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• Windows Azure Evolution &ndash; Welcome to VS2012

  - by Shaun

  When the Microsoft released the first preview version of Windows 8 and Visual Studio, many people in the community were asking if the windows azure tool is available to it. The answer was “NO”. Microsoft promised that the windows azure tool will only support the Visual Studio 2010 but when the 2012 was final released, windows azure tool should be work. But now alone with the new windows azure platform was published we got the latest Windows Azure SDK 1.7, which is compatible to the Visual Studio 2012 RC.   You can retrieve the latest version of the Windows Azure SDK through Web Platform Installer, which I think it’s the easiest and simplest way to download and install, since besides the SDK itself it also needs some other components. To download the latest windows azure SDK from Web Platform Installer, just go to the windows azure website and clicked the Develop, .NET and click the blue “install” button. Then you need to select which version of Visual Studio you want to use, Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2012 RC. After selected the current version you will download an EXE file. This file will lead you to install the Web Platform Installer 4.0 (if you haven’t installed) and the latest windows azure SDK. You can see the version name is June 2012, 1.7. Finally the WebPI will detect the dependent components you need to download and begin to install. But if you want to challenge yourself you can download the components and install them manually. The standalone installations are listed in this page with the instruction on how to install them with necessary pre-requirements.   Once you finished the installation you can open the Visual Studio 2012 RC and as usual, it need to be run as administrator. If you clicked the New Project link from the start page, navigated to Cloud category you will find that there no project template available. Is there anything wrong? So, if you changed the target framework from the default .NET 4.5 to .NET 4 you will see the azure project template. This is because, currently the windows azure instance does not support .NET 4.5. After clicked OK you will see the role creation window, which is similar as what you have seen before. But there are some new role templates in this SDK. Firstly you will have ASP.NET MVC 4 web role available, which means you can create ASP.NET MVC 4 applications for internet, intranet, mobile and WebAPI on the cloud. Then there are two new worker role templates, “Cache Worker Role” and “Worker Role with Service Bus Queue”. “Worker Role with Service Bus Queue” is a worker role which had added necessary references to access the Windows Azure Service Bus Queue. It also have some basic sample code in the worker role class which could read messages from the queue when started. The “Cache Worker Role” is a worker role which has the in-memory distributed cache feature enabled by default. This feature is different than the Windows Azure Caching. It allows the role instance to use its memory as a in-memory distributed cache clusters. By using this feature you can have one or more worker roles as some dedicate cache clusters. Alternatively, you can make part of your web role and worker role’s memory as the cache clusters as well. Let’s just create an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Role, and click F5 to run it under the local emulator. If you have been working with azure for a while you should know that I need to setup the local storage emulator before running locally if it’s a fresh azure SDK installation. But in this version when we started our azure project the Visual Studio will check if the storage emulator had been initialized. If not, it will run the initializer automatically. And as you can see, in this version the storage emulator relies on the SQL Server 2012 Local DB feature. It will create the emulator database and tables in the default local database. You can set the storage emulator to use a standard SQL Server default instance by using the command “dsinit /instance:.”. The “dsinit” tool now is located at %PROGRAM FILES%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\Emulator\devstore After the Visual Studio complied and deployed the package our website should be shown in the browser. This is the MVC 4 Web Role home page on my Windows 8 machine in IE10. Another thing you might notice is that, in this version the compute emulator utilizes IIS Express to host the web roles instead of the full IIS. You can add breakpoint in the code and debug, and you can use the local storage emulator to test your code for accessing the storage service. All of them are same as what your are doing now on SDK 1.6. You can switch to use IIS to run your web role in local emulator. Just open the windows azure porject property windows, in the Web page select “Use IIS Web Server”. For more information about this please have a look on Nuno’s blog post. In the role property page in Visual Studio there’s no massive changes. You can configure your role settings such as the endpoints, certificates and local storage, etc.. One thing was added is the Caching tab. Here you can specify enable the caching feature or not, and how much memory you want to use as the cache cluster. I will introduce more details about it in the future posts. The publish and package feature are also no change. You can publish your project to azure directly through Visual Studio 2012, while you can create the package and upload manually. Below is the SDK version of my deployment which is 1.7.30602.1703 in the developer portal.   Summary In this post I introduced about the new Windows Azure SDK 1.7 especially on how it works on the latest Visual Studio 2012 RC. There’s no significant changes in the visual studio tool in this version but some small enhancement such as ASP.NET MVC 4, Cache Worker Role, using SQL 2012 Local DB and IIS Express, etc..   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• OFM 11g: OAM SSO for Forms and ADF Faces

  - by olaf.heimburger

  In my blog entry OFM 11g: Implementing OAM SSO with Forms we set the foundation for providing a complete Single Sign-On solution based on Oracle Access Manager (OAM). This foundation should now be used to combine Forms 11g and ADF Faces 11g applications with a transparent login. The Beginning Before we start, lets re-consider the requirements to achieve the ultimate goal. These are:- Access to the Forms 11g Application must be authenticated by OAM (protected). Access to the ADF Faces 11g Application must be authenticated by OAM (protected). Switching from one application to the other should not result in a re-authentication (aka single sign-on). User identity should be availble to the application without any extra work in the application code. All these are the common requirements for a single sign-on solution. The challenge here is that Forms relies on Oracle AS SSO (OSSO or "the old SSO") while ADF Faces is quite open and can be protected by Oracle AS SSO and Oracle Access Manager SSO (OAM SSO or "the modern SSO"). Both application types can use their own login mechanism. The Forms 11g Application To demonstrate the SSO functionality, we use the standard Forms test (/forms/frmservlet?form=test.fmx). Although this shows nothing specific in the Forms application, it is good enough to demonstrate that it is protected. The ADF Faces 11g Application With ADF 11g you can develop quite a number of useful Faces based applications. Among many features, it comes with the ADF Security feature that provides you with functionality to protect your pages, regions, and even TaskFlows from un-authenticated usage in a declarative way.To demonstrate that functionality a sample application with different access levels plus a login dialog is used. This application comes with a publc page that has protected content (a button). Once you are authenticated for the application, the protected content and some personalisation (the users name) is shown. Protecting Forms 11g As already explained in the OFM 11g: Implementing OAM SSO with Forms, the easiest way to protect a Forms application is to configure it as a OSSO partner application, setup mod_osso, test it, migrate OSSO to OAM SSO with the Upgrade Agent, reconfigure mod_osso, and you are done.Sort of. By default the OAM is configured to run in co-exist mode. This means that a user has to re-authenticate to the Forms application when logged into an OAM SSO application before. To avoid this, you must disable the co-exist mode, for example by using WLST and issue the disableCoexistMode on the OAM server. Protecting ADF Faces 11g To protect an ADF Faces 11g application we have to consider two scenarios: Use a HTTPD server in front of WLS Use WLS without a HTTPD server Both scenarios have their pro's and cons' and we won't get into details and just describe how to configure both. Scenario 1: HTTPD Server with WLS In this scenario we have to setup the environment in some steps:- Configure a WebGate at OAMThis configuration can be done through the OAM console or by a script. No matter which way you choose, the WebGate configuration files will be created for you. Install the OAM WebGate into an HTTPD serverThe type of webgate you need to install depends on you HTTPD server. With Oracle HTTP Server 11g you can use the latest OAM 11g WebGate. With other HTTPD servers you must resort to OAM 10g WebGates. A OAM 11g WebGate can use the pre-created configuration files supplied during the WebGate configuration at OAM. An OAM 10g WebGate asks for the specific configuration and verifies it during installation. Configure the WLS plugin to forward the requests to WLSAgain, depending on your HTTPD Server you have different plugins to forward requests to WLS. With OHS 11g you can use the pre-installed mod_wl_ohs plugin. Its configuration is quite simple and straightforward. Configure an OAM SSPI Provider as a IdentityAsserter in WLS to retrieve the user identifierThis configuration is quite important as it retrieves the user identifier for the next step. If you have a SOA Suite installation within your OFM_HOME, the necessary software is already installed and you only need to setup your Security Realm within WLS.You can do this by pointing your browser to the WLS Console, log in as administrator, select the Security Realm (usually myrealm), and select Providers. We add the OAMIdentityAsserter as the first SSPI Provider. It is important that the Control Flag is set to SUFFICIENT. Every other configuration can be left as is, no changes are necessary here. Configure an OAM Identity Provider to get the real user identityIn OFM 11g: Implementing OAM SSO with Forms we have configured an OID as Identity Store. To get the user identity we need to configure the same OID as an SSPI Provider for WLS. This will retrieve the real user information from OID and creates the JAAS Subject and Principals to be used by any application within WLS.Again, you can do this by pointing your browser to the WLS Console, log in as administrator, select the Security Realm (usually myrealm), and select Providers. Now add the OIDAuthenticator as the second SSPI Provider. It is important that the Control Flag is set to OPTIONAL. After we saved this setup, we need to configure this provider by setting the Provider Specific details to access OID. Scenario 2: WLS only This scenario is a bit easier but requires more work in the WLS setup:- Configure a WebGate at OAMThis configuration can be done through the OAM console or by a script. No matter which way you choose, the WebGate configuration files will be created for you. Configure the OAM SSPI Provider as IdentityAuthenticator to authenticate and set the user identifierWhen using the OAM SSPI Provider as OAMAuthenticator we create it with the Control Flag as SUFFICIENT. Afte saving it, the Provider Specific settings must be configured to allow the OAM SSPI Provider to connect to the OAM Server. Configure an OAM Identity Provider to get the real user identity providerAgain, you can do this by pointing your browser to the WLS Console, log in as administrator, select the Security Realm (usually myrealm), and select Providers. Now add the OIDAuthenticator as the second SSPI Provider. It is important that the Control Flag is set to OPTIONAL. After we saved this setup, we need to configure this provider by setting the Provider Specific details to access OID. Configure ADF 11g Application for OAM Actually, there are no changes to be made within the ADF application. We only need to add the value CLIENT_CERT to the <auth-mode> tag in the <login-config> tag in the web.xml file. Testing To test the configuration, simply point your browser to one of both appliction URLs. OAM should kick in and redirect you to the OAM Login page. After you have entered the correct credentials, access to the URLs is granted and you will see the application. Enjoy!

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• SQL SERVER – Introduction to SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP

  - by Pinal Dave

  In SQL Server 2014 Microsoft has introduced a new database engine component called In-Memory OLTP aka project “Hekaton” which is fully integrated into the SQL Server Database Engine. It is optimized for OLTP workloads accessing memory resident data. In-memory OLTP helps us create memory optimized tables which in turn offer significant performance improvement for our typical OLTP workload. The main objective of memory optimized table is to ensure that highly transactional tables could live in memory and remain in memory forever without even losing out a single record. The most significant part is that it still supports majority of our Transact-SQL statement. Transact-SQL stored procedures can be compiled to machine code for further performance improvements on memory-optimized tables. This engine is designed to ensure higher concurrency and minimal blocking. In-Memory OLTP alleviates the issue of locking, using a new type of multi-version optimistic concurrency control. It also substantially reduces waiting for log writes by generating far less log data and needing fewer log writes. Points to remember Memory-optimized tables refer to tables using the new data structures and key words added as part of In-Memory OLTP. Disk-based tables refer to your normal tables which we used to create in SQL Server since its inception. These tables use a fixed size 8 KB pages that need to be read from and written to disk as a unit. Natively compiled stored procedures refer to an object Type which is new and is supported by in-memory OLTP engine which convert it into machine code, which can further improve the data access performance for memory –optimized tables. Natively compiled stored procedures can only reference memory-optimized tables, they can’t be used to reference any disk –based table. Interpreted Transact-SQL stored procedures, which is what SQL Server has always used. Cross-container transactions refer to transactions that reference both memory-optimized tables and disk-based tables. Interop refers to interpreted Transact-SQL that references memory-optimized tables. Using In-Memory OLTP In-Memory OLTP engine has been available as part of SQL Server 2014 since June 2013 CTPs. Installation of In-Memory OLTP is part of the SQL Server setup application. The In-Memory OLTP components can only be installed with a 64-bit edition of SQL Server 2014 hence they are not available with 32-bit editions. Creating Databases Any database that will store memory-optimized tables must have a MEMORY_OPTIMIZED_DATA filegroup. This filegroup is specifically designed to store the checkpoint files needed by SQL Server to recover the memory-optimized tables, and although the syntax for creating the filegroup is almost the same as for creating a regular filestream filegroup, it must also specify the option CONTAINS MEMORY_OPTIMIZED_DATA. Here is an example of a CREATE DATABASE statement for a database that can support memory-optimized tables: CREATE DATABASE InMemoryDB ON PRIMARY(NAME = [InMemoryDB_data], FILENAME = 'D:\data\InMemoryDB_data.mdf', size=500MB), FILEGROUP [SampleDB_mod_fg] CONTAINS MEMORY_OPTIMIZED_DATA (NAME = [InMemoryDB_mod_dir], FILENAME = 'S:\data\InMemoryDB_mod_dir'), (NAME = [InMemoryDB_mod_dir], FILENAME = 'R:\data\InMemoryDB_mod_dir') LOG ON (name = [SampleDB_log], Filename='L:\log\InMemoryDB_log.ldf', size=500MB) COLLATE Latin1_General_100_BIN2; Above example code creates files on three different drives (D:  S: and R:) for the data files and in memory storage so if you would like to run this code kindly change the drive and folder locations as per your convenience. Also notice that binary collation was specified as Windows (non-SQL). BIN2 collation is the only collation support at this point for any indexes on memory optimized tables. It is also possible to add a MEMORY_OPTIMIZED_DATA file group to an existing database, use the below command to achieve the same. ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks2012 ADD FILEGROUP hekaton_mod CONTAINS MEMORY_OPTIMIZED_DATA; GO ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks2012 ADD FILE (NAME='hekaton_mod', FILENAME='S:\data\hekaton_mod') TO FILEGROUP hekaton_mod; GO Creating Tables There is no major syntactical difference between creating a disk based table or a memory –optimized table but yes there are a few restrictions and a few new essential extensions. Essentially any memory-optimized table should use the MEMORY_OPTIMIZED = ON clause as shown in the Create Table query example. DURABILITY clause (SCHEMA_AND_DATA or SCHEMA_ONLY) Memory-optimized table should always be defined with a DURABILITY value which can be either SCHEMA_AND_DATA or  SCHEMA_ONLY the former being the default. A memory-optimized table defined with DURABILITY=SCHEMA_ONLY will not persist the data to disk which means the data durability is compromised whereas DURABILITY= SCHEMA_AND_DATA ensures that data is also persisted along with the schema. Indexing Memory Optimized Table A memory-optimized table must always have an index for all tables created with DURABILITY= SCHEMA_AND_DATA and this can be achieved by declaring a PRIMARY KEY Constraint at the time of creating a table. The following example shows a PRIMARY KEY index created as a HASH index, for which a bucket count must also be specified. CREATE TABLE Mem_Table ( [Name] VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED HASH WITH (BUCKET_COUNT = 100000), [City] VARCHAR(32) NULL, [State_Province] VARCHAR(32) NULL, [LastModified] DATETIME NOT NULL, ) WITH (MEMORY_OPTIMIZED = ON, DURABILITY = SCHEMA_AND_DATA); Now as you can see in the above query example we have used the clause MEMORY_OPTIMIZED = ON to make sure that it is considered as a memory optimized table and not just a normal table and also used the DURABILITY Clause= SCHEMA_AND_DATA which means it will persist data along with metadata and also you can notice this table has a PRIMARY KEY mentioned upfront which is also a mandatory clause for memory-optimized tables. We will talk more about HASH Indexes and BUCKET_COUNT in later articles on this topic which will be focusing more on Row and Index storage on Memory-Optimized tables. So stay tuned for that as well. Now as we covered the basics of Memory Optimized tables and understood the key things to remember while using memory optimized tables, let’s explore more using examples to understand the Performance gains using memory-optimized tables. I will be using the database which i created earlier in this article i.e. InMemoryDB in the below Demo Exercise. USE InMemoryDB GO -- Creating a disk based table CREATE TABLE dbo.Disktable ( Id INT IDENTITY, Name CHAR(40) ) GO CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_ID ON dbo.Disktable (Id) GO -- Creating a memory optimized table with similar structure and DURABILITY = SCHEMA_AND_DATA CREATE TABLE dbo.Memorytable_durable ( Id INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED Hash WITH (bucket_count =1000000), Name CHAR(40) ) WITH (MEMORY_OPTIMIZED = ON, DURABILITY = SCHEMA_AND_DATA) GO -- Creating an another memory optimized table with similar structure but DURABILITY = SCHEMA_Only CREATE TABLE dbo.Memorytable_nondurable ( Id INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED Hash WITH (bucket_count =1000000), Name CHAR(40) ) WITH (MEMORY_OPTIMIZED = ON, DURABILITY = SCHEMA_only) GO -- Now insert 100000 records in dbo.Disktable and observe the Time Taken DECLARE @i_t bigint SET @i_t =1 WHILE @i_t<= 100000 BEGIN INSERT INTO dbo.Disktable(Name) VALUES('sachin' + CONVERT(VARCHAR,@i_t)) SET @i_t+=1 END -- Do the same inserts for Memory table dbo.Memorytable_durable and observe the Time Taken DECLARE @i_t bigint SET @i_t =1 WHILE @i_t<= 100000 BEGIN INSERT INTO dbo.Memorytable_durable VALUES(@i_t, 'sachin' + CONVERT(VARCHAR,@i_t)) SET @i_t+=1 END -- Now finally do the same inserts for Memory table dbo.Memorytable_nondurable and observe the Time Taken DECLARE @i_t bigint SET @i_t =1 WHILE @i_t<= 100000 BEGIN INSERT INTO dbo.Memorytable_nondurable VALUES(@i_t, 'sachin' + CONVERT(VARCHAR,@i_t)) SET @i_t+=1 END The above 3 Inserts took 1.20 minutes, 54 secs, and 2 secs respectively to insert 100000 records on my machine with 8 Gb RAM. This proves the point that memory-optimized tables can definitely help businesses achieve better performance for their highly transactional business table and memory- optimized tables with Durability SCHEMA_ONLY is even faster as it does not bother persisting its data to disk which makes it supremely fast. Koenig Solutions is one of the few organizations which offer IT training on SQL Server 2014 and all its updates. Now, I leave the decision on using memory_Optimized tables on you, I hope you like this article and it helped you understand  the fundamentals of IN-Memory OLTP . Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Koenig

