stored procedures - Page 276

How to implement an email unsubscribe system for a site with many kinds of emails?

- by Mike Liu

I'm working on a website that features many different types of emails. Users have accounts, and when logged in they have access to a setting page that they can use to customize what types of emails they receive. However, I'd like to also give users an easy way to unsubscribe directly in the emails they receive. I've looked into list unsubscribe headers as well as creating some type of one click link that would unsubscribe a user from that type of email without requiring login or further action. The later would probably require me to break convention and make changes to the database in response to a GET on the link. However, am I incorrect in thinking that either of these would require me to generate and permanently store a unique identifier in my database for every email I ever send, really complicating email delivery? Without that, I'm not sure how I would be able to uniquely identify a user and a type of email in order to change their email preferences, and this identifier would need to be stored forever as a user could have an email sitting in their inbox for a long time before they decide to act on it. Alternatively, I was considering having a no-login page for managing email preferences. In contrast to above where I would need one of these identifiers for each email, this would only need one identifier per user, with no generation or other action required on sending an email. All of these raise security issues, and they could potentially be used by people to tamper with others' email preferences. This could be mitigated somewhat by ensuring that the identifier is really difficult to guess. For the once per user identifier approach, I was considering generating the identifier by passing a user's ID through some type of encryption algorithm, is this a sound approach? For the per-email identifiers, perhaps I could use a user's ID appended to the time. However, even this would not eliminate the problem entirely, as this would really just be security through obscurity, and anyone with the URL could tamper, and in the end the main defense would have to be that most people aren't so bored as to tamper with other people's email preferences. Are there any other alternatives I've missed, or issues or solutions with these that anyone can provide insight on? What are best practices in this area?

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How does I/O work for large graph databases?

- by tjb1982

I should preface this by saying that I'm mostly a front end web developer, trained as a musician, but over the past few years I've been getting more and more into computer science. So one idea I have as a fun toy project to learn about data structures and C programming was to design and implement my own very simple database that would manage an adjacency list of posts. I don't want SQL (maybe I'll do my own query language? I'm just having fun). It should support ACID. It should be capable of storing 1TB let's say. So with that, I was trying to think of how a database even stores data, without regard to data structures necessarily. I'm working on linux, and I've read that in that world "everything is a file," including hardware (like /dev/*), so I think that that obviously has to apply to a database, too, and it clearly does--whether it's MySQL or PostgreSQL or Neo4j, the database itself is a collection of files you can see in the filesystem. That said, there would come a point in scale where loading the entire database into primary memory just wouldn't work, so it doesn't make sense to design it with that mindset (I assume). However, reading from secondary memory would be much slower and regardless some portion of the database has to be in primary memory in order for you to be able to do anything with it. I read this post: Why use a database instead of just saving your data to disk? And I found it difficult to understand how other databases, like SQLite or Neo4j, read and write from secondary memory and are still very fast (faster, it would seem, than simply writing files to the filesystem as the above question suggests). It seems the key is indexing. But even indexes need to be stored in secondary memory. They are inherently smaller than the database itself, but indexes in a very large database might be prohibitively large, too. So my question is how is I/O generally done with large databases like the one I described above that would be at least 1TB storing a big adjacency list? If indexing is more or less the answer, how exactly does indexing work--what data structures should be involved?

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T-SQL Tuesday #31 - Logging Tricks with CONTEXT_INFO

- by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Aaron Nelson [b | t], fellow Atlantan (the city in Georgia, not the famous sunken city, or the resort in the Bahamas) and covers the topic of logging (the recording of information, not the harvesting of trees) and maintains the fine T-SQL Tuesday tradition begun by Adam Machanic [b | t] (the SQL Server guru, not the guy who fixes cars, check the spelling again, there will be a quiz later). This is a trick I learned from Fernando Guerrero [b | t] waaaaaay back during the PASS Summit 2004 in sunny, hurricane-infested Orlando, during his session on Secret SQL Server (not sure if that's the correct title, and I haven't used parentheses in this paragraph yet). CONTEXT_INFO is a neat little feature that's existed since SQL Server 2000 and perhaps even earlier. It lets you assign data to the current session/connection, and maintains that data until you disconnect or change it. In addition to the CONTEXT_INFO() function, you can also query the context_info column in sys.dm_exec_sessions, or even sysprocesses if you're still running SQL Server 2000, if you need to see it for another session. While you're limited to 128 bytes, one big advantage that CONTEXT_INFO has is that it's independent of any transactions. If you've ever logged to a table in a transaction and then lost messages when it rolled back, you can understand how aggravating it can be. CONTEXT_INFO also survives across multiple SQL batches (GO separators) in the same connection, so for those of you who were going to suggest "just log to a table variable, they don't get rolled back": HA-HA, I GOT YOU! Since GO starts a new batch all variable declarations are lost. Here's a simple example I recently used at work. I had to test database mirroring configurations for disaster recovery scenarios and measure the network throughput. I also needed to log how long it took for the script to run and include the mirror settings for the database in question. I decided to use AdventureWorks as my database model, and Adam Machanic's Big Adventure script to provide a fairly large workload that's repeatable and easily scalable. My test would consist of several copies of AdventureWorks running the Big Adventure script while I mirrored the databases (or not). Since Adam's script contains several batches, I decided CONTEXT_INFO would have to be used. As it turns out, I only needed to grab the start time at the beginning, I could get the rest of the data at the end of the process. The code is pretty small: declare @time binary(128)=cast(getdate() as binary(8)) set context_info @time ... rest of Big Adventure code ... go use master; insert mirror_test(server,role,partner,db,state,safety,start,duration) select @@servername, mirroring_role_desc, mirroring_partner_instance, db_name(database_id), mirroring_state_desc, mirroring_safety_level_desc, cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime), datediff(s,cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime),getdate()) from sys.database_mirroring where db_name(database_id) like 'Adv%'; I declared @time as a binary(128) since CONTEXT_INFO is defined that way. I couldn't convert GETDATE() to binary(128) as it would pad the first 120 bytes as 0x00. To keep the CAST functions simple and avoid using SUBSTRING, I decided to CAST GETDATE() as binary(8) and let SQL Server do the implicit conversion. It's not the safest way perhaps, but it works on my machine. :) As I mentioned earlier, you can query system views for sessions and get their CONTEXT_INFO. With a little boilerplate code this can be used to monitor long-running procedures, in case you need to kill a process, or are just curious how long certain parts take. In this example, I added code to Adam's Big Adventure script to set CONTEXT_INFO messages at strategic places I want to monitor. (His code is in UPPERCASE as it was in the original, mine is all lowercase): declare @msg binary(128) set @msg=cast('Altering bigProduct.ProductID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ALTER COLUMN ProductID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg1 binary(128) set @msg1=cast('Adding pk_bigProduct Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg1 go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigProduct PRIMARY KEY (ProductID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg2 binary(128) set @msg2=cast('Altering bigTransactionHistory.TransactionID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg2 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ALTER COLUMN TransactionID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg3 binary(128) set @msg3=cast('Adding pk_bigTransactionHistory Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg3 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigTransactionHistory PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED(TransactionID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg4 binary(128) set @msg4=cast('Creating IX_ProductId_TransactionDate Index' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg4 go CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_ProductId_TransactionDate ON bigTransactionHistory(ProductId,TransactionDate) INCLUDE(Quantity,ActualCost) GO set context_info 0x0 This doesn't include the entire script, only those portions that altered a table or created an index. One annoyance is that SET CONTEXT_INFO requires a literal or variable, you can't use an expression. And since GO starts a new batch I need to declare a variable in each one. And of course I have to use CAST because it won't implicitly convert varchar to binary. And even though context_info is a nullable column, you can't SET CONTEXT_INFO NULL, so I have to use SET CONTEXT_INFO 0x0 to clear the message after the statement completes. And if you're thinking of turning this into a UDF, you can't, although a stored procedure would work. So what does all this aggravation get you? As the code runs, if I want to see which stage the session is at, I can run the following (assuming SPID 51 is the one I want): select CAST(context_info as varchar(128)) from sys.dm_exec_sessions where session_id=51 Since SQL Server 2005 introduced the new system and dynamic management views (DMVs) there's not as much need for tagging a session with these kinds of messages. You can get the session start time and currently executing statement from them, and neatly presented if you use Adam's sp_whoisactive utility (and you absolutely should be using it). Of course you can always use xp_cmdshell, a CLR function, or some other tricks to log information outside of a SQL transaction. All the same, I've used this trick to monitor long-running reports at a previous job, and I still think CONTEXT_INFO is a great feature, especially if you're still using SQL Server 2000 or want to supplement your instrumentation. If you'd like an exercise, consider adding the system time to the messages in the last example, and an automated job to query and parse it from the system tables. That would let you track how long each statement ran without having to run Profiler. #TSQL2sDay

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Safely deploying changes to production servers

