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How can I minimize the amount my router slows down my Internet connection speed?

- by Lord Torgamus

Background I'm working with what I assume is a pretty common Internet setup: a cable modem, a wireless router and a few Internet-connected devices. Lately, I've started being more demanding on my Internet connection, and noticed that using my router slows down my download speeds considerably. I just kind of dealt with it until Zune Marketplace on the Xbox 360 told me that a movie was going to take well over ten hours to download, and I just didn't want to wait that long. Good little scientist that I am, I tried to reduce the problem down to one variable. The test As a control, I turned off all the devices in the house that use wireless Internet, and unplugged all the wired devices except for the Xbox. I also power-cycled both the modem and the router. I then tried to download the movie again, and was told that it would still take over ten hours. Next, I unplugged the router, and connected the Xbox directly to the modem. The movie downloaded in just over one hour. As far as I can tell, this means that my ISP, other cable users near me, the remote servers, anything wireless-related and my machines' disk speeds can't be at fault. A similar experiment that replaced the Xbox with a wired laptop produced similar results. To me, this says "the router is responsible for things taking around ten times longer to download." My question I'd still prefer to use the router for a few reasons: it's a pain to connect and disconnect everything every time there's a big file to download direct connection to the modem isn't good for security only one machine can be connected directly to the modem at a time What can I do to have fast connection speeds while still using the router? I don't mind turning other machines off, as long as I don't have to mess with power and ethernet cables. EDIT : After asking this followup question and then this one, I installed dd-wrt on my router, and I seem to be getting higher and more consistent speeds. Perhaps more importantly, my memory use is fairly constant. I know this isn't an answer — which is why I'm not posting it as an answer — but it is how I resolved the situation, and hopefully it'll be helpful for someone.

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Google Rules for Retail

- by David Dorf

In the book What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis outlines ten "Google Rules" that define how Google acts. These rules help define how Web 2.0 businesses operate today and into the future. While there's a chapter in the book on applying these rules to the retail industry, it wasn't very in-depth. So I've decided to more directly apply the rules to retail, along with some notable examples of success. The table below shows Jeff's Google Rule, some Industry Examples, and New Retailer Rules that I created. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid black 1.0pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-border-alt:solid black .5pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insideh-themecolor:text1; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insidev-themecolor:text1; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Google Rule Industry Examples New Retailer Rule New Relationship Your worst customer is your friend; you best customer is your partner Newegg.com lets manufacturers respond to customer comments that are critical of the product, and their EggXpert site lets customers help other customers. Listen to what your customers are saying about you. Convert the critics to fans and the fans to influencers. New Architecture Join a network; be a platform Tesco and BestBuy released APIs for their product catalogs so third-parties could create new applications. Become a destination for information. New Publicness Life is public, so is business Zappos and WholeFoods founders are prolific tweeters/bloggers, sharing their opinions and connecting to customers. It's not always pretty, but it's genuine. Be transparent. Share both your successes and failures with your customers. New Society Elegant organization Wet Seal helps their customers assemble outfits and show them off to each other. Barnes & Noble has a community site that includes a bookclub. Communities of your customers already exist, so help them organize better. New Economy Mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches lululemon found a niche for yoga inspired athletic wear. Threadless uses crowd-sourcing to design short-runs of T-shirts. Serve small markets with niche products. New Business Reality Decide what business you're in When Lowes realized catering to women brought the men along, their sales increased. Customers want experiences to go with the products they buy. New Attitude Trust the people and listen In 2008 Starbucks launched MyStartbucksIdea to solicit ideas from their customers. Use social networks as additional data points for making better merchandising decisions. New Ethic Be honest and transparent; don't be evil Target is giving away reusable shopping bags for Earth Day. Kohl's has outfitted 67 stores with solar arrays. Being green earns customers' respect and lowers costs too. New Speed Life is live H&M and Zara keep up with fashion trends. Be prepared to pounce on you customers' fickle interests. New Imperatives Encourage, enable and protect innovation 1-800-Flowers was the first do sales in Facebook and an early adopter of mobile commerce. The Sears Personal Shopper mobile app finds products based on a photo. Give your staff permission to fail so innovation won't be stifled. Jeff will be a keynote speaker at Crosstalk, our upcoming annual user conference, so I'm looking forward to hearing more of his perspective on retail and the new economy.

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Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy

- by kellsey.ruppel

Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy Adds Social Cloud and Showcases early customers Redwood Shores, Calif. – June 6, 2012 “Almost seven years of relentless engineering and innovation plus key strategic acquisitions. An investment of billions. We are now announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don’t have platforms to extend. Oracle is the only vendor that offers a complete suite of modern, socially-enabled applications, all based on a standards-based platform.” News Facts In a major strategy update today, Larry Ellison announced the industry’s broadest and most advanced Cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a broad Enterprise Social Platform offering. Oracle Cloud delivers a broad set of industry-standards based, integrated services that provide customers with subscription-based access to Oracle Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all completely managed, hosted and supported by Oracle. Offering a wide range of business applications and platform services, the Oracle Cloud is the only cloud to enable customers to avoid the data and business process fragmentation that occurs when using multiple, siloed public clouds. Oracle Cloud is powered by leading enterprise-grade infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, providing customers and partners with a high-performance, reliable, and secure infrastructure for running critical business applications. Oracle Cloud enables easy self-service for both business users and developers. Business users can order, configure, extend, and monitor their applications. Developers and administrators can easily develop, deploy, monitor and manage their applications. As part of the event, Oracle also showcased several early Oracle Cloud customers and partners including system integrators and independent software vendors. Oracle Cloud Platform Services Built on a common, complete, standards-based and enterprise-grade set of infrastructure components, Oracle Cloud Platform Services enable customers to speed time to market and lower costs by quickly building, deploying and managing bespoke applications. Oracle Cloud Platform Services will include: Database Services to manage data and build database applications with the Oracle Database. Java Services to develop, deploy and manage Java applications with Oracle WebLogic. Developer Services to allow application developers to collaboratively build applications. Web Services to build Web applications rapidly using PHP, Ruby, and Python. Mobile Services to allow developers to build cross-platform native and HTML5 mobile applications for leading smartphones and tablets. Documents Services to allow project teams to collaborate and share documents through online workspaces and portals. Sites Services to allow business users to develop and maintain visually engaging .com sites Analytics Services to allow business users to quickly build and share analytic dashboards and reports through the Cloud. Oracle Cloud Application Services Oracle Cloud Application Services provides customers access to the industry’s broadest range of enterprise applications available in the cloud today, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities. Easy to setup, configure, extend, use and administer, Oracle Cloud Application Services will include: ERP Services: A complete set of Financial Accounting, Project Management, Procurement, Sourcing, and Governance, Risk & Compliance solutions. HCM Services: A complete Human Capital Management solution including Global HR, Workforce Lifecycle Management, Compensation, Benefits, Payroll and other solutions. Talent Management Services: A complete Talent Management solution including Recruiting, Sourcing, Performance Management, and Learning. Sales and Marketing Services: A complete Sales and Marketing solution including Sales Planning, Territory Management, Leads & Opportunity Management, and Forecasting. Customer Experience Services: A complete Customer Service solution including Web Self-Service, Contact Centers, Knowledge Management, Chat, and e-mail Management. Oracle Cloud Social Services Oracle Cloud Social Services provides the most broad and complete enterprise social platform available in the cloud today. With Oracle Cloud Social Services, enterprises can engage with their customers on a range of social media properties in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion including social marketing, commerce, service and listening. The platform also provides enterprises with a rich social networking solution for their employees to collaborate effectively inside the enterprise. Oracle’s integrated social platform will include: Oracle Social Network to enable secure enterprise collaboration and purposeful social networking for business. Oracle Social Data Services to aggregate data from social networks and enterprise data sources to enrich business applications. Oracle Social Marketing and Engagement Services to enable marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Oracle Social Intelligence Services to enable marketers to analyze social media interactions and to enable customer service and sales teams to engage with customers and prospects effectively. Supporting Resources Oracle Cloud – learn more cloud.oracle.com – sign up now Webcast – watch the replay About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. TrademarksOracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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The Winds of Change are a Blowin’

- by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now. Not the fan part, but the paying customer part. I’m still a huge fan. I think that SourceGear does a great job with their product and support has been fantastic when needed (which is not very often). I think that Eric Sink has done a fine job building a quality company and products, and I appreciate his contributions to the tech community through this blogging and books. I still think their products are high quality and do a fantastic job of what they do. But there’s the rub…what they do is no longer enough for me. As I have rebuilt our development team over the last couple of years, and we have begun to investigate Scrum and Kanban, I realize that I need more visibility into the progress of the team. I need better project management tools, and this is where Vault Professional lags behind several other tools. Granted, in the latest release (Vault 6.0) they added a nice time tracking feature, but I want more. (Note, I did contact SourceGear about my quest for more, but apparently, the rest of their customer base has not been clamoring for this and so they have not built it. Granted, I wasn’t clamoring for it either until just recently, but unfortunately for SourceGear, I want it now and don’t want to wait for them to build it into their system.) Ironically, it was SourceGear themselves who started to turn me on to the possibilities of other tools. They built a limited integration with Axosoft OnTime which I read about several times on their support site (I used to regularly read and occasionally comment on their Support Forum). I decided to check out OnTime and was very impressed with the tool for work item tracking and project management (not to mention their great Scrum Master in 10 Minutes video). I fell in love with the capabilities of OnTime. Unfortunately, the integration with Vault for source control management was, as I mentioned, limited. I could have forfeited the integration between work items and source code, but there is too much benefit to linking check-ins to work items for me to give that up. So then I did what was previously unthinkable for me, I considered switching not just the work tracking tool, but also the source code management tool. This was really stepping outside my comfort zone because source code is Gold, and not to be trifled with. When you find a good weapon to protect your gold, stick with it. I looked at Git and Tortoise SVN, but the integration methods for those was pretty rough compared to what I was used to. The recommended tool from Axosoft’s point of view appeared to be RocketSVN, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to go the “flavor of Subversion” route. Then I started thinking about that other tool I liked back when I first chose to go with Vault, but couldn’t afford: Team Foundation Server. And what do you know…Microsoft has not only radically improved it over that version from back in 2006, but they also came to their senses about how it should be licensed, and it is much more affordable now. So I started looking into the latest capabilities in the 2012 version, and I fell in love all over again. I really went deep on checking out the tools. I watched numerous webcasts from Microsoft partners, went to a beta preview on Microsoft’s campus, and watched a lot of Channel 9 videos on the new ALM features (oooh…shiny). Frankly, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the newest version, and figured this was probably our direction. As an interesting twist of fate, one of my employees crossed paths with an ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence, a local Microsoft Partner, and one of the companies that produced several of the webcasts that I had been watching. So I gave Bryon a call and started grilling him to see if he really knew anything or was just another guy who couldn’t find a job so he called himself a consultant. It turns out Bryon actually knows a lot, especially in an area that was becoming a frustration point for us: Branching strategies and automated builds (that’s probably a whole separate blog entry). As we talked, Bryon suggested we look into doing a DTDPS (Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services) session with his company. This is a service that can be paid for by Microsoft Enterprise Agreement planning services credits or SA training benefits, and, again, coincidentally, we had several that were just about to expire, so I put them to good use. The DTDPS sessions were great; and Bryon, Rick, and the rest of the folks at Northwest Cadence have been a pleasure to work with. We have just purchased a new server for our TFS rollout and are planning the steps and options right now. This is still a big project ahead of us to not only install and configure TFS, but also to load all of our source code (many different systems, not just one program) and transition to the new way of life with TFS, but I am convinced that it is the right move for my team at this point in time. We need the new capabilities that are in alignment with Scrum and Kanban methodologies in order to more efficiently manage all the different projects that we have going on at one time. I would still wholeheartedly endorse SourceGear’s products and Axosoft’s OnTime for those whose needs are met by those tools, but for me and my team, I think that TFS is the right fit, and I am looking forward to the change.

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Guest Post: Christian Finn: Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success?

