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• SQL SERVER – Beginning New Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #001

  - by pinaldave

  I am introducing a new series today.  This series is called “Memory Lane.”  From the last six years and 2,300 articles, there are fantastic articles I keep revisiting.  Sometimes when I read old blog posts I think I should have included something or added a bit more to the topic.  But for many articles, I still feel they are fantastic (even after six years) and could be read again and again. I have also found that after six years of blogging, readers will write to me and say “Pinal, why don’t you write about X, Y or Z.”  The answer is: I already did!  It is here on the blog, or in the comments, or possibly in one of my books.  The solution has always been there, it is simply a matter of finding it and presenting it again.  That is why I have created Memory Lane.  I will be listing the best articles from the same week of the past six years.  You will find plenty of reading material every Saturday from articles of SQLAuthority past. Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 Query to Display Foreign Key Relationships and Name of the Constraint for Each Table in Database My blogging journey began with this blog post. As many of you know my journey began with creating a repository of my scripts. This was very first script which I had written to find out foreign key relationship and constraints. The same query was updated later on using the new SYS schema modification in SQL Server. Version 1: Using sys.schema Version 2: Using sys.schema and additional columns 2007 Milestone Posts – 1 Year (365 blogs) and 1 Million Views When I reached 1st week of Nov in 2007 SQLAuthority.com blog had around 365 blog posts and 1 Million Views. I was not obsessed with the statistics before but this was indeed an interesting moment for me as I was blogging for myself and did not realize that so many people are reading my blog. In year 2006 there were not many bloggers so blogging was new to me as well. I was learning it as I go. 2008 Stored Procedure WITH ENCRYPTION and Execution Plan If you have stored procedure and its code is encrypted when you execute it what will be displayed in the execution plan. There are two kinds of execution plans 1) Estimated and 2) Actual. It will be indeed interesting to know what is displayed in both the cases when Stored Procedure is encrypted. What is your guess? Now go ahead and click on here and figure out your answer. If the user is not able to login into SQL Server due to any error or issues there were two different blog post addresses the same issue here and here. 2009 It seems like Nov is the month of SQLPASS month. In 2009 on the same week I was in USA attending SQLPASS event. I had a fantastic experience attending the event. Here are the blog posts covering the subject Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4 2010 Finding the last backup time for all the databases This little script is very powerful and instantly gives details when was the last time your database backup performed. If you are reading this blog post – I say just go ahead and check if everything is alright on your server and you have all the necessary latest backup. It is better to be safe than sorrow. Version 1: Above script was improved to get more details about the database Version 2: This version of the script will include pretty much have all the backup related information in a single script. Do not miss to save it for future use. Are you a Database Administrator or a Database Developer? Three years ago I created a very small survey and the results which I have received are very interesting. The question was asking what is the profile of the visitor of that blog post and I noticed that DBA and Developers have balanced with little inclination towards Developers. Have you voted so far? If not, go ahead! 2011 New Book Released – SQL Server Interview Questions And Answers One year ago, on November 3, 2011 I published my book SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers.  The book has a lot of great reviews, and we have even received emails telling us this book was a life changer because it helped get them a great new job.  I don’t think anyone can get a job just from my book.  It was the individual who studied hard and took it seriously, and was determined to learn something new.  The book might have helped guide them and show them the topics to study, but they spent their own energy on it.  It was their own skills that helped them pass the exam. So, in this very first installment, I would like to thank the readers for accepting our book, for giving it great reviews and for using it and sharing it.  Our goal in writing this book was to help others, and it seems like we succeeded. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• IIS load balancing and site deployment

  - by KLC

  Hi, currently I have a site sits on one IIS7 server. When we deploy a new version of the site, we bring the site down and display an offline page. What I really want is have two same exact copies of the site sits in one IIS 7 server and load balance users among both servers. when we deploy a new version of the site, we will bring site1 down (users in site1 automatically routes to site2 on next postback), when site1 deployment is complete, bring site2 down (users in site2 being routes to site1 on next postback). is this even possible?

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• Towards an F# .NET Reflector add-in

  - by CliveT

  When I had the opportunity to spent some time during Red Gate's recent "down tools" week on a project of my choice, the obvious project was an F# add-in for Reflector . To be honest, this was a bit of a misnomer as the amount of time in the designated week for coding was really less than three days, so it was always unlikely that very much progress would be made in such a small amount of time (and that certainly proved to be the case), but I did learn some things from the experiment. Like lots of problems, one useful technique is to take examples, get them to work, and then generalise to get something that works across the board. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to do the last stage. The obvious first step is to take a few function definitions, starting with the obvious hello world, moving on to a non-recursive function and finishing with the ubiquitous recursive Fibonacci function. let rec printMessage message  =     printfn  message let foo x  =    (x + 1) let rec fib x  =     if (x >= 2) then (fib (x - 1) + fib (x - 2)) else 1 The major problem in decompiling these simple functions is that Reflector has an in-memory object model that is designed to support object-oriented languages. In particular it has a return statement that allows function bodies to finish early. I used some of the in-built functionality to take the IL and produce an in-memory object model for the language, but then needed to write a transformer to push the return statements to the top of the tree to make it easy to render the code into a functional language. This tree transform works in some scenarios, but not in others where we simply regenerate code that looks more like CPS style. The next thing to get working was library level bindings of values where these values are calculated at runtime. let x = [1 ; 2 ; 3 ; 4] let y = List.map  (fun x -> foo x) x The way that this is translated into a set of classes for the underlying platform means that the code needs to follow references around, from the property exposing the calculated value to the class in which the code for generating the value is embedded. One of the strongest selling points of functional languages is the algebraic datatypes, which allow definitions via standard mathematical-style inductive definitions across the union cases. type Foo =     | Something of int     | Nothing type 'a Foo2 =     | Something2 of 'a     | Nothing2 Such a definition is compiled into a number of classes for the cases of the union, which all inherit from a class representing the type itself. It wasn't too hard to get such a de-compilation happening in the cases I tried. What did I learn from this? Firstly, that there are various bits of functionality inside Reflector that it would be useful for us to allow add-in writers to access. In particular, there are various implementations of the Visitor pattern which implement algorithms such as calculating the number of references for particular variables, and which perform various substitutions which could be more generally useful to add-in writers. I hope to do something about this at some point in the future. Secondly, when you transform a functional language into something that runs on top of an object-based platform, you lose some fidelity in the representation. The F# compiler leaves attributes in place so that tools can tell which classes represent classes from the source program and which are there for purposes of the implementation, allowing the decompiler to regenerate these constructs again. However, decompilation technology is a long way from being able to take unannotated IL and transform it into a program in a different language. For a simple function definition, like Fibonacci, I could write a simple static function and have it come out in F# as the same function, but it would be practically impossible to take a mass of class definitions and have a decompiler translate it automatically into an F# algebraic data type. What have we got out of this? Some data on the feasibility of implementing an F# decompiler inside Reflector, though it's hard at the moment to say how long this would take to do. The work we did is included the 6.5 EAP for Reflector that you can get from the EAP forum. All things considered though, it was a useful way to gain more familiarity with the process of writing an add-in and understand difficulties other add-in authors might experience. If you'd like to check out a video of Down Tools Week, click here.

