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• Antenna Aligner Part 7: Connecting the dots

  - by Chris George

  The app is basically ready, so I eagerly started to sort out creating the application entry in iTunes Connect. It's mostly intuitive actually, although I did have to create yet another icon for iTunes sized 512x512 pixels, damn lucky I did the original graphics as vector! It took me longer to write the application description than anything else, I'm so not a tech author! I didn't like the way you have to 'make up' an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) number. I have to do some googling to find out that it really doesn't matter what it is! It should be more obvious what to do from the actual website itself. That aside, the rest of it was actually fairly straightforward. As well as the details of the application, iPhone and iPad screenshots were also required. This posed somewhat of a problem. The iPhone ones were easy (as I have one!), but I do not (yet) own an iPad . So I thought I'd leave the iPad screenshots out for now. Once the application details were sorted, I moved onto the rights and pricing. At the start of the project I had made the decision that I wouldn't charge any more than the lowest amount £0.59. I believe there is a market for this, but as my first foray into app development I didn't want to take the mick. I did realise, however, that I had built my app with a developer certificate and provisioning profile. This was fairly quickly corrected, and again Nomad made this very easy to switch over to the distribution certificate and provisioning profile. With a sense of excitement I cracked open iTunes connect and clicked the upload button ... ...slight snag... . when the Nomad project was started, Apple allowed uploads of these binaries via iTunes Connect. But this is no longer possible, the only upload path is via the Application Loader available from the Apple Developer program. This itself has one limitation, it only runs on a mac! D'OH!!!  Actually my language was somewhat more colourful when this fact came to light. After picking my laptop up off the floor and putting it back together... ok only joking, but I did nearly throw it out of frustration!... I started to consider the options; I briefly entertained the idea of buying a cheap mac from ebay... no, that defeats the whole object of what I'm doing, plus my wife wouldn't be impressed there are some guys out there in the interweb who will upload your app for a small fee...but I don't really like the idea of giving some faceless email address my apple developer login details, as well as my app binary! find some willing friend with a mac who would kindly let me use it... obviously this is the only sensible option. In the meantime, I informed the Nomad team about this slight 'issue' and they are currently investigating possible solutions...

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• Impressions of Pivotal Tracker

  Pivotal Tracker is a free, online agile project management system. Ive been using it recently to better communicate to customers about the current state of our project. In Pivotal Tracker, the unit of work is a story and stories are arranged into iterations or delivery cycles. Stories can be any level of granularity you want, but the idea is to use stories to communicate clearly to customers, so you dont want to write a novel. You especially dont want to write a list of detailed programming tasks. A good story for a point of sale system might be: Allow managers to override the price of an item while ringing up a customer. A less useful story: Script out the process of adding a manager flag to the user table and stage that script into the deploy directory. Stories are estimated using a point scale, by default 1, 2 or 3. Iterations are then automatically laid out by combining enough tasks to fill the point total for that period of time. You have to start with a guess on how many points your team can do in an iteration, then adjust with real data as you complete iterations. This is basic agile methodology, but where Pivotal Tracker adds value is that it automatically and graphically lays out iterations for you on your project site. This makes communication and planning easy. Compiling release notes is no longer painful as it has been clear from the outset what work is going on. While I much prefer Pivotal Trackers customer facing interface over what we used previously (TFS), I see a couple of gaps. First, I have not able to make much headway with the reporting tools. Despite my complaints about TFS, it can produce some nice reports. Second, its not clear where if at all, Id keep track of purely internal tasks. Im talking about server maintenance, cleaning up source control, checking back on some code which you never quite felt right about. Theres no purpose in cluttering up an iteration backlog with these items, but if you dont track them, you lose them. Im not sure what a good answer for that is. One gap I thought Id see, which I dont, is more granular dev tasks. If Im implementing a story, Ill write out the steps and track my progress, but really, those steps arent useful to anybody but me. The only time Ive found that level of detail really useful is when my tasks are defined at too high a level anyway or when Im working with someone who needs more coaching and might not be able to finish a story in time without some scaffolding to get them going. You can learn more about Pivotal Tracker at: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/learnmore.   --- Relevant Links --- A good intro to stories: http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/userStory.htmDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• User Produtivity Kit - Powerful Packages (Part 1)

  - by [email protected]

  User Productivity Kit provides the ability to create a variety of content types including robust topics on system process and web pages with formatted text and graphics. There are times when you want to enhance content with media types not naively created by User Productivity Kit, media types such as video, custom animations, forms, and more. One method of doing this is to maintain these media files on a web server - separate from the User Productivity Kit player content and link to the files using absolute URLs such as http://myserver/overview.html. While this will get you going, you won't benefit from the content management capabilities of the UPK Developer. Features such as check-in / check-out, history, document properties, folder permissions and more are not available to this external content. Further, if you ever need to move that content to a server with a different name or domain, you'd need to update all your links. UPK version 3.1 introduced a new document type - the package. A package is a group of folders and files that you manage in the Developer library as a single document. These package documents work in the same manner as any other document in the library and you can use all of the collaborative content development features you see with other document types. Packages can be used for anything from single Word documents, PDF files, and graphics to more intricate sets of inter-related files commonly seen with HTML files and their graphics, style sheets, and JavaScript files. The structure of the files and folders within a package will always be preserved so this means that any relative links between files in the package will work. For example, an HTML file containing an image tag with a relative link to a graphic elsewhere in the same package will continue to function properly both when viewed in the Developer and when published to outputs such as the UPK Player. Once you start to use packages, you'll soon discover that there is a lot of existing content that can be re-purposed by placing it into UPK packages. Packages are easily created by selecting File...New...Package. Files can be added in a number of ways including the "Add Files" button, copy & paste from Windows Explorer, and drag & drop. To use one of the files in the package, just create a link to the file in the package you want to target. This is supported throughout the Developer in places such as section & topic concepts, frame links and hyperlinks in web pages. A little more challenging is determining how to structure packages in your library. As I mentioned earlier, a package can contain anything from a single file to dozens of files and folders. So what should you do? You could create a package for each file. You could create one package for all your files. But which one is right? Well, there's not a right and wrong answer to this question. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. The right decision will be influenced by the package files themselves, the structure of the content in the library, the size and working style of the development team, how content is shared between different outlines and more. The first consideration can be assessed the quickest. If the content to be placed in the package is composed of multiple files and those files reference each other, they should be in the same package. There are loads of examples of this type of content. HTML files with graphics and style sheets, HTML files with embedded Flash movies, and Word documents saved as HTML are all examples where the content is composed of multiple files and the files reference each other in some way. Content like this should always be placed in a singe package such that these relative links between the files are preserved and play properly in the UPK Player. In upcoming posts, I'll explain additional considerations.

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• More Stuff less Fluff

  - by brendonpage

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/brendonpage/archive/2013/11/08/more-stuff-less-fluff.aspxYAGNI – "You Aren't Going To Need It". This is an acronym commonly used in software development to remind developers to only write what they need. This acronym exists because software developers have gotten into the habit of writing everything they need to solve a problem and then everything they think they're going to possibly need in the future. Since we can't predict the future this results in a large portion of the code that we write never being used. That extra code causes unnecessary complexity, which makes it harder to understand and harder to modify when we inevitably have to write something that we didn't think of. I've known about YAGNI for some time now but I never really got it. The words made sense and the idea was clear but the concept never sank in. I was one of those devs who'd happily write a ton of code in the anticipation of future needs. In my mind this was an essential part of writing high quality code. I didn't realise that in doing so I was actually writing low quality code. If you are anything like me you are probably thinking "Lies and propaganda! High quality code needs to be future proof." I agree! But what makes code future proof? If we could see into the future the answer would be simple, code that allows for or meets all future requirements. Since we can't see the future the best we can do is write code that can easily adapt to future requirements, this means writing flexible code. Flexible code is: Fast to understand. Fast to add to. Fast to modify. To be flexible code has to be simple, this means only making it as complex as it needs to be to meet those 3 criteria. That is high quality code. YAGNI! The art is in deciding where to place the seams (abstractions) that will give you flexibility without making decisions about future functionality. Robert C Martin explains it very nicely, he says a good architecture allows you to defer decisions because if you can defer a decision then you have the flexibility to change it. I've recently had a YAGNI experience which brought this all into perspective. I was working on a new project which had multiple clients that connect to a server hosted in the cloud. I was tasked with adding a feature to the desktop client that would allow users to capture items that would then be saved to the cloud. My immediate thought was "Hey we have multiple clients so I should build a web service for these items, that way we can access them from other clients", so I went to work and this is what I created.  I stood back and gazed upon what I'd created with a warm fuzzy feeling. It was beautiful! Then the time came for the team to use the design I'd created for another feature with a new entity. Let's just say that they didn't get the same warm fuzzy feeling that I did when they looked at the design. After much discussion they eventually got it through to me that I'd bloated the design based on an assumption of future functionality. After much more discussion we cut the design down to the following. This design gives us future flexibility with no extra work, it is as complex as it needs to be. It has been a couple of months since this incident and we still haven't needed to access either of the entities from other clients. Using the simpler design allowed us to do more stuff with less stuff!

