Download MS SQL server 2008

You now can download MS SQL Server 2008 Release Candidate 0. It is available for a 180-day evaluation and can be downloaded from MSDN There is a X86 and a X64 version available.

If you are already familiar with MS SQL server it can be nice to check out what is new in the latest release. There are some nice improvements and new functions available. By reading the release documentation we find some nice new things in MS SQL Server 2008 RC0.

For example we have some new data types.
Newly introduced are 4 new variables on date and time data types. These types enable applications to have separate types for date or time, increased year range, increased fractional second precision and time-zone offset support.

Hierarchical data can now be made really hierarchical by making use of a new datatype called the hierarchyid data type which can be to query and perform work with hierarchical data by using Transact-SQL.

However the new data type which I would like to explore is the spatial data types which are new in MS SQL server 2008. Those 2 are geometry and geography data types. The geometry data type supports planar, or Euclidean (flat-earth), data. The geography data type stores ellipsoidal (round-earth) data, such as GPS latitude and longitude coordinates. These new data types support the storage and manipulation of spatial data objects such as linestrings, points, and polygons. For more information about working with spatial data in MS SQL server you can read this article at MSDN.

Also improved is the Full-text search engine which has now become a fully intergrated part of SQL server.

TSQL has some new or improved features:

ALTER DATABASE SET COMPATIBILITY_LEVEL replaces sp_dbcmptlevel for setting the database compatibility level. Also make sure you checkout Compound Operators, the CONVERT Function, Date and Time Functionality which now support for the ISO week-date system.

Also look at the new GROUPING SETS The GROUPING SETS, ROLLUP, and CUBE operators are added to the GROUP BY clause. There is a new function, GROUPING_ID(), that returns more grouping-level information than the existing GROUPING() function. The non-ISO compliant WITH ROLLUP, WITH CUBE, and ALL syntax is deprecated.

The merge statement, this new Transact-SQL statement performs INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE operations on a target table based on the results of a join with a source table. The syntax allows you to join a data source with a target table or view, and then perform multiple actions based on the results of that join.

Those are some of the new features in the MS SQL server 2008 Database Engine. However there is a lot more to explore in release candidate 0. If you are into MS SQL server this is a must have and worth the time to check it out. Setup a Virtual Machine and install the server to play arround with.

Mac OS X Leopard virtualization

The 61st supported virtualized operating system by Vmware will be Mac OS X Leopard Server. Vmmware Fusion 2 will be supporting the Leopard server. This will allow you to run multiple instances of the mac server on a single machine. Virtual Leopard Server will enable administrators and developers to play around with virtualization and bring full swing server farms up and running without the need of costly hardware.

Also great news is that Mac OS X Leopard has moved to 64-bit so that Vmware can make full use of the 64-bit platform. There where some license issues with Apple however the swing to virtualization will not go unnoticed at the apple HQ so this will be a minor issue for this release and in future release, I hope…

abandoned missile silos

Urbe, also called UE or in full Urban exploring is the game of products of civilization which are commonly not open for the regular crowed. Think about abandoned buildings, ships, military locations and such.

Itself it is a great “sport” find abandoned buildings and trying to get a peak inside and take some pictures. However, we always have some real champs. Like people who like to visit abandoned missile silos and such. The most secret places of the cold war, guarded and kept secret to the enemy and the local public are now after the cold war open for Urban Explorers. On the web you can find numerous locations of those abandoned locations and pictures made by those who already have visit.

A little tip, make a list of locations and if you are somewhere close visit those places who shaped the military, political and daily lives of many for so long.

Yahoo and Microsoft have no love

Forbes stated today that Yahoo is saying the acquisition discussion between Yahoo and Microsoft are over and that their will be no deal. Moments later Microsoft stated it won't "rebid" for the whole company but it's still open to discussing an "alternative transaction," likely an acquisition of just the portal's search advertising business.

We already knew this would never become a happy marriage, however now it looks like they can't even agree on IF they are going to be married. Conflicting statements and press releases are showing that the companies are not talking on a direct level anymore. This could be a indication that the deal is really out of the question.

