It was a very good year - 2013

The best thing that happened in 2013 was the miraculous recovery of our dog Oliver (Shar Pei, Shih Tzu mix with a black elongated tongue) from breathing problems which was troubling him since the day he was born. He recovered and is now enjoying the sunshine and the breeze in Honolulu.

 

All my blogs, four of them had increased readership to something like over a few hundred page views a day. I have not had the time to post to two of them which I hope to improve in 2014.

Hodentek is generic and HodentekMSSS  is 100% SQL Server

The book I had started writing in December 2012 got finished in the middle of 2013. This was the second edition, or the second avatar of my first book on SQL Server Reporting Services published in 2008. I managed to pack-in the SharePoint services providing Reporting Services 2012 as a service. This really gave completeness and justified the writing. Microsoft is relentless in its releases and I am not sure how many have adopted SQL Server 2012 (already SQL Server 2014 is in CTP2) and I am sure quite many are still on 2000 and 2005.

Honolulu is a haven for tourists and the scantily clad crowd but can get boring if you have to live. I was getting to the stage when I wanted to do something more engaging. In November 2013, Pacific Center for Advanced Technical Training provided me the opportunity to teach a non-credit introductory course on Structured Query Language. Some five professionals signed up and the course went very well to my satisfaction. I will be offering this course and one on SQL Server Reporting Services again in early 2014.

Finally the to do list for 2014:

• Keep up the long walks, Yoga and the Surya Namaskaras
• Improve my posts
• Work on my website
• Teach the course and add other courses
• Travel

 

Big Data generation 1: India's Aadhar Project

For a previous post on Hodentek follow this link here:
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2012/09/over-1-billion-id-database.html

By December 6, 2013 Aadhar had captured demographic and biometric data of over 500,000,000 Indian residents for India's Unique Identification project. This is the largest biometric database in the world. as in everything else there are critics and the criticism has been directed against choosing MongoDB for data capture and Management. MongoDB is a document-centric, NoSQL database which relies on tables allowing easy integration with some applications. It has been used by many organizations besides GOI (Government of India's Aadhar)such as eBay, New York Times and others. The reason for criticism is that MongoDB raised funding from in-Q-Tel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel). Presently it appears most of the data is stored on MySQL (found good for scalable demographic data) and perhaps still some on MongoDB for images.
http://www.mongodb.com/press/10gen-announces-strategic-investment-iqt

http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/06/inside-indias-aadhar-the-worlds-biggest-biometrics-database/

http://michael-maldonado.com/inside-indias-aadhar-the-worlds-biggest-biometrics-database.html

Leaving aside these political developments UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) is an ambitious project that will make life easy for its inhabitants by reducing the time it takes for the citizens to avail of the entitlements which in the past has been brokered by middlemen with vested interests and corrupt businesses. This is just the beginning.

Present size of database is around 5 petabytes which may grow to 15 petabytes.

Even as the database is growing it has already been used to link up 40 million bank accounts to make payments easier. More APPS are in the works to leverage this humongous database.

This was also recently aired on US TV on CNN as 'Fareed Zakaria to take viewers to India on Sunday for a look at a nation at crossroads' where he interviews tech entrepreneur Nandan Nilkeni.

Nandan Nilekeni on Aadhar



Here are some highlights of Aadhar showing screen shots and videos:

This post is basically made to bring to Hodentek audience who might have missed (the Aadhar news or Zakaria's TV show) this important technical development in India which touches upon Big Data Generation. Any use of the graphics used in this post are governed by the terms of use as referred to here:
http://uidai.gov.in/terms-of-use.html

Impact of social media on recent political happenings in India

Not only American elections but elections worldwide and political changes have been influenced by  the tremendous amount of sway social media have on public emotions that includes the 'Arab spring'. This post was inspired by a New York Times article that appeared a few days ago.

Google Hangouts have been used by Non-Resident Indians to bring about ground breaking changes to how business is run in India especially targeting corruption and ushering in new leaders and parties to end this scourge.

One incident of recent time that is noteworthy is the election of Kejri Lal of Aam Aadmi party to the post of chief minister of Delhi.

Google, Facebook and Twitter have contributed to make this happen with a great deal of crowd sourcing efforts and personal participation of overseas Indians in USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and other places where Indian diaspora have found their homes.  