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• Join us on our Journey to be #1 in SaaS!

  - by jessica.ebbelaar(at)oracle.com

  WHY ORACLE? Oracle is a robust organization that has proven to maintain growth and innovation at all levels with a constant evolving attitude. The main ingredient of Oracles success is the 105.000 talented employees who constantly amaze each other in building a better and more innovative organization. Oracle is a company where YOU can make a difference. What is OD? Oracle Direct is a state-of-the-art, multi-channel EMEA sales operation bringing to life the benefits of Oracle’s complete technology stack. It offers you the unique opportunity to work with the most talented and like-minded sales professionals in the industry.  You will have access to world class training and structured career development programmes allowing you to accelerate your Solution Sales career across a multitude of product lines and a choice of attractive locations. What positions are OD Hiring?   Oracle is on a journey to be the #1 SaaS vendor in EMEA.  Due to recent expansion and acquisitions within our Cloud Business, we are now growing our EMEA Cloud Applications Sales Group in Dublin. We have many exciting NEW opportunities across our CRM and HCM SaaS Sales teams. As a SaaS Sales Account Manager, you will proactively manage an assigned territory / vertical with responsibility for the full sales cycle. This role requires strong business development, solution selling, account management and closing skills. WHY ORACLE? Oracle is a robust organization that has proven to maintain growth and innovation at all levels with a constant evolving attitude. The main ingredient of Oracles success is the 105.000 talented employees who constantly amaze each other in building a better and more innovative organization. Oracle is a company where YOU can make a difference. What is OD? Oracle Direct is a state-of-the-art, multi-channel EMEA sales operation bringing to life the benefits of Oracle’s complete technology stack. It offers you the unique opportunity to work with the most talented and like-minded sales professionals in the industry.  You will have access to world class training and structured career development programmes allowing you to accelerate your Solution Sales career across a multitude of product lines and a choice of attractive locations. What positions are OD Hiring? Oracle is on a journey to be the #1 SaaS vendor in EMEA.  Due to recent expansion and acquisitions within our Cloud Business, we are now growing our EMEA Cloud Applications Sales Group in Dublin. We have many exciting NEW opportunities across our CRM and HCM SaaS Sales teams. As a SaaS Sales Account Manager, you will proactively manage an assigned territory / vertical with responsibility for the full sales cycle. This role requires strong business development, solution selling, account management and closing skills. What is the Business Development Group (BDG) The Business Development Group is the key entry point in Oracle for the future Sales and Management talent of the organisation. We are the Demand Generation engine for Oracle in EMEA. We provide revenue generating, quality sales pipeline to our Inside and Field Sales professionals as well as to our Channel Partners. Our current focus is to provide an agile and flexible service offering to our customers and stakeholders to meet ever changing business needs, whilst constantly striving to improve the customer experience, quality of our pipeline, market coverage and penetration. As a SaaS Business Development Consultant (BDC) you will be the first touch point with new customers. Your goal is to proactively identify and qualify business opportunities leading to revenue for Oracle. You will work closely with your Inside Sales colleagues who will progress your qualified pipeline and opportunities. Work for us Work for the only multi-pillar SaaS vendor in the market Be part of a FUN, fast paced and truly International sales team  Develop you solution sales EXPERTISE Drive your CAREER development within a structured and supportive environment The Profile You have a passion for selling cutting-edge technology You thrive in a fast paced and dynamic work environment where being the best is paramount Your priority is always the customer You live for a challenge and you love to win Join us on our Journey to be #1 in SaaS and be part of our Cloud Success Story! You will find more information about open roles here

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• Two Candidates + One Job = Two Different Outcomes

  - by david.talamelli

  Recruiters have always headhunted (sidenote: I do not like this word, in general I think the type of people who use the phrase “headhunting” are the ones who are trying to sound more important than what they likely are). Any serious Recruiter engages in direct recruiting activity, it is part and parcel of the business it is not something unique. With the uptake in Social Media the past 4-5 years, we have seen an increase in the number of Recruiters proactively reaching out to people about job opportunities. We have also seen this activity increase across all levels of hire, from help desk roles to C-Level Executives. While getting approached about a role can be a nice boost to a person’s ego, do not let it give you an inflated sense of entitlement. It is The way that people handle themselves during these calls and subsequent interviews will have a large impact on their potential to land that job. Last week I spoke to two very different candidates, both about the same position and both with very different outcomes. On paper, Candidate #1 looked fantastic; they ticked many of the boxes that we were looking for. The person is working at global IT company and working in a similar role as the one we were hiring for but not in as senior as the role we had. This role would have been the perfect step to getting involved in more complex work for the person. Candidate #2 had less polished IT experience, ticked some of the boxes we were looking for and on paper in comparison to Candidate #1 was not as close a fit as Candidate #1 was. It seemed like I was comparing apples and oranges. After speaking to both candidates it turns out I was comparing apples and oranges except the person better suited for our role was not the one I was expecting it would be. The first candidate on paper looked great – they had the experience we were looking for and appeared to be just right for the role, but after talking to them, they gave me the impression that they thought the world owed them. The impression I was left with was that they did not equate success with hard work, they seemed more interested in “what is in it for me”. Rather than having a proper conversation with me, I was often cut off and asked to hurry it up when explaining our business, what we are doing, etc... . This person seemed more interested in the job title and money than how rather than think about ways to make the role successful. Candidate #2 who had limited experience, made up for any perceived lack of experience and them some with a demonstrated motivation to succeed and do the things needed to make that happen. Candidate #2 made a great first impression, they did not seem afraid of hard work and demonstrated a “team player” attitude. In talking to them they kept me engaged, listened and asked thoughtful questions that made me think this is the type of person who creates their own luck and who would thrive in a place like Oracle. Skills, capabilities, experience and a good resume can certainly get your foot in the door, but the wrong attitude or approach to work can close those opportunities just as easily. On the other hand, hard work, effort and a genuine work ethic may help open those doors that would otherwise closed for you. A resume with all the credentials gets you in the front door but that is just the beginning of the process. It is not how we start the race that is important, it’s how things end that matter most.

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• Creating a Corporate Data Hub

  - by BuckWoody

  The Windows Azure Marketplace has a rich assortment of data and software offerings for you to use – a type of Software as a Service (SaaS) for IT workers, not necessarily for end-users. Among those offerings is the “Data Hub” – a  codename for a project that ironically actually does what the codename says. In many of our organizations, we have multiple data quality issues. Finding data is one problem, but finding it just once is often a bigger problem. Lots of departments and even individuals have stored the same data more than once, and in some cases, made changes to one of the copies. It’s difficult to know which location or version of the data is authoritative. Then there’s the problem of accessing the data. It’s fairly straightforward to publish a database, share or other location internally to store the data. But then you have to figure out who owns it, how it is controlled, and pass out the various connection strings to those who want to use it. And then you need to figure out how to let folks access the internal data externally – bringing up all kinds of security issues. Finally, in many cases our user community wants us to combine data from the internally sources with external data, bringing up the security, strings, and exploration features up all over again. Enter the Data Hub. This is an online offering, where you assign an administrator and data stewards. You import the data into the service, and it’s available to you - and only you and your organization if you wish. The basic steps for this service are to set up the portal for your company, assign administrators and permissions, and then you assign data areas and import data into them. From there you make them discoverable, and then you have multiple options that you or your users can access that data. You’re then able, if you wish, to combine that data with other data in one location. So how does all that work? What about security? Is it really that easy? And can you really move the data definition off to the Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) that know the particular data stack better than the IT team does? Well, nothing good is easy – but using the Data Hub is actually pretty simple. I’ll give you a link in a moment where you can sign up and try this yourself. Once you sign up, you assign an administrator. From there you’ll create data areas, and then use a simple interface to bring the data in. All of this is done in a portal interface – nothing to install, configure, update or manage. After the data is entered in, and you’ve assigned meta-data to describe it, your users have multiple options to access it. They can simply use the portal – which actually has powerful visualizations you can use on any platform, even mobile phones or tablets.     Your users can also hit the data with Excel – which gives them ultimate flexibility for display, all while using an authoritative, single reference for the data. Since the service is online, they can do this wherever they are – given the proper authentication and permissions. You can also hit the service with simple API calls, like this one from C#: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh921924  You can make HTTP calls instead of code, and the data can even be exposed as an OData Feed. As you can see, there are a lot of options. You can check out the offering here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazurelabs/labs/data-hub.aspx and you can read the documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh921938

