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• Highlights from the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  The Oracle Customer Experience Summit was the first-ever event covering the full breadth of Oracle's CX portfolio -- Marketing, Sales, Commerce, and Service. The purpose of the Summit was to articulate the customer experience imperative and to showcase the suite of Oracle products that can help our customers create the best possible customer experience. This topic has always been a very important one, but now that there are so many alternative companies to do business with and because people have such public ways to voice their displeasure, it's necessary for vendors to have multiple listening posts in place to gauge consumer sentiment. They need to know what is going on in real time and be able to react quickly to turn negative situations into positive ones. Those can then be shared in a social manner to enhance the brand and turn the customer into a repeat customer. The Summit was focused on Oracle's portfolio of products and entirely dedicated to customers who are committed to building great customer experiences within their businesses. Rather than DBAs, the attendees were business people looking to collaborate with other like-minded experts and find out how Oracle can help in terms of technology, best practices, and expertise. The event was at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco as part of Oracle OpenWorld. We had eight hundred people attend, which was great for the first year. Next year, there's no doubt in my mind, we can raise that number to 5,000. Alignment and Logic Oracle's Customer Experience portfolio is made up of a combination of acquired and organic products owned by many people who are new to Oracle. We include homegrown Fusion CRM, as well as RightNow, Inquira, OPA, Vitrue, ATG, Endeca, and many others. The attendees knew of the acquisitions, so naturally they wanted to see how the products all fit together and hear the logic behind the portfolio. To tell them about our alignment, we needed to be aligned. To accomplish that, a cross functional team at Oracle agreed on the messaging so that every single Oracle presenter could cover the big picture before going deep into a product or topic. Talking about the full suite of products in one session produced overflow value for other products. And even though this internal coordination was a huge effort, everyone saw the value for our customers and for our long-term cooperation and success. Keynotes, Workshops, and Tents of Innovation We scored by having Seth Godin as our keynote speaker ? always provocative and popular. The opening keynote was a session orchestrated by Mark Hurd, Anthony Lye, and me. Mark set the stage by giving real-world examples of bad customer experiences, Anthony clearly articulated the business imperative for addressing these experiences, and I brought it all to life by taking the audience around the Customer Lifecycle and showing demos and videos, with partners included at each of the stops around the lifecycle. Brian Curran, a VP for RightNow Product Strategy, presented a session that was in high demand called The Economics of Customer Experience. People loved hearing how to build a business case and justify the cost of building a better customer experience. John Kembel, another VP for RightNow Product Strategy, held a workshop that customers raved about. It was based on the journey mapping methodology he created, which is a way to talk to customers about where they want to make improvements to their customers' experiences. He divided the audience into groups led by facilitators. Each person had the opportunity to engage with experts and peers and construct some real takeaways. The conference hotel was across from Union Square so we used that space to set up Innovation Tents. During the day we served lunch in the tents and partners showed their different innovative ideas. It was very interesting to see all the technologies and advancements. It also gave people a place to mix and mingle and to think about the fringe of where we could all take these ideas. Product Portfolio Plus Thought Leadership Of course there is always room for improvement, but the feedback on the format of the conference was positive. Ninety percent of the sessions had either a partner or a customer teamed with an Oracle presenter. The presentations weren't dry, one-way information dumps, but more interactive. I just followed up with a CEO who attended the conference with his Head of Marketing. He told me that they are using John Kembel's journey mapping methodology across the organization to pull people together. This sort of thought leadership in these highly competitive areas gives Oracle permission to engage around the technology. We have to differentiate ourselves and it's harder to do on the product side because everyone looks the same on paper. But on thought leadership ? we can, and did, take some really big steps. David Vap Group Vice President Oracle Applications Product Development

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• Top Questions and Answers for Pluging into Oracle Database as a Service

  - by David Swanger

  Yesterday we hosted a comprehensive online forum that shared a comprehensive path to help your organization design, deploy, and deliver a Database as a Service cloud. If you missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand by registering here. We received numerous questions.  Below are highlights of the most informative: DBaaS requires a lengthy and careful design efforts. What is the minimum requirements of setting up a scaled-down environment and test it out? You should have an OEM 12c environment for DBaaS administration and then a target database deployment platform that has the key characteristics of what your production environment will look like. This could be a single server or it could be a small pool of hosts if your production DBaaS will be larger and you want to test a more robust / real world configuration with Zones and Pools or DR capabilities for example. How does this benefit companies having their own data center? This allows companies to transform their internal IT to a service delivery model for the database. The benefits to the company are significant cost savings, improved business agility and reduced risk. The benefits to the consumers (internal) of services if much fast provisioning, and response to change in business requirements. From a deployment perspective, is DBaaS's job solely DBA's job? The best deployment model enables the DBA (or end-user) to control the entire process. All resources required to deploy the service are pre-provisioned, and there are no external dependencies (on network, storage, sysadmins teams). The service is created either via a self-service portal or by the DBA. The purpose of self service seems to be that the end user does not rely on the DBA. I just need to give him a template. He decides how much AMM he needs. Why shall I set it one by one. That doesn't seem to be the purpose of self service. Most customers we have worked with define a standardized service catalog, with a few (2 to 5) different classes of service. For each of these classes, there is a pre-defined deployment template, and the user has the ability to select from some pre-defined service sizes. The administrator only has to create this catalog once. Each user then simply selects from the options offered in the catalog.  Looking at DBaaS service definition, it seems to be no different from a service definition provided by a well defined DBA team. Why do you attribute it to DBaaS? There are a couple of perspectives. First, some organizations might already be operating with a high level of standardization and a higher level of maturity from an ITIL or Service Management perspective. Their journey to DBaaS could be shorter and their Service Definition will evolve less but they still might need to add capabilities such as Self Service and Metering/Chargeback. Other organizations are still operating in highly siloed environments with little automation and their formal Service Definition (if they have one) will be a lot less mature today. Therefore their future state DBaaS will look a lot different from their current state, as will their Service Definition. How database as a service impact or help with "Click to Compute" or deploying "Database in cloud infrastructure" DBaaS enables Click to Compute. Oracle DBaaS can be implemented using three architecture models: Oracle Multitenant 12c, native consolidation using Oracle Database and consolidation using virtualization in infrastructure cloud. As Deploy session showed, you get higher consolidating density and efficiency using Multitenant and higher isolation using infrastructure cloud. Depending upon your business needs, DBaaS can be implemented using any of these models. How exactly is the DBaaS different from the traditional db? Storage/OS/DB all together to 'transparently' provide service to applications? Will there be across-databases access by application/user. Some key differences are: 1) The services run on a shared platform. 2) The services can be rapidly provisioned (< 15 minutes). 3) The services are dynamic and can be relocated, grown, shrunk as needed to meet business needs without disruption and rapidly. 4) The user is able to provision the services directly from a standardized service catalog.. With 24x7x365 databases its difficult to find off peak hrs to do basic admin tasks such as gathering stats, running backups, batch jobs. How does pluggable database handle this and different needs/patching downtime of apps databases might be serving? You can gather stats in Oracle Multitenant the same way you had been in regular databases. Regarding patching/upgrading, Oracle Multitenant makes patch/upgrade very efficient in that you can pre-provision a new version/patched multitenant db in a different ORACLE_HOME and then unplug a PDB from its CDB and plug it into the newer/patched CDB in seconds.  Thanks for all the great questions!  If you'd like to learn more and missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand here.

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• Identity Globe Trotters (Sep Edition): The Social Customer

  - by Tanu Sood

  Welcome to the inaugural edition of our monthly series - Identity Globe Trotters. Starting today, the last Friday of every month, we will explore regional commentary on Identity Management. We will invite guest contributors from around the world to share their opinions and experiences around Identity Management and highlight regional nuances, specific drivers, solutions and more. Today's feature is contributed by Michael Krebs, Head of Business Development at esentri consulting GmbH, a (SOA) specialized Oracle Gold Partner based in Ettlingen, Germany. In his current role, Krebs is dealing with the latest developments in Enterprise Social Networking and the Integration of Social Media within business processes.  By Michael Krebs The relevance of "easy sign-on" in the age of the "Social Customer" With the growth of Social Networks, the time people spend within those closed "eco-systems" is growing year by year. With social networks looking to integrate search engines, like Facebook announced some weeks ago, their relevance will continue to grow in contrast to the more conventional search engines. This is one of the reasons why social network accounts of the users are getting more and more like a virtual fingerprint. With the growing relevance of social networks the importance of a simple way for customers to get in touch with say, customer care or contract departments, will be crucial for sales processes in critical markets. Customers want to have one single point of contact and also an easy "login-method" with no dedicated usernames, passwords or proprietary accounts. The golden rule in the future social media driven markets will be: The lower the complexity of the initial contact, the better a company can profit from social networks. If you, for example, can generate a smart way of how an existing customer can use self-service portals, the cost in providing phone support can be lowered significantly. Recruiting and Hiring of "Digital Natives" Another particular example is "social" recruiting processes. The so called "digital natives" don´t want to type in their profile facts and CV´s in proprietary systems. Why not use the actual LinkedIn profile? In German speaking region, the market in the area of professional social networks is dominated by XING, the equivalent to LinkedIn. A few weeks back, this network also opened up their interfaces for integrating social sign-ons or the usage of profile data for recruiting-purposes. In the European (and especially the German) employment market, where the number of young candidates is shrinking because of the low birth rate in the region, it will become essential to use social-media supported hiring processes to find and on-board the rare talents. In fact, you will see traditional recruiting websites integrated with social hiring to attract the best talents in the market, where the pool of potential candidates has decreased dramatically over the years. Identity Management as a key factor in the Customer Experience process To create the biggest value for customers and also future employees, companies need to connect their HCM or CRM-systems with powerful Identity management solutions. With the highly efficient Oracle (social & mobile enabling) Identity Management solution, enterprises can combine easy sign on with secure connections to the backend infrastructure. This combination enables a "one-stop" service with personalized content for customers and talents. In addition, companies can collect valuable data for the enrichment of their CRM-data. The goal is to enrich the so called "Customer Experience" via all available customer channels and contact points. Those systems have already gained importance in the B2C-markets and will gradually spread out to B2B-channels in the near future. Conclusion: Central and "Social" Identity management is key to Customer Experience Management and Talent Management For a seamless delivery of "Customer Experience Management" and a modern way of recruiting the best talent, companies need to integrate Social Sign-on capabilities with modern CX - and Talent management infrastructure. This lowers the barrier for existing and future customers or employees to get in touch with sales, support or human resources. Identity management is the technology enabler and backbone for a modern Customer Experience Infrastructure. Oracle Identity management solutions provide the opportunity to secure Social Applications and connect them with modern CX-solutions. At the end, companies benefit from "best of breed" processes and solutions for enriching customer experience without compromising security. About esentri: esentri is a provider of enterprise social networking and brings the benefits of social network communication into business environments. As one key strength, esentri uses Oracle Identity Management solutions for delivering Social and Mobile access for Oracle’s CRM- and HCM-solutions. …..End Guest Post…. With new and enhanced features optimized to secure the new digital experience, the recently announced Oracle Identity Management 11g Release 2 enables organizations to securely embrace cloud, mobile and social infrastructures and reach new user communities to help further expand and develop their businesses. Additional Resources: Oracle Identity Management 11gR2 release Oracle Identity Management website Datasheet: Mobile and Social Access (pdf) IDM at OOW: Focus on Identity Management Facebook: OracleIDM Twitter: OracleIDM We look forward to your feedback on this post and welcome your suggestions for topics to cover in Identity Globe Trotters. Last Friday, every month!