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• SSAS Maestro Training in July 2012 #ssasmaestro #ssas

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  A few hours ago Chris Webb blogged about SSAS Maestro and I’d like to propagate the news, adding also some background info. SSAS Maestro is the premier certification on Analysis Services that selects the best experts in Analysis Services around the world. In 2011 Microsoft organized two rounds of training/exams for SSAS Maestros and up to now only 11 people from the first wave have been announced – around 10% of attendees of the course! In the next few days the new Maestros from the second round should be announced and this long process is caused by many factors that I’m going to explain. First, the course is just a step in the process. Before the course you receive a list of topics to study, including the slides of the course. During the course, students receive a lot of information that might not have been included in the slides and the best part of the course is class interaction. Students are expected to bring their experience to the table and comparing case studies, experiences and having long debates is an important part of the learning process. And it is also a part of the evaluation: good questions might be also more important than good answers! Finally, after the course, students have their homework and this may require one or two months to be completed. After that, a long (very long) evaluation process begins, taking into account homework, labs, participation… And for this reason the final evaluation may arrive months later after the course. We are going to improve and shorten this process with the next courses. The first wave of SSAS Maestro had been made by invitation only and now the program is opening, requiring a fee to participate in order to cover the cost of preparation, training and exam. The number of attendees will be limited and candidates will have to send their CV in order to be admitted to the course. Only experienced Analysis Services developers will be able to participate to this challenging program. So why you should do that? Well, only 10% of students passed the exam until now. So if you need 100% guarantee to pass the exam, you need to study a lot, before, during and after the course. But the course by itself is a precious opportunity to share experience, create networking and learn mission-critical enterprise-level best practices that it’s hard to find written on books. Oh, well, many existing white papers are a required reading *before* the course! The course is now 5 days long, and every day can be *very* long. We’ll have lectures and discussions in the morning and labs in the afternoon/evening. Plus some more lectures in one or two afternoons. A heavy part of the course is about performance optimization, capacity planning, monitoring. This edition will introduce also Tabular models, and don’t expect something you might find in the SSAS Tabular Workshop – only performance, scalability monitoring and optimization will be covered, knowing Analysis Services is a requirement just to be accepted! I and Chris Webb will be the teachers for this edition. The course is expensive. Applying for SSAS Maestro will cost around 7000€ plus taxes (reduced to 5000€ for students of a previous SSAS Maestro edition). And you will be locked in a training room for the large part of the week. So why you should do that? Well, as I said, this is a challenging course. You will not find the time to check your email – the content is just too much interesting to think you can be distracted by something else. Another good reason is that this course will take place in Italy. Well, the course will take place in the brand new Microsoft Innovation Campus, but in general we’ll be able to provide you hints to get great food and, if you are willing to attach one week-end to your trip, there are plenty of places to visit (and I’m not talking about the classic Rome-Florence-Venice) – you might really need to relax after such a week! Finally, the marking process after the course will be faster – we’d like to complete the evaluation within three months after the course, considering that 1-2 months might be required to complete the homework. If at this point you are not scared: registration will open in mid-April, but you can already write to [email protected] sending your CV/resume and a short description of your level of SSAS knowledge and experience. The selection process will start early and you may want to put your admission form on top of the FIFO queue!

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• How to flip the origin.y of an CGRect?

  - by mystify

  I'm trying to draw an UIImageView, but the frame's origin is wrong when I flip the coordinate system for drawing not upside-down. CGRect imgRect = imgView.frame; imgRect.origin.y += 10.0f; CGContextTranslateCTM(context, 0.0f, imgRect.size.height); CGContextScaleCTM(context, 1.0f, -1.0f); CGContextDrawImage(context, imgRect, imgView.image.CGImage); like you can see I move the image down by 10, but instead of going down by 10, it goes UP by 10. That's completely unlogical since I had actually inverted the wrong coordinate system to look exactly like the one in UIView, right? What to do about it?

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• Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business - Q&A from the Webcast

  - by [email protected]

  A few weeks ago, Vince Casarez and I presented with KMWorld on the Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business. It was an enjoyable, interactive webcast in which Vince and I discussed the ways Enterprise 2.0 can transform your business and more importantly, highlighted key customer examples of how to do so. If you missed the webcast, you can catch a replay here. We had a lot of audience participation in some of the polls we conducted and in the Q&A session. We weren't able to address all of the questions during the broadcast, so we attempted to answer them here: Q: Which area within your firm focuses on Web 2.0? Meaning, do you find new departments developing just to manage the web 2.0 (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) user experience or are you structuring current departments? A: There are three distinct efforts within Oracle. The first is around delivery of these Web 2.0 services for enterprise deployments. This is the focus of the WebCenter team. The second effort is injecting these Web 2.0 services into use cases that drive the different enterprise applications. This effort is focused on how to manage these external services and bring them into a cohesive flow for marketing programs, customer care, and purchasing. The third effort is how we consume these services internally to enhance Oracle's business delivery. It leverages the technologies and use cases of the first two but also pushes the envelope with regards to future directions of these other two areas. Q: In a business, Web 2.0 is mostly like action logs. How can we leverage the official process practice versus the logs of a recent action? Example: a system configuration modified last night on a call out versus the official practice that everybody would use in the morning.A: The key thing to remember is that most Web 2.0 actions / activity streams today are based on collaboration and communication type actions. At least with public social sites like Facebook and Twitter. What we're delivering as part of the WebCenter Suite are not just these types of activities but also enterprise application activities. These enterprise application activities come from different application modules: purchasing, HR, order entry, sales opportunity, etc. The actions within these systems are normally tied to a business object or process: purchase order/customer, employee or department, customer and supplier, customer and product, respectively. Therefore, the activities or "logs" as you name them are able to be "typed" so that as a viewer, you can filter or decide to see only certain types of information. In your example, you could have a view that only showed you recent "configuration" changes and this could be right next to a view that showed off the items to be watched every morning. Q: It's great to hear about customers using the software but is there any plan for future webinars to show what the products/installs look like? That would be very helpful.A: We don't have a webinar planned to show off the install process. However, we have a viewlet that's posted on Oracle Technology Network. You can see it here:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/testcontent/wcs-install-098014.htmlAnd we've got excellent documentation that walks you through the steps here:http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/install.1111/e12001/install.htmAnd there's a whole set of demos and examples of what WebCenter can do at this URL:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/webcenter/release11-demos-097468.html Q: How do you anticipate managing metadata across the enterprise to make content findable?A: We need to first make sure we are all talking about the same thing when we use a word like "metadata". Here's why...  For a developer, metadata means information that describes key elements of the portal or application and what the portal or application can do. For content systems, metadata means key terms that provide a taxonomy or folksonomy about the information that is being indexed, ordered, and managed. For business intelligence systems, metadata means key terms that provide labels to groups of data that most non-mathematicians need to understand. And for SOA, metadata means labels for parts of the processes that business owners should understand that connect development terminology. There are also additional requirements for metadata to be available to the team building these new solutions as well as requirements to make this metadata available to the running system. These requirements are often separated by "design time" and "run time" respectively. So clearly, a general goal of managing metadata across the enterprise is very challenging. We've invested a huge amount of resources around Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) to be able to provide a more generic system for all of these elements. No other vendor has anything like this technology foundation in their products. This provides a huge benefit to our customers as they will now be able to find content, processes, people, and information from a common set of search interfaces with consistent enterprise wide results. Q: Can you give your definition of terms as to document and content, please?A: Content applies to a broad category of information from Word documents, presentations and reports through attachments to invoices and/or purchase orders. Content is essentially any type of digital asset including images, video, and voice. A document is just one type of content. Q: Do you have special integration tools to realize an interaction between UCM and WebCenter Spaces/Services?A: Yes, we've dedicated a whole team of engineers to exploit the key features of Oracle UCM within WebCenter.  While ensuring that WebCenter can connect to other non-Oracle systems, we've made sure that with the combined set of Oracle technology, no other solution can match the combined power and integration.  This is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware strategy which is to provide best in class capabilities for Content and Portals.  When combined together, the synergy between the two products enables users to quickly add capabilities when they are needed.  For example, simple document sharing is part of the combined product offering, but if legal discovery or archiving is required, Oracle UCM product includes these capabilities that can be quickly added.  There's no need to move content around or add another system to support this, it's just a feature that gets turned on within Oracle UCM. Q: All customers have some interaction with their applications and have many older versions, how do you see some of these new Enterprise 2.0 capabilities adding value to existing enterprise application deployments?A: Just as Service Oriented Architectures allowed for connecting the processes of different applications systems to work together, there's a need for a similar approach with regards to these enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Oracle WebCenter is built on a core architecture that allows for SOA of these Enterprise 2.0 services so that one set of scalable services can be used and integrated directly into any type of application. In this way, users can get immediate value out of the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities without having to wait for the next major release or upgrade. These centrally managed WebCenter services expose a set of standard interfaces that make it extremely easy to add them into existing applications no matter what technology the application has been implemented. Q: We've heard about Oracle Next Generation applications called "Fusion Applications", can you tell me how all this works together?A: Oracle WebCenter powers the core collaboration and social computing services found within Fusion Applications. It is the core user experience technology for how all the application screens have been implemented. And the core concept of task flows allows for all the Fusion Applications modules to be adaptable and composable by business users and IT without needing to be a professional developer. Oracle WebCenter is at the heart of the new Fusion Applications. In addition, the same patterns and technologies are now being added to the existing applications including JD Edwards, Siebel, Peoplesoft, and eBusiness Suite. The core technology enables all these customers to have a much smoother upgrade path to Fusion Applications. They get immediate benefits of injecting new user interactions into their existing applications without having to completely move to Fusion Applications. And then when the time comes, their users will already be well versed in how the new capabilities work. Q: Does any of this work with non Oracle software? Other databases? Other application servers? etc.A: We have made sure that Oracle WebCenter delivers the broadest set of development choices so that no matter what technology you developers are using, WebCenter capabilities can be quickly and easily added to the site or application. In addition, we have certified Oracle WebCenter to run against non-Oracle databases like DB2 and SQLServer. We have stated plans for certification against MySQL as well. Later in CY 2011, Oracle will provide certification on non-Oracle application servers such as WebSphere and JBoss. Q: How do we balance User and IT requirements in regards to Enterprise 2.0 technologies?A: Wrong decisions are often made because employee knowledge is not tapped efficiently and opportunities to innovate are often missed because the right people do not work together. Collaboration amongst workers in the right business context is critical for success. While standalone Enterprise 2.0 technologies can improve collaboration for collaboration's sake, using social collaboration tools in the context of business applications and processes will improve business responsiveness and lead companies to a more competitive position. As these systems become more mission critical it is essential that they maintain the highest level of performance and availability while scaling to support larger communities. Q: What are the ways in which Enterprise 2.0 can improve business responsiveness?A: With a wide range of Enterprise 2.0 tools in the marketplace, CIOs need to deploy solutions that will meet the requirements from users as well as address the requirements from IT. Workers want a next-generation user experience that is personalized and aggregates their daily tools and tasks, while IT needs to ensure the solution is secure, scalable, flexible, reliable and easily integrated with existing systems. An open and integrated approach to deploying portals, content management, and collaboration can enhance your business by addressing both the needs of knowledge workers for better information and the IT mandate to conserve resources by simplifying, consolidating and centralizing infrastructure and administration.  