- by Michael Snow

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He gave an intro to himself in an earlier post this morning but his post below is a great example of how customer engagement takes on a life of its own in our global online connected and social digital ecosystem. Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success? What if I told you that your brand could advertise so successfully, you wouldn’t have to pay for the ads? A recent campaign by Ford Motor Company for the Ford Focus featuring Doug the spokespuppet (I am not making this up) did just that—and it raises some interesting issues for marketers and social media alike in the brave new world of customer engagement that is the Social Web. Allow me to elaborate. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week—“Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay” tells the story of Ford’s recently concluded online campaign for the 2012 Ford Focus. (Ford, by the way, under the leadership of people such as Scott Monty, has been a pioneer of effective social campaigns.) The centerpiece of the campaign was the aforementioned Doug, who appeared as a character on Facebook in videos and via chat. (If you are not familiar with Doug, you can see him in action here, and read the WSJ story here.) You may be thinking puppet ads are a sign of Internet Bubble 2.0 and want to stop now, but bear with me. The Journal reported that Ford spent about $95M on its overall Ford Focus campaign, with TV accounting for over $60M of that spend. The Internet buy for the campaign was just over $10M, which included ad buys to drive traffic to Facebook for people to meet and ‘Like’ Doug and some amount on Facebook ads, too, to promote Doug and by extension, the Ford Focus. So far, a fairly straightforward consumer marketing story in the Internet Era. Yet here’s the curious thing: once Doug reached 10,000 fans on Facebook, Ford stopped paying for Facebook ads. Doug had gone viral with people sharing his videos with one another; once critical mass was reached there was no need to buy more ads on Facebook. Doug went on to be Liked by over 43,000 people, and 61% of his fans said they would be more likely to consider buying a Focus. According to the article, Ford says Focus sales are up this year—and increasing sales is every marketer’s goal. And so in effect, Ford found its Facebook campaign so successful that it could stop paying for it, instead letting its target consumers communicate its messages for fun—and for free. Not only did they get a 3X increase in fans beyond their paid campaign, they had thousands of customers sharing their messages in video form for months. Since free advertising is the Holy Grail of marketing both old and new-- and it appears social networks have an advantage in generating that buzz—it seems reasonable to ask: what would happen to brands’ advertising strategies—and the media they use to engage customers, if this success were repeated at scale? It seems logical to conclude that, at least initially, more ad dollars would be spent with social networks like Facebook as brands attempt to replicate Ford’s success. Certainly Facebook ad revenues are on the rise—eMarketer expects Facebook’s ad revenues to quintuple by 2012 compared with 2009 levels, to nearly 2.9B. That’s bad news for TV and the already battered print media and good news for Facebook. But perhaps not so over the longer run. With TV buys, you have to keep paying to generate impressions. If Doug the spokespuppet is any guide, however, that may not be true for social media campaigns. After an initial outlay, if a social campaign takes off, the audience will generate more impressions on its own. Thus a social medium like Facebook could be the victim of its own success when it comes to ad revenue. It may be there is an inherent limiting factor in the ad spend they can capture, as exemplified by Ford’s experience with Dough and the Focus. And brands may spend much less overall on advertising, with as good or better results, than they ever have in the past. How will these trends evolve? Can brands create social campaigns that repeat Ford’s formula for the Focus with effective results? Can social networks find ways to capture more spend and overcome their potential tendency to make further spend unnecessary? And will consumers become tired and insulated from social campaigns, much as they have to traditional advertising channels? These are the questions CMOs and Facebook execs alike will be asking themselves in the brave new world of customer engagement. As always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome.

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The Complementary Roles of PLM and PIM

- by Ulf Köster

Oracle Product Value Chain Solutions (aka Enterprise PLM Solutions) are a comprehensive set of product management solutions that work together to provide Oracle customers with a broad array of capabilities to manage all aspects of product life: innovation, design, launch, and supply chain / commercialization processes beyond the capabilities and boundaries of traditional engineering-focused Product Lifecycle Management applications. They support companies with an integrated managed view across the product value chain: From Lab to Launch, From Farm to Fork, From Concept to Product to Customer, From Product Innovation to Product Design and Product Commercialization. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) represents a broad suite of software solutions to improve product-oriented business processes and data. PLM success stories prove that PLM helps companies improve time to market, increase product-related revenue, reduce product costs, reduce internal costs and improve product quality. As a maturing suite of enterprise solutions, PLM is still evolving to realize the promise it can provide across all facets of a business and all phases of the product lifecycle. The vision for PLM includes everything from gathering early requirements for a product through multiple stages of the product lifecycle from product design, through commercialization and eventual product retirement or replacement. In discrete or process industries, PLM is typically more focused on Product Definition as items with respect to the technical view of a material or part, including specifications, bills of material and manufacturing data. With Agile PLM, this is specifically related to capabilities addressing Product Collaboration, Governance and Compliance, Product Quality Management, Product Cost Management and Engineering Collaboration. PLM today is mainly addressing key requirements in the early product lifecycle, in engineering changes or in the “innovation cycle”, and primarily adds value related to product design, development, launch and engineering change process. In short, PLM is the master for Product Definition, wherever manufacturing takes place. Product Information Management (PIM) is a product suite that has evolved in parallel to PLM. Product Information Management (PIM) can extend the value of PLM implementations by providing complementary tools and capabilities. More relevant in the area of Product Commercialization, the vision for PIM is to manage product information throughout an enterprise and supply chain to improve product-related knowledge management, information sharing and synchronization from multiple data sources. PIM success stories have shown the ability to provide multiple benefits, with particular emphasis on reducing information complexity and information management costs. Product Information in PIM is typically treated as the commercial view of a material or part, including sales and marketing information and categorization. PIM collects information from multiple manufacturing sites and multiple suppliers into its repository, but also provides integration tools to push the information back out to the other systems, serving as an active central repository with the aim to provide a holistic view on any product sold by a company (hence the name “Product Hub”). In short, PIM is the master of commercial Product Information. So PIM is quickly becoming mandatory because of its value in optimizing multichannel selling processes and relationships with customers, as you can see from the following table: Viewpoint PLM Current State PIM Key Benefits PIM adds to PLM Product Lifecycle Primarily R&D Front end Innovation Cycle Change process Primarily commercial / transactional state of lifecycle Provides a seamless information flow from design and manufacturing through the ultimate selling and servicing of products Data Primarily focused on “item” vs. “product” data Product structures Specifications Technical information Repository for all product information. Reaches out to entire enterprise and its various silos of product information and descriptions Provides a “trusted source” of accurate product information to the internal organization and trading partners Data Lifecycle Repository for all design iterations Historical information Released, current information, with version management and time stamping Provides a single location to track and audit historical product information Communication PLM release finished product to ERP PLM is the master for Product Definition Captures information from disparate sources, including in-house data stores Recognizes the reality of today’s data “mess” across information silos Provides the ability to package product information to its audience in the desired, relevant format to meet their exacting business requirements Departmental R&D Manufacturing Quality Compliance Procurement Strategic Marketing Focus on Marketing and Sales Gathering information from other Departments, multiple sites, multiple suppliers A singular enterprise solution that leverages existing information silos and data stores Supply Chain Multi-site internal collaboration Supplier collaboration Customer collaboration Works with customers, exchanges / data pools, and trading partners to provide relevant product information packaged the way the customer desires Provides ability to provide trading partners and internal customers with information in a manner they desire, continuously Tools Data Management Collaboration Innovation Management Cleansing Synchronization Hub functions Consistent, clean and complete commercial product information The goals of both PLM and PIM, put simply, are to help companies make more profit from their products. PLM and PIM solutions can be easily added as they share some of the same goals, while coming from two different perspectives: the definition of the product and the commercialization of the product. Both can serve as a form of product “system of record”, but take different approaches to delivering value. Oracle Product Value Chain solutions offer rich new strategies for executives to collectively leverage Agile PLM, Product Data Hub, together with Enterprise Data Quality for Products, and other industry leading Oracle applications to achieve further incremental value, like Oracle Innovation Management. This is unique on the market today.

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World Record Oracle Business Intelligence Benchmark on SPARC T4-4

- by Brian

Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server configured with four SPARC T4 3.0 GHz processors delivered the first and best performance of 25,000 concurrent users on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) 11g benchmark using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle Solaris 10. A SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g achieved 25,000 concurrent users with an average response time of 0.36 seconds with Oracle BI server cache set to ON. The benchmark data clearly shows that the underlying hardware, SPARC T4 server, and the Oracle BI EE 11g (11.1.1.6.0 64-bit) platform scales within a single system supporting 25,000 concurrent users while executing 415 transactions/sec. The benchmark demonstrated the scalability of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g 11.1.1.6.0, which was deployed in a vertical scale-out fashion on a single SPARC T4-4 server. Oracle Internet Directory configured on SPARC T4 server provided authentication for the 25,000 Oracle BI EE users with sub-second response time. A SPARC T4-4 with internal Solid State Drive (SSD) using the ZFS file system showed significant I/O performance improvement over traditional disk for the Web Catalog activity. In addition, ZFS helped get past the UFS limitation of 32767 sub-directories in a Web Catalog directory. The multi-threaded 64-bit Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g and SPARC T4-4 server proved to be a successful combination by providing sub-second response times for the end user transactions, consuming only half of the available CPU resources at 25,000 concurrent users, leaving plenty of head room for increased load. The Oracle Business Intelligence on SPARC T4-4 server benchmark results demonstrate that comprehensive BI functionality built on a unified infrastructure with a unified business model yields best-in-class scalability, reliability and performance. Oracle BI EE 11g is a newer version of Business Intelligence Suite with richer and superior functionality. Results produced with Oracle BI EE 11g benchmark are not comparable to results with Oracle BI EE 10g benchmark. Oracle BI EE 11g is a more difficult benchmark to run, exercising more features of Oracle BI. Performance Landscape Results for the Oracle BI EE 11g version of the benchmark. Results are not comparable to the Oracle BI EE 10g version of the benchmark. Oracle BI EE 11g Benchmark System Number of Users Response Time (sec) 1 x SPARC T4-4 (4 x SPARC T4 3.0 GHz) 25,000 0.36 Results for the Oracle BI EE 10g version of the benchmark. Results are not comparable to the Oracle BI EE 11g version of the benchmark. Oracle BI EE 10g Benchmark System Number of Users 2 x SPARC T5440 (4 x SPARC T2+ 1.6 GHz) 50,000 1 x SPARC T5440 (4 x SPARC T2+ 1.6 GHz) 28,000 Configuration Summary Hardware Configuration: SPARC T4-4 server 4 x SPARC T4-4 processors, 3.0 GHz 128 GB memory 4 x 300 GB internal SSD Storage Configuration: "> Sun ZFS Storage 7120 16 x 146 GB disks Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 Oracle Solaris Studio 12.1 Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g (11.1.1.6.0) Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.5 Oracle Internet Directory 11.1.1.6.0 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Benchmark Description Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Oracle BI EE) delivers a robust set of reporting, ad-hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboard, and scorecard functionality with a rich end-user experience that includes visualization, collaboration, and more. The Oracle BI EE benchmark test used five different business user roles - Marketing Executive, Sales Representative, Sales Manager, Sales Vice-President, and Service Manager. These roles included a maximum of 5 different pre-built dashboards. Each dashboard page had an average of 5 reports in the form of a mix of charts, tables and pivot tables, returning anywhere from 50 rows to approximately 500 rows of aggregated data. The test scenario also included drill-down into multiple levels from a table or chart within a dashboard. The benchmark test scenario uses a typical business user sequence of dashboard navigation, report viewing, and drill down. For example, a Service Manager logs into the system and navigates to his own set of dashboards using Service Manager. The BI user selects the Service Effectiveness dashboard, which shows him four distinct reports, Service Request Trend, First Time Fix Rate, Activity Problem Areas, and Cost Per Completed Service Call spanning 2002 to 2005. The user then proceeds to view the Customer Satisfaction dashboard, which also contains a set of 4 related reports, drills down on some of the reports to see the detail data. The BI user continues to view more dashboards – Customer Satisfaction and Service Request Overview, for example. After navigating through those dashboards, the user logs out of the application. The benchmark test is executed against a full production version of the Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Applications with a fully populated underlying database schema. The business processes in the test scenario closely represent a real world customer scenario. See Also SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Business Intelligence oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN WebLogic Suite oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 30 September 2012.