- by oazabir

When you deploy incremental changes on a production server, which is running and live all the time, you some times see error messages like “Compiler Error Message: The Type ‘XXX’ exists in both…”. Sometimes you find Application_Start event not firing although you shipped a new class, dll or web.config. Sometimes you find static variables not getting initialized and so on. There are so many weird things happen on webservers when you incrementally deploy changes to the server and the server has been up and running for several weeks. So, I came up with a full proof house keeping steps that we always do whenever we deploy some incremental change to our websites. These steps ensure that the web sites are properly recycled , cached are cleared, all the data stored at Application level is initialized. First of all you should have multiple web servers behind load balancer. This way you can take one server our of the production traffic, do your deployment and house keeping tasks like restarting IIS, and then put it back. Then you can do it for the second server and so on. This ensures there’s no outage for customer. If you can do it reasonable fast, hopefully customers won’t notice discrepancy between the servers some having new code and some having old code. You should only do this when your changes aren’t drastic. For ex, you aren’t delivering a complete revamped UI. In that case, some users hitting server1 with latest UI will suddenly get a completely different experience and then on next page refresh, they might hit server2 with old code and get a totally different experience. This works for incremental non-dramatic changes only. During deployment you should follow these steps: Take server X out of load balancer so that it does not get any traffic. Stop all windows services on the server. Stop IIS. Delete the Temporary ASP.NET folders of all .NET versions incase you have multiple .NET versions running. You can follow this link. Deploy the changes. Flush any distributed cache you have, for ex, Velocity or Memcached. Start IIS. Start the windows services on the server. Warm up all websites by hitting major URLs on the websites. You should have some automated script to do this. You can use tinyget to hit some major URLs, especially pages that take a lot of time to compile. Read my post on keeping websites warm with zero coding. Put server X back to load balancer so that it starts receiving traffic. That’s it. It should give you a clean deployment and prevent unexpected errors. You should print these steps and hang on the desk of your deployment guys so that they never forget during deployment pressure.

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Sniffing out SQL Code Smells: Inconsistent use of Symbolic names and Datatypes

- by Phil Factor

It is an awkward feeling. You’ve just delivered a database application that seems to be working fine in production, and you just run a few checks on it. You discover that there is a potential bug that, out of sheer good chance, hasn’t kicked in to produce an error; but it lurks, like a smoking bomb. Worse, maybe you find that the bug has started its evil work of corrupting the data, but in ways that nobody has, so far detected. You investigate, and find the damage. You are somehow going to have to repair it. Yes, it still very occasionally happens to me. It is not a nice feeling, and I do anything I can to prevent it happening. That’s why I’m interested in SQL code smells. SQL Code Smells aren’t necessarily bad practices, but just show you where to focus your attention when checking an application. Sometimes with databases the bugs can be subtle. SQL is rather like HTML: the language does its best to try to carry out your wishes, rather than to be picky about your bugs. Most of the time, this is a great benefit, but not always. One particular place where this can be detrimental is where you have implicit conversion between different data types. Most of the time it is completely harmless but we’re concerned about the occasional time it isn’t. Let’s give an example: String truncation. Let’s give another even more frightening one, rounding errors on assignment to a number of different precision. Each requires a blog-post to explain in detail and I’m not now going to try. Just remember that it is not always a good idea to assign data to variables, parameters or even columns when they aren’t the same datatype, especially if you are relying on implicit conversion to work its magic.For details of the problem and the consequences, see here: SR0014: Data loss might occur when casting from {Type1} to {Type2} . For any experienced Database Developer, this is a more frightening read than a Vampire Story. This is why one of the SQL Code Smells that makes me edgy, in my own or other peoples’ code, is to see parameters, variables and columns that have the same names and different datatypes. Whereas quite a lot of this is perfectly normal and natural, you need to check in case one of two things have gone wrong. Either sloppy naming, or mixed datatypes. Sure it is hard to remember whether you decided that the length of a log entry was 80 or 100 characters long, or the precision of a number. That is why a little check like this I’m going to show you is excellent for tidying up your code before you check it back into source Control! 1/ Checking Parameters only If you were just going to check parameters, you might just do this. It simply groups all the parameters, either input or output, of all the routines (e.g. stored procedures or functions) by their name and checks to see, in the HAVING clause, whether their data types are all the same. If not, it lists all the examples and their origin (the routine) Even this little check can occasionally be scarily revealing. ;WITH userParameter AS ( SELECT c.NAME AS ParameterName, OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(c.object_ID) + '.' + OBJECT_NAME(c.object_ID) AS ObjectName, t.name + ' ' + CASE --we may have to put in the length WHEN t.name IN ('char', 'varchar', 'nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN '(' + CASE WHEN c.max_length = -1 THEN 'MAX' ELSE CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), CASE WHEN t.name IN ('nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN c.max_length / 2 ELSE c.max_length END) END + ')' WHEN t.name IN ('decimal', 'numeric') THEN '(' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), c.precision) + ',' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), c.Scale) + ')' ELSE '' END --we've done with putting in the length + CASE WHEN XML_collection_ID <> 0 THEN --deal with object schema names '(' + CASE WHEN is_XML_Document = 1 THEN 'DOCUMENT ' ELSE 'CONTENT ' END + COALESCE( (SELECT QUOTENAME(ss.name) + '.' + QUOTENAME(sc.name) FROM sys.xml_schema_collections sc INNER JOIN Sys.Schemas ss ON sc.schema_ID = ss.schema_ID WHERE sc.xml_collection_ID = c.XML_collection_ID),'NULL') + ')' ELSE '' END AS [DataType] FROM sys.parameters c INNER JOIN sys.types t ON c.user_Type_ID = t.user_Type_ID WHERE OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(c.object_ID) <> 'sys' AND parameter_id>0)SELECT CONVERT(CHAR(80),objectName+'.'+ParameterName),DataType FROM UserParameterWHERE ParameterName IN (SELECT ParameterName FROM UserParameter GROUP BY ParameterName HAVING MIN(Datatype)<>MAX(DataType))ORDER BY ParameterName so, in a very small example here, we have a @ClosingDelimiter variable that is only CHAR(1) when, by the looks of it, it should be up to ten characters long, or even worse, a function that should be a char(1) and seems to let in a string of ten characters. Worth investigating. Then we have a @Comment variable that can't decide whether it is a VARCHAR(2000) or a VARCHAR(MAX) 2/ Columns and Parameters Actually, once we’ve cleared up the mess we’ve made of our parameter-naming in the database we’re inspecting, we’re going to be more interested in listing both columns and parameters. We can do this by modifying the routine to list columns as well as parameters. Because of the slight complexity of creating the string version of the datatypes, we will create a fake table of both columns and parameters so that they can both be processed the same way. After all, we want the datatypes to match Unfortunately, parameters do not expose all the attributes we are interested in, such as whether they are nullable (oh yes, subtle bugs happen if this isn’t consistent for a datatype). We’ll have to leave them out for this check. Voila! A slight modification of the first routine ;WITH userObject AS ( SELECT Name AS DataName,--the actual name of the parameter or column ('@' removed) --and the qualified object name of the routine OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(ObjectID) + '.' + OBJECT_NAME(ObjectID) AS ObjectName, --now the harder bit: the definition of the datatype. TypeName + ' ' + CASE --we may have to put in the length. e.g. CHAR (10) WHEN TypeName IN ('char', 'varchar', 'nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN '(' + CASE WHEN MaxLength = -1 THEN 'MAX' ELSE CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), CASE WHEN TypeName IN ('nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN MaxLength / 2 ELSE MaxLength END) END + ')' WHEN TypeName IN ('decimal', 'numeric')--a BCD number! THEN '(' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), Precision) + ',' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), Scale) + ')' ELSE '' END --we've done with putting in the length + CASE WHEN XML_collection_ID <> 0 --tush tush. XML THEN --deal with object schema names '(' + CASE WHEN is_XML_Document = 1 THEN 'DOCUMENT ' ELSE 'CONTENT ' END + COALESCE( (SELECT TOP 1 QUOTENAME(ss.name) + '.' + QUOTENAME(sc.Name) FROM sys.xml_schema_collections sc INNER JOIN Sys.Schemas ss ON sc.schema_ID = ss.schema_ID WHERE sc.xml_collection_ID = XML_collection_ID),'NULL') + ')' ELSE '' END AS [DataType], DataObjectType FROM (Select t.name AS TypeName, REPLACE(c.name,'@','') AS Name, c.max_length AS MaxLength, c.precision AS [Precision], c.scale AS [Scale], c.[Object_id] AS ObjectID, XML_collection_ID, is_XML_Document,'P' AS DataobjectType FROM sys.parameters c INNER JOIN sys.types t ON c.user_Type_ID = t.user_Type_ID AND parameter_id>0 UNION all Select t.name AS TypeName, c.name AS Name, c.max_length AS MaxLength, c.precision AS [Precision], c.scale AS [Scale], c.[Object_id] AS ObjectID, XML_collection_ID,is_XML_Document, 'C' AS DataobjectType FROM sys.columns c INNER JOIN sys.types t ON c.user_Type_ID = t.user_Type_ID WHERE OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(c.object_ID) <> 'sys' )f)SELECT CONVERT(CHAR(80),objectName+'.' + CASE WHEN DataobjectType ='P' THEN '@' ELSE '' END + DataName),DataType FROM UserObjectWHERE DataName IN (SELECT DataName FROM UserObject GROUP BY DataName HAVING MIN(Datatype)<>MAX(DataType))ORDER BY DataName Hmm. I can tell you I found quite a few minor issues with the various tabases I tested this on, and found some potential bugs that really leap out at you from the results. Here is the start of the result for AdventureWorks. Yes, AccountNumber is, for some reason, a Varchar(10) in the Customer table. Hmm. odd. Why is a city fifty characters long in that view? The idea of the description of a colour being 256 characters long seems over-ambitious. Go down the list and you'll spot other mistakes. There are no bugs, but just mess. We started out with a listing to examine parameters, then we mixed parameters and columns. Our last listing is for a slightly more in-depth look at table columns. You’ll notice that we’ve delibarately removed the indication of whether a column is persisted, or is an identity column because that gives us false positives for our code smells. If you just want to browse your metadata for other reasons (and it can quite help in some circumstances) then uncomment them! ;WITH userColumns AS ( SELECT c.NAME AS columnName, OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(c.object_ID) + '.' + OBJECT_NAME(c.object_ID) AS ObjectName, REPLACE(t.name + ' ' + CASE WHEN is_computed = 1 THEN ' AS ' + --do DDL for a computed column (SELECT definition FROM sys.computed_columns cc WHERE cc.object_id = c.object_id AND cc.column_ID = c.column_ID) --we may have to put in the length WHEN t.Name IN ('char', 'varchar', 'nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN '(' + CASE WHEN c.Max_Length = -1 THEN 'MAX' ELSE CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), CASE WHEN t.Name IN ('nchar', 'nvarchar') THEN c.Max_Length / 2 ELSE c.Max_Length END) END + ')' WHEN t.name IN ('decimal', 'numeric') THEN '(' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), c.precision) + ',' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(4), c.Scale) + ')' ELSE '' END + CASE WHEN c.is_rowguidcol = 1 THEN ' ROWGUIDCOL' ELSE '' END + CASE WHEN XML_collection_ID <> 0 THEN --deal with object schema names '(' + CASE WHEN is_XML_Document = 1 THEN 'DOCUMENT ' ELSE 'CONTENT ' END + COALESCE((SELECT QUOTENAME(ss.name) + '.' + QUOTENAME(sc.name) FROM sys.xml_schema_collections sc INNER JOIN Sys.Schemas ss ON sc.schema_ID = ss.schema_ID WHERE sc.xml_collection_ID = c.XML_collection_ID), 'NULL') + ')' ELSE '' END + CASE WHEN is_identity = 1 THEN CASE WHEN OBJECTPROPERTY(object_id, 'IsUserTable') = 1 AND COLUMNPROPERTY(object_id, c.name, 'IsIDNotForRepl') = 0 AND OBJECTPROPERTY(object_id, 'IsMSShipped') = 0 THEN '' ELSE ' NOT FOR REPLICATION ' END ELSE '' END + CASE WHEN c.is_nullable = 0 THEN ' NOT NULL' ELSE ' NULL' END + CASE WHEN c.default_object_id <> 0 THEN ' DEFAULT ' + object_Definition(c.default_object_id) ELSE '' END + CASE WHEN c.collation_name IS NULL THEN '' WHEN c.collation_name <> (SELECT collation_name FROM sys.databases WHERE name = DB_NAME()) COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS THEN COALESCE(' COLLATE ' + c.collation_name, '') ELSE '' END,' ',' ') AS [DataType]FROM sys.columns c INNER JOIN sys.types t ON c.user_Type_ID = t.user_Type_ID WHERE OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(c.object_ID) <> 'sys')SELECT CONVERT(CHAR(80),objectName+'.'+columnName),DataType FROM UserColumnsWHERE columnName IN (SELECT columnName FROM UserColumns GROUP BY columnName HAVING MIN(Datatype)<>MAX(DataType))ORDER BY columnName If you take a look down the results against Adventureworks, you'll see once again that there are things to investigate, mostly, in the illustration, discrepancies between null and non-null datatypes So I here you ask, what about temporary variables within routines? If ever there was a source of elusive bugs, you'll find it there. Sadly, these temporary variables are not stored in the metadata so we'll have to find a more subtle way of flushing these out, and that will, I'm afraid, have to wait!