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• Creating a multi-column rollover image gallery with HTML 5

  - by nikolaosk

  I know it has been a while since I blogged about HTML 5. I have two posts in this blog about HTML 5. You can find them here and here.I am creating a small content website (only text,images and a contact form) for a friend of mine.He wanted to create a rollover gallery.The whole concept is that we have some small thumbnails on a page, the user hovers over them and they appear enlarged on a designated container/placeholder on a page. I am trying not to use Javascript scripts when I am using effects on a web page and this is what I will be doing in this post.  Well some people will say that HTML 5 is not supported in all browsers. That is true but most of the modern browsers support most of its recommendations. For people who still use IE6 some hacks must be devised.Well to be totally honest I cannot understand why anyone at this day and time is using IE 6.0.That really is beyond me.Well, the point of having a web browser is to be able to ENJOY the great experience that the WE? offers today.  Two very nice sites that show you what features and specifications are implemented by various browsers and their versions are http://caniuse.com/ and http://html5test.com/. At this times Chrome seems to support most of HTML 5 specifications.Another excellent way to find out if the browser supports HTML 5 and CSS 3 features is to use the Javascript lightweight library Modernizr.In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like.You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here. In order to be absolutely clear this is not (and could not be ) a detailed tutorial on HTML 5. There are other great resources for that.Navigate to the excellent interactive tutorials of W3School.Another excellent resource is HTML 5 Doctor.For the people who are not convinced yet that they should invest time and resources on becoming experts on HTML 5 I should point out that HTML 5 websites will be ranked higher than others. Search engines will be able to locate better the content of our site and its relevance/importance since it is using semantic tags. Let's move now to the actual hands-on example. In this case (since I am mad Liverpool supporter) I will create a rollover image gallery of Liverpool F.C legends. I create a folder in my desktop. I name it Liverpool Gallery.Then I create two subfolders in it, large-images (I place the large images in there) and thumbs (I place the small images in there).Then I create an empty .html file called LiverpoolLegends.html and an empty .css file called style.css.Please have a look at the HTML Markup that I typed in my fancy editor package below<!doctype html><html lang="en"><head><title>Liverpool Legends Gallery</title><meta charset="utf-8"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"></head><body><header><h1>A page dedicated to Liverpool Legends</h1><h2>Do hover over the images with the mouse to see the full picture</h2></header><ul id="column1"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/john-barnes.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/john-barnes-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/ian-rush.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/ian-rush-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/graeme-souness.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/graeme-souness-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul><ul id="column2"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/steven-gerrard.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/steven-gerrard-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/kenny-dalglish.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/kenny-dalglish-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/robbie-fowler.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/robbie-fowler-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul><ul id="column3"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/alan-hansen.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/alan-hansen-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/michael-owen.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/michael-owen-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul></body></html> It is very easy to follow the markup. Please have a look at the new doctype and the new semantic tag <header>. I have 3 columns and I place my images in there.There is a class called "large".I will use this class in my CSS code to hide the large image when the mouse is not on (hover) an image Make sure you validate your HTML 5 page in the validator found hereHave a look at the CSS code below that makes it all happen.img { border:none;}#column1 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 100; }li { margin: 15px; list-style-type:none;}#column1 a img.large {  position: absolute; top: 0; left:700px; visibility: hidden;}#column1 a:hover { background: white;}#column1 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}#column2 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 195px; }li { margin: 5px; list-style-type:none;}#column2 a img.large { position: absolute; top: 0; left:510px; margin-left:0; visibility: hidden;}#column2 a:hover { background: white;}#column2 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}#column3 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 400px; width:108px;}li { margin: 5px; list-style-type:none;}#column3 a img.large { width: 260px; height:260px; position: absolute; top: 0; left:315px; margin-left:0; visibility: hidden;}#column3 a:hover { background: white;}#column3 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}?n the first line of the CSS code I set the images to have no border.Then I place the first column in the page and then remove the bullets from the list elements.Then I use the large CSS class to create a position for the large image and hide it.Finally when the hover event takes place I make the image visible.I repeat the process for the next two columns. I have tested the page with IE 10 and the latest versions of Opera,Chrome and Firefox.Feel free to style your HTML 5 gallery any way you want through the magic of CSS.I did not bother adding background colors and borders because that was beyond the scope of this post. Hope it helps!!!!

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• So, how is the Oracle HCM Cloud User Experience? In a word, smokin’!

  - by Edith Mireles-Oracle

  By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle unveiled its game-changing cloud user experience strategy at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 (remember that?) with a new simplified user interface (UI) paradigm.  The Oracle HCM cloud user experience is about light-weight interaction, tailored to the task you are trying to accomplish, on the device you are comfortable working with. A key theme for the Oracle user experience is being able to move from smartphone to tablet to desktop, with all of your data in the cloud. The Oracle HCM Cloud user experience provides designs for better productivity, no matter when and how your employees need to work. Release 8  Oracle recently demonstrated how fast it is moving development forward for our cloud applications, with the availability of release 8.  In release 8, users will see expanded simplicity in the HCM cloud user experience, such as filling out a time card and succession planning. Oracle has also expanded its mobile capabilities with task flows for payslips, managing absences, and advanced analytics. In addition, users will see expanded extensibility with the new structures editor for simplified pages, and the with the user interface text editor, which allows you to update language throughout the UI from one place. If you don’t like calling people who work for you “employees,” you can use this tool to create a term that is suited to your business.  Take a look yourself at what’s available now. What are people saying?Debra Lilley (@debralilley), an Oracle ACE Director who has a long history with Oracle Applications, recently gave her perspective on release 8: “Having had the privilege of seeing a preview of release 8, I am again impressed with the enhancements around simplified UI. Even more so, at a user group event in London this week, an existing Cloud HCM customer speaking publically about his implementation said he was very excited about release 8 as the absence functionality was so superior and simple to use.”  In an interview with Lilley for a blog post by Dennis Howlett  (@dahowlett), we probably couldn’t have asked for a more even-handed look at the Oracle Applications Cloud and the impact of user experience. Take the time to watch all three videos and get the full picture.  In closing, Howlett’s said: “There is always the caveat that getting from the past to Fusion [from the editor: Fusion is now called the Oracle Applications Cloud] is not quite as simple as may be painted, but the outcomes are much better than anticipated in large measure because the user experience is so much better than what went before.” Herman Slange, Technical Manager with Oracle Applications partner Profource, agrees with that comment. “We use on-premise Financials & HCM for internal use. Having a simple user interface that works on a desktop as well as a tablet for (very) non-technical users is a big relief. Coming from E-Business Suite, there is less training (none) required to access HCM content.  From a technical point of view, having the abilities to tailor the simplified UI very easy makes it very efficient for us to adjust to specific customer needs.  When we have a conversation about simplified UI, we just hand over a tablet and ask the customer to just use it. No training and no explanation required.” Finally, in a story by Computer Weekly  about Oracle customer BG Group, a natural gas exploration and production company based in the UK and with a presence in 20 countries, the author states: “The new HR platform has proved to be easier and more intuitive for HR staff to use than the previous SAP-based technology.” What’s Next for Oracle’s Applications Cloud User Experiences? This is the question that Steve Miranda, Oracle Executive Vice President, Applications Development, asks the Applications User Experience team, and we’ve been hard at work for some time now on “what’s next.”  I can’t say too much about it, but I can tell you that we’ve started talking to customers and partners, under non-disclosure agreements, about user experience concepts that we are working on in order to get their feedback. We recently had a chance to talk about possibilities for the Oracle HCM Cloud user experience at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit. This was a fantastic event, hosted by Shane Bliss and Vance Morossi of the Oracle Client Success Team. We got to use the uber-slick facilities of Allergan, our hosts (of Botox fame), headquartered in Irvine, Calif., with a presence in more than 100 countries. Photo by Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Vance Morossi, left, and Shane Bliss, of the Oracle Client Success Team, at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit.  We were treated to a few really excellent talks around human resources (HR). Alice White, VP Human Resources, discussed Allergan's process for global talent acquisition -- how Allergan has designed and deployed a global process, and global tools, along with Oracle and Cognizant, and are now at the end of a global implementation. She shared a couple of insights about the journey for Allergan: “One of the major areas for improvement was on role clarification within the company.” She said the company is “empowering managers and deputizing them as recruiters. Now it is a global process that is nimble and efficient."  Deepak Rammohan, VP Product Management, HCM Cloud, Oracle, also took the stage to talk about pioneering modern HR. He reflected modern HR problems of getting the right data about the workforce, the importance of getting the right talent as a key strategic initiative, and other workforce insights. "How do we design systems to deal with all of this?” he asked. “Make sure the systems are talent-centric. The next piece is collaborative, engaging, and mobile. A lot of this is influenced by what users see today. The last thing is around insight; insight at the point of decision-making." Rammohan showed off some killer HCM Cloud talent demos focused on simplicity and mobility that his team has been cooking up, and closed with a great line about the nature of modern recruiting: "Recruiting is a team sport." Deepak Rammohan, left, and Jake Kuramoto, both of Oracle, debate the merits of a Google Glass concept demo for recruiters on-the-go. Later, in an expo-style format, the Apps UX team showed several concepts for next-generation HCM Cloud user experiences, including demos shown by Jake Kuramoto (@jkuramoto) of The AppsLab, and Aylin Uysal (@aylinuysal), Director, HCM Cloud user experience. We even hauled out our eye-tracker, a research tool used to show where the eye is looking at a particular screen, thanks to teammate Michael LaDuke. Dionne Healy, HCM Client Executive, and Aylin Uysal, Director, HCM Cloud user experiences, Oracle, take a look at new HCM Cloud UX concepts. We closed the day with Jeremy Ashley (@jrwashley), VP, Applications User Experience, who brought it all back together by talking about the big picture for applications cloud user experiences. He covered the trends we are paying attention to now, what users will be expecting of their modern enterprise apps, and what Oracle’s design strategy is around these ideas.   We closed with an excellent reception hosted by ADP Payroll services at Bistango. Want to read more?Want to see where our cloud user experience is going next? Read more on the UsableApps web site about our latest design initiative: “Glance, Scan, Commit.” Or catch up on the back story by looking over our Applications Cloud user experience content on the UsableApps web site.  You can also find out where we’ll be next at the Events page on UsableApps.