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• CPU Usage in Very Large Coherence Clusters

  - by jpurdy

  When sizing Coherence installations, one of the complicating factors is that these installations (by their very nature) tend to be application-specific, with some being large, memory-intensive caches, with others acting as I/O-intensive transaction-processing platforms, and still others performing CPU-intensive calculations across the data grid. Regardless of the primary resource requirements, Coherence sizing calculations are inherently empirical, in that there are so many permutations that a simple spreadsheet approach to sizing is rarely optimal (though it can provide a good starting estimate). So we typically recommend measuring actual resource usage (primarily CPU cycles, network bandwidth and memory) at a given load, and then extrapolating from those measurements. Of course there may be multiple types of load, and these may have varying degrees of correlation -- for example, an increased request rate may drive up the number of objects "pinned" in memory at any point, but the increase may be less than linear if those objects are naturally shared by concurrent requests. But for most reasonably-designed applications, a linear resource model will be reasonably accurate for most levels of scale. However, at extreme scale, sizing becomes a bit more complicated as certain cluster management operations -- while very infrequent -- become increasingly critical. This is because certain operations do not naturally tend to scale out. In a small cluster, sizing is primarily driven by the request rate, required cache size, or other application-driven metrics. In larger clusters (e.g. those with hundreds of cluster members), certain infrastructure tasks become intensive, in particular those related to members joining and leaving the cluster, such as introducing new cluster members to the rest of the cluster, or publishing the location of partitions during rebalancing. These tasks have a strong tendency to require all updates to be routed via a single member for the sake of cluster stability and data integrity. Fortunately that member is dynamically assigned in Coherence, so it is not a single point of failure, but it may still become a single point of bottleneck (until the cluster finishes its reconfiguration, at which point this member will have a similar load to the rest of the members). The most common cause of scaling issues in large clusters is disabling multicast (by configuring well-known addresses, aka WKA). This obviously impacts network usage, but it also has a large impact on CPU usage, primarily since the senior member must directly communicate certain messages with every other cluster member, and this communication requires significant CPU time. In particular, the need to notify the rest of the cluster about membership changes and corresponding partition reassignments adds stress to the senior member. Given that portions of the network stack may tend to be single-threaded (both in Coherence and the underlying OS), this may be even more problematic on servers with poor single-threaded performance. As a result of this, some extremely large clusters may be configured with a smaller number of partitions than ideal. This results in the size of each partition being increased. When a cache server fails, the other servers will use their fractional backups to recover the state of that server (and take over responsibility for their backed-up portion of that state). The finest granularity of this recovery is a single partition, and the single service thread can not accept new requests during this recovery. Ordinarily, recovery is practically instantaneous (it is roughly equivalent to the time required to iterate over a set of backup backing map entries and move them to the primary backing map in the same JVM). But certain factors can increase this duration drastically (to several seconds): large partitions, sufficiently slow single-threaded CPU performance, many or expensive indexes to rebuild, etc. The solution of course is to mitigate each of those factors but in many cases this may be challenging. Larger clusters also lead to the temptation to place more load on the available hardware resources, spreading CPU resources thin. As an example, while we've long been aware of how garbage collection can cause significant pauses, it usually isn't viewed as a major consumer of CPU (in terms of overall system throughput). Typically, the use of a concurrent collector allows greater responsiveness by minimizing pause times, at the cost of reducing system throughput. However, at a recent engagement, we were forced to turn off the concurrent collector and use a traditional parallel "stop the world" collector to reduce CPU usage to an acceptable level. In summary, there are some less obvious factors that may result in excessive CPU consumption in a larger cluster, so it is even more critical to test at full scale, even though allocating sufficient hardware may often be much more difficult for these large clusters.

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• C# Open Source software that is useful for learning Design Patterns

  - by Fathom Savvy

  In college I took a class in Expert Systems. The language the book taught (CLIPS) was esoteric - Expert Systems: Principles and Programming, Fourth Edition. I remember having a tough time with it. So, after almost failing the class, I needed to create the most awesome Expert System for my final presentation. I chose to create an expert system that would calculate risk analysis for a person's retirement portfolio. In short, the system would provide the services normally performed by one's financial adviser. In other words, based on personality, age, state of the macro economy, and other factors, should one's portfolio be conservative, moderate, or aggressive? In the appendix of the book (or on the CD-ROM), there was this in-depth example program for something unrelated to my presentation. Over my break, I read and re-read every line of that program until I understood it to the letter. Even though it was unrelated, I learned more than I ever could by reading all of the chapters. My presentation turned out to be pretty damn good and I received praises from my professor and classmates. So, the moral of the story is..., by understanding other people's code, you can gain greater insight into a language/paradigm than by reading canonical examples. Still, to this day, I am having trouble with everyday design patterns such as the Factory Pattern. I would like to know if anyone could recommend open source software that would help me understand the Gang of Four design patterns, at the very least. I have read the books, but I'm having trouble writing code for the concepts in the real world. Perhaps, by studying code used in today's real world applications, it might just "click". I realize a piece of software may only implement one kind of design pattern. But, if the pattern is an implementation you think is good for learning, and you know what pattern to look for within the source, I'm hoping you can tell me about it. For example, the System.Linq.Expressions namespace has a good example of the Visitor Pattern. The client calls Expression.Accept(new ExpressionVisitor()), which calls ExpressionVisitor (VisitExtension), which calls back to Expression (VisitChildren), which then calls Expression (Accept) again - wooah, kinda convoluted. The point to note here is that VisitChildren is a virtual method. Both Expression and those classes derived from Expression can implement the VisitChildren method any way they want. This means that one type of Expression can run code that is completely different from another type of derived Expression, even though the ExpressionVisitor class is the same in the Accept method. (As a side note Expression.Accept is also virtual). In the end, the code provides a real world example that you won't get in any book because it's kinda confusing. To summarize, If you know of any open source software that uses a design pattern implementation you were impressed by, please list it here. I'm sure it will help many others besides just me. public class VisitorPatternTest { public void Main() { Expression normalExpr = new Expression(); normalExpr.Accept(new ExpressionVisitor()); Expression binExpr = new BinaryExpression(); binExpr.Accept(new ExpressionVisitor()); } } public class Expression { protected internal virtual Expression Accept(ExpressionVisitor visitor) { return visitor.VisitExtension(this); } protected internal virtual Expression VisitChildren(ExpressionVisitor visitor) { if (!this.CanReduce) { throw Error.MustBeReducible(); } return visitor.Visit(this.ReduceAndCheck()); } public virtual Expression Visit(Expression node) { if (node != null) { return node.Accept(this); } return null; } public Expression ReduceAndCheck() { if (!this.CanReduce) { throw Error.MustBeReducible(); } Expression expression = this.Reduce(); if ((expression == null) || (expression == this)) { throw Error.MustReduceToDifferent(); } if (!TypeUtils.AreReferenceAssignable(this.Type, expression.Type)) { throw Error.ReducedNotCompatible(); } return expression; } } public class BinaryExpression : Expression { protected internal override Expression Accept(ExpressionVisitor visitor) { return visitor.VisitBinary(this); } protected internal override Expression VisitChildren(ExpressionVisitor visitor) { return CreateDummyExpression(); } protected internal Expression CreateDummyExpression() { Expression dummy = new Expression(); return dummy; } } public class ExpressionVisitor { public virtual Expression Visit(Expression node) { if (node != null) { return node.Accept(this); } return null; } protected internal virtual Expression VisitExtension(Expression node) { return node.VisitChildren(this); } protected internal virtual Expression VisitBinary(BinaryExpression node) { return ValidateBinary(node, node.Update(this.Visit(node.Left), this.VisitAndConvert<LambdaExpression>(node.Conversion, "VisitBinary"), this.Visit(node.Right))); } }

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• MERGE gives better OUTPUT options

  - by Rob Farley

  MERGE is very cool. There are a ton of useful things about it – mostly around the fact that you can implement a ton of change against a table all at once. This is great for data warehousing, handling changes made to relational databases by applications, all kinds of things. One of the more subtle things about MERGE is the power of the OUTPUT clause. Useful for logging.   If you’re not familiar with the OUTPUT clause, you really should be – it basically makes your DML (INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE/MERGE) statement return data back to you. This is a great way of returning identity values from INSERT commands (so much better than SCOPE_IDENTITY() or the older (and worse) @@IDENTITY, because you can get lots of rows back). You can even use it to grab default values that are set using non-deterministic functions like NEWID() – things you couldn’t normally get back without running another query (or with a trigger, I guess, but that’s not pretty). That inserted table I referenced – that’s part of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ work that goes on with all DML changes. When you insert data, this internal table called inserted gets populated with rows, and then used to inflict the appropriate inserts on the various structures that store data (HoBTs – the Heaps or B-Trees used to store data as tables and indexes). When deleting, the deleted table gets populated. Updates get a matching row in both tables (although this doesn’t mean that an update is a delete followed by an inserted, it’s just the way it’s handled with these tables). These tables can be referenced by the OUTPUT clause, which can show you the before and after for any DML statement. Useful stuff. MERGE is slightly different though. With MERGE, you get a mix of entries. Your MERGE statement might be doing some INSERTs, some UPDATEs and some DELETEs. One of the most common examples of MERGE is to perform an UPSERT command, where data is updated if it already exists, or inserted if it’s new. And in a single operation too. Here, you can see the usefulness of the deleted and inserted tables, which clearly reflect the type of operation (but then again, MERGE lets you use an extra column called $action to show this). (Don’t worry about the fact that I turned on IDENTITY_INSERT, that’s just so that I could insert the values) One of the things I love about MERGE is that it feels almost cursor-like – the UPDATE bit feels like “WHERE CURRENT OF …”, and the INSERT bit feels like a single-row insert. And it is – but into the inserted and deleted tables. The operations to maintain the HoBTs are still done using the whole set of changes, which is very cool. And $action – very convenient. But as cool as $action is, that’s not the point of my post. If it were, I hope you’d all be disappointed, as you can’t really go near the MERGE statement without learning about it. The subtle thing that I love about MERGE with OUTPUT is that you can hook into more than just inserted and deleted. Did you notice in my earlier query that my source table had a ‘src’ field, that wasn’t used in the insert? Normally, this would be somewhat pointless to include in my source query. But with MERGE, I can put that in the OUTPUT clause. This is useful stuff, particularly when you’re needing to audit the changes. Suppose your query involved consolidating data from a number of sources, but you didn’t need to insert that into the actual table, just into a table for audit. This is now very doable, either using the INTO clause of OUTPUT, or surrounding the whole MERGE statement in brackets (parentheses if you’re American) and using a regular INSERT statement. This is also doable if you’re using MERGE to just do INSERTs. In case you hadn’t realised, you can use MERGE in place of an INSERT statement. It’s just like the UPSERT-style statement we’ve just seen, except that we want nothing to match. That’s easy to do, we just use ON 1=2. This is obviously more convoluted than a straight INSERT. And it’s slightly more effort for the database engine too. But, if you want the extra audit capabilities, the ability to hook into the other source columns is definitely useful. Oh, and before people ask if you can also hook into the target table’s columns... Yes, of course. That’s what deleted and inserted give you.

