I am very new to SAS, but found it's really a amazing tool.
Now i have a very basic and fundamental question/problem about the readiness & installation of SAS.
My boss is considering the possibility to have an environment for running PHP script directly to trigger SAS with the connection to mysql, so, i suppose we need SAS with at least "SAS Access interface for mysql" & "SAS/Intrnet", am i right?
Besides contact SAS office for help, I want to get more understandings of it first.
(A) all SAS copy contains all of these modules, and even the current SID doesnt cover "mysql & intrnet", i still can activate them after attaining another SID which has these two modules? or
(B) some SAS copies contain these modules but some are not, so, even if i had a SID which cover these two modules, it doesnt mean i can activate them for use if the installation copy do not have them actually.
It's a fundamental concept which makes me puzzle and curious, and i dont know how to explain to my boss yet....
Your kind help and information is much appreciated, thanks
Both are possible. If your deployment package includes those products, then you might have them installed, even if they are not available per your license (SID file). That depends on what was selected at installation, and when the original deployment package was created. You (or whomever manages installations) could look at the deployment package in SAS Deployment Manager to find out.
To answer the question I think you're asking, you could certainly have one deployment package that includes the modules, and use the appropriate SID file to only activate the desired products on the desired machine(s) while still using the same deployment package. You could also install with a SID file that does not contain them and then run a new SID that does contain them later, so long as your deployment package contains them.
Related
TL;DR
How do I encapsulate my Apache/PHP/MySQL/Wordpress installation in an environment or sandbox?
In my absence the designers-that-be have decreed that we use Wordpress for our newest project, as opposed to the Django-type applications I am familiar with. Another developer has already started making a custom theme, but now he's gone and I'm supposed to take over his work but I have no experience whatsoever with LAMP or Wordpress.
I thought it would be a good start to encapsulate the project into a proper standalone repository that I can copy and share between machines and people, put on github, etc, and most importantly: it needs to run in a virtual-env instance (or equivalent), so it doesn't mess up anybody's other projects, we can run multiple versions, etc.
Can anybody help me with that? At the moment it looks like the required files are spread out over my whole computer, I keep having to touch stuff in my root-directory, I need sudo simply to start and stop the *##+ing server, it's complete lunacy.
Thank you!
Take a look at virtPHP, phpenv and php-build for creating isolated environments. As for typing sudo every time you need to start or stop the server, this is the right way of doing things.
I have a data-centered application with SQL Server. The environments in which it´ll be deployed are not under our control and there´s no DBA in there (they are all small businesses) so we need the process of distribution of each application/database update to be as automatic as possible.
Besides of the normal changes between versions of an application (kind of unpredictable sometimes), we already know that we´ll need to distribute some new seed data with each version. Sometimes this seed data will be related to other data in our system. For instance: maybe we´ll need to insert 2 new rows of some master data during the v2-v3 update process, and some other 5 rows during the v5-v6 update process.
EF
We have checked Entity Framework Db Migrations (available for existing databases with no Code-First since 4.3.1 release), which represents the traditional sequential scripts in a more automatic and controlled way (like Fluent Migrations).
SSDT
On the other hand, with a different philosophy, we have checked SSDT and its dacpacs, snapshots and pre- and post-deployment scripts.
The questions are:
Which of these technologies / philosophies is more appropriate for the case described?
Any other technology / philosophy that could be used?
Any other advice?
Thanks in advance.
That's an interesting question. Here at Red Gate we're hoping to tackle this issue later this year, as we have many customers asking about how we might provide a simple deployment package. We do have SQL Packager, which essentially wraps a SQL script into an exe.
I would say that dacpacs are designed to cover the use case you describe. However, as far as I understand they work be generating a deployment script dynamically when applied to the target. The drawback is that you won't have the warm fuzzy feeling that you might get when deploying a pre-tested SQL script.
