Infosys delivers concept-to-market software engineering services across the engineering value chain. Our blog will discuss the latest trends in software product engineering, outsourcing, technologies, and address business challenges.

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January 17, 2012

SQL Server Query and Transact SQL Performance Tuning

In Applications where SQL Server is used as a back-end for data storage and manipulation purposes, there are various reasons for SQL Queries or Transact SQL Statements or Code running slow when the Application is executed in a Production Server Environment. Some of the reasons for slow running queries and updates are:

  • Low network speed or slow network communication.
  • Inadequate memory in the server computer or not enough memory available for SQL Server.
  • Improper indexing in database.
  • Lack of usage of database statistics.
  • Lack of proper database partitioning.

To facilitate development of applications with reliable and faster performance, there are some basic SQL Server Tools and Techniques to enhance the Query and Transact SQL Performance.

Continue reading "SQL Server Query and Transact SQL Performance Tuning" »

Posted by Krishnaraj Valthajamana at 12:05 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 11, 2012

OCS, Lync 2010 and Lync Online

Unified Communication platform gives solution for an organization's communication and collaboration need. With the release of Lync Server 2010 Microsoft is taking collaboration to the next higher level;. ie. from LAN to over the cloud. Microsoft has added many capabilities with Lync when we compare it with the last release of Office Communication Server (OCS).

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Posted by Seena Latha Sasidharan at 6:07 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 7, 2011

Cloud Computing - Planning for the non-promise of High Availability

More and more businesses today are experimenting with moving their applications into the cloud - a key motivation being, to be able to leverage highly available and redundant cloud infrastructure at reduced IT costs. However, sporadic failures over this year in cloud services provided by the cloud computing Big-3 have indicated that companies have to factor-in downtime in their application deployment strategy, irrespective of the advertised promises of high availability. A failure in Amazon's EC2 cloud service, early this year, had resulted in many internet sites being down throughout the day as per a report here. Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service and Google's Gmail and Appservices too have had their share of downtimes this year.

 

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Posted by Suraj Nair at 10:14 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 29, 2011

Adoption of IPv6

In recent times, there seems to have been a renewed interest in IPv6 adoption - with the impending state of exhaustion of IPv4 closer than ever before. The internet explosition and the proliferation of internet enabled devices (ever-connected and online) have resulted in a much quicker-than-expected exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. Strangely, over the years, there have been various publicly advised debates around the accessibility and growth of the internet -but somewhere there, the urgency to think about a state where existing IP addresses would exhaust - seemed lacking. We are at that very point now where transitioning to IPv6 has seemingly become very important.  Apparently, the last blocks of IPv4 internet addresses will soon be assigned to regional internet registries.

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Posted by Suraj Nair at 11:55 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 30, 2011

Modernize to invest in Innovation

Interestingly, there are actually more lines of COBOL being handled in enterprise applications in the world than Java - even today. It surely is difficult to imagine, considering that the latest TIOBE Programming Index for August 2011, still indicates Java to be safely ensconced right on top of the programming language list. (The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages based on certain parameters and is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.). Regular maintenance/enhancement tweaks in billion lines of existing legacy COBOL code, actually turns out to be a lot of code being handled.

Continue reading "Modernize to invest in Innovation" »

Posted by Suraj Nair at 5:46 AM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

August 16, 2011

The need to build complex systems - smarter

Kristof Kloeckner (General Manager, IBM Software, and Rational) spoke at the IBM Software Innovate Conference at the Infosys campus last week - on the need to drive product/service innovation and ALM practices to be able to manage today's complex systems. Thought leaders in business, government and society are capturing the potential of smarter systems to achieve economic growth, sustainable development and societal progress. IBM's strategy as part of its Smarter Planet initiative is to enable many of the technology and process management capabilities - to help develop complex software systems that collaborate intelligently to solve the planet's pressing problems (water management, green revolution etc)

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Posted by Suraj Nair at 11:24 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

July 27, 2011

Akamai's presence in Cloud and Mobile Computing Infrastructure

Early this year, Tom Leighton, co-founder of Akamai Technologies - a company that provides a distributed computing platform for global internet content and delivery, delivered an insightful talk at the Bangalore campus. Though the talk was obviously focused on what Akamai Technologies had to offer in today's world of cloud and mobile computing, it was indeed interesting to understand some of the technical principles behind the development of their solutions.
Fundamentally, Akamai enables infrastructure optimization, application awareness, cloud security and global network acceleration.

 

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Posted by Suraj Nair at 12:41 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

July 5, 2011

Security is Paramount

Open any tech news forum on any given day and you are bound to come across a headline about Zero Day Attack on some product. Fact is that there are countless hackers around the world with malicious intentions just trying to break into software through sophisticated techniques using the holes present in the software itself. It's simple - there's boundless data lying in systems and passing through various networks, and hackers try to steal it. Their only job is to continuously think of new ways to exploit vulnerabilities present in systems because vulnerabilities always exist. Even the biggest players in the industry have fallen prey to hackers who have been able to get into their systems and steal data. Some of the recent high profile cyber attacks include the SEGA server attack, attack on Lockheed Martin's VPN Access System and the Sony Playstation network attack ,which unbelievably, happened twice. If reports are to be believed, attack on Sony Playstation network attack compromised credit card and other personal information of millions of users worldwide. This provides a sense of the looming threat that we are living with.