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• Windows Azure SDK 1.3 addresses early adopter feedback

  - by Eric Nelson

  At the end of November 2010 we released a new version of the Windows Azure SDK which contains many new features driven by the great feedback of early adopters plus a shiny new portal. New Portal implemented in Silverlight: The new portal is implemented using Silverlight and replaces the (IMHO rather clunky) original HTML + JavaScript portal. It is 100% better although does still have a few bugs. Enjoy! P.S. You can if you wish still use the old portal:   New runtime functionality: The following functionality is now generally available through the Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio and the new Windows Azure Management Portal: Elevated Privileges and Full IIS. You can now run a portion or all of your code in Web and Worker roles with elevated administrator privileges. The Web role now provides Full IIS functionality, which enables multiple IIS sites per Web role and the ability to install IIS modules. Remote Desktop functionality enables you to connect to a running instance of your application or service in order to monitor activity and troubleshoot common problems. Windows Server 2008 R2 Roles: Windows Azure now supports Windows Server 2008 R2 in its Web, worker and VM roles. This new support enables you to take advantage of the full range of Windows Server 2008 R2 features such as IIS 7.5, AppLocker, and enhanced command-line and automated management using PowerShell Version 2.0. New runtime functionality – in beta: Windows Azure Virtual Machine Role: Support for more types of new and existing Windows applications will soon be available with the introduction of the Virtual Machine (VM) role. You can move more existing applications to Windows Azure, reducing the need to make costly code or deployment changes. Extra Small Windows Azure Instance, which is priced at $0.05 per compute hour, provides developers with a cost-effective training and development environment. Developers can also use the Extra Small instance to prototype cloud solutions at a lower cost. Windows Azure Connect: (formerly Project Sydney), which enables a simple and easy-to-manage mechanism to set up IP-based network connectivity between on-premises and Windows Azure resources, is the first Windows Azure Virtual Network feature that we’re making available as a CTP. You can sign up for any of the betas via the Windows Azure Management Portal. Improved processes and simplified operations New portal! (see above) Access to new diagnostic information including the ability to click on a role to see role type, deployment time and last reboot time A new sign-up process that dramatically reduces the number of steps needed to sign up for Windows Azure. New scenario based Windows Azure Platform forums to help answer questions and share knowledge more efficiently. Multiple Service Administrators: Windows Azure now supports multiple Windows Live IDs to have administrator privileges on the same Windows Azure account. The objective is to make it easy for a team to work on the same Windows Azure account while using their individual Windows Live IDs.   Related Links Please also let us know through Microsoft Platform Ready if and when you intend to build an application using the Windows Azure Platform. Or indeed if you already have (Well done). You will get access to some great benefits if you do (more on that in a future post). It also really helps us better understand the demand out there which directly impacts how we will plan the next six months of activities around the Windows Azure Platform. Visit Microsoft Platform Ready to tell us about your plans for your applications UK based? Interested in the Windows Azure Platform? Join http://ukazure.ning.com Get started with the Windows Azure Platform http://bit.ly/startazure

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• Microsoft Build 2012 Day 1 Keynote Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  So I have finally dried the tears after watching the Keynote for Build 2012.  This wasn’t because it was an emotional presentation, but because for the second year I missed the goodies.  Each on site attendee got a Surface RT, a Lumia 920 and a voucher for 100GB of SkyDrive storage. The event was opened with the announcement that in the three days since the launch of Windows 8 over 4 million upgrades have been sold.  I don’t care who you are that is an impressive stat.  Ballmer then spent a fair amount of time remaking the case for the Windows and Windows Phone platforms similar to what we have heard over the last to launch events. There were some cool, but non-essential demos.  The one that was the most fun was the Perceptive Pixel 82” slate device.  At first glance I wondered why I would ever want such a device, but then Ballmer explained it’s possible use for schools and boardrooms.  The actually made sense. Then things got strange.  Steve started explaining features that developers could leverage.  Usually this type of information is left to the product leads.  He focused on the integration with the Charms features such as Search and Share. Steve “Guggs” Guggenheim showed off an app that would appeal to my kids from Disney called “Agent P” which is base on Phineas and Ferb.  Then he got to the meat of the presentation.  We found out that you could add a tile that can be used to sell ad space.  In the same vein we also found out that you could use Microsoft’s, Paypal’s or any commerce engine of your own creation or choosing. For those who are interested in sports and especially developing sports apps you would have found the small presentation from Michael Bayle of ESPN.  He introduced the ESPN app which has tons of features.  For the developers in the crowd he also mentioned that ESPN has an API available at developer.espn.com. During the launch events we were told apps were coming.  In this presentation we were actually shown a scrolling list of logos and told about a couple of them.  Ballmer mentioned specifically Twitter, SAP and DropBox.  These are impressive names that were just a couple of the list impressive names. Steve Ballmer addressed the question of why you should develop for the Windows 8 platform.  He feels that Microsoft has the best commercial terms for developers, a better way to build apps than other platforms and a variety of form factors.  His key point though was the available volume of customers given the current Windows install base and assuming even a flat growth of the platform.  This he backed with a promise that Microsoft is going to do better at marketing and you won’t be able to avoid the ads that they are bringing out. The last section of the key note was present by Kevin Gallo from the Windows Phone team.  This was the real reason I tuned into the webcast.  He impressed upon those watching that the strength of developing for the Microsoft platform is the common programming model that now exist.  While there are difference between form factor implementations you can leverage code across them. He claimed that 90% of developer requests for Windows Phone 8 had been implemented.  These include: More controls with better performance Better live tiles including lock screen integration Speech support in custom apps Easier submission to the market place App camera integration VOIP and chat support Bluetooth and NFC support Native C++ development Direct 3D development   The quote from Kevin that stood out for me was that “Take your Dramamine and buckle your seatbelt type of games are coming to Windows Phone 8”.  He back this up by displaying a list of game development frameworks and then having Unity come out and do a demo. Ok, almost done … The last two things of note for me were the announcement that the SDK is immediately available at dev.windowsphone.com and that they were reducing the cost of an individual developer account to $8 for the next 8 days. Let the development commence. del.icio.us Tags: Build 2012,Windows 8,Windows Phone 8,Windows Phone

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• SQL Authority News – FalafelCON 2014: 2 days with the Best Developers in the World