I've not tried updating data with dacpacs before, so I'd be interested to know how well this works. As far as I recall, it truncates the target tables and repopulates them.
I have no experience with EF migrations so I'd be curious to read any answers on this topic.
We´ll probably adopt an hybrid solution. We´d like not to renounce to the idea deployment packagers, but in the other hand, due to our applications´s nature (small businesses as final users, no DBA, no obligation to upgrade so multiple "alive" database versions coexisting), we can´t either renounce to the full control of the migration process, including schema and data. In our case, pre and post-deployment scripts may not be enough (or at least not comfortable enough ) for a full migration like EF Migrations are. Changes like addind/removing seed data, changing a "one to many" to a "many to many" relationship or even radical database schema changes (and, consequently , data migrations to this schema from any previous released schema) may be part of our diary work when our first version is released.
So we´ll probably use EF migations, with its "Up" and "Down" system for each version release. In principle, each "Up" will invoke a dacpac with the last database snapshot (and each Down, its previous), each one with its own deployment parameters for this specific migration. EF migrations will handle the versioning line, an maybe also some complex parts of data migration.
We feel more secure in this hybrid way. We missed automatization and schema changes detection in Entity Framework Migrations as much as we missed versioning line control in Dacpacs way.
I would love to hear ideas on how to best move code from development server to production server.
A list of gotcha's, don't do this list would be helpful.
Any tools to help automate the steps of.
Make backups of existing code, given these list of files
Record the Deployment of these files from dev to production
Allow easier rollback if deployment or app fails in any way...
I have never worked at a company that had a deployment process, other than a very manual, ftp files from dev to production.
What have you done in your companies, departments, etc?
Thank you...
Yes, I am a coldfusion programmer, but files are files, and this should be language agnostic question.
OK, I'll bite. There's the technology aspect of this problem, which other answers have already covered. But the real issue is a process problem. Where the real focus should be ensuring a meaningful software development life cycle (SDLC) - planning, development, validation, and deployment. I'll cover each in turn. What you want is a repeatable activity at each phase.
Planning
Articulating and recording what's to be delivered. Often tickets or user stories are enough. Sometimes you do more, like a written requirements document, that a customer signs off on, that's translated into various artifacts such as written use cases - ultimately what you want though is something recorded in an electronic system where you can associate changes to code with it. Which leads me to...
Development
Remember that electronic system? Good. Now when you make changes to code (you're committing to source control right?) you associate those change with something in this electronic system - typically tickets. I like Trac, but have also heard good things about Atlassian's suite. This gives you traceability. So you can assert what's been done and how. Then you can use this system and source control to create a build - all the bits needed for whatever's changed - and tag that build in source control - that's your list of what's changed. Even better, have a build contain everything, so that it's standalone entity that can easily be deployed on it's own. The build is then delivered for...
Validation
Perhaps the most important step that many shops ignore - at their own peril. Defects found in production are exponentially more expensive to fix then when they're discovered earlier in the process. And validation is often the only step where this occurs in many shops - so make sure yours does it.
This should not be done by the programmer! That's like the fox watching the hen house. And whoever is doing is should be following some sort of plan. We use Test Link. This means each build is validated the same way, so you can identify regression bugs. And, this build should be deployed in the same way as you would into production.
If all goes well (we usually need a minimum of 3 builds) the build is validated. And this goes to...
Deployment
This should be a non-event, because you're taking a validated build following the same steps as you did in testing. Could be first it hits a staging server, where there's an automated copying process, but the point being is that is shouldn't be an issue at this point, because you validated with the same process.
Conclusion
In terms of knowing what's where, what you really want is a logical way to group changes together. This is where the idea of a build comes in. It's really the unit that should segue between steps in the SDLC. If you already have that, then the ability to understand the state of a given system becomes trivial.
Check out Ant or Maven - these are build and deployment tools used in the Java world which can help you copy / ftp files, backup and even check out code from SVN.