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• Understanding the 'High Performance' meaning in Extreme Transaction Processing

  - by kyap

  Despite my previous blogs entries on SOA/BPM and Identity Management, the domain where I'm the most passionated is definitely the Extreme Transaction Processing, commonly called XTP.I came across XTP back to 2007 while I was still FMW Product Manager in EMEA. At that time Oracle acquired a company called Tangosol, which owned an unique product called Coherence that we renamed to Oracle Coherence. Beside this innovative renaming of the product, to be honest, I didn't know much about it, except being a "distributed in-memory cache for Extreme Transaction Processing"... not very helpful still.In general when people doesn't fully understand a technology or a concept, they tend to find some shortcuts, either correct or not, to justify their lack-of understanding... and of course I was part of this category of individuals. And the shortcut was "Oracle Coherence Cache helps to improve Performance". Excellent marketing slogan... but not very meaningful still. By chance I was able to get away quickly from that group in July 2007* at Thames Valley Park (UK), after I attended one of the most interesting workshops, in my 10 years career in Oracle, delivered by Brian Oliver. The biggest mistake I made was to assume that performance improvement with Coherence was related to the response time. Which can be considered as legitimus at that time, because after-all caches help to reduce latency on cached data access, hence reduce the response-time. But like all caches, you need to define caching and expiration policies, thinking about the cache-missed strategy, and most of the time you have to re-write partially your application in order to work with the cache. At a result, the expected benefit vanishes... so, not very useful then?The key mistake I made was my perception or obsession on how performance improvement should be driven, but I strongly believe this is still a common problem to most of the developers. In fact we all know the that the performance of a system is generally presented by the Capacity (or Throughput), with the 2 important dimensions Speed (response-time) and Volume (load) :Capacity (TPS) = Volume (T) / Speed (S)To increase the Capacity, we can either reduce the Speed(in terms of response-time), or to increase the Volume. However we tend to only focus on reducing the Speed dimension, perhaps it is more concrete and tangible to measure, and nicer to present to our management because there's a direct impact onto the end-users experience. On the other hand, we assume the Volume can be addressed by the underlying hardware or software stack, so if we need more capacity (scale out), we just add more hardware or software. Unfortunately, the reality proves that IT is never as ideal as we assume...The challenge with Speed improvement approach is that it is generally difficult and costly to make things already fast... faster. And by adding Coherence will not necessarily help either. Even though we manage to do so, the Capacity can not increase forever because... the Speed can be influenced by the Volume. For all system, we always have a performance illustration as follow: In all traditional system, the increase of Volume (Transaction) will also increase the Speed (Response-Time) as some point. The reason is simple: most of the time the Application logics were not designed to scale. As an example, if you have a while-loop in your application, it is natural to conceive that parsing 200 entries will require double execution-time compared to 100 entries. If you need to "Speed-up" the execution, you can only upgrade your hardware (scale-up) with faster CPU and/or network to reduce network latency. It is technically limited and economically inefficient. And this is exactly where XTP and Coherence kick in. The primary objective of XTP is about designing applications which can scale-out for increasing the Volume, by applying coding techniques to keep the execution-time as constant as possible, independently of the number of runtime data being manipulated. It is actually not just about having an application running as fast as possible, but about having a much more predictable system, with constant response-time and linearly scale, so we can easily increase throughput by adding more hardwares in parallel. It is in general combined with the Low Latency Programming model, where we tried to optimize the network usage as much as possible, either from the programmatic angle (less network-hoops to complete a task), and/or from a hardware angle (faster network equipments). In this picture, Oracle Coherence can be considered as software-level XTP enabler, via the Distributed-Cache because it can guarantee: - Constant Data Objects access time, independently from the number of Objects and the Coherence Cluster size - Data Objects Distribution by Affinity for in-memory data grouping - In-place Data Processing for parallel executionTo summarize, Oracle Coherence is indeed useful to improve your application performance, just not in the way we commonly think. It's not about the Speed itself, but about the overall Capacity with Extreme Load while keeping consistant Speed. In the future I will keep adding new blog entries around this topic, with some sample codes experiences sharing that I capture in the last few years. In the meanwhile if you want to know more how Oracle Coherence, I strongly suggest you to start with checking how our worldwide customers are using Oracle Coherence first, then you can start playing with the product through our tutorial.Have Fun !

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part IV: Dependency injection, it's what's for breakfast

  - by Jeff

  (Repost from my personal blog.) This is another post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch soon. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love" If anything generally good for the craft has come out of the rise of ASP.NET MVC, it's that people are more likely to use dependency injection, and loosely couple the pieces parts of their applications. A lot of the emphasis on coding this way has been to facilitate unit testing, and that's awesome. Unit testing makes me feel a lot less like a hack, and a lot more confident in what I'm doing. Dependency injection is pretty straight forward. It says, "Given an instance of this class, I need instances of other classes, defined not by their concrete implementations, but their interfaces." Probably the first place a developer exercises this in when having a class talk to some kind of data repository. For a very simple example, pretend the FooService has to get some Foo. It looks like this: public class FooService {    public FooService(IFooRepository fooRepo)    {       _fooRepo = fooRepo;    }    private readonly IFooRepository _fooRepo;    public Foo GetMeFoo()    {       return _fooRepo.FooFromDatabase();    } } When we need the FooService, we ask the dependency container to get it for us. It says, "You'll need an IFooRepository in that, so let me see what that's mapped to, and put it in there for you." Why is this good for you? It's good because your FooService doesn't know or care about how you get some foo. You can stub out what the methods and properties on a fake IFooRepository might return, and test just the FooService. I don't want to get too far into unit testing, but it's the most commonly cited reason to use DI containers in MVC. What I wanted to mention is how there's another benefit in a project like mine, where I have to glue together a bunch of stuff. For example, when I have someone sign up for a new account on CoasterBuzz, I'm actually using POP Forums' new account mailer, which composes a bunch of text that includes a link to verify your account. The thing is, I want to use custom text and some other logic that's specific to CoasterBuzz. To accomplish this, I make a new class that inherits from the forum's NewAccountMailer, and override some stuff. Easy enough. Then I use Ninject, the DI container I'm using, to unbind the forum's implementation, and substitute my own. Ninject uses something called a NinjectModule to bind interfaces to concrete implementations. The forum has its own module, and then the CoasterBuzz module is loaded second. The CB module has two lines of code to swap out the mailer implementation: Unbind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>(); Bind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>().To<CbNewAccountMailer>(); Piece of cake! Now, when code asks the DI container for an INewAccountMailer, it gets my custom implementation instead. This is a lot easier to deal with than some of the alternatives. I could do some copy-paste, but then I'm not using well-tested code from the forum. I could write stuff from scratch, but then I'm throwing away a bunch of logic I've already written (in this case, stuff around e-mail, e-mail settings, mail delivery failures). There are other places where the DI container comes in handy. For example, CoasterBuzz does a number of custom things with user profiles, and special content for paid members. It uses the forum as the core piece to managing users, so I can ask the container to get me instances of classes that do user lookups, for example, and have zero care about how the forum handles database calls, configuration, etc. What a great world to live in, compared to ten years ago. Sure, the primary interest in DI is around the "separation of concerns" and facilitating unit testing, but as your library grows and you use more open source, it starts to be the glue that pulls everything together.

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; YourKit Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  The YourKit (v7.0.5) profiler is interesting in terms of price (79€ single place license, 409€ + 1 year support and upgrades) and feature set. You do get a performance and memory profiler in one package for which you normally need also to pay extra from the other vendors. As an interesting side note the profiler UI is written in Java because they do also sell Java profilers with the same feature set. To get all methods of a VS startup you need first to configure it to include System* in the profiled methods and you need to configure * to measure wall clock time. By default it does record only CPU times which allows you to optimize CPU hungry operations. But you will never see a Thread.Sleep(10000) in the profiler blocking the UI in this mode. It can profile as all others processes started from within the profiler but it can also profile the next or all started processes. As usual it can profile in sampling and tracing mode. But since it is a memory profiler as well it does by default also record all object allocations > 1MB. With allocation recording enabled VS2012 did crash but without allocation recording there were no problems. The CPU tab contains the time line of the application and when you click in the graph you the call stacks of all threads at this time. This is really a nice feature. When you select a time region you the CPU Usage estimation for this time window. I have seen many applications consuming 100% CPU only because they did create garbage like crazy. For this is the Garbage Collection tab interesting in conjunction with a time range. This view is like the CPU table only that the CPU graph (green) is missing. All relevant information except for GCs/s is already visible in the CPU tab. Very handy to pinpoint excessive GC or CPU bound issues. The Threads tab does show the thread names and their lifetime. This is useful to see thread interactions or which thread is hottest in terms of CPU consumption. On the CPU tab the call tree does exist in a merged and thread specific view. When you click on a method you get below a list of all called methods. There you can sort for methods with a high own time which are worth optimizing. In the Method List you can select which scope you want to see. Back Traces are the methods which did call you. Callees ist the list of methods called directly or indirectly by your method as a flat list. This is not a call stack but still very useful to see which methods were slow so you can see the “root” cause quite quickly without the need to click trough long call stacks. The last view Merged Calles is a call stacked view of the previous view. This does help a lot to understand did call each method at run time. You would get the same view with a debugger for one call invocation but here you get the full statistics (invocation count) as well. Since YourKit is also a memory profiler you can directly see which objects you have on your managed heap and which objects do hold most of your precious memory. You can in in the Object Explorer view also examine the contents of your objects (strings or whatsoever) to get a better understanding which objects where potentially allocating this stuff.   YourKit is a very easy to use combined memory and performance profiler in one product. The unbeatable single license price makes it very attractive to straightly buy it. Although it is a Java UI it is very responsive and the memory consumption is considerably lower compared to dotTrace and ANTS profiler. What I do really like is to start the YourKit ui and then start the processes I want to profile as usual. There is no need to alter your own application code to be able to inject a profiler into your new started processes. For performance and memory profiling you can simply select the process you want to investigate from the list of started processes. That's the way I like to use profilers. Just get out of the way and let the application run without any special preparations.   Next: Telerik JustTrace

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• Where would a spam bot be located?

