ESP – Product Engineering – Platform and Software Products

SQL Server Query and Transact SQL Performance Tuning

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:05:29 +0000

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.

OCS, Lync 2010 and Lync Online

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:07:11 +0000

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).

JEE: Server Performance and Configuration

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 06:56:46 +0000

Guest Post by

Anupindi Ravi Shankar, Technology Architect, Manufacturing, Infosys Limited

An often heard complaint from development managers is

"The response time of our web application is very high to pass the UAT.What corrective steps can we take to improve the performance of our application?"

Such statements are a clear indication of the fact that either the performance aspect was not considered or even if considered during requirements, architecture or design stages, was not executed fully. In most of the cases, performance aspect is being side-tracked for functional features and is considered only in the eleventh hour when the performance improvements prove very expensive and often patch works or quick workarounds are done to make the application perform better

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

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 10:14:52 +0000

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.

Adoption of IPv6

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:55:39 +0000

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.

Modernize to invest in Innovation

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 05:46:59 +0000

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.

The need to build complex systems - smarter

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 11:24:39 +0000

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)

Will C++0x stand the test of Unicode?

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 16:41:10 +0000

C++0x is going to be the next ISO C++ standard which will replace the existing C++ standard C++03. It was earlier scheduled to be released in 2009, but most likely will get released in 2011. We will probably see it rechristened to C++11 once released. This new standard will have several additions and improvements to the core language and will extend the C++ standard library. The last publicly available working draft of the new specification was submitted on 28th Feb, 2011 and is available for public access here. For the C++ developers all over the world working on Internationalization of software; the most awaited improvement to the C++ standard is going to be native Unicode support. Will C++0x meet all the Unicode requirements or will developers still have to depend on third party libraries like ICU, Rosette, Boost etc for their i18n development?

Akamai's presence in Cloud and Mobile Computing Infrastructure

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:41:43 +0000

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.

Security is Paramount

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:35:47 +0000

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.

Native Mobile Apps or Mobile Web Solution?

Thu, 19 May 2011 10:57:33 +0000

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.

Offline web applications with HTML5

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 05:14:50 +0000

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.

The cloud in mobility use cases

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:51:18 +0000

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.

Rising Awareness of Cloud Computing

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 12:18:14 +0000

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.

Internationalization considerations for Mobile applications

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:45:48 +0000

Mobile devices of today are no longer restricted to making or receiving phone calls or text messages. The capabilities of modern mobile devices or smart phones have exceedingly surpassed those of commercial cell phones that were launched way back in the 70's. A typical mobile device today is a mini computer in itself. Such devices have the capability to exchange emails, play songs, videos, multimedia, weather forecasting, GPS and a lot more. The developments in the mobile world seem to reflect the evolution that happened in the desktop computing world in the days gone by. As the operating system for mobile devices evolves with each passing day, developers around the world are creating more and more varied mobile applications catering to different user groups. For example, there are mobile applications today for social networking, banking, retailing, games etc. In order to expand the user base for these applications, it is essential that the applications should be internationalized and localized so that it may be possible for users around the globe to use them.