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  • gauge chart is not displaying any thing

    - by Sandy
    i am trying to display the latest speed in mysql database on guage chart. i have tried so many things but gauge is not display plz any can help me...my code is attached and php part shows the correct value but dont know why guage is not display <?php $host="localhost"; // Host name $username="root"; // Mysql username $password=""; // Mysql password $db_name="mysql"; // Database name $tbl_name="gpsdb"; // Table name // Connect to server and select database. $con=mysql_connect("$host", "$username")or die("cannot connect"); mysql_select_db("$db_name")or die("cannot select DB"); $data = mysql_query("SELECT speed FROM gpsdb WHERE DeviceId=1234 ORDER BY TIME DESC LIMIT 1") or die(mysql_error()); while ($nt = mysql_fetch_assoc($data)) { $speed = $nt['speed']; $jsonTable = json_encode($speed); echo $jsonTable; } ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> <title> Google Visualization API Sample </title> <script type="text/javascript" src="//www.google.com/jsapi"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> google.load('visualization', '1', {packages: ['gauge']}); </script> <script type="text/javascript"> function drawVisualization() { // Create and populate the data table. var data = new google.visualization.DataTable(<?=$speed?>); // Create and draw the visualization. new google.visualization.Gauge(document.getElementById('visualization')). draw(data); } google.setOnLoadCallback(drawVisualization); </script> </head> <body style="font-family: Arial;border: 0 none;"> <div id="visualization" style="width: 600px; height: 300px;"></div> </body> </html>

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  • Rails Active Record find(:all, :order => ) issue.

    - by CodingWithoutComments
    I seem to be unable to use :order_by for more than one column at a time. For example, I have a "Show" model with date and attending columns. If I run the following code: @shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date") I get the following results: [#<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>, #<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>, #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>, #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>, #<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>] If I run the following code: @shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "attending DESC") [#<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>, #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>, #<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>, #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>, #<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>] But, if I run: @shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date, attending DESC") OR @shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date, attending ASC") OR @shows = Show.find(:all, :order => "date ASC, attending DESC") I get the same results as only sorting by date: [#<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>, #<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>, #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>, #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>, #<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>] Where as, I want to get these results: [#<Show id: 1, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 78>, #<Show id: 7, date: "2009-04-18", attending: 2>, #<Show id: 2, date: "2009-04-19", attending: 91>, #<Show id: 3, date: "2009-04-20", attending: 16>, #<Show id: 4, date: "2009-04-21", attending: 136>] This is the query being generated from the logs: [4;35;1mUser Load (0.6ms)[0m [0mSELECT * FROM "users" WHERE ("users"."id" = 1) LIMIT 1[0m [4;36;1mShow Load (3.0ms)[0m [0;1mSELECT * FROM "shows" ORDER BY date ASC, attending DESC[0m [4;35;1mUser Load (0.6ms)[0m [0mSELECT * FROM "users" WHERE ("users"."id" = 1) [0m Finally, here is my model: create_table "shows", :force => true do |t| t.string "headliner" t.string "openers" t.string "venue" t.date "date" t.text "description" t.datetime "created_at" t.datetime "updated_at" t.decimal "price" t.time "showtime" t.integer "attending", :default => 0 t.string "time" end What am I missing? What am I doing wrong? UPDATE: Thanks for all your help, but it seems that all of you were stumped as much as I was. What solved the problem was actually switching databases. I switched from the default sqlite3 to mysql.

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  • Authlogic: passwords saved in the DB are not working as expected.

    - by user570459
    Hello everyone, Im having trouble with authlogic on my production server. Im able to update passwords in the database but when i try to validate a user using the new password, the validation fails. Please check the below console output. Notice how the salt and crypted_password fields get update before and after the new password is saved. The issue is only on my production server (running passenger). Everything works fine on my development machine. => #<User id: 3, login: "saravk", email: "[email protected]", crypted_password: "9bc86247105e940bb748ab680c0e77d9c44a82ea", salt: "WdVpQIdwl68k8lJWOU"> irb(main):003:0> u.password = "kettik123" => "kettik123" irb(main):004:0> u.password_confirmation = "kettik123" => "kettik123" irb(main):005:0> u.save! => true irb(main):006:0> u.valid_password?("kettik123") => true irb(main):007:0> u.reload => #<User id: 3, login: "saravk", email: "[email protected]", crypted_password: "f059007c56f498a12c63209c849c1e65bb151174", salt: "lVmmczhyGE0gxsbV421A"> irb(main):008:0> u.valid_password?("kettik123") => false The authlogic configuration in my User model.. class User < ActiveRecord::Base acts_as_authentic do |c| c.login_field :email c.validate_login_field false c.validate_email_field false c.perishable_token_valid_for = 1.day c.disable_perishable_token_maintenance = true end I use the email field as the main key for the user. Also the email field is allowed to be blank in some cases (eg a facebook user) Also i belive that my schema is proper (in terms of the length of the salt & crypted password fields) create_table "users", :force => true do |t| t.string "login" t.string "email" t.string "crypted_password", :limit => 128, :default => "" t.string "salt", Any help on this would be highly appreciated. Thanks.

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  • How to custom query using ORM in Fuelphp?

    - by viyancs
    I have a problem when I want to query table using ORM ,example I have article table with field id,author,text. My code like this : // Single where $article = Model_Article::find()->where('id', 4); print_r($article); that't code will be fetch all field on table article, it's like select * from article where id = 4 Try Possibility $article = Model_Article::find(null, array('id','title'))->where('id', 3); the response is object(Orm\Query)#89 (14) { ["model":protected]=> string(10) "Model_Article" ["connection":protected]=> NULL ["view":protected]=> NULL ["alias":protected]=> string(2) "t0" ["relations":protected]=> array(0) { } ["joins":protected]=> array(0) { } ["select":protected]=> array(1) { ["t0_c0"]=> string(5) "t0.id" } ["limit":protected]=> NULL ["offset":protected]=> NULL ["rows_limit":protected]=> NULL ["rows_offset":protected]=> NULL ["where":protected]=> array(1) { [0]=> array(2) { [0]=> string(9) "and_where" [1]=> array(3) { [0]=> string(5) "t0.id" [1]=> string(1) "=" [2]=> int(3) } } } ["order_by":protected]=> array(0) { } ["values":protected]=> array(0) { } } that's is not return id or title field. but when i'm try by adding get_one() method $article = Model_Article::find(null, array('id','title'))->where('id', 3)->get_one(); id is return , but title is not and another field, i don't know why ? Reference ORM Discussion FuelPHP it's say ORM currently will be select all column, no plans to change that at the moment. My Goal I want to query in orm like this select id,owner from article where id = 4 it's will be return only id & owner, how i can get that using orm ?

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  • Magento - How to select mysql rows by max value?

    - by Damodar Bashyal
    mysql> SELECT * FROM `log_customer` WHERE `customer_id` = 224 LIMIT 0, 30; +--------+------------+-------------+---------------------+-----------+----------+ | log_id | visitor_id | customer_id | login_at | logout_at | store_id | +--------+------------+-------------+---------------------+-----------+----------+ | 817 | 50139 | 224 | 2011-03-21 23:56:56 | NULL | 1 | | 830 | 52317 | 224 | 2011-03-27 23:43:54 | NULL | 1 | | 1371 | 136549 | 224 | 2011-11-16 04:33:51 | NULL | 1 | | 1495 | 164024 | 224 | 2012-02-08 01:05:48 | NULL | 1 | | 2130 | 281854 | 224 | 2012-11-13 23:44:13 | NULL | 1 | +--------+------------+-------------+---------------------+-----------+----------+ 5 rows in set (0.00 sec) mysql> SELECT * FROM `customer_entity` WHERE `entity_id` = 224; +-----------+----------------+---------------------------+----------+---------------------+---------------------+ | entity_id | entity_type_id | email | group_id | created_at | updated_at | +-----------+----------------+---------------------------+----------+---------------------+---------------------+ | 224 | 1 | [email protected] | 3 | 2011-03-21 04:59:17 | 2012-11-13 23:46:23 | +-----------+----------------+---------------------------+----------+--------------+----------+-----------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) How can i search for customers who hasn't logged in for last 10 months and their account has not been updated for last 10 months. I tried below but failed. $collection = Mage::getModel('customer/customer')->getCollection(); $collection->getSelect()->joinRight(array('l'=>'log_customer'), "customer_id=entity_id AND MAX(l.login_at) <= '" . date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('10 months ago')) . "'")->group('e.entity_id'); $collection->addAttributeToSelect('*'); $collection->addFieldToFilter('updated_at', array( 'lt' => date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('10 months ago')), 'datetime'=>true, )); $collection->addAttributeToFilter('group_id', array( 'neq' => 5, )); Above tables have one customer for reference. I have no idea how to use MAX() on joins. Thanks UPDATE: This seems returning correct data, but I would like to do magento way using resource collection, so i don't need to do load customer again on for loop. $read = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource')->getConnection('core_read'); $sql = "select * from ( select e.*,l.login_at from customer_entity as e left join log_customer as l on l.customer_id=e.entity_id group by e.entity_id order by l.login_at desc ) as l where ( l.login_at <= '".date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('10 months ago'))."' or ( l.created_at <= '".date('Y-m-d H:i:s', strtotime('10 months ago'))."' and l.login_at is NULL ) ) and group_id != 5"; $result = $read->fetchAll($sql); I have loaded full shell script to github https://github.com/dbashyal/Magento-ecommerce-Shell-Scripts/blob/master/shell/suspendCustomers.php

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  • Delete duplicate rows, do not preserve one row

    - by Radley
    I need a query that goes through each entry in a database, checks if a single value is duplicated elsewhere in the database, and if it is - deletes both entries (or all, if more than two). Problem is the entries are URLs, up to 255 characters, with no way of identifying the row. Some existing answers on Stackoverflow do not work for me due to performance limitations, or they use uniqueid which obviously won't work when dealing with a string. Long Version: I have two databases containing URLs (and only URLs). One database has around 3,000 urls and the other around 1,000. However, a large majority of the 1,000 urls were taken from the 3,000 url database. I need to merge the 1,000 into the 3,000 as new entries only. For this, I made a third database with combined URLs from both tables, about 4,000 entries. I need to find all duplicate entries in this database and delete them (Both of them, without leaving either). I have followed the query of a few examples on this site, but whenever I try to delete both entries it ends up deleting all the entries, or giving sql errors. Alternatively: I have two databases, each containing the separate database. I need to check each row from one database against the other to find any that aren't duplicates, and then add those to a third database. Edit: I've got my own PHP solution which is pretty hacky, but works. I cannot answer my own question for 8 hours because I'm new, so here it is for now: I went with a PHP script to accomplish this, as I'm more familiar with PHP than MySQL. This generates a simple list of urls that only exist in the target database, but not both. If you have more than 7,000 entries to parse this may take awhile, and you will need to copy/paste the results into a text file or expand the script to store them back into a database. I'm just doing it manually to save time. Note: Uses MeekroDB <pre> <?php require('meekrodb.2.1.class.php'); DB::$user = 'root'; DB::$password = ''; DB::$dbName = 'testdb'; $all = DB::query('SELECT * FROM old_urls LIMIT 7000'); foreach($all as $row) { $test = DB::query('SELECT url FROM new_urls WHERE url=%s', $row['url']); if (!is_array($test)) { echo $row['url'] . "\n"; }else{ if (count($test) == 0) { echo $row['url'] . "\n"; } } } ?> </pre>

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  • priority_queue with dynamic priorities

    - by Layne
    Hey, I have a server application which accepts incomming queries and executes them. If there are too many queries they should be queued and if some of the other queries got executed the queued queries should be executed as well. Since I want to pass queries with different priorities I think using a priority_queue would be the best choice. e.g. The amout of the axcepting queries (a) hit the limt and new queries will be stored in the queue. All queries have a priority of 1 (lowest) if some of the queries from (a) get executed the programm will pick the query with the highest priority out of the queue and execute it. Still no problem. Now someone is sending a query with a priority of 5 which gets added to the queue. Since this is the query with the highest priority the application will execute this query as soon as the running queries no longer hit the limit. There might be the worst case that 500 queries with a priority of 1 are queued but wont be executed since someone is always sending queries with a priority of 5 hence these 500 queries will be queued for a looooong time. In order to prevent that I want to increase the prioritiy of all queries which have a lower priority than the query with the higher priority, in this example which have a priority lower than 5. So if the query with a priority of 5 gets pulled out of the queue all other queries with a priority < 5 should be increased by 0.2. This way queries with a low priority wont be queued for ever even if there might be 100 queries with a higher priority. I really hope can help me to solve the problem with the priorities: Since my queries consist of an object I thought something like this might work: class Query { public: Query( std::string p_stQuery ) : stQuery( p_stQuery ) {}; std::string getQuery() const {return stQuery;}; void increasePriority( const float fIncrease ) {fPriority += fIncrease;}; friend bool operator < ( const Query& PriorityFirst, const Query& PriorityNext ) { if( PriorityFirst.fPriority < PriorityNext.fPriority ) { if( PriorityFirst.fStartPriority < PriorityNext.fStartPriority ) { Query qTemp = PriorityFirst; qTemp.increasePriority( INCREASE_RATE ); } return true; } else { return false; } }; private: static const float INCREASE_RATE = 0.2; float fPriority; // current priority float fStartPriority; // initialised priority std::string stQuery; };