  - by Tim

  I have a hosted website using a free hosting service, I received an email this afternoon saying that I have been suspended because my account has been compromised. Basically, someone is using my email account to mass send spam. I've changed all the passwords and everything but when my Gmail pulls the emails from the host it's still downloading loads of spam messages that show like this: This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: [email protected] SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: host 198.91.80.251 [198.91.80.251]: 554 5.6.0 id=23634-03 - Rejected by MTA on relaying, from MTA([127.0.0.1]:10030): 554 Error: This email address has lost rights to send email from the system ------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------ Return-path: <[email protected]> Received: from keenesystems.com ([66.135.33.211]:2370 helo=server211) by absolut.x10hosting.com with esmtpsa (TLSv1:RC4-MD5:128) (Exim 4.77) (envelope-from <[email protected]>) id 1TGwSW-002hHe-Lc for [email protected]; Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:35:44 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:35:43 -0500 X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 3.9.9 (8.5.3-6) Subject: New staff members wanted at Auction It Online From: [email protected] Reply-To: [email protected] To: "Nadia Monti" <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-ID: <OUTLOOK-IDM-9aed7054-6a3e-e1a4-1d5c-3e73377652a6@server211> Date : 26 September 2012=0ATime : 13:35=0ASender : Dennise Halcomb Head = Office Manager of RJ Auction Drop-Off Int.=0A=0ANice to meet you Nadia M= onti=0A=0ARJ ADO Ltd., a USA based company, offers a significant amount = of goods worldwide for our customers on eBay and other auction venues. = Our company's main target is to provide a suitable and cost-effective se= rvice for any person, company or fundraising company. The main purpose o= f the administrative assistant / sales support representative is to cont= ribute to the sales force and add convenience to our cost-effective serv= ice dedicated to individuals, businesses, and organizations worldwide. O= ur HR department obtained your resume from one of the various job-orient= ed websites just to offer you this post.=0A=0AWorking Schedule: This is = a part time and home-based offer. You won't need to spend more than 3 ho= urs each day. Your =0Aschedule will be flexible.=0A=0ASalary: At the end= of the trial period (it lasts for 1 month) you will be paid 1,800 EUR. = With the average volume of clients your overall income will raise up to = 3,000 EUR per month. After the trial period is over your base salary wil= l grow up to 2,500 EUR per month, so you will earn 5% commission from th= e transactions completed.=0A=0AWhere?: Italy Wide. As it is a stay at ho= me position all the communication will be carried out via email and via = phone.=0A=0ARequirements: Access to the internet during the workday and = basic microsoft office skills are needed. Basic knowledge of English is = required (most of the contacts will be in English).=0A=0ACosts and Fees:= There are NO costs at any time for our employees. All fees related to t= his position are covered by the RJ ADO Co. Ltd..=0A=0AFurther Hiring Pro= cess: If you are interested in position we offer, please reply to this e= mail and send us the copy of your resume for verification.=0A=0AAfter re= viewing all of the received applications we will reply to successful app= licants only. Then we'll offer to these successful applicants a position= within our firm on a trial period basis for one month beginning from th= e date you sign a trial agreement. During this trial period you will rec= eive full guidance and support. Employees on a one monthly trial period = are evaluated at least one week prior to the end of their trial. During = the trial, your supervisor can recommend termination. At the end of the = trial period, the supervisor can offer continued employment, extension o= f trial period, or termination. After the trial period you may ask for m= ore hours or continue full-time.=0A=0AIf you are interested in this posi= tion, just reply to this email and send any questions you have and the c= opy of your resume for verification.=0A=0AThank You,=0AHR-Manager of RJ = ADO Co. Ltd.=0A=0APermission Settings=0AYou have been referred to RJ Auc= tion Drop-Off If you feel you received this email in error or do not wis= h to receive future messages, please reply to this message with "remove"= in the subject field. We will immediately update our database according= ly. =0AWe apologize for any inconvenience caused.=0A=0ARJ Auction Drop-O= ff Co. Ltd. I'm not aware of how this has happened. I'm not sure how anyone could have got hold of my password. It's a simple wordpress install, at some point recently my host went down and there was a fresh install of wordpress with default admin accounts, I have a feeling it could be something to do with this. My question is, even though I've changed all my passwords it's all still happening, is there annywhere in paticular this script would be stored on my host. I really can't deal with having my hosting account suspended and my email account sending all this spam.

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• Visual Tree Enumeration

  - by codingbloke

  I feel compelled to post this blog because I find I’m repeatedly posting this same code in silverlight and windows-phone-7 answers in Stackoverflow. One common task that we feel we need to do is burrow into the visual tree in a Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application (actually more recently I found myself doing this in WPF as well).  This allows access to details that aren’t exposed directly by some controls.  A good example of this sort of requirement is found in the “Restoring exact scroll position of a listbox in Windows Phone 7”  question on stackoverflow.  This required that the scroll position of the scroll viewer internal to a listbox be accessed. A caveat One caveat here is that we should seriously challenge the need for this burrowing since it may indicate that there is a design problem.  Burrowing into the visual tree or indeed burrowing out to containing ancestors could represent significant coupling between module boundaries and that generally isn’t a good idea. Why isn’t this idea just not cast aside as a no-no?  Well the whole concept of a “Templated Control”, which are in extensive use in these applications, opens the coupling between the content of the visual tree and the internal code of a control.   For example, I can completely change the appearance and positioning of elements that make up a ComboBox.  The ComboBox control relies on specific template parts having set names of a specified type being present in my template.  Rightly or wrongly this does kind of give license to writing code that has similar coupling. Hasn’t this been done already? Yes it has.  There are number of blogs already out there with similar solutions.  In fact if you are using Silverlight toolkit the VisualTreeExtensions class already provides this feature.  However I prefer my specific code because of the simplicity principle I hold to.  Only write the minimum code necessary to give all the features needed.  In this case I add just two extension methods Ancestors and Descendents, note I don’t bother with “Get” or “Visual” prefixes.  Also I haven’t added Parent or Children methods nor additional “AndSelf” methods because all but Children is achievable with the addition of some other Linq methods.  I decided to give Descendents an additional overload for depth hence a depth of 1 is equivalent to Children but this overload is a little more flexible than simply Children. So here is the code:- VisualTreeEnumeration public static class VisualTreeEnumeration {     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Descendents(this DependencyObject root, int depth)     {         int count = VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(root);         for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)         {             var child = VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(root, i);             yield return child;             if (depth > 0)             {                 foreach (var descendent in Descendents(child, --depth))                     yield return descendent;             }         }     }     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Descendents(this DependencyObject root)     {         return Descendents(root, Int32.MaxValue);     }     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Ancestors(this DependencyObject root)     {         DependencyObject current = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(root);         while (current != null)         {             yield return current;             current = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(current);         }     } }   Usage examples The following are some examples of how to combine the above extension methods with Linq to generate the other axis scenarios that tree traversal code might require. Missing Axis Scenarios var parent = control.Ancestors().Take(1).FirstOrDefault(); var children = control.Descendents(1); var previousSiblings = control.Ancestors().Take(1)     .SelectMany(p => p.Descendents(1).TakeWhile(c => c != control)); var followingSiblings = control.Ancestors().Take(1)     .SelectMany(p => p.Descendents(1).SkipWhile(c => c != control).Skip(1)); var ancestorsAndSelf = Enumerable.Repeat((DependencyObject)control, 1)     .Concat(control.Ancestors()); var descendentsAndSelf = Enumerable.Repeat((DependencyObject)control, 1)     .Concat(control.Descendents()); You might ask why I don’t just include these in the VisualTreeEnumerator.  I don’t on the principle of only including code that is actually needed.  If you find that one or more of the above  is needed in your code then go ahead and create additional methods.  One of the downsides to Extension methods is that they can make finding the method you actually want in intellisense harder. Here are some real world usage scenarios for these methods:- Real World Scenarios //Gets the internal scrollviewer of a ListBox ScrollViewer sv = someListBox.Descendents().OfType<ScrollViewer>().FirstOrDefault(); // Get all text boxes in current UserControl:- var textBoxes = this.Descendents().OfType<TextBox>(); // All UIElement direct children of the layout root grid:- var topLevelElements = LayoutRoot.Descendents(0).OfType<UIElement>(); // Find the containing `ListBoxItem` for a UIElement:- var container = elem.Ancestors().OfType<ListBoxItem>().FirstOrDefault(); // Seek a button with the name "PinkElephants" even if outside of the current Namescope:- var pinkElephantsButton = this.Descendents()     .OfType<Button>()     .FirstOrDefault(b => b.Name == "PinkElephants"); //Clear all checkboxes with the name "Selector" in a Treeview foreach (CheckBox checkBox in elem.Descendents()     .OfType<CheckBox>().Where(c => c.Name == "Selector")) {     checkBox.IsChecked = false; }   The last couple of examples above demonstrate a common requirement of finding controls that have a specific name.  FindName will often not find these controls because they exist in a different namescope. Hope you find this useful, if not I’m just glad to be able to link to this blog in future stackoverflow answers.

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• High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

  - by BuckWoody

  Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that. Planning for HA in IaaS IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective. As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching. In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients. You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this. This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial. You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution. Planning for HA in PaaS Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer. Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR. Planning for HA in SaaS In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case).   All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA. References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability  (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

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• Finding it Hard to Deliver Right Customer Experience: Think BPM!

  - by Ajay Khanna

  Our relationship with our customers is not a just a single interaction and we should not treat it like one. A customer’s relationship with a vendor is like a journey which starts way before customer makes a purchase and lasts long after that. The journey may start with customer researching a product that may lead to the eventual purchase and may continue with support or service needs for the product. A typical customer journey can be represented as shown below: As you may notice, customers tend to use multiple channels to interact with a company throughout their journey.  They also expect that they should get consistent experience, no matter what interaction channel they may choose. Customers do not like to repeat the information they have already provided and expect companies to remember their preferences, and offer them relevant products and services. If the company fails to meet this expectation, customers not only will abandon the purchase and go to the competitor but may also influence others’ purchase decision. Gone are the days when word of mouth was the only medium, and the customer could influence “Six” others. This is the age of social media and customer’s good or bad experience, especially bad get highly amplified and may influence hundreds of others. Challenges that face B2C companies today include: Delivering consistent experience: The reason that delivering consistent experience is challenging is due to fragmented data, disjointed systems and siloed multichannel interactions. Customers tend to get different service quality if they use web vs. phone vs. store. They get different responses from different service agents or get inconsistent answers if they call sales vs. service group in the company. Such inconsistent experiences result in lower customer satisfaction or NPS (net promoter score) numbers. Increasing Revenue: To stay competitive companies frequently introduce new products and services. Delay in launching such offerings has a significant impact on revenue realization. In addition to new product revenue, there are multiple opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell that impact bottom line. If companies are not able to identify such opportunities, bring a product to market quickly, or not offer the right product to the right customer at the right time, significant loss of revenue may occur. Ensuring Compliance: Companies must be compliant to ever changing regulations, these could be about Know Your Customer (KYC), Export/Import regulations, or taxation policies. In addition to government agencies, companies also need to comply with the SLA that they have committed to their customers. Lapse in meeting any of these requirements may lead to serious fines, penalties and loss in business. Companies have to make sure that they are in compliance will all such regulations and SLA commitments, at any given time. With the advent of social networks and mobile technology, companies not only need to focus on process efficiency but also on customer engagement. Improving engagement means delivering the customer experience as the customer is expecting and interacting with the customer at right time using right channel. Customers expect to be able to contact you via any channel of their choice (web, email, chat, mobile, social media), purchase via any viable channel (web, phone, store, mobile). Customers expect companies to understand their particular needs and remember their preferences on repeated visits. To deliver such an integrated, consistent, and contextual experience, power of BPM in must. Your company may be organized in departments like Marketing, Sales, Service. You may hold prospect data in SFA, order information in ERP, customer issues in CRM. However, the experience delivered to the customer must not be constrained by your system legacy. BPM helps in designing the right experience for the right customer and integrates all the underlining channels, systems, applications to make sure right information will be delivered to the right knowledge worker or to the customer every single time.     Orchestrating information across all systems (MDM, CRM, ERP), departments (commerce, merchandising, marketing service) and channels (Email, phone, web, social)  is the key, and that’s what BPM delivers. In addition to orchestrating systems and channels for consistency, BPM also provides an ability for analysis and decision management. By using data from historical transactions, social media and from other systems, users can determine the customer preferences, customer value, and churn propensity. This information, in the context, is then used while making a decision at a process step. Working with real-time decision management system can also suggest right up-sell or cross-sell offers, discounts or next-best-action steps for a particular customer. Timely action on customer issues or request is also a key tenet of a good customer experience. BPM’s complex event processing capabilities help companies to take proactive actions before issues get escalated. BPM system can be designed to listen to a certain event patters then deduce from those customer situations (credit card stolen, baggage lost, change of address) and do a triage before situation goes out of control. If such a situation arises you can send alerts to right people or immediately invoke corrective actions. Last but not least one of BPM’s key values is to drive continuous improvement. Learning about customers past experiences, interactions and social conversations, provide valuable insight. Such insight can be used to improve products, customer facing processes, and customer experience. You may take these insights as an input to design better more efficient and customer friendly sales, contact center or self-service processes. If customer experience is important for your business, make sure you have incorporated BPM as a part of your strategy to design, orchestrate and improve your customer facing processes.