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• XNA Notes 010

  - by George Clingerman

  With GDC 2011 wrapping up there were a LOT of great interviews and posts with and about XNA and XBLIG and some of our more notorious developers. Definitely worth spending many, many hours watching, listening and reading all those. Very inspiring! Also, don’t forget to get signed up for Dream Build Play! And just as an early warning reminder do NOT, I repeat do NOT wait to submit your game the last day. There are major issues submitting the last day every year and you do not want all your hard work to be hanging on whether your entry actually went through in that last day. Plan on submitting a few days if not a week before. I’m serious, you’ll thank yourself later! Now on to what’s happening in the XNA community! Time Critical XNA News: PAX East Meet Up (really wish I was going!) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71921/439262.aspx Want to stay panicked about the countdown to Dream Build Play? Mike McLaughlin shares his DBP countdown clock http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/44454458960252928 XNA Team: Nick Gravelyn Only needs less than 600 new users in his unique marketing plan for Pixel Man 2 http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ And hares his ad revenue numbers with his XNA WP7 games http://theoneswiththelight.com/2011/my-results-with-ad-revenue-for-wp7-games/ XNA MVPs: Andy “The ZMan” Dunn posts his 15,000th App Hub forum post and shares a few thoughts on the MVP summit http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/77625.aspx Chris Williams shares his thoughts on the MVP summit http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/03/07/144229.aspx XNA Developers: Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best games Wraps up GDC http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/gdc-2011-wrapped.html And shares the wonderful screenshots from Serious Sam. (I’m so jealous people at PAX East willl be playing a demo of this game!) http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/serious-sam-double-d.html James Silva of Ska Studios announces http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/09/vampire-smile-at-hotel-sierra/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/08/vengeance-begins-april-6th/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/04/good-morning-gato-52/ Michael McLaughlin writes an extremely useful set of tips for XNA WP7 developers http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/03/10/tips-for-xna-wp7-developers.aspx Robert Boyd “the one man XBLIG improving machine” posts his 9 tips for marketing an Xbox LIVE Indie Gam http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110309/7183/9_Tips_for_XBLIG_Marketing.php http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/77534/470586.aspx#470586 And shares his day by day experience at GDC this year http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7118/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_1.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7123/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_2.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110303/7129/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_3.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7133/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_4.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7160/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_5.php Phillipe Da Silva releases new IGF Pong Sample preview http://www.vimeo.com/20904070 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Gamergeddon posts XBox Indie Game Roundup for March 6th http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/03/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-march-6th/ Dealspwn interviews FortressCraft developer Projector Games http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-minecraft-clones-venting-haters-part-1/ http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-part-2-trials-tribulations-indie-development/ Writings of Mass Destruction continues the Xbox LIVE Indie Game a day campaign, here’s his take on FishCraft (be sure to check out his other posts!) http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/2011/03/05/day-116-fishcraft/ Tom Ogburn shares his GDC notes on the XBLIG panel jotted quickly while attending the panel http://twitter.com/#!/TOgburn/status/44454191028125696 http://www.starlitskygames.com/blogs/site_news/archive/2011/03/06/802.aspx Dave Voyles of Armless Octopus has crazy good coverage on XNA and Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers at GDC 2011. Interviews and articles all extremely well done! http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/06/gdc-2011-successful-indie-developers-share-insight-on-microsofts-self-publishing-service/ There’s honestly so many posts and interviews you should just hit his front page and scroll down through all of the latest ones. http://www.armlessoctopus.com/ GameMarx Episode 12 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/27/ep-12-march-4-2011.aspx B.U.T.T.O.N now on Steam! http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/03/button_party_game_now_on_steam.php German Xbox Dashboard gets review program from GamePro http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/07/gamepo-indie-review-show-debuts-on-german-xbox-dashboard/ XboxIndies.com (one of the best XNA sites out there at this point!) continues to add review sites to it’s main review feed. (And don’t forget to play with that awesome XBLIG pivot control!) http://xboxindies.com/ Kris Steele of FunInfused Games shares early footage of his game World of Chalk http://twitter.com/#!/kriswd40/status/45007114371989504 Raymond Matthews of Darkstarmatryx reviews FunInfused Games Abduction Action http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=264 TheVideoGamerRob reviews Zombie Football Carnage http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/xblig-review-zombie-football-carnage/ XBLIG Square Off Making the Jump to WP7 http://www.wp7connect.com/2011/03/08/xblig-square-off-will-make-the-jump-to-windows-phone/ Mommy’s Best Games making the news round with their Serious Sam announcement http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/09/serious-sam-gets-serious-indie-cred-with-new-indie-series/ Most quoted and linked XBLIG article of the week with the least amount of actual facts and reporting. Shared only because it makes me sad that this is the best coverage we get. (Hey reporters, there’s LOT and LOTS of XBLIG and XNA experts you can contact if you need to check up on facts or wonder why on questions like, Why can’t XBLIGs have Nazis? There’s actually a real answer for that..) http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/06/xblig-facts-nazi-killing-a-no-no-revenue-a-yes-yes/ XNA Development: Mort8088 has been in an XNA tutorial writing frenzy releasing 4 XNA 4.0 entry level tutorials this week! http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-0-intro/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-1-fonts/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-2-sprites/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-3-input-from-keyboard/ Interesting discussion on what it means to be a community (you do have to sign up to be a member of the XNA UK forums to read it...) http://twitter.com/#!/XNAUK/status/44705269254594560 Slyprid continues his incredible pace on Transmute and shares screens of his new Animation Builder http://twitter.com/#!/slyprid/status/45169271847911424 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/blog/ Philippe Da Silva wants to know who is using IGF for their games. If it’s you, drop him a note letting him know! http://twitter.com/#!/philippedasilva/status/44325893719588864 New Sunburn Video Tutorials released http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/03/07/new-documentation-video-tutorials.aspx Loading and rendering animated collada models using XNA 4.0 http://bunkernetz.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/loading-and-rendering-animated-collada-models-using-xna-4-0/ XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 6 Accelerometer Input http://buzzgamesnews.blogspot.com/2011/03/xna-for-silverlight-developers-part-6.html

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• Win a place at a SQL Server Masterclass with Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal

  - by Testas

  The top things YOU need to know about managing SQL Server - in one place, on one day - presented by two of the best SQL Server industry trainers!And you could be there courtesy of UK SQL Server User Group and SQL Server Magazine! This week the UK SQL Server User Group will provide you with details of how to win a place at this must see seminar   You can also register for the seminar yourself at:www.regonline.co.uk/kimtrippsql More information about the seminar   Where: Radisson Edwardian Heathrow Hotel, London When: Thursday 17th June 2010 This one-day MasterClass will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based solution. In the case where a company has no dedicated DBA, IT managers sometimes struggle to keep the data tier performing well and the data available. This can be especially troublesome when the development team is unfamiliar with the affect application design choices have on database performance. The Microsoft SQL Server MasterClass 2010 is presented by Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp, two of the most experienced and respected people in the SQL Server world. Together they have over 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server in the field, and on the SQL Server product team itself. This is a unique opportunity to hear them present at a UK event which will:·         Debunk many of the ingrained misconceptions around SQL Server's behaviour   ·         Show you disaster recovery techniques critical to preserving your company's life-blood - the data   ·         Explain how a common application design pattern can wreak havoc in the database ·         Walk through the top-10 points to follow around operations and maintenance for a well-performing and available data tier! Please Note: Agenda may be subject to changeSessions AbstractsKEYNOTE: Bridging the Gap Between Development and Production  Applications are commonly developed with little regard for how design choices will affect performance in production. This is often because developers don't realize the implications of their design on how SQL Server will be able to handle a high workload (e.g. blocking, fragmentation) and/or because there's no full-time trained DBA that can recognize production problems and help educate developers. The keynote sets the stage for the rest of the day. Discussing some of the issues that can arise, explaining how some can be avoided and highlighting some of the features in SQL 2008 that can help developers and DBAs make better use of SQL Server, and troubleshoot when things go wrong.  SESSION ONE: SQL Server MythbustersIt's amazing how many myths and misconceptions have sprung up and persisted over the years about SQL Server - after many years helping people out on forums, newsgroups, and customer engagements, Paul and Kimberly have heard it all. Are there really non-logged operations? Can interrupting shrinks or rebuilds cause corruption? Can you override the server's MAXDOP setting? Will the server always do a table-scan to get a row count? Many myths lead to poor design choices and inappropriate maintenance practices so these are just a few of many, many myths that Paul and Kimberly will debunk in this fast-paced session on how SQL Server operates and should be managed and maintained. SESSION TWO: Database Recovery Techniques Demo-Fest Even if a company has a disaster recovery strategy in place, they need to practice to make sure that the plan will work when a disaster does strike. In this fast-paced demo session Paul and Kimberly will repeatedly do nasty things to databases and then show how they are recovered - demonstrating many techniques that can be used in production for disaster recovery. Not for the faint-hearted! SESSION THREE: GUIDs: Use, Abuse, and How To Move Forward Since the addition of the GUID (Microsoft’s implementation of the UUID), my life as a consultant and "tuner" has been busy. I’ve seen databases designed with GUID keys run fairly well with small workloads but completely fall over and fail because they just cannot scale. And, I know why GUIDs are chosen - it simplifies the handling of parent/child rows in your batches so you can reduce round-trips or avoid dealing with identity values. And, yes, sometimes it's even for distributed databases and/or security that GUIDs are chosen. I'm not entirely against ever using a GUID but overusing and abusing GUIDs just has to be stopped! Please, please, please let me give you better solutions and explanations on how to deal with your parent/child rows, round-trips and clustering keys! SESSION 4: Essential Database MaintenanceIn this session, Paul and Kimberly will run you through their top-ten database maintenance recommendations, with a lot of tips and tricks along the way. These are distilled from almost 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server customers and are geared towards making your databases more performant, more available, and more easily managed (to save you time!). Everything in this session will be practical and applicable to a wide variety of databases. Topics covered include: backups, shrinks, fragmentation, statistics, and much more! Focus will be on 2005 but we'll explain some of the key differences for 2000 and 2008 as well.    Speaker Biographies     Paul S.Randal  Kimberley L. Tripp Paul and Kimberly are a husband-and-wife team who own and run SQLskills.com, a world-renowned SQL Server consulting and training company. They are both SQL Server MVPs and Microsoft Regional Directors, with over 30 years of combined experience on SQL Server. Paul worked on the SQL Server team for nine years in development and management roles, writing many of the DBCC commands, and ultimately with responsibility for core Storage Engine for SQL Server 2008. Paul writes extensively on his blog (SQLskills.com/blogs/Paul) and for TechNet Magazine, for which he is also a Contributing Editor. Kimberly worked on the SQL Server team in the early 1990s as a tester and writer before leaving to found SQLskills and embrace her passion for teaching and consulting. Kimberly has been a staple at worldwide conferences since she first presented at TechEd in 1996, and she blogs at SQLskills.com/blogs/Kimberly. They have written Microsoft whitepapers and books for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, and are regular, top-rated presenters worldwide on database maintenance, high availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning, and SQL Server internals. Together they teach the SQL MCM certification and throughout Microsoft.In their spare time, they like to find frogfish in remote corners of the world.  

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• The hidden cost of interrupting knowledge workers

  - by Piet

  The November issue of pragpub has an interesting article on interruptions. The article is written by Brian Tarbox, who also mentions the article on his blog. I like the subtitle: ‘Simple Strategies for Avoiding Dumping Your Mental Stack’. Brian talks about the effective cost of interrupting a ‘knowledge worker’, often with trivial questions or distractions. In the eyes of the interruptor, the interruption only costs the time the interrupted had to listen to the question and give an answer. However, depending on what the interrupted was doing at the time, getting fully immersed in their task again might take up to 15-20 minutes. Enough interruptions might even cause a knowledge worker to mentally call it a day. According to this article interruptions can consume about 28% of a knowledge worker’s time, translating in a $588 billion loss for US companies each year. Looking for a new developer to join your team? Ever thought about optimizing your team’s environment and the way they work instead? Making non knowledge workers aware You can’t. Well, I haven’t succeeded yet. And believe me: I’ve tried. When you’ve got a simple way to really increase your productivity (’give me 2 hours of uninterrupted time a day’) it wouldn’t be right not to tell your boss or team-leader about it. The problem is: only productive knowledge workers seem to understand this. People who don’t fall into this category just seem to think you’re joking, being arrogant or anti-social when you tell them the interruptions can really have an impact on your productivity. Also, knowledge workers often work in a very concentrated mental state which is described here as: It is the same mindfulness as ecstatic lovemaking, the merging of two into a fluidly harmonious one. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task. Yes, coding can be addictive and if you’re interrupting a programmer at the wrong moment, you’re effectively bringing down a junkie from his high in just a few seconds. This can result in seemingly arrogant, almost aggressive reactions. How to make people aware of the production-cost they’re inflicting: I’ve been often pondering that question myself. The article suggests that solutions based on that question never seem to work. To be honest: I’ve never even been able to find a half decent solution for this question. People who are not in this situations just don’t understand the issue, no matter how you try to explain it. Fun (?) thing I’ve noticed: Programmers or IT people in general who don’t get this are often the kind of people who just don’t get anything done. Interrupt handling (interruption management?) IRL Have non-urgent questions handled in a non-interruptive way It helps a bit to educate people into using non-interruptive ways to ask questions: “duh, I have no idea, but I’m a bit busy here now could you put it in an email so I don’t forget?”. Eventually, a considerable amount of people will skip interrupting you and just send an email right away. Some stubborn-headed people however will continue to just interrupt you, saying “you’re 10 meters from my desk, why can’t we just talk?”. Just remember to disable your email notifications, it can be hard to resist opening your email client when you know a new email just arrived. Use Do Not Disturb signals When working in a group of programmers, often the unofficial sign you can only be interrupted for something important is to put on headphones. And when the environment is quiet enough, often people aren’t even listening to music. Otherwise music can help to block the indirect distractions (someone else talking on the phone or tapping their feet). You might get a “they’re all just surfing and listening to music”-reaction from outsiders though. Peopleware talks about a team where the no-interruption sign was placing a shawl on the desk. If I remember correctly, I am unable to locate my copy of this really excellent must-read book. If you have all standardized on the same IM tool, maybe that tool has a ‘do not disturb’ setting. Also some phone-systems have a ‘DND’ (do not disturb) setting. Hide Brian offers a number of good suggestions, some obvious like: hide away somewhere they can’t find you. Not sure how long it’ll be till someone thinks you’re just taking a nap somewhere though. Also, this often isn’t possible or your boss might not understand this. And if you really get caught taking a nap, make sure to explain that your were powernapping. Counter-act interruptions Another suggestion he offers is when you’re being interrupted to just hold up your hand, blocking the interruption, and at least giving you time to finish your sentence or your block/line of code. The last suggestion works more as a way to make it obvious to the interruptor that they really are interrupting your work and to offload some of the cost on the interruptor. In practice, this can also helps you cool down a bit so you don’t start saying nasty things to the interruptor. Unfortunately I’ve sometimes been confronted with people who just ignore this signal and keep talking, as if they’re sure that whatever they’ve got to say is really worth listening to and without a doubt more important than anything you might be doing. This behaviour usually leaves me speechless (not good when someone just asked a question). I’ve noticed that these people are usually also the first to complain when being interrupted themselves. They’re generally not very liked as colleagues, so try not to imitate their behaviour. TDD as a way to minimize recovery time I don’t like Test Driven Development. Mainly for only one reason: It interrupts flow. At least, that’s what it does for me, but maybe I’m just not grown used to TDD yet. BUT a positive effect TDD has on me when I have to work in an interruptive environment and can’t really get into the ‘flow’ (also supposedly called ‘the zone’ by software developers, although I’ve never heard it 1st hand), TDD helps me to concentrate on the tasks at hand and helps me to get back at work after an interruption. I feel when using TDD, I can get by without the need for being totally ‘in’ the project and I can be reasonably productive without obtaining ‘flow’. Do you have a suggestion on how to make people aware of the concept of ‘flow’ and the cost of interruptions? (without looking like an arrogant ass or a weirdo)

