Windows

How to bring OSX Lion’s Natural Scrolling to Windows 7

If, like me, you move between Windows and Mac on a daily basis you may have found yourself finding it a little hard to figure out which way to scroll the mouse.  With OS-X Lion Apple introduced ‘natural’ scrolling which means that when you scroll the wheel on the mouse an upwards push sends the scroll bar down, that might sound weird but in essence your upward movement of the wheel actually pushes the screen upwards – very much like a touch gesture on a smartphone or tablet.

Whether you love it out loath it, getting used to switching between the two is difficult and you could either turn it off on the Mac or if you like it you could bring the same feature to Windows.  As it happens the feature is already there, to enable it you need to edit a registry key and if you’re not familiar with this process I would advise caution since a mistake in the Registry can make your machine quite unstable but if you’re comfortable with RegEdit you’ll need to modify the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\????\????\Device Parameters\FlipFlopWheel

Set the value from 0 (default) to 1 where the ????\???? section are whatever device IDs you can see.  I changed the FlipFlopWheel property for all of the devices I could see, unplugged and re-plugged the mouse and the then it worked – natural scrolling on Windows.

Credits go to darkfader on the NeoSmart forums for the original solution.

Internet Explorer Using 2.7GB RAM!

Erm, something’s not right here…

… I only had about eight tabs open, although one was Google Reader.

Enabling Hyper-V Dynamic Memory in Windows Server 2008 R2

Last week saw the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 and with it one of the feature’s I’ve been waiting for – Hyper-V Dynamic Memory.  Until now if you were running a Hyper-V host with (for example) 16GB of RAM your guests could never exceed that amount, e.g. you could have 4 x 4GB, 2 x 4GB + 1 x 8GB, etc. but never more than 16GB in total. 

With the addition of Dynamic Memory you can finally over-commit RAM enabling you to make better use of available resources, as with CPU usage you still need to balance your workloads carefully and it only really makes sense to combine workloads that have high memory pressures at different times otherwise you could end up with poor performance or experience system failures when memory is unavailable. 

Please note that Dynamic Memory is configured on a host-by-host basis so nothing will change until you follow the process below, Microsoft have a really helpful TechNet page explaining how to configure Dynamic Memory but in a nutshell you should follow these steps…

Update both the Host and the Guest to Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 then use Hyper-V Manager to connect to the Guest then choose Action >> Insert Integration Services Setup Disk and reinstall the integration components. 

Shut down the Guest and in Hyper-V Manager right-click on the guest and pick Settings in the memory panel choose Dynamic then set the Startup RAM and Maximum RAM.  There’s also a configurable buffer percentage (Hyper-V reserves this extra amount but will give it up under pressure).  I’d leave it on the default 20% unless you’ve got a good reason not to. 

Set  a priority for this guest (e.g. you could set this higher for servers that could fail with too little memory). 

Restart the guest and check in Hyper-V Manager…

Here you can see that I’ve exceeded my Startup memory of 2GB but only have a current demand of 1795MB and since there’s no memory pressure on the host the status shows as OK.  If the host is unable to reserver the entire buffer amount (in my case 20%) the status will show as “Low” and if the host is unable to allocate any buffer it will show “Warning”.

Using 32-bit Task Scheduler + CScript on Windows 2008 R2

One of my primary data sources for Business Objects is a replicated pair of MySQL servers where I am asked by the DBAs to report against the slave however during maintenance replication can fall behind and reports that require up-to-date data will be incomplete.  Since we don’t live in an ideal world we can’t always plan our maintenance windows so I wrote a small VBScript routine that will detect the replication delay and if if it exceeds a threshold will change the ODBC source to point to the master. 

If you’ve caught my earlier article on 32-bit ODBC Drivers in Windows Server 2008 R2 you’ll know that there’s plenty of fun to be had since my ODBC drivers are 32-bit.  This means that I need to run the VBScript using the 32-bit version of CScript and the schedule it using the 32-bit Task Scheduler and once again the solution is to use the 32-bit tools provided in the SysWOW64 directory….

• C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cscript
• C:\Windows\SysWOW64\taskschd.msc

Beyond that you shouldn’t have too much trouble but if you do please leave a comment below with details and I’ll get back to you if I can help.

Quick Tip: Print Current Time in Batch File

I just had cause to monitor the progress of a batch file to see if there are any particular sticking points, to do this I wanted to simply print the current time along with a little text describing the process being run.  To do this I used the %time% variable as follows…

ECHO Batch Started at %time%

[commands, commands, commands]
ECHO Step 1 Completed at %time%

[commands, commands, commands]
ECHO Step 2 Completed at %time%

ECHO Batch Completed at %time%

Trends in Business Intelligence & 2010 Review

It’s the time of year when magazine editors can’t resist the urge to fill their glossy wares full of ‘thing of the year’ articles, the print equivalent of the mid-season “clip show” that has plagued many a TV series.  Well, if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for me so here’s my rather unstructured and unscientific take on Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing in the year that was – 2010…

Market Trends

To start, I’ve taken a series of snapshots from the excellent Google Trends showing global search volumes for each of the Big Four offerings to measure the level of interest.  It’s reasonably clear to see from the graph below that interest in OBIEE shows a small but steady growth whilst Reporting Services shows a marked decline and the other two offerings remains roughly static (maybe a small decline?), this surprised me given that with the release of 2008 R2 I think that Reporting Services is really getting to the point where it offers a legitimate choice in the BI marketplace.  Perhaps the issue that Microsoft have fragmented their BI offering to include a mixture of terms with Excel, PowerPivot, SharePoint, Analysis Services and Reporting Services all making up the BI stack and nobody really knows what to call it?

