2010-03-10 Wed

20:30 ODTUG Kaleidoscope Conference 2010 (1787 Bytes) » Inside the Oracle Optimizer - Removing the black magic

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010, June 27 - July 1st Washington DC is a great conference for Oracle developers and architects, offering the best content by renowned experts. We will have the privilege of delivering two Optimizer sessions this year, 'Explaining the Explain plan' and 'Finally Plan Stability during Database Upgrade with SQL Plan Management'. In the Explain the Explain plan session we will discuss each aspect of an execution plan (from selectivity to parallel execution), explain what information you should be getting from the plan, and how it will affects the execution. While in the SQL Plan Management session, we will will give detailed instructions on how to capture your existing execution plans before you upgrade to 11g, as well as an in-depth discussion on what to expect from the Optimizer after you upgrade to 11g.
ODTUG is a great conference where you can learn lots in a fun and casual atmosphere. Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

13:45 Liveblogging at confoo: Can Twitter make money? (3150 Bytes) » The Pythian Blog

subtitle: Monetizing Social Media

Why is social media and social networking essential to you and your business? (because it will drive sales, but there’s very few analytics for ROI on social networking and social media)

Relying on advertising is no longer working for print newspapers and television. So why do we think it will work on internet media?

Blogging — you must post 2-4 quality blog posts every week to maintain readership. This takes a lot of work! Content is king.

No matter how cool the technology/product/service is, people still buy more often and more easily from people they know and trust.

Social media is a way to show people that you are an industry expert, and that is how you should use them (not to spam and only say “buy my product”).

If you do not love your job and try to sell it (say, on social networking), you are going to fail, because you are not passionate about it.

Start small, do not promise a lot, it is better to have more to say than to have dead air time (radio analogy).

Social media is all about building good relationships by having good content that people trust.

Lots of people spend a lot of money on their website, but the website is just a vector to show people your content, and the content is the most important thing.

Cross-pollination – I think he means forward on information you learn (like, say, liveblogging!)

Get expert guest bloggers — he did not explain that you can leverage the relationships you form by asking them to blog. We do this with the Log Buffers….

How to make money:
sponsorships
white paper composition
paid articles
consulting
adjunct tie-ins to other related venues
branded blogs

I am personally disappointed because I wanted to learn more, and I feel as though Pythian already uses the knowledge presented — we have great exposure through our blog, and have started really using Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, etc.

Hansen’s information was good, and absolutely 100% correct, but I felt that for me it was very basic. I would like to know some more advanced topics, like:
- How do you know when you have reached the tipping point?
- How do you convert anonymous readers/followers to people you know, without turning them away because they feel they’re being watched, spammed or don’t want to give out their info to you?
- When does copy/paste to send out your information start to bother people, how do you know how not to do too much?
- How do you convert readers/followers (anon or not) to paid customers without making them feel like you’re all about $$, what about if you have some free content and some paid content, how do you know how much to have?

11:00 SOA - Transactional Database API - Database access guideline (2338 Bytes) » 木匠的天空 Oracle Architect and Developer

"Applications come, applications go, they crash, they change, they are fleeting."
The data however -- that'll be here long.

Programming language come, programming languages go, DBMSs come, DBMSs go,

In fact, I've seen successful Cobol, Fortran, VB, Perl, PHP, Java, Python, whatever language; FoxPro, Sybase, DB2, Oracle, MySQL, Cassandra HBase, whatever database.

The data, well, Our AbePOs(orders) and Clients data have been in a database for over 12 years now -- the applications that access (should say "have accessed in the past for they no longer exist") it come and they go and there will be many many many more in the future.

The solution is there: SOA (Modular programming)

SOA is a design principle, whereas web services is an implementation technology. You can build a Service-Oriented Application with .Net, C, Java, or PL/SQL, T-SQL.

The basic building block... is the service. A service is a self-contained software module that performs a predetermined task: e.g. a business transaction to submit order, audit the changes, update inventory, update finance data, queue the changes to asynchronous batch notice buyers ...; that comes to the Transactional database API.

