SQL Server 2000 Scalability

The client has a problem with Scalability. I've yet to see the design configuration, but started looking for some material to help.

A scan of CSC RFA camme up with a response with an attached paper from ORACLE Data Warehouse with SQL Server response giving ORACLE's views on the weaknesses of SQL Server.

That paper references a site called SQL-Server-Performance.com. There are some useful tips here.

A paper that describes the use of Distirbuted Partition Views to scale up can be found here.

There are several versions of SQL Server 2000. The MS SQL site explains
here.

Decent overview of options for scale-out and failover are
here.

Now I know I've got some stuff on scaling SQL Server from previous assignments - I just have to find it....

Web Services Testing

I recently raised an RFA on Web Services Testing.

What strategy and tools are people using for testing Web Services in CSC? My client is currently starting to build some but has no environment or tools in which to test. The providing application is expecting WS-I Basic Profile-compliant SOAP/XML calls. Some orchestration and performance testing capabilities in the testing environment are desirable.

One response pointed me to Web Services Help a website run by Peter J Wood (a fellow CSCer)which discusses use of a tool called SOAPscope from Mindreef. Peter himself recommended looking at Optimyz which allows you to test the orchestration layer (BPEL) in addition to discrete web services, although he says it is not as mature as SOAPscope.

But nobody really answered the question about testing strategy. I found a couple of useful White papers on the Wipro site, but, curiously, the one on testing web services seems to have gone. But Red Gate's paper Web Services Testing describes the same approach, i.e.

Proof-of-concept testing

Functional testing

Regression testing

Load/stress testing and

Monitoring

The paper goes onto describe how their tool supports stress/load testing. It misses testing out the orchestration aspects, though - I think this is another required testing step. Anybody got any other pointers?

Identifying and Specifying Web Services

A question I am worrying about at the moment...
My client intends developing a set of Web Services to allow 3rd parties to sell (and possibly service) their insurance products. The question is, how do they decide what services to expose and how?

This is actually a huge and distinctly non-trivial question to answer. I'm curious as to how things have moved on from when we did the Archtiectrue Conundrum work a couple of years ago. [The Blog we created of some resources we found is still here].

From a thread in the CSC RFA, Glen Best has provided a few links on service modelling. RFA Response.

It seems to me that you need to define a framework and set of patterns you are going to use before you start building. Questions to answer include:

What does the orchestration (or choreography) of the services?

How are the services monitored and managed?

How do you provide resilience and performance?

What is the security model and how is it implemented?

By the way Andrew's Blog has an excellent discussion on Service Versioning, which is part of the story.

As for how to expose the web services, there are some who would say that the services should be "RESTful". See here for example, for some tips on that. How well is this accepted? Or are people just using XML/SOAP?

Of course Web Services Interoperability is an important part of the story. But what is the level of adoption of the standard and when should we look to intercept which standards as they are defined and ratified?

Questions, questions... I've got a bit of catching up to do. Not least to find ouy what Zapthink are saying these days - I was quite impressed with their analysis in this area a couple of years ago.

Downloading.....

I thought I'd test the new image embedding functionality. Thanks are due to Mike Dyer for this.
His message was :

Just in case you are wondering what I'm doing in my spare time.....

(What else do you expect from a Performance Engineering expert?)

Sound Editing

As an alternative to the expensive option of using BT's service for recording a telephone conference of £280 per event, I spent £44.50 + VAT to buy the Telesto Telephone Conversation Recorder device, cables and software to allow me to record our lunchtime briefings conference calls. I piloted it yesterday on the 1hr session on SOA.

Having recorded the call I ended up with a 74Mb WAV file. I then needed to convert this to something that I could upload to the CSC Portal (with its 10,000,000 byte file limit). (Yes it's true. The limit is 10 million bytes, not 10 Mb. Wacky!). Having tried a shareware tool called MP3 WAV Converter, and used up the 5 free conversions without getting a usable result (My final attempt with MP3 WAV resulted in a file of 10,077,000 bytes. It took me ages to figure out why I couldn't upload it!), I looked again and came across this rather good Freeware tool Audacity.

Not only is it free, but it has got lots of useful functionality, including mixing, editing and format conversion. It allowed me to turn my 74Mb WAV file into 2 MP3 files of c 8.5Mb each. Then all I had to do was upload them to the portal....

Oh, by the way, I did also experiment for quite some time with using Skype, dialling into MeetMe with SkypeOut (including playing a file of the touchtones of the PIN code using Dialabc's generator) and trying to record that. I tried various shareware/freeware tools for recording the sound, but there's not a good solution (yet) to the problem of getting an echo when you use the Mono or Stereo Mix sound source to allow you to record. A pity. That solution would only have cost 84p/hr (the SkypeOut cost to a UK landline).

Now that's cracked, how about podcasting?

Wikis

I've been using a couple of free Wiki hosting services lately. I have to say I'm pretty impressed with Jotspot.

I particularly liked their concept of a hackathon as an innovation mechanism.

I'll also be interested to see how they get on with their Jotspot Live real-time wiki interface that allows multiple users to edit the same page at the same time

A new one that is pretty simple and extremely quick to to get up and running with is Pbwiki. As they say...
"Make a free, password protected wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich."

And if you are after some links re Wikis this is where I started from Wikis Galore. See also the links in The Public Wiki Forums listing in the original Wiki - the
PortlandPatternRepository.

And, of course, don't forget the stonking Wikipedia, now up to 635,000+ articles in the English edition.

Formatting problem

I've taken a drastic approach to sorting out the format problem by changing the template used. I then had to edit a lot of the posts for the columns to display correctly. But it's sorted now. Is it an improvement?

By the way, the new template allows us to display some stuff about ourselves. If we wish. I'm not sure I do!

Opening minds with open-source collaboration

neus.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Very interesting article. How to do 'transformation' and why introduce modern collaboration.