Behind the Book: Oracle Database 11g R2 Performance Tuning Cookbook

Ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes when a book is published? Follow the story, as it takes place, behind the Oracle Database 11g R2 Performance Tuning Cookbook

Believe in Open Source: Meet the team

Packt is dedicated to the Open Source community and over the course of the past month, there has been articles published on www.PacktPub.com which feature various Open Source communities with insight provided by a respected figure from the community. Now, let’s turn the tables and look at the Open Source community within Packt.

The Packt Open Source team provides the Open Source community with the valuable resource of books and eBooks that share the experiences of your fellow IT professionals and brings you more focused, solutions-based content.

We start our 'Meet the team' with no other than Doug Paterson, the Open Source Publisher...

Big Data Analysis

This article created by Jonathan R. Owens, Jon Lentz, and Brian Femiano, authors of Hadoop Real-World Solutions Cookbook, contains recipes designed to show how you can put Hadoop to use to answer different questions about your data. Several of the Hive examples will demonstrate how to properly implement and use a custom function (UDF) for reuse in different analytics. There are two Pig recipes that show different analytics with the Audioscrobbler dataset and one MapReduce Java API recipe that shows Combiners.

In this article, we will cover:

• Counting distinct IPs in weblog data using MapReduce and Combiners

• Using Hive date UDFs to transform and sort event dates from geographic event data

• Using Hive to build a per-month report of fatalities over geographic event data

• Implementing a custom UDF in Hive to help validate source reliability over geographic event data

• Marking the longest period of non-violence using Hive MAP/REDUCE operators and Python

• Calculating the cosine similarity of Artists in the Audioscrobbler dataset using Pig

• Trim outliers from the Audioscrobbler dataset using Pig and datafu

Learning to apply Apache Hive, Pig, and MapReduce to solve the specific problems you are faced with can be difficult. The recipes in this article present a few big data problems and provide solutions that show how to tackle them. You will notice that the questions we ask of the data are not incredibly complicated, but you will require a different approach when dealing with a large volume of data. Even though the sample datasets in the recipes are small, you will find that the code is still very applicable to bigger problem spaces distributed over large Hadoop clusters.

The analytic questions in this article are designed to highlight many of the more powerful features of the various tools. You will find many of these features and operators useful as you begin solving your own problems.

Binding Web Services in ESB—Web Services Gateway

Since SOI (Service Oriented Integration) is all about integrating multiple SOA-based systems, web services play a critical role in the integration space. This article is all about the importance of web services in integration. We will use the samples to illustrate how to bind web services with the ServiceMix ESB to facilitate integration.

In this article by Binildas A. Christudas, we will cover the following:

• Web services and binding
• Introduction to HTTP
• ServiceMix's servicemix-http component
• The consumer and provider roles for the ServiceMix JBI components
• servicemix-http in the consumer and provider roles
• Web service binding (Gateway) sample

BizTalk Application: Dynamics AX Message Outflow

In the previous article, BizTalk Application: Currency Exchange Rates, we took a look at the setup for sending data using AIF XML documents to AX. We can use the BizTalk adapter to retrieve data from Dynamics AX via this AIF module. This is done using the AIF Queue manager. Throughout Dynamics AX, there are Send electronically buttons that can allow you to push data into the AIF Queue with an Outbound direction. Similarly, asynchronous incoming messages have an Inbound direction parameter.

In this article by Carl Darski, author of Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration, we'll create a BizTalk application that retrieves messages from Dynamics AX 2009 via the AIF Queue.

BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5: Activating Devices and Users

The purpose of creating a BlackBerry Enterprise Server user is to assign a device to the user and then manage that device via policies. In this article by Mitesh Desai, author of BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5 Implementation Guide, we will be looking at activating devices and the various methods that are available to do so. We will create users on our BES system, and then assigning them Smartphone devices. We will be providing our Microsoft Exchange users access to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

We will look at creating a single user account so that we become familiar with the settings, but in a practical environment we would need a quicker way to create the users, especially if we have over 500 users in our organization. In the Lab, at the end of the article, we will be importing users to the BES.

BlackBerry: BES Architecture and Implementation Planning

Planning is a key element of any IT implementation, but planning can only be accomplished with an understanding of the technical underpinnings of the proposed solution. In this article, authors Mitesh Desai and Dan Renfroe delve more deeply into the technical architecture of BES in order to provide you with an understanding of what’s under the hood. This article also covers the system requirements and pre-requisites for a BES implementation, including operating system, hardware, network, and database requirements.

Blender 2.49 Scripting: Animating the Visibility of objects

There are many places where Python can be used in Blender. In this article by Michel Anders, author of Blender 2.49 Scripting, we will now look at scripts that may be used to act on certain events. These scripts come in two flavors—script links and space handlers. You will learn what script links and space handlers are and how they can be used to perform activities on each frame change in an animation. You also see how to associate additional information with an object, how to use script links to make an object appear or disappear by changing its layout or changing its transparency.

Blender 2.49 Scripting: Shape Keys, IPOs, and Poses

The Blender API provides us with the means to define IPOs from scratch, enabling the definition of movements not easily re-created by setting key frames by hand. Thus there is more to IPOs than just driving one IPO by another one. Furthermore, Shape keys and poses are examples of (collections of) IPOs that are quite different from, for example, a location IPO. We will encounter both shape keys and poses later on in this article, but we will start off with looking at how we might define an IPO from scratch.

In this article by Michel Anders, author of Blender 2.49 Scripting, you will learn how to:

• Define IPOs
• Define shape keys on a mesh
• Define IPOs for those shape keys
• Pose armatures
• Group changes in poses into actions

(Other related articles on Blender 2.49 Scripting are listed at the end of this page.)