful syntactical features of the new Razor view-engine – the @: and <text> syntax support. Fluid Coding with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to the existing .aspx view engine).  You can learn more about Razor, why we are introducing it, and the syntax it supports from my Introducing Razor blog post.  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type. For example, the Razor snippet below can be used to iterate a list of products: When run, it generates output like:   One of the techniques that Razor uses to implicitly identify when a code block ends is to look for tag/element content to denote the beginning of a content region.  For example, in the code snippet above Razor automatically treated the inner <li></li> block within our foreach loop as an HTML content block because it saw the opening <li> tag sequence and knew that it couldn’t be valid C#.  This particular technique – using tags to identify content blocks within code – is one of the key ingredients that makes Razor so clean and productive with scenarios involving HTML creation. Using @: to explicitly indicate the start of content Not all content container blocks start with a tag element tag, though, and there are scenarios where the Razor parser can’t implicitly detect a content block. Razor addresses this by enabling you to explicitly indicate the beginning of a line of content by using the @: character sequence within a code block.  The @: sequence indicates that the line of content that follows should be treated as a content block: As a more practical example, the below snippet demonstrates how we could output a “(Out of Stock!)” message next to our product name if the product is out of stock: Because I am not wrapping the (Out of Stock!) message in an HTML tag element, Razor can’t implicitly determine that the content within the @if block is the start of a content block.  We are using the @: character sequence to explicitly indicate that this line within our code block should be treated as content. Using Code Nuggets within @: content blocks In addition to outputting static content, you can also have code nuggets embedded within a content block that is initiated using a @: character sequence.  For example, we have two @: sequences in the code snippet below: Notice how within the second @: sequence we are emitting the number of units left within the content block (e.g. - “(Only 3 left!”). We are doing this by embedding a @p.UnitsInStock code nugget within the line of content. Multiple Lines of Content Razor makes it easy to have multiple lines of content wrapped in an HTML element.  For example, below the inner content of our @if container is wrapped in an HTML <p> element – which will cause Razor to treat it as content: For scenarios where the multiple lines of content are not wrapped by an outer HTML element, you can use multiple @: sequences: Alternatively, Razor also allows you to use a <text> element to explicitly identify content: The <text> tag is an element that is treated specially by Razor. It causes Razor to interpret the inner contents of the <text> block as content, and to not render the containing <text> tag element (meaning only the inner contents of the <text> element will be rendered – the tag itself will not).  This makes it convenient when you want to render multi-line content blocks that are not wrapped by an HTML element.  The <text> element can also optionally be used to denote single-lines of content, if you prefer it to the more concise @: sequence: The above code will render the same output as the @: version we looked at earlier.  Razor will automatically omit the <text> wrapping element from the output and just render the content within it.  Summary Razor enables a clean and concise templating syntax that enables a very fluid coding workflow.  Razor’s smart detection of <tag> elements to identify the beginning of content regions is one of the reasons that the Razor approach works so well with HTML generation scenarios, and it enables you to avoid having to explicitly mark the beginning/ending of content regions in about 95% of if/else and foreach scenarios. Razor’s @: and <text> syntax can then be used for scenarios where you want to avoid using an HTML element within a code container block, and need to more explicitly denote a content region. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• How to Troubleshoot TFS Build Server Failure?