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  • PHP array performance

    - by dfo
    Hi, this is my first question on Stackoverflow, please bear with me. I'm testing an algorithm for 2d bin packing and I've chosen PHP to mock it up as it's my bread-and-butter language nowadays. As you can see on http://themworks.com/pack_v0.2/oopack.php?ol=1 it works pretty well, but you need to wait around 10-20 seconds for 100 rectangles to pack. For some hard to handle sets it would hit the php's 30s runtime limit. I did some profiling and it shows that most of the time my script goes through different parts of a small 2d array with 0's and 1's in it. It either checks if certain cell equals to 0/1 or sets it to 0/1. It can do such operations million times and each times it takes few microseconds. I guess I could use an array of booleans in a statically typed language and things would be faster. Or even make an array of 1 bit values. I'm thinking of converting the whole thing to some compiled language. Is PHP just not good for it? If I do need to convert it to let's say C++, how good are the automatic converters? My script is just a lot of for loops with basic arrays and objects manipulations. Thank you! Edit. This function gets called more than any other. It reads few properties of a very simple object, and goes through a very small part of a smallish array to check if there's any element not equal to 0. function fits($bin, $file, $x, $y) { $flag = true; $xw = $x + $file->get_width();; $yh = $y + $file->get_height(); for ($i = $x; $i < $xw; $i++) { for ($j = $y; $j < $yh; $j++) { if ($bin[$i][$j] !== 0) { $flag = false; break; } } if (!$flag) break; } return $flag; }

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  • PHP send batch email [closed]

    - by qalbiol
    Possible Duplicate: Sending mass email using PHP I have a PHP script that sends an individual email to all users in my DB, such as a monthly / weekly newsletter. The code I am using goes as follows: $subject = $_POST['subject']; $message = $_POST['message']; // Get all the mailing list subscribers. $query = $db->prepare("SELECT * FROM maildb"); $query->execute(); // Loop through all susbcribers, and send and individual email. foreach ($query as $row) { // Setting maximum time limit to infinite. set_time_limit(0); $newMessage = '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> </head> <body>'; // Search for the [unsubscribe] tag and replace it with a URL for the user to unsubscribe $newMessage .= str_replace("[unsubscribe]", "<a href='".BASE_URL."unsubscribe/".$row['hash']."/".$row['email']."'>unsubscribe</a>", $message); $newMessage .= '</body></html>'; $to = $row['email']; // Establish content headers $headers = "From: [email protected]"."\n"; $headers .= "Reply-To: [email protected]"."\n"; $headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP v.". phpversion()."\n"; $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0"."\n"; $headers .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"."\n"; $headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit;"; mail($to, $subject, $newMessage, $headers); // Send email to each individual user } This code works perfectly with a REALLY small database... I recently populated my test db with 200k+ users, and obviously this script fails, gets out of memory, and dies... I know this is a bad way to send so many emails, thats why I'd like to ask you for much more efficient ways to do this! Thank you very much!

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  • ActiveX component can't create Object Error? Check 64 bit Status

    - by Rick Strahl
    If you're running on IIS 7 and a 64 bit operating system you might run into the following error using ASP classic or ASP.NET with COM interop. In classic ASP applications the error will show up as: ActiveX component can't create object   (Error 429) (actually without error handling the error just shows up as 500 error page) In my case the code that's been giving me problems has been a FoxPro COM object I'd been using to serve banner ads to some of my pages. The code basically looks up banners from a database table and displays them at random. The ASP classic code that uses it looks like this: <% Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" Response.Write(banner.GetBanner(-1)) %> Originally this code had no specific error checking as above so the ASP pages just failed with 500 error pages from the Web server. To find out what the problem is this code is more useful at least for debugging: <% ON ERROR RESUME NEXT Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") Response.Write(err.Number & " - " & err.Description) banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" Response.Write(banner.GetBanner(-1)) %> which results in: 429 - ActiveX component can't create object which at least gives you a slight clue. In ASP.NET invoking the same COM object with code like this: <% dynamic banner = wwUtils.CreateComInstance("wwBanner.aspBanner") as dynamic; banner.cBANNERFILE = "wwsitebanners"; Response.Write(banner.getBanner(-1)); %> results in: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {B5DCBB81-D5F5-11D2-B85E-00600889F23B} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)). The class is in fact registered though and the COM server loads fine from a command prompt or other COM client. This error can be caused by a COM server that doesn't load. It looks like a COM registration error. There are a number of traditional reasons why this error can crop up of course. The server isn't registered (run regserver32 to register a DLL server or /regserver on an EXE server) Access permissions aren't set on the COM server (Web account has to be able to read the DLL ie. Network service) The COM server fails to load during initialization ie. failing during startup One thing I always do to check for COM errors fire up the server in a COM client outside of IIS and ensure that it works there first - it's almost always easier to debug a server outside of the Web environment. In my case I tried the server in Visual FoxPro on the server with: loBanners = CREATEOBJECT("wwBanner.aspBanner") loBanners.cBannerFile = "wwsitebanners" ? loBanners.GetBanner(-1) and it worked just fine. If you don't have a full dev environment on the server you can also use VBScript do the same thing and run the .vbs file from the command prompt: Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" MsgBox(banner.getBanner(-1)) Since this both works it tells me the server is registered and working properly. This leaves startup failures or permissions as the problem. I double checked permissions for the Application Pool and the permissions of the folder where the DLL lives and both are properly set to allow access by the Application Pool impersonated user. Just to be sure I assigned an Admin user to the Application Pool but still no go. So now what? 64 bit Servers Ahoy A couple of weeks back I had set up a few of my Application pools to 64 bit mode. My server is Server 2008 64 bit and by default Application Pools run 64 bit. Originally when I installed the server I set up most of my Application Pools to 32 bit mainly for backwards compatibility. But as more of my code migrates to 64 bit OS's I figured it'd be a good idea to see how well code runs under 64 bit code. The transition has been mostly painless. Until today when I noticed the problem with the code above when scrolling to my IIS logs and noticing a lot of 500 errors on many of my ASP classic pages. The code in question in most of these pages deals with this single simple COM object. It took a while to figure out that the problem is caused by the Application Pool running in 64 bit mode. The issue is that 32 bit COM objects (ie. my old Visual FoxPro COM component) cannot be loaded in a 64 bit Application Pool. The ASP pages using this COM component broke on the day I switched my main Application Pool into 64 bit mode but I didn't find the problem until I searched my logs for errors by pure chance. To fix this is easy enough once you know what the problem is by switching the Application Pool to Enable 32-bit Applications: Once this is done the COM objects started working correctly again. 64 bit ASP and ASP.NET with DCOM Servers This is kind of off topic, but incidentally it's possible to load 32 bit DCOM (out of process) servers from ASP.NET and ASP classic even if those applications run in 64 bit application pools. In fact, in West Wind Web Connection I use this capability to run a 64 bit ASP.NET handler that talks to a 32 bit FoxPro COM server which allows West Wind Web Connection to run in native 64 bit mode without custom configuration (which is actually quite useful). It's probably not a common usage scenario but it's good to know that you can actually access 32 bit COM objects this way from ASP.NET. For West Wind Web Connection this works out well as the DCOM interface only makes one non-chatty call to the backend server that handles all the rest of the request processing. Application Pool Isolation is your Friend For me the recent incident of failure in the classic ASP pages has just been another reminder to be very careful with moving applications to 64 bit operation. There are many little traps when switching to 64 bit that are very difficult to track and test for. I described one issue I had a couple of months ago where one of the default ASP.NET filters was loading the wrong version (32bit instead of 64bit) which was extremely difficult to track down and was caused by a very sneaky configuration switch error (basically 3 different entries for the same ISAPI filter all with different bitness settings). It took me almost a full day to track this down). Recently I've been taken to isolate individual applications into separate Application Pools rather than my past practice of combining many apps into shared AppPools. This is a good practice assuming you have enough memory to make this work. Application Pool isolate provides more modularity and allows me to selectively move applications to 64 bit. The error above came about precisely because I moved one of my most populous app pools to 64 bit and forgot about the minimal COM object use in some of my old pages. It's easy to forget. To 64bit or Not Is it worth it to move to 64 bit? Currently I'd say -not really. In my - admittedly limited - testing I don't see any significant performance increases. In fact 64 bit apps just seem to consume considerably more memory (30-50% more in my pools on average) and performance is minimally improved (less than 5% at the very best) in the load testing I've performed on a couple of sites in both modes. The only real incentive for 64 bit would be applications that require huge data spaces that exceed the 32 bit 4 gigabyte memory limit. However I have a hard time imagining an application that needs 4 gigs of memory in a single Application Pool :-). Curious to hear other opinions on benefits of 64 bit operation. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in COM   ASP.NET  FoxPro  

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  • AutoMapper MappingFunction from Source Type of NameValueCollection

    - by REA_ANDREW
    I have had a situation arise today where I need to construct a complex type from a source of a NameValueCollection.  A little while back I submitted a patch for the Agatha Project to include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract.  I realized today that as useful as it is, it did not actually support true REST conformance, as REST should support GET so that you can use JSONP from JavaScript directly meaning you can query cross domain services.  My original implementation for POX and JSON used the POST method and this immediately rules out JSONP as from reading, JSONP only works with GET Requests. This then raised another issue.  The current operation contract of Agatha and one of its main benefits is that you can supply an array of Request objects in a single request, limiting the about of server requests you need to make.  Now, at the present time I am thinking that this will not be the case for the REST imlementation but will yield the benefits of the fact that : The same Request objects can be used for SOAP and RST (POX, JSON) The construct of the JavaScript functions will be simpler and more readable It will enable the use of JSONP for cross domain REST Services The current contract for the Agatha WcfRequestProcessor is at time of writing the following: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessRequests")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] Response[] Process(params Request[] requests); [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessOneWayRequests", IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] void ProcessOneWayRequests(params OneWayRequest[] requests); }   My current proposed solution, and at the very early stages of my concept is as follows: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRestJsonRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name="process")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] Response[] Process(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); [OperationContract(Name="processoneway",IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process-one-way/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] void ProcessOneWayRequests(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); }   Now this part I have not yet implemented, it is the preliminart step which I have developed which will allow me to take the name of the Request Type and the NameValueCollection and construct the complex type which is that of the Request which I can then supply to a nested instance of the original IWcfRequestProcessor  and work as it should normally.  To give an example of some of the urls which you I envisage with this method are: http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getweather/?location=london http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getproductsbycategory/?categoryid=1 http://www.url.om/service.svc/json/process/sayhello/?name=andy Another reason why my direction has gone to a single request for the REST implementation is because of restrictions which are imposed by browsers on the length of the url.  From what I have read this is on average 2000 characters.  I think that this is a very acceptable usage limit in the context of using 1 request, but I do not think this is acceptable for accommodating multiple requests chained together.  I would love to be corrected on that one, I really would but unfortunately from what I have read I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. The mapping function So, as I say this is just the first pass I have made at this, and I am not overly happy with the try catch for detecting types without default constructors.  I know there is a better way but for the minute, it escapes me.  I would also like to know the correct way for adding mapping functions and not using the anonymous way that I have used.  To achieve this I have used recursion which I am sure is what other mapping function use. As you do have to go as deep as the complex type is. public static object RecurseType(NameValueCollection collection, Type type, string prefix) { try { var returnObject = Activator.CreateInstance(type); foreach (var property in type.GetProperties()) { foreach (var key in collection.AllKeys) { if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) || key.Length > prefix.Length) { var propertyNameToMatch = String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) ? key : key.Substring(property.Name.IndexOf(prefix) + prefix.Length + 1); if (property.Name == propertyNameToMatch) { property.SetValue(returnObject, Convert.ChangeType(collection.Get(key), property.PropertyType), null); } else if(property.GetValue(returnObject,null) == null) { property.SetValue(returnObject, RecurseType(collection, property.PropertyType, String.Concat(prefix, property.PropertyType.Name)), null); } } } } return returnObject; } catch (MissingMethodException) { //Quite a blunt way of dealing with Types without default constructor return null; } }   Another thing is performance, I have not measured this in anyway, it is as I say the first pass, so I hope this can be the start of a more perfected implementation.  I tested this out with a complex type of three levels, there is no intended logical meaning to the properties, they are simply for the purposes of example.  You could call this a spiking session, as from here on in, now I know what I am building I would take a more TDD approach.  OK, purists, why did I not do this from the start, well I didn’t, this was a brain dump and now I know what I am building I can. The console test and how I used with AutoMapper is as follows: static void Main(string[] args) { var collection = new NameValueCollection(); collection.Add("Name", "Andrew Rea"); collection.Add("Number", "1"); collection.Add("AddressLine1", "123 Street"); collection.Add("AddressNumber", "2"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeCountry", "United Kingdom"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeNumber", "3"); AutoMapper.Mapper.CreateMap<NameValueCollection, Person>() .ConvertUsing(x => { return(Person) RecurseType(x, typeof(Person), null); }); var person = AutoMapper.Mapper.Map<NameValueCollection, Person>(collection); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); Console.WriteLine(person.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Line1); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Country); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Number); Console.ReadLine(); }   Notice the convention that I am using and that this method requires you do use.  Each property is prefixed with the constructed name of its parents combined.  This is the convention used by AutoMapper and it makes sense. I can also think of other uses for this including using with ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders for creating a complex type from the QueryString which is itself is a NameValueCollection. Hope this is of some help to people and I would welcome any code reviews you could give me. References: Agatha : http://code.google.com/p/agatha-rrsl/ AutoMapper : http://automapper.codeplex.com/   Cheers for now, Andrew   P.S. I will have the proposed solution for a more complete REST implementation for AGATHA very soon. 