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• How to hide the vertical scroll bar in a .NET ListView Control in Details mode

  - by Adam Haile

  I've got a ListView control in Details mode with a single column. It's on a form that is meant to only be used with the keyboard, mostly with the up/down arrows for scrolling and enter to select. So I don't really need to have the scroll bars and would just like them to not show for a cleaner look. However, when I set the ListView.Scrollable property to false, I can still move the selected item up and down, but as soon as it moves to an item not currently in view, the list won't move to show that item. I've tried using EnsureVisible to programmatically scroll the list, but it does nothing when in this mode. Is there any way to manually move the list up and down to scroll, but without having the scrollbar present?

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• InfoPath Repeating Group with Data from SharePoint and User Input

  - by 0x808080

  I have a series of questions which are pulled from a SharePoint list and loaded into a repeating section. The section has three elements, the Question # (from SharePoint), and Question itself (from SharePoint), and a drop down box Yes/No (NOT from SharePoint)... The repeating group portion works just fine, it is pulling all Question # and Questions from the SharePoint site, but I cannot bind the drop down box (yes/no) to any sort of local data source in order to record the information. Essentially what I have is a dynamically generated form which pulls questions off a SharePoint and a user will answer Yes or No for each question. I cannot associate the Yes/No drop down with anything because it resides within a Repeating section... Thanks for any help!

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• jList in Scrollpane, seeking and displaying value of selectedIndex

  - by Mech Software

  I have a JList inside a Scrollpane. If you click on the list and move the arrow keys up and down it works like you expect, you can move your selection index and display around just fine. Now, what I want to do is basically have a text box and i'm typing in the text box like "comic" and want it to seek to the index of that value. This WORKS just fine. Where the problem is when the value of the list box is below, or above the viewable area. When it is, the selected index seeks, but does not change the position of the scrollable region. However, if I press the up or down arrows and requestFocus() to the list, and move up and down it seeks to the right viewable area. What am I missing to make this happen WITHOUT changing focus. I want to be able to just type in the list all I want and have it show me what is selected. I feel i'm missing something obvious here.

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• Microsoft Business Intelligence Seminar 2011

  - by DavidWimbush

  I was lucky enough to attend the maiden presentation of this at Microsoft Reading yesterday. It was pretty gripping stuff not only because of what was said but also because of what could only be hinted at. Here's what I took away from the day. (Disclaimer: I'm not a BI guru, just a reasonably experienced BI developer, so I may have misunderstood or misinterpreted a few things. Particularly when so much of the talk was about the vision and subtle hints of what is coming. Please comment if you think I've got anything wrong. I'm also not going to even try to cover Master Data Services as I struggled to imagine how you would actually use it.) I was a bit worried when I learned that the whole day was going to be presented by one guy but Rafal Lukawiecki is a very engaging speaker. He's going to be presenting this about 20 times around the world over the coming months. If you get a chance to hear him speak, I say go for it. No doubt some of the hints will become clearer as Denali gets closer to RTM. Firstly, things are definitely happening in the SQL Server Reporting and BI world. Traditionally IT would build a data warehouse, then cubes on top of that, and then publish them in a structured and controlled way. But, just as with many IT projects in general, by the time it's finished the business has moved on and the system no longer meets their requirements. This not sustainable and something more agile is needed but there has to be some control. Apparently we're going to be hearing the catchphrase 'Balancing agility with control' a lot. More users want more access to more data. Can they define what they want? Of course not, but they'll recognise it when they see it. It's estimated that only 28% of potential BI users have meaningful access to the data they need, so there is a real pent-up demand. The answer looks like: give them some self-service tools so they can experiment and see what works, and then IT can help to support the results. It's estimated that 32% of Excel users are comfortable with its analysis tools such as pivot tables. It's the power user's preferred tool. Why fight it? That's why PowerPivot is an Excel add-in and that's why they released a Data Mining add-in for it as well. It does appear that the strategy is going to be to use Reporting Services (in SharePoint mode), PowerPivot, and possibly something new (smiles and hints but no details) to create reports and explore data. Everything will be published and managed in SharePoint which gives users the ability to mash-up, share and socialise what they've found out. SharePoint also gives IT tools to understand what people are looking at and where to concentrate effort. If PowerPivot report X becomes widely used, it's time to check that it shows what they think it does and perhaps get it a bit more under central control. There was more SharePoint detail that went slightly over my head regarding where Excel Services and Excel Web Application fit in, the differences between them, and the suggestion that it is likely they will one day become one (but not in the immediate future). That basic pattern is set to be expanded upon by further exploiting Vertipaq (the columnar indexing engine that enables PowerPivot to store and process a lot of data fast and in a small memory footprint) to provide scalability 'from the desktop to the data centre', and some yet to be detailed advances in 'frictionless deployment' (part of which is about making the difference between local and the cloud pretty much irrelevant). Excel looks like becoming Microsoft's primary BI client. It already has: the ability to consume cubes strong visualisation tools slicers (which are part of Excel not PowerPivot) a data mining add-in PowerPivot A major hurdle for self-service BI is presenting the data in a consumable format. You can't just give users PowerPivot and a server with a copy of the OLTP database(s). Building cubes is labour intensive and doesn't always give the user what they need. This is where the BI Semantic Model (BISM) comes in. I gather it's a layer of metadata you define that can combine multiple data sources (and types of data source) into a clear 'interface' that users can work with. It comes with a new query language called DAX. SSAS cubes are unlikely to go away overnight because, with their pre-calculated results, they are still the most efficient way to work with really big data sets. A few other random titbits that came up: Reporting Services is going to get some good new stuff in Denali. Keep an eye on www.projectbotticelli.com for the slides. You can also view last year's seminar sessions which covered a lot of the same ground as far as the overall strategy is concerned. They plan to add more material as Denali's features are publicly exposed. Check out the PASS keynote address for a showing of Yahoo's SQL BI servers. Apparently they wheeled the rack out on stage still plugged in and running! Check out the Excel 2010 Data Mining Add-Ins. 32 bit only at present but 64 bit is on the way. There are lots of data sets, many of them free, at the Windows Azure Marketplace Data Market (where you can also get ESRI shape files). If you haven't already seen it, have a look at the Silverlight Pivot Viewer (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/29/silverlight-pivotviewer-now-available.aspx). The Bing Maps Data Connector is worth a look if you're into spatial stuff (http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/07/13/data-connector-sql-server-2008-spatial-amp-bing-maps.aspx).  