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JWT Token Security with Fusion Sales Cloud

- by asantaga

When integrating SalesCloud with a 3rd party application you often need to pass the users identity to the 3rd party application so that The 3rd party application knows who the user is The 3rd party application needs to be able to do WebService callbacks to Sales Cloud as that user. Until recently without using SAML, this wasn't easily possible and one workaround was to pass the username, potentially even the password, from Sales Cloud to the 3rd party application using URL parameters.. With Oracle Fusion R8 we now have a proper solution and that is called "JWT Token support". This is based on the industry JSON Web Token standard , for more information see here JWT Works by allowing the user the ability to generate a token (lasts a short period of time) for a specific application. This token is then passed to the 3rd party application as a GET parameter. The 3rd party application can then call into SalesCloud and use this token for all webservice calls, the calls will be executed as the user who generated the token in the first place, or they can call a special HR WebService (UserService-findSelfUserDetails() ) with the token and Fusion will respond with the users details. Some more details The following will go through the scenario that you want to embed a 3rd party application within a WebContent frame (iFrame) within the opportunity screen. 1. Define your application using the topology manager in setup and maintenance See this documentation link on topology manager 2. From within your groovy script which defines the iFrame you wish to embed, write some code which looks like this : def thirdpartyapplicationurl = oracle.topologyManager.client.deployedInfo.DeployedInfoProvider.getEndPoint("My3rdPartyApplication" )def crmkey= (new oracle.apps.fnd.applcore.common.SecuredTokenBean().getTrustToken())def url = thirdpartyapplicationurl +"param1="+OptyId+"&jwt ="+crmkeyreturn (url) This snippet generates a URL which contains The Hostname/endpoint of the 3rd party application Two Parameters The opportunityId stored in parameter "param1" The JWT Token store in parameter "jwt" 3. From your 3rd Party Application you now have two options Execute a webservice call by first setting the header parameter "Authentication" to the JWT token. The webservice call will be executed against Fusion Applications "As" the user who execute the process To find out "Who you are" , set the header parameter to "Authentication" and execute the special webservice call findSelfUserDetails(), in the UserDetailsService For more information Oracle Sales Cloud Documentation , specific chapter on JWT Token OTN samples, specifically the Rich UI With JWT Token Sample Oracle Fusion Applications General Documentation

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Building dynamic OLAP data marts on-the-fly