 

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Posted by Ruchin Goel at 11:35 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 19, 2011

Native Mobile Apps or Mobile Web Solution?

Mobile enabling their business is one of the latest trends most companies around the world are following. When a company decides to mobile enable their business, they want to target the maximum number of customers possible. Over the past few years any company engaged in B2C or B2B model have made their presence felt in the mobile world. Businesses ranging from banking, retailing, gaming, ticket booking to health care are all going mobile. Some companies are clear on their mobility roadmap and have a particular segment of users in mind e.g. they want to build mobile apps for people using the iPhone because the Apple App store is the largest app store currently and attracts a huge user base. Some customers might want to target the Android platform and others might want to target users irrespective of the type of mobile device they use. This leads to the million dollar question, do we build a native mobile application (for one or multiple platforms) or do we go for a mobile web solution? Both approaches have their own pros and cons. In the end, it is all about the user experience that a mobile solution provides to the customer.

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Posted by Aviraj Singh at 10:57 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

February 16, 2011

Offline web applications with HTML5

W

eb applications are preferred over desktop applications because they are available 24x7 and are accessible from anywhere in the network. A couple of years back, the term network implied wired-network but more recently, due to availability of high-speed wireless networks and handy mobile devices, the dependency over wired-network has diminished greatly. Via wireless connectivity, web applications are now accessible from literally anywhere. But there could be situations when internet connectivity may get lost. This loss of connectivity could be due to various reasons, like user is in transit or is switching between networks or is simply at a remote location where the wired/wireless network isn't available.

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Posted by Nikhil Chitnis at 5:14 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

February 10, 2011

The cloud in mobility use cases

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. launched the first iPad-only newspaper - The Daily - last week with the idea of targeting the growing segment of people around the world who are educated and sophisticated who would expect content to be delivered anywhere anytime, without having to be tethered to a physical newspaper or the television. Businesses today have realized the need to exploit mobile devices to target a wide and sophisticated market place. The industry is witnessing a scramble to join the bandwagon called the mobile device enablement (hardware, software, networking etc) and servicing industry. The need to be one-up in a new and highly competitive industry has spawned solutions that enable more and more complex use cases around mobile devices. Most use cases typically involve some sort of collaboration. With mobile devices being pervasive and in the hands of a growing knowledgeable user base, there is a need for the backend to support the potentially massive but varying scalability needs -   what better than cloud computing to do the trick.

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Posted by Suraj Nair at 5:51 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 23, 2010

Rising Awareness of Cloud Computing


It is quite gratifying that there has been a serious acceptance of the need of the IT industry to aggressively develop and adopt technologies which are far more energy efficient than those available currently. Over the last year, there has been increased awareness about cloud computing.  Businesses have realized that adopting this model would result in reduced hardware and infrastructure costs, reduced IT management costs, on demand scaling to meet business needs in a pay-per-use model and much more. In addition, from a social responsibility perspective, this would also mean reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from the elimination of the need of tones of hardware, server and data center needs.

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Posted by Suraj Nair at 12:18 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 24, 2010

Embracing the open source world

Eben Moglen, a pioneer of the Free Software Movement, visited the Infosys Bangalore campus on September 16th, 2010. In a rousing talk, he expressed his mind on the need for software to be free to balance power equally in a democratic and free society. Besides, he shared what he felt would be the right recipe that would enable Indian IT companies to break into the global top five list.

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Posted by Suraj Nair at 5:33 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 23, 2010

HTML5 - What's new?

T

he wide spread of the Internet has made WebApp (Web Application)  extremely popular and indispensable part of internet usage. As a result, WebApp developers have started seeking "desktop application like" capabilities for their WebApp. Browser vendors have also tried to bridge the gap between the web and desktop platforms by incorporating high performance script-engines and support for (vendor specific) GUI & storage related web APIs in their web-browsers. As a result, the web platform is fast catching up with the capabilities that native desktop applications have enjoyed for decades. Indeed over the last few years, the number of capabilities/features added to the web platform exceeds those added to the desktop platform. The web platform owes its current popularity to scripting engines and a few 3rd party sandbox plug-ins. Script engine optimizations resulted in faster script execution and sandbox plug-ins fulfilled the rich and interactive UE requirement. Today, WebApp developers have exploited Flash, Silverlight technologies to come-up with very innovative online applications like image editing (pixlr, imageeditor), click-less UI concept (dontclick.it) and even video blogging.

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Posted by Nikhil Chitnis at 4:39 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 31, 2010

Are you IPv6 ready?