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• effective retrieve for a voting system in PHP and MySQL

  - by Adnan

  Hello, I have a system where registered users can vote up/vote down comment for a picture. Something very similar to SO's voting system. I store the votes in a table with values as such; vote_id | vote_comment_id | vote_user_id | vote_date | vote_type Now I have few a question concerned the speed and efficiency for the following; PROB: Once a user opens the picture page with comments I need, if that user has already voted UP/DOWN a comment to show it like; "you voted up" or "you voted down" next to the comment (in SO it the vote image is highlighted) MY POSSIBLE SOL: Right now when I open a picture page for each comment I loop thru, I loop thru my table of votes as well and check if a user has voted and show the status (I compare the vote_user_id with the user's session). How efficient is this? Anyone have a better approach to tackle this kind of problem?

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• BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up I

  - by Tim Dexter

  I was out in Yellowstone last week soaking up various wildlife and a bit too much rain ... good to be back until the 95F heat yesterday. Taking a little break from the Excel templates; the dev folks are planing an Excel patch in the next week or so that will add a mass of new functionality. At the risk of completely mis leading you I'm going to hang back a while. What I have written so far holds true and will continue to do so. This week, I have been mostly eating 'mapviewer' ... answers on a post card please, TV show and character. I had a request to show how BIP can call mapviewer and render a dynamic map in an output. So I hit the books and colleagues for some answers. Mapviewer is Oracle's geographic information system, hereby known as GIS. I use it a lot in our BIEE demos where the interaction with the maps is very impressive. Need a map of California and its congressional districts? I have contacts; Jerry and David with their little black box of maps. Once in my possession I can build highly interactive, clickable maps that allow the user to drill into more information using a very friendly interface driving BIEE content and navigation. But what about maps in BIP output? Bryan Wise, who has written some articles on this blog did some work a while back with the PL/SQL API interface. The extract for the report called a function that in turn called the mapviewer server, passing a set of mapping requirements, it then returned a URL to a cached copy of that map. Easy to then have BIP render that image. Thats still very doable. You need to install a couple of packages and then load the mapviewer java APIs into the database. Then you can write your function to the APIs. A little involved? Maybe, but the database is doing all the heavy lifting for you. I thought I would investigate another method for getting the maps back into BIP. There is a URL interface you can call, this involves building an XML message to be passed to the mapviewer server. It's pretty straightforward to use on the mapviewer side. On the BIP side things are little more tricksy. After some unexpected messing about I finally got the ubiquitous Hello World map to render using the URL method. Not the most exciting map in the world, lots of ocean and a rather long URL to get it to render. http://127.0.0.1:9704/mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22%20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E Notice all of the encoding in the URL string to handle the spaces, quotes, etc. All necessary to get BIP to make the call to the mapviewer server correctly without truncating the URL if it hits a real space rather than a %20. With that in mind constructing the URL was pretty simple. I'm not going to get into the content of the URL too much, for that you need to bone up on the mapviewer XML API. Check out the home page here and the documentation here. To make the template portable I used the standard CURRENT_SERVER_URL parameter from the BIP server and declared that in my template. <?param@begin:CURRENT_SERVER_URL;'myserver'?> Ignore the 'myserver', that was just a dummy value for testing at runtime it will resolve to: 'http://yourserver:port/xmlpserver' Not quite what we need as mapviewer has its own server path, in my case I needed 'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=' as the fixed path to the mapviewer request URL. A little concatenation and substringing later I came up with <?param@begin:mURL;concat(substring($CURRENT_SERVER_URL,1,22),'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=')?> Thats the basic URL that I can then build on. To get the Hello World map I need to add the following: <map_request title="Hello World" datasource="cagis" format="GIF_STREAM"/> Those angle brackets were the source of my headache, BIPs XSLT engine was attempting to process them rather than just pass them. Hok Min to the rescue ... again. I owe him lunch when I get out to HQ again! To solve the problem, I needed to escape all the characters and white space and then use native XSL to assign the string to a parameter. <xsl:param xdofo:ctx="begin"name="pXML">%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22 %20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E</xsl:param> I did not need to assign it to a parameter but I felt that if I were going to do anything more serious than Hello World like plotting points of interest on the map. I would need to dynamically build the URL, so using a set of parameters or variables that I then concatenated would be easier. Now I had the initial server string and the request all I then did was combine the two using a concat: concat($mURL,$pXML) Embedding that into an image tag: <fo:external-graphic src="url({concat($mURL,$pXML)})"/> and I was done. Notice the curly braces to get the concat evaluated prior to the image call. As you will see next time, building the XML message to go onto the URL can get quite complex but I have used it with some data. Ultimately, it would be easier to build an extension to BIP to handle the data to be plotted, it would then build the XML message, call mapviewer and return a URL to the map image for BIP to render. More on that next time ...

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 22, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 22, 2014Popular ReleasesQuickMon: Version 3.22: This release add two important changes. 1. Config variables at the monitor pack level (global to entire monitor pack for all Collectors) 2. The QuickMon (Windows) service now automatically reloads monitor packs that have been changed since it was started. This means you don't have to restart the service for changes to take effect.SSIS ReportGeneratorTask: ReportGenerator Task 1.8: New version of the SSIS Report Generator Task that supports SQL Server 2008, 2012 and 2014. In addition to minor bug fixes Multi-Value Parameters and Execution Information were integrated. The complete variable and parameter assignment is now a string and can be set dynamically.Corefig for Windows Server 2012 Core and Hyper-V Server 2012: Corefig 1.1.2 ISO: FixesUpdated Hyper-V scripts to use version 2 of the WMI tree. Updated the Hyper-V check for saved VM to look for the proper identifier. Fixed text issues with the licensing tab (thanks to briangw for rooting this problem out). EnhancementsNew (and improved) version number in Corefig.psd1.Outlook 2013 Backup Add-In: Outlook Backup Add-In 1.3: Changelog for new version: Added button in config-window to reset the last backup-time (this will trigger the backup after closing outlook) Minimum interval set to 0 (backup at each closing of outlook) Catch exception when data store entry is corrupt Added two parameters (prefix and suffix) to automatically rename the backup file Updated VSTO-Runtime to 10.0.50325 Upgraded project to Visual Studio 2013 Added optional command to run after backup (e.g. pack backup files, ...) Add...babelua: 1.6.7.0: V1.6.7.0 - 2014.8.21New feature: add a file search window ( ctrl+1 or ALT+L ), like The file search in VC Assistant; Stability improvement: performance improvement when BabeLua load/unload; performance improvement when debugger load lua files;File Explorer for WPF: FileExplorer3_20August2014: Please see Aug14 Update.Open NFe: RDI Open NFe 3.0 (alpha): Atualização para o layout 3.10 da NFe.ODBC Connect: v1.0: ODBC Connect executables for both 32bit and 64bit ODBC data sourcesMSSQL Deployment Tool: Microsoft SQL Deploy Tool v1.3.1: MicrosoftSqlDeployTool: v1.3.1.38348 What's changed? Update namespace and assembly name. Bug fixing.SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool: SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool v2.1: Layout improvements Bug fixes Stores auth method and user name Moved experimental settings to Advanced boxCtrlAltStudio Viewer: CtrlAltStudio Viewer 1.2.2.41183 Alpha: This alpha of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer provides some preliminary Oculus Rift DK2 support. For more details, see the release notes linked to below. Release notes: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/release-notes/1-2-2-41183-alpha Support info: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/support Privacy policy: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/privacy Disclaimer: This software is not provided or supported by Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life.HDD Guardian: HDD Guardian 0.6.1: New: package now include smartctl 6.3; Removed: standard notification e-mail. Now you have to set your mail server to send e-mail alerts; Bugfix: USB detection error; custom e-mail server settings issue; bottom panel displays a wrong ATA error count.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.62: changes NEW: Added Support for 'MadImage.org' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgSpot.org' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgClick.net' links NEW: Added Support for 'Imaaage.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'Image-Bugs.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'Pictomania.org' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgDap.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'FileSpit.com' links FIXED: 'ImgSee.me' linksMagick.NET: Magick.NET 7.0.0.0001: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 7-Beta.CMake Tools for Visual Studio: CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.2: This release adds the following new features and bug fixes from CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.1: Added support for CMake 3.0. Added support for word completion. Added IntelliSense support for the CMAKEHOSTSYSTEM_INFORMATION command. Fixed syntax highlighting for tokens beginning with escape sequences. Fixed issue uninstalling CMake Tools for Visual Studio after Visual Studio has been uninstalled.GW2 Personal Assistant Overlay: GW2 Personal Assistant Overlay 1.1: Overview1.1 is the second 'stable' release of the GW2 Personal Assistant Overlay. This version includes just a couple of very minor features and some minor bug fixes. For details regarding installation, setup, and general use, see Documentation. Note: If you were using a previous version, you will probably want to copy over the following user settings files: GW2PAO.DungeonSettings.xml GW2PAO.EventSettings.xml GW2PAO.WvWSettings.xml GW2PAO.ZoneCompletionSettings.xml New FeaturesAdded new "No...Fluentx: Fluentx v1.5.3: Added few more extension methods.fastJSON: v2.1.2: 2.1.2 - bug fix circular referencesJPush.NET: JPush Server SDK 1.2.1 (For JPush V3): Assembly: 1.2.1.24728 JPush REST API Version: v3 JPush Documentation Reference .NET framework: v4.0 or above. Sample: class: JPushClientV3 2014 Augest 15th.SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.043.008 Release 1: Changed ship/station names to use new DisplayName instead of Beacon/Antenna. Fixed issue with updated SE binaries 01.043.018 using new Voxel Material definitions.New Projects1thManage: GDT for erevery oneCreateProjectOnCodePlex: This is the first project for CoderCamps.HEAD FIRST C# LAB 1 : A DAY AT THE RACES: This has been provided for educational purposes and general discussion to improve coding practices associated with the resources detailed within Head First C#.Introduce Audit logging to your EF application using Repository & Unit of Work: Introduce Auditing in your application that uses Entity Framework by utilizing the Repository and Unit of Work design patterns.License Registration (C++): Allow to create demo version, activate or not a module.MS Word SharepointWiki Plugin: Scope of the Plugin is to enable a Post to a Sharepoint Wiki from within MS Word with Formatted Text and Images.Send My Zip: This app will help you to send the files were zipped then send the email about password information. This project is currently in setup mode and only availablewinhttp: this is a project for http/https download.Wix Builder: WixBuilder focusses on easily generating a WiX script from a project ouput, compile and link it into msi installer using the WiX Toolset.XiamiSig: ????????。