- by DrJohn

At the forthcoming SQLBits conference, I will be presenting a session on how to dynamically build an OLAP data mart on-the-fly. This blog entry is intended to clarify exactly what I mean by an OLAP data mart, why you may need to build them on-the-fly and finally outline the steps needed to build them dynamically. In subsequent blog entries, I will present exactly how to implement some of the techniques involved. What is an OLAP data mart? In data warehousing parlance, a data mart is a subset of the overall corporate data provided to business users to meet specific business needs. Of course, the term does not specify the technology involved, so I coined the term "OLAP data mart" to identify a subset of data which is delivered in the form of an OLAP cube which may be accompanied by the relational database upon which it was built. To clarify, the relational database is specifically create and loaded with the subset of data and then the OLAP cube is built and processed to make the data available to the end-users via standard OLAP client tools. Why build OLAP data marts? Market research companies sell data to their clients to make money. To gain competitive advantage, market research providers like to "add value" to their data by providing systems that enhance analytics, thereby allowing clients to make best use of the data. As such, OLAP cubes have become a standard way of delivering added value to clients. They can be built on-the-fly to hold specific data sets and meet particular needs and then hosted on a secure intranet site for remote access, or shipped to clients' own infrastructure for hosting. Even better, they support a wide range of different tools for analytical purposes, including the ever popular Microsoft Excel. Extension Attributes: The Challenge One of the key challenges in building multiple OLAP data marts based on the same 'template' is handling extension attributes. These are attributes that meet the client's specific reporting needs, but do not form part of the standard template. Now clearly, these extension attributes have to come into the system via additional files and ultimately be added to relational tables so they can end up in the OLAP cube. However, processing these files and filling dynamically altered tables with SSIS is a challenge as SSIS packages tend to break as soon as the database schema changes. There are two approaches to this: (1) dynamically build an SSIS package in memory to match the new database schema using C#, or (2) have the extension attributes provided as name/value pairs so the file's schema does not change and can easily be loaded using SSIS. The problem with the first approach is the complexity of writing an awful lot of complex C# code. The problem of the second approach is that name/value pairs are useless to an OLAP cube; so they have to be pivoted back into a proper relational table somewhere in the data load process WITHOUT breaking SSIS. How this can be done will be part of future blog entry. What is involved in building an OLAP data mart? There are a great many steps involved in building OLAP data marts on-the-fly. The key point is that all the steps must be automated to allow for the production of multiple OLAP data marts per day (i.e. many thousands, each with its own specific data set and attributes). Now most of these steps have a great deal in common with standard data warehouse practices. The key difference is that the databases are all built to order. The only permanent database is the metadata database (shown in orange) which holds all the metadata needed to build everything else (i.e. client orders, configuration information, connection strings, client specific requirements and attributes etc.). The staging database (shown in red) has a short life: it is built, populated and then ripped down as soon as the OLAP Data Mart has been populated. In the diagram below, the OLAP data mart comprises the two blue components: the Data Mart which is a relational database and the OLAP Cube which is an OLAP database implemented using Microsoft Analysis Services (SSAS). The client may receive just the OLAP cube or both components together depending on their reporting requirements. So, in broad terms the steps required to fulfil a client order are as follows: Step 1: Prepare metadata Create a set of database names unique to the client's order Modify all package connection strings to be used by SSIS to point to new databases and file locations. Step 2: Create relational databases Create the staging and data mart relational databases using dynamic SQL and set the database recovery mode to SIMPLE as we do not need the overhead of logging anything Execute SQL scripts to build all database objects (tables, views, functions and stored procedures) in the two databases Step 3: Load staging database Use SSIS to load all data files into the staging database in a parallel operation Load extension files containing name/value pairs. These will provide client-specific attributes in the OLAP cube. Step 4: Load data mart relational database Load the data from staging into the data mart relational database, again in parallel where possible Allocate surrogate keys and use SSIS to perform surrogate key lookup during the load of fact tables Step 5: Load extension tables & attributes Pivot the extension attributes from their native name/value pairs into proper relational tables Add the extension attributes to the views used by OLAP cube Step 6: Deploy & Process OLAP cube Deploy the OLAP database directly to the server using a C# script task in SSIS Modify the connection string used by the OLAP cube to point to the data mart relational database Modify the cube structure to add the extension attributes to both the data source view and the relevant dimensions Remove any standard attributes that not required Process the OLAP cube Step 7: Backup and drop databases Drop staging database as it is no longer required Backup data mart relational and OLAP database and ship these to the client's infrastructure Drop data mart relational and OLAP database from the build server Mark order complete Start processing the next order, ad infinitum. So my future blog posts and my forthcoming session at the SQLBits conference will all focus on some of the more interesting aspects of building OLAP data marts on-the-fly such as handling the load of extension attributes and how to dynamically alter the structure of an OLAP cube using C#.

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How to Format a USB Drive in Ubuntu Using GParted

- by Trevor Bekolay

If a USB hard drive or flash drive is not properly formatted, then it will not show up in the Ubuntu Places menu, making it hard to interact with. We’ll show you how to format a USB drive using the tool GParted. Note: Formatting a USB drive will destroy any data currently stored on it. If you think that your USB drive is already properly formatted, but Ubuntu just isn’t picking it up, try unplugging it and plugging it back in to a different USB slot, or restarting your machine with the device plugged in on start-up. Open a terminal by clicking on Applications in the top-left of the screen, then Accessories > Terminal. GParted should be installed by default, but we’ll make sure it’s installed by entering the following command in the terminal: sudo apt-get install gparted To open GParted, enter the following command in the terminal: sudo gparted Find your USB drive in the drop-down box at the top right of the GParted window. The drive should be unallocated – if it has a valid partition on it, then you may be looking at the wrong drive. Note: Make sure you’re on the correct drive, as making changes on the wrong hard drive with GParted can delete all data on a hard drive! Assuming you’re on the right drive, right-click on the unallocated grey block and click New. In the window that pops up, change the File System to fat32 for USB Flash Drives, NTFS for USB Hard Drives that will be used in Windows, or ext3/ext4 for USB Hard Drives that will be used exclusively in Linux. Add a label if you’d like, and then click Add. Click the green checkmark and then the Apply button to apply the changes. GParted will now format your drive. If you’re formatting a large USB Hard Drive, this can take some time. Once the process is done, you can close GParted, and the drive will now show up in the Places menu. Clicking on the drive will mount it and open it in a File Browser window. It will also add a shortcut to the drive on the Desktop by default. Your USB drive is now ready to store your files! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using GParted to Resize Your Windows Vista PartitionInstall an RPM Package on Ubuntu LinuxCreate a Persistent Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash DriveShare Ubuntu Home Directories using SambaCreate a Samba User on Ubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

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Getting your bearings and defining the project objective

- by johndoucette

I wrote this two years ago and thought it was worth posting… Some may think this is a daunting task and some may even say “what a waste of time” and want to open MS Project and start typing out tasks because someone asked for an estimate and a task list. Hell, maybe you even use Excel and pump out a spreadsheet with some real scientific formula for guessing how long it will take to code a bunch of classes. However, this short exercise will provide the basis for the entire project, whether small or large and be a great friend when communicating to anyone on your team or even your client. I call this the Project Brief. If you find yourself going beyond a single page, then you must decompose the sections and summarize your findings so there is a complete and clear picture of the project you are working on in a relatively short statement. Here is a great quote from the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) relative to what a project is; A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. With this in mind, the project brief should encompass the entirety (objective) of the endeavor in its explanation and what it will take (goals) to create the product, service or result (deliverables). Normally the process of identifying the project objective is done during the first stage of a project called the Project Kickoff, but you can perform this very important step anytime to help you get a bearing. There are many more parts to helping a project stay on course, but this is usually the foundation where it can be grounded on. Through a series of 3 exercises, you should be able to come up with the objective, goals and deliverables on your project. Follow these steps, and in no time (about ½ hour), you will have the foundation of your project plan. (See examples below) Exercise 1 – Objectives Begin with the end in mind. Think about your project in business terms with a couple things to help you understand the objective; Reference the business benefit in terms of cost, speed and / or quality, Provide a higher level of what the outcome will look like (future sense) It should be non-measurable, that’s what the goals are all about The output should be a single paragraph with three sentences and take 10 minutes to write. *Typically, agreement must be reached on the objectives of the project before you would proceed to the next steps of the project. Exercise 2 – Goals A project goal is a statement that answers questions about who, what, why, where and when. A good project goal statement; Answers the five “W” questions for the project Is measurable in each of its parts Is published and agreed on by all the owners This helps the Project Manager receive confirmation on defining the project target. Using the established project objective done in the first exercise, think about the things it will take to get the job done. Think about tangible activities which are the top level tasks in a typical Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The overall goal statement plus all the deliverables (next exercise) can be seen as the project team’s contract with the project owners. Write 3 - 5 goals in about 10 minutes. You should not write the words “Who, what, why, where and when, but merely be able to answer the questions when you read a goal. Exercise 3 – Deliverables Every project creates some type of output and these outputs are called deliverables. There are two classes of deliverables; Internal – produced for project team members to meet their goals External – produced for project owners to meet their expectations The list you enter here provides a checklist for the team’s delivery and/or is a statement of all the expectations of the project owners. Here are some typical project deliverables; Product and product documentation End product/system Requirements/feature documents Installation guides Demo/prototype System design documents User guides/help files Plans Project plan Training plan Conversion/installation/delivery plan Test plans Documentation plan Communication plan Reports and general documentation Progress reports System acceptance tests Outstanding bug list Procedures Risk and issue logs Project history Deliverables should go with each of the goals. Have 3-5 deliverables for each goal. When you are done, you will have established a great foundation for the clarity of your project. This exercise can take some time, but with practice, you should be able to whip this one out in 10 minutes as well, especially if you are intimate with an ongoing project. Samples Objective [Client] is implementing a series of MOSS sites to support external public (Internet), internal employee (Intranet) and an external secure (password protected Internet) applications. This project will focus on the public-facing web site and will provide [Client] with architectural recommendations based on the current design being done by their design partner [Partner] and the internal Content Team. In addition, it will provide [Client] with a development plan and confidence they need to deploy a world class public Internet website. Goals 1. [Consultant] will provide technical guidance and set project team expectations for the implementation of the MOSS Internet site based on provided features/functions within three weeks. 2. [Consultant] will understand phase 2 secure password-protected Internet site design and provide recommendations. Deliverables 1.1 Public Internet (unsecure) Architectural Recommendation Plan 1.2 Physical Site construction Work Breakdown Structure and plan (Time, cost and resources needed) 2.1 Two Factor authentication recommendation document Objective [Client] is currently using an application developed by [Consultant] many years ago called "XXX". This application, although functional, does not meet their new updated business requirements and contains a few defects which [Client] has developed work-around processes. [Client] would like to have a "new and improved" system to support their membership management needs by expanding membership and subscription capabilities, provide accounting integration with internal (GL) and external (VeriSign) systems, and implement hooks to the current CRM solution. This effort will take place through a series of phases, beginning with envisioning. Goals 1. Through discussions with users, [Consultant] will discover current issues/bugs which need to be resolved which must meet the current functionality requirements within three weeks. 2. [Consultant] will gather requirements from the users about what is "needed" vs. "what they have" for enhancements and provide a high level document supporting their needs. 3. [Consultant] will meet with the team members through a series of meetings and help define the overall project plan to deliver a new and improved solution. Deliverables 1.1 Prioritized list of Current application issues/bugs that need to be resolved 1.2 Provide a resolution plan on the issues/bugs identified in the current application 1.3 Risk Assessment Document 2.1 Deliver a Requirements Document showing high-level [Client] needs for the new XXX application. · New feature functionality not in the application today · Existing functionality that will remain in the new functionality 2.2 Reporting Requirements Document 3.1 A Project Plan showing the deliverables and cost for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.2 A Statement of Work for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.3 An Estimate of any work that would need to follow the second phase.