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• Performance triage

  - by Dave

  Folks often ask me how to approach a suspected performance issue. My personal strategy is informed by the fact that I work on concurrency issues. (When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but I'll try to keep this general). A good starting point is to ask yourself if the observed performance matches your expectations. Expectations might be derived from known system performance limits, prototypes, and other software or environments that are comparable to your particular system-under-test. Some simple comparisons and microbenchmarks can be useful at this stage. It's also useful to write some very simple programs to validate some of the reported or expected system limits. Can that disk controller really tolerate and sustain 500 reads per second? To reduce the number of confounding factors it's better to try to answer that question with a very simple targeted program. And finally, nothing beats having familiarity with the technologies that underlying your particular layer. On the topic of confounding factors, as our technology stacks become deeper and less transparent, we often find our own technology working against us in some unexpected way to choke performance rather than simply running into some fundamental system limit. A good example is the warm-up time needed by just-in-time compilers in Java Virtual Machines. I won't delve too far into that particular hole except to say that it's rare to find good benchmarks and methodology for java code. Another example is power management on x86. Power management is great, but it can take a while for the CPUs to throttle up from low(er) frequencies to full throttle. And while I love "turbo" mode, it makes benchmarking applications with multiple threads a chore as you have to remember to turn it off and then back on otherwise short single-threaded runs may look abnormally fast compared to runs with higher thread counts. In general for performance characterization I disable turbo mode and fix the power governor at "performance" state. Another source of complexity is the scheduler, which I've discussed in prior blog entries. Lets say I have a running application and I want to better understand its behavior and performance. We'll presume it's warmed up, is under load, and is an execution mode representative of what we think the norm would be. It should be in steady-state, if a steady-state mode even exists. On Solaris the very first thing I'll do is take a set of "pstack" samples. Pstack briefly stops the process and walks each of the stacks, reporting symbolic information (if available) for each frame. For Java, pstack has been augmented to understand java frames, and even report inlining. A few pstack samples can provide powerful insight into what's actually going on inside the program. You'll be able to see calling patterns, which threads are blocked on what system calls or synchronization constructs, memory allocation, etc. If your code is CPU-bound then you'll get a good sense where the cycles are being spent. (I should caution that normal C/C++ inlining can diffuse an otherwise "hot" method into other methods. This is a rare instance where pstack sampling might not immediately point to the key problem). At this point you'll need to reconcile what you're seeing with pstack and your mental model of what you think the program should be doing. They're often rather different. And generally if there's a key performance issue, you'll spot it with a moderate number of samples. I'll also use OS-level observability tools to lock for the existence of bottlenecks where threads contend for locks; other situations where threads are blocked; and the distribution of threads over the system. On Solaris some good tools are mpstat and too a lesser degree, vmstat. Try running "mpstat -a 5" in one window while the application program runs concurrently. One key measure is the voluntary context switch rate "vctx" or "csw" which reflects threads descheduling themselves. It's also good to look at the user; system; and idle CPU percentages. This can give a broad but useful understanding if your threads are mostly parked or mostly running. For instance if your program makes heavy use of malloc/free, then it might be the case you're contending on the central malloc lock in the default allocator. In that case you'd see malloc calling lock in the stack traces, observe a high csw/vctx rate as threads block for the malloc lock, and your "usr" time would be less than expected. Solaris dtrace is a wonderful and invaluable performance tool as well, but in a sense you have to frame and articulate a meaningful and specific question to get a useful answer, so I tend not to use it for first-order screening of problems. It's also most effective for OS and software-level performance issues as opposed to HW-level issues. For that reason I recommend mpstat & pstack as my the 1st step in performance triage. If some other OS-level issue is evident then it's good to switch to dtrace to drill more deeply into the problem. Only after I've ruled out OS-level issues do I switch to using hardware performance counters to look for architectural impediments.

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• Think before you animate

  - by David Paquette

  Animations are becoming more and more common in our applications.  With technologies like WPF, Silverlight and jQuery, animations are becoming easier for developers to use (and abuse).  When used properly, animation can augment the user experience.  When used improperly, animation can degrade the user experience.  Sometimes, the differences can be very subtle. I have recently made use of animations in a few projects and I very quickly realized how easy it is to abuse animation techniques.  Here are a few things I have learned along the way. 1) Don’t animate for the sake of animating We’ve all seen the PowerPoint slides with annoying slide transitions that animate 20 different ways.  It’s distracting and tacky.  The same holds true for your application.  While animations are fun and becoming easy to implement, resist the urge to use the technology just because you think the technology is amazing.   2) Animations should (and do) have meaning I recently built a simple Windows Phone 7 (WP7) application, Steeped (download it here).  The application has 2 pages.  The first page lists a number of tea types.  When the user taps on one of the tea types, the application navigates to the second page with information about that tea type and some options for the user to choose from.       One of the last things I did before submitting Steeped to the marketplace was add a page transition between the 2 pages.  I choose the Slide / Fade Out transition.  When the user selects a tea type, the main page slides to the left and fades out.  At the same time, the details page slides in from the right and fades in.  I tested it and thought it looked great so I submitted the app.  A few days later, I asked a friend to try the app.  He selected a tea type, and I was a little surprised by how he used the app.  When he wanted to navigate back to the main page, instead of pressing the back button on the phone, he tried to use a swiping gesture.  Of course, the swiping gesture did nothing because I had not implemented that feature.  After thinking about it for a while, I realized that the page transition I had chosen implied a particular behaviour.  As a user, if an action I perform causes an item (in this case the page) to move, then my expectation is that I should be able to move it back.  I have since added logic to handle the swipe gesture and I think the app flows much better now. When using animation, it pays to ask yourself:  What story does this animation tell my users?   3) Watch the replay Some animations might seem great initially but can get annoying over time.  When you use an animation in your application, make sure you try using it over and over again to make sure it doesn’t get annoying.  When I add an animation, I try watch it at least 25 times in a row.  After watching the animation repeatedly, I can make a more informed decision whether or not I should keep the animation.  Often, I end up shortening the length of the animations.   4) Don’t get in the users way An animation should never slow the user down.  When implemented properly, an animation can give a perceived bump in performance.  A good example of this is a the page transitions in most of the built in apps on WP7.  Obviously, these page animations don’t make the phone any faster, but they do provide a more responsive user experience.  Why?  Because most of the animations begin as soon as the user has performed some action.  The destination page might not be fully loaded yet, but the system responded immediately to user action, giving the impression that the system is more responsive.  If the user did not see anything happen until after the destination page was fully loaded, the application would feel clumsy and slow.  Also, it is important to make sure the animation does not degrade the performance (or perceived performance) of the application.   Jut a few things to consider when using animations.  As is the case with many technologies, we often learn how to misuse it before we learn how to use it effectively.

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• Take Two: Comparing JVMs on ARM/Linux

  - by user12608080

  Although the intent of the previous article, entitled Comparing JVMs on ARM/Linux, was to introduce and highlight the availability of the HotSpot server compiler (referred to as c2) for Java SE-Embedded ARM v7,  it seems, based on feedback, that everyone was more interested in the OpenJDK comparisons to Java SE-E.  In fact there were two main concerns: The fact that the previous article compared Java SE-E 7 against OpenJDK 6 might be construed as an unlevel playing field because version 7 is newer and therefore potentially more optimized. That the generic compiler settings chosen to build the OpenJDK implementations did not put those versions in a particularly favorable light. With those considerations in mind, we'll institute the following changes to this version of the benchmarking: In order to help alleviate an additional concern that there is some sort of benchmark bias, we'll use a different suite, called DaCapo.  Funded and supported by many prestigious organizations, DaCapo's aim is to benchmark real world applications.  Further information about DaCapo can be found at http://dacapobench.org. At the suggestion of Xerxes Ranby, who has been a great help through this entire exercise, a newer Linux distribution will be used to assure that the OpenJDK implementations were built with more optimal compiler settings.  The Linux distribution in this instance is Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. Having experienced difficulties getting Ubuntu 11.10 to run on the original D2Plug ARMv7 platform, for these benchmarks, we'll switch to an embedded system that has a supported Ubuntu 11.10 release.  That platform is the Freescale i.MX53 Quick Start Board.  It has an ARMv7 Coretex-A8 processor running at 1GHz with 1GB RAM. We'll limit comparisons to 4 JVM implementations: Java SE-E 7 Update 2 c1 compiler (default) Java SE-E 6 Update 30 (c1 compiler is the only option) OpenJDK 6 IcedTea6 1.11pre 6b23~pre11-0ubuntu1.11.10.2 CACAO build 1.1.0pre2 OpenJDK 6 IcedTea6 1.11pre 6b23~pre11-0ubuntu1.11.10.2 JamVM build-1.6.0-devel Certain OpenJDK implementations were eliminated from this round of testing for the simple reason that their performance was not competitive.  The Java SE 7u2 c2 compiler was also removed because although quite respectable, it did not perform as well as the c1 compilers.  Recall that c2 works optimally in long-lived situations.  Many of these benchmarks completed in a relatively short period of time.  To get a feel for where c2 shines, take a look at the first chart in this blog. The first chart that follows includes performance of all benchmark runs on all platforms.  Later on we'll look more at individual tests.  In all runs, smaller means faster.  The DaCapo aficionado may notice that only 10 of the 14 DaCapo tests for this version were executed.  The reason for this is that these 10 tests represent the only ones successfully completed by all 4 JVMs.  Only the Java SE-E 6u30 could successfully run all of the tests.  Both OpenJDK instances not only failed to complete certain tests, but also experienced VM aborts too. One of the first observations that can be made between Java SE-E 6 and 7 is that, for all intents and purposes, they are on par with regards to performance.  While it is a fact that successive Java SE releases add additional optimizations, it is also true that Java SE 7 introduces additional complexity to the Java platform thus balancing out any potential performance gains at this point.  We are still early into Java SE 7.  We would expect further performance enhancements for Java SE-E 7 in future updates. In comparing Java SE-E to OpenJDK performance, among both OpenJDK VMs, Cacao results are respectable in 4 of the 10 tests.  The charts that follow show the individual results of those four tests.  Both Java SE-E versions do win every test and outperform Cacao in the range of 9% to 55%. For the remaining 6 tests, Java SE-E significantly outperforms Cacao in the range of 114% to 311% So it looks like OpenJDK results are mixed for this round of benchmarks.  In some cases, performance looks to have improved.  But in a majority of instances, OpenJDK still lags behind Java SE-Embedded considerably. Time to put on my asbestos suit.  Let the flames begin...

