SPDY, an experiemental web protocol to speed up HTTP

Page loading and latency are two of the important parameters in web traffic. If your page does not load under something like 4 sec, the surfer will go elsewhere. SPDY is all about reducing the page loading and improving latency. SPDY is a Google trade mark and it is still in experimentation.

Read this White paper to get a feeling for what is brewing:
http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper

SPDY modifies the HTTP rather than replacing it and functions at the Session level. It functions as a tunnel for HTTP and HTTPs requests. HTTP 2.0 which in the works takes SPDY as a starting point.

Source: white paper

Basic Features(Google white Paper)

• Multiplexed Streams
• Request prioritization
• HTTP Header compression

Google will try to get it standardized (in the works) and implementations exist for Chromium, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and other browsers including IE.

How is the speed achieved?
Latency reduction is acheived through compression, mulitplexing and prioritization (Basic features). The multiplexing is carried over one client connection for subweb resources instead of HTTP fetching one resource per connection.

Well how does HTTP with SPDY compares with HTTP?

Well web pages are complex constructs with images; style sheets; media etc fetched through connections slow and fast. It appears SDPY would work faster than HTTP in most cases.
Here is the performance comparison table from Google whitepaper:

Microsoft is also looking at SPDY and here is link to Microsoft research on comparing HTTP with SPDY and HTTP:

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/170059/A%20comparison%20of%20SPDY%20and%20HTTP%20performance.pdf

Here is a performance chart for a popular web site (from Microsoft's PDF above):

Well we want to surf faster and with our Smartphones to get the same experience like the one on desktop something has to change.

Windows 7 support is ending

Recently Microsoft turned off (or in the process) support for Windows XP and now it seems Windows 7 is also headed for the chopping block.

http://news.yahoo.com/microsoft-ending-mainstream-support-windows-7-early-2015-185319567.html?.tsrc=rogers

View details of the dead-line here:
https://bgr.com/2014/07/08/microsoft-windows-7-support-deadline/

However there will be an extended support after Jan 13, 2015 (not a Friday) for

Windows Server 2008
Exchange Server 2010
Windows 7 Home, Professional, Starter, Enterprise and Ultimate

The extended supports takes you Jan 14,2020, not too bad!
Go to Microsoft Web site to find finer details.

Use Sybase(SAP)'s SQL Anywhere OLE DB Provider 16 to create a linked server in SQL Server 2012

Linked servers offer the following advantages as noted in MSDN documentation:

•The ability to access data from outside of SQL Server.
•The ability to issue distributed queries, updates, commands, and transactions on heterogeneous
data sources across the enterprise.
•The ability to address diverse data sources similarly.

There are two ways to create Linked Servers in SQL Server 2012.

• Using SQL Server Management Studio
• Using the sp_addlinkedserver stored procedure

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 has two providers to connect to SQL Anywhere 16 from SAP (Sybase). They are,

MSDASQL - Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC
SAOLEDB.16 - SQL Anywhere OLE DB Provider 16

When you install SQL Anywhere 16 the servers can be used for both architectures.,
Of the two providers MSDASQL cannot be used as no MSDASQL is available for x64bit and attempts to use it to configure a linked server results in failure.

However if you use SAOLEDB.16 you can successfully create a linked server.

For a detailed step-by-step explanation review the following link:
http://hodentekmsss.blogspot.com/2014/07/creating-linked-server-to-sapsybase-sql.html

Windows Azure cloud services get the FedRamp JAB P-ATO

Well this is good news for Microsoft because Microsoft was the first cloud services vendor to get this OK.

Let us start expalining what this FedRamp JAB-PTO is.

FedRamp:
FedRamp stands for Federal Risk and Authorization Managment Program which has government-wide range and provides a stardardized procedure to assess security, authorization  and continuosly monitor cloud services.

What is JAB?
There are lots of government agencies that may want to use cloud services. The Joint Authorization Board (JAB) consisting of the following key agencies constitutes the board created under FedRamp:

• Department of Defense(DOD)
• Department of Homeland Security(DHS)
• US General Services Administration(GSA)

These cover most of the government agencies that take care government programs.

And now P-ATO:
It is a Provisional Authority to Operate.

This a good thing for Microsoft because individual government organization do not need to check out Microsfot's cloud services  regarding many of its security, authorization and other risk related features as these have already been checked by the board.  This makes Fed moving to the cloud a lot easier on all fronts.

These are some links you may be interested:
FedRamp JAB P-ATO details:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2013/09/30/windows-azure-cloud-services-achieve-critical-federal-security-milestone.aspx
FedRamp site:
http://cloud.cio.gov/fedramp

 

Stop this senseless killing of elephants

As Mysorian I cannot simply tolerate. Shocking news. What right do we have?

Please follow this link:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/hours_to_save_elephants_usa/?cMPbpbb

and sign the petition. Why 500,000 signatures I want at least a million!