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SQL University: What and why of database testing

- by Mladen Prajdic

This is a post for a great idea called SQL University started by Jorge Segarra also famously known as SqlChicken on Twitter. It’s a collection of blog posts on different database related topics contributed by several smart people all over the world. So this week is mine and we’ll be talking about database testing and refactoring. In 3 posts we’ll cover: SQLU part 1 - What and why of database testing SQLU part 2 - What and why of database refactoring SQLU part 2 – Tools of the trade With that out of the way let us sharpen our pencils and get going. Why test a database The sad state of the industry today is that there is very little emphasis on testing in general. Test driven development is still a small niche of the programming world while refactoring is even smaller. The cause of this is the inability of developers to convince themselves and their managers that writing tests is beneficial. At the moment they are mostly viewed as waste of time. This is because the average person (let’s not fool ourselves, we’re all average) is unable to think about lower future costs in relation to little more current work. It’s orders of magnitude easier to know about the current costs in relation to current amount of work. That’s why programmers convince themselves testing is a waste of time. However we have to ask ourselves what tests are really about? Maybe finding bugs? No, not really. If we introduce bugs, we’re likely to write test around those bugs too. But yes we can find some bugs with tests. The main point of tests is to have reproducible repeatability in our systems. By having a code base largely covered by tests we can know with better certainty what a small code change can break in other parts of the system. By having repeatability we can make code changes with confidence, since we know we’ll see what breaks in other tests. And here comes the inability to estimate future costs. By spending just a few more hours writing those tests we’d know instantly what broke where. Imagine we fix a reported bug. We check-in the code, deploy it and the users are happy. Until we get a call 2 weeks later about a certain monthly process has stopped working. What we don’t know is that this process was developed by a long gone coworker and for some reason it relied on that same bug we’ve happily fixed. There’s no way we could’ve known that. We say OK and go in and fix the monthly process. But what we have no clue about is that there’s this ETL job that relied on data from that monthly process. Now that we’ve fixed the process it’s giving unexpected (yet correct since we fixed it) data to the ETL job. So we have to fix that too. But there’s this part of the app we coded that relies on data from that exact ETL job. And just like that we enter the “Loop of maintenance horror”. With the loop eventually comes blame. Here’s a nice tip for all developers and DBAs out there: If you make a mistake man up and admit to it. All of the above is valid for any kind of software development. Keeping this in mind the database is nothing other than just a part of the application. But a big part! One reason why testing a database is even more important than testing an application is that one database is usually accessed from multiple applications and processes. This makes it the central and vital part of the enterprise software infrastructure. Knowing all this can we really afford not to have tests? What to test in a database Now that we’ve decided we’ll dive into this testing thing we have to ask ourselves what needs to be tested? The short answer is: everything. The long answer is: read on! There are 2 main ways of doing tests: Black box and White box testing. Black box testing means we have no idea how the system internals are built and we only have access to it’s inputs and outputs. With it we test that the internal changes to the system haven’t caused the input/output behavior of the system to change. The most important thing to test here are the edge conditions. It’s where most programs break. Having good edge condition tests we can be more confident that the systems changes won’t break. White box testing has the full knowledge of the system internals. With it we test the internal system changes, different states of the application, etc… White and Black box tests should be complementary to each other as they are very much interconnected. Testing database routines includes testing stored procedures, views, user defined functions and anything you use to access the data with. Database routines are your input/output interface to the database system. They count as black box testing. We test then for 2 things: Data and schema. When testing schema we only care about the columns and the data types they’re returning. After all the schema is the contract to the out side systems. If it changes we usually have to change the applications accessing it. One helpful T-SQL command when doing schema tests is SET FMTONLY ON. It tells the SQL Server to return only empty results sets. This speeds up tests because it doesn’t return any data to the client. After we’ve validated the schema we have to test the returned data. There no other way to do this but to have expected data known before the tests executes and comparing that data to the database routine output. Testing Authentication and Authorization helps us validate who has access to the SQL Server box (Authentication) and who has access to certain database objects (Authorization). For desktop applications and windows authentication this works well. But the biggest problem here are web apps. They usually connect to the database as a single user. Please ensure that that user is not SA or an account with admin privileges. That is just bad. Load testing ensures us that our database can handle peak loads. One often overlooked tool for load testing is Microsoft’s OSTRESS tool. It’s part of RML utilities (x86, x64) for SQL Server and can help determine if our database server can handle loads like 100 simultaneous users each doing 10 requests per second. SQL Profiler can also help us here by looking at why certain queries are slow and what to do to fix them. One particular problem to think about is how to begin testing existing databases. First thing we have to do is to get to know those databases. We can’t test something when we don’t know how it works. To do this we have to talk to the users of the applications accessing the database, run SQL Profiler to see what queries are being run, use existing documentation to decipher all the object relationships, etc… The way to approach this is to choose one part of the database (say a logical grouping of tables that go together) and filter our traces accordingly. Once we’ve done that we move on to the next grouping and so on until we’ve covered the whole database. Then we move on to the next one. Database Testing is a topic that we can spent many hours discussing but let this be a nice intro to the world of database testing. See you in the next post.

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What are the default mount settings for mount / fstab?

- by John Craick

What are the default mounting options for a non root partition ? The man entry for mount says ... defaults - use default options: rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, and async. ... so that might be what we expect to see. But, unless I'm missing something, that's not what happens. I have an ext3 partition labelled "NewHome20G" which is seen as /dev/sdc6 by the system. This we can see from ... root@john-pc1204:~# blkid | grep NewHome20G /dev/sdc6: LABEL="NewHome20G" UUID="d024bad5-906c-46c0-b7d4-812daf2c9628" TYPE="ext3" I have an entry in fstab as follows ... root@john-pc1204:~# cat /etc/fstab | grep NewHome LABEL=NewHome20G /media/NewHome20G ext3 rw,nosuid,nodev,exec,users 0 2 Note the option settings that are specified in that fstab line. Now I look at how the partition is actually mounted after boot up ... root@john-pc1204:~# mount -l | grep sdc6 /dev/sdc6 on /media/NewHome20G type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) [NewHome20G] ... so, when the filesystem gets mounted the exec & users options I specified seem to have been ignored. Just to be sure, I unmount sdc6, remount it and look at the mount options again ... root@john-pc1204:~# umount /dev/sdc6 root@john-pc1204:~# mount /dev/sdc6 root@john-pc1204:~# mount -l | grep sdc6 /dev/sdc6 on /media/NewHome20G type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) [NewHome20G] .... same result Now I unmount the partition again, remount it specifying the exec option and look at the result ... root@john-pc1204:~# umount /dev/sdc6 root@john-pc1204:~# mount /dev/sdc6 -o exec root@john-pc1204:~# mount -l | grep sdc6 /dev/sdc6 on /media/NewHome20G type ext3 (rw,nosuid,nodev) [NewHome20G] ... and here the exec option has finally taken effect and the noexec setting has vanished. Just for interest, I re-mount the partition with the defaults option root@john-pc1204:~# umount /dev/sdc6 root@john-pc1204:~# mount /dev/sdc6 -o defaults root@john-pc1204:~# mount -l | grep sdc6 /dev/sdc6 on /media/NewHome20G type ext3 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) [NewHome20G] The noexec is back, so it looks very like rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev are the default options which is NOT what man says. Why does this matter ? I have a folder full of useful scripts stored on a data disk. Because that disk is mounted noexec those scripts won't run, even though they have all been set with chmod 777. I can work round this in several ways but it's disappointing that the man entry seems to be wrong. Have I missed something obvious here or have the default options in Ubuntu changed from what they were a few versions ago ?