Microsoft could try to do some hostile takeover bidding. The deal range was $31 to $33 per share. Microsoft launched an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! at $31 per share on Jan. 31 and later raised the offer to $33. Yahoo! wanted at least $37, so Microsoft threw in the towel on May 3.

You can read the complete forbes artikel on the forbes website.

Keyhole Markup Language

KML is an XML-based language schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing or future Web-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Keyhole Earth Viewer.

Because of the easy way to create KML data it can be used or generated by numerous applications and not only by google earth. However, there are some very very nice KML files you can download which give you all kinds of insights on for example data of the curren state of the rain forest and the woods around the world.

The Google Earth outreach website is giving you a couple of those KML files for you to enjoy or to educate.

In my opinion mastering KML is something you can benefit from in the near future because more and more applications will be using geo-xxxx data.

large scale, data intensive computing clusters

Christophe Bisciglia is talking in this movie about big datasets and large scale, data intensive computing clusters.

“For the last year or so, we've been telling you about educational and research partnerships resulting form our Academic Cloud Computing Initiative. We've shared educational material resulting from our extensive partnership with the University of Washington and partnered with the National Science Foundation to directly engage the research community and provide access to a large scale, data intensive computing cluster.

Why? Because big data is cool; it drives nearly everything we do here at Google and provides unprecedented opportunities for understanding science in new ways. It's been an exciting year learning how to work with the academic community in this space, and we'd like to start sharing that with other passionate educators.


To that end, we've worked with our academic partners to offer a two and a half day NSF-sponsored workshop, hosted at UW, which will focus on providing material and curricular support to undergraduate computer science educators seeking to address big data in the classroom. This will largely focus on material that can be found on Google Code University, but will include practical lab components so educators can get their hands dirty with the open source platforms and the tools necessary to offer a class.

Oracle Information Rights Management

Oracle Information Rights Management 10g Release3 PR3 is out and can be downloaded, this product is formally known as SealedMedia. This product encrypts e-mails and files to protect them from being read by un-authorized users.

When distributing files around your organization they can go all around the globe without you knowing about it. With Oracle Information Rights Management people are required to install the client software on their workstation. When receiving a file or e-mail they have to enter their information and the software checks with the Oracle IRM server if and how this user can access this information.

A user can for example be prohibited to open or print, edit, printscreen, forward or other operations. Even when the user has opened the file once you will still have the possibility to grant or revoke rights on this particular document.

By using Oracle Information Rights Management you will have full control on who can read and access your documents even if they are no longer on a corporate server.

The desktop client software installs without any hassle and integration with Microsoft Office products is out of the box. It is compatible with Office 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007.

In the upcoming days I will be starting to test the options of this new version of Oracle Information Rights Management and will provide more details on my weblog. If you have any questions about this product you can contact me directly, if you have any questions about implementing Oracle Information Rights Management and or hosting of Oracle IRM Servers in a secure environment you can contact SmartApps* by visiting the SmartApps* website or send a e-mail to info{at]smartapps.nl

Shop 2.0

A new way of shopping without the webshop and still we can call it shop2.0…. When walking in a city you can encounter from time to time a shopping window where you see something of your interest however you are not willing to go inside to get more information about the product. Or even worse, you would love to go in but the shop is closed.

The thing you could do is to get your mobile phone and surf to the website of the shop and get more information. The other option is now provided by Philips research lab that has created the Intelligent Shop Window. This window is displaying information to the customer and can interact with the customer. You can see it as touch screen on the store window. Currently the screen is shown in the Philips ExperienceLab at the high-tech campus in Eindhoven.

Now imagine having a see-through touch screen on your shops window, the options are virtually endless. You can have product demonstration on the window, give customers the possibility to find more information and even send that information to their e-mail address if requested, upload it via Bluetooth to their mobile phone…. All kinds of narrowcasting possibilities are coming to mind.

But in the end…. The first one who has this in the city is just the most cool looking shop there is…

Handy network tools

When working in a environment where you are expected to be quite self supporting, which means that you are at least able to spot network problems instead of only being a Oracle consultant you have to have some network tools on your laptop.

