Bill Evjen's Blog

Larry Ellison Keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2008

Bill Evjen — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:37:38 GMT

First, I would like to say that I am quite the Microsoft guy and I am at my first non-Microsoft conference - Oracle OpenWorld 2008. Within my organization, Thomson-Reuters, I lead a team that built a new product platform. Our platform has an Oracle 10g back end and a complete .NET 3.5 middle tier and presentation layer.

I have been to a lot of PDCs and TechEd sessions and it is interesting some of the differences between the two conferences. The first big difference is in how they do these keynotes. Microsoft starts off with a big bang - usually Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates coming out and providing a big set of powerful punches of demos - giving it a complete WOW factor. Oracle on the other hand starts off with light keynotes that aren't that big and then as the sessions go on day-to-day - the keynotes get bigger and bigger in importance. So, I am here at at the last keynote and this is the big one - Larry Ellison. I have never seen him speak before - so this should be pretty interesting.

Before Larry Ellison came out the first visitor was an HP Vice President who was really focused on making a big HP sales pitch to the 40,000+ conference attendees. The main point of her message is that by 2010, more than 1/3 of CEOs and CIOs say their current data center will be unable to meet their growing demands due to information expansion, CEOs demanding more from IT, and an aging infrastructure. To me - this is nothing new and you could have said the exact same thing in 1995. Really as an architect/CTO, you are always focused on these items. This is a common thing that many organizations have been trying to solve and continue to try to solve. Also - this is something (in my mind) that never goes away and will always have to be worked on. Interesting quote that the HP VP said is that her company ships a server every 13 seconds. They also claim to be the fifth largest software company in the world. Another big focus of her presentation was on the transformation of data centers. They want to help people get to an organized, lights-out facility. From this point, they then showed us a long commercial about how HP can create a data center for you that is more efficient and better all around for you. HP moved from 85 data centers to 6. They moved IT spending to 2% of revenue. More computing power with 40% less machines. One big part of transforming the data center is around the idea of virtualization. This provides them the means to rapidly deploy products. Also - HP is focusing on making machines ready for cloud computing. There was a statement about if your organization is going to host your own cloud architecture - that HP is there to help you out with this process. This entire thing was a big big commercial and took around 20 minutes. It was quite disappointing to be forced to sit through.

From here, they showed a video of Larry racing his yacht and then he came out to discuss having two jobs - yachting and the head of Oracle. He focused on making a comparison to the new yacht that he built to get the America Cup and Oracle Performance and helping customers get past the data bandwidth problem.

One rather annoying thing about this presentation is that Larry doesn't have a clicker with him - but instead has to say "Next slide please" on each and every slide.

Some random notes from Larry Ellison and this presentation:

Once they hit around 1TB you will start experiences full-table scan problems
Oracle announces Oracle's First Hardware product - The Exadata Programmable Storage Server

2 Intel processors : 8 cores - 4 cores each
12 Disk Drives - Up to 12 TB raw storage
Oracle Enterprise Linux OS
In partnership with HP

They aren't really doing this themselves

Brainier software - this is a quote from Larry

He then showed an Exadata Storage Server as a Grid - Exadata Storage Grid
"Provides very very fast query processing"
Brawnier Hardware - wider pipes and more of them

In conjunction with HP
2 InfiniBand Pipes - 1 GB/sec - Per Storage Server

Will work with any Oracle Database Server

Linux x86 Database servers today

others on the way

"Add capacity - on demand - one server at a time"

He is proposing fan-out rather than beef-up in your server approach

Announced the Oracle Database Machine - world's fastest Database machine

8 Oracle Database servers
64 Intel processor cores
Oracle Enterprise Linus
Oracle Real Applicaiton Clusters

14 Exadata Storage Servers

14 GB/Sec data bandwidth
112 Intel Processor Cores
168 300 or 1000GB Disk Drives
1,400 Larger than the largest IPOD"

The Oracle Database Machine is a three year development program
M-Tel manager said, "Every query was faster on Exadata compared to our current systems"
M-Tel Exadata Speedup - 10x to 72x faster on all their queries
LGR Telecommunications - 30 min queries now take 1 min
Conventional disk arrays cannot compete with Exadata Smart Storage Servers
Database Machine Faster than Five Rack Teradata 5550
Many slides on comparing Oracle databases to Netezza and how Oracle is better than them. Larry's quote was that their database machine runs Oracle and "their's does not"
$650,000 for the system price
$1,680,000 for the software licenses
168TB total storage
This is all available today
Hardware problems go through HP (just signifying that this is an HP thing really just running Oracle software)
The head of HP then came on via satellite and told the crowd that his company was putting everything they had behind this.