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Removing hard-coded values and defensive design vs YAGNI

- by Ben Scott

First a bit of background. I'm coding a lookup from Age - Rate. There are 7 age brackets so the lookup table is 3 columns (From|To|Rate) with 7 rows. The values rarely change - they are legislated rates (first and third columns) that have stayed the same for 3 years. I figured that the easiest way to store this table without hard-coding it is in the database in a global configuration table, as a single text value containing a CSV (so "65,69,0.05,70,74,0.06" is how the 65-69 and 70-74 tiers would be stored). Relatively easy to parse then use. Then I realised that to implement this I would have to create a new table, a repository to wrap around it, data layer tests for the repo, unit tests around the code that unflattens the CSV into the table, and tests around the lookup itself. The only benefit of all this work is avoiding hard-coding the lookup table. When talking to the users (who currently use the lookup table directly - by looking at a hard copy) the opinion is pretty much that "the rates never change." Obviously that isn't actually correct - the rates were only created three years ago and in the past things that "never change" have had a habit of changing - so for me to defensively program this I definitely shouldn't store the lookup table in the application. Except when I think YAGNI. The feature I am implementing doesn't specify that the rates will change. If the rates do change, they will still change so rarely that maintenance isn't even a consideration, and the feature isn't actually critical enough that anything would be affected if there was a delay between the rate change and the updated application. I've pretty much decided that nothing of value will be lost if I hard-code the lookup, and I'm not too concerned about my approach to this particular feature. My question is, as a professional have I properly justified that decision? Hard-coding values is bad design, but going to the trouble of removing the values from the application seems to violate the YAGNI principle. EDIT To clarify the question, I'm not concerned about the actual implementation. I'm concerned that I can either do a quick, bad thing, and justify it by saying YAGNI, or I can take a more defensive, high-effort approach, that even in the best case ultimately has low benefits. As a professional programmer does my decision to implement a design that I know is flawed simply come down to a cost/benefit analysis?

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Configurable Objects - Introduction

- by Anthony Shorten

One of the interesting facilities in the framework is Configurable Object functionality (it is also known as Task Optimization and also known as Cool Tools). The idea is that any implementation can create their own views of the base product objects and services and implement functionality against those new views. For example, in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, there is a Person object. That object is used to store and manage information about individuals as well as companies. In the base product you would use the Person Maintenance screen and fill in some of the screen when you wanted to register or maintain and individual as well and fill out other parts of the screen when you wanted to register or maintain a company. This can be somewhat confusing to some customers. Using Configurable Objects this can be simplified. A business object can be created that is a view of the any object. For example, you could create a Human business object which would cover the aspects of the Person object pertaining to an individual and a Company business object to cover the aspects unique to a company. Even the tag names (i.e. Field Names) in the object can be changed to be more what the implementation is familiar with. The object can also restructure the object. For example, a common identifier for an individual in the USA is the Social Security number, this value is a Person Identifier (as this varies in each country). In the new Human object you can remap the Person Identifier as a Social Security number. To define a Business Object you use a schema editor built into the browser user interface and use a mapping language to setup the business objects. An example of the language is shown below in an extract of the schema for the Human business object. As you can see there are mapping as well as formatting and other tags. This information can be built manually or using a wizard which generates the base structure for you to alter. This is all stored as meta data when saved. Once a Business object is built it can be used as basis for code, other business objects (we support inheritance), called by a screen (called a UI Map) or even as a Web Service. This is just a start with Configurable Objects as you can also create views of base services called Business Services, Service Scripts used for non-object or complex object processing (as well as other things), UI Maps used for screens and Data Areas to reuse definitions across multiple objects. Configurable Objects are powerful and I only really touched on them here. Over the next few months I hope to add lots more entries about them.

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Handy SQL Server Function Series: Part 1

- by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

I've been preparing to give a presentation on SQL Server for a while now, and a topic that was recommended was SQL Server functions. More specifically, the lesser-known functions (like @@OPTIONS), and maybe some interesting ways to use well-known functions (like using PARSENAME to split IP addresses) I think this is a veritable goldmine of useful information, and researching for the presentation has confirmed that beyond my initial expectations.I even found a few undocumented/underdocumented functions, so for the first official article in this series I thought I'd start with 2 of each, COLLATIONPROPERTY() and COLLATIONPROPERTYFROMID().COLLATIONPROPERTY() provides information about (wait for it) collations, SQL Server's method for handling foreign character sets, sort orders, and case- or accent-sensitivity when sorting character data. The Books Online entry for COLLATIONPROPERTY() lists 4 options for code page, locale ID, comparison style and version. Used in conjunction with fn_helpcollations():SELECT *, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'LCID') LCID, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'CodePage') CodePage, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'ComparisonStyle') ComparisonStyle, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'Version') Version FROM fn_helpcollations()You can get some excellent information. (c'mon, be honest, did you even know about fn_helpcollations?)Collations in SQL Server have a unique name and ID, and you'll see one or both in various system tables or views like syscolumns, sys.columns, and INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS. Unfortunately they only link the ID and name for collations of existing columns, so if you wanted to know the collation ID of Albanian_CI_AI_WS, you'd have to declare a column with that collation and query the system table.While poking around the OBJECT_DEFINITION() of sys.columns I found a reference to COLLATIONPROPERTYFROMID(), and the unknown property "Name". Not surprisingly, this is how sys.columns finds the name of the collation, based on the ID stored in the system tables. (Check yourself if you don't believe me)Somewhat surprisingly, the "Name" property also works for COLLATIONPROPERTY(), although you'd already know the name at that point. Some wild guesses and tests revealed that "CollationID" is also a valid property for both functions, so now:SELECT *, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'LCID') LCID, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'CodePage') CodePage, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'ComparisonStyle') ComparisonStyle, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'Version') Version, COLLATIONPROPERTY(name,'CollationID') CollationID FROM fn_helpcollations() Will get you the collation ID-name link you…probably didn't know or care about, but if you ever get on Jeopardy! and this question comes up, feel free to send some of your winnings my way. :)And last but not least, COLLATIONPROPERTYFROMID() uses the same properties as COLLATIONPROPERTY(), so you can use either one depending on which value you have available.Keep an eye out for Part 2!

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How to handle lookup data in a C# ASP.Net MVC4 application?

- by Jim

I am writing an MVC4 application to track documents we have on file for our clients. I'm using code first, and have created models for my objects (Company, Document, etc...). I am now faced with the topic of document expiration. Business logic dictates certain documents will expire a set number of days past the document date. For example, Document A might expire in 180 days, Document 2 in 365 days, etc... I have a class for my documents as shown below (simplified for this example). What is the best way for me to create a lookup for expiration values? I want to specify documents of type DocumentA expire in 30 days, type DocumentB expire in 75 days, etc... I can think of a few ways to do this: Lookup table in the database I can query New property in my class (DaysValidFor) which has a custom getter that returns different values based on the DocumentType A method that takes in the document type and returns the number of days and I'm sure there are other ways I'm not even thinking of. My main concern is a) not violating any best practices and b) maintainability. Are there any pros/cons I need to be aware of for the above options, or is this a case of "just pick one and run with it"? One last thought, right now the number of days is a value that does not need to be stored anywhere on a per-document basis -- however, it is possible that business logic will change this (i.e., DocumentA's are 30 days expiration by default, but this DocumentA associated with Company XYZ will be 60 days because we like them). In that case, is a property in the Document class the best way to go, seeing as I need to add that field to the DB? namespace Models { // Types of documents to track public enum DocumentType { DocumentA, DocumentB, DocumentC // etc... } // Document model public class Document { public int DocumentID { get; set; } // Foreign key to companies public int CompanyID { get; set; } public DocumentType DocumentType { get; set; } // Helper to translate enum's value to an integer for DB storage [Column("DocumentType")] public int DocumentTypeInt { get { return (int)this.DocumentType; } set { this.DocumentType = (DocumentType)value; } } [DataType(DataType.Date)] [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:MM-dd-yyyy}", ApplyFormatInEditMode = true)] public DateTime DocumentDate { get; set; } // Navigation properties public virtual Company Company { get; set; } } }

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Oracle Joins XBRL US To Help Drive Adoption

- by Theresa Hickman

Recently, Oracle joined XBRL US, the national consortium for XML business reporting standards to stay ahead of the technology and help increase XBRL adoption by U.S. companies by 2011. Large accelerated filers were mandated to use XBRL starting in 2009; other large filers started in 2010 and all other public companies must comply in June 2011. Here is a list of other organizations that recently joined XBRL US: Oracle Citi Federal Filings LLC Edgar Agents LLC XSP For those of you who have been living under a rock, XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Simply put, it's reporting electronically. Just like PDFs or spreadsheets are a type of output, XBRL is another output option in electronic form. Right now, the transition to XBRL means extra work for publicly traded companies because they need to file their financial statements in both EDGAR and XBRL formats. Once the SEC phases out the EDGAR system, XBRL will be the primary way to deliver financial information with footnotes and supporting schedules to multiple audiences without having to re-key or reformat the information. A single XBRL document can be converted to printed output, published via the Web, fed into an SEC database (e.g. EDGAR) or forwarded to a creditor for analysis. Question: How does Oracle support XBRL reporting? Answer: The latest XBRL 2.1 specifications are supported by Oracle Hyperion Disclosure Management, which is part of Oracle's Hyperion Financial Close Suite along with Hyperion Financial Management, Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management and Hyperion Financial Close Management. Hyperion Disclosure Management supports the authoring of financial filings in Microsoft Office, with "hot links" to reports and data stored in Hyperion Financial Management or Oracle Essbase. It supports the XBRL tagging of financial statements as well as the disclosures and footnotes within your 10K and 10Q filings. Because many of our customers use Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) for their consolidation needs, they simply generate XBRL statements from their consolidated financial results. Question: What if you don't use Hyperion Financial Management, and you only use E-Business Suite General Ledger or PeopleSoft General Ledger? Answer: No problem, all you need is Hyperion Disclosure Management to generate XBRL from your general ledger. Here are the steps: Upload the XBRL taxonomy from the SEC or XBRL website into Hyperion Disclosure Management. Publish your financial statements out of general ledger to Excel. Perform the XBRL tag mapping from the Excel output to Hyperion Disclosure Management. For more information and some interesting background on XBRL, I recommend reading What You Need To Know About XBRL written by our EPM expert, John O'Rourke.

