Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Performance Tuning: Implementing Physical Database Structure

Your database performance heavily depends on how you have physically placed your database objects and how you have configured your disk subsystem. Designing the physical layout of your database correctly is the key factor to improve the performance of your database queries and thus the performance of your database. However, the correct decision on a physical design structure of the database depends on the available hardware resources that you might have. This includes the number of processors, RAM, and storage resources, such as how many ,disks or RAID controllers you might have in your database environment. The best thing while designing physical layout of the database is to have multiple physical disks for your database. If you configure your database in such a way that it spreads across multiple disks, it can benefit from parallel I/O operations.

The following are some of the decisions that influence your database performance:

• Where do you place data files?
• Where do you place log files?
• Where do you place large objects?
• Where do you place indexes?
• Where do you place the tempdb database?

You can control the physical location of database objects within the database by using files and filegroups.

In this article by Ritesh Shah and Bihag Thaker, co-authors of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Performance Tuning Cookbook, we will learn how to best design the physical structure of the database on your disk subsystem when you have enough available hardware resources, such as multiple processors and multiple physical disks.

Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Solution - Architecture and Design

Setting the foundation of your business intelligence and data warehouse solution is key to the project. By making specific architecture and design decisions, you will be required to build the solution in a particular way. It is essential to understand some of the different architectural options and how they will affect your design, before you begin the development effort.

Making a mistake at the architecture and design stage of the project will have many ramifications in the form of rework and additional time, cost, and expense. Business intelligence and data warehouse projects have been around for many years, and there is a wealth of best practice information available, which is a great place to begin your project.

In this article by John Heaton, author of Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology, we will review some of the key architecture and design issues that should be addressed by the project. Specifically, we will cover:

• Choosing your database type
• Defining your database layout
• Selecting the Third Normal Form or a Dimensional model

Installing and Configuring Drupal

Drupal 7 is a modern Content Management System famed for its flexibility and power. Using Drupal you can easily create custom functionality that would otherwise have to be purchased in many of the other leading CMSs

In this article by Dylan James, author of the book Drupal 7 Cookbook, we will explore the process of setting up a Drupal website. We will see how to install the offcial Drupal 7 release and also how to install third-party Drupal distributions which are preconfigured in a variety of ways.

Following the installation, we will move on to the installation of third-party modules and then how your site can be configured to provide a site search form.

The article culminates with a recipe on setting up Drupal multi-site where two Drupal sites are configured to run from the same core files.

Setting up the Basics for a Drupal Multilingual site: Languages and UI Translation

Drupal's default installation is in English. But, as you'll soon see, it can be configured to handle other languages as well. Creating a multilingual website expands your audience, and studies have shown that users are more likely to buy products and services on a website when content is presented in their native language. Coupled with the fact that there are many more non-English native speakers than English native speakers, you should see the full value of creating a site that supports other languages.

This article by Kristen Pol, author of Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites starts with setting up a test site. Once the site is ready, we'll add several new languages and configure language detection so that we can view each language using different URLs. With the detection in place, we will enable a switcher block to easily navigate between each language.

After the language settings are done, we'll move on to translating the Drupal interface. First we will translate manually by grabbing files from localize.drupal.org, and then we'll configure the site for automatic updates. Once the contributed translations are in place, we will learn how to add and change translated UI strings as well as how to contribute these translations back to the Drupal community. The last part of the interface translation section deals with changing English strings and reusing strings on other sites.

WebGL: Animating a 3D scene

Objects in 3D scenes can have actions on their own. For instance, in a racing car game, each car has its own speed and trajectory. In a first-person shooting game your enemies can hide behind barricades then come and fight you or run away. In general, each one of these actions is modeled as a matrix transformation that is attached to the corresponding actor in the scene. These are called local transforms.

In this article by Diego Cantor author of WebGL Beginner’s Guide, we will study different techniques to make use of local transforms.

Wordpress: Buddypress Courseware

The BuddyPress (BP) Courseware plugin by ScholarPress transforms our WordPres site into a learning management system. This plugin provides educators with the ability to post and organize course content, assignments, bibliographies, and schedules. BP Courseware works by extending the BuddyPress group functionality. Each courseware-enabled group receives a courseware dashboard where teachers and students can quickly access and post course content. The BP Courseware plugin is ideal for managing multiple courses by the same instructor or for an entire academic department.

In this article by Adam D. Scott, author of the book WordPress for Education, we'll cover techniques to install and configure the BP Courseware plugin. Once the plugin is installed, we'll develop content for a sample courseware course by adding course information, posting assignments, grading student assignments, creating a bibliography, and managing the course calendar.