  - by Tarun Arora

  Ever found your self in this helpless situation where you think you have tried every possible suggestion on the internet to bring the build server back but it just won’t work. Well some times before hunting around for a solution it is important to understand what the problem is, if the error messages in the build logs don’t seem to help you can always enable tracing on the build server to get more information on what could possibly be the root cause of failure. In this blog post today I’ll be showing you how to enable tracing on, - TFS 2010/11 Server - Build Server - Client Enable Tracing on Team Foundation Server 2010/2011 On the Team Foundation Server navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services, right click web.config and from the context menu select edit.          Search for the <appSettings> node in the config file and set the value of the key ‘traceWriter’ to true.          In the <System.diagnostics> tag set the value of switches from 0 to 4 to set the trace level to maximum to write diagnostics level trace information.          Restart the TFS Application pool to force this change to take effect. The application pool restart will impact any one using the TFS server at present. Note - It is recommended that you do not make any changes to the TFS production application server, this can have serious consequences and can even jeopardize the installation of your server.          Download the Debug view tool from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896647.aspx and set it to capture “Global Events”. Perform any actions in the Team Explorer on the client machine, you should be able to see a series of trace data in the debug view tool now.         Enable Tracing on Build Controller/Agents Log on to the Build Controller/Agent and Navigate to the directory C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools         Look for the configuration file ‘TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.config’ if it is not already there create a new text file and rename it to ‘TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.config’         To Enable tracing uncomment the <system.diagnostics> and paste the snippet below if it is not already there. <configuration> <system.diagnostics> <switches> <add name="BuildServiceTraceLevel" value="4"/> </switches> <trace autoflush="true" indentsize="4"> <listeners> <add name="myListener" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TeamFoundationTextWriterTraceListener, Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" initializeData="c:\logs\TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.log" /> <remove name="Default" /> </listeners> </trace> </system.diagnostics> </configuration> The highlighted path above is where the Log file will be created. If the folder is not already there then create the folder, also, make sure that the account running the build service has access to write to this folder.         Restart the build Controller/Agent service from the administration console (or net stop tfsbuildservicehost & net start tfsbuildservicehost) in order for the new setting to be picked up.         Enable TFS Tracing on the Client Machine On the client machine, shut down Visual Studio, navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common 7\IDE          Search for devenv.exe.config, make a backup copy of the config file and right click the file and from the context menu select edit. If its not already there create this file.          Edit devenv.exe.config by adding the below code snippet before the last </configuration> tag <system.diagnostics> <switches> <add name="TeamFoundationSoapProxy" value="4" /> <add name="VersionControl" value="4" /> </switches> <trace autoflush="true" indentsize="3"> <listeners> <add name="myListener" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TeamFoundationTextWriterTraceListener,Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" initializeData="c:\tf.log" /> <add name="perfListener" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PerfTraceListener, Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"/> </listeners> </trace> </system.diagnostics> The highlighted path above is where the Log file will be created. If the folder is not already there then create the folder. Start Visual Studio and after a bit of activity you should be able to see the new log file being created on the folder specified in the config file. Other Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN.   Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Have you come across an interesting one to one with the build server, please share your experience here. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Thank You! Share this post : CodeProject

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• SQL SERVER – Advanced Data Quality Services with Melissa Data – Azure Data Market

  - by pinaldave

  There has been much fanfare over the new SQL Server 2012, and especially around its new companion product Data Quality Services (DQS). Among the many new features is the addition of this integrated knowledge-driven product that enables data stewards everywhere to profile, match, and cleanse data. In addition to the homegrown rules that data stewards can design and implement, there are also connectors to third party providers that are hosted in the Azure Datamarket marketplace.  In this review, I leverage SQL Server 2012 Data Quality Services, and proceed to subscribe to a third party data cleansing product through the Datamarket to showcase this unique capability. Crucial Questions For the purposes of the review, I used a database I had in an Excel spreadsheet with name and address information. Upon a cursory inspection, there are miscellaneous problems with these records; some addresses are missing ZIP codes, others missing a city, and some records are slightly misspelled or have unparsed suites. With DQS, I can easily add a knowledge base to help standardize my values, such as for state abbreviations. But how do I know that my address is correct? And if my address is not correct, what should it be corrected to? The answer lies in a third party knowledge base by the acknowledged USPS certified address accuracy experts at Melissa Data. Reference Data Services Within DQS there is a handy feature to actually add reference data from many different third-party Reference Data Services (RDS) vendors. DQS simplifies the processes of cleansing, standardizing, and enriching data through custom rules and through service providers from the Azure Datamarket. A quick jump over to the Datamarket site shows me that there are a handful of providers that offer data directly through Data Quality Services. Upon subscribing to these services, one can attach a DQS domain or composite domain (fields in a record) to a reference data service provider, and begin using it to cleanse, standardize, and enrich that data. Besides what I am looking for (address correction and enrichment), it is possible to subscribe to a host of other services including geocoding, IP address reference, phone checking and enrichment, as well as name parsing, standardization, and genderization.  These capabilities extend the data quality that DQS has natively by quite a bit. For my current address correction review, I needed to first sign up to a reference data provider on the Azure Data Market site. For this example, I used Melissa Data’s Address Check Service. They offer free one-month trials, so if you wish to follow along, or need to add address quality to your own data, I encourage you to sign up with them. Once I subscribed to the desired Reference Data Provider, I navigated my browser to the Account Keys within My Account to view the generated account key, which I then inserted into the DQS Client – Configuration under the Administration area. Step by Step to Guide That was all it took to hook in the subscribed provider -Melissa Data- directly to my DQS Client. The next step was for me to attach and map in my Reference Data from the newly acquired reference data provider, to a domain in my knowledge base. On the DQS Client home screen, I selected “New Knowledge Base” under Knowledge Base Management on the left-hand side of the home screen. Under New Knowledge Base, I typed a Name and description of my new knowledge base, then proceeded to the Domain Management screen. Here I established a series of domains (fields) and then linked them all together as a composite domain (record set). Using the Create Domain button, I created the following domains according to the fields in my incoming data: Name Address Suite City State Zip I added a Suite column in my domain because Melissa Data has the ability to return missing Suites based on last name or company. And that’s a great benefit of using these third party providers, as they have data that the data steward would not normally have access to. The bottom line is, with these third party data providers, I can actually improve my data. Next, I created a composite domain (fulladdress) and added the (field) domains into the composite domain. This essentially groups our address fields together in a record to facilitate the full address cleansing they perform. I then selected my newly created composite domain and under the Reference Data tab, added my third party reference data provider –Melissa Data’s Address Check- and mapped in each domain that I had to the provider’s Schema. Now that my composite domain has been married to the Reference Data service, I can take the newly published knowledge base and create a project to cleanse and enrich my data. My next task was to create a new Data Quality project, mapping in my data source and matching it to the appropriate domain column, and then kick off the verification process. It took just a few minutes with some progress indicators indicating that it was working. When the process concluded, there was a helpful set of tabs that place the response records into categories: suggested; new; invalid; corrected (automatically); and correct. Accepting the suggestions provided by  Melissa Data allowed me to clean up all the records and flag the invalid ones. It is very apparent that DQS makes address data quality simplistic for any IT professional. Final Note As I have shown, DQS makes data quality very easy. Within minutes I was able to set up a data cleansing and enrichment routine within my data quality project, and ensure that my address data was clean, verified, and standardized against real reference data. As reviewed here, it’s easy to see how both SQL Server 2012 and DQS work to take what used to require a highly skilled developer, and empower an average business or database person to consume external services and clean data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology Tagged: DQS