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  • Database users in the Oracle Utilities Application Framework

    - by Anthony Shorten
    I mentioned the product database users fleetingly in the last blog post and they deserve a better mention. This applies to all versions of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. The Oracle Utilities Application Framework uses up to three users initially as part of the base operations of the product. The type of database supported (the framework supports Oracle, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server) dictates the number of users used and their permissions. For publishing brevity I will outline what is available for the Oracle database and, in summary, mention where it differs for the other database supported. For Oracle database customers we ship three distinct database users: Administration User (SPLADM or CISADM by default) - This is the database user that actually owns the schema. This user is not used by the product to do any DML (Data Manipulation Language) SQL other than that is necessary for maintenance of the database. This database user performs all the DCL (Data Control Language) and DDL (Data Definition Language) against the database. It is typically reserved for Database Administration use only. Product Read Write User (SPLUSER or CISUSER by default) - This is the database user used by the product itself to execute DML (Data Manipulation Language) statements against the schema owned by the Administration user. This user has the appropriate read and write permission to objects within the schema owned by the Administration user. For databases such as DB2 and SQL Server we may not create this user but use other DCL (Data Control Language) statements and facilities to simulate this user. Product Read User (SPLREAD or CISREAD by default) - This is the database that has read only permission to the schema owned by the Administration user. It is used for reporting or any part of the product or interface that requires read permissions to the database (for example, products that have ConfigLab and Archiving use this user for remote access). For databases such as DB2 and SQL Server we may not create this user but use other DCL (Data Control Language) statements and facilities to simulate this user. You may notice the words by default in the list above. The values supplied with the installer are the default and can be changed to what the site standard or implementation wants to use (as long as they conform to the standards supported by the underlying database). You can even create multiples of each within the same database and pointing to same schema. To manage the permissions for the users, there is a utility provided with the installation (oragensec (Oracle), db2gensec (DB2) or msqlgensec (SQL Server)) that generates the security definitions for the above users. That can be executed a number of times for each schema to give users appropriate permissions. For example, it is possible to define more than one read/write User to access the database. This is a common technique used by implementations to have a different user per access mode (to separate online and batch). In fact you can also allocate additional security (such as resource profiles in Oracle) to limit the impact of specific users at the database. To facilitate users and permissions, in Oracle for example, we create a CISREAD role (read only role) and a CISUSER role (read write role) that can be allocated to the appropriate database user. When the security permissions utility, oragensec in this case, is executed it uses the role to determine the permissions. To give you a case study, my underpowered laptop has multiple installations on it of multiple products but I have one database. I create a different schema for each product and each version (with my own naming convention to help me manage the databases). I create individual users on each schema and run oragensec to maintain the permissions for each appropriately. It works fine as long I have setup the userids appropriately. This means: Creating the users with the appropriate roles. I use the common CISUSER and CISREAD role across versions and across Oracle Utilities Application Framework products. Just remember to associate the CISUSER role with the database user you want to use for read/write operations and the CISREAD role with the user you wish to use for the read only operations. The role is treated as a tag to indicate the oragensec utility which appropriate permissions to assign to the user. The utilities for the other database types essentially do the same, obviously using the technology available within those databases. Run oragensec against the read write user and read only user against the appropriate administration user (I will abbreviate the user to ADM user). This ensures the right permissions are allocated to the right users for the right products. To help me there, I use the same prefix on the user name for the same product. For example, my Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4 environment has the administration user set to FW4ADM and the associated FW4USER and FW4READ as the users for the product to use. For my MWM environment I used MWMADM for the administration user and MWMUSER and MWMREAD for my associated users. You get the picture. When I run oragensec (once for each ADM user), I know what other users to associate with it. Remember to rerun oragensec against the users if I run upgrades, service packs or database based single fixes. This assures that the users are in synchronization with the ADM user. As a side note, for those who do not understand the difference between DML, DCL and DDL: DDL (Data Definition Language) - These are SQL statements that define the database schema and the structures within. SQL Statements such as CREATE and DROP are examples of DDL SQL statements. DCL (Data Control Language) - These are the SQL statements that define the database level permissions to DDL maintained objects within the database. SQL Statements such as GRANT and REVOKE are examples of DCL SQL statements. DML (Database Manipulation Language) - These are SQL statements that alter the data within the tables. SQL Statements such as SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE are examples of DML SQL statements. Hope this has clarified the database user support. Remember in Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4 we enhanced this by also supporting CLIENT_IDENTIFIER to allow the database to still use the administration user for the main processing but make the database session more traceable.

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  • SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Part 3

    - by SQLOS Team
    In parts 1 and 2 of this series we looked at the basics of Hyper-V Dynamic Memory and SQL Server memory management. In this part Serdar looks at configuration guidelines for SQL Server memory management. Part 3: Configuration Guidelines for Hyper-V Dynamic Memory and SQL Server Now that we understand SQL Server Memory Management and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory basics, let’s take a look at general configuration guidelines in order to utilize benefits of Hyper-V Dynamic Memory in your SQL Server VMs. Requirements Host Operating System Requirements Hyper-V Dynamic Memory feature is introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Therefore in order to use Dynamic Memory for your virtual machines, you need to have Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1 in your Hyper-V host. Guest Operating System Requirements In addition to this Dynamic Memory is only supported in Standard, Web, Enterprise and Datacenter editions of windows running inside VMs. Make sure that your VM is running one of these editions. For additional requirements on each operating system see “Dynamic Memory Configuration Guidelines” here. SQL Server Requirements All versions of SQL Server support Hyper-V Dynamic Memory. However, only certain editions of SQL Server are aware of dynamically changing system memory. To have a truly dynamic environment for your SQL Server VMs make sure that you are running one of the SQL Server editions listed below: ·         SQL Server 2005 Enterprise ·         SQL Server 2008 Enterprise / Datacenter Editions ·         SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise / Datacenter Editions Configuration guidelines for other versions of SQL Server are covered below in the FAQ section. Guidelines for configuring Dynamic Memory Parameters Here is how to configure Dynamic Memory for your SQL VMs in a nutshell: Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Parameter Recommendation Startup RAM 1 GB + SQL Min Server Memory Maximum RAM > SQL Max Server Memory Memory Buffer % 5 Memory Weight Based on performance needs   Startup RAM In order to ensure that your SQL Server VMs can start correctly, ensure that Startup RAM is higher than configured SQL Min Server Memory for your VMs. Otherwise SQL Server service will need to do paging in order to start since it will not be able to see enough memory during startup. Also note that Startup Memory will always be reserved for your VMs. This will guarantee a certain level of performance for your SQL Servers, however setting this too high will limit the consolidation benefits you’ll get out of your virtualization environment. Maximum RAM This one is obvious. If you’ve configured SQL Max Server Memory for your SQL Server, make sure that Dynamic Memory Maximum RAM configuration is higher than this value. Otherwise your SQL Server will not grow to memory values higher than the value configured for Dynamic Memory. Memory Buffer % Memory buffer configuration is used to provision file cache to virtual machines in order to improve performance. Due to the fact that SQL Server is managing its own buffer pool, Memory Buffer setting should be configured to the lowest value possible, 5%. Configuring a higher memory buffer will prevent low resource notifications from Windows Memory Manager and it will prevent reclaiming memory from SQL Server VMs. Memory Weight Memory weight configuration defines the importance of memory to a VM. Configure higher values for the VMs that have higher performance requirements. VMs with higher memory weight will have more memory under high memory pressure conditions on your host. Questions and Answers Q1 – Which SQL Server memory model is best for Dynamic Memory? The best SQL Server model for Dynamic Memory is “Locked Page Memory Model”. This memory model ensures that SQL Server memory is never paged out and it’s also adaptive to dynamically changing memory in the system. This will be extremely useful when Dynamic Memory is attempting to remove memory from SQL Server VMs ensuring no SQL Server memory is paged out. You can find instructions on configuring “Locked Page Memory Model” for your SQL Servers here. Q2 – What about other SQL Server Editions, how should I configure Dynamic Memory for them? Other editions of SQL Server do not adapt to dynamically changing environments. They will determine how much memory they should allocate during startup and don’t change this value afterwards. Therefore make sure that you configure a higher startup memory for your VM because that will be all the memory that SQL Server utilize Tune Maximum Memory and Memory Buffer based on the other workloads running on the system. If there are no other workloads consider using Static Memory for these editions. Q3 – What if I have multiple SQL Server instances in a VM? Having multiple SQL Server instances in a VM is not a general recommendation for predictable performance, manageability and isolation. In order to achieve a predictable behavior make sure that you configure SQL Min Server Memory and SQL Max Server Memory for each instance in the VM. And make sure that: ·         Dynamic Memory Startup Memory is greater than the sum of SQL Min Server Memory values for the instances in the VM ·         Dynamic Memory Maximum Memory is greater than the sum of SQL Max Server Memory values for the instances in the VM Q4 – I’m using Large Page Memory Model for my SQL Server. Can I still use Dynamic Memory? The short answer is no. SQL Server does not dynamically change its memory size when configured with Large Page Memory Model. In virtualized environments Hyper-V provides large page support by default. Most of the time, Large Page Memory Model doesn’t bring any benefits to a SQL Server if it’s running in virtualized environments. Q5 – How do I monitor SQL performance when I’m trying Dynamic Memory on my VMs? Use the performance counters below to monitor memory performance for SQL Server: Process - Working Set: This counter is available in the VM via process performance counters. It represents the actual amount of physical memory being used by SQL Server process in the VM. SQL Server – Buffer Cache Hit Ratio: This counter is available in the VM via SQL Server counters. This represents the paging being done by SQL Server. A rate of 90% or higher is desirable. Conclusion These blog posts are a quick start to a story that will be developing more in the near future. We’re still continuing our testing and investigations to provide more detailed configuration guidelines with example performance numbers with a white paper in the upcoming months. Now it’s time to give SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory a try. Use this guidelines to kick-start your environment. See what you think about it and let us know of your experiences. - Serdar Sutay Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

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  • Understanding 400 Bad Request Exception