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Off The Beaten Path—Three Things Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful For

- by Christine Randle

By: Jim Lein, Senior Director, Oracle Accelerate Last Sunday I went on a walkabout. That’s when I just step out the door of my Colorado home and hike through the mountains for hours with no predetermined destination. I favor “social trails”, the unmapped routes pioneered by both animal and human explorers. These tracks are usually more challenging than established, marked routes and you can’t be 100% sure of where you’re going to end up. But I’ve found the rewards to be much greater. For awhile, I pondered on how—depending upon your perspective—the current economic situation worldwide could be viewed as either a classic “the glass is half empty” or a “the glass is half full” scenario. Midsize companies buy Oracle to grow and so I’m continually amazed and fascinated by the success stories our customers relate to me. Oracle’s successful midsize companies are growing via innovation, agility, and opportunity. For them, the glass isn’t half full—it’s overflowing. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Innovation The sun angling through the pine trees reminded me of a conversation with a European customer a year ago May. You might not recognize the name but, chances are, your local evening weather report relies on this company’s weather observation, monitoring and measurement products. For decades, the company was recognized in its industry for product innovation, but its recent rapid growth comes from tailoring end to end product and service solutions based on the needs of distinctly different customer groups across industrial, public sector, and defense sectors. Hours after that phone call I was walking my dog in a local park and came upon a small white plastic box sprouting short antennas and dangling by a nylon cord from a tree branch. I cut it down. The name of that customer’s company was stamped on the housing. “It’s a radiosonde from a high altitude weather balloon,” he told me the next day. “Keep it as a souvenir.” It sits on my fireplace mantle and elicits many questions from guests. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Agility In July, I had another interesting discussion with the CFO of an Asia-Pacific company which owns and operates a large portfolio of leisure assets. They are best known for their epic outdoor theme parks. However, their primary growth today is coming from a chain of indoor amusement centers in the USA where billiards, bowling, and laser tag take the place of roller coasters, kiddy rides, and wave pools. With mountains and rivers right out my front door, I’m not much for theme parks, but I’ll take a spirited game of laser tag any day. This company has grown dramatically since first implementing Oracle ERP more than a decade ago. Their profitable expansion into a completely foreign market is derived from the ability to replicate proven and efficient best business practices across diverse operating environments. They recently went live on Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Taleo. Their CFO explained to me how, with thousands of employees in three countries, Fusion HCM and Taleo would enable them to remain incredibly agile by acting on trends linking individual employee performance to their management, establishing and maintaining those best practices. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Opportunity I have three GPS apps on my iPhone. I use them mainly to keep track of my stats—distance, time, and vertical gain. However, every once in awhile I need to find the most efficient route back home before dark from my current location (notice I didn’t use the word “lost”). In August I listened in on an interview with the CFO of another European company that designs and delivers telematics solutions—the integrated use of telecommunications and informatics—for managing the mobile workforce. These solutions enable customers to achieve evolutionary step-changes in their performance and service delivery. Forgive the overused metaphor, but this is route optimization on steroids. The company’s executive team saw an opportunity in this emerging market and went “all in”. Consequently, they are being rewarded with tremendous growth results and market domination by providing the ability for their clients to collect and analyze performance information related to fuel consumption, service workforce safety, and asset productivity. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for health, family, friends, and a career with an innovative company that helps companies leverage top tier software to drive and manage growth. And I’m thankful to have learned the lesson that good things happen when you get off the beaten path—both when hiking and when forging new routes through a complex world economy. Halfway through my walkabout on Sunday, after scrambling up a long stretch of scree-covered hill, I crested a ridge with an obstructed view of 14,265 ft Mt Evans just a few miles to the west. There, nowhere near a house or a trail, someone had placed a wooden lounge chair. Its wood was worn and faded but it was sturdy. I had lunch and a cold drink in my pack. Opportunity knocked and I seized it. Happy Thanksgiving.

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PRUEBAS DE ESPECIALIZACION 2013/2014

- by agallego

Consigue tu Certificado de Especialista Oracle de forma GRATUITA , 27 y 28 de Noviembre de 2013 Ahora puedes realizar los exámenes de implementación de las especializaciones de Oracle y convertirte en especialista. Podrás realizar cualquiera de los exámenes de implementación de la siguiente lista: Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management 11g Sales Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-456) Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management 11g Incentive Compensation Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-472) Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10 Implementation Developer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-510) Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service 2012 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-465) Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service 2012 Developer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-480) Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management 11g Human Resources Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-584) Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management 11g Talent Management Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-585) Oracle Taleo Recruiting Cloud Service 2013 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-474) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g Accounts Payable Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-507) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g Accounts Receivable Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-506) Oracle Fusion Financials 11g General Ledger Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-508) Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration 11g Essentials (1Z0-469) Oracle Documaker Standard Edition 12 Implementation Essentials (1Z0-570) Oracle Hyperion Planning 11 Essentials (1Z0-533) Oracle Hyperion Financial Management 11 Essentials (1Z0-532) Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite 11g Essentials (1Z0-591) Oracle Essbase 11 Essentials (1Z0-531) Oracle GoldenGate 10 Essentials (1Z0-539) Oracle GoldenGate 11g Certified Implementation Exam Essentials Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 for CRM Essentials (1Z0-524) Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6 for ERP Essentials (1Z0-525) Oracle Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 2.3 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-461) Oracle SOA Suite 11g Essentials (1Z0-478) Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-451) Oracle Unified Business Process Management Suite 11g Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-560) Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-599) Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-523) Oracle WebCenter Content 11g Essentials (1Z0-542) Oracle WebCenter Portal 11g Essentials (1Z0-541) Oracle Application Development Framework Essentials (1Z1-554) Oracle Identity Governance Suite 11g Essentials(1z0-459) Oracle Access Management Suite Plus 11g Essentials Exam(1z0-479) M2M Platform Certified Architecture Essentials (1Z0-467) Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-462) Oracle Cloud Application Foundation Essentials(1Z0-468) Oracle Exadata 11g Essentials (1Z0-536) Exadata Database Machine Models X3-2 and X3-8 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-485) Oracle Certified Expert, Oracle Exadata X3 Administration(1Z0-027) Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-569) Oracle Linux System Administration (1Z0-403) Oracle Linux Fundamentals (1Z0-402) Oracle Linux 6 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-460) Oracle VM 3 for x86 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-590) Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Essentials (1Z0-530 ) Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Essentials (1Z0-457) SPARC T4-Based Server Installation Essentials (1Z0-597) 1Z0-821 Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration 1Z0-822 Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced System Administration Oracle Solaris 11 Installation and Configuration Essentials (1Z0-580) StorageTek Tape Libraries Certified Implementation Specialist(1Z0-546) Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Certified Implementation Specialist The Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management 8 Essentials (1Z0-567) The Primavera Portfolio Management Essentials (1Z0-544) Primavera Contract Management 14 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-582) Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-562) Oracle Policy Automation 10 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-534) Oracle User Productivity Kit 11 Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-566) Oracle User Productivity Kit 11 Technical Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-583) Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting 13.3 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-463) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Merchandising System 13.2 Foundation Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-453) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Point-of-Service Technical Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-572) Oracle Retail Price Management 13.2 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-454) Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server 13 Configuration Implementation Specialist (1Z0-576) Oracle Retail Store Inventory Management 13.2 Functional Implementer Certified Implementation Specialist (1Z0-455) Oracle Flexcube Universal Banking 11 Technical Implementation Essentials (1Z0-579) Oracle FlexCube Universal Banking 11 Basic Implementation Essentials (1Z0-561) Oracle Flexcube Universal Banking 11 Technical Implementation Essentials (1Z0-579) Oracle FLEXCUBE Direct Banking 6 Implementation Essentials (1Z0-594) Puedes consultar la información acerca de los examenes en cada uno de los enlaces. Para prepararte los examenes sigue la Guia de estudio que encontrarás en la página de cada examen. Requisitos: ser Partner Gold, Platinum o Diamond de Oracle y tener un usuario de Oracle Pearson Vue. ¿Cuándo?: 27 y 28 de noviembre a las (9:00, 12:00, 16:00) ¿Dónde?: Core Networks, C.E.Parque Norte, Edificio Olmo, Planta 1 Serrano Galvache 56 | 28033, Madrid Para inscribirte: Create una cuenta en Pearson Vue (www.pearsonvue.com/oracle). Para Registrarte aquí. Para más información sobre el programa de especializaciones, haz clic aquí. No pierdas esta oportunidad e inscríbete hoy. Para cualquier duda contactar con [email protected]. Ana María Gallego Partner Enablement Manager Spain and Portugal

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Not so long ago in a city not so far away by Carlos Martin

- by Maria Sandu

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is the story of how the EMEA Presales Center turned an Oracle intern into a trusted technology advisor for both Oracle’s Sales and customers. It was the summer of 2011 when I was finishing my Computer Engineering studies as well as my internship at Oracle when I was offered what could possibly be THE dream job for any young European Computer Engineer. Apart from that, it also seemed like the role was particularly tailored to me as I could leverage almost everything I learned at University and during the internship. And all of it in one of the best cities to live in, not only from my home country but arguably from Europe: Malaga! A day at EPC As part of the EPC Technology pillar, and later on completely focused on WebCenter, there was no way to describe a normal day on the job as each day had something unique. Some days I was researching documentation in order to elaborate accurate answers for a customer’s question within a Request for Information or Proposal (RFI/RFP), other days I was doing heavy programming in order to bring a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a customer to life and last not but least, some days I presented to the customer via webconference the demo I built for them the past weeks. So as you can see, the role has research, development and presentation, could you ask for more? Well, don’t worry because there IS more! Internationality As the organization’s name suggests, EMEA Presales Center, it is the Center of Presales within Europe, Middle East and Africa so I got the chance to work with great professionals from all this regions, expanding my network and learning things from one country to apply them to others. In addition to that, the teams based in the Malaga office are comprised of many young professionals hailing mainly from Western and Central European countries (although there are a couple of exceptions!) with very different backgrounds and personalities which guaranteed many laughs and stories during lunch or coffee breaks (or even while working on projects!). Furthermore, having EPC offices in Bucharest and Bangalore and thanks to today’s tele-presence technologies, I was working every day with people from India or Romania as if they were sitting right next to me and the bonding with them got stronger day by day. Career development Apart from the research and self-study I’ve earlier mentioned, one of the EPC’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is that 15% of your time is spent on training so you get lots and lots of trainings in order to develop both your technical product knowledge and your presentation, negotiation and other soft skills. Sometimes the training is via webcast, sometimes the trainer comes to the office and sometimes, the best times, you get to travel abroad in order to attend a training, which also helps you to further develop your network by meeting face to face with many people you only know from some email or instant messaging interaction. And as the months go by, your skills improving at a very fast pace, your relevance increasing with each new project you successfully deliver, it’s only a matter of time (and a bit of self-promoting!) that you get the attention of the manager of a more senior team and are offered the opportunity to take a new step in your professional career. For me it took 2 years to move to my current position, Technology Sales Consultant at the Oracle Direct organization. During those 2 years I had built a good relationship with the Oracle Direct Spanish sales and sales managers, who are also based in the Malaga office. I supported their former Sales Consultant in a couple of presentations and demos and were very happy with my overall performance and attitude so even before the position got eventually vacant, I got a heads-up from then in advance that their current Sales Consultant was going to move to a different position. To me it felt like a natural step, same as when I joined EPC, I had at least a 50% of the “homework” already done but wanted to experience that extra 50% to add new product and soft skills to my arsenal. The rest is history, I’ve been in the role for more than half a year as I’m writing this, achieved already some important wins, gained a lot of trust and confidence in front of customers and broadened my view of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware portfolio. I look back at the 2 years I spent in EPC and think: “boy, I’d recommend that experience to absolutely anyone with the slightest interest in IT, there are so many different things you can do as there are different kind of roles you can end up taking thanks to the experience gained at EPC” /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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Who is Jeremiah Owyang?

