Communication is Key

The older I get the more I realise how import clear communication is. Communication does not come naturally to all people, espically people in the more technical sectors. I must say I really enjoying working with technology. Things are normally always black and white or zeros and ones. When it comes to people that are a number of soft skills that in my case needed to be learnt and did not come natually and I have to admit I'm still learning new things every day about working with people.

Leason for today:

Talk to people, not about people.

One thing I need to start doing is after key meetings send out my own 'minutes'. This way I communicate my understanding of what was communicated in the meeting and what decisions where made. Also I need to make clear statements in my 'minutes' about assigned roles and responsbilities. Never assume someone has commited to doing something unless it's in black and white!

Database Table Names

Learnt this the hard way when I found out MySQL tables are case sensitive.

A bit of background information:

The (ANSI) SQL standard requires that non-quoted identifiers are stored in all uppercase in the system catalogs and that non-quoted identifiers are case-insensitive.

According to the standard the following non-quoted identifiers reference the same object (e.g. a table): FOOBAR, foobar, FooBar (and all would have been stored as FOOBAR in the system catalogs).

The following quoted identifiers reference 3 different objects: "FOOBAR", "foobar", "FooBar".

Nearly all DBMS comply at least with the requirement that non-quoted identifiers are case insensitive. Except for MySQL and SQL Server as far as I know - both can be configured to be case-sensitive even for non-quoted identifiers. I'm not sure what the default behaviour of SQL Server is though (as Damien pointed out in his comment, this depends on the collation being used for SQL Server).

MySQL is even more confusing as its behaviour depends on the combination of several configuration settings, the storage engine and the filesystem. All other DBMS I know are consistent regarding their behaviour across all platforms and installations.

PostgreSQL complies with the case-sensitivity but it folds everything to lowercase.

So given these rules, I think that the "traditional" naming convention using underscores stems from the fact that object names are stored in uppercase. The only way to get "readable" names is to separate important parts of the name with underscores.

SQL Server is even more non-standard as it is case-preserving (similar to the way NTFS under Windows works) so it does not fold the names to anything. So it does not change the case of the name when it's stored in the system catalog (but it is by default case insensitive). For that reason you will find people working in a Microsoft environment using CamelCase more often then e.g. in an Oracle environment.

Reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14317784/why-underline-is-usually-used-in-the-sql-table-names-rather-than-camel-case

Windows 2008 Remove Shutdown / Restart Reason

So I've been working with a Windows 2008 VM and was finding it a real pain to keep typing in a message every time I needed to restart / shutdown the VM, and as we know Windows loves restarting after every patch / update / software installation.

This quick fixed removed the required to input a shutdown/restart reason -> http://www.win2008r2workstation.com/disable-shutdown-event-tracker/

NetIQ / Novell IDM 4.0.2 Engine Patch 3

I was getting the following error when trying to install engine patch 3:

"Script for patch install,patchUpgrade.sh,does not have correct permissions,exiting the installation.."

You need to make the following files executable on Linux for the install to work:

- install.sh
- config/patchUpgrade.sh
- config/NonRootPatcher.sh

Since when do you put executable files in the config directory? Especially when there is already a bin folder as part of the patch. Really sad to see the lack of quality control on patches being released.

McAfee Registry Madness

Just had to make a quick note about this.

So I could not seem to get Explorer to show hidden files. Eventually I found out it was an issue writing to the following registry tree:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Checked numerous online posts about registry permissions. Eventually I found out the McAfee was blocking me writing to this specific part of the registry. I have now decided to can McAfee and go back to MS Security Essentials. What an absolute waste of time just to fix something so simple.

Reinstalling Windows

So I just went through the pretty painful process of reinstalling Windows 7 on my laptop. I decided to buy a SSD drive and thought the best option would be a clean install. Sadly it took 2 days for Windows to install all its updates. I think I must have rebooted my laptop about 10 times or more in total to get it up to the latest patched version. I decided to write this blog entry just to track the software I installed after loading Windows. So here goes:

• Drivers, drivers and more drivers
• JRE
• Chrome
• Firefox
• VMware
• Office 2013
• Dropbox
• Picasa
• Notepad++
• VLC
• 7-Zip
• Gadwin Print Screen
• MobaXterm
• Nitro PDF Reader

Doing this whole process make me realise what a painful operating system Windows really is. Ideally installing all this should not take this long and the Windows update process is just an absolute pain. Going forward lets hope Windows 8 and it's app store can make life a little easier when it comes to reinstalls. 