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 04, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 04, 2010New ProjectsAcervo 2 - Gerenciador de coleções: Acervo 2 is a web application developed in ASP.NET 3.5 with Entity Framework, Coolite UI web controls and MySQL database that helps to catalog and ...AssemblyInfo Editor: AssemblyInfo Editor is a small Visual Studio 2010 extension I developed for my personal use mainly for automatically incrementing AssemblyVersion a...CommLine: It's a Command Line Interpreter. At the moment, it's a beta version, so I wait for developers that wanna help meFlowgraph Viewer: The flowgraph viewer enables users to view, build and share flowgraphs for the Crysis-franchise. It's built on Silverlight4, using MEF and Mvvmlight.Hash Calculator: WPF Windows 7 program to compute SHA1 & MD5 hash functions.MediaRSS library for .NET: This is a small set of libraries that allow you to create, read, and write MediaRSS files. By leveraging the syndication model object in .NET this...MEF Visualizer Tool: Helps to see what is going on inside the CompositionContainerone framework for developing asp.net project more elegent、flexible、and testable: if you are familiar with jsf、cdi、scoped javabean and work under asp.net, you may want to support aop and max flexibility and testability , all of ...Picasa Manager: A Silverlight Out Of Browser Application that Helps you manage your PicasaWeb albums in the easyest way possible.SharePhone: Windows Phone 7 library for connecting to SharePoint 2007/2010. Lets you work with SPWeb, SPList, reading/writing strong typed list items, user ...Silverlight Resource Extension: Silverlight Resource Extension. Extension silverlight project for use ResX resources and localize satellite dll.Silverlight Streamgraph: Streamgraph component for SilverlightTFTP Server: Managed TFTP server implementation, written in C#. Supports: - IPv4 and IPv6 - correct retry behavior. - TFTP options: block size, transfer size, a...Virtual UserGroup Video Helpers: This is a project that holds all the tools used by the C4MVC Virtual Usergroup. Tools written in C# and Powershell to automate, Live Meeting, Expr...xBlog: xBlog is a project to build a simple and extensible Blog Engine based on xml and linqXmlCodeEditor: XmlCodeEditor is a Silverlight 4 control based on RichTextControl that creates coloring and intellisense similar to the one in Visual Studio for ed...Zinc Launcher: Zinc Launcher is a simple Windows Media Center plugin that launches Zinc and attempts to manage the windows as seamlessly as possible. In addition ...New ReleasesAcervo 2 - Gerenciador de coleções: Acervo 2 - v1.0: Arquivos para implantação do sistema Acervo2 Aplicação web Web service Smart ClientAssemblyInfo Editor: Beta 1: Initial release of Assembly Info Editor. At this point, it is feature-complete and is relatively stable. There are undoubtedly some bugs to work o...Box2D.XNA: Box2D.XNA r70 Source Code and Solution: This version is synced to changeset 44697. This represents our official port of the C Box2D up to r70 on the Google Code project. With this versi...Boxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher Release 1.0.1.2: Will now stop Media Center playback before launching BoxeeBoxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher Release 1.0.1.3: Added a background window that attempts to display over the desktop and taskbar, and below Boxee and Media Center so that the desktop and taskbar a...CommLine: Beta Version 0.1: First Beta Of the AppCommLine: Source v0.1 Beta: Source Code C of 0.1 beta versionEncrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.6.2: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.6.2), with general changes and improved randomness for the key generator. It has an installer that...Hash Calculator: HashCalculator: HashCalculator 1.0Hash Calculator: HashCalculator Source code: HashCalculator 1.0Hulu Launcher: Hulu Launcher 1.0.1.3: Added a background window that attempts to display over the desktop and taskbar, and below Hulu and Media Center so that the desktop and taskbar ar...Hulu Launcher: Hulu Launcher Release 1.0.1.2: Hulu Launcher will now stop playback in Media Center before launching Hulu Desktop.Innovative Games: 4.3 - Sprite Effects: Source code download for chapter 4.3 - "Sprite Effects"MediaRSS library for .NET: 0.1: Alpha release. Majority of MediaRSS spec is supported. A small set of unit test / sample code are included. A lightly tested CustomFormatter object...MEF Visualizer Tool: MEF Visualizer Tool 0.1: Help to see what going on in side CompositionContainer Container = new CompositionContainer( new AggregateCatalog( ...Ncqrs Framework - A CQRS framework for .NET: Ncqrs with sample application: This is the first release of the Ncqrs Framework. It contains the Ncqrs source code and a runnable sample application. All the code in this release...Rubik Cube's 3D Silverlight 3.0 Animated Solution: Rubik Cube 3D with Animated Solution: This project is a realization of Silverlight 3.0 Rubik Cube 3D with Animated Solution. The Solution is available for 3x3x3 cube, other features are...Scrabler: scrabler release 0.6.2.5: fixed a bug that werent executed some scriptsSharePhone: SharePhone: Initial release with basic functionality: Open SharePoint webs and subwebs Retrieve lists on SPWeb objects Read metadata/properties on lists ...SharePhone: SharePhone v.1.0.1: Fixed a bug that prevented saving list items to SharePointSharePoint Labs: SPLab4001A-FRA-Level100: SPLab4001A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you the first best practice you should apply when writing code with the SharePoint API. Lab ...Silverlight Resource Extension: ResourceExtension (alpha): Alpha version is not stable. Only for review.Silverlight Streamgraph: Port from processing.org: A port from the processing.org streamgraph. Code-heavy with very little XAML involved at this point.Theocratic Ministry School System: TMSS - Ver 1.1.1: What’s New! Added Menu Options 2010 Schedule Access 2007 Runtime There are still many uncompleted items so this is still a conceptual release....Theocratic Ministry School System: TMSS - Ver 1.1.2: Fixed the Schedule Import. Need needs to be tested. Click import button and make sure you can get the 2010 Schedule from the internet.thinktecture Starter STS (Community Edition): StarterSTS v1.0 RTW: Version 1.0 RTWTribe.Cache: Tribe.Cache Alpha - 0.2.0.0: Tribe.Cache Alpha - 0.2.0.0 - Now has sliding and absolute expiration on cache entries. Functional Alpha Release - But do not use in productionTwitterVB - A .NET Twitter Library: TwitterVB-2.3.1: This is mostly a minor release that adds br.st URL shortening to the menu (API key from http://br.st required)Virtu: Virtu 0.8.1: Source Requirements.NET Framework 3.5 with Service Pack 1 Visual Studio 2008 with Service Pack 1, or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition with Service Pa...Visual Studio DSite: Advanced C++ Calculator: An advanced visual c 2008 calculator that can do all your basic operations, plus some advanced mathematical functions. Source Code Only.xnaWebcam: xnaWebcam 0.3: xnaWebcam 0.3 Version 0.3: -ResolutionSet: 400x300 (Default), 800x600, 1024x720 -Settings Window got Icon -Settings Window Changes -DevConsole.cs ...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsGraffiti CMSnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.RawrFacebook Developer ToolkitjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesLINQ to TwitterBlogEngine.NETN2 CMSBase Class LibrariesFarseer Physics Engine

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• WWDC and Tech Ed: A Tale of Two DevCons

  - by andrewbrust

  Next week marks the first full week of June.  Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology.  In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday.  Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its Tech Ed conference in muggy, oil-laden yet soulful New Orleans.  A brief survey of each show reveals much about the differences in each company’s offerings, strategy, and approach to customers and partners. In the interest of full disclosure, I must explain that I will be speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed show, and have done so, on and off, since 2003.  I have never been to an Apple conference and, as readers of this blog may know, I acquired my first ever Apple product 2 months ago when I bought an iPad on the day of that product’s launch.  I think I have keen insights into Microsoft’s conference.  My ability to comment on Apple’s event ranges somewhere between backseat driver and naive observer.  Just so you know. Although both shows cater to their respective company’s developers, there are a number of differences in the events’ purposes and content approaches.  First off, let’s consider each show as a news and PR vehicle.  WWDC will feature Steve Jobs’ keynote address and most likely will be where Apple officially reveals details of its 4th-generation iPhone. Jobs will likely also provide deep background information on the corresponding iPhone OS release.  These presumed announcements will make the show a magnet for the tech press and tech blogger elite.  Apple’s customers will be interested too, especially since the iPhone OS release will likely be made available to owners of existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. Tech Ed, on the other hand, may not be especially newsworthy at all.  The keynote address will be given by Bob Muglia, who is President of the company’s Server and Tools Division, and he’ll likely be reviewing things more than previewing them. That’s because the company has, in the last 6-8 months, already released new versions of a majority of its products, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, its Azure cloud platform, its .NET software development layer, its Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology and its Visual Studio developer suite.  Redmond’s product pipeline has functioned more like a firehose of late, and the company has a ton of work to do to get developers up to speed on everything that’s new. I know I keep saying “developers,” but in Tech Ed’s case, that’s not really accurate.  In North America, Tech Ed caters to both developers and IT pros (i.e. technologists who work with physical IT infrastructure, as well as security and administration of the server software that runs on it).  This pairing has, since its inception, struck some as anomalous and others, including many exhibitors, as very smart. Certainly, it means Tech Ed ends up being a confab for virtually all professionals in Microsoft’s ecosystem.  And this year, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) conference will be co-located with Tech Ed, further enhancing that fusion effect. Clearly then, Microsoft’s show will focus on education, as its name assures us.  Apple’s will serve as both a press event and an opportunity to get its own App Store developer channel synced up with its newest technology advances.  For example, we already know that iPhone OS 4.0 will provide for a limited multitasking capability; that will only work well if people know how to code to it in a capable way.  Apple also told us its iAd advertising platform will be part of the new OS, and Steve Jobs insists that’s to provide a revenue opportunity for developers.  This too, then, needs to be explicated and soaked up buy the faithful. A look at each show’s breakout session lineup provides some interesting takeaways.  WWDC will have very few Mac-specific sessions on offer, and virtually no sessions that at are IT- or “Enterprise-“ related.  It’s all about the phone, music players and tablets.  However, WWDC will have plenty of low-level, hardcore tech coverage of such things as Advanced Memory Analysis and Creating Secure Applications, as well as lots of rich media-related content like Core Animation and Game Design and Development.  Beyond Apple’s proprietary platform, WWDC will also feature an array of sessions on HTML 5 and other Web standards.  In all, WWDC offers over 100 technical sessions and hands-on labs. What about Tech Ed’s editorial content?  Like the target audience, it really runs the gamut.  The show has 21 tracks (versus WWDC’s 5) and more than 745 “learning opportunities” which include breakout sessions, demo stations, hands-on labs and BIrds of a Feather discussion sessions.  Topics range from Architecture talks like Patterns of Parallel Programming to cloud computing talks like Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure to IT-focused topics like Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture.  I also count 19 sessions on Windows Phone 7.  Unfortunately, with regard to Web standards and HTML 5, only a few sessions are offered, all of them specific to Internet Explorer. All-in-all, Apple’s show looks more exciting and “sexier” than Tech Ed. Microsoft’s show seems a lot more enterprise-focused than WWDC. This is, of course, well in sync with each company’s approach and products.  Microsoft’s content is much wider ranging and bests WWDC in sheer volume of sessions and labs.  I suppose some might argue that less is more; others that Apple’s consumer-focused offerings simply don’t provide for the same depth of coverage to a business audience.  Microsoft has a serious focus on the cloud and  a paucity of coverage on client-side Web standards; Apple has virtually no cloud offering at all.  Again, this reflects each tech titan’s go-to-market strategy. My own take is that employees of each company should attend the other’s event.  The amount of mutual exclusivity in content may make sense in terms of corporate philosophy, but the reality is that each company could stand to diversify into the other’s territory, at least somewhat. My own talk at Tech Ed will focus on competitive analysis around Microsoft’s BI products.  Apple does not today figure into that analysis. Maybe one day it will.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 11, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 11, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET Wiki Control: This ASP.NET user control allows you to embed a very useful wiki directly into your already existing ASP.NET website taking advantage of the popula...BabyLog: Log baby daily activity.buddyHome: buddyHome is a project that can make your home smarter. as good as your buddy. Cloud Community: Cloud Community makes it easier for organizations to have a simple to use community platform. Our mission is to create an easy to use community pl...Community Connectors for Microsoft CRM 4.0: Community Connectors for Microsoft CRM 4.0 allows Microsoft CRM 4.0 customers and partners to monitor and analyze customers’ interaction from their...Console Highlighter: Hightlights Microsoft Windows Command prompt (cmd.exe) by outputting ANSI VT100 Control sequences to color the output. These sequences are not hand...Cornell Store: This is IN NO WAY officially affiliated or related to the Cornell University store. Instead, this is a project that I am doing for a class. Ther...DevUtilities: This project is for creating some utility tools, and they will be useful during the development.DotNetNuke® Skin Maple: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by DyNNamite.co.uk. The package includes 4 color variations and sev...HRNet: HRNetIIS Web Site Monitoring: A software for monitor a particular web site on IIS, even if its IP is sharing between different web site.Iowa Code Camp: The source code for the Iowa Code Camp website.Leonidas: Leonidas is a virtual tutorLunch 'n Learn: The Lunch 'n Learn web application is an open source ASP.NET MVC application that allows you to setup lunch 'n learn presentations for your team, c...MNT Cryptography: A very simple cryptography classMooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL Web Databinder: mvc2linq2sql is a databinder for ASP.NET MVC that make able developer to clean bind object from HTML FORMS to Linq entities. Even 1 to N relations ...MoqBot: MoqBot is an auto mocking library for Moq and Ninject.mtExperience1: hoiMvcPager: MvcPager is a free paging component for ASP.NET MVC web application, it exposes a series of extension methods for using in ASP.NET MVC applications...OCal: OCal is based on object calisthenics to identify code smellsPex Custom Arithmetic Solver: Pex Custom Arithmetic Solver contains a collection of meta-heuristic search algorithms. The goal is to improve Pex's code coverage for code involvi...SetControls: Расширеные контролы для ASP.NET приложений. Полная информация ближе к релизу...shadowrage1597: CTC 195 Game Design classSharePoint Team-Mailer: A SharePoint 2007 solution that defines a generic CustomList for sending e-mails to SharePoint Groups.Sql Share: SQL Share is a collaboration tool used within the science to allow database engineers to work tightly with domain scientists.TechCalendar: Tech Events Calendar ASP.NET project.ZLYScript: A very simple script language compiler.New ReleasesALGLIB: ALGLIB 2.4.0: New ALGLIB release contains: improved versions of several linear algebra algorithms: QR decomposition, matrix inversion, condition number estimatio...AmiBroker Plug-Ins with C#: AmiBroker Plug-Ins v0.0.2: Source codes and a binaryAppFabric Caching UI Admin Tool: AppFabric Caching Beta 2 UI Admin Tool: System Requirements:.NET 4.0 RC AppFabric Caching Beta2 Test On:Win 7 (64x)Autodocs - WCF REST Automatic API Documentation Generator: Autodocs.ServiceModel.Web: This archive contains the reference DLL, instructions and license.Compact Plugs & Compact Injection: Compact Injection and Compact Plugs 1.1 Beta: First release of Compact Plugs (CP). The solution includes a simple example project of CP, called "TestCompactPlugs1". Also some fixes where made ...Console Highlighter: Console Highlighter 0.9 (preview release): Preliminary release.Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.3: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.3). It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My Documents. The last one was ...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.0.2: Family Tree Analyzer Version 1.0.2 This early beta version implements loading a gedcom file and displaying some basic reports. These reports inclu...FRC1103 - FRC Dashboard viewer: 2010 Documentation v0.1: This is my current version of the control system documentation for 2010. It isn't complete, but it has the information required for a custom dashbo...jQuery.cssLess: jQuery.cssLess 0.5 (Even less release): NEW - support for nested special CSS classes (like :hover) MAIN RELEASE This release, code "Even less", is the one that will interpret cssLess wit...MooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL Web Databinder: MooiNooi MVC2LINQ2SQL DataBinder: I didn't try this... I just took it off from my project. Please, tell me any problem implementing in your own development and I'll be pleased to h...MvcPager: MvcPager 1.2 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0: MvcPager 1.2 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0Mytrip.Mvc: Mytrip 1.0 preview 1: Article Manager Blog Manager L2S Membership(.NET Framework 3.5) EF Membership(.NET Framework 4) User Manager File Manager Localization Captcha ...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel 2007 Template, version 1.0.1.117: The NodeXL Excel 2007 template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 workbook. What's NewThis version adds ...Pex Custom Arithmetic Solver: PexCustomArithmeticSolver: This is the alpha release containing the Alternating Variable Method and Evolution Strategies to try and solve constraints over floating point vari...Scrum Sprint Monitor: v1.0.0.44877: What is new in this release? Major performance increase in animations (up to 50 fps from 2 fps) by replacing DropShadow effect with png bitmaps; ...sELedit: sELedit v1.0b: + Added support for empty strings / wstrings + Fixed: critical bug in configuration files (list 53)sPWadmin: pwAdmin v0.9_nightly: + Fixed: XML editor can now open and save character templates + Added: PWI item name database + Added: Plugin SupportTechCalendar: Events Calendar v.1.0: Initial release.The Silverlight Hyper Video Player [http://slhvp.com]: Beta 2: Beta 2.0 Some fixes from Beta 1, and a couple small enhancements. Intensive testing continues, and I will continue to update the code at least ever...ThreadSafe.Caching: 2010.03.10.1: Updates to the scavanging behaviour since last release. Scavenging will now occur every 30 seconds by default and all objects in the cache will be ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30310.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: Email Sender (C++): The same Email Sender program that I but made in visual c plus plus 2008 instead of visual basic 2008.Web Forms MVP: Web Forms MVP CTP7: The release can be considered stable, and is in use behind several high traffic, public websites. It has been marked as a CTP release as it is not ...White Tiger: 0.0.3.1: Now you can load or create files with whatever root element you want *check f or sets file permisionsMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NET Ajax LibraryMost Active ProjectsUmbraco CMSRawrSDS: Scientific DataSet library and toolsN2 CMSFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APIjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and Silverlight

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• Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 Event and its SNMP Interface