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• ADF Business Components

  - by Arda Eralp

  ADF Business Components and JDeveloper simplify the development, delivery, and customization of business applications for the Java EE platform. With ADF Business Components, developers aren't required to write the application infrastructure code required by the typical Java EE application to: Connect to the database Retrieve data Lock database records Manage transactions   ADF Business Components addresses these tasks through its library of reusable software components and through the supporting design time facilities in JDeveloper. Most importantly, developers save time using ADF Business Components since the JDeveloper design time makes typical development tasks entirely declarative. In particular, JDeveloper supports declarative development with ADF Business Components to: Author and test business logic in components which automatically integrate with databases Reuse business logic through multiple SQL-based views of data, supporting different application tasks Access and update the views from browser, desktop, mobile, and web service clients Customize application functionality in layers without requiring modification of the delivered application The goal of ADF Business Components is to make the business services developer more productive.   ADF Business Components provides a foundation of Java classes that allow your business-tier application components to leverage the functionality provided in the following areas: Simplifying Data Access Design a data model for client displays, including only necessary data Include master-detail hierarchies of any complexity as part of the data model Implement end-user Query-by-Example data filtering without code Automatically coordinate data model changes with business services layer Automatically validate and save any changes to the database   Enforcing Business Domain Validation and Business Logic Declaratively enforce required fields, primary key uniqueness, data precision-scale, and foreign key references Easily capture and enforce both simple and complex business rules, programmatically or declaratively, with multilevel validation support Navigate relationships between business domain objects and enforce constraints related to compound components   Supporting Sophisticated UIs with Multipage Units of Work Automatically reflect changes made by business service application logic in the user interface Retrieve reference information from related tables, and automatically maintain the information when the user changes foreign-key values Simplify multistep web-based business transactions with automatic web-tier state management Handle images, video, sound, and documents without having to use code Synchronize pending data changes across multiple views of data Consistently apply prompts, tooltips, format masks, and error messages in any application Define custom metadata for any business components to support metadata-driven user interface or application functionality Add dynamic attributes at runtime to simplify per-row state management   Implementing High-Performance Service-Oriented Architecture Support highly functional web service interfaces for business integration without writing code Enforce best-practice interface-based programming style Simplify application security with automatic JAAS integration and audit maintenance "Write once, run anywhere": use the same business service as plain Java class, EJB session bean, or web service   Streamlining Application Customization Extend component functionality after delivery without modifying source code Globally substitute delivered components with extended ones without modifying the application   ADF Business Components implements the business service through the following set of cooperating components: Entity object An entity object represents a row in a database table and simplifies modifying its data by handling all data manipulation language (DML) operations for you. These are basically your 1 to 1 representation of a database table. Each table in the database will have 1 and only 1 EO. The EO contains the mapping between columns and attributes. EO's also contain the business logic and validation. These are you core data services. They are responsible for updating, inserting and deleting records. The Attributes tab displays the actual mapping between attributes and columns, the mapping has following fields: Name : contains the name of the attribute we expose in our data model. Type : defines the data type of the attribute in our application. Column : specifies the column to which we want to map the attribute with Column Type : contains the type of the column in the database   View object A view object represents a SQL query. You use the full power of the familiar SQL language to join, filter, sort, and aggregate data into exactly the shape required by the end-user task. The attributes in the View Objects are actually coming from the Entity Object. In the end the VO will generate a query but you basically build a VO by selecting which EO need to participate in the VO and which attributes of those EO you want to use. That's why you have the Entity Usage column so you can see the relation between VO and EO. In the query tab you can clearly see the query that will be generated for the VO. At this stage we don't need it and just use it for information purpose. In later stages we might use it. Application module An application module is the controller of your data layer. It is responsible for keeping hold of the transaction. It exposes the data model to the view layer. You expose the VO's through the Application Module. This is the abstraction of your data layer which you want to show to the outside word.It defines an updatable data model and top-level procedures and functions (called service methods) related to a logical unit of work related to an end-user task. While the base components handle all the common cases through built-in behavior, customization is always possible and the default behavior provided by the base components can be easily overridden or augmented. When you create EO's, a foreign key will be translated into an association in our model. It defines the type of relation and who is the master and child as well as how the visibility of the association looks like. A similar concept exists to identify relations between view objects. These are called view links. These are almost identical as association except that a view link is based upon attributes defined in the view object. It can also be based upon an association. Here's a short summary: Entity Objects: representations of tables Association: Relations between EO's. Representations of foreign keys View Objects: Logical model View Links: Relationships between view objects Application Model: interface to your application  

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• Application Composer Series: Where and When to use Groovy

  - by Richard Bingham

  This brief post is really intended as more of a reference than an article. The table below highlights two things, firstly where you can add you own custom logic via groovy code (end column), and secondly (middle column) when you might use each particular feature. Obviously this applies only where Application Composer exists, namely Fusion CRM and Oracle Sales Cloud, and is based on current (release 8) functionality. Feature Most Common Use Case Groovy Field Triggers React to run-time data changes. Only fired when the field is changed and upon submit. Y Object Triggers To extend the standard processing logic for an object, based on record creation, updates and deletes. There is a split between these firing events, with some related to UI/ADF actions and others originating in the database. UI Trigger Points: After Create - fires when a new object record is created. Commonly used to set default values for fields. Before Modify - Fires when the end-user tries to modify a field value. Could be used for generic warnings or extra security logic. Before Invalidate - Fires on the parent object when one of its child object records is created, updated, or deleted. For building in relationship logic. Before Remove - Fires when an attempt is made to delete an object record. Can be used to create conditions that prevent deletes. Database Trigger Points: Before Insert in Database - Fires before a new object is inserted into the database. Can be used to ensure a dependent record exists or check for duplicates. After Insert in Database - Fires after a new object is inserted into the database. Could be used to create a complementary record. Before Update in Database -Fires before an existing object is modified in the database. Could be used to check dependent record values. After Update in Database - Fires after an existing object is modified in the database. Could be used to update a complementary record. Before Delete in Database - Fires before an existing object is deleted from the database. Could be used to check dependent record values. After Delete in Database - Fires after an existing object is deleted from the database. Could be used to remove dependent records. After Commit in Database - Fires after the change pending for the current object (insert, update, delete) is made permanent in the current transaction. Could be used when committed data that has passed all validation is required. After Changes Posted to Database - Fires after all changes have been posted to the database, but before they are permanently committed. Could be used to make additional changes that will be saved as part of the current transaction. Y Field Validation Displays a user entered error message based groovy logic validating the field value. The message is shown only when the validation logic returns false, and the logic is triggered only when tabbing out of the field on the user interface. Y Object Validation Commonly used where validation is needed across multiple related fields on the object. Triggered on the submit UI action. Y Object Workflows All Object Workflows are fired upon either record creation or update, along with the option of adding a custom groovy firing condition. Y Field Updates - change another field when a specified one changes. Intended as an easy way to set different run-time values (e.g. pick values for LOV's) plus the value field permits groovy logic entry. Y E-Mail Notification - sends an email notification to specified users/roles. Templates support using run-time value tokens and rich text. N Task Creation - for adding standard tasks for use in the worklist functionality. N Outbound Message - will create and send an XML payload of the related object SDO to a specified endpoint. N Business Process Flow - intended for approval using the seeded process, however can also trigger custom BPMN flows. N Global Functions Utility functions that can be called from any groovy code in Application Composer (across applications). Y Object Functions Utility functions that are local to the parent object. Usually triggered from within 'Buttons and Actions' definitions in Application Composer, although can be called from other code for that object (e.g. from a trigger). Y Add Custom Fields When adding custom fields there are a few places you can include groovy logic. Y Default Value - to add logic within setting the default value when new records are entered. Y Conditionally Updateable - to add logic to set the field to read-only or not. Y Conditionally Required - to add logic to set the field to required or not. Y Formula Field - Used to provide a new aggregate field that is entirely based on groovy logic and other field values. Y Simplified UI Layouts - Advanced Expressions Used for creating dynamic layouts for simplified UI pages where fields and regions show/hide based on run-time context values and logic. Also includes support for the depends-on feature as a trigger. Y Related References This Blog: Application Composer Series Extending Sales Guide: Using Groovy Scripts Groovy Scripting Reference Guide

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• Silverlight Reporting Application Part 3.5 - Prism Background and WCF RIA [Series Intermission]

  Taking a step back before I dive into the details and full-on coding fun, I wanted to once again respond to a comment on my last post to clear up some things in regards to how I'm setting up my project and some of the choices I've made. Aka, thanks Ben. :) Prism Project Setup For starters, I'm not the ideal use case for a Prism application. In most cases where you've got a one-man team, Prism can be overkill as it is more intended for large teams who are geographically dispersed or in applications that have a larger scale than my Recruiting application in which you'll greatly benefit from modularity, delayed loading of xaps, etc. What Prism offers, though, is a manner for handling UI, commands, and events with the idea that, through a modular approach in which no parts really need to know about one another, I can update this application bit by bit as hiring needs change or requirements differ between offices without having to worry that changing something in the Jobs module will break something in, say, the Scheduling module. All that being said, here's a look at how our project breakdown for Recruit (MVVM/Prism implementation) looks: This could be a little misleading though, as each of those modules is actually another project in the overall Recruit solution. As far as what the projects actually are, that looks a bit like this: Recruiting Solution Recruit (Shell up there) - Main Silverlight Application .Web - Default .Web application to host the Silverlight app Infrastructure - Silverlight Class Library Project Modules - Silverlight Class Library Projects Infrastructure &Modules The Infrastructure project is probably something you'll see to some degree in any composite application. In this application, it is going to contain custom commands (you'll see the joy of these in a post or two down the road), events, helper classes, and any custom classes I need to share between different modules. Think of this as a handy little crossroad between any parts of your application. Modules on the other hand are the bread and butter of this application. Besides the shell, which holds the UI skeleton, and the infrastructure, which holds all those shared goodies, the modules are self-contained bundles of functionality to handle different concerns. In my scenario, I need a way to look up and edit Jobs, Applicants, and Schedule interviews, a Notification module to handle telling the user when different things are happening (i.e., loading from database), and a Menu to control interaction and moving between different views. All modules are going to follow the following pattern: The module class will inherit from IModule and handle initialization and loading the correct view into the correct region, whereas the Views and ViewModels folders will contain paired Silverlight user controls and ViewModel class backings. WCF RIA Services Since we've got all the projects in a single solution, we did not have to go the route of creating a WCR RIA Services Class Library. Every module has it's WCF RIA link back to the main .Web project, so the single Linq-2-SQL (yes, I said Linq-2-SQL, but I'll soon be switching to OpenAccess due to the new visual designer) context I'm using there works nicely with the scope of my project. If I were going for completely separating this project out and doing different, dynamically loaded elements, I'd probably go for the separate class library. Hope that clears that up. In the future though, I will be using that in a project that I've got in the "when I've got enough time to work on this" pipeline, so we'll get into that eventually- and hopefully when WCF RIA is in full release! Why Not use Silverlight Navigation/Business Template? The short answer- I'm a creature of habit, and having used Silverlight for a few years now, I'm used to doing lots of things manually. :) Plus, starting with a blank slate of a project I'm able to set up things exactly as I want them to be. In this case, rather than the navigation frame we would see in one of the templates, the MainRegion/ContentControl is working as our main navigation window. In many cases I will use theSilverlight navigation template to start things off, however in this case I did not need those features so I opted out of using that. Next time when I actually hit post #4, we're going to get into the modules and starting to get functionality into this application. Next week is also release week for the Q1 2010 release, so be sure to check out our annualWebinar Week (I might be biased, but Wednesday is my favorite out of the group). Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Eloqua Experience 2013: Mystique, Modern Marketing and Masterful Engagement