- by Michael Hylton

Q: What’s your current role and what career path brought you here? J.O.: I'm currently a partner and one of the founding team members at Altimeter Group. I'm currently the Research Director, as well as wear the hat of Industry Analyst. Prior to joining Altimeter, I was an Industry Analyst at Forrester covering Social Computing, and before that, deployed and managed the social media program at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara. Around that time, I started a career blog called Web Strategy which focused on how companies were using the web to connect with customers --and never looked back. Q: As an industry analyst, what are you focused on these days? J.O.: There are three trends that I'm focused my research on at this time: 1) The Dynamic Customer Journey: Individuals (both b2c and b2b) are given so many options in their sources of data, channels to choose from and screens to consume them on that we've found that at each given touchpoint there are 75 potential permutations. Companies that can map this, then deliver information to individuals when they need it will have a competitive advantage and we want to find out who's doing this. 2) One of the sub themes that supports this trend is Social Performance. Yesterday's social web was disparate engagement of humans, but the next phase will be data driven, and soon new technologies will emerge to help all those that are consuming, publishing, and engaging on the social web to be more efficient with their time through forms of automation. As you might expect, this comes with upsides and downsides. 3) The Sentient World is our research theme that looks out the furthest as the world around us (even inanimate objects) become 'self aware' and are able to talk back to us via digital devices and beyond. Big data, internet of things, mobile devices will all be this next set. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? J.O.: The lines between our work and personal lives are dissolving, and this leads to a greater upside of being always connected and have deeper relationships with those that are not. It also means a downside of society expectations that we're always around and available for colleagues, customers, and beyond. In the future, a balance will be sought as we seek to achieve the goals of family, friends, work, and our own personal desires. All of this is being ironically written at 430 am on a Sunday am. Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? J.O.: A great question, thanks. There are a few sources of information to find out, I'll lead with the first which is my blog at web-strategist.com. A few times a week I'll publish my industry insights (hires, trends, forces, funding, M&A, business needs) as well as on twitter where I'll point to all the news that's fit to print @jowyang. As my research reports go live (we publish them for all to read --called Open Research-- at no cost) they'll emerge on my blog, or checkout the research tab to find out more now. http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/research/ Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon? J.O.: Absolutely! This coming Thursday, September 13th, I’m doing a webcast with Oracle on “Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise”. This is going to be a great discussion with Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Oracle and Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter. I’m looking forward to a great discussion around all those issues that so many companies are struggling with these days as they realize how much social media is impacting their business. It’s changing the way your customers and employees interact with your brand. Today it’s no longer a matter of when to become a social-enabled enterprise, but how to become a successful one. Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast? J.O.: Below is a 15 minute video which encapsulates Altimeter’s themes on the Dynamic Customer Journey and the Sentient World. I’m really proud to have taken an active role in the first ever LeWeb outside of Paris. This one, which was featured in downtown London across the street from Westminster Abbey was sold out. If you’ve not heard of LeWeb, this is a global Internet conference hosted by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, a power couple that stem from Paris but are also living in Silicon Valley, this is one of my favorite conferences to connect with brands, technology innovators, investors and friends. Altimeter was able to play a minor role in suggesting the theme for the event “Faster Than Real Time” which stems off previous LeWebs that focused on the “Real time web”. In this radical state, companies are able to anticipate the needs of their customers by using data, technology, and devices and deliver meaningful experiences before customers even know they need it. I explore two of three of Altimeter’s research themes, the Dynamic Customer Journey, and the Sentient World in my speech, but due to time, did not focus on Adaptive Organization.

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Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

- by Kellsey Ruppel

As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared. Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it. Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations. Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created. Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose. Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience. I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose. The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them. Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging. Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities. An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter). Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage. I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service. From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets. Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate. As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors. This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy. This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies. These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick.

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What Keeps You from Changing Your Public IP Address and Wreaking Havoc on the Internet?

- by Jason Fitzpatrick

What exactly is preventing you (or anyone else) from changing their IP address and causing all sorts of headaches for ISPs and other Internet users? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Whitemage is curious about what’s preventing him from wantonly changing his IP address and causing trouble: An interesting question was asked of me and I did not know what to answer. So I’ll ask here. Let’s say I subscribed to an ISP and I’m using cable internet access. The ISP gives me a public IP address of 60.61.62.63. What keeps me from changing this IP address to, let’s say, 60.61.62.75, and messing with another consumer’s internet access? For the sake of this argument, let’s say that this other IP address is also owned by the same ISP. Also, let’s assume that it’s possible for me to go into the cable modem settings and manually change the IP address. Under a business contract where you are allocated static addresses, you are also assigned a default gateway, a network address and a broadcast address. So that’s 3 addresses the ISP “loses” to you. That seems very wasteful for dynamically assigned IP addresses, which the majority of customers are. Could they simply be using static arps? ACLs? Other simple mechanisms? Two things to investigate here, why can’t we just go around changing our addresses, and is the assignment process as wasteful as it seems? The Answer SuperUser contributor Moses offers some insight: Cable modems aren’t like your home router (ie. they don’t have a web interface with simple point-and-click buttons that any kid can “hack” into). Cable modems are “looked up” and located by their MAC address by the ISP, and are typically accessed by technicians using proprietary software that only they have access to, that only runs on their servers, and therefore can’t really be stolen. Cable modems also authenticate and cross-check settings with the ISPs servers. The server has to tell the modem whether it’s settings (and location on the cable network) are valid, and simply sets it to what the ISP has it set it for (bandwidth, DHCP allocations, etc). For instance, when you tell your ISP “I would like a static IP, please.”, they allocate one to the modem through their servers, and the modem allows you to use that IP. Same with bandwidth changes, for instance. To do what you are suggesting, you would likely have to break into the servers at the ISP and change what it has set up for your modem. Could they simply be using static arps? ACLs? Other simple mechanisms? Every ISP is different, both in practice and how close they are with the larger network that is providing service to them. Depending on those factors, they could be using a combination of ACL and static ARP. It also depends on the technology in the cable network itself. The ISP I worked for used some form of ACL, but that knowledge was a little beyond my paygrade. I only got to work with the technician’s interface and do routine maintenance and service changes. What keeps me from changing this IP address to, let’s say, 60.61.62.75 and mess with another consumer’s internet access? Given the above, what keeps you from changing your IP to one that your ISP hasn’t specifically given to you is a server that is instructing your modem what it can and can’t do. Even if you somehow broke into the modem, if 60.61.62.75 is already allocated to another customer, then the server will simply tell your modem that it can’t have it. David Schwartz offers some additional insight with a link to a white paper for the really curious: Most modern ISPs (last 13 years or so) will not accept traffic from a customer connection with a source IP address they would not route to that customer were it the destination IP address. This is called “reverse path forwarding”. See BCP 38. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

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Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

- by aspiringgeek

Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014. Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc. The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps. In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data. The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario Conventional Structures Columnstore ? SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically. The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes. As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics. Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible. The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators. As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing. I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Let's Get Social and Interactive

- by Christie Flanagan

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} On this blog, we often write about getting social and interactive. Usually, we’re talking about how to create a social business or how to make the customer experience more social and interactive. Today’s topic is about getting social and interactive as well. But this time we’re talking about getting social and interactive the old fashioned way, face-to-face at Oracle OpenWorld with fellow Oracle WebCenter customers, partners and experts and the broader Oracle community. Here are some great ways to get social at OpenWorld outside of the exhibition halls and meeting rooms: Oracle OpenWorld Welcome Reception - Sponsored by FujitsuSunday, September 30, 7:00 p.m.–8:30 p.m.Yerba Buena Gardens & Howard Street Tent You’ll definitely want to attend the Opening Ceremonies for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 on Sunday, September 30. Centered in Yerba Buena Gardens (YBG) and shimmying out to other venues, the Opening Ceremonies are not to be missed. Join other attendees for great food and drink, energizing music, networking opportunities, and more. While you’re at YBG (home of ORACLE TEAM USA’s America’s Cup Pavilion), be sure to meet the sailors who will be defending the 34th America’s Cup in 2013. Get a good look at the 161-year old Trophy itself—the oldest trophy still being contested in international sport. And at the AC72 boat display, view a model of the largest wingsail ever built. Oracle WebCenter Customer Appreciation ReceptionTuesday, October 2, 6:30 p.m.—9:30 p.m.The Palace Hotel, Rallston BallroomThose Oracle WebCenter customers who’ve RSVP’d to attend the Oracle WebCenter Customer Appreciation Reception shouldn’t miss this private cocktail reception at one of San Francisco’s finest hotels. Sponsored by Oracle WebCenter partners Fishbowl Solutions, Fujitsu, Keste, Mythics, Redstone Content Solutions, TEAM Informatics, and TekStream, this evening will provide plenty of time to interact with other WebCenter customers, partners and employees over hors d'oeuvres and cocktails. Oracle Appreciation Event – Sponsored by CSC, Fujitsu and IntelWednesday, October 3, 7:30 p.m.—1:00 a.m.Treasure Island, San Francisco On Wednesday night October 3, Treasure Island will be engineered to rock as the Oracle Appreciation Event gets revved up and attendees get rolling. As always at the Oracle Appreciation Event, there will be unlimited refreshments, fun and games, the most awesome views of San Francisco from just about anywhere, and top notch entertainment. Past performers read like a veritable who’s who of the rock and roll elite. Join us—it's our way of saying thanks to you for supporting Oracle and our flagship conference. Complimentary shuttle service to and from Treasure Island will be provided, so all you have to worry about is having a rocking night of your own. Oracle OpenWorld Music FestivalSeptember 30-October 4, Check schedule for venues and times.Oracle presents the first annual Oracle OpenWorld Musical Festival, featuring some of today’s breakthrough musicians from around the country and the world including Macy Gray, Joss Stone, Jimmy Cliff and The Hives. It’s five nights of back-to-back performances in the heart of San Francisco. Registered Oracle conference attendees get free admission, so remember your badge when you head to a show. With limited space at some venues, these concerts are first-come, first-served. So mark your calendars and get ready for the music to begin. See you there!I hope this give you an idea of the many opportunities to socialize and interact with the Oracle community at OpenWorld, and if you’re a music lover like me, you’re in for a special treat as we debut our first annual Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival. Check out the links below for more information on these events and the many featured performers: Reflections from the Young Prisms A Brief Soul Session with Joss Stone Mixing It Up with Blues Mix Red Meat’s Music is Rare and Well Done The English Beat’s Dave Wakeling Gets Philosophical Top Ten Reasons to Attend the Oracle Appreciation Event There’s Magic in the Air, There’ll Be Music Everywhere Looking forward to seeing you at OpenWorld!