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• Using Oracle ADF Data Visualization Tools (DVT) Line Graphs to Display Weather Information

  - by Christian David Straub

  OverviewA guest post by Jeanne Waldman.I have a simple JDeveloper Fusion application that retrieves weather data. I wanted to compare the week's temperatures of different locations in a graph. I decided to check out the dvt:lineGraph component, and it took me a few minutes to add it to my jspx page and supply it with data.Drag and Drop the dvt:lineGraph onto your pageI opened my .jspx page in design modeIn the Component Palette, I selected ADF Data Visualization.Then I dragged 'Line' onto my page.A dialog popped up giving me options of the type of line graph. I chose the default.A lineGraph displayed with some default data. Hook up your weather dataNow I wanted to hook up my own data. I browsed the tagdoc, and I found the tabularData attribute.Attribute: tabularDataType: java.util.ListTagDoc:Specifies a list of data that the graph uses to create a grid and populate itself. The List consists of a three-member Object array for each data value to be passed to the graph. The members of each array must be organized as follows: The first member (index 0) is the column label, in the grid, of the data value. This is generally a String. If the graph has a time axis, then this should be a Java Date. Column labels typically identify groups in the graph. The second member (index 1) is the row label, in the grid, of the data value. This is generally a String. Row labels appear as series labels in the graph (usually in the legend). The third member (index 2) is the data value, which is usually a Double.The first member is the column label of the data value. This would be the day of the week.The second member is the row label of the data value. This would be the location name.The third member is the data value, usually a Double. This would be the temperature. I already had all this information, I just needed to put it in a List with a three-member Object array for each data value.   /**    * This is used for the lineGraph to show the data for each location.    */   public List<Object[]> getTabularData()   {      List<Object[]> tabularData = new ArrayList<Object []>();      List<WeatherForecast> weatherForecastList = getWeatherForecastList();      // loop through the list and build up the tabular data. Then cache it.      for(WeatherForecast wf : weatherForecastList)      {        List<ForecastDay> forecastDayList = wf.getForecastDayList();        String location = wf.getLocation();        for (ForecastDay fday : forecastDayList)        {          String day = fday.getPrettyDate();          String highTemp = fday.getHighF();          tabularData.add(new Object[]{day, location, Double.valueOf(highTemp)});        }             }      return tabularData;    }  Now I bound the lineGraph to this method by setting tabularData to#{weatherForAllLocationsBean.tabularData}weatherForAllLocationsBean is my bean that is defined in faces-config.xml. Adding a barGraphIn about 30 seconds, I added a barGraph with the same data. I dragged and dropped a bar graph onto the page, used the same tabularData as I did in the line graph. The page looks like this:  ConclusionI was very happy how fast it was to hook up my weather data to these graphs. They look great, and they have built in functionality. For instance, I can hide/show a location by clicking on the name of the location in the legend.