2008 is the Cloud Computing Year

Bill Evjen — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:35:24 GMT

The last half of this year is being completely focused on cloud computing. Microsoft is focusing a lot of attention in this space and are focusing on setting up development centers around the world to assist customers in hosting logic and data centrally in the cloud to make use of for your global applications. It really is the next step in expansion of the Internet and is something that will be greatly adopted by organizations all over the world. There are some tricky areas that still have to be addressed. Especially in the area of private content and getting past the idea of allowing private content to be hosted by a third party. This is a scary thing for organizations to handle. Think about all the credit card numbers stolen from 3rd party web sites every year (this just happened to my card this week). The reason for this is quite simple - data is king. Data is the life blood of an organization and the thing that companies like to keep close to their chest. What is the point where companies will feel comfortable in moving this precious asset to a 3rd party to be hosted in the cloud? It will take some serious convincing and time for this to occur.

There will be trivial applications put forward first in cloud computing and their successes in the areas of responsiveness and security will hopefully pave the way for more fundamental applications to venture forward in this space.

I am at the Oracle conference in San Francisco and they are also touting cloud computing. They are not setting up something on their own and nothing as grandiose as Microsoft is doing, so they are partnering with Amazon and using the infrastructure that Amazon is providing. Amazon is really the first major player in cloud computing and Oracle is simply jumping on the boat to help them offer more enterprise-level offerings for cloud computing. They call this Oracle on EC2.

Oracle software can now be licensed for the cloud. You will be able to transfer your license to your cloud instance. They will do this in the following manner:

0-4 virtual cores will equal 1 processor license (1 socket)
4 virtual cores will equal 1 cpu

Some other notes with their operation with Amazon:

They will offer pre-configured virtual machine images
It consists of Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle DB and APEX applications
They will provide the fully configured hardware and Oracle environment in less than 30 minutes
They allow you to backup your database in the cloud
- Oracle has created a secure backup cloud module that compresses and encrypts the backup and the backup is then on disc in the cloud. This is something that you have to license yourself for and you are licensed based on the the number of concurrent parallel streams (RMAN channels).

A lot of the tools that Oracle showed that you would use in configuring your cloud Oracle databases was non-Oracle tools - such as Putty Configuration. This is something that I found surprising. It seems that their focus was a lot more on the back-end integration with Amazon rather than a full blown out solution with a lot of investment from Oracle. It made me wonder how much they are investing in this. Do they see this as something that is good for the company and something they should dedicate a lot of attention to? Or is this something that they needed to answer in that all these other organizations are moving forward with and are making quite strategic in their immediate plans?

Backing up in the cloud and not being able to pull the data out of the cloud seems a big problem to me. Most enterprise organizations are going to want to get their physical hands on their own backups. It seems a way to trap an organization into a specific cloud vendor if you are locked into putting your disc-based cloud db backups in the same Amazon infrastructure. This won't fly with most organizations.

One thing that all this cloud computer discussions will bring forward is it will make many enterprise architects question the needs of cloud computing and also bring forth questions (for large organizations) of whether they should implement cloud computing within their own organizations rather than going to a third party to take care of the cloud computing implementation.

UPDATE (SEPT 26 2008): It seems that it is true that Oracle isn't putting much thought behind cloud computing. The Wall Street Journal's blog site has a post on Larry Ellison going on a 10 minute "rant" about cloud computing. Read the details here:

WSJ Blog - Larry Ellison’s Brilliant Anti-Cloud Computing Rant
ValleyWag - Larry Ellison on cloud computing buzzword: "Complete gibberish"
Aware 11 - Larry Ellison: Someone Explain To Me This “Cloud Computing” Thing My Company Is Committing To

Oracle OpenWorld 2008

Bill Evjen — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:00:51 GMT

I'm for the first time at a non-Microsoft conference in my life. I am at Oracle's OpenWorld 2008 in the lovely city of San Francisco. So far so good. The biggest surprise is really how big this conference is. There are more than 43,000 people at this conference. Wow - amazingly big. The other thing that is different than the TechEd and PDC conferences that I attended in the past is that there are a number of keynotes here and it seems that the first ones aren't that important and they build up in importance till the last keynote is the big one (with Larry Ellison). The first one was with James Carville and Mary Matelin both of political commentary fame.

They spent about two hours speaking on politics and each other and James is quite the joker and through out a lot of really funny jokes that I shouldn't repeat here really. It was a nice presentation - but then again, it was strange that everyone showed up for the first keynote and it had absolutely nothing to do with technology.

