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SchemaEditor improvements when dropping columns on Oracle

July 8, 2013   I’ve been recently working with a couple of customers who were dropping database columns from their schema on Oracle, and the drops were taking a long time to complete. In one instance, the customer estimated it would take 50 hours to drop a bunch of columns from their contact table. In another, a customer observed that dropping two columns from table_site_part took over two hours. Dropping 3 columns from table_contact took over 1 hour. These long execution times can disrupt normal operations – especially those environments with limited maintenance windows. Dovetail’s schema editing tool (Schema Editor) and Amdocs schema editing tools (ddcomp, SchemaManager) all do the same basic operations when it comes to dropping columns. Basically they all do this: ALTER TABLE table_name DROP COLUMN column_name; There’s a better way. Set Unused On large tables the process of physically…

Optimized Views

May 31, 2013 Within your Clarify / Dovetail schema, there’s a concept of an Optimized View. This is really an implicit feature of a view, but if you’re aware of it, and understand how they work, you can use it to your advantage.   An optimized view happens when you have a join to a table, but the only field that you’re including from the joined in table is the objid field, and the relation type from the main table to the joined table is a OTOP or MTO.   When these conditions are met, then the schema editing tools (ddcomp, SchemaManager, Dovetail SchemaEditor) will optimize the underlying view, meaning that it will not actually create a join to the table, but instead will simply use the column from the main table as part of the select clause.   That’s a bunch of info…

A Rapportive raplet for bringing Dovetail info into Gmail

May 29, 2013 A few months ago, I demonstrated using a custom raplet with Rapportive and Gmail to bring Clarify / Dovetail information into the context of your email.   As I mentioned, I initially hacked together some code as a proof-of-concept.   I’ve cleaned up the code a bit, and have made it available on Github: https://github.com/gsherman/raplet   The code is freely available, although it does use the Dovetail SDK, so you do need an SDK license key.   I totally dig this integration. It’s not uncommon that I exchange emails directly with customers, and having additional case information right there in context is pretty sweet.     Hope you find this useful.   Rock on.

How To Make Dovetail Agent and Admin Compatible With Internet Explorer 9 and 10

May 3, 2013   New versions of Dovetail Agent and Admin are in the works to allow compatibility with Internet Explorer versions 9 and 10.   Although there are going to be more reasons to upgrade to the latest version, some Dovetail Agent and Admin users may consider making the older versions they currently use IE9 or IE10 compatible while remaining existing compatibility with IE8 intact. Essentially, the same code should run on all three versions of Internet Explorer, no version detection should be required to modify functionality or appearance.   This can be achieved by a set of modifications to the source code and web site configuration.   This is a list of things that need to change:   Enforce compatibility mode Remove DOCTYPE statements and certain meta tags Add meta tags where needed Change the handling of 'required' property Discontinue the use of 'required'…

Deletes (Drops) in SchemaEditor

While discussing Dovetail SchemaEditor recently, a question came up around deletes (drops), i.e. How do you delete a column using SchemaEditor, as it doesn’t seem like SchemaScript supports deletes.   First, a little background.   SchemaEditor works with Data Dictionary files and with SchemaScript files.   A Data Dictionary file is a complete reference of the database schema. This is similar to a Clarify complete schema files.   SchemaScript is a simple, imperative way of specifying the changes to be made to the database schema.   A complete schema file (Data Dictionary), because of its size and complexity, can quickly become unwieldy and cumbersome to work with.   Schema Script simplifies the process of schema changes by allowing a user to specify only the changes to be made, as opposed to the complete schema.   However, only adds and updates can be performed using SchemaScript. Deletes are not currently supported.  …

Clarify Infrastructure Upgrade Services for MS SQL and Oracle Customers

February 14, 2013 Are you running a Clarify version prior to Clarify 12.5? Is your Clarify database running on a version earlier than MS SQL Server 2005 or Oracle 10?   With the news that MS SQL 2000 will no longer be supported by Microsoft in March, we’ve been receiving a lot of inquiries this month about our Clarify Infrastructure Upgrade Services. While we haven't marketed it as a service in the past, our team has extensive experience upgrading RDBMS Infrastructures for Clarify clients.   It’s very common for organizations that have implemented Clarify over the last 20 years to lag behind on the Clarify version they are running and for good reason. Clarify upgrades are costly, time-consuming and the new features are often not the best fit for their business model. If you’re running an older version of Clarify and need to upgrade…

awesome CSS Specificity cheat sheet

February 4, 2013 Over the weekend I attended the HTML5.TX conference here in Austin, along with an awesome CSS workshop byEstelle Weyl. It was a great conference and workshop. Austin is such a great community for technology.   Every time I think I got a handle on CSS, I learn some new stuff that blows my mind, both practical tips and fun stuff.   For a bit of CSS fun, check out her Gangham style done with CSS sprite animations.   One of the helpful things that Estelle shared was her CSS SpeciFISHity cheat sheet, which helps explain CSS specificity.  Download the PDF.     Hopefully you’ll find this as useful as I did.

Job Opportunities – here and there

January 28, 2013 A couple of job opportunities to share.   Front End Web Developer here at Dovetail   We’re looking for an experienced front end web developer to join our team. HTML/CSS and heavy JavaScript.   What you bring to the table:   You write JavaScript from scratch and have written your own JavaScript library because it’s fun If you aren’t working with HTML5 and CSS3 you feel like you are working on legacy applications You love client-side MVC frameworks such as Backbone.js, Knockout.js, Underscore.js, etc. (we do!) When you go out to eat at a restaurant, you wonder why the menu isn’t presented in JSON You understand cross browser compatibility and testing in your development process You thrive in a fast paced work environment and get a rush from releasing a new build You contribute to the open source/technical community and…

You got Dovetail in my Gmail!

December 13, 2012 If you use Gmail, you may have heard of Rapportive. It’s a plugin that brings in social information into the context of an email.   For example, when I’m looking at email from from my buddy Kevin, the sidebar fills in with contextual information, like so:     Now I can quickly see his avatar, recent tweets, see where he’s located, job titles, get to his Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, etc.   This is nice when emailing with people I know. It’s even nicer when I get emails from people I don’t know (or don’t know well), as it brings in much more contextual information. You can also hover over any email address and have the relevant info show up. Really powerful stuff.   If you use Gmail, I highly recommend Rapportive. Raplets   What’s even better is that they’ve opened up…

Authentication across applications, including Dovetail Mobile / AgentLite

December 11, 2012 We’ve worked with a couple of customers recently who use some other application for authentication. Basically, Single Sign-On. One was using CA SiteMinder, and another had a home grown application. In both instances, we were able to easily allow Dovetail Mobile / AgentLite to work with their existing authentication mechanisms, allowing single sign-on capabilities. This means that if a user has already authenticated in their environment, then they were automatically logged into Dovetail, without having to enter their username and password again. Pretty nice user experience.   In this post, I’ll share some of the details about how this all works.   For this scenario, our customer had a home grown “App Store”. Users logged into this App Store, which authenticates them, and then shows them a list of applications that they are authorized to use. One of them is Dovetail Mobile.  …