The main theme behind SOA is to find the appropriate modularity ... where the modules don't have too much tight coupling. such as UI, Business rule and DAL.

An typical bad example is the Buyer Order Tracker UI, the reporting UI rule is tightly coupled with data access, make it so hard to refactor the data access part. BOT has made database performance plunged many times.

If we implement the SOA, the database handle the data access, and the Java handle the UI, it'll be a piece of cake to fix the BOT database performance issue.

When we want to migrate to Sybase, just write a new DB API on Sybase, UI application call the new API.
When we want to migrate to .Net, just write a new UI module, that calls the same DB API to access the data.

Notes: many statements are referenced from AskTom

07:56 NoSQL @ QCon London (1527 Bytes) » myNoSQL

☞ QCon London is hosting a full day track on NoSQL. Presentations in the track:
- Geir Magnusson: Project Voldemort at Gilt Groupe: When Failure isn’t An Option
- Enda Farrell: Auntie on the Couch
- Emil Eifrém: Not Only SQL: Alternative Data Persistence and Neo4J
- Lars George & Fabrizio Schmidt: Social networks and the Richness of Data: Getting distributed webservices done with NoSQL
- Mark Ramm: MongoDB: huMONGOus Data at SourceForge
The track was recorded and InfoQ will publish the presentations in the upcoming month. As an example of what I’m talking about you can watch ☞ Facebook’s Petabyte Scale Data Warehouse using Hive and Hadoop.

07:17 Liveblogging: HTML5 – Confoo Keynote (10341 Bytes) » The Pythian Blog

What is confoo? It is the sequel to the PHP Quebéc Conference (2003 – 2009). This year PHP Quebec decided to team up with Montreal-Python, W3Quebéc and OWASP Montréal to produce confoo.

And now, on to Mark Pilgrim of Google speaking on HTML5.

Timeline
1991 – HTML 1
1994 – HTML 2
1995 – Netscape discovers web, ruins it
1996 – CSS1 + JavaScript
1996 – Microsoft discovers web, ruins it
1997 – HTML4 + EMCAScript1
1998 – CSS2 + EMCAScript2 + DOM1
2000 – XHTML1 + EMCAScript3 + DOM2
2001 – XHTML 1.1
[long break!]
2009 – HTML 5 + ECMA5 + CSS 2.1

HTML5 is not a spec, it’s a marketing term. It’s really HTML5 + CSS3 + JavaScript.

IsHTML5ReadyYet.com and IsHTML5Ready.com are both real websites that give different answers to the question “is HTML 5 ready?”

Semantics
HTML started as a semantic language (until Netscape came along).

New elements (html tags) that do not do anything – they are for semantic use only:

&lt;header&gt; &lt;footer&gt;
&lt;section&gt;
&lt;article&gt;
&lt;nav&gt;
&lt;aside&gt; (pull quotes and such)
&lt;time&gt; (datetime markup)
&lt;mark&gt; (marking up runs of text)
&lt;figure&gt; &lt;figcaption&gt;

Instead of “div class=_____” use these tags….for example:

&lt;body&gt;
  &lt;header&gt;
    &lt;hgroup&gt;
    &lt;h2&gt;page title&lt;/h2&gt;
    &lt;h3&gt;page subtitle&lt;/h3&gt;
    &lt;/hgroup&gt;
   &lt;/header&gt;

&lt;nav&gt;
  &lt;ul&gt; Navigation......
     .....
  &lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;/nav&gt;

&lt;section&gt;
  &lt;article&gt;
   &lt;header&gt;
    &lt;h2&gt;Title&lt;/h2&gt;
   &lt;/header&gt;
&lt;/section&gt;

Caveat: This doesn’t work in IE but there is a workaround…..

This can help blind people navigate better….and bots too!

“Google is just another blind web user with 7 million friends”

Forms
Web forms 2.0
To make a slider from 0-50:

&lt;input type='range' mix='0' max='50' value='0'&gt;&lt;/input&gt;

To use autofocus:

&lt;input autofocus&gt;

(works in 3 browsers)

Talking about blind users again: “Focus tracking is VERY important if you can’t see. You really need to know where on the page you are, if you start typing what will happen.”