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Subset sum problem

- by MadBoy

I'm having a problem with counting which is continuation of this question. I am not really a math person so it's really hard for me to figure out this subset sum problem which was suggested as resolution. I'm having 4 ArrayList in which I hold data: alId, alTransaction, alNumber, alPrice Type | Transaction | Number | Price 8 | Buy | 95.00000000 | 305.00000000 8 | Buy | 126.00000000 | 305.00000000 8 | Buy | 93.00000000 | 306.00000000 8 | Transfer out | 221.00000000 | 305.00000000 8 | Transfer in | 221.00000000 | 305.00000000 8 | Sell | 93.00000000 | 360.00000000 8 | Sell | 95.00000000 | 360.00000000 8 | Sell | 126.00000000 | 360.00000000 8 | Buy | 276.00000000 | 380.00000000 In the end I'm trying to get what's left for customer and what's left I put into 3 array lists: alNew (corresponds to alNumber), alNewPoIle (corresponds to alPrice), and alNewCo (corrseponds to alID) ArrayList alNew = new ArrayList(); ArrayList alNewPoIle = new ArrayList(); ArrayList alNewCo = new ArrayList(); for (int i = 0; i < alTransaction.Count; i++) { string tempAkcjeCzynnosc = (string) alTransaction[i]; string tempAkcjeInId = (string) alID[i]; decimal varAkcjeCena = (decimal) alPrice[i]; decimal varAkcjeIlosc = (decimal) alNumber[i]; int index; switch (tempAkcjeCzynnosc) { case "Transfer out": case "Sell": index = alNew.IndexOf(varAkcjeIlosc); if (index != -1) { alNew.RemoveAt(index); alNewPoIle.RemoveAt(index); alNewCo.RemoveAt(index); } else { ArrayList alTemp = new ArrayList(); decimal varAkcjeSuma = 0; for (int j = 0; j < alNew.Count; j ++) { string akcjeInId = (string) alNewCo[j]; decimal akcjeCena = (decimal) alNewPoIle[j]; decimal akcjeIlosc = (decimal) alNew[j]; if (tempAkcjeInId == akcjeInId && akcjeCena == varAkcjeCena) { alTemp.Add(j); varAkcjeSuma = varAkcjeSuma + akcjeIlosc; } } if (varAkcjeSuma == varAkcjeIlosc) { for (int j = alTemp.Count -1 ; j >=0 ; j --) { int tempIndex = (int) alTemp[j]; alNew.RemoveAt(tempIndex); alNewPoIle.RemoveAt(tempIndex); alNewCo.RemoveAt(tempIndex); } } } break; case "Transfer In": case "Buy": alNew.Add(varAkcjeIlosc); alNewPoIle.Add(varAkcjeCena); alNewCo.Add(tempAkcjeInId); break; } } Basically I'm adding and removing things from Array depending on Transaction Type, Transaction ID and Numbers. I'm adding numbers to ArrayList like 156, 340 (when it is TransferIn or Buy) etc and then i remove them doing it like 156, 340 (when it's TransferOut, Sell). My solution works for that without a problem. The problem I have is that for some old data employees were entering sum's like 1500 instead of 500+400+100+500. How would I change it so that when there's Sell/TransferOut or Buy/Transfer In and there's no match inside ArrayList it should try to add multiple items from thatArrayList and find elements that combine into aggregate. Inside my code I tried to resolve that problem with simple summing everything when there's no match (index == 1) if (index != -1) { alNew.RemoveAt(index); alNewPoIle.RemoveAt(index); alNewCo.RemoveAt(index); } else { ArrayList alTemp = new ArrayList(); decimal varAkcjeSuma = 0; for (int j = 0; j < alNew.Count; j ++) { string akcjeInId = (string) alNewCo[j]; decimal akcjeCena = (decimal) alNewPoIle[j]; decimal akcjeIlosc = (decimal) alNew[j]; if (tempAkcjeInId == akcjeInId && akcjeCena == varAkcjeCena) { alTemp.Add(j); varAkcjeSuma = varAkcjeSuma + akcjeIlosc; } } if (varAkcjeSuma == varAkcjeIlosc) { for (int j = alTemp.Count -1 ; j >=0 ; j --) { int tempIndex = (int) alTemp[j]; alNew.RemoveAt(tempIndex); alNewPoIle.RemoveAt(tempIndex); alNewCo.RemoveAt(tempIndex); } } But it only works if certain conditions are met, and fails for the rest.

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?My Oracle Support???????????????

- by user763198

Normal 0 7.8 ? 0 2 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE Normal 0 7.8 ? 0 2 false false false EN-US ZH-CN X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:????; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:105%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-language:EN-US; mso-bidi-language:EN-US;} l ????????? ??????Help ??????? Table of Contents? ????Certification? ??,????????: My Oracle Support Help - Certifications (Doc ID 870956.5) l ????????? ?????????????????????????,???My Oracle Support Help - Certifications (Doc ID 870956.5)????????????????????,??? Global Customer Support ????? l ??????????? ????????????: http://www.oracle.com/support/contact.html l ???????????? ????????????: https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=dstore:home:0:::::&tz=8:00 ????????????????,???? “Contact Us” ??? l ???????,??? Export ??? ???????: 1. ???????,????,????Copy Selected Row,??Actions?????Copy Selected Rows? 2. ??????spreadsheet,??????? email ???? ?????????????table ??,????table ??,????Printable View????????????????,?????????????? ????tables????Export??, ??????export???????CSV???? ??:???Printable View ?Export?????????,??????????????? l ?????????? ?Oracle Education ??????????: http://education.oracle.com ????????????? ???????????,???Oracle Education ??(????????????)? l ????? License codes/Keys? http://www.oracle.com/us/support/licensecodes/index.html ?????????License Codes ?????????????(?????),????????????????????Oracle license code ?????????,????Customer Support Identifier (CSI)? l ???Software Delivery Cloud ????????? ???Software Delivery Cloud ???????? (Doc ID 1070969.1) ??? http://edelivery.oracle.com/ ,Oracle Software Delivery Cloud. ??“Sign In/Register” button. ??Terms & Restrictions ????Continue ????????,????Go ????????Continue ????????? l ??????Oracle.com ???? 1, ? www.oracle.com 2, ???????“Help” 3, ?????,???“Oracle.com login FAQ” 4, ???????????? 5, Oracle.com ???????????? l ????CRM Ondemand ????? ?CRMOD ??,????????: (i) CRMOD ??????: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/crmondemand/support/customer-care-support-337680.html (ii) CRMOD ?????????,?????????????????: https://ebusiness.siebel.com/odcustomercare/contact/contact_cc.asp l ???? Oracle Software Delivery Cloud ??? ????Oracle Software Delivery Cloud – ??Oracle ??????,???/????????email ???????? ???????: 1. ? www.oracle.com ?????Single Sign-On (SSO) ?? 2. ?????"Account" 3. ????,?? "Please verify account(?????)" ,????????????email ID 4. ????????,???????? l ???My Oracle Support??????Oracle Database Patchset ? 1. ?????? 2. ??Product ?Product Family: Oracle database. 3. ????:? Oracle 10.2.0.4. 4. ????:?Microsoft x64 (64-bit). 5. ??????: Patchset/Minipack. 6. ?? Go. l ?????????????FTP ??? ???? CD/DVD ? FTP ??: ???My Oracle Support ( https://support.oracle.com ) ???????Contact Us?? ???????????? CD/DVD ? FTP ???????????? ????????,????????,?????????????,????????????

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Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 3

- by Tarun Arora

Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll be discussing Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, Asp.net Profiler and some closing thoughts. Test Results – I see some creepy worms! In Part 2 we put together a web performance test and a load test, lets run the test to see load test to see how the Web site responds to the load simulation. While the load test is running you will be able to see close to real time analysis in the Load Test Analyser window. You can use the Load Test Analyser to conduct load test analysis in three ways: Monitor a running load test - A condensed set of the performance counter data is maintained in memory. To prevent the results memory requirements from growing unbounded, up to 200 samples for each performance counter are maintained. This includes 100 evenly spaced samples that span the current elapsed time of the run and the most recent 100 samples. After the load test run is completed - The test controller spools all collected performance counter data to a database while the test is running. Additional data, such as timing details and error details, is loaded into the database when the test completes. The performance data for a completed test is loaded from the database and analysed by the Load Test Analyser. Below you can see a screen shot of the summary view, this provides key results in a format that is compact and easy to read. You can also print the load test summary, this is generated after the test has completed or been stopped. Analyse the load test results of a previously run load test – We’ll see this in the section where i discuss comparison between two test runs. The performance counters can be plotted on the graphs. You also have the option to highlight a selected part of the test and view details, drill down to the user activity chart where you can hover over to see more details of the test run. Generate Report => Test Run Comparisons The level of reports you can generate using the Load Test Analyser is astonishing. You have the option to create excel reports and conduct side by side analysis of two test results or to track trend analysis. The tools also allows you to export the graph data either to MS Excel or to a CSV file. You can view the ASP.NET profiler report to conduct further analysis as well. View Data and Diagnostic Attachments opens the Choose Diagnostic Data Adapter Attachment dialog box to select an adapter to analyse the result type. For example, you can select an IntelliTrace adapter, click OK and open the IntelliTrace summary for the test agent that was used in the load test. Compare results This creates a set of reports that compares the data from two load test results using tables and bar charts. I have taken these screen shots from the MSDN documentation, I would highly recommend exploring the wealth of knowledge available on MSDN. Leaving Thoughts While load testing the application with an excessive load for a longer duration of time, i managed to bring the IIS to its knees by piling up a huge queue of requests waiting to be processed. This clearly means that the IIS had run out of threads as all the threads were busy processing existing request, one easy way of fixing this is by increasing the default number of allocated threads, but this might escalate the problem. The better suggestion is to try and drill down to the actual root cause of the problem. When ever the garbage collection runs it stops processing any pages so all requests that come in during that period are queued up, but realistically the garbage collection completes in fraction of a a second. To understand this better lets look at the .net heap, it is divided into large heap and small heap, anything greater than 85kB in size will be allocated to the Large object heap, the Large object heap is non compacting and remember large objects are expensive to move around, so if you are allocating something in the large object heap, make sure that you really need it! The small object heap on the other hand is divided into generations, so all objects that are supposed to be short-lived are suppose to live in Gen-0 and the long living objects eventually move to Gen-2 as garbage collection goes through. As you can see in the picture below all < 85 KB size objects are first assigned to Gen-0, when Gen-0 fills up and a new object comes in and finds Gen-0 full, the garbage collection process is started, the process checks for all the dead objects and assigns them as the valid candidate for deletion to free up memory and promotes all the remaining objects in Gen-0 to Gen-1. So in the future when ever you clean up Gen-1 you have to clean up Gen-0 as well. When you fill up Gen – 0 again, all of Gen – 1 dead objects are drenched and rest are moved to Gen-2 and Gen-0 objects are moved to Gen-1 to free up Gen-0, but by this time your Garbage collection process has started to take much more time than it usually takes. Now as I mentioned earlier when garbage collection is being run all page requests that come in during that period are queued up. Does this explain why possibly page requests are getting queued up, apart from this it could also be the case that you are waiting for a long running database process to complete. Lets explore the heap a bit more… What is really a case of crisis is when the objects are living long enough to make it to Gen-2 and then dying, this is definitely a high cost operation. But sometimes you need objects in memory, for example when you cache data you hold on to the objects because you need to use them right across the user session, which is acceptable. But if you wanted to see what extreme caching can do to your server then write a simple application that chucks in a lot of data in cache, run a load test over it for about 10-15 minutes, forcing a lot of data in memory causing the heap to run out of memory. If you get to such a state where you start running out of memory the IIS as a mode of recovery restarts the worker process. It is great way to free up all your memory in the heap but this would clear the cache. The problem with this is if the customer had 10 items in their shopping basket and that data was stored in the application cache, the user basket will now be empty forcing them either to get frustrated and go to a competitor website or if the customer is really patient, give it another try! How can you address this, well two ways of addressing this; 1. Workaround – A x86 bit processor only allows a maximum of 4GB of RAM, this means the machine effectively has around 3.4 GB of RAM available, the OS needs about 1.5 GB of RAM to run efficiently, the IIS and .net framework also need their share of memory, leaving you a heap of around 800 MB to play with. Because Team builds by default build your application in ‘Compile as any mode’ it means the application is build such that it will run in x86 bit mode if run on a x86 bit processor and run in a x64 bit mode if run on a x64 but processor. The problem with this is not all applications are really x64 bit compatible specially if you are using com objects or external libraries. So, as a quick win if you compiled your application in x86 bit mode by changing the compile as any selection to compile as x86 in the team build, you will be able to run your application on a x64 bit machine in x86 bit mode (WOW – By running Windows on Windows) and what that means is, you could use 8GB+ worth of RAM, if you take away everything else your application will roughly get a heap size of at least 4 GB to play with, which is immense. If you need a heap size of more than 4 GB you have either build a software for NASA or there is something fundamentally wrong in your application. 2. Solution – Now that you have put a workaround in place the IIS will not restart the worker process that regularly, which means you can take a breather and start working to get to the root cause of this memory leak. But this begs a question “How do I Identify possible memory leaks in my application?” Well i won’t say that there is one single tool that can tell you where the memory leak is, but trust me, ‘Performance Profiling’ is a great start point, it definitely gets you started in the right direction, let’s have a look at how. Performance Wizard - Start the Performance Wizard and select Instrumentation, this lets you measure function call counts and timings. Before running the performance session right click the performance session settings and chose properties from the context menu to bring up the Performance session properties page and as shown in the screen shot below, check the check boxes in the group ‘.NET memory profiling collection’ namely ‘Collect .NET object allocation information’ and ‘Also collect the .NET Object lifetime information’. Now if you fire off the profiling session on your pages you will notice that the results allows you to view ‘Object Lifetime’ which shows you the number of objects that made it to Gen-0, Gen-1, Gen-2, Large heap, etc. Another great feature about the profile is that if your application has > 5% cases where objects die right after making to the Gen-2 storage a threshold alert is generated to alert you. Since you have the option to also view the most expensive methods and by capturing the IntelliTrace data you can drill in to narrow down to the line of code that is the root cause of the problem. Well now that we have seen how crucial memory management is and how easy Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 makes it for us to identify and reproduce the problem with the best of breed tools in the product. Caching One of the main ways to improve performance is Caching. Which basically means you tell the web server that instead of going to the database for each request you keep the data in the webserver and when the user asks for it you serve it from the webserver itself. BUT that can have consequences! Let’s look at some code, trust me caching code is not very intuitive, I define a cache key for almost all searches made through the common search page and cache the results. The approach works fine, first time i get the data from the database and second time data is served from the cache, significant performance improvement, EXCEPT when two users try to do the same operation and run into each other. But it is easy to handle this by adding the lock as you can see in the snippet below. So, as long as a user comes in and finds that the cache is empty, the user locks and starts to get the cache no more concurrency issues. But lets say you are processing 10 requests per second, by the time i have locked the operation to get the results from the database, 9 other users came in and found that the cache key is null so after i have come out and populated the cache they will still go in to get the results again. The application will still be faster because the next set of 10 users and so on would continue to get data from the cache. BUT if we added another null check after locking to build the cache and before actual call to the db then the 9 users who follow me would not make the extra trip to the database at all and that would really increase the performance, but didn’t i say that the code won’t be very intuitive, may be you should leave a comment you don’t want another developer to come in and think what a fresher why is he checking for the cache key null twice !!! The downside of caching is, you are storing the data outside of the database and the data could be wrong because the updates applied to the database would make the data cached at the web server out of sync. So, how do you invalidate the cache? Well if you only had one way of updating the data lets say only one entry point to the data update you can write some logic to say that every time new data is entered set the cache object to null. But this approach will not work as soon as you have several ways of feeding data to the system or your system is scaled out across a farm of web servers. The perfect solution to this is Micro Caching which means you cache the query for a set time duration and invalidate the cache after that set duration. The advantage is every time the user queries for that data with in the time span for which you have cached the results there are no calls made to the database and the data is served right from the server which makes the response immensely quick. Now figuring out the appropriate time span for which you micro cache the query results really depends on the application. Lets say your website gets 10 requests per second, if you retain the cache results for even 1 minute you will have immense performance gains. You would reduce 90% hits to the database for searching. Ever wondered why when you go to e-bookers.com or xpedia.com or yatra.com to book a flight and you click on the book button because the fare seems too exciting and you get an error message telling you that the fare is not valid any more. Yes, exactly => That is a cache failure! These travel sites or price compare engines are not going to hit the database every time you hit the compare button instead the results will be served from the cache, because the query results are micro cached, its a perfect trade-off, by micro caching the results the site gains 100% performance benefits but every once in a while annoys a customer because the fare has expired. But the trade off works in the favour of these sites as they are still able to process up to 30+ page requests per second which means cater to the site traffic by may be losing 1 customer every once in a while to a competitor who is also using a similar caching technique what are the odds that the user will not come back to their site sooner or later? Recap Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN. You can always make use of Fiddler to debug Web Performance Tests. Some community test extensions and plug ins available on Codeplex might also be of interest to you. The Road Ahead Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, you may also want to read Part I and Part II if you haven’t so far. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Next ‘Load Testing in the cloud’, I’ll be working on exploring the possibilities of running Test controller/Agents in the Cloud. See you on the other side! Thank You! Share this post : CodeProject