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• How to disable multitouch?

  - by cannyboy

  My app has several buttons which trigger different events. The user should NOT be able to hold down several buttons. Anyhow, holding down several buttons crashes the app. And so, I'm trying to disable multi-touch in my app. I've unchecked 'Multiple Touch' in all the xib files, and as far as I can work out, the properties 'multipleTouchEnabled' and 'exclusiveTouch' control whether the view uses multitouch. So in my applicationDidFinishLaunching I've put this: self.mainViewController.view.multipleTouchEnabled=NO; self.mainViewController.view.exclusiveTouch =YES; And in each of my view controllers I've put this in the viewDidLoad self.view.multipleTouchEnabled=NO; self.view.exclusiveTouch=YES; However, it still accepts multiple touches. I could do something like disable other buttons after getting a touch down event, but this would be an ugly hack. Surely there is a way to properly disable multi-touch?

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• The Future of Project Management is Social

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Kazim Isfahani, Director, Product Marketing, Oracle Rapid Ascent. Breakneck Speed. Lightning Fast. Perhaps even overwhelming. No matter which set of adjectives we use to describe it, social media’s rise into the enterprise mainstream has been unprecedented. Indeed, the big 4 social media powerhouses (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter), have nearly 2 Billion users between them. You may be asking (as you should really) “That’s all well and good for the consumer, but for me at my company, what’s your point? Beyond the fact that I can check and post updates, that is.” Good question, kind sir. Impact of Social and Collaboration on Project Management I’ll dovetail this discussion to the project management realm, since that’s what I’m writing about. Speed is a big challenge for project-driven organizations. Anything that can help speed up project delivery - be it a new product introduction effort or a geographical expansion project - fast is a good thing. So where does this whole social thing fit particularly since there are already a host of tools to help with traditional project execution? The fact is companies have seen improvements in their productivity by deploying departmental collaboration and other social-oriented solutions. McKinsey’s survey on social tools shows we have reached critical scale: 72% of respondents report that their companies use at least one and over 40% say they are using social networks and blogs. We don’t hear as much about the impact of social media technologies at the project and project manager level, but that does not mean there is none. Consider the new hire. The type of individual entering the workforce and executing on projects is a generation of worker expecting visually appealing, easy to use and easy to understand technology meshing hand-in-hand with business processes. Consider the project manager. The social era has enhanced the role that the project manager must play. Today’s project manager must be a supreme communicator, an influencer, a sympathizer, a negotiator, and still manage to keep all stakeholders in the loop on project progress. Social tools play a significant role in this effort. Now consider the impact to the project team. The way that a project team functions has changed, with newer, social oriented technologies making the process of information dissemination and team communications much more fluid. It’s clear that a shift is occurring where “social” is intersecting with project management. The Rise of Social Project Management We refer to the melding of project management and social networking as Social Project Management. Social Project Management is based upon the philosophy that the project team is one part of an integrated whole, and that valuable and unique abilities exist within the larger organization. For this reason, Social Project Management systems should be integrated into the collaborative platform(s) of an organization, allowing communication to proceed outside the project boundaries. What makes social project management "social" is an implicit awareness where distributed teams build connected links in ways that were previously restricted to teams that were co-located. Just as critical, Social Project Management embraces the vision of seamless online collaboration within a project team, but also provides for, (and enhances) the use of rigorous project management techniques. Social Project Management acknowledges that projects (particularly large projects) are a social activity - people doing work with people, for other people, with commitments to yet other people. The more people (larger projects), the more interpersonal the interactions, and the more social affects the project. The Epitome of Social - Fusion Project Portfolio Management If I take this one level further to discuss Fusion Project Portfolio Management, the notion of Social Project Management is on full display. With Fusion Project Portfolio Management, project team members have a single place for interaction on projects and access to any other resources working within the Fusion ERP applications. This allows team members the opportunity to be informed with greater participation and provide better information. The application’s the visual appeal, and highly graphical nature makes it easy to navigate information. The project activity stream adds to the intuitive user experience. The goal of productivity is pervasive throughout Fusion Project Portfolio Management. Field research conducted with Oracle customers and partners showed that users needed a way to stay in the context of their core transactions and yet easily access social networking tools. This is manifested in the application so when a user executes a business process, they not only have the transactional application at their fingertips, but also have things like e-mail, SMS, text, instant messaging, chat – all providing a number of different ways to interact with people and/or groups of people, both internal and external to the project and enterprise. But in the end, connecting people is relatively easy. The larger issue is finding a way to serve up relevant, system-generated, actionable information, in real time, which will allow for more streamlined execution on key business processes. Fusion Project Portfolio Management’s design concept enables users to create project communities, establish discussion threads, manage event calendars as well as deliver project based work spaces to organize communications within the context of a project – all within a secure business environment. We’d love to hear from you and get your thoughts and ideas about how Social Project Management is impacting your organization. To learn more about Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management, please visit this link

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• Using key().id() on GAE Datastore and reverse geocoding

  - by Ivan Slaughter

  I have 6000 data of district, subdistrict. I need to represent this on dependent dropdown. The datamodel is for example; class Location(db.Model): location_name = db.StringProperty() location_parent = db.IntegerProperty() location_parent is reference to key() or id()? Still cannot decide which one is good. When i use key() as reference then using JSON to create jquery dependent drop down. My page loading/query and rendering time the dropdown is quite slow? Can i use key().id() as drop down option value to lighten up the page load? Any better solution for this parent/child reference for the drop down? For example: for the district record/entities the location-parent is null, for sub district record location_name will contain reference to parent district record. Other issue is to reverse geocoding the location to store or display geoPoint (lat,long)? Is google MAP API always find the exact lat,long of specific region boundaries or any error checking for the result?