  - by Pinal Dave

  I love presenting at various forums on various technologies. I am extremely excited that I got invited to speak at Falafel Conference 2014 in San Francisco. I will present two technology sessions on SQL Server. If you are into web development or if you just want to attend a conference with the best of the industry speakers, this may be the right conference for you. What set apart this conference from other conference is technology presented as well as speakers. Usually one has to attend very expensive and high scale event when they have to hear good speakers. At this conference, you will find quite a many industry legends are available to present on the bleeding edge technology. Here are few of the reasons why I believe you should attend this conference: Choose from four tracks covering Web, Mobile development and testing, Sitefinity, and Automated Testing, or attend sessions from all four! Learn from the best developers and testers in the business in an intimate setting. Surround yourself with your peers and the opportunity to network Learn about the latest platforms and technologies including Kendo UI, AngularJS, ASP.NET MVC, WebAPI, and more! Here are the details for the sessions which I am going to present at Falafel Conference. Secrets of SQL Server: Database Worst Practices Abstract: Chances are you have heard, or even uttered, this expression. This demo-oriented session will show many examples where database professionals were dumbfounded by their own mistakes, and could even bring back memories of your own early DBA days. The goal of this session is to expose the small details that can be dangerous to the production environment and SQL Server as a whole, as well as talk about worst practices and how to avoid them. Shedding light on some of these perils and the tricks to avoid them may even save your current job. After attending this session, Developers will only need 60 seconds to improve performance of their database server in their SharePoint implementation. We will have a quiz during the session to keep the conversation alive. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Additionally, all attendees of the session will have access to learning material presented in the session. The Unsung Hero Abstract: Slow Running Queries are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame the SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, however the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how Indexes has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Server, and Indexing tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Register Now! I have learned from the Falafel Team that they are running out of tickets and soon they will close the registration.  For next 10 days the price for the registration is only USD 149. Trust me, you can’t get such a world class training and networking opportunity at such a low price. Click to Register Here! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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• Oracle GoldenGate Active-Active Part 1

  - by Nick_W

  My name is Nick Wagner, and I'm a recent addition to the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) product management team.  I've spent the last 15+ years working on database replication products, and I've spent the last 10 years working on the Oracle GoldenGate product.  So most of my posting will probably be focused on OGG.  One question that comes up all the time is around active-active replication with Oracle GoldenGate.  How do I know if my application is a good fit for active-active replication with GoldenGate?   To answer that, it really comes down to how you plan on handling conflict resolution.  I will delve into topology and deployment in a later blog, but here is a simple architecture: The two most common resolution routines are host based resolution and timestamp based resolution. Host based resolution is used less often, but works with the fewest application changes.  Think of it like this: any transactions from SystemA always take precedence over any transactions from SystemB.  If there is a conflict on SystemB, then the record from SystemA will overwrite it.  If there is a conflict on SystemA, then it will be ignored.  It is quite a bit less restrictive, and in most cases, as long as all the tables have primary keys, host based resolution will work just fine.  Timestamp based resolution, on the other hand, is a little trickier. In this case, you can decide which record is overwritten based on timestamps. For example, does the older record get overwritten with the newer record?  Or vice-versa?  This method not only requires primary keys on every table, but it also requires every table to have a timestamp/date column that is updated each time a record is inserted or updated on the table.  Most homegrown applications can always be customized to include these requirements, but it's a little more difficult with 3rd party applications, and might even be impossible for large ERP type applications.  If your database has these features - whether it’s primary keys for host based resolution, or primary keys and timestamp columns for timestamp based resolution - then your application could be a great candidate for active-active replication.  But table structure is not the only requirement.  The other consideration applies when there is a conflict; i.e., do I need to perform any notification or track down the user that had their data overwritten?  In most cases, I don't think it's necessary, but if it is required, OGG can always create an exceptions table that contains all of the overwritten transactions so that people can be notified. It's a bit of extra work to implement this type of option, but if the business requires it, then it can be done. Unless someone is constantly monitoring this exception table or has an automated process in dealing with exceptions, there will be a delay in getting a response back to the end user. Ideally, when setting up active-active resolution we can include some simple procedural steps or configuration options that can reduce, or in some cases eliminate the potential for conflicts.  This makes the whole implementation that much easier and foolproof.  And I'll cover these in my next blog. 

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• New R Interface to Oracle Data Mining Available for Download

  - by charlie.berger

    The R Interface to Oracle Data Mining ( R-ODM) allows R users to access the power of Oracle Data Mining's in-database functions using the familiar R syntax. R-ODM provides a powerful environment for prototyping data analysis and data mining methodologies. R-ODM is especially useful for: Quick prototyping of vertical or domain-based applications where the Oracle Database supports the application Scripting of "production" data mining methodologies Customizing graphics of ODM data mining results (examples: classification, regression, anomaly detection) The R-ODM interface allows R users to mine data using Oracle Data Mining from the R programming environment. It consists of a set of function wrappers written in source R language that pass data and parameters from the R environment to the Oracle RDBMS enterprise edition as standard user PL/SQL queries via an ODBC interface. The R-ODM interface code is a thin layer of logic and SQL that calls through an ODBC interface. R-ODM does not use or expose any Oracle product code as it is completely an external interface and not part of any Oracle product. R-ODM is similar to the example scripts (e.g., the PL/SQL demo code) that illustrates the use of Oracle Data Mining, for example, how to create Data Mining models, pass arguments, retrieve results etc. R-ODM is packaged as a standard R source package and is distributed freely as part of the R environment's Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). For information about the R environment, R packages and CRAN, see www.r-project.org. R-ODM is particularly intended for data analysts and statisticians familiar with R but not necessarily familiar with the Oracle database environment or PL/SQL. It is a convenient environment to rapidly experiment and prototype Data Mining models and applications. Data Mining models prototyped in the R environment can easily be deployed in their final form in the database environment, just like any other standard Oracle Data Mining model. What is R? R is a system for statistical computation and graphics. It consists of a language plus a run-time environment with graphics, a debugger, access to certain system functions, and the ability to run programs stored in script files. The design of R has been heavily influenced by two existing languages: Becker, Chambers & Wilks' S and Sussman's Scheme. Whereas the resulting language is very similar in appearance to S, the underlying implementation and semantics are derived from Scheme. R was initially written by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. Since mid-1997 there has been a core group (the "R Core Team") who can modify the R source code archive. Besides this core group many R users have contributed application code as represented in the near 1,500 publicly-available packages in the CRAN archive (which has shown exponential growth since 2001; R News Volume 8/2, October 2008). Today the R community is a vibrant and growing group of dozens of thousands of users worldwide. It is free software distributed under a GNU-style copyleft, and an official part of the GNU project ("GNU S"). Resources: R website / CRAN R-ODM

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• What You Can Learn from the NFL Referee Lockout

  - by Christina McKeon

  American football is a lot like religion. The fans are devoted followers that take brand loyalty to a whole new level. These fans that worship their teams each week showed that they are powerful customers whose voice has an impact. Yesterday, these fans proved that their opinion could force the hand of a large and powerful institution. With a three-month NFL referee lockout that seemed like it was nowhere close to resolution, the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks competed last Monday night. For those of you that might have been out of the news cycle the past few days, Green Bay lost the game due to a controversial call that many experts and analysts agree should have resulted in Green Bay winning the game. Outrage ensued. The NFL had pulled replacement referees from the high school ranks, and these replacements did not have the knowledge and experience to handle high intensity NFL games. Fans protested about their customer experience. Their anger-filled rants were heard in social media, in the headlines of newspapers, on radio, and on national TV. Suddenly, the NFL was moved to reach an agreement with the referees. That agreement was reached late in the night on Wednesday with many believing that the referees had the upper hand forcing the owners into submission. Some might argue that the referees benefited, not the fans. Since the fans wanted qualified and competent referees, I would say the fans did benefit. The referees are scheduled to return to the field this Sunday, so the fans got what they wanted. What can you learn from this negative customer experience? Customers are in control. NFL owners thought they were controlling this situation with the upper hand over referees. The owners figured out they weren’t in control when their fans reacted negatively. Customers can make or break you more now than ever before, which is why it is more important to connect with them, engage them in a personal manner, and create rewarding relationships. Protect your brand. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, the NFL put their brand and each team’s brand at risk with replacement referees. Think about each business decision you make, and how it may impact your brand at different points in time. A decision that results in a gain today could result in a larger loss down the road. Customer experience matters. The NFL likely foresaw declining revenues in ticket sales, merchandising, advertising, and other areas if the lockout continued. While fans primarily spoke with their minds in the days following the Green Bay debacle, their wallets would be the next things to speak. Customer experience directly affects your success and is one of the few areas where you can differentiate your business. What would you do if your brand got such negative attention? Would you be prepared to navigate such stormy waters? Would you be able to prevent such a fiasco? If you don’t have a good answer to these questions, consider joining us October 3-5, 2012 at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit in San Francisco. You’ll have the opportunity to learn even more about customer experience from industry experts such as best-selling author Seth Godin, Paul Hagen and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, Inc., George Kembel from the Stanford d.School, Bruce Temkin of The Temkin Group, and Gene Alvarez from Gartner Inc.. There will also be plenty of your peers and customer experience experts available for networking and discussions.