It will go without saying you will have to have some ssh client to connect to a prompt. Besides that it always comes in handy to have a port scanner ready for those moments you don’t know which ports are used by Oracle.

One of the other tools I just encountered is a response grapher you can run on a windows client without having to install it. MultiPing Grapher can be downloaded from the ccschmidt website and is freeware. You should check it out whenever you have to monitor a server if he is available and how fast it is responding to network calls.

Canon EOS 400D

A new “toy”. A just purchased a new toy, a new digital camera. A new Canon EOS 400D is the new star. We were already looking for some time now for a new and good camera for a normal price and which can be used by people who are just starting with digital photography on a more than “click-clack” level.

So for someone starting to take digital photography to the next amateur level the Canon EOS 400D is a very good camera, especially when you consider that Canon launched a couple of new products which helps the dropping of the price of the older cameras. I will be posting some photos which we made with the new camera shortly to show you some of the capabilities.

And I am not really admitting it but Canon is still my preferred supplier of Digital SLR cameras not only because they make the best SLR cameras in my opinion but also because I have had splendid time while having Canon Europe as an employee during the Tri-Can project where we implemented Oracle E-Business suite in the main European offices. Tri-Can is/was the biggest Oracle E-Business suite rollout in Europe when I was working on the project.

While talking about Canon Tri.Can project I found very good video on YouTube about the Tri.Can project by Abhishek Banerjee who made a photo video with very nice and true music.. Just watch the video and listen to the lyrics.

Daily web finds 2.0

British Telecom (BT) wants to sell datacenters.
BT announced that they would like to sell datacenters to HP. One of the selling conditions would be that BT would get the data and voice networks of HP to manage. The deal would consider the British datacenters of BT, the voice and data networks BT would like to manage are the worldwide networks of HP.

New 8 Gbps server storage connections.
Today Jasper Bakker announced in a vnunet article that Brocade is launching a new storage switch and host bus adapter for storage networks capable of reaching 8 Gbps. The new equipment will also be downwards compatible with the now common 4 Gbps network equipment from Brocade. Brocade announced that around 40 to 50 percent of their current customers are on a 4 Gbps data network. The new equipment has been developed while keeping close contact with Microsoft and VMware so it will be compatible and adopted by software from those vendors.

New release from nimbuzz.
Today a new release of nimbuzz so the day of light. Nimbuzz is direct competition for Skype, eBuddy and Fring. Nimbuzz released a mobile voice and chat service accompanied with widgets to incorporate in Hyves, Jabber and facebook. It is compatible with Skype, Google Talk, AOL-IM, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo-IM.

VirtualCenter 2.5 Database White Paper.
VMware® VirtualCenter database stores metadata on the state of a VMware Infrastructure environment and is a key component of VirtualCenter performance. VirtualCenter 2.5 features a number of enhancements that are aimed at greatly improving the performance and scalability of the VirtualCenter database. This paper presents the performance results of benchmarks we conducted to validate these performance enhancements and to provide best practices information for configuring a VirtualCenter database. The paper also provides information for sizing the server you use to host the VirtualCenter database based on these performance results. Although the new features in VirtualCenter 2.5 benefit users with any of the supported databases, the examples and performance data presented in this study are specific to Microsoft SQL Server and the paper assumes that you have a working knowledge of SQL Server. Read the paper on the VMware website.

Vulnerability in Debian cryptographic functions.
Debian has warned of a vulnerability in its cryptographic functions that could leave systems open to attack.
The use of a cryptographically flawed pseudo random number generator in Debian's implementation of OpenSSL meant that potentially predictable keys were generated. Versions of Debian's OpenSSL packages starting with 0.9.8c-1 (released in September 2006) are potentially vulnerable. Many types of cryptographic keys (including SSH, SSL session keys, OpenVPN and others) generated on affected systems may be weak, so the impact of the bug is potentially far reaching.

jDeveloper 11G Technology Preview 4

Now available for downloading from the Oracle website is Oracle jDeveloper 11G Technology Preview 4 (Build 4949). jDeveloper is already the leading development environment for many oracle developers for years. I used it to make my first corporate Java developments years ago when I made the switch from VI to a "real" java editor. There is a moment that things become too complex to manage it in VI.