The growth and proliferation of social media and the availability of mobile devices have forever changed the World and politics is no more localized.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/nonresident-indians-play-major-role-in-aam-aadmi-partys-delhi-campaign/

This image was screen captured from the above site:
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/27/a-conversation-with-aam-aadmi-party-leader-arvind-kejriwal/?ref=world&_r=0
 

SQL Training in Honolulu: Introduction to Structured Query Language (SQL)

The above course will be offered again as a non-credit course by the Pacific Center for Advanced Technology Training.

Course summary:
Databases, organized repositories of information, have become indispensable in today's world. In this introductory course you will learn about relational databases and the basics of Structured Query Language (SQL) including sorting; grouping result sets; using DDL, DML, DCL, and TCL. All SQL statements will initially be written for one table. Most practical, modern and relational databases will include a large number of tables and SQL queries have to access information from several tables. This course will then introduce you to querying more than one table. With this skill you will be able to query two or more tables in a database. This is a hands-on course which will take you from installing SQL Server 2012; learning the ins and outs of SQL Server Management Studio and of course a full dose of SQL.

The course covers most of the requirements to take Microsoft’s latest certification (98-364), the Microsoft Technology Associate.  During each meeting the students will be assessed for their knowledge, competency and proficiency in SQL.

Schedule:
Feb 4 - Mar 6, 2014; Tuesdays and Thrusdays; 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm; 10 mtgs

Can you deploy a Data-tier component extracted from SQL Server 2014 CTP1 to SQL Server 2012?

This should not be possible according to documentation here  and quoted below unless the DAC Framework version are the same.

'A DAC package or export file built with one version of the DAC Framework cannot be processed by an earlier version of the DAC Framework. For example, a DAC package extracted using the SQL Server 2012 client tools cannot be deployed using the SQL Server 2008 R2 client tools.'

This post is about a little experiment to test the validity of the above statement. In an earlier post in HodentekMSSS.blogspot.com here a .dac extracted from SQL Server 2012 was deployed to CTP1:

http://hodentekmsss.blogspot.com/2013/12/deploying-dac-to-sql-server-2014.html

The above post was about a DAC package extracted from SQL Server 2012 Express on Windows 7 Platform (x64) and deployed to SQL Server 2014 CTP1 on Windows 8 Preview platform.

In this post the database created using the above procedure was extracted and deployed back to SQL Server 2012 Express on the other partition. This was also successful in violation of the previously quoted procedure.

The reason was the DAC Framework versions were found to be the same on both servers using the DacUnpack utility.

The DacUnpack utility unpacks the .dac files. Here are the two files opened in Safari browser.

Northwind.dacpack's Origin.xml


3.0.0.0 false 2.0.0.0 1.0.0.0 4e266c18-42ec-4e0c-b3ce-5894ab3f1cd1 2013-12-09T15:29:51.5237832-10:00 0001-01-01T00:00:00.0000000 Microsoft.SqlServer.Dac, Version=10.3.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a 11.0.2902.0 http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/dac/Serialization/2012/02 

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 - 11.0.2218.0 (X64) Jun 12 2012 13:05:25 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation Express Edition (64-bit) on Windows NT 6.1 <X64> (Build 7601: Service Pack 1) 

8 103 1 9 13 27 1 1 13 91 100 11 1 19


 16  C3CCC630725BF4F1785C54AEC314B1D687A323EDAD15DA1235BA5CFD6FC5865A
 
NorthwindCTP1.dacpack's Origin.xml (obtained after unpacking)

3.0.0.0 false 2.0.0.0 c1c8859f-2548-4873-a550-b322e63d5ef4 2013-12-26T10:09:30.4691845-10:00 0001-01-01T00:00:00.0000000 Microsoft.SqlServer.Dac, Version=10.3.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a 10.3.0.0 http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/dac/Serialization/2012/02 
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 (CTP1) - 11.0.9120.5 (X64) Jun 10 2013 20:09:10 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation Enterprise Evaluation Edition (64-bit) on Windows NT 6.2 <X64> (Build 9200: ) (Hypervisor) 
8 103 1 9 13 27 1 1 13 9 1 100 111 19
 16  87A4AC4BF297030FAFDEA917D02EF357DFDC8F92CED835DA64DF47683B851272