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Upcoming EMEA, APAC & US Events with MySQL in 2014

- by Lenka Kasparova

As an update to the previous announcement from Mar 25, 2014 please find below the updated list of events where MySQL Community team is attending and/or supporting. This time you can find not only EMEA & APAC ones but also conferences & events we are covering in the US & Canada. You are invited to meet our engineers at the events below. EMEA NEW!! BGOUG, Sandanski, Bulgaria, June 13, 2014 Georgi Kodinov will attend and speak at this local Oracle User Group event. Feel free to come. PHP Tour Lyon, Lyon, France, June 23-24, 2014 MySQL team is going to be part of this show as well, we are not going to have a booth here but very active networking by our french MySQL team around the event. Come to meet us and talk to us! NEW!! Converge Conference, Glasgow, Scotland, August 15-16, 2014 MySQL Community Manager, David Stokes attends with MySQL talk. NEW!! CakeFest, Madrid, Spain, August 21-24, 2014 A talk on "Scaling Your MySQL instances AND keeping your Sanity" will be given by the MySQL Community Manager, David Stokes. Froscon 2014, St.Augustin, Germany, August 23-24, 2014 Please visit our booth as well as watch the Froscon website for the schedule updates. NEW!! SymfonyLive, UK, London, September 25-26, 2014 MySQL Community Magers, David Stokes & Morgan Tocker submitted MySQL talks for this show. Schedule will be announced later on. DrupalCon Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 29-Oct 3, 2014 Meet us at our booth at DrupalCon Amsterdam. For the schedule please watch the DrupalCon website. All Your Base, Oxford UK, October 17, 2014 Come to visit our MySQL booth and talk to our MySQL experts. NEW!! WebTechCon / IPC, Munich Germany, October 26-29, 2014 NEW!! DOAG, Nuremberg, Germany, November 18-20, 2014 There will be a full day of MySQL talks and one full day of MySQL workshop & sessions with live demo. This event is simply hard to miss! NEW!! Forum PHP Paris, France, November 21-22, 2014 More details: TBD NEW!! UK OUG, Liverpool, UK, December 8-10, 2014 MySQL will be part of the Oracle booth and we hope to get more space for MySQL talks. USA NEW!! Texas Linux Fest, Austin, Texas, US, June 13-14, 2014 NEW!! SouthEast Linux Fest, Charlotte, US, June 20-22, 2014 NEW!! Debian Conference 2014, Portland, OR, US, August 23-31, 2014 NEW!! FossetCon, Orlando, US, September 11-13, 2014 NEW!! Oracle Open World, San Francisco, US, September 29-October 3, 2014 NEW!! MySQL Central @ Open/World, San Francisco, US, September 29-October 3, 2014 NEW!! PyTexas 2014, Dallas, TX, US, October 3-5, 2014 NEW!! All Things Open (replacing POSSCON), Raleigh, NC, October 23-24, 2014 NEW!! Ohio LinuxFest 2014, Columbus, Ohio, US, October 24-25, 2014 NEW!! ZendCon PHP, Santa Clara, US, October 27-30, 2014 NEW!! Kuali Days 2014, Indianapolis, US, November 10-13, 2014 NEW!! Live 360, Orlando, FL, US, November 17-20, 2014 APAC OpenSourceConference Japan, Hokkaido, June 13-14, 2014 MySQL is represented by Ryusuke Kajiyama with the talk on "MySQL Technology Updates". NEW!! db tech showcase, Osaka Japan, June 18-20, 2014 Three MySQL talks are scheduled for this show, "MySQL for Oracle DBA" & "MySQL Technology Updates" by Ryusuke Kajiyama. The last talk will be on MySQL Fabric by Yoshiaki Yamasaki. NEW!! PyCon Singapore, Singapore, June 18-20, 2014 Ryusuke Kajiyama will be talking about "Sharding and scale-out using Python-based MySQL Fabric". NEW!! COSCUP, Taipei, Taiwan, July 19-20, 2014 We are going to run a technical session on MySQL Workbench & one talk on how to make MySQL better MySQL. NEW!! PyCon New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand, September 13-14, 2014 MySQL talks were submitted as well as one talk by Solaris Modernization team on Python & Solaris, watch the website for schedule updates. NEW!! PyCon Japan, Tokyo Japan, September 13-15, 2014 MySQL will be a MySQL session speaker, no schedule is announced yet. Ruby Kaigi, Tokyo, Japan, September 18-20, 2014 Another event MySQL supports and attends in APAC region. Ruby Kaigi is the international Ruby Conference in Japan, Tokyo. Ruby started in Japan, so Ruby Kaigi has excellent speakers and developers! MySQL team is going to be present at this conference with MySQL talks and active networking around the venue. NEW!! PyCon India, Bangalore, India, September 26-28, 2014 A MySQL talk on "MySQL Utilities scaling MySQL with Python" has been submitted, please watch the PyCon website for the schedule updates. NEW!! OpenSourceConference Japan, Tokyo, October 18-19, 2014 NEW!! OpenSource India, Bengaluru, India, November 7-8, 2014 NEW!! OpenSourceConference Japan, Fukuoka, November 14-15, 2014 You can check the MySQL wikis for updates on the conferences we are attending. Next time I hope to have more details for each event above (especially for the US ones).

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Silverlight Cream for February 26, 2011 -- #1052

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Mark Monster, Gill Cleeren, Pencho Popadiyn, Kevin Dockx, Joost van Schaik, Jesse Liberty, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, Arik Poznanski(-2-), Page Brooks, Deborah Kurata, Mike Snow, Alfred Astort, Samuel Jack, XAMLNinja, and Shawn Wildermuth. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Asynchronous Callbacks with Rx" Jesse Liberty WP7: "Phoney Windows Phone 7 Project Now Available!" Shawn Wildermuth MVVM: "Validating our ViewModel" Mark Monster Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuth has a video up of his FadingMessage class to show it off: Introducing Phoney's FadingMessage Class From SilverlightCream.com: Validating our ViewModel Mark Monster discusses Validation in his latest post... using INotifyDataErrorInfo and his own implementation of a ViewModel base that supports it and INPC. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 7) Gill Cleeren hits part 7 of his series at SilverlightShow on a great walk through Silverlight and getting ready for the exam. This is the final part and concentrates on deploying apps. Windows Phone 7–Creating Custom Keyboard Pencho Popadiyn has a post at SilverlightShow discussing problems with WP7 keyboards in his native Bulgaria, and his solution to the problem... create his own. 360 Degrees Feedback by Kevin Dockx Kevin Dockx produced a white paper for his company about an employee review solution they did in Silverlight. The white paper is available, and SilverlightShow interviewd Kevin to answer questions about the app. Extended Windows Phone 7 page for handling rotation, focused element updates and back key press Looks like Joost van Schaik has a few posts I've missed... and I'm not going to get to them all today! ... this one is about the base class he uses for WP7 apps... a bunch of utilities he uses... definitely worth a look (and a take). Asynchronous Callbacks with Rx Jesse Liberty has his 8th post in the Rx series up and this one's on Asynchronous Callbacks... if you haven't seen this before, you should definitely look into it... cool stuff, Jesse! Silverlight TV 63: Exploring National Instruments' App Using Data and Business Features John Papa has Silverlight TV number 63 up and is talking to Steve Lasker about National Instruments and their Lab View product. Great demo and discussion. Jounce Part 11: Debugging MEF Jeremy Likness's latest (number 11) in his series on his MVVM framework Jounce is out, and he's discussing how to debug MEF, which Jounce handles nicely through the logging he provides... and you can use it externally to Jounce. Get Twitter Trends on Windows Phone 7 Arik Poznanski has a couple Twitter for WP7 posts up... first is one for pulling Twitter trends from whatthetrend.com... plus the code to do it. Searching Twitter on Windows Phone 7 In his next post, Arik Poznanski shows how to search twitter from your WP7 ... again with code. Tiled Background Control in Silverlight Page Brooks shows how to get a tiled background control in Silverlight ... did you know there was one in the JetPack them? Silverlight Charting: Displaying Data Above the Column Deborah Kurata continues her charting posts with this one displaying the column value above the column. I like this... it has a clean look and all the data is available at a glance. Silverlight: Tasks on the Win7 Mobile Phone Mike Snow has a list of the WP7 tasks available and an example of using them... looks like a pretty good reference! 10 of 10 - Aesthetics and alignment matter Alfred Astort discusses aesthetics and WP7 dev... looks like it's the same as any app development, but if you're not doing it, you should be. Simon Squared – We have Multi-player: Days 4, 5 and (ahem!) 6 Samuel Jack details the completion of his multi-player game for WP7 utilizing Azure, in the hour-by-hour detail he's done the rest... plus a video of the final product! Who ate all the pies!! XAMLNinja has a very good discussion/link set of Charting posts all leading up to a portrait-only version of charting for WP7 with labels that looks looks great Phoney Windows Phone 7 Project Now Available! Shawn Wildermuth has a collection of classes he always uses with WP7 dev, and he's sharing them with all of us a "Phoney" Tools project on Codeplex... and now has a NuGet project also. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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SQL Saturday #44 Huntington Beach Recap