HTTP Status 404 - /nps/servlet/imanauthentication

The above is a nice error you get on new install of iManager 2.7.5. It's always fun when it takes you hours to install a product...NOT

This error can be fixed by replacing one file:

cp /var/opt/novell/iManager/nps/WEB-INF/newweb.xml /var/opt/novell/iManager/nps/WEB-INF/web.xml

Then restart tomcat.

Do people not test their software?

ldconfig Segmentation fault on SLES 11 SP2

To resolve just delete the following file:

/var/cache/ldconfig/aux-cache

SQL Error: ORA-23412: master table's primary key columns have changed

Got this beautiful error when trying to re-create one of our Materialized views (MV). Sadly googling did not seem to provide a solution. To fix this I had to drop the MV log on the 'parent' database for the table in question. I could then re-create the MV.

CSVDE install

Note to self: To get CSVDE you need to install 'Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services' ->

ORA-01882 timezone region not found - Can not connect to database in SQL Developer

Got this nice error when I upgrade my Oracle SQL Developer:

Basically you just need to add a time zone to the SQL Developer Config file (/opt/sqldeveloper/sqldeveloper/bin/sqldeveloper.conf) to resolve. I added the following line:

AddVMOption -Duser.timezone=SAST

How to rename file extentions in Linux

for x in *.csv; do mv "$x" "${x%.dot}.bak"; done

AD Change Password on next Logon

So there seem to be a number of posts on how to set this via Novell IDM. All you really need to do is the the pwdLastSet attribute on a user to 0. Then the next time they log in they will need to change their password. We had a challenge where for certain users on creation we did not what their password to be 'expired'. To acheive this you have to set pwdLastSet to -1. I could not find to many posts on this but this one helped ->

"If the previous value of pwdLastSet is 0, assigning the value -1 results in
Active Directory actually making the value equivalent to the current
date/time (as if the user just changed their password). If the previous
value of pwdLastSet is any other value (even if the password is expired),
assigning the value -1 results in no change. If you want the value of
pwdLastSet to be equivalent to the current time, first assign 0, then
assign -1."

JDBC Driver - Table/view 'TABLENAME' is undefined or unsyncable.

So I was pulling my hair out with this error on the Driver.
I started looking through the changes I'd made to the Driver and could not find anything that would cause this issue. I eventually deployed the backup of the Driver and found the issue still persisted.
At least then I realised the issue was not with the Driver. Someone had made a change to the database to allow for the deletion of records during a cleanup process. They forgot to put the foreign key constraint back for the table. We add the foreign key constraint back to the table, restarted the Driver and we where back in business. The JDBC Driver will not sync data to other tables if the foreign key constraint is not setup correctly.

WSDL Cheat Sheet

Service -> ‘Java Class’

Operation -> ‘Java Function’ The Operation defines the name of the Operation and ties the request response messages together.

Port -> A service is assessable on a Port.  A Port has a unique name space and binding attribute. The Port specifies the service address. Web service can be exposed as SOAP or HTTP. The same web service can also be exposed by multiple Ports.

SOAP example:

<port name='WeatherSoapPort' binding='wsdlns:WeatherSoapBinding' >

<soap:address   location='http://localhost/demos/wsdl/devxpert/weatherservice.asp' />

</port>

HTTP example:

<port name='WeatherSoapPort' binding='wsdlns:WeatherSoapBinding' >

<http:address location="http://localhost/demos/wsdl/devxpert/weatherGET.asp"/

</port>

Message -> Normally two messages required i.e. input message and output message. Messages contain zero or more <part> elements. Sample messages below

<message name='Weather.GetTemperature'>

    <part name='zipcode' type='xsd:string'/>

    <part name='celsius' type='xsd:boolean'/>

 </message>

 <message name='Weather.GetTemperatureResponse'>

    <part name='Result' type='xsd:float'/>

 </message>

Binding -> ‘Ties it all together’ - specifies binding(s) of each operation in the PortTypes section