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Game Center: Leaderboard score inconsistencies

- by Hasyimi Bahrudin

Background I'm currently developing a simple library that mirrors Game Center's functionalities locally. Basically, this library is a system that manages achievements and leaderboards, and optionally sync it with the Game Center. So, if the game is not GC enabled, the game will still have achievements and leaderboards (stored inside a plist). But of course, the leaderboards will then only contain the local player's scores (which is kind of useless, I know :P). Problem Currently I have coded both of the achievements and leaderboards subsystems. The achievements subsystem have already been tested and it works. I'm currently testing the leaderboards subsystem using multiple test user accounts. I loaded the test app on a device and on the simulator, both logged in with 2 different user accounts. Then I performed these steps: I first used the device to upload a score. Then, I ran the simulator, and the score submitted by the user on the device is shown. Which is cool. Then, I used the simulator to upload a score. But on the device, still, only one score is listed. I checked on the Game Center app (to see if the bug lies within my code), and I got the same thing. Under "All players", there is only one score on the device, but there are 2 scores on the simulator. I wanted to make sure that the simulator is not causing this, so I swapped the users on the device and the simulator, and the result is still the same. In other words, the first user is oblivious of the second user's score, but the second user can see the first user's score. Then I tried with a third user. The result: the third user can only see the scores of the first user and himself. The second user still sees the scores of the first user and himself. The first user only sees his own score. Now here comes the weird part. I then make the first user and the second user befriend each other. The result: under "Friends", the first user can see the second user's score, but under "All Players", the first user's score is the only one listed. Screenshots The first user sees this: The second user sees this: So, is this a normal thing when using sandboxed GC accounts? Is this behavior documented somewhere by Apple?

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Beat detection and FFT

- by Quincy

So I am working on a platformer game which includes music with beat detection. I am currently using a simple if the energy that is stored in the history buffer is smaller then the current energy there is a beat. The problem with this is that ofcourse if you use songs like rock songs where you have a pretty steady amplitude this isn't going to work. So I looked further and found algorithms splitting the sound into multiple bands using FFT. I then found this : http://en.literateprograms.org/Cooley-Tukey_FFT_algorithm_(C) The only problem I'm having is that I am quite new to audio and I have no idea how to use that to split the signal up into multiple signals. So my question is : How do you use a FFT to split a signal into multiple bands ? Also for the guys interested, this is my algorithm in c# : // C = threshold, N = size of history buffer / 1024 public void PlaceBeatMarkers(float C, int N) { List<float> instantEnergyList = new List<float>(); short[] samples = soundData.Samples; float timePerSample = 1 / (float)soundData.SampleRate; int sampleIndex = 0; int nextSamples = 1024; // Calculate instant energy for every 1024 samples. while (sampleIndex + nextSamples < samples.Length) { float instantEnergy = 0; for (int i = 0; i < nextSamples; i++) { instantEnergy += Math.Abs((float)samples[sampleIndex + i]); } instantEnergy /= nextSamples; instantEnergyList.Add(instantEnergy); if(sampleIndex + nextSamples >= samples.Length) nextSamples = samples.Length - sampleIndex - 1; sampleIndex += nextSamples; } int index = N; int numInBuffer = index; float historyBuffer = 0; //Fill the history buffer with n * instant energy for (int i = 0; i < index; i++) { historyBuffer += instantEnergyList[i]; } // If instantEnergy / samples in buffer < instantEnergy for the next sample then add beatmarker. while (index + 1 < instantEnergyList.Count) { if(instantEnergyList[index + 1] > (historyBuffer / numInBuffer) * C) beatMarkers.Add((index + 1) * 1024 * timePerSample); historyBuffer -= instantEnergyList[index - numInBuffer]; historyBuffer += instantEnergyList[index + 1]; index++; } }

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Cannot boot into system after deleting partition

- by Clayton

Okay...so this was kind of a stupid thing for me to do now that I think back on it. I was experiencing a ton of lag and not as much memory that I could use after installing Ubuntu 12.04. So after remembering I had installed multiple server versions of Ubuntu 12.04 by mistake, I went into Disk Management and proceeded to delete each and every one. Everything went fine. Up until this week, I have not experienced any problems. But starting yesterday I began to get lag just as I had before, and nothing fixed the problem. I decided to remove the Ubuntu partition, since I was also experiencing a visual error when given the option to select one to boot(the screen doesn't come up at all, and I recieved a monitor resolution error instead, but could still access both Windows and Ubuntu via arrow keys). After deleting the Ubuntu partition, so that I could see if running just Windows would fix the problem, I proceeded with what I was doing, installing a few programs that were not tied to my prediciment in any way. Upon rebooting my desktop, however, I recieved the following error: error: unknown filesystem. grub rescue> Hoping I could boot into Ubuntu via a pendrive and possibly backup my important files and wipe the hard drive to start fresh, I installed Ubuntu 13.04, but even that does not boot. Instead, I get this message on a terminal screen: SYSLINUX 4.06. EDD 4.06-pre1 Copyright (C) 1994-2011 H. Peter Anvin et al ERROR: No configuration file found No DEFAULT or UI configuration directive found! boot: So more or less, my desktop is screwed. I need to be able to get to the files inside because of my job as an artist, as well as retrieve my documents for my stories stored on Windows. Once I can succeed in solving this once and for all, I know for a fact I will stick to Ubuntu only, and install what is required to be able to run any Windows applications I used to use or need to use. I would rather not reformat the hard drive, and if I need to, it is a last resort. And I doubt I can use a Windows Recovery Disk to get my files back, as my mom has thrown out a lot of the installation disks and paperwork I would need to even follow through with that. :\ Keep in mind that I am a novice/newbie when it comes to Linux, but am hoping ot become better at it as time goes by. I appreciate any help you guys can give me. This will probably be the last time I attempt to do anything that could risk the well-being of my PC. (I've also looked through various questions on the site and tested a lot of the solutions. None seem to have worked.)

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introducing pointers to a large software project

- by stefan

I have a fairly large software project written in c++. In there, there is a class foo which represents a structure (by which i don't mean the programmers struct) in which foo-objects can be part of a foo-object. Here's class foo in simplest form: class Foo { private: std::vector<unsigned int> indices; public: void addFooIndex(unsigned int); unsigned int getFooIndex(unsigned int); }; Every foo-object is currently stored in an object of class bar. class Bar { private: std::vector<Foo> foos; public: void addFoo(Foo); std::vector<Foo> getFoos(); } So if a foo-object should represent a structure with a "inner" foo-object, I currently do Foo foo; Foo innerFoo; foo.addFooIndex(bar.getFoos().size() - 1); bar.addFoo(innerFoo); And to get it, I obviously use: Foo foo; for ( unsigned int i = 0; i < foo.getFooIndices().size(); ++i ) { Foo inner_foo; assert( foo.getFooIndices().at(i) < bar.getFoos().size() ); inner_foo = bar.getFoos().at(foo.getFooIndices().at(i)); } So this is not a problem. It just works. But it's not the most elegant solution. I now want to make the inner foos to be "more connected" with the foo-object. It would be obviously to change class foo to: class Foo { private: std::vector<Foo*> foo_pointers; public: void addFooPointer(Foo*); std::vector<Foo*> getFooPointers(); }; So now, for my question: How to gently change this basic class without messing up the whole code? Is there a "clean way"?

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Development-led security vs administration-led security in a software product?