The second day keynote was done by a President of the company, Charles Phillips, and he then brought out Michael Phelps on stage and then did a comparison between Michael and Oracle. That was a bit strange and it was an odd connection. Here is a photo I took (not good) where they list all the Oracle medals compared to the list of Phelps medals.

When he left - my comment to a friend was really wondering how much money he was paid for that experience. My guess is 100K. Not a bad day's work!

I will be off to the exhibition to see all the vendors and what is going on there. I have a presentation tomorrow with friend Alex Key from Oracle on ODP.NET and .NET Performance. My group at Lipper and Thomson-Reuters has really focused on building the best and fastest set of services (WCF) from an Oracle database. The amount of data that we are delivering to our applications is rather large and we have done some good things to really get the most performance we can in moving this data from the database to the client applications.

Big Problem Solved - No More TypeLibBuilder.exe Crashes!

Bill Evjen — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:27:56 GMT

While working with Visual Studio 2008, I would constantly get exceptions thrown at me while working with any ASP.NET AJAX page. I also had no Intellisense when working with JavaScript which was a pain. I found an issue to the problem from Josh Berke on his blog here. It seems that there is a conflict with using a fingerprint reader while you are working with AJAX (they are somewhat related, aren't they?). You have to open up your processes (ALT + CTRL + DEL) and kill DPAgent.exe. Doing this immediately got everything working ... thanks Josh for the tip!

Looking at Google Chrome

Bill Evjen — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:12:39 GMT

Well, like most, I downloaded Google Chrome and gave it a whirl. So far, I like it. There are things that bother me - but overall - I like it. Here are some of my likes:

It is faster. It does seem to deal with JavaScript quite a bit faster than other browsers. Pages load faster than before for me. This is probably the biggest plus of the whole thing really.
The look and feel of the application is more modern looking (again, from my perspective) and it provides more real estate for browsing by default then other browsers do. Another good thing!
There is a smoothness in movements that make the application seem less jerky. So, for instance, opening another tab will quickly slide the tab open to the right rather than the jerk of just magically appearing.
I really like the start page as it shows the top nine sites that you are visiting. Though - be careful of where you are browsing! Don't want Dice.com showing up at work as your top viewed site or anything.
The developer options are nice - viewing source is a lot prettier than otherwise.

Some bads:

Probably the biggest bad for me is that this doesn't work on a lot of sites that require some type of login. Funny, a lot of Microsoft sites I need to visit don't work (e.g. MSDN Subscribers). :)
My Delicious bookmarks don't work as a plug-in as they do in IE. There is a temporary workaround that comes somewhat close (http://fernandoacorreia.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/delicious-in-google-chrome/).
There seems to be no add-in architecture really discussed anywhere for Chrome. I hope it is easy for third parties to add in their stuff to the browser.

Some quick tricks:

CRTL + B will make the bookmark bar appear and disappear
Put your cursor in the Omnibar (address bar) and press CTRL + K. This will cause a question mark (?) to appear which signifies that you are going to want to perform a search.
Good or bad - it is really easy to see your saved passwords and what they are in your browser by going to Settings (the wrench) --> Options --> Minor Tweaks --> Show Saved Passwords.
CTRL + SHIFT + N for when you want to surf to sites secretly (incognito). This means that the page will not show up in the top visited sites, no history will be kept, no cookies, etc.
The Omnibar is great. It remembers where you have been and if you want to visit CNN, just type in CNN and hit ENTER rather than typing www.cnn.com.

Overall - interesting software. Is it Google's attempt to dislodge Windows? That is what Computer World magazine is saying this week.

Update: Another thing not working is my fingerprint reader! This really is not good right now as I use a fingerprint reader on all my sites that require a login. Using Chrome - none of the login pages are recognized as such.

Unrecognized Zune - Reinstall Windows Media Player

Bill Evjen — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 19:49:41 GMT

All of a sudden I couldn't sync my Zune anymore on my Windows XP computer. I would always get an error that there was an error on the installation of the hardware when I plugged the Zune into the USB port. The actual error I would get was:

There was a problem installing this hardware "zune"

I tried all sorts of "fixes" including installing the Zune software update and uninstalling the Zune drivers, but nothing seemed to be working. There were folks on the Internet saying that I should format the Zune through a series of clicks - ummm no.