Placeholder text — in a text box, that light text that goes away when you click:

&lt;input type='text' placeholder='click here and this will disappear'&gt;

(works in 2 browsers)

New input types
These are semantic types, do different things in different browsers

&lt;input type='email'&gt; (on the iphone you get a different keyboard, by default you just get a textfield, so these things degrade gracefully if the browser does not support the feature)
&lt;input type='url'&gt; (a browser like &lt;A HREF=&quot;http://www.opera.com&quot;&gt;Opera&lt;/A&gt; can validate a URL for you instead of you doing it yourself!)
&lt;input type='datetime'&gt; (and more...date pickers are tedious)
&lt;input type='file' multiple&gt; (multiple files without using flash!)

For all the inputs HTML5 supports and which browsers support them (Opera is leading the way) search for “HTML5 input support”

Accessibility
ARIA = “accessible rich internet applications”. Alt-text is technology that’s long behind. ARIA does stuff like making tree views accessible. For example, right now with a tree view you have to tab through each item, which is a pain. With code like this:

&lt;ul id='tree1' role='tree' tabindex='0' aria-labelledby='label_1'&gt;
  &lt;li role='treeitem' tabindex='-1' aria-expanded='true'&gt;Fruits &lt;/li&gt;
    &lt;li role='group'&gt;
    &lt;ul&gt;
      &lt;li role='treeitem' tabindex='-1'&gt;Oranges&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li role='treeitem' tabindex='-1'&gt;Pineapples&lt;/li&gt;
    &lt;/ul&gt;
   &lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

….keyboard users can tab to the treeview itself, then use arrow keys to navigate and spacebar to select. This makes selecting an item at the end of a tree view much easier, and also makes it easy to move beyond the tree view without having to press Tab a million times.

Use your favorite search engine for “ARIA accessibility” to learn more.

CSS
Mark threw this image up on the screen:

(image from http://www.zazzle.com/stevenfrank – on that site you can buy this coffee mug or a T-shirt with the design)

Web fonts finally work in CSS3 – you can use more than Times, Courier, Arial, and occasionally Helvetica. This works EVERYWHERE – Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. Well, it’s true that they all use it, but they all have different fonts they support. Read Bulletproof font face for tips on how to get the font you want no matter what browser is used (yes, even IE).

Opacity is easy [author's note - it's just the "opacity" element, see examples at http://www.css3.info/preview/opacity/].

Rounded corners are EASY – Mark’s slide passed too fast for me, so I grabbed an example from http://24ways.org/2006/rounded-corner-boxes-the-css3-way:

.box {
  border-radius: 1.6em;
}

Gradients are easy [author's note -- looks like you need webkit, there's examples at http://gradients.glrzad.com/]

To test CSS3 stuff, use www.css3please.com – “This element will receive inline changes as you edit the CSS rules on the left.”

[Author's note -- while searching I found http://www.webappers.com/2009/08/10/70-must-have-css3-and-html5-tutorials-and-resources/ which is definitely a "must have".]

Canvas
A canvas is a blank slate where you can draw whatever you want, use the canvas tag and id, width and height attributes, everything else is javascript. Pretty awesome. [Author's note -- Mark had examples but I did not have time to capture them. I did find a nice tutorial at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial.]

Multimedia
Video with no flash! YouTube has HTML5 integration. Here’s sample code of how to do movies in HTML5:

&lt;video src='movie.ogv' controls&gt;&lt;/video&gt;
&lt;video src='movie.ogv' loop&gt;&lt;/video&gt;
&lt;video src='movie.ogv' preload='none'&gt;&lt;/video&gt;  -- don't preload the movie
&lt;video src='movie.ogv' preload='auto'&gt;&lt;/video&gt;
&lt;video src='movie.ogv' autoplay&gt;&lt;/video&gt; -- if you don't have this you don't do evil autoplay....