    - by imran_ku07
        Introduction:          Why I am getting this exception? What is the cause of this error. Developers are always curious to know the root cause of an exception, even though they found the solution from elsewhere. So what is the reason of this exception (400 Bad Request).The answer is security. Security is an important feature for any application. ASP.NET try to his best to give you more secure application environment as possible. One important security feature is related to URLs. Because there are various ways a hacker can try to access server resource. Therefore it is important to make your application as secure as possible. Fortunately, ASP.NET provides this security by throwing an exception of Bad Request whenever he feels. In this Article I am try to present when ASP.NET feels to throw this exception. You will also see some new ASP.NET 4 features which gives developers some control on this situation.   Description:   http.sys Restrictions:           It is interesting to note that after deploying your application on windows server that runs IIS 6 or higher, the first receptionist of HTTP request is the kernel mode HTTP driver: http.sys. Therefore for completing your request successfully you need to present your validity to http.sys and must pass the http.sys restriction.           Every http request URL must not contain any character from ASCII range of 0x00 to 0x1F, because they are not printable. These characters are invalid because these are invalid URL characters as defined in RFC 2396 of the IETF. But a question may arise that how it is possible to send unprintable character. The answer is that when you send your request from your application in binary format.           Another restriction is on the size of the request. A request containg protocal, server name, headers, query string information and individual headers sent along with the request must not exceed 16KB. Also individual header should not exceed 16KB.           Any individual path segment (the portion of the URL that does not include protocol, server name, and query string, for example, http://a/b/c?d=e,  here the b and c are individual path) must not contain more than 260 characters. Also http.sys disallows URLs that have more than 255 path segments.           If any of the above rules are not follow then you will get 400 Bad Request Exception. The reason for this restriction is due to hack attacks against web servers involve encoding the URL with different character representations.           You can change the default behavior enforced by http.sys using some Registry switches present at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\HTTP\Parameters    ASP.NET Restrictions:           After passing the restrictions enforced by the kernel mode http.sys then the request is handed off to IIS and then to ASP.NET engine and then again request has to pass some restriction from ASP.NET in order to complete it successfully.           ASP.NET only allows URL path lengths to 260 characters(only paths, for example http://a/b/c/d, here path is from a to d). This means that if you have long paths containing 261 characters then you will get the Bad Request exception. This is due to NTFS file-path limit.           Another restriction is that which characters can be used in URL path portion.You can use any characters except some characters because they are called invalid characters in path. Here are some of these invalid character in the path portion of a URL, <,>,*,%,&,:,\,?. For confirming this just right click on your Solution Explorer and Add New Folder and name this File to any of the above character, you will get the message. Files or folders cannot be empty strings nor they contain only '.' or have any of the following characters.....            For checking the above situation i have created a Web Application and put Default.aspx inside A%A folder (created from windows explorer), then navigate to, http://localhost:1234/A%25A/Default.aspx, what i get response from server is the Bad Request exception. The reason is that %25 is the % character which is invalid URL path character in ASP.NET. However you can use these characters in query string.           The reason for these restrictions are due to security, for example with the help of % you can double encode the URL path portion and : is used to get some specific resource from server.   New ASP.NET 4 Features:           It is worth to discuss the new ASP.NET 4 features that provides some control in the hand of developer. Previously we are restricted to 260 characters path length and restricted to not use some of characters, means these characters cannot become the part of the URL path segment.           You can configure maxRequestPathLength and maxQueryStringLength to allow longer or shorter paths and query strings. You can also customize set of invalid character using requestPathInvalidChars, under httpruntime element. This may be the good news for someone who needs to use some above character in their application which was invalid in previous versions. You can find further detail about new ASP.NET features about URL at here           Note that the above new ASP.NET settings will not effect http.sys. This means that you have pass the restriction of http.sys before ASP.NET ever come in to the action. Note also that previous restriction of http.sys is applied on individual path and maxRequestPathLength is applied on the complete path (the portion of the URL that does not include protocol, server name, and query string). For example, if URL is http://a/b/c/d?e=f, then maxRequestPathLength will takes, a/b/c/d, into account while http.sys will take a, b, c individually.   Summary:           Hopefully this will helps you to know how some of initial security features comes in to play, but i also recommend that you should read (at least first chapter called Initial Phases of a Web Request of) Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management by Stefan Schackow. This is really a nice book.

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  • Session memory – who’s this guy named Max and what’s he doing with my memory?

    - by extended_events
    SQL Server MVP Jonathan Kehayias (blog) emailed me a question last week when he noticed that the total memory used by the buffers for an event session was larger than the value he specified for the MAX_MEMORY option in the CREATE EVENT SESSION DDL. The answer here seems like an excellent subject for me to kick-off my new “401 – Internals” tag that identifies posts where I pull back the curtains a bit and let you peek into what’s going on inside the extended events engine. In a previous post (Option Trading: Getting the most out of the event session options) I explained that we use a set of buffers to store the event data before  we write the event data to asynchronous targets. The MAX_MEMORY along with the MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE defines how big each buffer will be. Theoretically, that means that I can predict the size of each buffer using the following formula: max memory / # of buffers = buffer size If it was that simple I wouldn’t be writing this post. I’ll take “boundary” for 64K Alex For a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this blog, we create event buffers in 64K chunks. The result of this is that the buffer size indicated by the formula above is rounded up to the next 64K boundary and that is the size used to create the buffers. If you think visually, this means that the graph of your max_memory option compared to the actual buffer size that results will look like a set of stairs rather than a smooth line. You can see this behavior by looking at the output of dm_xe_sessions, specifically the fields related to the buffer sizes, over a range of different memory inputs: Note: This test was run on a 2 core machine using per_cpu partitioning which results in 5 buffers. (Seem my previous post referenced above for the math behind buffer count.) input_memory_kb total_regular_buffers regular_buffer_size total_buffer_size 637 5 130867 654335 638 5 130867 654335 639 5 130867 654335 640 5 196403 982015 641 5 196403 982015 642 5 196403 982015 This is just a segment of the results that shows one of the “jumps” between the buffer boundary at 639 KB and 640 KB. You can verify the size boundary by doing the math on the regular_buffer_size field, which is returned in bytes: 196403 – 130867 = 65536 bytes 65536 / 1024 = 64 KB The relationship between the input for max_memory and when the regular_buffer_size is going to jump from one 64K boundary to the next is going to change based on the number of buffers being created. The number of buffers is dependent on the partition mode you choose. If you choose any partition mode other than NONE, the number of buffers will depend on your hardware configuration. (Again, see the earlier post referenced above.) With the default partition mode of none, you always get three buffers, regardless of machine configuration, so I generated a “range table” for max_memory settings between 1 KB and 4096 KB as an example. start_memory_range_kb end_memory_range_kb total_regular_buffers regular_buffer_size total_buffer_size 1 191 NULL NULL NULL 192 383 3 130867 392601 384 575 3 196403 589209 576 767 3 261939 785817 768 959 3 327475 982425 960 1151 3 393011 1179033 1152 1343 3 458547 1375641 1344 1535 3 524083 1572249 1536 1727 3 589619 1768857 1728 1919 3 655155 1965465 1920 2111 3 720691 2162073 2112 2303 3 786227 2358681 2304 2495 3 851763 2555289 2496 2687 3 917299 2751897 2688 2879 3 982835 2948505 2880 3071 3 1048371 3145113 3072 3263 3 1113907 3341721 3264 3455 3 1179443 3538329 3456 3647 3 1244979 3734937 3648 3839 3 1310515 3931545 3840 4031 3 1376051 4128153 4032 4096 3 1441587 4324761 As you can see, there are 21 “steps” within this range and max_memory values below 192 KB fall below the 64K per buffer limit so they generate an error when you attempt to specify them. Max approximates True as memory approaches 64K The upshot of this is that the max_memory option does not imply a contract for the maximum memory that will be used for the session buffers (Those of you who read Take it to the Max (and beyond) know that max_memory is really only referring to the event session buffer memory.) but is more of an estimate of total buffer size to the nearest higher multiple of 64K times the number of buffers you have. The maximum delta between your initial max_memory setting and the true total buffer size occurs right after you break through a 64K boundary, for example if you set max_memory = 576 KB (see the green line in the table), your actual buffer size will be closer to 767 KB in a non-partitioned event session. You get “stepped up” for every 191 KB block of initial max_memory which isn’t likely to cause a problem for most machines. Things get more interesting when you consider a partitioned event session on a computer that has a large number of logical CPUs or NUMA nodes. Since each buffer gets “stepped up” when you break a boundary, the delta can get much larger because it’s multiplied by the number of buffers. For example, a machine with 64 logical CPUs will have 160 buffers using per_cpu partitioning or if you have 8 NUMA nodes configured on that machine you would have 24 buffers when using per_node. If you’ve just broken through a 64K boundary and get “stepped up” to the next buffer size you’ll end up with total buffer size approximately 10240 KB and 1536 KB respectively (64K * # of buffers) larger than max_memory value you might think you’re getting. Using per_cpu partitioning on large machine has the most impact because of the large number of buffers created. If the amount of memory being used by your system within these ranges is important to you then this is something worth paying attention to and considering when you configure your event sessions. The DMV dm_xe_sessions is the tool to use to identify the exact buffer size for your sessions. In addition to the regular buffers (read: event session buffers) you’ll also see the details for large buffers if you have configured MAX_EVENT_SIZE. The “buffer steps” for any given hardware configuration should be static within each partition mode so if you want to have a handy reference available when you configure your event sessions you can use the following code to generate a range table similar to the one above that is applicable for your specific machine and chosen partition mode. DECLARE @buf_size_output table (input_memory_kb bigint, total_regular_buffers bigint, regular_buffer_size bigint, total_buffer_size bigint) DECLARE @buf_size int, @part_mode varchar(8) SET @buf_size = 1 -- Set to the begining of your max_memory range (KB) SET @part_mode = 'per_cpu' -- Set to the partition mode for the table you want to generate WHILE @buf_size <= 4096 -- Set to the end of your max_memory range (KB) BEGIN     BEGIN TRY         IF EXISTS (SELECT * from sys.server_event_sessions WHERE name = 'buffer_size_test')             DROP EVENT SESSION buffer_size_test ON SERVER         DECLARE @session nvarchar(max)         SET @session = 'create event session buffer_size_test on server                         add event sql_statement_completed                         add target ring_buffer                         with (max_memory = ' + CAST(@buf_size as nvarchar(4)) + ' KB, memory_partition_mode = ' + @part_mode + ')'         EXEC sp_executesql @session         SET @session = 'alter event session buffer_size_test on server                         state = start'         EXEC sp_executesql @session         INSERT @buf_size_output (input_memory_kb, total_regular_buffers, regular_buffer_size, total_buffer_size)             SELECT @buf_size, total_regular_buffers, regular_buffer_size, total_buffer_size FROM sys.dm_xe_sessions WHERE name = 'buffer_size_test'     END TRY     BEGIN CATCH         INSERT @buf_size_output (input_memory_kb)             SELECT @buf_size     END CATCH     SET @buf_size = @buf_size + 1 END DROP EVENT SESSION buffer_size_test ON SERVER SELECT MIN(input_memory_kb) start_memory_range_kb, MAX(input_memory_kb) end_memory_range_kb, total_regular_buffers, regular_buffer_size, total_buffer_size from @buf_size_output group by total_regular_buffers, regular_buffer_size, total_buffer_size Thanks to Jonathan for an interesting question and a chance to explore some of the details of Extended Event internals. - Mike

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  • A Guided Tour of Complexity