  - by user12609115

  Background The cluster event SNMP interface was first introduced in Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.2 release. The details of the SNMP interface are described in the Oracle Solaris Cluster System Administration Guide and the Cluster 3.2 SNMP blog. Prior to the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 release, when the event SNMP interface was enabled, it would take effect on WARNING or higher severity events. The events with WARNING or higher severity are usually for the status change of a cluster component from ONLINE to OFFLINE. The interface worked like an alert/alarm interface when some components in the cluster were out of service (changed to OFFLINE). The consumers of this interface could not get notification for all status changes and configuration changes in the cluster. Cluster Event and its SNMP Interface in Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 The user model of the cluster event SNMP interface is the same as what was provided in the previous releases. The cluster event SNMP interface is not enabled by default on a freshly installed cluster; you can enable it by using the cluster event SNMP administration commands on any cluster nodes. Usually, you only need to enable it on one of the cluster nodes or a subset of the cluster nodes because all cluster nodes get the same cluster events. When it is enabled, it is responsible for two basic tasks. • Logs up to 100 most recent NOTICE or higher severity events to the MIB. • Sends SNMP traps to the hosts that are configured to receive the above events. The changes in the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 release are1) Introduction of the NOTICE severity for the cluster configuration and status change events.The NOTICE severity is introduced for the cluster event in the 4.2 release. It is the severity between the INFO and WARNING severity. Now all severities for the cluster events are (from low to high) • INFO (not exposed to the SNMP interface) • NOTICE (newly introduced in the 4.2 release) • WARNING • ERROR • CRITICAL • FATAL In the 4.2 release, the cluster event system is enhanced to make sure at least one event with the NOTICE or a higher severity will be generated when there is a configuration or status change from a cluster component instance. In other words, the cluster events from a cluster with the NOTICE or higher severities will cover all status and configuration changes in the cluster (include all component instances). The cluster component instance here refers to an instance of the following cluster componentsnode, quorum, resource group, resource, network interface, device group, disk, zone cluster and geo cluster heartbeat. For example, pnode1 is an instance of the cluster node component, and oracleRG is an instance of the cluster resource group. With the introduction of the NOTICE severity event, when the cluster event SNMP interface is enabled, the consumers of the SNMP interface will get notification for all status and configuration changes in the cluster. A thrid-party system management platform with the cluster SNMP interface integration can generate alarms and clear alarms programmatically, because it can get notifications for the status change from ONLINE to OFFLINE and also from OFFLINE to ONLINE. 2) Customization for the cluster event SNMP interface • The number of events logged to the MIB is 100. When the number of events stored in the MIB reaches 100 and a new qualified event arrives, the oldest event will be removed before storing the new event to the MIB (FIFO, first in, first out). The 100 is the default and minimum value for the number of events stored in the MIB. It can be changed by setting the log_number property value using the clsnmpmib command. The maximum number that can be set for the property is 500. • The cluster event SNMP interface takes effect on the NOTICE or high severity events. The NOTICE severity is also the default and lowest event severity for the SNMP interface. The SNMP interface can be configured to take effect on other higher severity events, such as WARNING or higher severity events by setting the min_severity property to the WARNING. When the min_severity property is set to the WARNING, the cluster event SNMP interface would behave the same as the previous releases (prior to the 4.2 release). Examples, • Set the number of events stored in the MIB to 200 # clsnmpmib set -p log_number=200 event • Set the interface to take effect on WARNING or higher severity events. # clsnmpmib set -p min_severity=WARNING event Administering the Cluster Event SNMP Interface Oracle Solaris Cluster provides the following three commands to administer the SNMP interface. • clsnmpmib: administer the SNMP interface, and the MIB configuration. • clsnmphost: administer hosts for the SNMP traps • clsnmpuser: administer SNMP users (specific for SNMP v3 protocol) Only clsnmpmib is changed in the 4.2 release to support the aforementioned customization of the SNMP interface. Here are some simple examples using the commands. Examples: 1. Enable the cluster event SNMP interface on the local node # clsnmpmib enable event 2. Display the status of the cluster event SNMP interface on the local node # clsnmpmib show -v 3. Configure my_host to receive the cluster event SNMP traps. # clsnmphost add my_host Cluster Event SNMP Interface uses the common agent container SNMP adaptor, which is based on the JDMK SNMP implementation as its SNMP agent infrastructure. By default, the port number for the SNMP MIB is 11161, and the port number for the SNMP traps is 11162. The port numbers can be changed by using the cacaoadm. For example, # cacaoadm list-params Print all changeable parameters. The output includes the snmp-adaptor-port and snmp-adaptor-trap-port properties. # cacaoadm set-param snmp-adaptor-port=1161 Set the SNMP MIB port number to 1161. # cacaoadm set-param snmp-adaptor-trap-port=1162 Set the SNMP trap port number to 1162. The cluster event SNMP MIB is defined in sun-cluster-event-mib.mib, which is located in the /usr/cluster/lib/mibdirectory. Its OID is 1.3.6.1.4.1.42.2.80, that can be used to walk through the MIB data. Again, for more detail information about the cluster event SNMP interface, please see the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 System Administration Guide. - Leland Chen 

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• Big Data&rsquo;s Killer App&hellip;

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  Recently Keith spent  some time talking about the cloud on this blog and I will spare you my thoughts on the whole thing. What I do want to write down is something about the Big Data movement and what I think is the killer app for Big Data... Where is this coming from, ok, I confess... I spent 3 days in cloud land at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara and it was quite a lot of fun. One of the nice things at Cloud Connect was that there was a track dedicated to Big Data, which prompted me to some extend to write this post. What is Big Data anyways? The most valuable point made in the Big Data track was that Big Data in itself is not very cool. Doing something with Big Data is what makes all of this cool and interesting to a business user! The other good insight I got was that a lot of people think Big Data means a single gigantic monolithic system holding gazillions of bytes or documents or log files. Well turns out that most people in the Big Data track are talking about a lot of collections of smaller data sets. So rather than thinking "big = monolithic" you should be thinking "big = many data sets". This is more than just theoretical, it is actually relevant when thinking about big data and how to process it. It is important because it means that the platform that stores data will most likely consist out of multiple solutions. You may be storing logs on something like HDFS, you may store your customer information in Oracle and you may store distilled clickstream information in some distilled form in MySQL. The big question you will need to solve is not what lives where, but how to get it all together and get some value out of all that data. NoSQL and MapReduce Nope, sorry, this is not the killer app... and no I'm not saying this because my business card says Oracle and I'm therefore biased. I think language is important, but as with storage I think pragmatic is better. In other words, some questions can be answered with SQL very efficiently, others can be answered with PERL or TCL others with MR. History should teach us that anyone trying to solve a problem will use any and all tools around. For example, most data warehouses (Big Data 1.0?) get a lot of data in flat files. Everyone then runs a bunch of shell scripts to massage or verify those files and then shoves those files into the database. We've even built shell script support into external tables to allow for this. I think the Big Data projects will do the same. Some people will use MapReduce, although I would argue that things like Cascading are more interesting, some people will use Java. Some data is stored on HDFS making Cascading the way to go, some data is stored in Oracle and SQL does do a good job there. As with storage and with history, be pragmatic and use what fits and neither NoSQL nor MR will be the one and only. Also, a language, while important, does in itself not deliver business value. So while cool it is not a killer app... Vertical Behavioral Analytics This is the killer app! And you are now thinking: "what does that mean?" Let's decompose that heading. First of all, analytics. I would think you had guessed by now that this is really what I'm after, and of course you are right. But not just analytics, which has a very large scope and means many things to many people. I'm not just after Business Intelligence (analytics 1.0?) or data mining (analytics 2.0?) but I'm after something more interesting that you can only do after collecting large volumes of specific data. That all important data is about behavior. What do my customers do? More importantly why do they behave like that? If you can figure that out, you can tailor web sites, stores, products etc. to that behavior and figure out how to be successful. Today's behavior that is somewhat easily tracked is web site clicks, search patterns and all of those things that a web site or web server tracks. that is where the Big Data lives and where these patters are now emerging. Other examples however are emerging, and one of the examples used at the conference was about prediction churn for a telco based on the social network its members are a part of. That social network is not about LinkedIn or Facebook, but about who calls whom. I call you a lot, you switch provider, and I might/will switch too. And that just naturally brings me to the next word, vertical. Vertical in this context means per industry, e.g. communications or retail or government or any other vertical. The reason for being more specific than just behavioral analytics is that each industry has its own data sources, has its own quirky logic and has its own demands and priorities. Of course, the methods and some of the software will be common and some will have both retail and service industry analytics in place (your corner coffee store for example). But the gist of it all is that analytics that can predict customer behavior for a specific focused group of people in a specific industry is what makes Big Data interesting. Building a Vertical Behavioral Analysis System Well, that is going to be interesting. I have not seen much going on in that space and if I had to have some criticism on the cloud connect conference it would be the lack of concrete user cases on big data. The telco example, while a step into the vertical behavioral part is not really on big data. It used a sample of data from the customers' data warehouse. One thing I do think, and this is where I think parts of the NoSQL stuff come from, is that we will be doing this analysis where the data is. Over the past 10 years we at Oracle have called this in-database analytics. I guess we were (too) early? Now the entire market is going there including companies like SAS. In-place btw does not mean "no data movement at all", what it means that you will do this on data's permanent home. For SAS that is kind of the current problem. Most of the inputs live in a data warehouse. So why move it into SAS and back? That all worked with 1 TB data warehouses, but when we are looking at 100TB to 500 TB of distilled data... Comments? As it is still early days with these systems, I'm very interested in seeing reactions and thoughts to some of these thoughts...

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• SharePoint 2010 Replaceable Parameter, some observations…

  - by svdoever

  SharePoint Tools for Visual Studio 2010 provides a rudimentary mechanism for replaceable parameters that you can use in files that are not compiled, like ascx files and your project property settings. The basics on this can be found in the documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee231545.aspx. There are some quirks however. For example: My Package name is MacawMastSP2010Templates, as defined in my Package properties: I want to use the $SharePoint.Package.Name$ replaceable parameter in my feature properties. But this parameter does not work in the “Deployment Path” property, while other parameters work there, while it works in the “Image Url” property. It just does not get expanded. So I had to resort to explicitly naming the first path of the deployment path: : You also see a special property for the “Receiver Class” in the format $SharePoint.Type.<GUID>.FullName$. The documentation gives the following description:The full name of the type matching the GUID in the token. The format of the GUID is lowercase and corresponds to the Guid.ToString(“D”) format (that is, xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx). Not very clear. After some searching it happened to be the guid as declared in my feature receiver code: In other properties you see a different set of replaceable parameters: We use a similar mechanism for replaceable parameter for years in our Macaw Solutions Factory for SharePoint 2007 development, where each replaceable parameter is a PowerShell function. This provides so much more power. For example in a feature declaration we can say: Code Snippet <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <!-- Template expansion      [[ProductDependency]] -> Wss3 or Moss2007      [[FeatureReceiverAssemblySignature]] -> for example: Macaw.Mast.Wss3.Templates.SharePoint.Features, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=6e9d15db2e2a0be5      [[FeatureReceiverClass]] -> for example: Macaw.Mast.Wss3.Templates.SharePoint.Features.SampleFeature.FeatureReceiver.SampleFeatureFeatureReceiver --> <Feature Id="[[$Feature.SampleFeature.ID]]"   Title="MAST [[$MastSolutionName]] Sample Feature"   Description="The MAST [[$MastSolutionName]] Sample Feature, where all possible elements in a feature are showcased"   Version="1.0.0.0"   Scope="Site"   Hidden="FALSE"   ImageUrl="[[FeatureImage]]"   ReceiverAssembly="[[FeatureReceiverAssemblySignature]]"   ReceiverClass="[[FeatureReceiverClass]]"   xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">     <ElementManifests>         <ElementManifest Location="ExampleCustomActions.xml" />         <ElementManifest Location="ExampleSiteColumns.xml" />         <ElementManifest Location="ExampleContentTypes.xml" />         <ElementManifest Location="ExampleDocLib.xml" />         <ElementManifest Location="ExampleMasterPages.xml" />           <!-- Element files -->         [[GenerateXmlNodesForFiles -path 'ExampleDocLib\*.*' -node 'ElementFile' -attributes @{Location = { RelativePathToExpansionSourceFile -path $_ }}]]         [[GenerateXmlNodesForFiles -path 'ExampleMasterPages\*.*' -node 'ElementFile' -attributes @{Location = { RelativePathToExpansionSourceFile -path $_ }}]]         [[GenerateXmlNodesForFiles -path 'Resources\*.resx' -node 'ElementFile' -attributes @{Location = { RelativePathToExpansionSourceFile -path $_ }}]]     </ElementManifests> </Feature> We have a solution level PowerShell script file named TemplateExpansionConfiguration.ps1 where we declare our variables (starting with a $) and include helper functions: Code Snippet # ============================================================================================== # NAME: product:\src\Wss3\Templates\TemplateExpansionConfiguration.ps1 # # AUTHOR: Serge van den Oever, Macaw # DATE  : May 24, 2007 # # COMMENT: # Nota bene: define variable and function definitions global to be visible during template expansion. # # ============================================================================================== Set-PSDebug -strict -trace 0 #variables must have value before usage $global:ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop' # Stop on errors $global:VerbosePreference = 'Continue' # set to SilentlyContinue to get no verbose output   # Load template expansion utility functions . product:\tools\Wss3\MastDeploy\TemplateExpansionUtil.ps1   # If exists add solution expansion utility functions $solutionTemplateExpansionUtilFile = $MastSolutionDir + "\TemplateExpansionUtil.ps1" if ((Test-Path -Path $solutionTemplateExpansionUtilFile)) {     . $solutionTemplateExpansionUtilFile } # ==============================================================================================   # Expected: $Solution.ID; Unique GUID value identifying the solution (DON'T INCLUDE BRACKETS). # function: guid:UpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{...}' ensures correct syntax $global:Solution = @{     ID = GuidUpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{d366ced4-0b98-4fa8-b256-c5a35bcbc98b}'; }   #  DON'T INCLUDE BRACKETS for feature id's!!! # function: GuidUpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{...}' ensures correct syntax $global:Feature = @{     SampleFeature = @{         ID = GuidUpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{35de59f4-0c8e-405e-b760-15234fe6885c}';     } }   $global:SiteDefinition = @{     TemplateBlankSite = @{         ID = '12346';     } }   # To inherit from this content type add the delimiter (00) and then your own guid # ID: <base>00<newguid> $global:ContentType = @{     ExampleContentType = @{         ID = '0x01008e5e167ba2db4bfeb3810c4a7ff72913';     } }   #  INCLUDE BRACKETS for column id's and make them LOWER CASE!!! # function: GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{...}' ensures correct syntax $global:SiteColumn = @{     ExampleChoiceField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{69d38ce4-2771-43b4-a861-f14247885fe9}';     };     ExampleBooleanField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{76f794e6-f7bd-490e-a53e-07efdf967169}';     };     ExampleDateTimeField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{6f176e6e-22d2-453a-8dad-8ab17ac12387}';     };     ExampleNumberField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{6026947f-f102-436b-abfd-fece49495788}';     };     ExampleTextField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{23ca1c29-5ef0-4b3d-93cd-0d1d2b6ddbde}';     };     ExampleUserField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{ee55b9f1-7b7c-4a7e-9892-3e35729bb1a5}';     };     ExampleNoteField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{f9aa8da3-1f30-48a6-a0af-aa0a643d9ed4}';     }; } This gives so much more possibilities, like for example the elements file expansion where a PowerShell function iterates through a folder and generates the required XML nodes. I think I will bring back this mechanism, so it can work together with the built-in replaceable parameters, there are hooks to define you custom replacements as described by Waldek in this blog post.