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• On The Road with the HR Community

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Steve Boese, Director, Talent Strategy, Oracle One of the best ways to connect with and to get a feel for what is on the minds of Human Resources leaders is to get out of the office and hit the road. I’ve had the great honor to attend and/or present at a number of events recently, including the massive SHRM Annual Conference, the HR Florida Conference, and Taleo World in Chicago. These events, and many others, offer solution providers, talent management professionals, business leaders, and even more casual observers of the Human Resources field with tremendous opportunities to connect, to share information, and to learn from each other. Attending the conferences also give people a sense of how they can improve and enhance their skills and knowledge, learn about the latest workforce technologies, and bring new and innovative ideas back to their organizations. And sure, the parties and conference swag can be pretty nice as well! If you attend a few of these industry events, one of the most beneficial by-products that you can emerge with -- whether you are on the front lines in HR at your organization, or as we are at Oracle, in the business of developing and delivering innovative and impactful technology solutions to our customers -- is to get a larger sense of the big ideas and major trends, concerns, and challenges facing organizations all across the landscape, and to be able to better understand how your strategies and solutions can be improved with this greater perspective. So what are HR folks discussing and debating? What questions and problems keep them up at night? What are the bloggers and large community of HR social media enthusiasts buzzing about? From my perspective some of the common themes you see over and again across the HR community break down (broadly), into three main areas: Talent attraction - How can we locate, attract, recruit, and hire the best talent possible? What new strategies, approaches, and technologies can help us in this critically important area? What role do external social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter play in the increasingly competitive search for talent? Talent Retention - How can we make sure to keep that talent on our team? What engagement, development, recognition, and compensation tools can help us in this regard? How can we continue, (or become), an employer of choice? What is our unique and compelling employer value proposition? Talent Empowerment - How can we put our employees in the best position to succeed? What can we do to better align our talent with the organization’s mission and goals, while simultaneously providing the best and most driven to succeed individuals a clear path to achieve their career goals and aspirations? How can new technologies, particularly social and collaboration tools help in this area? While these are the ‘big themes’ that I know I have seen this year, certainly they are not really new, nor are they likely to fundamentally change in the next year or two. I think the reason is that at the core of any successful enterprise is a collection of smart, interested, engaged, challenged, and empowered group of people. And that was likely the case 10 or 20 years ago, and will probably be the case 10 or 20 years into the future. But what has changed, and what you can see -- evidenced by simply following the Twitter backchannel for an event and by reading some of the many fantastic HR blogs out there -- is that the HR professional's ability, along with technology solution providers like Oracle, to connect, to more openly share information with each other, and to make each other better in the process, (and to create new, improved, and more innovative solutions), has never been greater. And I think it is with this heretofore unprecedented level of opportunity to connect with other members of the community that HR professionals will be better equipped to help their organizations attract, retain, and empower their teams. We at Oracle HCM look forward to continuing to meet, engage, and connect with the HR community in the coming months. Until then -- follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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• SQL Server IO handling mechanism can be severely affected by high CPU usage

  - by sqlworkshops

  Are you using SSD or SAN / NAS based storage solution and sporadically observe SQL Server experiencing high IO wait times or from time to time your DAS / HDD becomes very slow according to SQL Server statistics? Read on… I need your help to up vote my connect item – https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/744650/sql-server-io-handling-mechanism-can-be-severely-affected-by-high-cpu-usage. Instead of taking few seconds, queries could take minutes/hours to complete when CPU is busy.In SQL Server when a query / request needs to read data that is not in data cache or when the request has to write to disk, like transaction log records, the request / task will queue up the IO operation and wait for it to complete (task in suspended state, this wait time is the resource wait time). When the IO operation is complete, the task will be queued to run on the CPU. If the CPU is busy executing other tasks, this task will wait (task in runnable state) until other tasks in the queue either complete or get suspended due to waits or exhaust their quantum of 4ms (this is the signal wait time, which along with resource wait time will increase the overall wait time). When the CPU becomes free, the task will finally be run on the CPU (task in running state).The signal wait time can be up to 4ms per runnable task, this is by design. So if a CPU has 5 runnable tasks in the queue, then this query after the resource becomes available might wait up to a maximum of 5 X 4ms = 20ms in the runnable state (normally less as other tasks might not use the full quantum).In case the CPU usage is high, let’s say many CPU intensive queries are running on the instance, there is a possibility that the IO operations that are completed at the Hardware and Operating System level are not yet processed by SQL Server, keeping the task in the resource wait state for longer than necessary. In case of an SSD, the IO operation might even complete in less than a millisecond, but it might take SQL Server 100s of milliseconds, for instance, to process the completed IO operation. For example, let’s say you have a user inserting 500 rows in individual transactions. When the transaction log is on an SSD or battery backed up controller that has write cache enabled, all of these inserts will complete in 100 to 200ms. With a CPU intensive parallel query executing across all CPU cores, the same inserts might take minutes to complete. WRITELOG wait time will be very high in this case (both under sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats and sys.dm_os_wait_stats). In addition you will notice a large number of WAITELOG waits since log records are written by LOG WRITER and hence very high signal_wait_time_ms leading to more query delays. However, Performance Monitor Counter, PhysicalDisk, Avg. Disk sec/Write will report very low latency times.Such delayed IO handling also occurs to read operations with artificially very high PAGEIOLATCH_SH wait time (with number of PAGEIOLATCH_SH waits remaining the same). This problem will manifest more and more as customers start using SSD based storage for SQL Server, since they drive the CPU usage to the limits with faster IOs. We have a few workarounds for specific scenarios, but we think Microsoft should resolve this issue at the product level. We have a connect item open – https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/744650/sql-server-io-handling-mechanism-can-be-severely-affected-by-high-cpu-usage - (with example scripts) to reproduce this behavior, please up vote the item so the issue will be addressed by the SQL Server product team soon.Thanks for your help and best regards,Ramesh MeyyappanHome: www.sqlworkshops.comLinkedIn: http://at.linkedin.com/in/rmeyyappan

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• Reducing Deadlocks - not a DBA issue ?

  - by steveh99999

   As a DBA, I'm involved on an almost daily basis troubleshooting 'SQL Server' performance issues. Often, this troubleshooting soon veers away from a 'its a SQL Server issue' to instead become a wider application/database design/coding issue.One common perception with SQL Server is that deadlocking is an application design issue - and is fixed by recoding...  I see this reinforced by MCP-type questions/scenarios where the answer to prevent deadlocking is simply to change the order in code in which tables are accessed....Whilst this is correct, I do think this has led to a situation where many 'operational' or 'production support' DBAs, when faced with a deadlock, are happy to throw the issue over to developers without analysing the issue further....A couple of 'war stories' on deadlocks which I think are interesting :- Case One , I had an issue recently on a third-party application that I support on SQL 2008.  This particular third-party application has an unusual support agreement where the customer is allowed to change the index design on the third-party provided database.  However, we are not allowed to alter application code or modify table structure..This third-party application is also known to encounter occasional deadlocks – indeed, I have documentation from the vendor that up to 50 deadlocks per day is not unusual !So, as a DBA I have to support an application which in my opinion has too many deadlocks - but, I cannot influence the design of the tables or stored procedures for the application. This should be the classic - blame the third-party developers scenario, and hope this issue gets addressed in a future application release - ie we could wait years for this to be resolved and implemented in our production environment...But, as DBAs  can change the index layout, is there anything I could do still to reduce the deadlocks in the application ?I initially used SQL traceflag 1222 to write deadlock detection output to the SQL Errorlog – using this I was able to identify one table heavily involved in the deadlocks.When I examined the table definition, I was surprised to see it was a heap – ie no clustered index existed on the table.Using SQL profiler to see locking behaviour and plan for the query involved in the deadlock, I was able to confirm a table scan was being performed.By creating an appropriate clustered index - it was possible to produce a more efficient plan and locking behaviour.So, less locks, held for less time = less possibility of deadlocks. I'm still unhappy about the overall number of deadlocks on this system - but that's something to be discussed further with the vendor.Case Two,  a system which hadn't changed for months suddenly started seeing deadlocks on a regular basis. I love the 'nothing's changed' scenario, as it gives me the opportunity to appear wise and say 'nothings changed on this system, except the data'.. This particular deadlock occurred on a table which had been growing rapidly. By using DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS - the DBA team were able to see that the deadlocks seemed to be occurring shortly after auto-update stats had regenerated the table statistics using it's default sampling behaviour.As a quick fix, we were able to schedule a nightly UPDATE STATISTICS WITH FULLSCAN on the table involved in the deadlock - thus, greatly reducing the potential for stats to be updated via auto_update_stats, consequently reducing the potential for a bad plan to be generated based on an unrepresentative sample of the data. This reduced the possibility of a deadlock occurring.  Not a perfect solution by any means, but quick, easy to implement, and needed no application code changes. This fix gave us some 'breathing space'  to properly fix the code during the next scheduled application release.   The moral of this post - don't dismiss deadlocks as issues that can only be fixed by developers...