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• SQL SERVER – Beginning of SQL Server Architecture – Terminology – Guest Post

  - by pinaldave

  SQL Server Architecture is a very deep subject. Covering it in a single post is an almost impossible task. However, this subject is very popular topic among beginners and advanced users.  I have requested my friend Anil Kumar who is expert in SQL Domain to help me write  a simple post about Beginning SQL Server Architecture. As stated earlier this subject is very deep subject and in this first article series he has covered basic terminologies. In future article he will explore the subject further down. Anil Kumar Yadav is Trainer, SQL Domain, Koenig Solutions. Koenig is a premier IT training firm that provides several IT certifications, such as Oracle 11g, Server+, RHCA, SQL Server Training, Prince2 Foundation etc. In this Article we will discuss about MS SQL Server architecture. The major components of SQL Server are: Relational Engine Storage Engine SQL OS Now we will discuss and understand each one of them. 1) Relational Engine: Also called as the query processor, Relational Engine includes the components of SQL Server that determine what your query exactly needs to do and the best way to do it. It manages the execution of queries as it requests data from the storage engine and processes the results returned. Different Tasks of Relational Engine: Query Processing Memory Management Thread and Task Management Buffer Management Distributed Query Processing 2) Storage Engine: Storage Engine is responsible for storage and retrieval of the data on to the storage system (Disk, SAN etc.). to understand more, let’s focus on the following diagram. When we talk about any database in SQL server, there are 2 types of files that are created at the disk level – Data file and Log file. Data file physically stores the data in data pages. Log files that are also known as write ahead logs, are used for storing transactions performed on the database. Let’s understand data file and log file in more details: Data File: Data File stores data in the form of Data Page (8KB) and these data pages are logically organized in extents. Extents: Extents are logical units in the database. They are a combination of 8 data pages i.e. 64 KB forms an extent. Extents can be of two types, Mixed and Uniform. Mixed extents hold different types of pages like index, System, Object data etc. On the other hand, Uniform extents are dedicated to only one type. Pages: As we should know what type of data pages can be stored in SQL Server, below mentioned are some of them: Data Page: It holds the data entered by the user but not the data which is of type text, ntext, nvarchar(max), varchar(max), varbinary(max), image and xml data. Index: It stores the index entries. Text/Image: It stores LOB ( Large Object data) like text, ntext, varchar(max), nvarchar(max),  varbinary(max), image and xml data. GAM & SGAM (Global Allocation Map & Shared Global Allocation Map): They are used for saving information related to the allocation of extents. PFS (Page Free Space): Information related to page allocation and unused space available on pages. IAM (Index Allocation Map): Information pertaining to extents that are used by a table or index per allocation unit. BCM (Bulk Changed Map): Keeps information about the extents changed in a Bulk Operation. DCM (Differential Change Map): This is the information of extents that have modified since the last BACKUP DATABASE statement as per allocation unit. Log File: It also known as write ahead log. It stores modification to the database (DML and DDL). Sufficient information is logged to be able to: Roll back transactions if requested Recover the database in case of failure Write Ahead Logging is used to create log entries Transaction logs are written in chronological order in a circular way Truncation policy for logs is based on the recovery model SQL OS: This lies between the host machine (Windows OS) and SQL Server. All the activities performed on database engine are taken care of by SQL OS. It is a highly configurable operating system with powerful API (application programming interface), enabling automatic locality and advanced parallelism. SQL OS provides various operating system services, such as memory management deals with buffer pool, log buffer and deadlock detection using the blocking and locking structure. Other services include exception handling, hosting for external components like Common Language Runtime, CLR etc. I guess this brief article gives you an idea about the various terminologies used related to SQL Server Architecture. In future articles we will explore them further. Guest Author  The author of the article is Anil Kumar Yadav is Trainer, SQL Domain, Koenig Solutions. Koenig is a premier IT training firm that provides several IT certifications, such as Oracle 11g, Server+, RHCA, SQL Server Training, Prince2 Foundation etc. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – SSMS: Memory Usage By Memory Optimized Objects Report