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• Eine komplette Virtualisierungslandschaft auf dem eigenen Laptop – So geht’s

  - by Manuel Hossfeld

  Eine komplette Virtualisierungslandschaftauf dem eigenen Laptop – So geht’s Wenn man sich mit dem Virtualisierungsprodukt Oracle VM in der aktuellen Version 3.x näher befassen möchte, bietet es sich natürlich an, eine eigene Umgebung zu Lern- und Testzwecken zu installieren. Doch leichter gesagt als getan: Bei näherer Betrachtung der Architektur wird man schnell feststellen, dass mehrere Rechner benötigt werden, um überhaupt alle Komponenten abbilden zu können: Zum einen gilt es, den oder die OVM Server selbst zu installieren. Das ist recht leicht und schnell erledigt, aber da Oracle VM ein „Typ 1 Hypervisor ist“ - also direkt auf dem Rechner („bare metal“) installiert wird – ist der eigenen Arbeits-PC oder Laptop dafür recht ungeeignet. (Eine Dual-Boot Umgebung wäre zwar denkbar, aber recht unpraktisch.) Zum anderen wird auch ein Rechner benötigt, auf dem der OVM Manager installiert wird. Im Gegensatz zum OVM Server erfolgt dessen Installation nicht „bare metal“, sondern auf einem bestehenden Oracle Linux. Aber was tun, wenn man gerade keinen Linux-Server griffbereit hat und auch keine extra Hardware dafür opfern will? Möchte man alle Funktionen von Oracle VM austesten, so sollte man zusätzlich über einen Shared Storag everüfugen. Dieser kann wahlweise über NFS oder über ein SAN (per iSCSI oder FibreChannel) angebunden werden. Zwar braucht man zum Testen nicht zwingend entsprechende „echte“ Storage-Hardware, aber auch die „Simulation“ entsprechender Komponenten erfordert zusätzliche Hardware mit entsprechendem freien Plattenplatz.(Alternativ können auch fertige „Software Storage Appliances“ wie z.B. OpenFiler oder FreeNAS verwendet werden). Angenommen, es stehen tatsächlich keine „echte“ Server- und Storage Hardware zur Verfügung, so benötigt man für die oben genannten drei Punkte  drei bzw. vier Rechner (PCs, Laptops...) - je nachdem ob man einen oder zwei OVM Server starten möchte. Erfreulicherweise geht es aber auch mit deutlich weniger Aufwand: Wie bereits kurz im Blogpost anlässlich des letzten OVM-Releases 3.1.1 beschrieben, ist die aktuelle Version in der Lage, selbst vollständig innerhalb von VirtualBox als Gast zu laufen. Wer bei dieser „doppelten Virtualisierung“ nun an das Prinzip der russischen Matroschka-Puppen denkt, liegt genau richtig. Oracle VM VirtualBox stellt dabei gewissermaßen die äußere Hülle dar – und da es sich bei VirtualBox im Gegensatz zu Oracle VM Server um einen „Typ 2 Hypervisor“ handelt, funktioniert dieser Ansatz auch auf einem „normalen“ Arbeits-PC bzw. Laptop, ohne dessen eigentliche Betriebsystem komplett zu überschreiben. Doch das beste dabei ist: Die Installation der jeweiligen VirtualBox VMs muss man nicht selber durchführen. Der OVM Manager als auch der OVM Server stehen bereits als vorgefertigte „VirtualBox Appliances“ im Oracle Technology Network zum Download zur Verfügung und müssen im Grunde nur noch importiert und konfiguriert werden. Das folgende Schaubild verdeutlicht das Prinzip: Die dunkelgrünen Bereiche stellen jeweils Instanzen der eben erwähnten VirtualBox Appliances für OVM Server und OVM Manager dar. (Hier im Bild sind zwei OVM Server zu sehen, als Minimum würde natürlich auch einer genügen. Dann können aber viele Features wie z.B. OVM HA nicht ausprobieren werden.) Als cleveren Trick zur Einsparung einer weiteren VM für Storage-Zwecke hat Wim Coekaerts (Senior Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering bei Oracle), der „Erbauer“ der VirtualBox Appliances, die OVM Manager Appliance bereits so vorbereitet, dass diese gleichzeitig als NFS-Share (oder ggf. sogar als iSCSI Target) dienen kann. Dies beschreibt er auch kurz auf seinem Blog. Die hellgrünen Ovale stellen die VMs dar, welche dann innerhalb einer der virtualisierten OVM Server laufen können. Aufgrund der Tatsache, dass durch diese „doppelte Virtualisierung“ die Fähigkeit zur Hardware-Virtualisierung verloren geht, können diese „Nutz-VMs“ demzufolge nur paravirtualisiert sein (PVM). Die hier in blau eingezeichneten Netzwerk-Schnittstellen sind virtuelle Interfaces, welche beliebig innerhalb von VirtualBox eingerichtet werden können. Wer die verschiedenen Netzwerk-Rollen innerhalb von Oracle VM im Detail ausprobieren will, kann hier natürlich auch mehr als zwei dieser Interfaces konfigurieren. Die Vorteile dieser Lösung für Test- und Demozwecke liegen auf der Hand: Mit lediglich einem PC bzw. Laptop auf dem VirtualBox installiert ist, können alle oben genannten Komponenten installiert und genutzt werden – genügend RAM vorausgesetzt. Als Minimum darf hier 8GB gelten. Soll auf der „Host-Umgebung“ (also dem PC auf dem VirtualBox läuft) nebenbei noch gearbeiten werden und/oder mehrere „Nutz-VMs“ in dieser simulierten OVM-Server-Umgebung laufen, empfehlen sich natürlich eher 16GB oder mehr. Da die nötigen Schritte zum Installieren und initialen Konfigurieren der Umgebung ausführlich in einem entsprechenden Paper beschrieben sind, möchte ich im Rest dieses Artikels noch einige zusätzliche Tipps und Details erwähnen, welche einem das Leben etwas leichter machen können: Um möglichst entstpannt und mit zusätzlichen „Sicherheitsnetz“ an die Konfiguration der Umgebung herangehen zu können, empfiehlt es sich, ausgiebigen Gebrauch von der in VirtualBox eingebauten Funktionalität der VM Snapshots zu machen. Dies ermöglicht nicht nur ein Zurücksetzen falls einmal etwas schiefgehen sollte, sondern auch ein beliebiges Wiederholen von bereits absolvierten Teilschritten (z.B. um eine andere Idee oder Variante der Umgebung auszuprobieren). Sowohl bei den gerade erwähnten Snapshots als auch bei den VMs selbst sollte man aussagekräftige Namen verwenden. So ist sichergestellt, dass man nicht durcheinander kommt und auch nach ein paar Wochen noch weiß, welche Umgebung man da eigentlich vor sich hat. Dies beinhaltet auch die genaue Versions- und Buildnr. des jeweiligen OVM-Releases. (Siehe dazu auch folgenden Screenshot.) Weitere Informationen und Details zum aktuellen Zustand sowie Zweck der jeweiligen VMs kann in dem oft übersehenen Beschreibungsfeld hinterlegt werden. Es empfiehlt sich, bereits VOR der Installation einen Notizzettel (oder eine Textdatei) mit den geplanten IP-Adressen und Namen für die VMs zu erstellen. (Nicht vergessen: Auch der Server Pool benötigt eine eigene IP.) Dabei sollte man auch nochmal die tatsächlichen Netzwerke der zu verwendenden Virtualbox-Interfaces prüfen und notieren. Achtung: Es gibt im Rahmen der Installation einige Passworte, die vom Nutzer gesetzt werden können – und solche, die zunächst fest eingestellt sind. Zu letzterem gehört das Passwort für den ovs-agent sowie den root-User auf den OVM Servern, welche beide per Default „ovsroot“ lauten. (Alle weiteren Passwort-Informationen sind in dem „Read me first“ Dokument zu finden, welches auf dem Desktop der OVM Manager VM liegt.) Aufpassen muss man ggf. auch in der initialen „Interview-Phase“ welche die VirtualBox VMs durchlaufen, nachdem sie das erste mal gebootet werden. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt ist nämlich auf jeden Fall noch die amerikanische Tastaturbelegung aktiv, so dass man z.B. besser kein „y“ und „z“ in seinem selbst gewählten Passwort verwendet. Aufgrund der Tatsache, dass wie oben erwähnt der OVM Manager auch gleichzeitig den Shared Storage bereitstellt, sollte darauf geachtet werden, dass dessen VM vor den OVM Server VMs gestartet wird. (Andernfalls „findet“ der dem OVM Server Pool zugrundeliegende Cluster sein sog. „Server Pool File System“ nicht.)

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• SQL SERVER – 5 Tips for Improving Your Data with expressor Studio

  - by pinaldave

  It’s no secret that bad data leads to bad decisions and poor results.  However, how do you prevent dirty data from taking up residency in your data store?  Some might argue that it’s the responsibility of the person sending you the data.  While that may be true, in practice that will rarely hold up.  It doesn’t matter how many times you ask, you will get the data however they decide to provide it. So now you have bad data.  What constitutes bad data?  There are quite a few valid answers, for example: Invalid date values Inappropriate characters Wrong data Values that exceed a pre-set threshold While it is certainly possible to write your own scripts and custom SQL to identify and deal with these data anomalies, that effort often takes too long and becomes difficult to maintain.  Instead, leveraging an ETL tool like expressor Studio makes the data cleansing process much easier and faster.  Below are some tips for leveraging expressor to get your data into tip-top shape. Tip 1:     Build reusable data objects with embedded cleansing rules One of the new features in expressor Studio 3.2 is the ability to define constraints at the metadata level.  Using expressor’s concept of Semantic Types, you can define reusable data objects that have embedded logic such as constraints for dealing with dirty data.  Once defined, they can be saved as a shared atomic type and then re-applied to other data attributes in other schemas. As you can see in the figure above, I’ve defined a constraint on zip code.  I can then save the constraint rules I defined for zip code as a shared atomic type called zip_type for example.   The next time I get a different data source with a schema that also contains a zip code field, I can simply apply the shared atomic type (shown below) and the previously defined constraints will be automatically applied. Tip 2:     Unlock the power of regular expressions in Semantic Types Another powerful feature introduced in expressor Studio 3.2 is the option to use regular expressions as a constraint.   A regular expression is used to identify patterns within data.   The patterns could be something as simple as a date format or something much more complex such as a street address.  For example, I could define that a valid IP address should be made up of 4 numbers, each 0 to 255, and separated by a period.  So 192.168.23.123 might be a valid IP address whereas 888.777.0.123 would not be.   How can I account for this using regular expressions? A very simple regular expression that would look for any 4 sets of 3 digits separated by a period would be:  ^[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}$ Alternatively, the following would be the exact check for truly valid IP addresses as we had defined above:  ^(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])$ .  In expressor, we would enter this regular expression as a constraint like this: Here we select the corrective action to be ‘Escalate’, meaning that the expressor Dataflow operator will decide what to do.  Some of the options include rejecting the offending record, skipping it, or aborting the dataflow. Tip 3:     Email pattern expressions that might come in handy In the example schema that I am using, there’s a field for email.  Email addresses are often entered incorrectly because people are trying to avoid spam.  While there are a lot of different ways to define what constitutes a valid email address, a quick search online yields a couple of really useful regular expressions for validating email addresses: This one is short and sweet:  \b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b (Source: http://www.regular-expressions.info/) This one is more specific about which characters are allowed:  ^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)$ (Source: http://regexlib.com/REDetails.aspx?regexp_id=26 ) Tip 4:     Reject “dirty data” for analysis or further processing Yet another feature introduced in expressor Studio 3.2 is the ability to reject records based on constraint violations.  To capture reject records on input, simply specify Reject Record in the Error Handling setting for the Read File operator.  Then attach a Write File operator to the reject port of the Read File operator as such: Next, in the Write File operator, you can configure the expressor operator in a similar way to the Read File.  The key difference would be that the schema needs to be derived from the upstream operator as shown below: Once configured, expressor will output rejected records to the file you specified.  In addition to the rejected records, expressor also captures some diagnostic information that will be helpful towards identifying why the record was rejected.  This makes diagnosing errors much easier! Tip 5:    Use a Filter or Transform after the initial cleansing to finish the job Sometimes you may want to predicate the data cleansing on a more complex set of conditions.  For example, I may only be interested in processing data containing males over the age of 25 in certain zip codes.  Using an expressor Filter operator, you can define the conditional logic which isolates the records of importance away from the others. Alternatively, the expressor Transform operator can be used to alter the input value via a user defined algorithm or transformation.  It also supports the use of conditional logic and data can be rejected based on constraint violations. However, the best tip I can leave you with is to not constrain your solution design approach – expressor operators can be combined in many different ways to achieve the desired results.  For example, in the expressor Dataflow below, I can post-process the reject data from the Filter which did not meet my pre-defined criteria and, if successful, Funnel it back into the flow so that it gets written to the target table. I continue to be impressed that expressor offers all this functionality as part of their FREE expressor Studio desktop ETL tool, which you can download from here.  Their Studio ETL tool is absolutely free and they are very open about saying that if you want to deploy their software on a dedicated Windows Server, you need to purchase their server software, whose pricing is posted on their website. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Customize Team Build 2010 – Part 13: Get control over the Build Output

  In the series the following parts have been published Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Create your own activity Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion Part 6: Use custom type for an argument Part 7: How is the custom assembly found Part 8: Send information to the build log Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials) Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template Part 12: How to debug my custom activities Part 13: Get control over the Build Output Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application In the part 8, I have explained how you can add informational messages, warnings or errors to the build output. If you want to integrate with other lines of text to the build output, you need to do more. This post will show you how you can add extra steps, additional information and hyperlinks to the build output. UPDATE 13-12-2010: Thanks to Jason Pricket, it is now also possible to not show every activity in the build log. This is really useful when you are doing for-loops in your template. To see how you can do that, check out Jason's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jpricket/archive/2010/12/09/tfs-2010-making-your-build-log-less-noisy.aspx Add an hyperlink to the end of the build output Lets start with a simple example of how you can adjust the build output. In this case we are going to add at the end of the build output an hyperlink where a user can click on to for example start the deployment to the test environment. In part 4 you can find information how you can create a custom activity To add information to the build output, you need the BuildDetail. This value is a variable in your xaml and is thus easily transferable to you custom activity. Besides the BuildDetail the user has also to specify the text and the url that has to be added to the end of the build output. The following code segment shows you how you can achieve this.     [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.All)]    public sealed class AddHyperlinkToBuildOutput : CodeActivity    {        [RequiredArgument]        public InArgument<IBuildDetail> BuildDetail { get; set; }         [RequiredArgument]        public InArgument<string> DisplayText { get; set; }         [RequiredArgument]        public InArgument<string> Url { get; set; }         protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context)        {            // Obtain the runtime value of the input arguments                        IBuildDetail buildDetail = context.GetValue(this.BuildDetail);            string displayText = context.GetValue(this.DisplayText);            string url = context.GetValue(this.Url);             // Add the hyperlink            buildDetail.Information.AddExternalLink(displayText, new Uri(url));            buildDetail.Information.Save();        }    } If you add this activity to somewhere in your build process template (within the scope Run on Agent), you will get the following build output Add an line of text to the build output The next challenge is to add this kind of output not only to the end of the build output but at the step that is currently executing. To be able to do this, you need the current node in the build output. The following code shows you how you can achieve this. First you need to get the current activity tracking, which you can get with the following line of code             IActivityTracking currentTracking = context.GetExtension<IBuildLoggingExtension>().GetActivityTracking(context); Then you can create a new node and set its type to Activity Tracking Node (so copy it from the current node) and do nice things with the node.             IBuildInformationNode childNode = currentTracking.Node.Children.CreateNode();            childNode.Type = currentTracking.Node.Type;            childNode.Fields.Add("DisplayText", "This text is displayed."); You can also add a build step to display progress             IBuildStep buildStep = childNode.Children.AddBuildStep("Custom Build Step", "This is my custom build step");            buildStep.FinishTime = DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(10);            buildStep.Status = BuildStepStatus.Succeeded; Or you can add an hyperlink to the node             childNode.Children.AddExternalLink("My link", new Uri(http://www.ewaldhofman.nl)); When you combine this together you get the following result in the build output   You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.