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• "previousMode": Controling the Pin Action of a TopComponent

  - by Geertjan

  An excellent thing I learned today is that you, as a developer of a NetBeans module or NetBeans Platform application, can control the pin button. Up until today, whenever I had a TopComponent defined to appear in "rightSlidingSide" mode and then I clicked the "pin" button, as shown here... ...the TopComponent would then find itself pinned in the "explorer" mode. Would make more sense if it would be pinned in the "properties" mode, which is the docked mode closest to the "rightSlidingSide" mode. Not being able to control the "pin" button has been a recurring question (including in my own head) over several years. But the NetBeans Team's window system guru Stan Aubrecht informed me today that a "previousMode" attribute exists in the "tc-ref" file of the TopComponent. Since a few releases, that file is generated via the annotations in the TopComponent. However, "previousMode" is currently not one of the attributes exposed by the @TopComponent.Registration annotation. Therefore, what I did was this: Set "rightSlidingSide" in the "mode" attribute of the @TopComponent.Registration. Build the module. Find the "generated-layer.xml" (in the Files window) and move the layer registration of the TopComponent, including its action and menu item for opening the TopComponent, into my own manual layer within the module. Then remove all the TopComponent annotations from the TopComponent, though you can keep @ConvertAsProperties and @Messages. Then add the "previousMode" attribute, as highlighted below, into my own layer file, i.e., within the tags copied from the "generated-layer.xml": <folder name="Modes"> <folder name="rightSlidingSide"> <file name="ComparatorTopComponent.wstcref"> <![CDATA[<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE tc-ref PUBLIC "-//NetBeans//DTD Top Component in Mode Properties 2.0//EN" "http://www.netbeans.org/dtds/tc-ref2_0.dtd"> <tc-ref version="2.0"> <tc-id id="ComparatorTopComponent"/> <state opened="false"/> <previousMode name="properties" index="0" /> </tc-ref> ]]> </file> </folder> </folder> Now when you run the application and pin the specific TopComponent defined above, i.e., in the above case, named "ComparatorTopComponent", you will find it is pinned into the "properties" mode! That's pretty cool and if you agree, then you're a pretty cool NetBeans Platform developer, and I'd love to find out more about the application/s you're creating on the NetBeans Platform! Meanwhile, I'm going to create an issue for exposing the "previousMode" attribute in the @TopComponent.Registration annotation.

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Hyundai Motor Company

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryHyundai Motor Company is one of the world’s fastest-growing car manufacturers, ranked as the fifth-largest in 2011. The company also operates the world’s largest integrated automobile manufacturing facility in Ulsan, Republic of Korea, which can produce 1.6 million units per year. They  undertook a project to improve business efficiency and reinforce data security by centralizing the company’s sales, financial, and car manufacturing documents into a single repository. Hyundai Motor Company chose Oracle Exalogic, Oracle Exadata, Oracle WebLogic Sever, and Oracle WebCenter Content 11g, as they provided better performance, stability, storage, and scalability than their competitors.  Hyundai Motor Company cut the overall time spent each day on document-related work by around 85%, saved more than US$1 million in paper and printing costs, laid the foundation for a smart work environment, and supported their future growth in the competitive car industry. Company OverviewHyundai Motor Company is one of the world’s fastest-growing car manufacturers, ranked as the fifth-largest in 2011. The company also operates the world’s largest integrated automobile manufacturing facility in Ulsan, Republic of Korea, which can produce 1.6 million units per year. The company strives to enhance its brand image and market recognition by continuously improving the quality and design of its cars. Business Challenges To maximize the company’s growth potential, Hyundai Motor Company undertook a project to improve business efficiency and reinforce data security by centralizing the company’s sales, financial, and car manufacturing documents into a single repository. Specifically, they wanted to: Introduce a smart work environment to improve staff productivity and efficiency, and take advantage of rapid company growth due to new, enhanced car designs Replace a legacy document system managed by individual staff to improve collaboration, the visibility of corporate documents, and sharing of work-related files between employees Improve the security and storage of documents containing corporate intellectual property, and prevent intellectual property loss when staff leaves the company Eliminate delays when downloading files from the central server to a PC Build a large, single document repository to more efficiently manage and share data between 30,000 staff at the company’s headquarters Establish a scalable system that can be extended to Hyundai offices around the world Solution DeployedAfter conducting a large-scale benchmark test, Hyundai Motor Company chose Oracle Exalogic, Oracle Exadata, Oracle WebLogic Sever, and Oracle WebCenter Content 11g, as they provided better performance, stability, storage, and scalability than their competitors. Business Results Lowered the overall time spent each day on all document-related work by approximately 85%—from 4.5 hours to around 42 minutes on an average day Saved more than US$1 million per year in printer, paper, and toner costs, and laid the foundation for a completely paperless environment Reduced staff’s time spent requesting and receiving documents about car sales or designs from supervisors by 50%, by storing and managing all documents across the corporation in a single repository Cut the time required to draft new-car manufacturing, sales, and design documents by 20%, by allowing employees to reference high-quality data, such as marketing strategy and product planning documents already in the system Enhanced staff productivity at company headquarters by 9% by reducing the document-related tasks of 30,000 administrative and research and development staff Ensured the system could scale to hold 3 petabytes of car sales, manufacturing, and design data by 2013 and be deployed at branches worldwide We chose Oracle Exalogic, Oracle Exadata, and Oracle WebCenter Content to support our new document-centralization system over their competitors as Oracle offers stable storage for petabytes of data and high processing speeds. We have cut the overall time spent each day on document-related work by around 85%, saved more than US$1 million in paper and printing costs, laid the foundation for a smart work environment, and supported our future growth in the competitive car industry. Kang Tae-jin, Manager, General Affairs Team, Hyundai Motor Company Additional Information Hyundai Motor Company Customer Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Content

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• Friday Tips #3

  - by Chris Kawalek

  Even though yesterday was Thanksgiving here in the US, we still have a Friday tip for those of you around your computers today. In fact, we have two! The first one came in last week via our #AskOracleVirtualization Twitter hashtag. The tweet has disappeared into the ether now, but we remember the gist, so here it is: Question: Will there be an Oracle Virtual Desktop Client for Android? Answer by our desktop virtualization product development team: We are looking at Android as a supported platform for future releases. Question: How can I make a Sun Ray Client automatically connect to a virtual machine? Answer by Rick Butland, Principal Sales Consultant, Oracle Desktop Virtualization: Someone recently asked how they can assign VM’s to specific Sun Ray Desktop Units (“DTU’s”) without any user interfaction being required, without the “Desktop Selector” being displayed, or any User Directory.  That is, they wanted each Sun Ray to power on and immediately connect to a pre-assigned Solaris VM.   This can be achieved by using “tokens” for user assignment – that is, the tokens found on Smart Cards, DTU’s, or OVDC clients can be used in place of user credentials.  Note, however, that mixing “token-only” assignments and “User Directories” in the same VDI Center won’t work.   Much of this procedure is covered in the documentation, particularly here. But it can useful to have everything in one place, “cookbook-style”:  1. Create the “token-only” directory type: From the VDI administration interface, select:  “Settings”, “Company”, “New”, select the “None” radio button, and click “Next.” Enter a name for the new “Company”, and click “Next”, then “Finish.” 2. Create Desktop Providers, Pools, and VM’s as appropriate. 3. Access the Sun Ray administration interface at http://servername:1660 and login using “root” credentials, and access the token-id’s you wish to use for assignment.  If you’re using DTU tokens rather than Smart Card tokens, these can be found under the “Tokens” tab, and “Search-ing” using the “Currently Used Tokens” tab.  DTU’s can be identified by the prefix “psuedo.”   For example: 4. Copy/paste this token into the VDI administrative interface, by selecting “Users”, “New”, and pasting in the token ID, and click “OK” - for example: 5. Assign the token (DTU) to a desktop, that is, in the VDI Admin Gui, select “Pool”, “Desktop”, select the VM, and click "Assign" and select the token you want, for example: In addition to assigning tokens to desktops, you'll need to bypass the login screen.  To do this, you need to do two things:  1.  Disable VDI client authentication with:  /opt/SUNWvda/sbin/vda settings-setprops -p clientauthentication=Disabled 2. Disable the VDI login screen – to do this,  add a kiosk argument of "-n" to the Sun Ray kiosk arguments screen.   You set this on the Sun Ray administration page - "Advanced", "Kiosk Mode", "Edit", and add the “-n” option to the arguments screen, for example: 3.  Restart both the Sun Ray and VDI services: # /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utstart –c # /opt/SUNWvda/sbin/vda-service restart Remember, if you have a question for us, please post on Twitter with our hashtag (again, it's #AskOracleVirtualization), and we'll try to answer it if we can. See you next time!