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• The Oracle Graduate Experience...A Graduates Perspective by Angelie Tierney

  - by david.talamelli

  [Note: Angelie has just recently joined Oracle in Australia in our 2011 Graduate Program. Last week I shared my thoughts on our 2011 Graduate Program, this week Angelie took some time to share her thoughts of our Graduate Program. The notes below are Angelie's overview from her experience with us starting with our first contact last year - David Talamelli] How does the 1 year program work? It consists of 3 weeks of training, followed by 2 rotations in 2 different Lines of Business (LoB's). The first rotation goes for 4 months, while your 2nd rotation goes for 7, when you are placed into your final LoB for the program. The interview process: After sorting through the many advertised graduate jobs, submitting so many resumes and studying at the same time, it can all be pretty stressful. Then there is the interview process. David called me on a Sunday afternoon and I spoke to him for about 30 minutes in a mini sort of phone interview. I was worried that working at Oracle would require extensive technical experience, but David stressed that even the less technical, and more business-minded person could, and did, work at Oracle. I was then asked if I would like to attend a group interview in the next weeks, to which I said of course! The first interview was a day long, consisting of a brief introduction, a group interview where we worked on a business plan with a group of other potential graduates and were marked by 3 Oracle employees, on our ability to work together and presentation. After lunch, we then had a short individual interview each, and that was the end of the first round. I received a call a few weeks later, and was asked to come into a second interview, at which I also jumped at the opportunity. This was an interview based purely on your individual abilities and would help to determine which Line of Business you would go to, should you land a graduate position. So how did I cope throughout the interview stages? I believe the best tool to prepare for the interview, was to research Oracle and its culture and to see if I thought I could fit into that. I personally found out about Oracle, its partners as well as competitors and along the way, even found out about their part (or Larry Ellison's specifically) in the Iron Man 2 movie. Armed with some Oracle information and lots of enthusiasm, I approached the Oracle Graduate Interview process. Why did I apply for an Oracle graduate position? I studied a Bachelor of Business/Bachelor of Science in IT, and wanted to be able to use both my degrees, while have the ability to work internationally in the future. Coming straight from university, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do in terms of my career. With the program, you are rotated across various lines of business, to not only expose you to different parts of the business, but to also help you to figure out what you want to achieve out of your career. As a result, I thought Oracle was the perfect fit. So what can an Oracle ANZ Graduate expect? First things first, you can expect to line up for your visitor pass. Really. Next you enter a room full of unknown faces, graduates just like you, and then you realise you're in this with 18 other people, going through the same thing as you. 3 weeks later you leave with many memories, colleagues you can call your friends, and a video of your presentation. Vanessa, the Graduate Manager, will also take lots of photos and keep you (well) fed. Well that's not all you leave with, you are also equipped with a wealth of knowledge and contacts within Oracle, both that will help you throughout your career there. What training is involved? We started our Oracle experience with 3 weeks of training, consisting of employee orientation, extensive product training, presentations on the various lines of business (LoB's), followed by sales and presentation training. While there was potential for an information overload, maybe even death by Powerpoint, we were able to have access to the presentations for future reference, which was very helpful. This period also allowed us to start networking, not only with the graduates, but with the managers who presented to us, as well as through the monthly chinwag, HR celebrations and even with the sharing of tea facilities. We also had a team bonding day when we recorded a "commercial" within groups, and learned how to play an Irish drum. Overall, the training period helped us to learn about Oracle, as well as ourselves, and to prepare us for our transition into our rotations. Where to now? I'm now into my 2nd week of my first graduate rotation. It has been exciting to finally get out into the work environment and utilise that knowledge we gained from training. My manager has been a great mentor, extremely knowledgeable, and it has been good being able to participate in meetings, conference calls and make a contribution towards the business. And while we aren't necessarily working directly with the other graduates, they are still reachable via email, Pidgin and lunch and they are important as a resource and support, after all, they are going through a similar experience to you. While it is only the beginning, there is a lot more to learn and a lot more to experience along the way, especially because, as we learned during training, at Oracle, the only constant is change.

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• Developing a Cost Model for Cloud Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  Note - please pay attention to the date of this post. As much as I attempt to make the information below accurate, the nature of distributed computing means that components, units and pricing will change over time. The definitive costs for Microsoft Windows Azure and SQL Azure are located here, and are more accurate than anything you will see in this post: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/  When writing software that is run on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering like Windows Azure / SQL Azure, one of the questions you must answer is how much the system will cost. I will not discuss the comparisons between on-premise costs (which are nigh impossible to calculate accurately) versus cloud costs, but instead focus on creating a general model for estimating costs for a given application. You should be aware that there are (at this writing) two billing mechanisms for Windows and SQL Azure: “Pay-as-you-go” or consumption, and “Subscription” or commitment. Conceptually, you can consider the former a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan, where you pay by the unit used (at a slightly higher rate) and the latter as a standard cell phone plan where you commit to a contract and thus pay lower rates. In this post I’ll stick with the pay-as-you-go mechanism for simplicity, which should be the maximum cost you would pay. From there you may be able to get a lower cost if you use the other mechanism. In any case, the model you create should hold. Developing a good cost model is essential. As a developer or architect, you’ll most certainly be asked how much something will cost, and you need to have a reliable way to estimate that. Businesses and Organizations have been used to paying for servers, software licenses, and other infrastructure as an up-front cost, and power, people to the systems and so on as an ongoing (and sometimes not factored) cost. When presented with a new paradigm like distributed computing, they may not understand the true cost/value proposition, and that’s where the architect and developer can guide the conversation to make a choice based on features of the application versus the true costs. The two big buckets of use-types for these applications are customer-based and steady-state. In the customer-based use type, each successful use of the program results in a sale or income for your organization. Perhaps you’ve written an application that provides the spot-price of foo, and your customer pays for the use of that application. In that case, once you’ve estimated your cost for a successful traversal of the application, you can build that into the price you charge the user. It’s a standard restaurant model, where the price of the meal is determined by the cost of making it, plus any profit you can make. In the second use-type, the application will be used by a more-or-less constant number of processes or users and no direct revenue is attached to the system. A typical example is a customer-tracking system used by the employees within your company. In this case, the cost model is often created “in reverse” - meaning that you pilot the application, monitor the use (and costs) and that cost is held steady. This is where the comparison with an on-premise system becomes necessary, even though it is more difficult to estimate those on-premise true costs. For instance, do you know exactly how much cost the air conditioning is because you have a team of system administrators? This may sound trivial, but that, along with the insurance for the building, the wiring, and every other part of the system is in fact a cost to the business. There are three primary methods that I’ve been successful with in estimating the cost. None are perfect, all are demand-driven. The general process is to lay out a matrix of: components units cost per unit and then multiply that times the usage of the system, based on which components you use in the program. That sounds a bit simplistic, but using those metrics in a calculation becomes more detailed. In all of the methods that follow, you need to know your application. The components for a PaaS include computing instances, storage, transactions, bandwidth and in the case of SQL Azure, database size. In most cases, architects start with the first model and progress through the other methods to gain accuracy. Simple Estimation The simplest way to calculate costs is to architect the application (even UML or on-paper, no coding involved) and then estimate which of the components you’ll use, and how much of each will be used. Microsoft provides two tools to do this - one is a simple slider-application located here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing-calculator/  The other is a tool you download to create an “Return on Investment” (ROI) spreadsheet, which has the advantage of leading you through various questions to estimate what you plan to use, located here: https://roianalyst.alinean.com/msft/AutoLogin.do?d=176318219048082115  You can also just create a spreadsheet yourself with a structure like this: Program Element Azure Component Unit of Measure Cost Per Unit Estimated Use of Component Total Cost Per Component Cumulative Cost               Of course, the consideration with this model is that it is difficult to predict a system that is not running or hasn’t even been developed. Which brings us to the next model type. Measure and Project A more accurate model is to actually write the code for the application, using the Software Development Kit (SDK) which can run entirely disconnected from Azure. The code should be instrumented to estimate the use of the application components, logging to a local file on the development system. A series of unit and integration tests should be run, which will create load on the test system. You can use standard development concepts to track this usage, and even use Windows Performance Monitor counters. The best place to start with this method is to use the Windows Azure Diagnostics subsystem in your code, which you can read more about here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sumitm/archive/2009/11/18/introducing-windows-azure-diagnostics.aspx This set of API’s greatly simplifies tracking the application, and in fact you can use this information for more than just a cost model. After you have the tracking logs, you can plug the numbers into ay of the tools above, which should give a representative cost or in some cases a unit cost. The consideration with this model is that the SDK fabric is not a one-to-one comparison with performance on the actual Windows Azure fabric. Those differences are usually smaller, but they do need to be considered. Also, you may not be able to accurately predict the load on the system, which might lead to an architectural change, which changes the model. This leads us to the next, most accurate method for a cost model. Sample and Estimate Using standard statistical and other predictive math, once the application is deployed you will get a bill each month from Microsoft for your Azure usage. The bill is quite detailed, and you can export the data from it to do analysis, and using methods like regression and so on project out into the future what the costs will be. I normally advise that the architect also extrapolate a unit cost from those metrics as well. This is the information that should be reported back to the executives that pay the bills: the past cost, future projected costs, and unit cost “per click” or “per transaction”, as your case warrants. The challenge here is in the model itself - statistical methods are not foolproof, and the larger the sample (in this case I recommend the entire population, not a smaller sample) is key. References and Tools Articles: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patrick_butler_monterde/archive/2010/02/10/windows-azure-billing-overview.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg213848.aspx http://blog.codingoutloud.com/2011/06/05/azure-faq-how-much-will-it-cost-me-to-run-my-application-on-windows-azure/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnalioto/archive/2010/08/25/10054193.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/02/08/qampa-how-can-i-calculate-the-tco-and-roi-when.aspx   Other Tools: http://cloud-assessment.com/ http://communities.quest.com/community/cloud_tools