Multimedia is in the DOM and responds to CSS effects, such as reflection:

&lt;video src='movie.ogv' loop style='webkit-box-reflect: below 1px;'&gt;&lt;/video&gt;

(this code might be wrong, the slide flipped fast)

Of course the problem — codecs. Right now, .ogv and .mp4 (h264).

Audio inline too, same problem — only .oga and .mp3:

&lt;audio src ='podcast.oga' controls&gt;&lt;/audio&gt;

Geolocation
IsGeolocationPartofHTML5.com is a real site, go to it to get the answer.
Geolocation demos — very much the same, find your location and display it. Simple but cool.

Cache manifest
Get everything you need for offline usage…

&lt;html manifest='another-sky.manifest'&gt;

CACHE MANIFEST
/avatars/zoe.png
/avatars/tamara.png
/scripts/holoband.jpg

search for “google for mobile HTML5 series” – good series of articles on using this stuff.

HTML 5 has much more
Local storage
Web workers
Web sockets (2way connections, like raw tcp/ip cxns over the web)
3D canvas (webgl)
Microdata (enhanced semantics)
Desktop notifications
Drag and Drop

Learn more:
whatwg.org/html5
diveintohtml5.org

06:06 Priority Queue with Barbershop and Redis (1883 Bytes) » myNoSQL

Priority Queue with Barbershop and Redis:

We have already talked about queues being a good Redis usecase and covered QR, Resque and thanks to readers heard of RestMQ.

Now we also have Babershop:

Barbershop is a simple priority queue daemon written in C using libevent and some well-crafted indexes and reverse indexes. With Barbershop, your created jobs’ ids are injected into Barbershop and the clients then query Barbershop for the next task/job to perform. You get the power that is Redis to scale tasks/jobs horizontally and the ability to increment and peak into a priority queue to adjust your application as needed.

Interesting ☞ comment from Salvatore Sanfilippo (@antirez)

Btw IMHO the way to go for Redis priority queues is mapping the priority to a discrete number of Redis lists instead going continuous

03:52 SQLULDR2从标准输入读取SQL (4097 Bytes) » AnySQL.net

从今天开始, SQLULDR2可以从标准输入设备接受复杂的SQL语句了. 如下所示, SQL是人工输入的, 而最后一行的反斜杆用来表示输入结束.

D:\>sqluldr2 scott/tiger file=- sql=-
select
*
from tab
/
DBOBJECTS,TABLE,
BLOB,TABLE,
SPACE_DAILY,TABLE,
SQLULDR2_LOG,TABLE,
TRADE_MONTHLY_SUMMARY,TABLE,
TRADE_DATA,TABLE,

这个可以省去创建SQL文件的步骤, 更重要的是在Linux的Shell或Perl脚本中调用SQLULDR2, 并传入复杂的SQL时, 也不需要创建SQL文件了, 而且很容易使用Shell或Perl中的变量, 进行替换生成动态的SQL. 例如, 我们经常会见到如下脚本.

sqlplus -s "/ as sysdba" << EOF
select
*
from tab;
exit
EOF

现在SQLULDR2也可以这样用了, 在Linux的Shell或Perl脚本中同样使用.

sqluldr2 sys file=- sql=- << EOF
select
*
from tab
EOF

使用这个功能, 可以使嵌入SQLULDR2的批脚本更具有通用性, 方便移值到不同的平台.

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02:06 MySQL and MongoDB Sitting In a Boat (1620 Bytes) » myNoSQL

MySQL and MongoDB Sitting In a Boat:

An interesting post from lunar logic guys about using MySQL and MongoDB for their Kanban product, how that get there and the tools they are using.

As a personal note, I thought how this system would be characterized in terms of CAP. It should be quite clear that we cannot speak about consistency over the two systems as MongoDB doesn’t really support transactions (you can check these notes on MongoDB for more details). So, in case their system would be using master-master MySQL replication and replica-pairs for MongoDB, and the internal tools would know how to work with this setup, we could probably say that we have an AP system. But if any of these preconditions are not fulfilled, I’d say both A and P are lost.