When jDeveloper was launched a couple of years ago it was a non-free product however Oracle allowed developers to download it and use it… in a we are not looking at you when you use it and do not pay kind of way. Sometime after that it became a complete free to use editor officially and I think this is a great way.

jDeveloper is named by some market thought leaders as the number one editor and I have to agree with them… jDeveloper is one of the best and leading development environments there is.

php token_get_all LifeType

We are currently running lifetype, a opensource blog platform on a Gentoo Linux machine with Apache and PHP Version 5.1.2-pl1-gentoo. In this version of PHP the function token_get_all is not included. Lifetype, or to be more precise Smarty which is included in liftype to handle the templates uses this to extract non-cacheable parts out of compiled templates.

If you do not have the token_get_all function available some pages in lifetype will show the following error:

[error] [client xxxxxxxxx] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function token_get_all() in /usr/home/www/xxxxxxxxxx /public_html/class/template/smarty/internals/core.write_compiled_include.php on line 45

One solution is to add the function token_get_all so LifeType will work as intended, this however will require a recompile of php. A more simple hack is to change core.write_compiled_include.php which can generally be found in $lifetype/class/template/smarty/internals/.

On line 39 you will find a statement that makes sure that the function will only work when your php version is higher than version 5.0.

$this_varname = ((double)phpversion() >= 5.0) ? '_smarty' : 'this';

Now we do not want to have this executed so we change the required version from 5.0 to 7.0 which is not the version we are currently running. By making the change we make sure that there is never a call to token_get_all and by this we solve the problem.

$this_varname = ((double)phpversion() >= 7.0) ? '_smarty' : 'this';

This however is a quick and dirty hack, a better way is to recompile PHP with the token_get_all function included.

Blogging as a job

Most people who have a blog which they keep up to date and accurate will most likely enjoy this and as everything you do what you enjoy you might from time to time wonder, “Would it not be nice if this was my job”. Well, I think I have had this thought a couple of times, and now it has become reality…. It is not becoming my job but we have started the first of a couple of corporate weblogs.

The first corporate weblog is about Oracle Supply Chain Management and as I am also a Oracle Supply Chain Consultant I will be writing a lot of articles for this weblog. Please feel free to check out the SmartApps Oracle Supply Chain Weblog.

Before starting the weblog we have given it some thought and I have been reading on about the do’s and don’ts of corporate blogging. Meaning this new SmartApps weblog will have a slight different approach, mainly it will be different on focus. This corporate weblog will be handling Supply Chain Management and related topics while my private weblog is handling various topics.

The plan is to expand the number of weblogs in the upcoming time so that other people who are not directly working with SCM will have a chance to write about the things in their area. Now about the things I will be blogging about,… I will cross-post them on this weblog also or at least make a referring to it so people can track my postings on that site.

Currently I have already posted 4 blogposts.

RFID and Oracle in the Supply Chain:
An article on how RFID tags can help you plan your Supply Chain Management and warehouse management in combination with Oracle.

Oracle and Drop Shipment:
An article on how Oracle E-Business suite can handle drop shipments.

Oracle iStore return orders:
An Article on Oracle iStore and how to handle return orders from customers with some examples of flows.

Oracle demand planning with Demantra:
A quick introduction on demand planning in Oracle E-business suite, I will be posting more on this topic on this weblog and the SmartApps weblog.

20 most profitable tech companies

cnnmoney.com is running an article about the top 20 most profitable tech companies.

01: Microsoft
02: IBM
03: Cisco Systems
04: Hewlett-Packard
05: Intel
06: Oracle
07: Google
08: Apple
09: Qualcomm
10: Dell
11: Texas Instruments
12: Corning
13: Applied Materials
14: EMC
15: Xerox
16: MEMC Electronic Materials
17: Nvidia
18: Adobe Systems
19: Electronic Data Systems
20: Lam Research