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• effective retrieve for a voting system in PHP

  - by Adnan

  Hello, I have a system where registered users can vote up/vote down comment for a picture. Something very similar to SO's voting system. I store the votes in a table with values as such; vote_id | vote_comment_id | vote_user_id | vote_date Now I have few a question concerned the speed and efficiency for the following; PROB: Once a user opens the picture page with comments I need, if that user has already voted UP/DOWN a comment to show it like; "you voted up" or "you voted down" next to the comment (in SO it the vote image is highlighted) MY POSSIBLE SOL: Right now when I open a picture page for each comment I loop thru, I loop thru my table of votes as well and check if a user has voted and show the status (I compare the vote_user_id with the user's session). How efficient is this? Anyone have a better approach to tackle this kind of problem?

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• How to move sub-headings to under other headings in emacs org-mode

  - by Mittenchops

  My list looks like this: * TODAY ** TODO Item 1 ** TODO Item 2 * TOMORROW ** TODO Item 3 ** TODO Item 4 ...as a single list, based on some advice I received here. I'd like to move TODO Item 2 from under TODAY to under TOMORROW. The manual says: M-up M-down Move the item including subitems up/down (swap with previous/next item of same indentation). If the list is ordered, renumbering is automatic. But while I can change the places of Item 1 and Item 2, I cannot move Item 2 outside of the Today heading---I cannot move it down under TOMORROW to proceed Item 3. The buffer tells me: cannot move past superior level or buffer limit org mode What is the keystroke that lets me move sub-items "past superior level" to under new headings?

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• How to traverse the item in the collection in a List or Observable collection?

  - by Ashish Ashu

  I have a collection that is binded to my Listview. I have provided options to user to "move up" "move down" the selected item in the list view. I have binded the selected item of the listview to my viewmodel, hence I get the item in the collection on which user want to do the operation. I have attached "move up" "move down" commands in my viewmodel. I want what is the best way to move up and down in the collection in the collection which is reflected in the list view. Please suggest.

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• Delivering the Integrated Portal Experience!

  - by Michael Snow

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Guest post by Richard Maldonado, Principal Product Manager, Oracle WebCenter Portal Organizations are still struggling to standardize on a user interaction platform which can meet the needs of all their target audiences.  This has not only resulted in inefficient and inconsistent experiences for their users, but it also creates inefficiencies (productivity and costs) for the departments that manage the applications and information systems.  Portals have historically been the unifying platform that provide IT with a common interface which can securely surface the most relevant interactions for a given user and/or group of users.  However, organizations have found that the technologies available have either not provided the flexibility necessary to address all of their use cases, or they rely too much on IT resources to manage, maintain, and evolve.  Empowering  the Business Groups The core issue that IT departments face with delivering portal experiences is having enough resources to respond and address the influx of requirements which come in from the business.  Commonly, when a business group wants a new portal site established for their group, they will submit a request to the IT dept, the IT dept then assigns a resource to an administrator and/or developer to build.  Unfortunately, this approach is not scalable, it can be a time consuming activity which requires significant interaction between the business owner and the IT resource.  A modern user interaction platforms should empower the business groups by providing them tools which they can use to build and manage the portal experiences without the need for IT's involvement.  And because business groups rarely have technical resources (developers) on staff, the tools must be easy enough that virtually any business user could use.  In addition, the tool must be powerful enough to allow them to build the experience that they need, things such as creating a whole new portal, add/manage page and page hierarchy, manage user/group access, add/modify components within the page, etc.  This balance between ease-of-use and flexibility is key to the successful adoption of tools which will ultimately reduce the burden on IT, respond to the needs of the business, and deliver high-value experiences for the users.  Ready or Not, Here They Come: Smartphones and Tablets Recently, several studies have highlighted that smartphone and tablet-style devices have overtaken PC's in both sales and usage.  This shift is further driving organizations to revaluate how they're delivering data, information, and applications to their users.  Users are expecting to get the same level of access and interaction, but in a ways which are optimized for the capabilities of the device that they are using.  Expect More With the ever growing number of new IT projects and flat/shrinking budgets, organizations are looking for comprehensive solutions which can deliver integrated web experiences that are tailored for the users and optimized for mobile devices.  Piecing together a number of point solutions is no longer an option.  A modern portal technology should not only address the traditional needs of integrating and surfacing back-end applications/information, but it should enable the business through easy-to-use tools and accelerate the delivery of mobile optimized experiences.   v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} WebCenter in Action Series: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter Featuring Qualcomm & Keste 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 -"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} 12.00 Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast- mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Gamification at OOW

  - by erikanollwebb

  Last week was Oracle OpenWorld, and for those of you not in tech or downtown San Francisco, that might not mean a whole lot.  However, if you are familiar with it, Oracle OpenWorld is our premier customer event.  This year, more than 50,000 people attended.  It's not a good week to visit San Francisco on vacation because Oracle customers take over all the hotels in town!  It was crazy, but a lot of fun and it's a great opportunity for the Apps UX group to do customer research with a range of customers.  This year, more than 100+ customers and partners took the time to team up with our UX experts and provide feedback on new designs and ideas. Over three days,  UX teams conducted 8  one-on-one user feedback sessions, 4 focus groups and 7 surveys. In addition, we conducted a voice capture activity and were able to collect close to 70 speech samples at the lab and DEMOgrounds. This was a great opportunity for us to do some testing on some specific gamification concepts with a set of business analysts.  We pulled in 8 folks for a focus group on gamification concepts and whether they thought those would work for their teams. To get ready for this, my designer extraordinaire, Andrea Cantú, flew into town and we spent almost a week locked in a room together brainstorming design ideas.  We killed a few trees trying to get all of our concepts and other examples together in the process, but in the end, we put together a whole series of examples of how you might gamify an Oracle app (in this case, CRM).  Andrea is a genius for this kind of thing and the comps she created looked great.  Here's a picture of her hard at work!  We also had the good fortune to have my boss, Laurie Pattison and my usability contractor, Shobana Subramanian there to note take and observe as well.  Here's a few shots of us, hard at work preparing for the day (or checking out something on Laurie's iPhone...) To start things off, we gave an overview of gamification and I talked about what it's used for.  Then we gave the participants a scenario about our sales person and what we were trying to get her to do. It was a great opportunity to highlight what our business goals might be and why we might want to add game mechanics.  It was also a good way to get them thinking about how that might work for them in their environments and workplaces. There were some surprises for the day.  We asked how many of them were already familiar with the concept of gamification--only two people had heard of it and only one was using game mechanics in his work.  That's in contrast to a survey we just ran internally with folks in a dev org where almost 50% of about 450 respondents had heard of gamification.  As we discussed the ways game mechanics could be used, it became clear that many of the folks had seen some game mechanics in action but didn't know that's what they were.  We also noticed that the folks in this group felt that if they were trying to sell the concept in their orgs, they wouldn't call it gamification.  That's not a huge surprise to me--they said what we've heard in the past, that gamification does not seem like a serious term for enterprise software.  They said they'd sell it with the goals--as a means to increase behaviors by rewarding users for activities.  It's a funny problem.  The word puts some folks off, but at the same time, I haven't seen another one word description that quite captures the range of things that "gamification" can cover.  My guess is that the more mainstream the term becomes, the more desensitized we'll become to the idea the it's trivializing enterprise software in some way.  Still, it was interesting to note that this group still felt that they would not take this concept to their bosses or teams and call it "gamification".  They focused on the goals, and how we could incentivize desired behaviors with game mechanics.  As I have already stated in other posts, I feel like my org is more receptive to discussing how this is just a more transparent type of usability and user experience methods than talking about gamification.  That's the argument they said they would use. All in all, it was a good session.  I love getting to talk to customers, present ideas and concepts, and get their feedback and input.  It's the type of thing that really helps drive our designs and keeps us grounded in what our customers need/want.  We're already planning where to get more feedback opportunities in the coming months. 