This year has also brought an increased emphasis on Mobile BI with the iPad and iPhone fast becoming common executive playthings, Business Objects making it’s Explorer and Xcelsius products available on Android in addition to the iPhone (Explorer only).  MicroStrategy took the mobile emphasis a step further (perhaps to help stick their head above the crowd) by announcing a strong focus on the mobile BI market and offering a free 25-seat licence for their Mobile Suite.  Despite a strong focus on marketing Mobile BI I’m still not convinced that any of the vendors have really hit the nail on the head with their solutions in that whilst many offer pretty visualisations and slick interfaces most seem to lack the kind of simplicity that helps to present information quickly and succinctly, even the frankly beautiful independent product RoamBI just feels a little overdone when it comes to actually using it.

Major Product Releases

It’s been quite a year in the BI & Database world with the launch of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 11g and IBM’s Cognos 10…

Microsoft’s launch is effectively a moderate evolution of SQL Server 2008 in most areas with little change to the database engine, it’s ETL tool Integration Services and it’s OLAP engine Analysis Services.  That said, R2 did bring some handy incremental features which will be especially welcomed by the budget-conscious with an increase in the DB size of the free Express Edition from 4GB to 10GB and the addition of Backup Compression to Standard Edition.  There were some interesting additions with PowerPivot, Master Data Services and StreamInsight thought I’m not sure that either will find a natural home for a good year or so as busy DBAs and developers struggle to find the time to try these new features out.

Despite the major jump in the version number Oracle’s release too seems to be mainly an evolution and as a great fan of the product I’m quite considerably relieved since Oracle could quite easily have been over-zealous in integrating their ‘own’ tools like Discoverer and Warehouse Builder with bought-in technologies like Siebel Analytics (which became the bedrock of OBIEE), Hyperion’s Essbase and Sunopsis (now Oracle Data Integrator).  One of the less exciting but fundamentally important additions is that the semantic layer employed in OBIEE will be directly and immediately compatible with future releases of other Oracle products in the CRM, ERP and Finance application spaces.

I’m not as familiar with Cognos as the other two tools having only experimented with Cognos 8 for a couple of weeks but from everything I’ve read it seems that Cognos 10 was certainly a major milestone in the product’s lifecycle.  Aside from the shiny sounding features such as Social Networking and iPad support (actually a very serviceable looking mobile BI app) there are some very cutting-edge additions to the product including a statistical engine drawn from SPSS and Active Reports which allows users to explore and analyse offline data including interactive email reports.

The Future?

No good review and roundup article ends without a nod to the future and whilst I’m not keen on making absolute predictions there are a few developments I’ll be keeping my eye on for 2011 and beyond.

The main event I’m anticipating is the release of Business Objects XI Release 4, I’ve not seen too many concrete details about functionality but over the last few years Business Objects have seen themselves distracted by the Crystal acquisition (including the shoe-horning of their core product into Crystal Enterprise) and in turn their acquisition by SAP.  As a regular and long-term user of Business Objects I’m really hoping that they’ll blow away some of the cobwebs and deliver some new functionality as well as rounding off some of the edges that in previous versions feel a little unfinished, it would be great too if they finally included the key functionality from the legacy desktop client (which many long-term customer still rely on) in their core Web Intelligence product (Freehand-SQL & Grouping – I’m looking at you).

Another area to watch in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing as well as the wider enterprise market is cloud computing, Informatica’s ETL in the Cloud offering has seen improvements and adoption throughout 2010 and it’s almost a given that Microsoft will be adding some degree of ETL capability to their SQL Azure platform. I’d expect an announcement if not a release along these lines in the coming year, though it’s possible that ETL comes behind providing cloud based analytics (something SSIS guru Jamie Thomson suggests).

In a broader sense I’m expecting to see a little more interest and pickup in the open source BI market, I’ve been saying this for a while (“this time next year, Rodders…“) and I might be wrong for some time to come but I always keep an eye on companies using an Open Source model such as the ETL vendor Talend who recently acquired Sopera (a middleware and SOA vendor), BI vendor Jaspersoft and all-rounder Pentaho.  With the global economy still suffering a hangover from the sub-prime mortgage crisis and banking collapse people have been looking for cheaper alternatives and open source companies provide a great way to achieve that, though some of Talend’s high-end offerings are almost comparable in price with other commercial products.

Another possible area to watch out for is the area of Personal Intelligence, essentially Business Intelligence for the individual.  A colleague and I spoke about this back in 2008 and we could both see that as people increasingly become data-aware they’ll start to look inwards and aim to measure things about themselves, one obvious starting point is fitness and we already have sites to log and chart your weight and calorie intake as well as the brilliant Nike+ product that measures your pace, time and distance during a run using either a sensor in your shoe or GPS (iPhone app), see the sidebar of this blog or below (one of my runs on the Nike+ site) for examples of the output.