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• SEASON'S GREETINGS AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS

  - by klaudia.drulis

  p.msonormal { margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:calibri; } li.msonormal { margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:calibri; } p.listparagraph { margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; margin-left:.5in; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:calibri; } -- ! Please follow Guidelines for a proper working email ! ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Oracle standard tags   symbol entity Special character Ampersand & & Apostrophe ’ ’ Copyright © © Ellipsis … … Em dash — — En dash – – Euro € € Pound £ £ Left quote “ “ Right quote ” ” Registered trademark ® ® Trademark ™ ℄ Yen ¥ ¥ ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ IMPORTANT in creating a link to have a desired color (red, black, etc) that will work in Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and Gmail You MUST Place the inside the Example Click Here The order you must follow to make the colored link appear in browsers. If not the default window link will appear 1. Select the word you want to use for the link 2. Select the desired color, Red, Black, etc 3. Select bold if necessary ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Templates use two sizes of fonts and the sans-serif font tag for the email. All Fonts should be (Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif) tags Normal size reading body fonts should be set to the size of 2. Small font sizes should be set to 1 !!!!!!!DO NOT USE ANY OTHER SIZE FONT FOR THE EMAILS!!!!!!!! ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ --   SEASON'S GREETINGS AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS Click here to view the e-card We would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a prosperous new year. Tanti auguri di buon natale e felice anno nuovo!!! Je vous souhaite de joyeuses fetes, et tous mes voeux de succes pour l'annee a venir ! Tous mes voeux de bonheur, de succes et d’epanouissement pour 2011! Va urez Sarbatori Fericite si un an nou fericit!!! El equipo de Recruitment de Oracle te desea una feliz navidad y un fantastico 2011 Namens het campus recruitment team wensen wij je fijne feestdagen en een uitdagend 2011! In this closing paragraph, reinforce the primary benefit or opportunity being offered. Include a call to action and contact information. Body copy to this point should not exceed 150 words. Wszystkim Sympatykom naszego Blogu skladamy zyczenia Spokojnych i Radosnych Swiat Bozego Narodzenia oraz Pomyslnosci i Sukcesów w Nowym Roku.     Stay Connected: Facebook Experienced YouTube Twitter OracleMix Graduates Copyright © 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.    

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for November 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Every day ArchBeat searches the web for content created by and for community members, and then shares that content via social media. Here's the list of the Top 10 most popular items posted on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for November 2012. One-Stop Shop for Oracle Webcasts Webcasts can be a great way to get information about Oracle products without having to go cross-eyed reading yet another document off your computer screen. Oracle's new Webcast Center offers selectable filtering to make it easy to get to the information you want. Yes, you have to register to gain access, but that process is quick, and with over 200 webcasts to choose from you know you'll find useful content. OAM/OVD JVM Tuning Vinay from the Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture Group (otherwise known as the A-Team) shares a process for analyzing and improving performance in Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Access Manager. White Paper: Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud: Advanced I/O Virtualization Architecture for Consolidating High-Performance Workloads This new white paper by Adam Hawley (with contributions from Yoav Eilat) describes in great detail the incorporation into Oracle Exalogic of virtualized InfiniBand I/O interconnects using Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology. Architected Systems: "If you don't develop an architecture, you will get one anyway..." "Can you build a system without taking care of architecture?," asks Manuel Ricca. "You certainly can. But inevitably the system will be unbalanced, neglecting the interests of key stakeholders, and problems will soon emerge." Backup and Recovery of an Exalogic vServer via rsync "On Exalogic a vServer will consist of a number of resources from the underlying machine," says the man known only as Donald. "These resources include compute power, networking and storage. In order to recover a vServer from a failure in the underlying rack all of these components have to be thoughts about. This article only discusses the backup and recovery strategies that apply to the storage system of a vServer." This Week on the OTN Architect Community Home Page Make time to check out this week's features on the OTN Solution Architect Homepage, including: SOA Practitioner Guide: Identifying and Discovering Services Technical article by Yuli Vasiliev on Setting Up, Configuring, and Using an Oracle WebLogic Server Cluster Podcast: Are You Future Proof? Clustering ODI11g for High-Availability Part 1: Introduction and Architecture | Richard Yeardley "JEE agents can be deployed alongside, or instead of, standalone agents," says Rittman Meade's Richard Yeardley. "But there is one key advantage in using JEE agents and WebLogic – when you deploy JEE agents as part of a WebLogic cluster they can be configured together to form a high availability cluster." Learn more in Yeardley's extensive post. OIM 11g : Multi-thread approach for writing custom scheduled job | Saravanan V S Saravanan shares insight and expertise relevant to "designing and developing an OIM schedule job that uses multi threaded approach for updating data in OIM using APIs." How to Create Virtual Directory in Weblogic Server | Zeeshan Baig Oracle ACE Zeeshan Baig shows you how in six easy steps. SOA Galore: New Books for Technical Eyes Only Shake up up your technical skills with this trio of new technical books from community members covering SOA and BPM. Thought for the Day "Humans are the best value in computers -- where else can you get a non-linear computer weighing only about 160lbs, having a billion binary decision elements, that can be mass-produced by unskilled labour?" — Anonymous Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management (SCM) Designs May Improve End User Productivity

  - by Applications User Experience

  By Applications User Experience on March 10, 2011 Michele Molnar, Senior Usability Engineer, Applications User Experience The Challenge: The SCM User Experience team, in close collaboration with product management and strategy, completely redesigned the user experience for Oracle Fusion applications. One of the goals of this redesign was to increase end user productivity by applying design patterns and guidelines and incorporating findings from extensive usability research. But a question remained: How do we know that the Oracle Fusion designs will actually increase end user productivity? The Test: To answer this question, the SCM Usability Engineers compared Oracle Fusion designs to their corresponding existing Oracle applications using the workflow time analysis method. The workflow time analysis method breaks tasks into a sequence of operators. By applying standard time estimates for all of the operators in the task, an estimate of the overall task time can be calculated. The workflow time analysis method has been recently adopted by the Applications User Experience group for use in predicting end user productivity. Using this method, a design can be tested and refined as needed to improve productivity even before the design is coded. For the study, we selected some of our recent designs for Oracle Fusion Product Information Management (PIM). The designs encompassed tasks performed by Product Managers to create, manage, and define products for their organization. (See Figure 1 for an example.) In applying this method, the SCM Usability Engineers collaborated with Product Management to compare the new Oracle Fusion Applications designs against Oracle’s existing applications. Together, we performed the following activities: Identified the five most frequently performed tasks Created detailed task scenarios that provided the context for each task Conducted task walkthroughs Analyzed and documented the steps and flow required to complete each task Applied standard time estimates to the operators in each task to estimate the overall task completion time Figure 1. The interactions on each Oracle Fusion Product Information Management screen were documented, as indicated by the red highlighting. The task scenario and script provided the context for each task.  The Results: The workflow time analysis method predicted that the Oracle Fusion Applications designs would result in productivity gains in each task, ranging from 8% to 62%, with an overall productivity gain of 43%. All other factors being equal, the new designs should enable these tasks to be completed in about half the time it takes with existing Oracle Applications. Further analysis revealed that these performance gains would be achieved by reducing the number of clicks and screens needed to complete the tasks. Conclusions: Using the workflow time analysis method, we can expect the Oracle Fusion Applications redesign to succeed in improving end user productivity. The workflow time analysis method appears to be an effective and efficient tool for testing, refining, and retesting designs to optimize productivity. The workflow time analysis method does not replace usability testing with end users, but it can be used as an early predictor of design productivity even before designs are coded. We are planning to conduct usability tests later in the development cycle to compare actual end user data with the workflow time analysis results. Such results can potentially be used to validate the productivity improvement predictions. Used together, the workflow time analysis method and usability testing will enable us to continue creating, evaluating, and delivering Oracle Fusion designs that exceed the expectations of our end users, both in the quality of the user experience and in productivity. (For more information about studying productivity, refer to the Measuring User Productivity blog.)