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is a guest post from Erick Mott, a social business leader at Oracle Eloqua. There’s a growing gap between 20th century marketing and a modern marketing way of doing business. I can’t think of a better example of modern marketing in action than what more than 2,000 people experienced in San Francisco at #EE13; customer-obsession, multichannel content, and real-time engagement all coming together at one extraordinary event. This was my first Eloqua Experience as a new Oracle Eloqua employee. In weeks prior, I heard about the mystique but didn’t know what to expect. What I’ve come to understand with more clarity is everything we do revolves around customer success, and we operate and educate at all times with these five tenets in mind: 1. Targeting: Really Know Your Buyer 2. Engagement: Create a 1:1 Relationship 3. Conversion: Visualize Guided Thinking 4. Analysis: Learn What’s Working 5. Marketing Technology: Enable and Extend the Cloud Product News from Eloqua Experience 2013 We made some announcements that John Stetic, VP of Products, Oracle Eloqua covers in this brief ‘Modern Marketing Minute’ video recorded after Wednesday’s keynote; summarized below, too: Oracle Eloqua AdFocus: While understanding the impact of a specific marketing channel was formerly relegated to marketers’ wish lists, the channels we now focus on are digital, social, and mobile. AdFocus gives marketers a single platform to dynamically create, manage and measure display ads alongside owned and earned media. AdFocus enables marketers to target only key accounts or prospects you want to reach with display ads, as well as provide creative content or personalized ad copy based on their persona and activities. Oracle Eloqua Profiler: The details of what we now know about customers have expanded into a universal customer profile, which can be used to create highly targeted segments. Marketers now can take data that’s not even stored in Eloqua to help targeted and score prospects for a complete, multichannel view of the customer. Profiler gives sales reps one, detailed view of the prospect to extend views beyond Oracle Eloqua asset activity (emails, forms, page views) to any external assets stored in Oracle Eloqua. Marketing Resource Management: New capabilities create more secure and controlled access to marketing resources and data. New integrations provide greater insight into campaign resources and management through a central marketing calendar and simplify resource management. Integrated Sales and Marketing Funnel: An integrated sales and marketing funnel view gives marketing and sales users, cross-functional teams, and executive management a consistent and clear view of pipeline performance. It also quickly provides users with historical metrics across different time spans and conditions. Eloqua AppCloud: More than 20 new AppCloud partners have been added to the community, which now includes 100+ apps. Eloqua AppCloud now provides modern marketers with an even broader range of marketing applications that help expand and enrich sales and marketing efforts; easily accessible in the Topliners Community. Social Capabilities: Recent integration between Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) deliver a comprehensive, scalable and integrated modern marketing solution. New capabilities include better tracking of social activities for a more complete customer profile. Engage Facebook custom audiences with AdFocus to deliver ads and meaningful experiences through trusted social networks. Biggest and Best Eloqua Experience. There’s a lot of talk in the industry about the Marketing Cloud. At Oracle Eloqua, we have been on a mission of delivering the most advanced and integrated modern marketing technology on the planet. It’s not just a concept but reality with proven execution, as seen first-hand this week in San Francisco. In this video, Kevin Akeroyd, SVP of Oracle Eloqua, provides some highlights of what made this year’s Eloqua Experience, exceptional, including Steve Woods’ presentation about the journey of modern marketers and Andrea Ward’s conversation with Vince Gilligan, creator of the Breaking Bad television series. The 2013 Markie Awards The Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud was best exemplified for me as 19 Markies were awarded to customers for their exceptional creativity and results as modern marketers. Wow, what a night to remember with so many committed and talented people working to create an extraordinary experience! To learn more about how to become a modern marketer, check out these resources. We look forward to seeing you next year at Eloqua Experience. More on Erick: 20 years experience at Oracle, Ektron, Sitecore, Lyris, Habeas, Nokia, creatorbase, Mark Monitor, Cisco Systems, GlobalFluency, Sun Microsystems, Philips NV, Elm Products and CBS TV. Patent holder with agency, Fortune 500, media, and startup company expertise. @mikestiles

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• #OOW 2012 : IaaS, Private Cloud, Multitenant Database, and X3H2M2

  - by Eric Bezille

  The title of this post is a summary of the 4 announcements made by Larry Ellison today, during the opening session of Oracle Open World 2012... To know what's behind X3H2M2, you will have to wait a little, as I will go in order, beginning with the IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service - announcement. Oracle IaaS goes Public... and Private... Starting in 2004 with Fusion development, Oracle Cloud was launch last year to provide not only SaaS Application, based on standard development, but also the underlying PaaS, required to build the specifics, and required interconnections between applications, in and outside of the Cloud. Still, to cover the end-to-end Cloud  Services spectrum, we had to provide an Infrastructure as a Service, leveraging our Servers, Storage, OS, and Virtualization Technologies, all "Engineered Together". This Cloud Infrastructure, was already available for our customers to build rapidly their own Private Cloud either on SPARC/Solaris or x86/Linux... The second announcement made today bring that proposition a big step further : for cautious customers (like Banks, or sensible industries) who would like to benefits from the Cloud value of "as a Service", but don't want their Data out in the Cloud... We propose to them to operate the same systems, Exadata, Exalogic & SuperCluster, that are providing our Public Cloud Infrastructure, behind their firewall, in a Private Cloud model. Oracle 12c Multitenant Database This is also a major announcement made today, on what's coming with Oracle Database 12c : the ability to consolidate multiple databases with no extra additional  cost especially in terms of memory needed on the server node, which is often THE consolidation limiting factor. The principle could be compare to Solaris Zones, where, you will have a Database Container, who is "owning" the memory and Database background processes, and "Pluggable" Database in this Database Container. This particular feature is a strong compelling event to evaluate rapidly Oracle Database 12c once it will be available, as this is major step forward into true Database consolidation with Multitenancy on a shared (optimized) infrastructure. X3H2M2, enabling the new Exadata X3 in-Memory Database Here we are :  X3H2M2 stands for X3 (the new version of Exadata announced also today) Heuristic Hierarchical Mass Memory, providing the capability to keep most if not all the Data in the memory cache hierarchy. Of course, this is the major software enhancement of the new X3 Exadata machine, but as this is a software, our current customers would be able to benefit from it on their existing systems by upgrading to the new release. But that' not the only thing that we did with X3, at the same time we have upgraded everything : the CPUs, adding more cores per server node (16 vs. 12, with the arrival of Intel E5 / Sandy Bridge), the memory with 512GB memory as well per node,  and the new Flash Fire card, bringing now up to 22 TB of Flash cache. All of this 4TB of RAM + 22TB of Flash being use cleverly not only for read but also for write by the X3H2M2 algorithm... making a very big difference compare to traditional storage flash extension. But what does those extra performances brings to you on an already very efficient system: double your performances compare to the fastest storage array on the market today (including flash) and divide you storage price x10 at the same time... Something to consider closely this days... Especially that we also announced the availability of a new Exadata X3-2 8th rack : a good starting point. As you have seen a major opening for this year again with true innovation. But that was not the only thing that we saw today, as before Larry's talk, Fujitsu did introduce more in deep the up coming new SPARC processor, that they are co-developing with us. And as such Andrew Mendelsohn - Senior Vice President Database Server Technologies came on stage to explain that the next step after I/O optimization for Database with Exadata, was to accelerate the Database at execution level by bringing functions in the SPARC processor silicium. All in all, to process more and more Data... The big theme of the day... and of the Oracle User Groups Conferences that were also happening today and where I had the opportunity to attend some interesting sessions on practical use cases of Big Data one in Finances and Fraud profiling and the other one on practical deployment of Oracle Exalytics for Data Analytics. In conclusion, one picture to try to size Oracle Open World ... and you can understand why, with such a rich content... and this only the first day !

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• How do I organize a GUI application for passing around events and for setting up reads from a shared resource

  - by Savanni D'Gerinel

  My tools involved here are GTK and Haskell. My questions are probably pretty trivial for anyone who has done significant GUI work, but I've been off in the equivalent of CGI applications for my whole career. I'm building an application that displays tabular data, displays the same data in a graph form, and has an edit field for both entering new data and for editing existing data. After asking about sharing resources, I decided that all of the data involved will be stored in an MVar so that every component can just read the current state from the MVar. All of that works, but now it is time for me to rearrange the application so that it can be interactive. With that in mind, I have three widgets: a TextView (for editing), a TreeView (for displaying the data), and a DrawingArea (for displaying the data as a graph). I THINK I need to do two things, and the core of my question is, are these the right things, or is there a better way. Thing the first: All event handlers, those functions that will be called any time a redisplay is needed, need to be written at a high level and then passed into the function that actually constructs the widget to begin with. For instance: drawStatData :: DrawingArea -> MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO () createStatView :: (DrawingArea -> IO ()) -> IO VBox createUI :: MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO HBox createUI storeMVar field = do graphs <- createStatView (\area -> drawStatData area storeMVar field) hbox <- hBoxNew False 10 boxPackStart hbox graphs PackNatural 0 return hbox In this case, createStatView builds up a VBox that contains a DrawingArea to graph the data and potentially other widgets. It attaches drawStatData to the realize and exposeEvent events for the DrawingArea. I would do something similar for the TreeView, but I am not completely sure what since I have not yet done it and what I am thinking of would involve replacing the TreeModel every time the TreeView needs to be updated. My alternative to the above would be... drawStatData :: DrawingArea -> MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO () createStatView :: IO (VBox, DrawingArea) ... but in this case, I would arrange createUI like so: createUI :: MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO HBox createUI storeMVar field = do (graphbox, graph) <- createStatView (\area -> drawStatData area storeMVar field) hbox <- hBoxNew False 10 boxPackStart hbox graphs PackNatural 0 on graph realize (drawStatData graph storeMVar field) on graph exposeEvent (do liftIO $ drawStatData graph storeMVar field return ()) return hbox I'm not sure which is better, but that does lead me to... Thing the second: it will be necessary for me to rig up an event system so that various events can send signals all the way to my widgets. I'm going to need a mediator of some kind to pass events around and to translate application-semantic events to the actual events that my widgets respond to. Is it better for me to pass my addressable widgets up the call stack to the level where the mediator lives, or to pass the mediator down the call stack and have the widgets register directly with it? So, in summary, my two questions: 1) pass widgets up the call stack to a global mediator, or pass the global mediator down and have the widgets register themselves to it? 2) pass my redraw functions to the builders and have the builders attach the redraw functions to the constructed widgets, or pass the constructed widgets back and have a higher level attach the redraw functions (and potentially link some widgets together)? Okay, and... 3) Books or wikis about GUI application architecture, preferably coherent architectures where people aren't arguing about minute details? The application in its current form (displays data but does not write data or allow for much interaction) is available at https://bitbucket.org/savannidgerinel/fitness . You can run the application by going to the root directory and typing runhaskell -isrc src/Main.hs data/ or... cabal build dist/build/fitness/fitness data/ You may need to install libraries, but cabal should tell you which ones.