What a great day. It was long and tiring, but rewarding in so many ways. On Sunday morning, I was driving home and I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach. It was a great chance to exhale and just enjoy the sun and smells of the beach (I really love SoCal sometimes). And for future reference for all you speakers, the beach and ocean are only 5 minutes from the SQL Saturday location. I just could help noticing also the shocking number of high priced cars on the road (4 Bentleys, 3 Ferraris, 1 Aston Martins, 3 Maserati, 1 Rolls Royce, and 2 Lamborghinis). It made me think about this: Price of all those cars: $ 150,000+. Impacting the ability of people to learn: Priceless. We have positively impacted the education, knowledge, capabilities of not only our attendees, but also all of their companies and people they might help as well. That is just staggering and something to be immensely proud of. To all of my fellow community leaders, I salute you. So lets talk about the event Overall We had over 220 people register for the event and had 180+ people attend the event. I was shooting for the magical 200 number, but I guess it just gives us more motivation to make it even bigger and better next time. We had a few snags along the way, but what event doesnt, but I think everything turned out great. I did not hear any negative comments and heard lots of positive comments along with people asking when the next one is going to be (More on that later). Location- Golden West College We could not have asked for a better partner for the event. Herb Cohen from Golden West College was the wizard behind the curtains. From the beginning, he was our advocate to the GWC Board and was instrumental in getting our event approved. The day off, Herb was a HUGE help getting any and all logistics that we needed taken care of. In the craziness of the early morning registration crush it was a big help knowing that he and Bret Stateham (Blog | Twitter) were taking care of testing projectors in all the rooms. Anything we needed he was there and was even proactive in getting some things that I had not even thought of (i.e. a dumpster for all of our garbage). I cannot thank Herb enough along with other members of the GWC staff including Minnie Higgins of the Career and Technical Education Division office, Jack Taylor, public safety, and Ron Pryor, Tech Services Support. And last, but not least, the Wireless on campus was absolutely FANTASTIC! Some lessons learned Unless you are a glutton for punishment, as I no doubt am, you most certainly want to give yourself more than six weeks to plan the event. I am lucky that I have a very understanding wife and had a wonderful set of co-coordinators helping me out. A big thanks goes out to Phil, Marlon (Blog | Twitter), Nitin (Twitter), Thomas (Blog | Twitter), Bret (Blog | Twitter), Ben, and Laurie. Thankfully, the sponsor and speaker community was hugely supportive and we were able to fill out the entire event with speakers and sponsors. I have to say that there is not a lot that I would change after this years event. There are obviously going to be some things that we can do better or differently next time, but overall I think it was a great event and I was more than happy with the response we received from the community. Sponsors We obviously could not have put together our event without our sponsors. So certainly have to show them some love. Platinum Sponsors Quest Software http://www.quest.com My Space http://www.myspace.com/ Gold Strategy Companion http://www.strategycompanion.com Silver Fusion-IO http://www.fusionio.com Bronze WestClinTech http://westclintech.com Professional Association For SQL Server http://www.sqlpass.org Attunity http://www.attunity.com Sharepoint 360 http://www.sharepoint360.com Some additional Thanks Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) Always there to answer my question and help out when I had some issues or questions with the website. The amount of work that he and everyone else put into SQL Saturday is very amazing. What a great gift to the community! Einstein Bros. Bagels They were our Breakfast Vendor and arrived perfectly on time with yummy bagels, sweets and most importantly coffee. Luccis Deli (http://www.luccisdeli.com) Luccis was out Lunch Vendor. They were great to work with and the food was excellent. They worked with us to give us a great price. Heard lots of great comments about the lunches. Definitely not your ordinary box lunch. Moving Forward Unfortunately, the work does not end after the event. We have a few things to clear up such as surveys, sponsor stuff, presentations uploaded to the website, expense reimbursement, stuff like that. Hopefully, all that should be cleared up within the next couple weeks. After that as a group we are going to get together and decide what our next steps are. We definitely want to keep some of the momentum that we are building as a SQL Community and channel that into future SQL Saturdays and other types of community events. In the meantime, for additional training be sure to check out your local User Group and PASS. San Diego SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sdsqlug.org/home/index.cfm ) Orange County SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sqloc.com/ ) L.A. SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sql.la/ ) SQL PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/ ) 24 Hours of PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2010/ ) So stay tuned, there will be more events to come in SoCal!!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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How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher?

- by kanichiro.nishida

Do you know how many reports on your BI Publisher server are accessed yesterday ? Or, how many users accessed to the reports yesterday, or what are the average number of the users accessed to the reports during the week vs. weekend or morning vs. afternoon ? With BI Publisher 11G, now you can audit your user’s reports access and understand the state of the reporting environment at your server, each user, or each report level. At the previous post I’ve talked about what the BI Publisher’s auditing functionality and how to enable it so that BI Publisher can start collecting such data. (How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access?)Now, how can you visualize such auditing data to have a better understanding and gain more insights? With Fusion Middleware Audit Framework you have an option to store the auditing data into a database instead of a log file, which is the default option. Once you enable the database storage option, that means you have your auditing data (or, user report access data) in your database tables, now no brainer, you can start visualize the data, create reports, analyze, and share with BI Publisher. So, first, let’s take a look on how to enable the database storage option for the auditing data. How to Feed the Auditing Data into Database First you need to create a database schema for Fusion Middleware Audit Framework with RCU (Repository Creation Utility). If you have already installed BI Publisher 11G you should be familiar with this RCU. It creates any database schema necessary to run any Fusion Middleware products including BI stuff. And you can use the same RCU that you used for your BI or BI Publisher installation to create this Audit schema. Create Audit Schema with RCU Here are the steps: Go to $RCU_HOME/bin and execute the ‘rcu’ command Choose Create at the starting screen and click Next. Enter your database details and click Next. Choose the option to create a new prefix, for example ‘BIP’, ‘KAN’, etc. Select 'Audit Services' from the list of schemas. Click Next and accept the tablespace creation. Click Finish to start the process. After this, there should be following three Audit related schema created in your database. <prefix>_IAU (e.g. KAN_IAU) <prefix>_IAU_APPEND (e.g. KAN_IAU_APPEND) <prefix>_IAU_VIEWER (e.g. KAN_IAU_VIEWER) Setup Datasource at WebLogic After you create a database schema for your auditing data, now you need to create a JDBC connection on your WebLogic Server so the Audit Framework can access to the database schema that was created with the RCU with the previous step. Connect to the Oracle WebLogic Server administration console: http://hostname:port/console (e.g. http://report.oracle.com:7001/console) Under Services, click the Data Sources link. Click ‘Lock & Edit’ so that you can make changes Click New –> ‘Generic Datasource’ to create a new data source. Enter the following details for the new data source: Name: Enter a name such as Audit Data Source-0. JNDI Name: jdbc/AuditDB Database Type: Oracle Click Next and select ‘Oracle's Driver (Thin XA) Versions: 9.0.1 or later’ as Database Driver (if you’re using Oracle database), and click Next. The Connection Properties page appears. Enter the following information: Database Name: Enter the name of the database (SID) to which you will connect. Host Name: Enter the hostname of the database. Port: Enter the database port. Database User Name: This is the name of the audit schema that you created in RCU. The suffix is always IAU for the audit schema. For example, if you gave the prefix as ‘BIP’, then the schema name would be ‘KAN_IAU’. Password: This is the password for the audit schema that you created in RCU. Click Next. Accept the defaults, and click Test Configuration to verify the connection. Click Next Check listed servers where you want to make this JDBC connection available. Click ‘Finish’ ! After that, make sure you click ‘Activate Changes’ at the left hand side top to take the new JDBC connection in effect. Register your Audit Data Storing Database to your Domain Finally, you can register the JNDI/JDBC datasource as your Auditing data storage with Fusion Middleware Control (EM). Here are the steps: 1. Login to Fusion Middleware Control 2. Navigate to Weblogic Domain, right click on ‘bifoundation…..’, select Security, then Audit Store. 3. Click the searchlight icon next to the Datasource JNDI Name field. 4.Select the Audit JNDI/JDBC datasource you created in the previous step in the pop-up window and click OK. 5. Click Apply to continue. 6. Restart the whole WebLogic Servers in the domain. After this, now the BI Publisher should start feeding all the auditing data into the database table called ‘IAU_BASE’. Try login to BI Publisher and open a couple of reports, you should see the activity audited in the ‘IAU_BASE’ table. If not working, you might want to check the log file, which is located at $BI_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/logs/AdminServer-diagnostic.log to see if there is any error. Once you have the data in the database table, now, it’s time to visualize with BI Publisher reports! Create a First BI Publisher Auditing Report Register Auditing Datasource as JNDI datasource First thing you need to do is to register the audit datasource (JNDI/JDBC connection) you created in the previous step as JNDI data source at BI Publisher. It is a JDBC connection registered as JNDI, that means you don’t need to create a new JDBC connection by typing the connection URL, username/password, etc. You can just register it using the JNDI name. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Login to BI Publisher as Administrator (e.g. weblogic) Go to Administration Page Click ‘JNDI Connection’ under Data Sources and Click ‘New’ Type Data Source Name and JNDI Name. The JNDI Name is the one you created in the WebLogic Console as the auditing datasource. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Click ‘Test Connection’ to make sure the datasource connection works. Provide appropriate roles so that the report developers or viewers can share this data source to view reports. Click ‘Apply’ to save. Create Data Model Select Data Model from the tool bar menu ‘New’ Set ‘Default Data Source’ to the audit JNDI data source you have created in the previous step. Select ‘SQL Query’ for your data set Use Query Builder to build a query or just type a sql query. Either way, the table you want to report against is ‘IAU_BASE’. This IAU_BASE table contains all the auditing data for other products running on the WebLogic Server such as JPS, OID, etc. So, if you care only specific to BI Publisher then you want to filter by using ‘IAU_COMPONENTTYPE’ column which contains the product name (e.g. ’xmlpserver’ for BI Publisher). Here is my sample sql query. select "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" as "IAU_COMPONENTTYPE", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTTYPE" as "IAU_EVENTTYPE", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTCATEGORY" as "IAU_EVENTCATEGORY", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TSTZORIGINATING" as "IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'YYYY-MM-DD') IAU_DATE, to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'DAY') as IAU_DAY, to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'HH24') as IAU_HH24, to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'WW') as IAU_WEEK_OF_YEAR, "IAU_BASE"."IAU_INITIATOR" as "IAU_INITIATOR", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_RESOURCE" as "IAU_RESOURCE", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TARGET" as "IAU_TARGET", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_MESSAGETEXT" as "IAU_MESSAGETEXT", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_FAILURECODE" as "IAU_FAILURECODE", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_REMOTEIP" as "IAU_REMOTEIP" from "KAN3_IAU"."IAU_BASE" "IAU_BASE" where "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" = 'xmlpserver' Once you saved a sample XML for this data model, now you can create a report with this data model. Create Report Now you can use one of the BI Publisher’s layout options to design the report layout and visualize the auditing data. I’m a big fan of Online Layout Editor, it’s just so easy and simple to create reports, and on top of that, all the reports created with Online Layout Editor has the Interactive View with automatic data linking and filtering feature without any setting or coding. If you haven’t checked the Interactive View or Online Layout Editor you might want to check these previous blog posts. (Interactive Reporting with BI Publisher 11G, Interactive Master Detail Report Just A Few Clicks Away!) But of course, you can use other layout design option such as RTF template. Here are some sample screenshots of my report design with Online Layout Editor. Visualize and Gain More Insights about your Customers (Users) ! Now you can visualize your auditing data to have better understanding and gain more insights about your reporting environment you manage. It’s been actually helping me personally to answer the questios like below. How many reports are accessed or opened yesterday, today, last week ? Who is accessing which report at what time ? What are the time windows when the most of the reports access happening ? What are the most viewed reports ? Who are the active users ? What are the # of reports access or user access trend for the last month, last 6 months, last 12 months, etc ? I was talking with one of the best concierge in the world at this hotel the other day, and he was telling me that the best concierge knows about their customers inside-out therefore they can provide a very private service that is customized to each customer to meet each customer’s specific needs. Well, this is true when it comes to how to administrate and manage your reporting environment, right ? The best way to serve your customers (report users, including both viewers and developers) is to understand how they use, what they use, when they use. Auditing is not just about compliance, but it’s the way to improve the customer service. The BI Publisher 11G Auditing feature enables just that to help you understand your customers better. Happy customer service, be the best reporting concierge! p.s. please share with us on what other information would be helpful for you for the auditing! Always, any feedback is a great value and inspiration for us!