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• Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Tips and Tricks&ndash;Part 1: Extensions

  - by ToStringTheory

  I don’t know about you, but when it comes to development, I prefer my environment to be as free of clutter as possible.  It may surprise you to know that I have tried ReSharper, and did not like it, for the reason that I stated above.  In my opinion, it had too much clutter.  Don’t get me wrong, there were a couple of features that I did like about it (inversion of if blocks, code feedback), but for the most part, I actually felt that it was slowing me down. Introduction Another large factor besides intrusiveness/speed in my choice to dislike ReSharper would probably be that I have become comfortable with my current setup and extensions.  I believe I have a good collection, and am quite happy with what I can accomplish in a short amount of time.  I figured that I would share some of my tips/findings regarding Visual Studio productivity here, and see what you had to say. The first section of things that I would like to cover, are Visual Studio Extensions.  In case you have been living under a rock for the past several years, Extensions are available under the Tools menu in Visual Studio: The extension manager enables integrated access to the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery online with access to a few thousand different extensions.  I have tried many extensions, but for reasons of lack reliability, usability, or features, have uninstalled almost all of them.  However, I have come across several that I find I can not do without anymore: NuGet Package Manager (Microsoft) Perspectives (Adam Driscoll) Productivity Power Tools (Microsoft) Web Essentials (Mads Kristensen) Extensions NuGet Package Manager To be honest, I debated on whether or not to put this in here.  Most people seem to have it, however, there was a time when I didn’t, and was always confused when blogs/posts would say to right click and “Add Package Reference…” which with one of the latest updates is now “Manage NuGet Packages”.  So, if you haven’t downloaded the NuGet Package Manager yet, or don’t know what it is, I would highly suggest downloading it now! Features Simply put, the NuGet Package Manager gives you a GUI and command line to access different libraries that have been uploaded to NuGet. Some of its features include: Ability to search NuGet for packages via the GUI, with information in the detail bar on the right. Quick access to see what packages are in a solution, and what packages have updates available, with easy 1-click updating. If you download a package that requires references to work on other NuGet packages, they will be downloaded and referenced automatically. Productivity Tip If you use any type of source control in Visual Studio as well as using NuGet packages, be sure to right-click on the solution and click "Enable NuGet Package Restore". What this does is add a NuGet package to the solution so that it will be checked in along side your solution, as well as automatically grab packages from NuGet on build if needed. This is an extremely simple system to use to manage your package references, instead of having to manually go into TFS and add the Packages folder. Perspectives I can't stand developing with just one monitor. Especially if it comes to debugging. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010, is that all of the panels and windows are floatable, and can dock to other screens. The only bad thing is, I don't use the same toolset with everything that I am doing. By this, I mean that I don't use all of the same windows for debugging a web application, as I do for coding a WPF application. Only thing is, Visual Studio doesn't save the screen positions for all of the undocked windows. So, I got curious one day and decided to check and see if there was an extension to help out. This is where I found Perspectives. Features Perspectives gives you the ability to configure window positions across any or your monitors, and then to save the positions in a profile. Perspectives offers a Panel to manage different presets/favorites, and a toolbar to add to the toolbars at the top of Visual Studio. Ability to 'Favorite' a profile to add it to the perspectives toolbar. Productivity Tip Take the time to setup profiles for each of your scenarios - debugging web/winforms/xaml, coding, maintenance, etc. Try to remember to use the profiles for a few days, and at the end of a week, you may find that your productivity was never better. Productivity Power Tools Ah, the Productivity Power Tools... Quite possibly one of my most used extensions, if not my most used. The tool pack gives you a variety of enhancements ranging from key shortcuts, interface tweaks, and completely new features to Visual Studio 2010. Features I don't want to bore you with all of the features here, so here are my favorite: Quick Find - Unobtrusive search box in upper-right corner of the code window. Great for searching in general, especially in a file. Solution Navigator - The 'Solution Explorer' on steroids. Easy to search for files, see defined members/properties/methods in files, and my favorite feature is the 'set as root' option. Updated 'Add Reference...' Dialog - This is probably my favorite enhancement period... The 'Add Reference...' dialog redone in a manner that resembles the Extension/Package managers. I especially love the ability to search through all of the references. "Ctrl - Click" for Definition - I am still getting used to this as I usually try to use my keyboard for everything, but I love the ability to hold Ctrl and turn property/methods/variables into hyperlinks, that you click on to see their definitions. Great for travelling down a rabbit hole in an application to research problems. While there are other commands/utilities, I find these to be the ones that I lean on the most for the usefulness. Web Essentials If you have do any type of web development in ASP .Net, ASP .Net MVC, even HTML, I highly suggest grabbing the Web Essentials right NOW! This extension alone is great for productivity in web development, and greatly decreases my development time on new features. Features Some of its best features include: CSS Previews - I say 'previews' because of the multiple kinds of previews in CSS that you get font-family, color, background/background-image previews. This is great for just tweaking UI slightly in different ways and seeing how they look in the CSS window at a glance. Live Preview - One word - awesome! This goes well with my multi-monitor setup. I put the site on one monitor in a Live Preview panel, and then as I make changes to CSS/cshtml/aspx/html, the preview window will update with each save/build automatically. For CSS, you can even turn on live-update, so as you are tweaking CSS, the style changes in real time. Great for tweaking colors or font-sizes. Outlining - Small, but I like to be able to collapse regions/declarations that are in the way of new work, or are just distracting. Commenting Shortcuts - I don't know why it wasn't included by default, but it is nice to have the key shortcuts for commenting working in the CSS editor as well. Productivity Tip When working on a site, hit CTRL-ALT-ENTER to launch the Live Preview window. Dock it to another monitor. When you make changes to the document/css, just save and glance at the other monitor. No need to alt tab, then alt tab before continuing editing. Conclusion These extensions are only the most useful and least intrusive - ones that I use every day. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010 is the extensibility options that it gives developers to utilize. Have an extension that you use that isn't intrusive, but isn't listed here? Please, feel free to comment. I love trying new things, and am always looking for new additions to my toolset of the most useful. Finally, please keep an eye out for Part 2 on key shortcuts in Visual Studio. Also, if you are visiting my site (http://tostringtheory.com || http://geekswithblogs.net/tostringtheory) from an actual browser and not a feed, please let me know what you think of the new styling!

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• How can I interrupt a ServerSocket accept() method?

  - by lukeo05

  Hi, In my main thread I have a while(listening) loop which calls accept() on my ServerSocket object, then starts a new client thread and adds it to a Collection when a new client is accepted. I also have an Admin thread which I want to use to issue commands, like 'exit', which will cause all the client threads to be shut down, shut itself down, and shut down the main thread, by turning listening to false. However, the accept() call in the while(listening) loop blocks, and there doesn't seem to be any way to interrupt it, so the while condition cannot be checked again and the program cannot exit! Is there a better way to do this? Or some way to interrupt the blocking method? Thanks!

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