    - by JoshReuben
    I just re-read Complexity – A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell , protégé of Douglas Hofstadter ( author of “Gödel, Escher, Bach”) http://www.amazon.com/Complexity-Guided-Tour-Melanie-Mitchell/dp/0199798109/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339744329&sr=8-1 here are some notes and links:   Evolved from Cybernetics, General Systems Theory, Synergetics some interesting transdisciplinary fields to investigate: Chaos Theory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory – small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible. System Dynamics / Cybernetics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Dynamics – study of how feedback changes system behavior Network Theory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_theory – leverage Graph Theory to analyze symmetric  / asymmetric relations between discrete objects Algebraic Topology - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_topology – leverage abstract algebra to analyze topological spaces There are limits to deterministic systems & to computation. Chaos Theory definitely applies to training an ANN (artificial neural network) – different weights will emerge depending upon the random selection of the training set. In recursive Non-Linear systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_system – output is not directly inferable from input. E.g. a Logistic map: Xt+1 = R Xt(1-Xt) Different types of bifurcations, attractor states and oscillations may occur – e.g. a Lorenz Attractor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system Feigenbaum Constants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feigenbaum_constants express ratios in a bifurcation diagram for a non-linear map – the convergent limit of R (the rate of period-doubling bifurcations) is 4.6692016 Maxwell’s Demon - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon - the Second Law of Thermodynamics has only a statistical certainty – the universe (and thus information) tends towards entropy. While any computation can theoretically be done without expending energy, with finite memory, the act of erasing memory is permanent and increases entropy. Life & thought is a counter-example to the universe’s tendency towards entropy. Leo Szilard and later Claude Shannon came up with the Information Theory of Entropy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) whereby Shannon entropy quantifies the expected value of a message’s information in bits in order to determine channel capacity and leverage Coding Theory (compression analysis). Ludwig Boltzmann came up with Statistical Mechanics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics – whereby our Newtonian perception of continuous reality is a probabilistic and statistical aggregate of many discrete quantum microstates. This is relevant for Quantum Information Theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_information and the Physics of Information - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information. Hilbert’s Problems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_problems pondered whether mathematics is complete, consistent, and decidable (the Decision Problem – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem – is there always an algorithm that can determine whether a statement is true).  Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems  proved that mathematics cannot be both complete and consistent (e.g. “This statement is not provable”). Turing through the use of Turing Machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine symbol processors that can prove mathematical statements) and Universal Turing Machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine Turing Machines that can emulate other any Turing Machine via accepting programs as well as data as input symbols) that computation is limited by demonstrating the Halting Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem (is is not possible to know when a program will complete – you cannot build an infinite loop detector). You may be used to thinking of 1 / 2 / 3 dimensional systems, but Fractal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal systems are defined by self-similarity & have non-integer Hausdorff Dimensions !!!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fractals_by_Hausdorff_dimension – the fractal dimension quantifies the number of copies of a self similar object at each level of detail – eg Koch Snowflake - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake Definitions of complexity: size, Shannon entropy, Algorithmic Information Content (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_information_theory - size of shortest program that can generate a description of an object) Logical depth (amount of info processed), thermodynamic depth (resources required). Complexity is statistical and fractal. John Von Neumann’s other machine was the Self-Reproducing Automaton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine  . Cellular Automata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton are alternative form of Universal Turing machine to traditional Von Neumann machines where grid cells are locally synchronized with their neighbors according to a rule. Conway’s Game of Life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life demonstrates various emergent constructs such as “Glider Guns” and “Spaceships”. Cellular Automatons are not practical because logical ops require a large number of cells – wasteful & inefficient. There are no compilers or general program languages available for Cellular Automatons (as far as I am aware). Random Boolean Networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_network are extensions of cellular automata where nodes are connected at random (not to spatial neighbors) and each node has its own rule –> they demonstrate the emergence of complex  & self organized behavior. Stephen Wolfram’s (creator of Mathematica, so give him the benefit of the doubt) New Kind of Science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science proposes the universe may be a discrete Finite State Automata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine whereby reality emerges from simple rules. I am 2/3 through this book. It is feasible that the universe is quantum discrete at the plank scale and that it computes itself – Digital Physics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics – a simulated reality? Anyway, all behavior is supposedly derived from simple algorithmic rules & falls into 4 patterns: uniform , nested / cyclical, random (Rule 30 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30) & mixed (Rule 110 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110 localized structures – it is this that is interesting). interaction between colliding propagating signal inputs is then information processing. Wolfram proposes the Principle of Computational Equivalence - http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrincipleofComputationalEquivalence.html - all processes that are not obviously simple can be viewed as computations of equivalent sophistication. Meaning in information may emerge from analogy & conceptual slippages – see the CopyCat program: http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/courses/concepts/copycat.pdf Scale Free Networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network have a distribution governed by a Power Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law - much more common than Normal Distribution). They are characterized by hubs (resilience to random deletion of nodes), heterogeneity of degree values, self similarity, & small world structure. They grow via preferential attachment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment – tipping points triggered by positive feedback loops. 2 theories of cascading system failures in complex systems are Self-Organized Criticality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality and Highly Optimized Tolerance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_optimized_tolerance. Computational Mechanics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_mechanics – use of computational methods to study phenomena governed by the principles of mechanics. This book is a great intuition pump, but does not cover the more mathematical subject of Computational Complexity Theory – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory I am currently reading this book on this subject: http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Complexity-Christos-H-Papadimitriou/dp/0201530821/ref=pd_sim_b_1   stay tuned for that review!

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  • The new workflow management of Oracle´s Hyperion Planning: Define more details with Planning Unit Hierarchies and Promotional Paths

    - by Alexandra Georgescu
    After having been almost unchanged for several years, starting with the 11.1.2 release of Oracle´s Hyperion Planning the Process Management has not only got a new name: “Approvals” now is offering the possibility to further split Planning Units (comprised of a unique Scenario-Version-Entity combination) into more detailed combinations along additional secondary dimensions, a so called Planning Unit Hierarchy, and also to pre-define a path of planners, reviewers and approvers, called Promotional Path. I´d like to introduce you to changes and enhancements in this new process management and arouse your curiosity for checking out more details on it. One reason of using the former process management in Planning was to limit data entry rights to one person at a time based on the assignment of a planning unit. So the lowest level of granularity for this assignment was, for a given Scenario-Version combination, the individual entity. Even if in many cases one person wasn´t responsible for all data being entered into that entity, but for only part of it, it was not possible to split the ownership along another additional dimension, for example by assigning ownership to different accounts at the same time. By defining a so called Planning Unit Hierarchy (PUH) in Approvals this gap is now closed. Complementing new Shared Services roles for Planning have been created in order to manage set up and use of Approvals: The Approvals Administrator consisting of the following roles: Approvals Ownership Assigner, who assigns owners and reviewers to planning units for which Write access is assigned (including Planner responsibilities). Approvals Supervisor, who stops and starts planning units and takes any action on planning units for which Write access is assigned. Approvals Process Designer, who can modify planning unit hierarchy secondary dimensions and entity members for which Write access is assigned, can also modify scenarios and versions that are assigned to planning unit hierarchies and can edit validation rules on data forms for which access is assigned. (this includes as well Planner and Ownership Assigner responsibilities) Set up of a Planning Unit Hierarchy is done under the Administration menu, by selecting Approvals, then Planning Unit Hierarchy. Here you create new PUH´s or edit existing ones. The following window displays: After providing a name and an optional description, a pre-selection of entities can be made for which the PUH will be defined. Available options are: All, which pre-selects all entities to be included for the definitions on the subsequent tabs None, manual entity selections will be made subsequently Custom, which offers the selection for an ancestor and the relative generations, that should be included for further definitions. Finally a pattern needs to be selected, which will determine the general flow of ownership: Free-form, uses the flow/assignment of ownerships according to Planning releases prior to 11.1.2 In Bottom-up, data input is done at the leaf member level. Ownership follows the hierarchy of approval along the entity dimension, including refinements using a secondary dimension in the PUH, amended by defined additional reviewers in the promotional path. Distributed, uses data input at the leaf level, while ownership starts at the top level and then is distributed down the organizational hierarchy (entities). After ownership reaches the lower levels, budgets are submitted back to the top through the approval process. Proceeding to the next step, now a secondary dimension and the respective members from that dimension might be selected, in order to create more detailed combinations underneath each entity. After selecting the Dimension and a Parent Member, the definition of a Relative Generation below this member assists in populating the field for Selected Members, while the Count column shows the number of selected members. For refining this list, you might click on the icon right beside the selected member field and use the check-boxes in the appearing list for deselecting members. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TIP: In order to reduce maintenance of the PUH due to changes in the dimensions included (members added, moved or removed) you should consider to dynamically link those dimensions in the PUH with the dimension hierarchies in the planning application. For secondary dimensions this is done using the check-boxes in the Auto Include column. For the primary dimension, the respective selection criteria is applied by right-clicking the name of an entity activated as planning unit, then selecting an item of the shown list of include or exclude options (children, descendants, etc.). Anyway in order to apply dimension changes impacting the PUH a synchronization must be run. If this is really necessary or not is shown on the first screen after selecting from the menu Administration, then Approvals, then Planning Unit Hierarchy: under Synchronized you find the statuses Yes, No or Locked, where the last one indicates, that another user is just changing or synchronizing the PUH. Select one of the not synchronized PUH´s (status No) and click the Synchronize option in order to execute. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the next step owners and reviewers are assigned to the PUH. Using the icons with the magnifying glass right besides the columns for Owner and Reviewer the respective assignments can be made in the ordermthat you want them to review the planning unit. While it is possible to assign only one owner per entity or combination of entity+ member of the secondary dimension, the selection for reviewers might consist of more than one person. The complete Promotional Path, including the defined owners and reviewers for the entity parents, can be shown by clicking the icon. In addition optional users might be defined for being notified about promotions for a planning unit. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TIP: Reviewers cannot change data, but can only review data according to their data access permissions and reject or promote planning units. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In order to complete your PUH definitions click Finish - this saves the PUH and closes the window. As a final step, before starting the approvals process, you need to assign the PUH to the Scenario-Version combination for which it should be used. From the Administration menu select Approvals, then Scenario and Version Assignment. Expand the PUH in order to see already existing assignments. Under Actions click the add icon and select scenarios and versions to be assigned. If needed, click the remove icon in order to delete entries. After these steps, set up is completed for starting the approvals process. Start, stop and control of the approvals process is now done under the Tools menu, and then Manage Approvals. The new PUH feature is complemented by various additional settings and features; some of them at least should be mentioned here: Export/Import of PUHs: Out of Office agent: Validation Rules changing promotional/approval path if violated (including the use of User-defined Attributes (UDAs)): And various new and helpful reviewer actions with corresponding approval states. About the Author: Bernhard Kinkel started working for Hyperion Solutions as a Presales Consultant and Consultant in 1998 and moved to Hyperion Education Services in 1999. He joined Oracle University in 2007 where he is a Principal Education Consultant. Based on these many years of working with Hyperion products he has detailed product knowledge across several versions. He delivers both classroom and live virtual courses. His areas of expertise are Oracle/Hyperion Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Web Analysis.

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  • On Her Majesty's Secret Source Code: .NET Reflector 7 Early Access Builds Now Available

    - by Bart Read
    Dodgy Bond references aside, I'm extremely happy to be able to tell you that we've just released our first .NET Reflector 7 Early Access build. We're going to make these available over the coming weeks via the main .NET Reflector download page at: http://reflector.red-gate.com/Download.aspx Please have a play and tell us what you think in the forum we've set up. Also, please let us know if you run into any problems in the same place. The new version so far comes with numerous decompilation improvements including (after 5 years!) support for iterator blocks - i.e., the yield statement first seen in .NET 2.0. We've also done a lot of work to solidify the support for .NET 4.0. Clive's written about the work he's done to support iterator blocks in much more detail here, along with the odd problem he's encountered when dealing with compiler generated code: http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/clivet/96199.aspx. On the UI front we've started what will ultimately be a rewrite of the entire front-end, albeit broken into stages over two or three major releases. The most obvious addition at the moment is tabbed browsing, which you can see in Figure 1. Figure 1. .NET Reflector's new tabbed decompilation feature. Use CTRL+Click on any item in the assembly browser tree, or any link in the source code view, to open it in a new tab. This isn't by any means finished. I'll be tying up loose ends for the next few weeks, with a major focus on performance and resource usage. .NET Reflector has historically been a largely single-threaded application which has been fine up until now but, as you might expect, the addition of browser-style tabbing has pushed this approach somewhat beyond its limit. You can see this if you refresh the assemblies list by hitting F5. This shows up another problem: we really need to make Reflector remember everything you had open before you refreshed the list, rather than just the last item you viewed - I discovered that it's always done the latter, but it used to hide all panes apart from the treeview after a Refresh, including the decompiler/disassembler window. Ultimately I've got plans to add the whole VS/Chrome/Firefox style ability to drag a tab into the middle of nowhere to spawn a new window, but I need to be mindful of the add-ins, amongst other things, so it's possible that might slip to a 7.5 or 8.0 release. You'll also notice that .NET Reflector 7 now needs .NET 3.5 or later to run. We made this jump because we wanted to offer ourselves a much better chance of adding some really cool functionality to support newer technologies, such as Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. We've also taken the opportunity to start using WPF for UI development, which has frankly been a godsend. The learning curve is practically vertical but, I kid you not, it's just a far better world. Really. Stop using WinForms. Now. Why are you still using it? I had to go back and work on an old WinForms dialog for an hour or two yesterday and it really made me wince. The point is we'll be able to move the UI in some exciting new directions that will make Reflector easier to use whilst continuing to develop its functionality without (and this is key) cluttering the interface. The 3.5 language enhancements should also enable us to be much more productive over the longer term. I know most of you have .NET Fx 3.5 or 4.0 already but, if you do need to install a new version, I'd recommend you jump straight to 4.0 because, for one thing, it's faster, and if you're starting afresh there's really no reason not to. Despite the Fx version jump the Visual Studio add-in should still work fine in Visual Studio 2005, and obviously will continue to work in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. If you do run into problems, again, please let us know here. As before, we continue to support every edition of Visual Studio exception the Express Editions. Speaking of Visual Studio, we've also been improving the add-in. You can now open and explore decompiled code for any referenced assembly in any project in your solution. Just right-click on the reference, then click Decompile and Explore on the context menu. Reflector will pop up a progress box whilst it decompiles your assembly (Figure 2) - you can move this out of the way whilst you carry on working. Figure 2. Decompilation progress. This isn't modal so you can just move it out of the way and carry on working. Once it's done you can explore your assembly in the Reflector treeview (Figure 3), also accessible via the .NET Reflector Explore Decompiled Assemblies main menu item. Double-click on any item to open decompiled source in the Visual Studio source code view. Use right-click and Go To Definition on the source view context menu to navigate through the code. Figure 3. Using the .NET Reflector treeview within Visual Studio. Double-click on any item to open decompiled source in the source code view. There are loads of other changes and fixes that have gone in, often under the hood, which I don't have room to talk about here, and plenty more to come over the next few weeks. I'll try to keep you abreast of new functionality and changes as they go in. There are a couple of smaller things worth mentioning now though. Firstly, we've reorganised the menus and toolbar in Reflector itself to more closely mirror what you might be used to in other applications. Secondly, we've tried to make some of the functionality more discoverable. For example, you can now switch decompilation target framework version directly from the toolbar - and the default is now .NET 4.0. I think that about covers it for the moment. As I said, please use the new version, and send us your feedback. Here's that download URL again: http://reflector.red-gate.com/Download.aspx. Until next time! Technorati Tags: .net reflector,7,early access,new version,decompilation,tabbing,visual studio,software development,.net,c#,vb