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What's going on with INETA and the Regional Speakers Bureau?

- by Chris Williams

For those of you that have been waiting patiently (and not so patiently) I'm happy to say that we're very near completion on some changes/enhancements/improvements that will allow us to finally go live with the INETA Regional Speakers Bureau. I know quite a few of you have already registered, which is great (though some of you may need to come back and update your info) and we've had a few folks submit requests, mostly in a test capacity, but soon we'll be up and live. Here's how it breaks down. Be sure to read this, because things have changed a bit from when we initially announced it. 1. The majority of our speaker/event funding is going into the Regional Speakers Bureau. The National Bureau still exists, but it's a good bit smaller than it was before, and it's not an "every group" benefit anymore. We'll be using the National Bureau as more of a strategic task force, targeting high impact events and areas that need some community building love from INETA. These will be identified and handled on a case by case basis, and may include more than just user group events. 2. You're going to get more events per group, per year than you did before. Not only are we focusing more resources on this program, but we're also making a lot of efforts to use it more effectively. With the INETA Regional Speakers Bureau, you should be able to get 2-3 INETA speakers per year, on average. Not every geographical area will have exactly the same experience, but we're doing the best we can. 3. It's not a farm team program for the National Bureau. Unsurprisingly, I managed to offend a number of people when I previously made the comment that the Regional Speakers Bureau program was a farm team or stepping stone to the National Bureau. It was a poor choice of words. Anyone can participate in the Regional Speakers Bureau, and I look forward to working with all of you. 4. There is assistance for your efforts. The exact final details are still being hammered out, but expect it to look something like this: (all distances listed are based on a round trip) Distances < 120 miles = $0 121 miles - 240 miles = $50 (effectively 1 to 2 hours, each way) 241 miles - 360 miles = $100 (effectively 2 to 3 hours, each way) 361 miles - 480 miles = $200 (effectively 3 to 4 hours, each way) For those of you who travel a lot, we're working on a solution to handle group visits when you're away from home. These will (for now) be handled on a case by case basis. 5. We're going to make it as easy as possible to work with the program. In order to do this, we need a few things from you. For speakers, that means your home address. It also means (maybe) filling out a simple 1 line expense report via the INETA website. For user groups, it means making sure your meeting address is up to date as well. 6. Distances will be automatically calculated from your home of record to the user group event and back. We realize that this is not a perfect solution to every instance, but we're not paying you to speak at an event, and you won't be taxed on this money. It's simply some assistance to make your community efforts easier. Our way of saying thanks for everything you do. 7. Sounds good so far, what's the catch? There's always a catch, right? In this case there are two of them: 1) At this time, Microsoft employees are welcome to use the website to line up speaking engagements with user groups, but are not eligible for financial assistance. 2) Anyone can register and use the website to line up speaking engagements with user groups, however you must receive and maintain a net score of 3+ positive ratings (we're implementing a thumbs up / thumbs down system) in order to receive financial assistance. These ratings are provided by the User Group leaders after the meeting has taken place. 8. Involvement by the User Group leaders is a key factor in the success of this program. Your job isn't done once you request a speaker. After you've had your meeting, it's critical that you go back to the website and take a very small survey. Doing this ensures that the speaker gets rated (and compensated if eligible) and also ensures that you can make another request, since you won't be able to make a new request if you have an old one outstanding. 9. What about Canada? We're definitely working on that. Unfortunately nothing new to report on that front, other than to say that we're trying. So... this is where things stand currently. We're working very quickly to get this in place and get speakers and groups together. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below and I'll answer them as quickly as possible. If I've forgotten anything, or if things change, I'll update it here. Thanks, Chris G. Williams INETA Board of Directors

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I, Android

- by andrewbrust

I’m just back from the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). I go to CES to get a sense of what Microsoft is doing in the consumer space, and how people are reacting to it. When I first went to CES 2 years ago, Steve Ballmer announced the beta of Windows 7 at his keynote address, and the crowd went wild. When I went again last year, everyone was hoping for a Windows tablet announcement at the Ballmer keynote. Although they didn’t get one (unless you count the unreleased HP Slate running Windows 7), people continued to show anticipation around Project Natal (which became Xbox 360 Kinect) and around Windows Phone 7. On the show floor last year, there were machines everywhere running Windows 7, including lots of netbooks. Microsoft had a serious influence at the show both years. But this year, one brand, one product, one operating system evidenced itself over and over again: Android. Whether in the multitude of tablet devices that were shown across the show, or the burgeoning number of smartphones shown (including all four forthcoming 4G-LTE handsets at Verizon Wireless’ booth) or the Google TV set top box from Logitech and the embedded implementation in new Sony TV models, Android was was there. There was excitement in the ubiquity of Android 2.2 (Froyo) and the emergence of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). There was anticipation around the tablet-optimized Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). There were highly customized skins. There was even an official CES Android app for navigating the exhibit halls and planning events. Android was so ubiquitous, in fact, that it became surprising to find a device that was running anything else. It was as if Android had become the de facto Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) operating system. Motorola’s booth was nothing less than an Android showcase. And it was large, and it was packed. Clearly Moto’s fortunes have improved dramatically in the last year and change. The fact that the company morphed from being a core Windows Mobile OEM to an Android poster child seems non-coincidental to their improved fortunes. Even erstwhile WinMo OEMs who now do produce Windows Phone 7 devices were not pushing them. Perhaps I missed them, but I couldn’t find WP7 handsets at Samsung’s booth, nor at LG’s. And since the only carrier exhibiting at the show was Verizon Wireless, which doesn’t yet have WP7 devices, this left Microsoft’s booth as the only place to see the phones. Why is Android so popular with consumer electronics manufacturers in Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan? Yes, it’s free, but there’s more to it than that. Android seems to have succeeded as an OEM OS because it’s directed at OEMs who are permitted to personalize it and extend it, and it provides enough base usability and touch-friendliness that OEMs want it. In the process, it has become a de facto standard (which makes OEMs want it even more), and has done so in a remarkably short time: the OS was launched on a single phone in the US just 2 1/4 years ago. Despite its success and popularity, Apple’s iOS would never be used by OEMs, because it’s not meant to be embedded and customized, but rather to provide a fully finished experience. Ironically, Windows Phone 7 is likewise disqualified from such embedded use. Windows Mobile (6.x and earlier) may have been a candidate had it not atrophied so much in its final 5 years of life. What can Microsoft do? It could start by developing a true touch-centric OS for tablets, whether that be within Windows 8, or derived from Windows Phone 7. It would then need to deconstruct that finished product into components, via a new or altered version of Windows Embedded or Windows Embedded Compact. And if Microsoft went that far, it would only make sense to work with its OEMs and mobile carriers to make certain they showcase their products using the OS at CES, and other consumer electronics venues, prominently. Mostly though, Microsoft would need to decide if it were really committed to putting sustained time, effort and money into a commodity product, especially given the far greater financial return that it now derives from its core Windows and Office franchises. Microsoft would need to see an OEM OS for what it is: a loss leader that helps build brand and platform momentum for up-level products. Is that enough to make the investment worthwhile? One thing is certain: if that question is not acknowledged and answered honestly, then any investment will be squandered.

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Windows Phone 7 Review – Part 1: LG Quantum

- by Nikita Polyakov

As many of my fellow geeks, I ran out and got a retail windows Phone 7 on the first day. Just had to have it :) I’ve had the developer prototypes in my hands for previous 3 months on and off, so I finally wanted to have one I call my own. I’ve rushed the Launch I’ve checked out both AT&T and T-Mobile offerings on day 1 and decided on a Samsung Focus. Great screen, super light and thin. If you don’t believe me that this phone can compete with the best of the non-Phone 7 offerings - get it in your hand to compare for yourself. I have to say that even though the on-screen keyboard on Windows Phone 7 is one of the best, the amount of text I write on my phone and my expectation of how long that takes for a short reply are very high. Also the phone being so slick and sexy did not feel solid or confident in my hand or pocket. As the dust settled Arrives the LG Quantum – now on AT&T and worldwide. First impression of the softer plastic, the back battery cover is solid metal - the entire phone feels solid and indestructible! Phone fits just right in my hand, it’s almost too good. It does not feel like it will crack in your jeans. I feel safe holding it and don’t feel like if I or someone were to bump into me walking it’d fly out of my hand. I’ve dropped and had thrown the Focus a few times on accident as it’s weight is negligible. I won’t even dream of lying the first day adjusting to a 3.5’ LCD screen from the Samsung’s blistering bright and poppy AMOLED 4’ was hard. But the colors and sharpness are still very good. I find it almost easier on the eyes actually for day to day use. I had a chance to lay the phone down in the line with the prototypes and final versions of other phones that had LCD screens – LG makes HTC looks like a budget LCD compared to a high end LCD in the home theatre department. I am consistently complemented by friends that have the HD7 or Surround on how much better my screen looks. The screen just looks like the most color correct phone out of the line up. Even next to Samsung it makes it look oversaturated, but can’t match the true blacks compensating with true white. Day to Day Usability What I also noticed that is a huge difference is how much I am not accidently hitting the soft keys at the bottom. I real pain on Focus since holding it in am average size hand already would accidently touch the controls at the bottom. QWERTY keyboard on this phone is great. It’s like the mission for LG is “make it solid!”. Keyboard has a very durable feel. LG’s has a secret wild card though is the DLNA support. If you seen an ad for it, you should. Imagine this – playing a song from your phone straight to your network connected A/V receiver. Done. Pictures to TV. Done. Video. Done. DLNA works with components that advertise to as well as Windows 7, XBOX 360 and other consoles. I will write an extensive review of that experience in near future. LG Exclusive apps – from panorama photo taker to voice to text translator and even look-n-type app that works like a backup inverse camera, there is quite a bit there that won’t be found on the other phones. I’ll review those in more detail in another segment. Conclusion So for a quick comparison: If you want a phone that is super thin, light and is core reference of a Windows Phone 7 – Samsung Focus it is. If you want a great phone with solid secure feel, real keyboard, media features - the hands down winner is LG Quantum. You can pick up the LG Quantum at AT&T in US and worldwide as LG Optimus 7Q. Final thought: I have not had SmartPhone that I felt was a reliable trusty primary communication device since Samsung BlackJack II, this time the LG got the crown. [ Disclosure: Phone was provided to me free of charge. That has been the case for all of my phones for years, nothing new - I get them all. ]

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