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• A Patent for Workload Management Based on Service Level Objectives

  - by jsavit

  I'm very pleased to announce that after a tiny :-) wait of about 5 years, my patent application for a workload manager was finally approved. Background Many operating systems have a resource manager which lets you control machine resources. For example, Solaris provides controls for CPU with several options: shares for proportional CPU allocation. If you have twice as many shares as me, and we are competing for CPU, you'll get about twice as many CPU cycles), dedicated CPU allocation in which a number of CPUs are exclusively dedicated to an application's use. You can say that a zone or project "owns" 8 CPUs on a 32 CPU machine, for example. And, capped CPU in which you specify the upper bound, or cap, of how much CPU an application gets. For example, you can throttle an application to 0.125 of a CPU. (This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of Solaris RM controls.) Workload management Useful as that is (and tragic that some other operating systems have little resource management and isolation, and frighten people into running only 1 app per OS instance - and wastefully size every server for the peak workload it might experience) that's not really workload management. With resource management one controls the resources, and hope that's enough to meet application service objectives. In fact, we hold resource distribution constant, see if that was good enough, and adjust resource distribution if that didn't meet service level objectives. Here's an example of what happens today: Let's try 30% dedicated CPU. Not enough? Let's try 80% Oh, that's too much, and we're achieving much better response time than the objective, but other workloads are starving. Let's back that off and try again. It's not the process I object to - it's that we to often do this manually. Worse, we sometimes identify and adjust the wrong resource and fiddle with that to no useful result. Back in my days as a customer managing large systems, one of my users would call me up to beg for a "CPU boost": Me: "it won't make any difference - there's plenty of spare CPU to be had, and your application is completely I/O bound." User: "Please do it anyway." Me: "oh, all right, but it won't do you any good." (I did, because he was a friend, but it didn't help.) Prior art There are some operating environments that take a stab about workload management (rather than resource management) but I find them lacking. I know of one that uses synthetic "service units" composed of the sum of CPU, I/O and memory allocations multiplied by weighting factors. A workload is set to make a target rate of service units consumed per second. But this seems to be missing a key point: what is the relationship between artificial 'service units' and actually meeting a throughput or response time objective? What if I get plenty of one of the components (so am getting enough service units), but not enough of the resource whose needed to remove the bottleneck? Actual workload management That's not really the answer either. What is needed is to specify a workload's service levels in terms of externally visible metrics that are meaningful to a business, such as response times or transactions per second, and have the workload manager figure out which resources are not being adequately provided, and then adjust it as needed. If an application is not meeting its service level objectives and the reason is that it's not getting enough CPU cycles, adjust its CPU resource accordingly. If the reason is that the application isn't getting enough RAM to keep its working set in memory, then adjust its RAM assignment appropriately so it stops swapping. Simple idea, but that's a task we keep dumping on system administrators. In other words - don't hold the number of CPU shares constant and watch the achievement of service level vary. Instead, hold the service level constant, and dynamically adjust the number of CPU shares (or amount of other resources like RAM or I/O bandwidth) in order to meet the objective. Instrumenting non-instrumented applications There's one little problem here: how do I measure application performance in a way relating to a service level. I don't want to do it based on internal resources like number of CPU seconds it received per minute - We need to make resource decisions based on externally visible and meaningful measures of performance, not synthetic items or internal resource counters. If I have a way of marking the beginning and end of a transaction, I can then measure whether or not the application is meeting an objective based on it. If I can observe the delay factors for an application, I can see which resource shortages are slowing an application enough to keep it from meeting its objectives. I can then adjust resource allocations to relieve those shortages. Fortunately, Solaris provides facilities for both marking application progress and determining what factors cause application latency. The Solaris DTrace facility let's me introspect on application behavior: in particular I can see events like "receive a web hit" and "respond to that web hit" so I can get transaction rate and response time. DTrace (and tools like prstat) let me see where latency is being added to an application, so I know which resource to adjust. Summary After a delay of a mere few years, I am the proud creator of a patent (advice to anyone interested in going through the process: don't hold your breath!). The fundamental idea is fairly simple: instead of holding resource constant and suffering variable levels of success meeting service level objectives, properly characterise the service level objective in meaningful terms, instrument the application to see if it's meeting the objective, and then have a workload manager change resource allocations to remove delays preventing service level attainment. I've done it by hand for a long time - I think that's what a computer should do for me.

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• Synergy - easy share of keyboard and mouse between multiple computers

  Did you ever have the urge to share one set of keyboard and mouse between multiple machines? If so, please read on... Using multiple machines Honestly, as a software craftsman it is my daily business to run multiple machines - either physical or virtual - to be able to solve my customers' requirements. Recent hardware equipment allows this very easily. For laptops it's a no-brainer to attach a second or even a third screen in order to extend your native display. This works quite handy and in my case I used to attached two additional screens - one via HD15 connector, the other via HDMI. But... as it's a laptop and therefore a mobile unit there are slight restrictions. Detaching and re-attaching all cables when changing locations is one of them but hardware limitations, too. After all, it's a laptop and not a workstation. I guess, that anyone working in IT (or ICT) has more than one machine at their workplace or their home office and at least I find it quite annoying to have multiple sets of keyboard and mouse conquering my remaining space on my desk. Despite the ugly looks of all those cables and whatsoever 'chaos of distraction' I prefer a more clean solution and working environment. This allows me to actually focus on my work and tasks to do rather than to worry about choosing the right combination of keyboard/mouse. My current workplace is a patch work of various pieces of hardware (approx. 2-3 years): DIY desktop on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, Core2 Duo (E7400, 2.8GHz), 4GB RAM, 2x 250GB HDD, nVidia GPU 512MB Dell Inspiron 1525 on Windows 8 64-bit, 4GB RAM, 200GB HDD HP Compaq 6720s on Windows Vista 32-bit, Core2 Duo (T5670, 1.8GHz), 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD Mac mini on Mac OS X 10.7, Core i5 (2.3 GHz), 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD I know... Not the latest and greatest but a decent combination to work with. New system(s) is/are already on the shopping list but I live in the 'wrong' country to buy computer hardware. So, the next trip abroad will provide me with some new stuff. Using multiple operating systems The list of hardware above already names different operating systems, and actually I have only one preference: Linux. But still my job as a software craftsman for Visual FoxPro and .NET development requires other OSes, too. Not a big deal, it's just like this. Additionally to those physical machines, there are a bunch of virtual machines around. Most of them running either Windows XP or Windows 7. Since years I have the practice that each development for one customer is isolated into its own virtual machine and environment. This keeps it clean and version-safe. But as you can easily imagine with that setup there are a couple of constraints referring to keyboard and mouse. Usually, those systems require their own pieces of hardware attached. As stated, I don't like clutter on my desk's surface, so a cross-platform solution has to come in here. In the past, I tried it with various applications, hardware or network protocols like X11, RDP, NX, TeamViewer, RAdmin, KVM switch, etc. but the problem in this case is that they either allow you to remotely connect to the other system or exclusively 'bind' your peripherals to the active system. Not optimal after all. Synergy to the rescue Quote from their website: "Synergy lets you easily share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers on your desk, and it's Free and Open Source. Just move your mouse off the edge of one computer's screen on to another. You can even share all of your clipboards. All you need is a network connection. Synergy is cross-platform (works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)." Yep, that's it! All I need for my setup here... Actually, I couldn't believe it myself that I didn't stumble over synergy earlier but 'Get over it' and there we go. And despite the fact that it is Open Source, no, it's also for free. Donations for the developers are very welcome and recently they introduced Synergy Premium. A possibility to buy so-called premium votes that can be used to put more weight / importance on specific issues or bugs that you would like the developers to look into. Installation and configuration Simply download the installation packages for your systems of choice, run the installer and enter some minor information about your network setup. I chose my desktop machine for the role of the Synergy server and configured my screen setup as follows: The screen setup allows you currently to build or connect up to 15 machines. The number of screens can be higher as those machine might have multiple screens physically attached. Synergy takes this into the overall calculations and simply works as expected. I tried it for fun with a second monitor each connected to both laptops to have a total number of 6 active screens. No flaws after all - stunning! All the other machines are configured as clients like so: Side note: The screenshot was taken on Windows 8 and pasted via clipboard into Gimp running on Ubuntu. Resume Synergy is now definitely in my box of tools for my daily work, and amongst the first pieces of software I install after the operating system. It just simplifies my life and cleans my desk. Never again without Synergy!Now, only waiting for an Android version to integrate my Galaxy Tab 10.1, too. ;-) Please, check out that superb product and enjoy sharing one keyboard, one mouse and one clipboard between your various machines and operating systems.

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• Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System Databases

  For a majority of software developers little time is spent understanding the inner workings of the database management systems (DBMS) they use to store data for their applications.  I personally place myself in this grouping. In my case, I have used various versions of Microsoft’s SQL Server (2000, 2005, and 2008 R2) and just recently learned how valuable they really are when I was preparing to deliver a lecture on "SQL Server 2008 R2, System Databases". Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System DatabasesSo what are system databases in MS SQL Server, and why should I know them? Microsoft uses system databases to support the SQL Server DBMS, much like a developer uses config files or database tables to support an application. These system databases individually provide specific functionality that allows MS SQL Server to function. Name Database File Log File Master master.mdf mastlog.ldf Resource mssqlsystemresource.mdf mssqlsystemresource.ldf Model model.mdf modellog.ldf MSDB msdbdata.mdf msdblog.ldf Distribution distmdl.mdf distmdl.ldf TempDB tempdb.mdf templog.ldf Master DatabaseIf you have used MS SQL Server then you should recognize the Master database especially if you used the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to connect to a user created database. MS SQL Server requires the Master database in order for DBMS to start due to the information that it stores. Examples of data stored in the Master database User Logins Linked Servers Configuration information Information on User Databases Resource DatabaseHonestly, until recently I never knew this database even existed until I started to research SQL Server system databases. The reason for this is due largely to the fact that the resource database is hidden to users. In fact, the database files are stored within the Binn folder instead of the standard MS SQL Server database folder path. This database contains all system objects that can be accessed by all other databases.  In short, this database contains all system views and store procedures that appear in all other user databases regarding system information. One of the many benefits to storing system views and store procedures in a single hidden database is the fact it improves upgrading a SQL Server database; not to mention that maintenance is decreased since only one code base has to be mainlined for all of the system views and procedures. Model DatabaseThe Model database as the name implies is the model for all new databases created by users. This allows for predefining default database objects for all new databases within a MS SQL Server instance. For example, if every database created by a user needs to have an “Audit” table when it is  created then defining the “Audit” table in the model will guarantees that the table will be located in every new database create after the model is altered. MSDB DatabaseThe MSDBdatabase is used by SQL Server Agent, SQL Server Database Mail, SQL Server Service Broker, along with SQL Server. The SQL Server Agent uses this database to store job configurations and SQL job schedules along with SQL Alerts, and Operators. In addition, this database also stores all SQL job parameters along with each job’s execution history.  Finally, this database is also used to store database backup and maintenance plans as well as details pertaining to SQL Log shipping if it is being used. Distribution DatabaseThe Distribution database is only used during replication and stores meta data and history information pertaining to the act of replication data. Furthermore, when transactional replication is used this database also stores information regarding each transaction. It is important to note that replication is not turned on by default in MS SQL Server and that the distribution database is hidden from SSMS. Tempdb DatabaseThe Tempdb as the name implies is used to store temporary data and data objects. Examples of this include temp tables and temp store procedures. It is important to note that when using this database all data and data objects are cleared from this database when SQL Server restarts. This database is also used by SQL Server when it is performing some internal operations. Typically, SQL Server uses this database for the purpose of large sort and index operations. Finally, this database is used to store row versions if row versioning or snapsot isolation transactions are being used by SQL Server. Additionally, I would love to hear from others about their experiences using system databases, tables, and objects in a real world environments.

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