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• Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 Launch Webcast Replay Available

  - by Irem Radzik

  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";} For those of you who missed Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 launch webcasts last week, the replay is now available from the following url. Harnessing the Power of the New Release of Oracle GoldenGate 11g I would highly recommend watching the webcast to meet many new features of the new release and hear the product management team respond to the questions from the audience in a nice long Q&A section. In my blog last week I listed the media coverage for this new release. There is a new article published by ITJungle talking about Oracle GoldenGate’s heterogeneity and support for DB2 for iSeries: Oracle Completes DB2/400 Support in Data Replication Tool As mentioned in last week’s blog, we received over 150 questions from the audience and in this blog I'd like to continue to post some of the frequently asked,  questions and their answers: Question: What are the fundamental differences between classic data capture and integrated data capture? Do both use the redo logs in the source database? Answer: Yes, they both use redo logs. Classic capture parses the redo log data directly, whereas the Integrated Capture lets the Oracle database parse the redo log record using an internal API. Question: Does GoldenGate version need to match Oracle Database version? Answer: No, they are not directly linked. Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 supports Oracle Database version 10gR2 as well. For Oracle Database version 10gR1 and Oracle Database version 9i you will need GoldenGate11g Release 1 or lower. And for Oracle Database 8i you need Oracle GoldenGate 10 or earlier versions. Question: If I already use Data Guard, do I need GoldenGate? Answer: Data Guard is designed as the best disaster recovery solution for Oracle Database. If you would like to implement a bidirectional Active-Active replication solution or need to move data between heterogeneous systems, you will need GoldenGate. Question: On Compression and GoldenGate, if the source uses compression, is it required that the target also use compression? Answer: No, the source and target do not need to have the same compression settings. Question: Does GG support Advance Security Option on the Source database? Answer: Yes it does. Question: Can I use GoldenGate to upgrade the Oracle Database to 11g and do OS migration at the same time? Answer: Yes, this is a very common project where GoldenGate can eliminate downtime, give flexibility to test the target as needed, and minimize risks with fail-back option to the old environment. For more information on database upgrades please check out the following white papers: Best Practices for Migrating/Upgrading Oracle Database Using Oracle GoldenGate 11g Zero-Downtime Database Upgrades Using Oracle GoldenGate Question: Does GoldenGate create any trigger in the source database table level or row level to for real-time data integration? Answer: No, GoldenGate does not create triggers. Question: Can transformation be done after insert to destination table or need to be done before? Answer: It can happen in the Capture (Extract) process, in the  Delivery (Replicat) process, or in the target database. For more resources on Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 please check out our Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 resource kit as well.

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• Ubiquitous BIP

  - by Tim Dexter

  The last number I heard from Mike and the PM team was that BIP is now embedded in more than 40 oracle products. That's a lot of products to keep track of and to help out with new releases, etc. Its interesting to see how internal Oracle product groups have integrated BIP into their products. Just as you might integrate BIP they have had to make a choice about how to integrate. 1. Library level - BIP is a pure java app and at the bottom of the architecture are a group of java libraries that expose APIs that you can use. they fall into three main areas, data extraction, template processing and formatting and delivery. There are post processing capabilities but those APIs are embedded withing the template processing libraries. Taking this integration route you are going to need to manage templates, data extraction and processing. You'll have your own UI to allow users to control all of this for themselves. Ultimate control but some effort to build and maintain. I have been trawling some of the products during a coffee break. I found a great post on the reporting capabilities provided by BIP in the records management product within WebCenter Content 11g. This integration falls into the first category, content manager looks after the report artifacts itself and provides you the UI to manage and run the reports. 2. Web Service level - further up in the stack is the web service layer. This is sitting on the BI Publisher server as a set of services, runReport and scheduleReport are the main protagonists. However, you can also manage the reports and users (locally managed) on the server and the catalog itself via the services layer.Taking this route, you still need to provide the user interface to choose reports and run them but the creation and management of the reports is all handled by the Publisher server. I have worked with a few customer on this approach. The web services provide the ability to retrieve a list of reports the user can access; then the parameters and LOVs for the selected report and finally a service to submit the report on the server. 3. Embedded BIP server UI- the final level is not so well supported yet. You can currently embed a report and its various levels of surrounding  'chrome' inside another html based application using a URL. Check the docs here. The look and feel can be customized but again, not easy, nor documented. I have messed with running the server pages inside an IFRAME, not bad, but not great. Taking this path should present the least amount of effort on your part to get BIP integrated but there are a few gotchas you need to get around. So a reasonable amount of choices with varying amounts of effort involved. There is another option coming soon for all you ADF developers out there, the ability to drop a BIP report into your application pages. But that's for another post.

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• Production Access Denied! Who caused this rule anyways?

  - by Matt Watson

  One of the biggest challenges for most developers is getting access to production servers. In smaller dev teams of less than about 5 people everyone usually has access. Then you hire developer #6, he messes something up in production... and now nobody has access. That is how it always starts in small dev teams. I think just about every rule of life there is gets created this way. One person messes it up for the rest of us. Rules are then put in place to try and prevent it from happening again.Breaking the rules is in our nature. In this example it is for good cause and a necessity to support our applications and troubleshoot problems as they arise. So how do developers typically break the rules? Some create their own method to collect log files off servers so they can see them. Expensive log management programs can collect log files, but log files alone are not enough. Centralizing where important errors are logged to is common. Some lucky developers are given production server access by the IT operations team out of necessity. Wait. That's not fair to all developers and knowingly breaks the company rule!  When customers complain or the system is down, the rules go out the window. Commonly lead developers get production access because they are ultimately responsible for supporting the application and may be the only person who knows how to fix it. The problem with only giving lead developers production access is it doesn't scale from a support standpoint. Those key employees become the go to people to help solve application problems, but they also become a bottleneck. They end up spending up to half of their time every day helping resolve application defects, performance problems, or whatever the fire of the day is. This actually the last thing you want your lead developers doing. They should be working on something more strategic like major enhancements to the product. Having production access can actually be a curse if you are the guy stuck hunting down log files all day. Application defects are good tasks for junior developers. They can usually handle figuring out simple application problems. But nothing is worse than being a junior developer who can't figure out those problems and the back log of them grows and grows. Some of them require production server access to verify a deployment was done correctly, verify config settings, view log files, or maybe just restart an application. Since the junior developers don't have access, they end up bugging the developers who do have access or they track down a system admin to help. It can take hours or days to see server information that would take seconds or minutes if they had access of their own. It is very frustrating to the developer trying to solve the problem, the system admin being forced to help, and most importantly your customers who are not happy about the situation. This process is terribly inefficient. Production database access is also important for solving application problems, but presents a lot of risk if developers are given access. They could see data they shouldn't.  They could write queries on accident to update data, delete data, or merely select every record from every table and bring your database to its knees. Since most of the application we create are data driven, it can be very difficult to track down application bugs without access to the production databases.Besides it being against the rule, why don't all developers have access? Most of the time it comes down to security, change of control, lack of training, and other valid reasons. Developers have been known to tinker with different settings to try and solve a problem and in the process forget what they changed and made the problem worse. So it is a double edge sword. Don't give them access and fixing bugs is more difficult, or give them access and risk having more bugs or major outages being created!Matt WatsonFounder, CEOStackifyAgile Support for Agile Developers

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