Global supply of publicly routable IP (Internet Protocol) addresses is going down and according to an estimate most of the remaining IPv4 addresses are expected to be allocated by the end of 2011. IPv4 addresses are 32-bit and can only provide around 4 billion (2^32) addresses. Less than 10% of these addresses are left and with the growing number of users and devices (e.g. smart phones) connecting to internet, it will become increasingly difficult to get new IPv4 addresses. With most of the current day businesses depending on internet to conduct their daily transactions, it is imperative that for business continuity, they should migrate to IPv6. Some of the leading web content providers are already offering services on IPv6 (e.g. www.ipv6.google.com, www.ipv6.netflix.com). IPv6 addresses are 128-bit and can provide virtually unlimited number of addresses (2^128). IPv6 protocol is specified by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and is documented in RFC 2460.

  

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Posted by Manjunath Ballur at 6:44 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 30, 2010

Open Source Hardware

Despite initial sceptism, open source software has become a rage over the years. Beyond individuals, even companies today are no longer shying away from openly embracing open source software to meet their software development needs. Interestingly, more than a decade after Richard Stallman had written about the possibility of 'open-sourcing' hardware based on the same philosophy of open source software, that concept seems to be finally taking on.

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Posted by Suraj Nair at 10:21 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 2, 2010

Architecture - the Zachman way

The iCMG Architecture World 2010 Summit was held on the 27th and 28th of July, 2010 at the IISc Campus in Bangalore, India. That was a unique opportunity to hear the legendary John Zachman speak at the summit on his thoughts about enterprise architecture.  The topic for Zachman's keynote address on 27th July, 2010 was Managing Complexity and Change - in which he stressed on how the description of architecture was important towards creating systems which were large, complex and flexible to change in future years. The famous Zachman Framework serves as a reference schema towards architecting complex software systems for any domain - though it was primarily conceived keeping Enterprise Software Architecture in mind.

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Posted by Suraj Nair at 10:11 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 3, 2010

Defect Prevention in SDLC Phases

The purpose of Defect Prevention is to identify the cause of defects and prevent them from recurring. Defect Prevention as a concept is something that people all over surely identify with, no matter if it has to do with things in the industry or with life in general. Is it not a great blessing if basic problems are identified well upfront, to enable the change of course before things become serious? In the industry the world over, there is a conscious effort to have processes in place to identify defects early enough to enable better quality within expected and scheduled timelines. In software, this is no different. The problem is however to identify finer aspects of 'when' you should trigger a conscious defect detection and prevention effort, so as to achieve benefits in the task under progress.

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Posted by Suraj Nair at 12:15 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 30, 2010

MapReduce

MapReduce is a programming model invented by Google for processing web scale data (check Google’s original paper on MapReduce here). Web applications like Facebook, Google Search Engine, Flickr etc., produce and consume huge amount of data. For example Facebook generates around 2 Peta Bytes of data everyday (as per the article here) and processing such a huge amount of data requires computing power of 100s of CPUs and could take several hours to complete. MapReduce aims to simplify this by automatically parallelizing the processing of such a huge amount of data and hiding the details of parallelization, fault tolerance and load balancing from the user. MapReduce is mainly suited for processing data in batch mode and is not suited for interactive applications. For e.g. offline processing of web logs to generate information about users, advertisers, publishers or processing archived data stored on tapes and generating reports, charts etc.

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Posted by Manjunath Ballur at 10:36 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 18, 2010

True Integration with VSTS 2010

Microsoft (India) conducted the "VSTS 2010 Launch" session at the Infosys Bangalore campus this week to familiarize the software community with VSTS 2010 before the official launch (planned in April, 2010). The session included a keynote followed by an intensive hands-on demonstration of the various facilities that are on offer in the latest edition of Visual Studio Team System Suite. There were a number of features on demo, but what was of special importance was the support for the architect community in this release.

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Posted by Suraj Nair at 5:11 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

January 24, 2010

Google File System

The Google File System (GFS) is a scalable distributed file system designed and developed by Google for distributed data intensive applications. GFS was born out of the need to meet the rapidly growing data processing needs of Google. The design of the GFS shared many of the same goals (e.g. concurrency, scalability, availability and reliability) as previous distributed file systems, but differed from earlier file systems to meet the demands of application workloads and technological environment at Google. Almost a decade later, most of Google’s applications rely on GFS to store and process data. Although Google has not published the GFS code, the design of GFS is discussed in detail, in a paper (titled “The Google File System”) published by Google engineers. To explore more about the design of GFS, one needs to read the original paper present at http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html.

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Posted by Manjunath Ballur at 10:29 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 30, 2009

Google Public DNS

A month ago, Google announced the release of Google Public DNS (Domain Name System), which is a free DNS resolution service. DNS is used to translate human friendly computer names into IP addresses. When a user types the name of a website, the Domain Name Servers convert this name into an IP address, and this IP address is used by your machine to send requests. A DNS network contains a set of servers which maintain a cache of domain name to IP address mappings. Usually these Domain Name Servers are maintained by your Internet Service Providers (ISP). With Public DNS service, Google wants to provide an alternative to your ISP’s service. Public DNS leverages the existing infrastructure used by Google’s search engine, which uses crawlers to scan through millions of websites. The DNS information cached by these web crawlers is used by Public DNS. Already a company by name Open DNS offers a similar popular DNS resolution service.

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Posted by Manjunath Ballur at 1:37 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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