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• SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Architecting Data Warehouse – Niraj Bhatt

  - by pinaldave

  Niraj Bhatt works as an Enterprise Architect for a Fortune 500 company and has an innate passion for building / studying software systems. He is a top rated speaker at various technical forums including Tech·Ed, MCT Summit, Developer Summit, and Virtual Tech Days, among others. Having run a successful startup for four years Niraj enjoys working on – IT innovations that can impact an enterprise bottom line, streamlining IT budgets through IT consolidation, architecture and integration of systems, performance tuning, and review of enterprise applications. He has received Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET, Connected Systems and most recently on Windows Azure. When he is away from his laptop, you will find him taking deep dives in automobiles, pottery, rafting, photography, cooking and financial statements though not necessarily in that order. He is also a manager/speaker at BDOTNET, Asia’s largest .NET user group. Here is the guest post by Niraj Bhatt. As data in your applications grows it’s the database that usually becomes a bottleneck. It’s hard to scale a relational DB and the preferred approach for large scale applications is to create separate databases for writes and reads. These databases are referred as transactional database and reporting database. Though there are tools / techniques which can allow you to create snapshot of your transactional database for reporting purpose, sometimes they don’t quite fit the reporting requirements of an enterprise. These requirements typically are data analytics, effective schema (for an Information worker to self-service herself), historical data, better performance (flat data, no joins) etc. This is where a need for data warehouse or an OLAP system arises. A Key point to remember is a data warehouse is mostly a relational database. It’s built on top of same concepts like Tables, Rows, Columns, Primary keys, Foreign Keys, etc. Before we talk about how data warehouses are typically structured let’s understand key components that can create a data flow between OLTP systems and OLAP systems. There are 3 major areas to it: a) OLTP system should be capable of tracking its changes as all these changes should go back to data warehouse for historical recording. For e.g. if an OLTP transaction moves a customer from silver to gold category, OLTP system needs to ensure that this change is tracked and send to data warehouse for reporting purpose. A report in context could be how many customers divided by geographies moved from sliver to gold category. In data warehouse terminology this process is called Change Data Capture. There are quite a few systems that leverage database triggers to move these changes to corresponding tracking tables. There are also out of box features provided by some databases e.g. SQL Server 2008 offers Change Data Capture and Change Tracking for addressing such requirements. b) After we make the OLTP system capable of tracking its changes we need to provision a batch process that can run periodically and takes these changes from OLTP system and dump them into data warehouse. There are many tools out there that can help you fill this gap – SQL Server Integration Services happens to be one of them. c) So we have an OLTP system that knows how to track its changes, we have jobs that run periodically to move these changes to warehouse. The question though remains is how warehouse will record these changes? This structural change in data warehouse arena is often covered under something called Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD). While we will talk about dimensions in a while, SCD can be applied to pure relational tables too. SCD enables a database structure to capture historical data. This would create multiple records for a given entity in relational database and data warehouses prefer having their own primary key, often known as surrogate key. As I mentioned a data warehouse is just a relational database but industry often attributes a specific schema style to data warehouses. These styles are Star Schema or Snowflake Schema. The motivation behind these styles is to create a flat database structure (as opposed to normalized one), which is easy to understand / use, easy to query and easy to slice / dice. Star schema is a database structure made up of dimensions and facts. Facts are generally the numbers (sales, quantity, etc.) that you want to slice and dice. Fact tables have these numbers and have references (foreign keys) to set of tables that provide context around those facts. E.g. if you have recorded 10,000 USD as sales that number would go in a sales fact table and could have foreign keys attached to it that refers to the sales agent responsible for sale and to time table which contains the dates between which that sale was made. These agent and time tables are called dimensions which provide context to the numbers stored in fact tables. This schema structure of fact being at center surrounded by dimensions is called Star schema. A similar structure with difference of dimension tables being normalized is called a Snowflake schema. This relational structure of facts and dimensions serves as an input for another analysis structure called Cube. Though physically Cube is a special structure supported by commercial databases like SQL Server Analysis Services, logically it’s a multidimensional structure where dimensions define the sides of cube and facts define the content. Facts are often called as Measures inside a cube. Dimensions often tend to form a hierarchy. E.g. Product may be broken into categories and categories in turn to individual items. Category and Items are often referred as Levels and their constituents as Members with their overall structure called as Hierarchy. Measures are rolled up as per dimensional hierarchy. These rolled up measures are called Aggregates. Now this may seem like an overwhelming vocabulary to deal with but don’t worry it will sink in as you start working with Cubes and others. Let’s see few other terms that we would run into while talking about data warehouses. ODS or an Operational Data Store is a frequently misused term. There would be few users in your organization that want to report on most current data and can’t afford to miss a single transaction for their report. Then there is another set of users that typically don’t care how current the data is. Mostly senior level executives who are interesting in trending, mining, forecasting, strategizing, etc. don’t care for that one specific transaction. This is where an ODS can come in handy. ODS can use the same star schema and the OLAP cubes we saw earlier. The only difference is that the data inside an ODS would be short lived, i.e. for few months and ODS would sync with OLTP system every few minutes. Data warehouse can periodically sync with ODS either daily or weekly depending on business drivers. Data marts are another frequently talked about topic in data warehousing. They are subject-specific data warehouse. Data warehouses that try to span over an enterprise are normally too big to scope, build, manage, track, etc. Hence they are often scaled down to something called Data mart that supports a specific segment of business like sales, marketing, or support. Data marts too, are often designed using star schema model discussed earlier. Industry is divided when it comes to use of data marts. Some experts prefer having data marts along with a central data warehouse. Data warehouse here acts as information staging and distribution hub with spokes being data marts connected via data feeds serving summarized data. Others eliminate the need for a centralized data warehouse citing that most users want to report on detailed data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Company Review: Google Products

  Google, Inc offers an array of products and services to all of its end-users. However their search capabilities are the foundation for Google’s current success and their primary business focus. Currently, Google offers over twenty different search applications that allow users to search the internet for books, maps, videos, images, products and much more. Their product decisions have allowed users demands to be met while focusing on the free based model. This allows users to access Google data free of charge and indirectly gives Google a strong competitive advantage of other competitors along with the accuracy of the search results. According to Google, Inc, they offer the following types of searching capabilities: Alerts Get email updates on the topics of your choice Blog Search Find blogs on your favorite topics  Books Search the full text of books  Custom Search Create a customized search experience for your community  Desktop Search and personalize your computer  Dictionary Search for definitions of words and phrases Directory Search the web, organized by topic or category Earth Explore the world from your computer Finance Business info, news and interactive charts GOOG-411 Find and connect for free with businesses from your phone  Images Search for images on the web Maps View maps and directions News Search thousands of news stories Patent Search Search the full text of US Patents Product Search Search for stuff to buy Scholar Search scholarly papers Toolbar Add a search box to your browser Trends Explore past and present search trends Videos Search for videos on the web Web Search Search billions of web pages Web Search Features Find movies, music, stocks, books and more mapping Google’s free based business model is only one way it differentiates itself from its competition. There is also a strong focus on the accuracy of search results and the speed in which they are returned to the end-user. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a structured method used to help connect user needs to the design features of a project proposed to address those needs. This method is particularly useful in accounting for needs that are not easily articulated or precisely defined according to the U. S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration. Due to the fact that QFD is so customer driven Google is always in a constant state of change in attempt to reengineer its search algorithms, and other dependant systems so that end-users requirements are constantly being met. Value engineering is a key example of this, Google is constantly trying to improve all aspects of its products, improve system maintainability, and system interoperability. Bridgefield Group defines value engineering as an organized methodology that identifies and selects the lowest lifecycle cost options in design, materials and processes that achieves the desired level of performance, reliability and customer satisfaction. In addition, it seeks to remove unnecessary costs in the above areas and is often a joint effort with cross-functional internal teams and relevant suppliers. Common issues that appear when developing large scale systems like Google’s search applications include modular design of a product and/or service and providing accurate value analysis. A design approach that adheres to four fundamental tenets of cohesiveness, encapsulation, self-containment, and high binding to design a system component as an independently operable unit subject to change is how the Open System Joint Task Force defines modular design. More specifically M. S. Schmaltz defines modular software design as having a large collection of statements strung together in one partition of in-line code; we segment or divide the statements into logical groups called modules. Each module performs one or two tasks, and then passes control to another module. By breaking up the code into "bite-sized chunks", so to speak, we are able to better control the flow of data and control. This is especially true in large software systems. Value analysis is a process to evaluate products and services based on effectiveness, safety, and cost. Value analysis involves assessing the quality as well as the cost of a product or service as defined by the Healthcare Financial Management Association.  “Operations Management deals with the design and management of products, processes, services and supply chains. It considers the acquisition, development, and utilization of resources that firms need to deliver the goods and services their clients want.” (MIT,2010) Google, Inc encourages an open environment between all employees, also known as Googlers. This is reinforced by a cross-section team or cross-functional teams comprised from multiple departments assigned to every project so that every department like marketing, finance, and quality assurance has input on every project. In addition, Google is known for their openness to new ideas regardless of the status or seniority of an employee. In fact, Google allows for 20% of an employee’s time can be devoted to developing new ideas and/or pet projects. HumTech.com defines a cross-functional team as a collection of people with varied levels of skills and experience brought together to accomplish a task. As the name implies, Cross-Functional Team members come from different organizational units. Cross-Functional Teams may be permanent or ad hoc. Google’s search application product strategy primarily focuses on mass customization. This is allows Google to create a base search application and allows results to be returned to the end-users quickly based on specific parameters and search settings. In addition, they also store the data that is returned in case other desire the same results based on other end-users supplying the same customized settings. This allows Google to appear to render search results in virtually real-time to the user while allowing for complete customization of the searching criteria. Greg Vogl, a professor at Uganda Martyrs University, defines mass customization as when a business gives its customers the opportunity to tailor its products or services to the customer's specifications. The IT staff at Google play a key role in ensuring that the search application’s product strategy is maintained simply because the IT staff designs, develops, and maintains all of their proprietary applications. In fact, they also maintain all network infrastructure to ensure that it is available to all end-users. References: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/publications/ftat_user_guide/sec5.htm http://www.bridgefieldgroup.com/bridgefieldgroup/glos9.htm#V http://www.acq.osd.mil/osjtf/termsdef.html http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~mssz/Pascal-CGS2462/prog-dsn.html http://www.hfma.org/publications/business_caring_newsletter/exclusives/Supply+and+Inventory+Terms+Defined.htm http://mitsloan.mit.edu/omg/om-definition.php http://www.humtech.com/opm/grtl/ols/ols3.cfm http://www.gregvogl.net/courses/mis1/glossary.htm

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• New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output in ASP.NET 4 (and ASP.NET MVC 2)

  - by ScottGu

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] This is the nineteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post covers a small, but very useful, new syntax feature being introduced with ASP.NET 4 – which is the ability to automatically HTML encode output within code nuggets.  This helps protect your applications and sites against cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML injection attacks, and enables you to do so using a nice concise syntax. HTML Encoding Cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML encoding attacks are two of the most common security issues that plague web-sites and applications.  They occur when hackers find a way to inject client-side script or HTML markup into web-pages that are then viewed by other visitors to a site.  This can be used to both vandalize a site, as well as enable hackers to run client-script code that steals cookie data and/or exploits a user’s identity on a site to do bad things. One way to help mitigate against cross-site scripting attacks is to make sure that rendered output is HTML encoded within a page.  This helps ensures that any content that might have been input/modified by an end-user cannot be output back onto a page containing tags like <script> or <img> elements.  ASP.NET applications (especially those using ASP.NET MVC) often rely on using <%= %> code-nugget expressions to render output.  Developers today often use the Server.HtmlEncode() or HttpUtility.Encode() helper methods within these expressions to HTML encode the output before it is rendered.  This can be done using code like below: While this works fine, there are two downsides of it: It is a little verbose Developers often forget to call the HtmlEncode method New <%: %> Code Nugget Syntax With ASP.NET 4 we are introducing a new code expression syntax (<%:  %>) that renders output like <%= %> blocks do – but which also automatically HTML encodes it before doing so.  This eliminates the need to explicitly HTML encode content like we did in the example above.  Instead you can just write the more concise code below to accomplish the same thing: We chose the <%: %> syntax so that it would be easy to quickly replace existing instances of <%= %> code blocks.  It also enables you to easily search your code-base for <%= %> elements to find and verify any cases where you are not using HTML encoding within your application to ensure that you have the correct behavior. Avoiding Double Encoding While HTML encoding content is often a good best practice, there are times when the content you are outputting is meant to be HTML or is already encoded – in which case you don’t want to HTML encode it again.  ASP.NET 4 introduces a new IHtmlString interface (along with a concrete implementation: HtmlString) that you can implement on types to indicate that its value is already properly encoded (or otherwise examined) for displaying as HTML, and that therefore the value should not be HTML-encoded again.  The <%: %> code-nugget syntax checks for the presence of the IHtmlString interface and will not HTML encode the output of the code expression if its value implements this interface.  This allows developers to avoid having to decide on a per-case basis whether to use <%= %> or <%: %> code-nuggets.  Instead you can always use <%: %> code nuggets, and then have any properties or data-types that are already HTML encoded implement the IHtmlString interface. Using ASP.NET MVC HTML Helper Methods with <%: %> For a practical example of where this HTML encoding escape mechanism is useful, consider scenarios where you use HTML helper methods with ASP.NET MVC.  These helper methods typically return HTML.  For example: the Html.TextBox() helper method returns markup like <input type=”text”/>.  With ASP.NET MVC 2 these helper methods now by default return HtmlString types – which indicates that the returned string content is safe for rendering and should not be encoded by <%: %> nuggets.  This allows you to use these methods within both <%= %> code nugget blocks: As well as within <%: %> code nugget blocks: In both cases above the HTML content returned from the helper method will be rendered to the client as HTML – and the <%: %> code nugget will avoid double-encoding it. This enables you to default to always using <%: %> code nuggets instead of <%= %> code blocks within your applications.  If you want to be really hardcore you can even create a build rule that searches your application looking for <%= %> usages and flags any cases it finds as an error to enforce that HTML encoding always takes place. Scaffolding ASP.NET MVC 2 Views When you use VS 2010 (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express) you’ll find that the views that are scaffolded using the “Add View” dialog now by default always use <%: %> blocks when outputting any content.  For example, below I’ve scaffolded a simple “Edit” view for an article object.  Note the three usages of <%: %> code nuggets for the label, textbox, and validation message (all output with HTML helper methods): Summary The new <%: %> syntax provides a concise way to automatically HTML encode content and then render it as output.  It allows you to make your code a little less verbose, and to easily check/verify that you are always HTML encoding content throughout your site.  This can help protect your applications against cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML injection attacks.  Hope this helps, Scott

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• SQL Monitor’s data repository

  - by Chris Lambrou

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

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

  - by Pinal Dave

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

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• Highlight Row in GridView with Colored Columns