  - by Pinal Dave

  At conferences and at speaking engagements at the local UG, there is one question that keeps on coming which I wish were never asked. The question around, “Why is SQL Server using up all the memory and not releasing even when idle?” Well, the answer can be long and with the release of SQL Server 2014, this got even more complicated. This release of SQL Server 2014 has the option of introducing In-Memory OLTP which is completely new concept and our dependency on memory has increased multifold. In reality, nothing much changes but we have memory optimized objects (Tables and Stored Procedures) additional which are residing completely in memory and improving performance. As a DBA, it is humanly impossible to get a hang of all the innovations and the new features introduced in the next version. So today’s blog is around the report added to SSMS which gives a high level view of this new feature addition. This reports is available only from SQL Server 2014 onwards because the feature was introduced in SQL Server 2014. Earlier versions of SQL Server Management Studio would not show the report in the list. If we try to launch the report on the database which is not having In-Memory File group defined, then we would see the message in report. To demonstrate, I have created new fresh database called MemoryOptimizedDB with no special file group. Here is the query used to identify whether a database has memory-optimized file group or not. SELECT TOP(1) 1 FROM sys.filegroups FG WHERE FG.[type] = 'FX' Once we add filegroup using below command, we would see different version of report. USE [master] GO ALTER DATABASE [MemoryOptimizedDB] ADD FILEGROUP [IMO_FG] CONTAINS MEMORY_OPTIMIZED_DATA GO The report is still empty because we have not defined any Memory Optimized table in the database.  Total allocated size is shown as 0 MB. Now, let’s add the folder location into the filegroup and also created few in-memory tables. We have used the nomenclature of IMO to denote “InMemory Optimized” objects. USE [master] GO ALTER DATABASE [MemoryOptimizedDB] ADD FILE ( NAME = N'MemoryOptimizedDB_IMO', FILENAME = N'E:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL12.SQL2014\MSSQL\DATA\MemoryOptimizedDB_IMO') TO FILEGROUP [IMO_FG] GO You may have to change the path based on your SQL Server configuration. Below is the script to create the table. USE MemoryOptimizedDB GO --Drop table if it already exists. IF OBJECT_ID('dbo.SQLAuthority','U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE dbo.SQLAuthority GO CREATE TABLE dbo.SQLAuthority ( ID INT IDENTITY NOT NULL, Name CHAR(500)  COLLATE Latin1_General_100_BIN2 NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Pinal', CONSTRAINT PK_SQLAuthority_ID PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED (ID), INDEX hash_index_sample_memoryoptimizedtable_c2 HASH (Name) WITH (BUCKET_COUNT = 131072) ) WITH (MEMORY_OPTIMIZED = ON, DURABILITY = SCHEMA_AND_DATA) GO As soon as above script is executed, table and index both are created. If we run the report again, we would see something like below. Notice that table memory is zero but index is using memory. This is due to the fact that hash index needs memory to manage the buckets created. So even if table is empty, index would consume memory. More about the internals of how In-Memory indexes and tables work will be reserved for future posts. Now, use below script to populate the table with 10000 rows INSERT INTO SQLAuthority VALUES (DEFAULT) GO 10000 Here is the same report after inserting 1000 rows into our InMemory table.    There are total three sections in the whole report. Total Memory consumed by In-Memory Objects Pie chart showing memory distribution based on type of consumer – table, index and system. Details of memory usage by each table. The information about all three is taken from one single DMV, sys.dm_db_xtp_table_memory_stats This DMV contains memory usage statistics for both user and system In-Memory tables. If we query the DMV and look at data, we can easily notice that the system tables have negative object IDs.  So, to look at user table memory usage, below is the over-simplified version of query. USE MemoryOptimizedDB GO SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), * FROM sys.dm_db_xtp_table_memory_stats WHERE OBJECT_ID > 0 GO This report would help DBA to identify which in-memory object taking lot of memory which can be used as a pointer for designing solution. I am sure in future we will discuss at lengths the whole concept of In-Memory tables in detail over this blog. To read more about In-Memory OLTP, have a look at In-Memory OLTP Series at Balmukund’s Blog. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Memory, SQL Reports

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