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  • Recover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CD

    - by Trevor Bekolay
    Accidentally deleting a file is a terrible feeling. Not being able to boot into Windows and undelete that file makes that even worse. Fortunately, you can recover deleted files on NTFS hard drives from an Ubuntu Live CD. To show this process, we created four files on the desktop of a Windows XP machine, and then deleted them. We then booted up the same machine with the bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash Drive that we created last week. Once Ubuntu 9.10 boots up, open a terminal by clicking Applications in the top left of the screen, and then selecting Accessories > Terminal. To undelete our files, we first need to identify the hard drive that we want to undelete from. In the terminal window, type in: sudo fdisk –l and press enter. What you’re looking for is a line that ends with HPSF/NTFS (under the heading System). In our case, the device is “/dev/sda1”. This may be slightly different for you, but it will still begin with /dev/. Note this device name. If you have more than one hard drive partition formatted as NTFS, then you may be able to identify the correct partition by the size. If you look at the second line of text in the screenshot above, it reads “Disk /dev/sda: 136.4 GB, …” This means that the hard drive that Ubuntu has named /dev/sda is 136.4 GB large. If your hard drives are of different size, then this information can help you track down the right device name to use. Alternatively, you can just try them all, though this can be time consuming for large hard drives. Now that you know the name Ubuntu has assigned to your hard drive, we’ll scan it to see what files we can uncover. In the terminal window, type: sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> and hit enter. In our case, the command is: sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 The names of files that can recovered show up in the far right column. The percentage in the third column tells us how much of that file can be recovered. Three of the four files that we originally deleted are showing up in this list, even though we shut down the computer right after deleting the four files – so even in ideal cases, your files may not be recoverable. Nevertheless, we have three files that we can recover – two JPGs and an MPG. Note: ntfsundelete is immediately available in the Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD. If you are in a different version of Ubuntu, or for some other reason get an error when trying to use ntfsundelete, you can install it by entering “sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs” in a terminal window. To quickly recover the two JPGs, we will use the * wildcard to recover all of the files that end with .jpg. In the terminal window, enter sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> –u –m *.jpg which is, in our case, sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 –u –m *.jpg The two files are recovered from the NTFS hard drive and saved in the current working directory of the terminal. By default, this is the home directory of the current user, though we are working in the Desktop folder. Note that the ntfsundelete program does not make any changes to the original NTFS hard drive. If you want to take those files and put them back in the NTFS hard drive, you will have to move them there after they are undeleted with ntfsundelete. Of course, you can also put them on your flash drive or open Firefox and email them to yourself – the sky’s the limit! We have one more file to undelete – our MPG. Note the first column on the far left. It contains a number, its Inode. Think of this as the file’s unique identifier. Note this number. To undelete a file by its Inode, enter the following in the terminal: sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> –u –i <Inode> In our case, this is: sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 –u –i 14159 This recovers the file, along with an identifier that we don’t really care about. All three of our recoverable files are now recovered. However, Ubuntu lets us know visually that we can’t use these files yet. That’s because the ntfsundelete program saves the files as the “root” user, not the “ubuntu” user. We can verify this by typing the following in our terminal window: ls –l We want these three files to be owned by ubuntu, not root. To do this, enter the following in the terminal window: sudo chown ubuntu <Files> If the current folder has other files in it, you may not want to change their owner to ubuntu. However, in our case, we only have these three files in this folder, so we will use the * wildcard to change the owner of all three files. sudo chown ubuntu * The files now look normal, and we can do whatever we want with them. Hopefully you won’t need to use this tip, but if you do, ntfsundelete is a nice command-line utility. It doesn’t have a fancy GUI like many of the similar Windows programs, but it is a powerful tool that can recover your files quickly. See ntfsundelete’s manual page for more detailed usage information Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDUse Ubuntu Live CD to Backup Files from Your Dead Windows ComputerCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveCreate a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayGuide to Using Check Disk in Windows Vista 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 Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data Geek Parents – Did you try Parental Controls in Windows 7? Change DNS servers on the fly with DNS Jumper

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  • SQL Monitor’s data repository

    - by Chris Lambrou
    As one of the developers of SQL Monitor, I often get requests passed on by our support people from customers who are looking to dip into SQL Monitor’s own data repository, in order to pull out bits of information that they’re interested in. Since there’s clearly interest out there in playing around directly with the data repository, I thought I’d write some blog posts to start to describe how it all works. The hardest part for me is knowing where to begin, since the schema of the data repository is pretty big. Hmmm… I guess it’s tricky for anyone to write anything but the most trivial of queries against the data repository without understanding the hierarchy of monitored objects, so perhaps my first post should start there. I always imagine that whenever a customer fires up SSMS and starts to explore their SQL Monitor data repository database, they become immediately bewildered by the schema – that was certainly my experience when I did so for the first time. The following query shows the number of different object types in the data repository schema: SELECT type_desc, COUNT(*) AS [count] FROM sys.objects GROUP BY type_desc ORDER BY type_desc;  type_desccount 1DEFAULT_CONSTRAINT63 2FOREIGN_KEY_CONSTRAINT181 3INTERNAL_TABLE3 4PRIMARY_KEY_CONSTRAINT190 5SERVICE_QUEUE3 6SQL_INLINE_TABLE_VALUED_FUNCTION381 7SQL_SCALAR_FUNCTION2 8SQL_STORED_PROCEDURE100 9SYSTEM_TABLE41 10UNIQUE_CONSTRAINT54 11USER_TABLE193 12VIEW124 With 193 tables, 124 views, 100 stored procedures and 381 table valued functions, that’s quite a hefty schema, and when you browse through it using SSMS, it can be a bit daunting at first. So, where to begin? Well, let’s narrow things down a bit and only look at the tables belonging to the data schema. That’s where all of the collected monitoring data is stored by SQL Monitor. The following query gives us the names of those tables: SELECT sch.name + '.' + obj.name AS [name] FROM sys.objects obj JOIN sys.schemas sch ON sch.schema_id = obj.schema_id WHERE obj.type_desc = 'USER_TABLE' AND sch.name = 'data' ORDER BY sch.name, obj.name; This query still returns 110 tables. I won’t show them all here, but let’s have a look at the first few of them:  name 1data.Cluster_Keys 2data.Cluster_Machine_ClockSkew_UnstableSamples 3data.Cluster_Machine_Cluster_StableSamples 4data.Cluster_Machine_Keys 5data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_Capacity_StableSamples 6data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_Keys 7data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_Sightings 8data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_UnstableSamples 9data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_Volume_StableSamples 10data.Cluster_Machine_Memory_Capacity_StableSamples 11data.Cluster_Machine_Memory_UnstableSamples 12data.Cluster_Machine_Network_Capacity_StableSamples 13data.Cluster_Machine_Network_Keys 14data.Cluster_Machine_Network_Sightings 15data.Cluster_Machine_Network_UnstableSamples 16data.Cluster_Machine_OperatingSystem_StableSamples 17data.Cluster_Machine_Ping_UnstableSamples 18data.Cluster_Machine_Process_Instances 19data.Cluster_Machine_Process_Keys 20data.Cluster_Machine_Process_Owner_Instances 21data.Cluster_Machine_Process_Sightings 22data.Cluster_Machine_Process_UnstableSamples 23… There are two things I want to draw your attention to: The table names describe a hierarchy of the different types of object that are monitored by SQL Monitor (e.g. clusters, machines and disks). For each object type in the hierarchy, there are multiple tables, ending in the suffixes _Keys, _Sightings, _StableSamples and _UnstableSamples. Not every object type has a table for every suffix, but the _Keys suffix is especially important and a _Keys table does indeed exist for every object type. In fact, if we limit the query to return only those tables ending in _Keys, we reveal the full object hierarchy: SELECT sch.name + '.' + obj.name AS [name] FROM sys.objects obj JOIN sys.schemas sch ON sch.schema_id = obj.schema_id WHERE obj.type_desc = 'USER_TABLE' AND sch.name = 'data' AND obj.name LIKE '%_Keys' ORDER BY sch.name, obj.name;  name 1data.Cluster_Keys 2data.Cluster_Machine_Keys 3data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_Keys 4data.Cluster_Machine_Network_Keys 5data.Cluster_Machine_Process_Keys 6data.Cluster_Machine_Services_Keys 7data.Cluster_ResourceGroup_Keys 8data.Cluster_ResourceGroup_Resource_Keys 9data.Cluster_SqlServer_Agent_Job_History_Keys 10data.Cluster_SqlServer_Agent_Job_Keys 11data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_BackupType_Backup_Keys 12data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_BackupType_Keys 13data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_CustomMetric_Keys 14data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_File_Keys 15data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_Keys 16data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_Table_Index_Keys 17data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_Table_Keys 18data.Cluster_SqlServer_Error_Keys 19data.Cluster_SqlServer_Keys 20data.Cluster_SqlServer_Services_Keys 21data.Cluster_SqlServer_SqlProcess_Keys 22data.Cluster_SqlServer_TopQueries_Keys 23data.Cluster_SqlServer_Trace_Keys 24data.Group_Keys The full object type hierarchy looks like this: Cluster Machine LogicalDisk Network Process Services ResourceGroup Resource SqlServer Agent Job History Database BackupType Backup CustomMetric File Table Index Error Services SqlProcess TopQueries Trace Group Okay, but what about the individual objects themselves represented at each level in this hierarchy? Well that’s what the _Keys tables are for. This is probably best illustrated by way of a simple example – how can I query my own data repository to find the databases on my own PC for which monitoring data has been collected? Like this: SELECT clstr._Name AS cluster_name, srvr._Name AS instance_name, db._Name AS database_name FROM data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_Keys db JOIN data.Cluster_SqlServer_Keys srvr ON db.ParentId = srvr.Id -- Note here how the parent of a Database is a Server JOIN data.Cluster_Keys clstr ON srvr.ParentId = clstr.Id -- Note here how the parent of a Server is a Cluster WHERE clstr._Name = 'dev-chrisl2' -- This is the hostname of my own PC ORDER BY clstr._Name, srvr._Name, db._Name;  cluster_nameinstance_namedatabase_name 1dev-chrisl2SqlMonitorData 2dev-chrisl2master 3dev-chrisl2model 4dev-chrisl2msdb 5dev-chrisl2mssqlsystemresource 6dev-chrisl2tempdb 7dev-chrisl2sql2005SqlMonitorData 8dev-chrisl2sql2005TestDatabase 9dev-chrisl2sql2005master 10dev-chrisl2sql2005model 11dev-chrisl2sql2005msdb 12dev-chrisl2sql2005mssqlsystemresource 13dev-chrisl2sql2005tempdb 14dev-chrisl2sql2008SqlMonitorData 15dev-chrisl2sql2008master 16dev-chrisl2sql2008model 17dev-chrisl2sql2008msdb 18dev-chrisl2sql2008mssqlsystemresource 19dev-chrisl2sql2008tempdb These results show that I have three SQL Server instances on my machine (a default instance, one named sql2005 and one named sql2008), and each instance has the usual set of system databases, along with a database named SqlMonitorData. Basically, this is where I test SQL Monitor on different versions of SQL Server, when I’m developing. There are a few important things we can learn from this query: Each _Keys table has a column named Id. This is the primary key. Each _Keys table has a column named ParentId. A foreign key relationship is defined between each _Keys table and its parent _Keys table in the hierarchy. There are two exceptions to this, Cluster_Keys and Group_Keys, because clusters and groups live at the root level of the object hierarchy. Each _Keys table has a column named _Name. This is used to uniquely identify objects in the table within the scope of the same shared parent object. Actually, that last item isn’t always true. In some cases, the _Name column is actually called something else. For example, the data.Cluster_Machine_Services_Keys table has a column named _ServiceName instead of _Name (sorry for the inconsistency). In other cases, a name isn’t sufficient to uniquely identify an object. For example, right now my PC has multiple processes running, all sharing the same name, Chrome (one for each tab open in my web-browser). In such cases, multiple columns are used to uniquely identify an object within the scope of the same shared parent object. Well, that’s it for now. I’ve given you enough information for you to explore the _Keys tables to see how objects are stored in your own data repositories. In a future post, I’ll try to explain how monitoring data is stored for each object, using the _StableSamples and _UnstableSamples tables. If you have any questions about this post, or suggestions for future posts, just submit them in the comments section below.