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  I wrote a blog post a while back before here that demonstrate how to highlight a GridView row on mouseover and as you can see its very easy to highlight rows in GridView. One of my colleague uses the same technique for implemeting gridview row highlighting but the problem is that if a Column has background color on it that cell will not be highlighted anymore. To make it more clear then let's build up a sample application. ASPX:   1: <asp:GridView runat="server" id="GridView1" onrowcreated="GridView1_RowCreated" 2: onrowdatabound="GridView1_RowDataBound"> 3: </asp:GridView>   CODE BEHIND:   1: private DataTable FillData() { 2:   3: DataTable dt = new DataTable(); 4: DataRow dr = null; 5:   6: //Create DataTable columns 7: dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("RowNumber", typeof(string))); 8: dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col1", typeof(string))); 9: dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col2", typeof(string))); 10: dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Col3", typeof(string))); 11:   12: //Create Row for each columns 13: dr = dt.NewRow(); 14: dr["RowNumber"] = 1; 15: dr["Col1"] = "A"; 16: dr["Col2"] = "B"; 17: dr["Col3"] = "C"; 18: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 19:   20: dr = dt.NewRow(); 21: dr["RowNumber"] = 2; 22: dr["Col1"] = "AA"; 23: dr["Col2"] = "BB"; 24: dr["Col3"] = "CC"; 25: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 26:   27: dr = dt.NewRow(); 28: dr["RowNumber"] = 3; 29: dr["Col1"] = "A"; 30: dr["Col2"] = "B"; 31: dr["Col3"] = "CC"; 32: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 33:   34: dr = dt.NewRow(); 35: dr["RowNumber"] = 4; 36: dr["Col1"] = "A"; 37: dr["Col2"] = "B"; 38: dr["Col3"] = "CC"; 39: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 40:   41: dr = dt.NewRow(); 42: dr["RowNumber"] = 5; 43: dr["Col1"] = "A"; 44: dr["Col2"] = "B"; 45: dr["Col3"] = "CC"; 46: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 47:   48: return dt; 49: } 50:   51: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { 52: if (!IsPostBack) { 53: GridView1.DataSource = FillData(); 54: GridView1.DataBind(); 55: } 56: }   As you can see there's nothing fancy in the code above. It just contain a method that fills a DataTable with a dummy data on it. Now here's the code for row highlighting:   1: protected void GridView1_RowCreated(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { 2: //Set Background Color for Columns 1 and 3 3: e.Row.Cells[1].BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Beige; 4: e.Row.Cells[3].BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red; 5:   6: //Attach onmouseover and onmouseout for row highlighting 7: e.Row.Attributes.Add("onmouseover", "this.style.backgroundColor='Blue'"); 8: e.Row.Attributes.Add("onmouseout", "this.style.backgroundColor=''"); 9: }   Running the code above will show something like this in the browser: On initial load: On mouseover of GridView row:   Noticed that Col1 and Col3 are not highlighted. Why? the reason is that Col1 and Col3 cells has background color set on it and we only highlight the rows (TR) and not the columns (TD) that's why on mouseover only the rows will be highlighted. To fix the issue we will create a javascript method that would remove the background color of the columns when highlighting a row and on mouseout set back the original color that is set on Col1 and Col3. Here are the codes below: JavaScript   1: <script type="text/javascript"> 2: function HighLightRow(rowIndex, colIndex,colIndex2, flag) { 3: var gv = document.getElementById("<%= GridView1.ClientID %>"); 4: var selRow = gv.rows[rowIndex]; 5: if (rowIndex > 0) { 6: if (flag == "sel") { 7: gv.rows[rowIndex].style.backgroundColor = 'Blue'; 8: gv.rows[rowIndex].style.color = "White"; 9: gv.rows[rowIndex].cells[colIndex].style.backgroundColor = ''; 10: gv.rows[rowIndex].cells[colIndex2].style.backgroundColor = ''; 11: } 12: else { 13: gv.rows[rowIndex].style.backgroundColor = ''; 14: gv.rows[rowIndex].style.color = "Black"; 15: gv.rows[rowIndex].cells[colIndex].style.backgroundColor = 'Beige'; 16: gv.rows[rowIndex].cells[colIndex2].style.backgroundColor = 'Red'; 17: } 18: } 19: } 20: </script>   The HighLightRow method is a javascript function that accepts four (4) parameters which are the rowIndex,colIndex,colIndex2 and the flag. The rowIndex is the current row index of the selected row in GridView. The colIndex is the index of Col1 and colIndex2 is the index of col3. We are passing these index because these columns has background color on it and we need to toggle its backgroundcolor when highlighting the row in GridView. Finally the flag is something that would determine if its selected or not. Now here's the code for calling the JavaScript function above.     1: protected void GridView1_RowCreated(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { 2:   3: //Set Background Color for Columns 1 and 3 4: e.Row.Cells[1].BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Beige; 5: e.Row.Cells[3].BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red; 6:   7: //Attach onmouseover and onmouseout for row highlighting 8: //and call the HighLightRow method with the required parameters 9: int index = e.Row.RowIndex + 1; 10: e.Row.Attributes.Add("onmouseover", "HighLightRow(" + index + "," + 1 + "," + 3 + ",'sel')"); 11: e.Row.Attributes.Add("onmouseout", "HighLightRow(" + index + "," + 1 + "," + 3 + ",'dsel')"); 12: 13: }   Running the code above will display something like this: On initial load:   On mouseover of GridView row:   That's it! I hope someone find this post useful!

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• Robotic Arm &ndash; Hardware

  - by Szymon Kobalczyk

  This is first in series of articles about project I've been building  in my spare time since last Summer. Actually it all began when I was researching a topic of modeling human motion kinematics in order to create gesture recognition library for Kinect. This ties heavily into motion theory of robotic manipulators so I also glanced at some designs of robotic arms. Somehow I stumbled upon this cool looking open source robotic arm: It was featured on Thingiverse and published by user jjshortcut (Jan-Jaap). Since for some time I got hooked on toying with microcontrollers, robots and other electronics, I decided to give it a try and build it myself. In this post I will describe the hardware build of the arm and in later posts I will be writing about the software to control it. Another reason to build the arm myself was the cost factor. Even small commercial robotic arms are quite expensive – products from Lynxmotion and Dagu look great but both cost around USD $300 (actually there is one cheap arm available but it looks more like a toy to me). In comparison this design is quite cheap. It uses seven hobby grade servos and even the cheapest ones should work fine. The structure is build from a set of laser cut parts connected with few metal spacers (15mm and 47mm) and lots of M3 screws. Other than that you’d only need a microcontroller board to drive the servos. So in total it comes a lot cheaper to build it yourself than buy an of the shelf robotic arm. Oh, and if you don’t like this one there are few more robotic arm projects at Thingiverse (including one by oomlout). Laser cut parts Some time ago I’ve build another robot using laser cut parts so I knew the process already. You can grab the design files in both DXF and EPS format from Thingiverse, and there are also 3D models of each part in STL. Actually the design is split into a second project for the mini servo gripper (there is also a standard servo version available but it won’t fit this arm).  I wanted to make some small adjustments, layout, and add measurements to the parts before sending it for cutting. I’ve looked at some free 2D CAD programs, and finally did all this work using QCad 3 Beta with worked great for me (I also tried LibreCAD but it didn’t work that well). All parts are cut from 4 mm thick material. Because I was worried that acrylic is too fragile and might break, I also ordered another set cut from plywood. In the end I build it from plywood because it was easier to glue (I was told acrylic requires a special glue). Btw. I found a great laser cutter service in Kraków and highly recommend it (www.ebbox.com.pl). It cost me only USD $26 for both sets ($16 acrylic + $10 plywood). Metal parts I bought all the M3 screws and nuts at local hardware store. Make sure to look for nylon lock (nyloc) nuts for the gripper because otherwise it unscrews and comes apart quickly. I couldn’t find local store with metal spacers and had to order them online (you’d need 11 x 47mm and 3 x 15mm). I think I paid less than USD $10 for all metal parts. Servos This arm uses five standards size servos to drive the arm itself, and two micro servos are used on the gripper. Author of the project used Modelcraft RS-2 Servo and Modelcraft ES-05 HT Servo. I had two Futaba S3001 servos laying around, and ordered additional TowerPro SG-5010 standard size servos and TowerPro SG90 micro servos. However it turned out that the SG90 won’t fit in the gripper so I had to replace it with a slightly smaller E-Sky EK2-0508 micro servo. Later it also turned out that Futaba servos make some strange noise while working so I swapped one with TowerPro SG-5010 which has higher torque (8kg / cm). I’ve also bought three servo extension cables. All servos cost me USD $45. Assembly The build process is not difficult but you need to think carefully about order of assembling it. You can do the base and upper arm first. Because two servos in the base are close together you need to put first with one piece of lower arm already connected before you put the second servo. Then you connect the upper arm and finally put the second piece of lower arm to hold it together. Gripper and base require some gluing so think it through too. Make sure to look closely at all the photos on Thingiverse (also other people copies) and read additional posts on jjshortcust’s blog: My mini servo grippers and completed robotic arm  Multiply the robotic arm and electronics Here is also Rob’s copy cut from aluminum My assembled arm looks like this – I think it turned out really nice: Servo controller board The last piece of hardware I needed was an electronic board that would take command from PC and drive all seven servos. I could probably use Arduino for this task, and in fact there are several Arduino servo shields available (for example from Adafruit or Renbotics).  However one problem is that most support only up to six servos, and second that their accuracy is limited by Arduino’s timer frequency. So instead I looked for dedicated servo controller and found a series of Maestro boards from Pololu. I picked the Pololu Mini Maestro 12-Channel USB Servo Controller. It has many nice features including native USB connection, high resolution pulses (0.25µs) with no jitter, built-in speed and acceleration control, and even scripting capability. Another cool feature is that besides servo control, each channel can be configured as either general input or output. So far I’m using seven channels so I still have five available to connect some sensors (for example distance sensor mounted on gripper might be useful). And last but important factor was that they have SDK in .NET – what more I could wish for! The board itself is very small – half of the size of Tic-Tac box. I picked one for about USD $35 in this store. Perhaps another good alternative would be the Phidgets Advanced Servo 8-Motor – but it is significantly more expensive at USD $87.30. The Maestro Controller Driver and Software package includes Maestro Control Center program with lets you immediately configure the board. For each servo I first figured out their move range and set the min/max limits. I played with setting the speed an acceleration values as well. Big issue for me was that there are two servos that control position of lower arm (shoulder joint), and both have to be moved at the same time. This is where the scripting feature of Pololu board turned out very helpful. I wrote a script that synchronizes position of second servo with first one – so now I only need to move one servo and other will follow automatically. This turned out tricky because I couldn’t find simple offset mapping of the move range for each servo – I had to divide it into several sub-ranges and map each individually. The scripting language is bit assembler-like but gets the job done. And there is even a runtime debugging and stack view available. Altogether I’m very happy with the Pololu Mini Maestro Servo Controller, and with this final piece I completed the build and was able to move my arm from the Meastro Control program.   The total cost of my robotic arm was: $10 laser cut parts $10 metal parts $45 servos $35 servo controller ----------------------- $100 total So here you have all the information about the hardware. In next post I’ll start talking about the software that I wrote in Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4. Stay tuned!

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• Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore

  - by sathya

  Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore Sorry for my delayed post on day 3 because I had to travel from Blore to Chennai So I couldnt write for the past two days. On day 3 as usual we had lot of simultaneous tracks on various sessions. This day I choose the Your Data, Our Platform Track. It had sessions on the following 5 topics :   Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam This was one of the superb sessions i have attended. He explained all the concepts in detail with a demo. The important thing in this is there is something called Data-Tier application project which is newly introduced in this VS2010 with which we can manage all our data along with our application inside our VS itself. We can create DB,Tables,Procs,Views etc. here itself and once we deploy it creates a compressed file called .dacpac which stores all the changes in Table Schema,Created procs, etc. on to that single file which reduces our (developer's) effort in preparing the deployment scripts and giving it to the DBA. It also has some policy configurations which can be managed easily by checking some rules like in outlook. For Ex : IF the SQL Server Version > 10 then deploy else dont. This rule specifies that even if we try to deploy on SQL Server DB with version less than 10 It will not do it. And if we deploy some .dacpac to SQL server production db with the option upgrade DB with this dacpac once everything completes successfully it will say success else it rollsback to the prior version. Even if it gets deployed successfully and later @ a point of time you wish to revert it back to the prior version, you can go ahead and delete the existing dacpac version so that it reverts to the older version of the db changes. And for the good questions that were asked in the session T-Shirts were given. SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M This one too was the best session. The speaker Vinod explained everything very much clearly. This was really useful session and you dont believe, as per my knowledge, in the total 3 days in the TechEd except the Keynote, for this session seats were full (House FULL)  People were even standing out to attend this session. Such a great one it was. The speaker did a deep dive in to the Query Plan section and showed which actually causes the problem. Its all about the thing that we need to understand about the execution of SQL server Queries. We think in a way and SQL Server never executes in that way. We need to understand that first. He also told about there might be two plans generated for a single query at a point of time because of parallel processors in the system. The Key is here in every query. There is something called Estimated Row Count and Actual Row Count in the query plan. If the estimated row count by SQL server tallies with the actual row count your performance will be awesome. He said some tweaks to achieve the same. After this as usual we had lunch SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan This was more of a DBA's session. Am really sorry I was totally blank and I was not interested to attend this session and walked out to attend Migrating to the cloud by Harish Ranganathan (My favorite Speaker) but unfortunately that was some other persons session. There the speaker was telling about how to configure the connection strings in such a way that we can connect to the SQL Azure platform from our VS and also showed us how to deploy the same in to Windows Azure. In between there were lot of technical problems like laptop hang, user locked and he was switching between systems, also i came in the half so i wasnt able to listen that fully. In between, Since I got an MCTS certification they gave me T-Shirt with the lines 'Iam Certified. Are you?' and they asked me to wear that. If we wear that we might get spotted and they would give us some goodies  So on the 3rd day I was wearing that T-Shirt. I got spotted by the person Tarun who was coordinating things about the certification, and he was accompanied with a cameraman and they interviewed me about the certification and I was shown live in the Teched and was seen by 60000 live viewers of the TechEd. I was really happy on that. Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M This was one of the best sessions too in the TechEd. This guy is really amazing. In front of us he crashed a DB and showed how to recover the same in 6 different ways for different no of failures. Showed about Different types of error msgs like : 823,824,825 msdb..suspect_pages DBCC CheckDB (different parameters to it) I am really waiting for his session to get uploaded live in the Teched Website. Here is his contact info If you wish to connect to him : Twitter : @vinodk_sql Website : www.ExtremeExperts.com Blog : http://blogs.sqlxml.org/vinodkumar Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Pinal Dave is a King in SQL and he is a SQL MVP and he is the owner of SQLAuthority.com He took the session on Spatial Databases from the start. Showed about the different types of Spatial : Geometric and Geographic Geometric : x and y axis its a planar surface Geographic : Spherical surface with 3600  as the maximum which is used to represent the geographic points on the earth and easy to draw maps of different kinds. He had a lot of obstacles during his session like rain coming inside the hall, mic wires got bursted due to rain, Videos off on the display screens. In spite of that he asked the audience to come in the front rows and managed to take a good session without ppts and finally we got the displays on and he was showing demos on the same what he explained orally. That was really a fun filled informative session. He gave some books for the persons who asked good questions and answered well for his questions and I got one too  (It was a book on Data Mining - Wrox Publishers) And finally after all these things there was Keynote session for close of the TechEd. and we all assembled in a big hall where Mr.Ashok Soota, a man of age around 70  co-founder of Mindtree was called to give some lecture on his successes. He was explaining about his past and what all companies he switched and for what reasons and what are all his successes and what are all his failures and the learnings of him from his past failures. and his success and failures on his partnerships with the other concern. And there were some questions for him like What is your suggestion on young entrepreneur? How did you learn from past failures? What is reiterating your success? What is your suggestion on partnerships? How to choose partnerships? etc. And they said @ 7.30 Pm there would be a party night, but unfortunately i was not able to attend that because I had to catch my train and before that i had to pack things, so I started @ 7 itself. Thats it about the TechED!!! Stay tuned for further Technology updates.

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