- by haylem

There are cases where you have the opportunity, as a developer, to enforce stricter security features and protections on a software, though they could very well be managed at an environmental level (ie, the operating system would take care of it). Where would you say you draw the line, and what elements do you factor in your decision? Concrete Examples User Management is the OS's responsibility Not exactly meant as a security feature, but in a similar case Google Chrome used to not allow separate profiles. The invoked reason (though it now supports multiple profiles for a same OS user) used to be that user management was the operating system's responsibility. Disabling Web-Form Fields A recurrent request I see addressed online is to have auto-completion be disabled on form fields. Auto-completion didn't exist in old browsers, and was a welcome feature at the time it was introduced for people who needed to fill in forms often. But it also brought in some security concerns, and so some browsers started to implement, on top of the (obviously needed) setting in their own preference/customization panel, an autocomplete attribute for form or input fields. And this has now been introduced into the upcoming HTML5 standard. For browsers that do not listen to this attribute, strange hacks* are offered, like generating unique IDs and names for fields to avoid them from being suggested in future forms (which comes with another herd of issues, like polluting your local auto-fill cache and not preventing a password from being stored in it, but instead probably duplicating its occurences). In this particular case, and others, I'd argue that this is a user setting and that it's the user's desire and the user's responsibility to enable or disable auto-fill (by disabling the feature altogether). And if it is based on an internal policy and security requirement in a corporate environment, then substitute the user for the administrator in the above. I assume it could be counter-argued that the user may want to access non-critical applications (or sites) with this handy feature enabled, and critical applications with this feature disabled. But then I'd think that's what security zones are for (in some browsers), or the sign that you need a more secure (and dedicated) environment / account to use these applications. * I obviously don't deny the ingeniosity of the people who were forced to find workarounds, just the necessity of said workarounds. Questions That was a tad long-winded, so I guess my questions are: Would you in general consider it to be the application's (hence, the developer's) responsiblity? Where do you draw the line, if not in the "general" case?

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Tackling Big Data Analytics with Oracle Data Integrator

- by Irem Radzik

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 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:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} By Mike Eisterer The term big data draws a lot of attention, but behind the hype there's a simple story. For decades, companies have been making business decisions based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, however, is a potential treasure trove of less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and documents that can be mined for useful information. Companies are facing emerging technologies, increasing data volumes, numerous data varieties and the processing power needed to efficiently analyze data which changes with high velocity. Oracle offers the broadest and most integrated portfolio of products to help you acquire and organize these diverse data sources and analyze them alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition(ODI) is critical to any enterprise big data strategy. ODI and the Oracle Data Connectors provide native access to Hadoop, leveraging such technologies as MapReduce, HDFS and Hive. Alongside with ODI’s metadata driven approach for extracting, loading and transforming data; companies may now integrate their existing data with big data technologies and deliver timely and trusted data to their analytic and decision support platforms. In this session, you’ll learn about ODI and Oracle Big Data Connectors and how, coupled together, they provide the critical integration with multiple big data platforms. Tackling Big Data Analytics with Oracle Data Integrator October 1, 2012 12:15 PM at MOSCONE WEST – 3005 For other data integration sessions at OpenWorld, please check our Focus-On document. If you are not able to attend OpenWorld, please check out our latest resources for Data Integration.

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Ubuntu won't display netbook's native resolution

- by Daniel

FYI: My Netbook model is HP Mini 210-1004sa, which comes with Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150, and has a display 10.1" Active Matrix Colour TFT 1024 x 600. I recently removed Windows 7 Starter from my netbook, and replaced it with Ubuntu 12.10. The problem is the OS doesn't seem to recognise the native display resolution of 1024x600 i.e. the bottom bits of Ubuntu is hidden beneath the screen & the only 2 available resolutions are: the default 1024x768 and 800x600. I've also thought about replacing Ubuntu with Lubuntu or Puppy Linux, as the system does run a bit slow, but I can't, as then I won't be able to access the taskbar and application menu which will be hidden beneath the screen. Only Ubuntu with Unity is currently usable, as the Unity Launcher is visible enough. I was able to define a custom resolution 1024x600 using the Q&A: How set my monitor resolution? but when I set that resolution, there appears a black band at the top of the screen and the desktop area is lowered, with bits of it hidden beneath the screen. I tried leaving it at this new resolution and restarting the system to see if the black band would disappear & the display will fit correctly, but it gets reset to 1024x768 at startup and displays following error: Could not apply the stored configuration for monitors none of the selected modes were compatible with the possible modes: Trying modes for CRTC 63 CRTC 63: trying mode 800x600@60Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 0) CRTC 63: trying mode 800x600@56Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 0) CRTC 63: trying mode 640x480@60Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 0) CRTC 63: trying mode 1024x768@60Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 1) CRTC 63: trying mode 800x600@60Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 1) CRTC 63: trying mode 800x600@56Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 1) CRTC 63: trying mode 640x480@60Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 1) Trying modes for CRTC 64 CRTC 64: trying mode 1024x768@60Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 0) CRTC 64: trying mode 800x600@60Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 0) CRTC 64: trying mode 800x600@56Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 0) CRTC 64: trying mode 640x480@60Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 0) CRTC 64: trying mode 1024x768@60Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 1) CRTC 64: trying mode 800x600@60Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 1) CRTC 64: trying mode 800x600@56Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 1) CRTC 64: trying mode 640x480@60Hz with output at 1024x600@60Hz (pass 1)

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Difference between the terms Material & Effect

- by codey

I'm making an effect system right now (I think, because it may be a material system... or both!). The effects system follows the common (e.g. COLLADA, DirectX) effect framework abstraction of Effects have Techniques, Techniques have Passes, Passes have States & Shader Programs. An effect, according to COLLADA, defines the equations necessary for the visual appearance of geometry and screen-space image processing. Keeping with the abstraction, effects contain techniques. Each effect can contain one or many techniques (i.e. ways to generate the effect), each of which describes a different method for rendering that effect. The technique could be relate to quality (e.g. high precision, high LOD, etc.), or in-game-situation (e.g. night/day, power-up-mode, etc.). Techniques hold a description of the textures, samplers, shaders, parameters, & passes necessary for rendering this effect using one method. Some algorithms require several passes to render the effect. Pipeline descriptions are broken into an ordered collection of Pass objects. A pass provides a static declaration of all the render states, shaders, & settings for "one rendering pipeline" (i.e. one pass). Meshes usually contain a series of materials that define the model. According to the COLLADA spec (again), a material instantiates an effect, fills its parameters with values, & selects a technique. But I see material defined differently in other places, such as just the Lambert, Blinn, Phong "material types/shaded surfaces", or as Metal, Plastic, Wood, etc. In game dev forums, people often talk about implementing a "material/effect system". Is the material not an instance of an effect? Ergo, if I had effect objects, stored in a collection, & each effect instance object with there own parameter setting, then there is no need for the concept of a material... Or am I interpreting it wrong? Please help by contributing your interpretations as I want to be clear on a distinction (if any), & don't want to miss out on the concept of a material if it should be implemented to follow the abstraction of the DirectX FX framework & COLLADA definitions closely.

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Export all SSIS packages from msdb using Powershell

- by jamiet

Have you ever wanted to dump all the SSIS packages stored in msdb out to files? Of course you have, who wouldn’t? Right? Well, at least one person does because this was the subject of a thread (save all ssis packages to file) on the SSIS forum earlier today. Some of you may have already figured out a way of doing this but for those that haven’t here is a nifty little script that will do it for you and it uses our favourite jack-of-all tools … Powershell!! Imagine I have the following package folder structure on my Integration Services server (i.e. in [msdb]): There are two packages in there called “20110111 Chaining Expression components” & “Package”, I want to export those two packages into a folder structure that mirrors that in [msdb]. Here is the Powershell script that will do that:Param($SQLInstance = "localhost") #####Add all the SQL goodies (including Invoke-Sqlcmd)##### add-pssnapin sqlserverprovidersnapin100 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue add-pssnapin sqlservercmdletsnapin100 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue cls $Packages = Invoke-Sqlcmd -MaxCharLength 10000000 -ServerInstance $SQLInstance -Query "WITH cte AS ( SELECT cast(foldername as varchar(max)) as folderpath, folderid FROM msdb..sysssispackagefolders WHERE parentfolderid = '00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000' UNION ALL SELECT cast(c.folderpath + '\' + f.foldername as varchar(max)), f.folderid FROM msdb..sysssispackagefolders f INNER JOIN cte c ON c.folderid = f.parentfolderid ) SELECT c.folderpath,p.name,CAST(CAST(packagedata AS VARBINARY(MAX)) AS VARCHAR(MAX)) as pkg FROM cte c INNER JOIN msdb..sysssispackages p ON c.folderid = p.folderid WHERE c.folderpath NOT LIKE 'Data Collector%'" Foreach ($pkg in $Packages) { $pkgName = $Pkg.name $folderPath = $Pkg.folderpath $fullfolderPath = "c:\temp\$folderPath\" if(!(test-path -path $fullfolderPath)) { mkdir $fullfolderPath | Out-Null } $pkg.pkg | Out-File -Force -encoding ascii -FilePath "$fullfolderPath\$pkgName.dtsx" } To run it simply change the “localhost” parameter of the server you want to connect to either by editing the script or passing it in when the script is executed. It will create the folder structure in C:\Temp (which you can also easily change if you so wish – just edit the script accordingly). Here’s the folder structure that it created for me: Notice how it is a mirror of the folder structure in [msdb]. Hope this is useful! @Jamiet UPDATE: THis post prompted Chad Miller to write a post describing his Powershell add-in that utilises a SSIS API to do exporting of packages. Go take a read here: http://sev17.com/2011/02/importing-and-exporting-ssis-packages-using-powershell/

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