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  • MySQL – Scalability on Amazon RDS: Scale out to multiple RDS instances

    - by Pinal Dave
    Today, I’d like to discuss getting better MySQL scalability on Amazon RDS. The question of the day: “What can you do when a MySQL database needs to scale write-intensive workloads beyond the capabilities of the largest available machine on Amazon RDS?” Let’s take a look. In a typical EC2/RDS set-up, users connect to app servers from their mobile devices and tablets, computers, browsers, etc.  Then app servers connect to an RDS instance (web/cloud services) and in some cases they might leverage some read-only replicas.   Figure 1. A typical RDS instance is a single-instance database, with read replicas.  This is not very good at handling high write-based throughput. As your application becomes more popular you can expect an increasing number of users, more transactions, and more accumulated data.  User interactions can become more challenging as the application adds more sophisticated capabilities. The result of all this positive activity: your MySQL database will inevitably begin to experience scalability pressures. What can you do? Broadly speaking, there are four options available to improve MySQL scalability on RDS. 1. Larger RDS Instances – If you’re not already using the maximum available RDS instance, you can always scale up – to larger hardware.  Bigger CPUs, more compute power, more memory et cetera. But the largest available RDS instance is still limited.  And they get expensive. “High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance”: 68 GB of memory 26 ECUs (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each) 64-bit platform High I/O Capacity Provisioned IOPS Optimized: 1000Mbps 2. Provisioned IOPs – You can get provisioned IOPs and higher throughput on the I/O level. However, there is a hard limit with a maximum instance size and maximum number of provisioned IOPs you can buy from Amazon and you simply cannot scale beyond these hardware specifications. 3. Leverage Read Replicas – If your application permits, you can leverage read replicas to offload some reads from the master databases. But there are a limited number of replicas you can utilize and Amazon generally requires some modifications to your existing application. And read-replicas don’t help with write-intensive applications. 4. Multiple Database Instances – Amazon offers a fourth option: “You can implement partitioning,thereby spreading your data across multiple database Instances” (Link) However, Amazon does not offer any guidance or facilities to help you with this. “Multiple database instances” is not an RDS feature.  And Amazon doesn’t explain how to implement this idea. In fact, when asked, this is the response on an Amazon forum: Q: Is there any documents that describe the partition DB across multiple RDS? I need to use DB with more 1TB but exist a limitation during the create process, but I read in the any FAQ that you need to partition database, but I don’t find any documents that describe it. A: “DB partitioning/sharding is not an official feature of Amazon RDS or MySQL, but a technique to scale out database by using multiple database instances. The appropriate way to split data depends on the characteristics of the application or data set. Therefore, there is no concrete and specific guidance.” So now what? The answer is to scale out with ScaleBase. Amazon RDS with ScaleBase: What you get – MySQL Scalability! ScaleBase is specifically designed to scale out a single MySQL RDS instance into multiple MySQL instances. Critically, this is accomplished with no changes to your application code.  Your application continues to “see” one database.   ScaleBase does all the work of managing and enforcing an optimized data distribution policy to create multiple MySQL instances. With ScaleBase, data distribution, transactions, concurrency control, and two-phase commit are all 100% transparent and 100% ACID-compliant, so applications, services and tooling continue to interact with your distributed RDS as if it were a single MySQL instance. The result: now you can cost-effectively leverage multiple MySQL RDS instance to scale out write-intensive workloads to an unlimited number of users, transactions, and data. Amazon RDS with ScaleBase: What you keep – Everything! And how does this change your Amazon environment? 1. Keep your application, unchanged – There is no change your application development life-cycle at all.  You still use your existing development tools, frameworks and libraries.  Application quality assurance and testing cycles stay the same. And, critically, you stay with an ACID-compliant MySQL environment. 2. Keep your RDS value-added services – The value-added services that you rely on are all still available. Amazon will continue to handle database maintenance and updates for you. You can still leverage High Availability via Multi A-Z.  And, if it benefits youra application throughput, you can still use read replicas. 3. Keep your RDS administration – Finally the RDS monitoring and provisioning tools you rely on still work as they did before. With your one large MySQL instance, now split into multiple instances, you can actually use less expensive, smallersmaller available RDS hardware and continue to see better database performance. Conclusion Amazon RDS is a tremendous service, but it doesn’t offer solutions to scale beyond a single MySQL instance. Larger RDS instances get more expensive.  And when you max-out on the available hardware, you’re stuck.  Amazon recommends scaling out your single instance into multiple instances for transaction-intensive apps, but offers no services or guidance to help you. This is where ScaleBase comes in to save the day. It gives you a simple and effective way to create multiple MySQL RDS instances, while removing all the complexities typically caused by “DIY” sharding andwith no changes to your applications . With ScaleBase you continue to leverage the AWS/RDS ecosystem: commodity hardware and value added services like read replicas, multi A-Z, maintenance/updates and administration with monitoring tools and provisioning. SCALEBASE ON AMAZON If you’re curious to try ScaleBase on Amazon, it can be found here – Download NOW. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • Video on Architecture and Code Quality using Visual Studio 2012&ndash;interview with Marcel de Vries and Terje Sandstrom by Adam Cogan

    - by terje
    Find the video HERE. Adam Cogan did a great Web TV interview with Marcel de Vries and myself on the topics of architecture and code quality.  It was real fun participating in this session.  Although we know each other from the MVP ALM community,  Marcel, Adam and I haven’t worked together before. It was very interesting to see how we agreed on so many terms, and how alike we where thinking.  The basics of ensuring you have a good architecture and how you could document it is one thing.  Also, the same agreement on the importance of having a high quality code base, and how we used the Visual Studio 2012 tools, and some others (NDepend for example)  to measure and ensure that the code quality was where it should be.  As the tools, methods and thinking popped up during the interview it was a lot of “Hey !  I do that too!”.  The tools are not only for “after the fact” work, but we use them during the coding.  That way the tools becomes an integrated part of our coding work, and helps us to find issues we may have overlooked.  The video has a bunch of call outs, pinpointing important things to remember. These are also listed on the corresponding web page. I haven’t seen that touch before, but really liked this way of doing it – it makes it much easier to spot the highlights.  Titus Maclaren and Raj Dhatt from SSW have done a terrific job producing this video.  And thanks to Lei Xu for doing the camera and recording job.  Thanks guys ! Also, if you are at TechEd Amsterdam 2012, go and listen to Adam Cogan in his session on “A modern architecture review: Using the new code review tools” Friday 29th, 10.15-11.30 and Marcel de Vries session on “Intellitrace, what is it and how can I use it to my benefit” Wednesday 27th, 5-6.15 The highlights points out some important practices.  I’ll elaborate on a few of them here: Add instructions on how to compile the solution.  You do this by adding a text file with instructions to the solution, and keep it under source control.  These instructions should contain what is needed on top of a standard install of Visual Studio.  I do a lot of code reviews, and more often that not, I am not even able to compile the program, because they have used some tool or library that needs to be installed.  The same applies to any new developer who enters into the team, so do this to increase your productivity when the team changes, or a team member switches computer. Don’t forget to document what you have to configure on the computer, the IIS being a common one. The more automatic you can do this, the better.  Use NuGet to get down libraries. When the text document gets more than say, half a page, with a bunch of different things to do, convert it into a powershell script instead.  The metrics warning levels.  These are very conservatively set by Microsoft.  You rarely see anything but green, and besides, you should have color scales for each of the metrics.  I have a blog post describing a more appropriate set of levels, based on both research work and industry “best practices”.  The essential limits are: Cyclomatic complexity and coupling:  Higher numbers are worse On method levels: Green :  From 0 to 10 Yellow:  From 10 to 20  (some say 15).   Acceptable, but have a look to see if there is something unneeded here. Red: From 20 to 40:   Action required, get these down. Bleeding Red: Above 40   This is the real red alert.  Immediate action!  (My invention, as people have asked what do I do when I have cyclomatic complexity of 150.  The only answer I could think of was: RUN! ) Maintainability index:  Lower numbers are worse, scale from 0 to 100. On method levels: Green:  60 to 100 Yellow:  40 – 60.    You will always have methods here too, accept the higher ones, take a look at those who are down to the lower limit.  Check up against the other metrics.) Red:  20 – 40:  Action required, fix these. Bleeding red:  Below 20.  Immediate action required. When doing metrics analysis, you should leave the generated code out.  You do this by adding attributes, unfortunately Microsoft has “forgotten” to add these to all their stuff, so you might have to add them to some of the code.  It most cases it can be done so that it is not overwritten by a new round of code generation.  Take a look a my blog post here for details on how to do that. Class level metrics might also be useful, at least for coupling and maintenance.  But it is much more difficult to set any fixed limits on those.  Any metric aggregations on higher level tend to be pretty useless, as the number of methods vary pretty much, and there are little science on what number of methods can be regarded as good or bad.  NDepend have a recommendation, but they say it may vary too.  And in these days of data binding, the number might be pretty high, as properties counts as methods.  However, if you take the worst case situations, classes with more than 20 methods are suspicious, and coupling and cyclomatic complexity go red above 20, so any classes with more than 20x20 = 400 for these measures should be checked over. In the video we mention the SOLID principles, coined by “Uncle Bob” (Richard Martin). One of them, the Dependency Inversion principle we discuss in the video.  It is important to note that this principle is NOT on whether you should use a Dependency Inversion Container or not, it is about how you design the interfaces and interactions between your classes.  The Dependency Inversion Container is just one technique which is based on this principle, but which main purpose is to isolate things you would like to change at runtime, for example if you implement a plug in architecture.  Overuse of a Dependency Inversion Container is however, NOT a good thing.  It should be used for a purpose and not as a general DI solution.  The general DI solution and thinking however is useful far beyond the DIC.   You should always “program to an abstraction”, and not to the concreteness.  We also talk a bit about the GRASP patterns, a term coined by Craig Larman in his book Applying UML and design patterns. GRASP patterns stand for General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns and describe fundamental principles of object design and responsibility assignment.  What I find great with these patterns is that they is another way to focus on the responsibility of a class.  One of the things I most often found that is broken in software designs, is that the class lack responsibility, and as a result there are a lot of classes mucking around in the internals of the other classes.  We also discuss the term “Code Smells”.  This term was invented by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler when they worked with Fowler’s “Refactoring” book. A code smell is a set of “bad” coding practices, which are the drivers behind a corresponding set of refactorings.  Here is a good list of the smells, and their corresponding refactor patterns. See also this.

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  • RequestValidation Changes in ASP.NET 4.0