There was also a suggestion of cleaning up my registry and that I should get a registry cleaner of sorts and fix the problem. Though, there was also the suggestion that I should do a complete download/reinstall of Windows Media Player 11 as it will install some services that might have been removed. I gave this a try (as it was an easy one) and it worked perfectly - now my Zune is back connected and I am syncing.

While I was at TechEd 2008, I bought myself some nice "premium" headphones (plugin style).

They have like a canvas feel to the cord which is different and interesting and provide a more rigid cord than otherwise. I like them and they sound great. I also got myself a docking station (to plug into my receiver at home), though the AC adapter is something that I can't take to Europe as it is for US power levels only. Dang. I would have rather carried a bigger AC adapter to then be able to carry that adapter around the world with me.

Wrong Perceptions in Modern Financial Charting

Bill Evjen — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:17:36 GMT

You see a ton of charting components out there for .NET. Whenever you look into any magazine for developers in the developer space, you will see all sorts of advertisements for charting components of every kind. One of the main things these companies show is the new fancy and shiny charts as proof that they are the obvious choice in your applications that you want to build. As a developer, you might look at this chart and say, "Wow, this is new and this would look wonderful in my application".

I am here to tell you that you are wrong and this assumption is just plain incorrect (sorry for being blunt).

When dealing with financial charting, your end users are only interested in getting a visual representation of a lot of data in a single glance. This "glance" just takes a lot longer when you turn your chart to a 3D chart or add too much visual noise to your charts. "Simplicity is KING" with charts. Remember this and repeat this ten times!

Here is a 3D chart of some performance data:

As you can see here, this chart may look cool to some as it is "new and shiny", "different", "modern", etc ... BUT it really is crap. The idea of a chart is to give you a visual representation of a large amount of data quickly and easily. You are going to want to do this with the least amount of visual noise as possible. Looking at this chart, it gets hard for your eyes to differentiate between the series items in the chart.

Now take a look at this chart:

This chart contains the same data, but it is quite a bit more readable. Here you have simple and flat lines and a line chart is really meant to be presented in a two dimensional fashion. So what if this charting style hasn't changed much for you in the last 100 years or so - it WORKS. You can read this fast and it conveys its points very well. There is no ambiguity in understanding its context.

The first 3D chart is a crazy example, but there are people actually doing this in the financial services world. The other approach in 3D is using something like tubes to represent lines to give the line itself a 3D feel. Again, bad bad bad. Don't fall victim to these types of charting ideas that you see in chart component advertisements. To make this chart even worse, you will also see some that have this in addition to shadows under the lines. How much visual noise do you need?

These non-workable 3D charts are starting to be shoved in our faces more and more as WPF and Silverlight have come to the scene. Microsoft, control vendors, and developers are really trying to show off the capabilities of the platforms they are presenting and show end users these really unusable and non-digestible charts.

I am not against WPF and Silverlight - on the contrary! I love these technologies and I think that it is quite possible to positively impact financial charting. How? Well, imagine a scatter chart:

A scatter chart can have a number of items on a page that represent an item in the collection and its place within an X/Y chart. You can also have a chart that utilizes this structure but also changes the size of the bubble based upon another factor (e.g. such as the worth of the item). An example of that is represented here:

Now in looking at how WPF might enhance this chart - let's say that your collection contains a large amount of constituents - let's say thousands. What could your chart look like in this case?

This is starting to look rather poor. The reason for this is the fact that there are so many constituents in the chart grid that they are stacked on top of each other and you are unable to really view the entire collection and how items in the collection relates to other elements within the same collection. This is really where technologies like WPF and Silverlight will have a dramatic impact. Imagine a situation in WPF where the elements are presented in the chart grid as a set of 20 items in the forefront while the other 980 items a bit more translucent - but still on the same chart (in the background). Then with some type of sliding capabilities with the mouse left click hold moving down or up you can slowly change the collection set of what is at the forefront allowing other items to fall back and become more transparent while the forefront items losing their transparencies.

My point is this - financial charting in the future should not change in how the data visual represented, but in the changing of how this data is interpreted on the chart and scouring through large collections of data can easily and intuitively be manipulated through WPF and Silverlight more so than ever before. I am really looking forward to the future of these technologies and how they will allow you to quickly filter large series of items based upon specific criteria with relative ease. To me the power for XAML will be in the ability to quickly zoom into a complicated chart to the exact scenario you wish to see, much like Virtual Earth or Google Maps allows you to zoom from a full-blown Earth map to your community with just a flick of the mouse.

This will be the power in charting - it will NOT be in 3D'ing your charts and turning them into unreadable graphics.