    - by Rick Strahl
    There’s been a change in the way the ValidateRequest attribute on WebForms works in ASP.NET 4.0. I noticed this today while updating a post on my WebLog all of which contain raw HTML and so all pretty much trigger request validation. I recently upgraded this app from ASP.NET 2.0 to 4.0 and it’s now failing to update posts. At first this was difficult to track down because of custom error handling in my app – the custom error handler traps the exception and logs it with only basic error information so the full detail of the error was initially hidden. After some more experimentation in development mode the error that occurs is the typical ASP.NET validate request error (‘A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detetected…’) which looks like this in ASP.NET 4.0: At first when I got this I was real perplexed as I didn’t read the entire error message and because my page does have: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="NewEntry.aspx.cs" Inherits="Westwind.WebLog.NewEntry" MasterPageFile="~/App_Templates/Standard/AdminMaster.master" ValidateRequest="false" EnableEventValidation="false" EnableViewState="false" %> WTF? ValidateRequest would seem like it should be enough, but alas in ASP.NET 4.0 apparently that setting alone is no longer enough. Reading the fine print in the error explains that you need to explicitly set the requestValidationMode for the application back to V2.0 in web.config: <httpRuntime executionTimeout="300" requestValidationMode="2.0" /> Kudos for the ASP.NET team for putting up a nice error message that tells me how to fix this problem, but excuse me why the heck would you change this behavior to require an explicit override to an optional and by default disabled page level switch? You’ve just made a relatively simple fix to a solution a nasty morass of hard to discover configuration settings??? The original way this worked was perfectly discoverable via attributes in the page. Now you can set this setting in the page and get completely unexpected behavior and you are required to set what effectively amounts to a backwards compatibility flag in the configuration file. It turns out the real reason for the .config flag is that the request validation behavior has moved from WebForms pipeline down into the entire ASP.NET/IIS request pipeline and is now applied against all requests. Here’s what the breaking changes page from Microsoft says about it: The request validation feature in ASP.NET provides a certain level of default protection against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. In previous versions of ASP.NET, request validation was enabled by default. However, it applied only to ASP.NET pages (.aspx files and their class files) and only when those pages were executing. In ASP.NET 4, by default, request validation is enabled for all requests, because it is enabled before the BeginRequest phase of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation applies to requests for all ASP.NET resources, not just .aspx page requests. This includes requests such as Web service calls and custom HTTP handlers. Request validation is also active when custom HTTP modules are reading the contents of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation errors might now occur for requests that previously did not trigger errors. To revert to the behavior of the ASP.NET 2.0 request validation feature, add the following setting in the Web.config file: <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" /> However, we recommend that you analyze any request validation errors to determine whether existing handlers, modules, or other custom code accesses potentially unsafe HTTP inputs that could be XSS attack vectors. Ok, so ValidateRequest of the form still works as it always has but it’s actually the ASP.NET Event Pipeline, not WebForms that’s throwing the above exception as request validation is applied to every request that hits the pipeline. Creating the runtime override removes the HttpRuntime checking and restores the WebForms only behavior. That fixes my immediate problem but still leaves me wondering especially given the vague wording of the above explanation. One thing that’s missing in the description is above is one important detail: The request validation is applied only to application/x-www-form-urlencoded POST content not to all inbound POST data. When I first read this this freaked me out because it sounds like literally ANY request hitting the pipeline is affected. To make sure this is not really so I created a quick handler: public class Handler1 : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World <hr>" + context.Request.Form.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } } and called it with Fiddler by posting some XML to the handler using a default form-urlencoded POST content type: and sure enough – hitting the handler also causes the request validation error and 500 server response. Changing the content type to text/xml effectively fixes the problem however, bypassing the request validation filter so Web Services/AJAX handlers and custom modules/handlers that implement custom protocols aren’t affected as long as they work with special input content types. It also looks that multipart encoding does not trigger event validation of the runtime either so this request also works fine: POST http://rasnote/weblog/handler1.ashx HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=------7cf2a327f01ae User-Agent: West Wind Internet Protocols 5.53 Host: rasnote Content-Length: 40 Pragma: no-cache <xml>asdasd</xml>--------7cf2a327f01ae *That* probably should trigger event validation – since it is a potential HTML form submission, but it doesn’t. New Runtime Feature, Global Scope Only? Ok, so request validation is now a runtime feature but sadly it’s a feature that’s scoped to the ASP.NET Runtime – effective scope to the entire running application/app domain. You can still manually force validation using Request.ValidateInput() which gives you the option to do this in code, but that realistically will only work with the requestValidationMode set to V2.0 as well since the 4.0 mode auto-fires before code ever gets a chance to intercept the call. Given all that, the new setting in ASP.NET 4.0 seems to limit options and makes things more difficult and less flexible. Of course Microsoft gets to say ASP.NET is more secure by default because of it but what good is that if you have to turn off this flag the very first time you need to allow one single request that bypasses request validation??? This is really shortsighted design… <sigh>© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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  • The Proper Use of the VM Role in Windows Azure

    - by BuckWoody
    At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in 2010 we announced an addition to the Computational Roles in Windows Azure, called the VM Role. This new feature allows a great deal of control over the applications you write, but some have confused it with our full infrastructure offering in Windows Hyper-V. There is a proper architecture pattern for both of them. Virtualization Virtualization is the process of taking all of the hardware of a physical computer and replicating it in software alone. This means that a single computer can “host” or run several “virtual” computers. These virtual computers can run anywhere - including at a vendor’s location. Some companies refer to this as Cloud Computing since the hardware is operated and maintained elsewhere. IaaS The more detailed definition of this type of computing is called Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) since it removes the need for you to maintain hardware at your organization. The operating system, drivers, and all the other software required to run an application are still under your control and your responsibility to license, patch, and scale. Microsoft has an offering in this space called Hyper-V, that runs on the Windows operating system. Combined with a hardware hosting vendor and the System Center software to create and deploy Virtual Machines (a process referred to as provisioning), you can create a Cloud environment with full control over all aspects of the machine, including multiple operating systems if you like. Hosting machines and provisioning them at your own buildings is sometimes called a Private Cloud, and hosting them somewhere else is often called a Public Cloud. State-ful and Stateless Programming This paradigm does not create a new, scalable way of computing. It simply moves the hardware away. The reason is that when you limit the Cloud efforts to a Virtual Machine, you are in effect limiting the computing resources to what that single system can provide. This is because much of the software developed in this environment maintains “state” - and that requires a little explanation. “State-ful programming” means that all parts of the computing environment stay connected to each other throughout a compute cycle. The system expects the memory, CPU, storage and network to remain in the same state from the beginning of the process to the end. You can think of this as a telephone conversation - you expect that the other person picks up the phone, listens to you, and talks back all in a single unit of time. In “Stateless” computing the system is designed to allow the different parts of the code to run independently of each other. You can think of this like an e-mail exchange. You compose an e-mail from your system (it has the state when you’re doing that) and then you walk away for a bit to make some coffee. A few minutes later you click the “send” button (the network has the state) and you go to a meeting. The server receives the message and stores it on a mail program’s database (the mail server has the state now) and continues working on other mail. Finally, the other party logs on to their mail client and reads the mail (the other user has the state) and responds to it and so on. These events might be separated by milliseconds or even days, but the system continues to operate. The entire process doesn’t maintain the state, each component does. This is the exact concept behind coding for Windows Azure. The stateless programming model allows amazing rates of scale, since the message (think of the e-mail) can be broken apart by multiple programs and worked on in parallel (like when the e-mail goes to hundreds of users), and only the order of re-assembling the work is important to consider. For the exact same reason, if the system makes copies of those running programs as Windows Azure does, you have built-in redundancy and recovery. It’s just built into the design. The Difference Between Infrastructure Designs and Platform Designs When you simply take a physical server running software and virtualize it either privately or publicly, you haven’t done anything to allow the code to scale or have recovery. That all has to be handled by adding more code and more Virtual Machines that have a slight lag in maintaining the running state of the system. Add more machines and you get more lag, so the scale is limited. This is the primary limitation with IaaS. It’s also not as easy to deploy these VM’s, and more importantly, you’re often charged on a longer basis to remove them. your agility in IaaS is more limited. Windows Azure is a Platform - meaning that you get objects you can code against. The code you write runs on multiple nodes with multiple copies, and it all works because of the magic of Stateless programming. you don’t worry, or even care, about what is running underneath. It could be Windows (and it is in fact a type of Windows Server), Linux, or anything else - but that' isn’t what you want to manage, monitor, maintain or license. You don’t want to deploy an operating system - you want to deploy an application. You want your code to run, and you don’t care how it does that. Another benefit to PaaS is that you can ask for hundreds or thousands of new nodes of computing power - there’s no provisioning, it just happens. And you can stop using them quicker - and the base code for your application does not have to change to make this happen. Windows Azure Roles and Their Use If you need your code to have a user interface, in Visual Studio you add a Web Role to your project, and if the code needs to do work that doesn’t involve a user interface you can add a Worker Role. They are just containers that act a certain way. I’ll provide more detail on those later. Note: That’s a general description, so it’s not entirely accurate, but it’s accurate enough for this discussion. So now we’re back to that VM Role. Because of the name, some have mistakenly thought that you can take a Virtual Machine running, say Linux, and deploy it to Windows Azure using this Role. But you can’t. That’s not what it is designed for at all. If you do need that kind of deployment, you should look into Hyper-V and System Center to create the Private or Public Infrastructure as a Service. What the VM Role is actually designed to do is to allow you to have a great deal of control over the system where your code will run. Let’s take an example. You’ve heard about Windows Azure, and Platform programming. You’re convinced it’s the right way to code. But you have a lot of things you’ve written in another way at your company. Re-writing all of your code to take advantage of Windows Azure will take a long time. Or perhaps you have a certain version of Apache Web Server that you need for your code to work. In both cases, you think you can (or already have) code the the software to be “Stateless”, you just need more control over the place where the code runs. That’s the place where a VM Role makes sense. Recap Virtualizing servers alone has limitations of scale, availability and recovery. Microsoft’s offering in this area is Hyper-V and System Center, not the VM Role. The VM Role is still used for running Stateless code, just like the Web and Worker Roles, with the exception that it allows you more control over the environment of where that code runs.

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  • Asserting with JustMock

    - by mehfuzh
    In this post, i will be digging in a bit deep on Mock.Assert. This is the continuation from previous post and covers up the ways you can use assert for your mock expectations. I have used another traditional sample of Talisker that has a warehouse [Collaborator] and an order class [SUT] that will call upon the warehouse to see the stock and fill it up with items. Our sample, interface of warehouse and order looks similar to : public interface IWarehouse {     bool HasInventory(string productName, int quantity);     void Remove(string productName, int quantity); }   public class Order {     public string ProductName { get; private set; }     public int Quantity { get; private set; }     public bool IsFilled { get; private set; }       public Order(string productName, int quantity)     {         this.ProductName = productName;         this.Quantity = quantity;     }       public void Fill(IWarehouse warehouse)     {         if (warehouse.HasInventory(ProductName, Quantity))         {             warehouse.Remove(ProductName, Quantity);             IsFilled = true;         }     }   }   Our first example deals with mock object assertion [my take] / assert all scenario. This will only act on the setups that has this “MustBeCalled” flag associated. To be more specific , let first consider the following test code:    var order = new Order(TALISKER, 0);    var wareHouse = Mock.Create<IWarehouse>();      Mock.Arrange(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(Arg.Any<string>(), 0)).Returns(true).MustBeCalled();    Mock.Arrange(() => wareHouse.Remove(Arg.Any<string>(), 0)).Throws(new InvalidOperationException()).MustBeCalled();    Mock.Arrange(() => wareHouse.Remove(Arg.Any<string>(), 100)).Throws(new InvalidOperationException());      //exercise    Assert.Throws<InvalidOperationException>(() => order.Fill(wareHouse));    // it will assert first and second setup.    Mock.Assert(wareHouse); Here, we have created the order object, created the mock of IWarehouse , then I setup our HasInventory and Remove calls of IWarehouse with my expected, which is called by the order.Fill internally. Now both of these setups are marked as “MustBeCalled”. There is one additional IWarehouse.Remove that is invalid and is not marked.   On line 9 ,  as we do order.Fill , the first and second setups will be invoked internally where the third one is left  un-invoked. Here, Mock.Assert will pass successfully as  both of the required ones are called as expected. But, if we marked the third one as must then it would fail with an  proper exception. Here, we can also see that I have used the same call for two different setups, this feature is called sequential mocking and will be covered later on. Moving forward, let’s say, we don’t want this must call, when we want to do it specifically with lamda. For that let’s consider the following code: //setup - data var order = new Order(TALISKER, 50); var wareHouse = Mock.Create<IWarehouse>();   Mock.Arrange(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(TALISKER, 50)).Returns(true);   //exercise order.Fill(wareHouse);   //verify state Assert.True(order.IsFilled); //verify interaction Mock.Assert(()=> wareHouse.HasInventory(TALISKER, 50));   Here, the snippet shows a case for successful order, i haven’t used “MustBeCalled” rather i used lamda specifically to assert the call that I have made, which is more justified for the cases where we exactly know the user code will behave. But, here goes a question that how we are going assert a mock call if we don’t know what item a user code may request for. In that case, we can combine the matchers with our assert calls like we do it for arrange: //setup - data  var order = new Order(TALISKER, 50);  var wareHouse = Mock.Create<IWarehouse>();    Mock.Arrange(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(TALISKER, Arg.Matches<int>( x => x <= 50))).Returns(true);    //exercise  order.Fill(wareHouse);    //verify state  Assert.True(order.IsFilled);    //verify interaction  Mock.Assert(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(Arg.Any<string>(), Arg.Matches<int>(x => x <= 50)));   Here, i have asserted a mock call for which i don’t know the item name,  but i know that number of items that user will request is less than 50.  This kind of expression based assertion is now possible with JustMock. We can extent this sample for properties as well, which will be covered shortly [in other posts]. In addition to just simple assertion, we can also use filters to limit to times a call has occurred or if ever occurred. Like for the first test code, we have one setup that is never invoked. For such, it is always valid to use the following assert call: Mock.Assert(() => wareHouse.Remove(Arg.Any<string>(), 100), Occurs.Never()); Or ,for warehouse.HasInventory we can do the following: Mock.Assert(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(Arg.Any<string>(), 0), Occurs.Once()); Or,  to be more specific, it’s even better with: Mock.Assert(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(Arg.Any<string>(), 0), Occurs.Exactly(1));   There are other filters  that you can apply here using AtMost, AtLeast and AtLeastOnce but I left those to the readers. You can try the above sample that is provided in the examples shipped with JustMock.Please, do check it out and feel free to ping me for any issues.   Enjoy!!

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