Building Better Software: Tips and Tools to Improve Your Applications

Bill Evjen — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:58:38 GMT

I attended a session (title above) by the famous Doug Seven. Doug is always one of the better speakers out there and he covered how to construct your projects to work with various systems that improve the overall application and approach. Focus was put on unit tests and code coverage and the importance of incorporating these items into your development process. It is surprising to me that this is not yet the norm of application development. Again, I said this in a previous post, but development teams need to work to a continuous integration process and use tools that facilitate such activities.

Microsoft has done a lot in this space, but so has the open source community. I, myself, use aspects of both to give me exactly what I am looking for. For unit testing, I use Visual Studio. For our build process - we are using CruiseControl.net.

The Code Coverage UI is not bad in Visual Studio and allows you to really drill into our code. NCover is the competition to this and provides more of a visual aspect to the coverage aspect of your code - but VS is definitely not bad. Looking at the code directly - Visual Studio is better and shows wonderful coloring to show which code is being covered and which code is not.

The other thing Doug presented is the integrated load test preparation capabilities that are built into Visual Studio. I haven't used the Visual Studio one myself, but instead, I have used ACT. I actually have a stand-alone version of ACT that was given to me from Microsoft and it is something that we have generated scripts for when we want to test our web pages as well as our ASMX and WCF services. The Visual Studio load testing features are a heck of a lot better than the ACT one. It definitely does a lot more for you around customization and visualization of your work and results.

Nice session overall.

Unit Testing Session at TechEd 2008

Bill Evjen — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:35:09 GMT

I'm in TechEd at the moment and I am sitting in a presentation on Unit Testing. Unit testing is something we have been doing on my teams for some time now and it is an intricate part of our development process. I am a big believer in continuous integration for development and part of the automatic build process includes a unit test run through the application/component that we are working with. The results of the unit tests are then deployed (automatically as well) to a server and made accessible to everyone on the teams as well as dependent teams within the organization.

BTW a good book on establishing this entire process yourself is Code Leader by Wrox.

"There is no such thing as "done". Much more investment will be spent modifying programs than developing them initially." - Beck

The session focuses on the concept that the development of your application is the smallest part of the process and much more of your time will be spent fixing and modifying the first results of your work.

The speaker here is a believer in that you can have more than one assert per test. There are many that don't believe this, but it makes more sense to test *one* thing, which may involve multiple assets. It definitely doesn't make sense to have multiple asserts to test multiple things.

Also - make sure that you keep your tests similar to your code. If what you are testing is in one assembly, do the same with your tests. The benefits of keeping your tests close are making sure that your tests are equivalent to production code and it solves any visibility problems.

We ourselves used to use NUnit testing, but have recently switched to Microsoft's testing framework as it allowed us to put a timeout in our tests, something the latest NUnit tests are unable to accomplish.

TechEd 2008 First Report

Bill Evjen — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:21:56 GMT

TechEd is going good. This years TechEd is a bit different than the many that I have been to before. The keynote was ok - not great, but not bad. I was hoping for some customers to come out on stage and present the really cool things they are doing with Microsoft's technologies. I love seeing front line implementations and the hills they had to climb to get to what they have. But there was none of that this year.

They brought out a robot as part of some new Robotics group in Microsoft and they brought out a robot as a demo of what they are talking about. They had the robot play back an old voice recording of S. Ballmer saying "developers, developers, developers". The sad part was this fancy robot was connected by an XBOX controller *with a cord* and a guy following behind controlling him to go this way and that. (wireless anyone?). Here is a good photo of how happy BillG was with the robot:

Beyond the keynote - it is a smaller TechEd in that the IT Pros are not part of this TechEd but they are part of next week's TechEd. I have heard that there are around 5 thousand people at this one (maybe less) and that there is double that next week for the IT Pro event.

I met up with a lot of vendors including FarPoint, Infragistics, ChartFx, Oracle and some others that I have to deal with as part of my job at Thomson Reuters. I have also been attending some of the sessions and meeting with all the various Microsoft teams on the floor of the convention floor. Meeting with the team members in the technology booths is probably the best thing about TechEd as you get some one on one time with them to go over your specific questions and issues. That part of the conference is worth the entire trip.

So far so good. BTW - Florida is hot.

BTW - on another note with the keynote - this is probably BillG's last keynote and there was no real kickoff for him, which is sad considering all he has done for the developer community. I really would have liked more on this topic rather than the joke video of his last day in the office (most of which has been seen before). The conference ended with a Q&A with BillG and most people had walked out by the end of that. I think most people left because of the really silly questions that were being asked of him.