You can automate your deployment steps using these tools, for example Ant will allow you declare a set of tasks as part of your deployment. So you could, for example:
Check out a revision using SVNAnt or similar to a directory
Copy (and perhaps zip first) these files to a backup directory
FTP all the files to your web server(s)
Create a report to email to the team illustrating the deployment
Really you can do almost anything you wish to put time into using Ant. Maven is a little more strucutred (and newer) and you can see a discussion of the differences here.
Hope that helps!
In a nutshell...
You should start with some source control solution - probably Subversion or Git. Once that's in place you can create a script that generates a clean build of your source code and deploys it to your production server(s).
You could do this with a simple batch script or use something like Ant for more control. Here is a simple example of a batch file using Subversion:
svn copy svn://path/to/your/project/trunk -r HEAD svn://path/to/your/project/tags/%version%
svn checkout svn://path/to/your/project/trunk -r HEAD //path/to/target/directory
Ant makes it easy to do things like automatically run unit tests and sync directories. For example:
<sync todir="//path/to/target/directory" includeEmptyDirs="true" overwrite="true">
<fileset dir="${basedir}">
<exclude name="**/*.svn"/>
<exclude name="**/test/"/>
</fileset>
</sync>
This is really just a starting point. A next step might be a continuous integration solution like Hudson. I would also recommend reading "Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Applications".
One ColdFusion specific gotcha is to make sure you clear the Application scope when required (to update any singleton components). A common approach here is to use a URL parameter that causes onRequestStart() to call onApplicationStart(). You may also have to clear the trusted cache.
We use a system called AnthillPro: http://www.anthillpro.com
It's commercial software, but it allows us to completely automate our deployment process across multiple servers and operating systems (We currently use it for both ColdFusion and Java, but it can be used for most languages. It has a ton of 3rd party integrations:
http://www.anthillpro.com/html/products/anthillpro/tool-integrations.html
I am aware that we can make templates of domains in weblogic very easily using config_builder script. Is there a similar thing in websphere?
I know nothing about WebLogic, but fix pack 9 for WebSphere added something you may find useful. The wsadmin command AdminTask.extractConfigProperties with GenerateTemplates and PortablePropertiesFile options set to true will generate a portable, editable file transferable to another cell. AdminTask.applyConfigProperties is used to read your edited output and apply the properties to a new cell, server, etc. I haven't tried this yet outside of a controlled sandbox environment; so, I'm not sure what pitfalls may await you. But if you have a ton of servers to build, it may be worth your time to do some experimentation.
Here's the IBM doc on the topic.
As far as i know i don't think there is such a capability.
You can use the default product shipped profiles to start with and create the servers and configure them the way you want.
These servers can then be used as a template to build other servers.
I am not sure if this helps you but i thought i would point this out.
Manglu
Let me first say I am aware of this faq for Mach-II, which discusses using application specific mappings as a third option when:
locating the framework in the server root is not possible and
creating a server wide mapping to the Mach-II framework directory is impossible
Using application specific mappings would also work for other ColdFusion frameworks with similar requirements (ColdSpring). Here is my issue however: my (I should say "their") production servers are all running ColdFusion MX7, and application specific mappings were introduced in ColdFusion 8. I most likely will be unable to do option 1 or 2 because they involve creating server wide changes that could conflict with other applications (I don't have a final word on this but I am preparing for that to be the case).
That said, is there anybody out there who was in similar bind and has done an option 4, in any ColdFusion version, or with any similar framework? The only option 4 I can think of is modifying the entire framework to change this hardcoded path, and even if that worked it would be time consuming and risky. I'm fairly sure that if there was a simple modification or other simple solution it would already be included in the framework (maybe it's included in version 1.8 of Mach-II and I don't know about it yet).
Any thoughts on solving this problem or even unorthodox setups with libraries that have specific path requirements would be appreciated. Any thoughts from Team Mach-II would especially appreciated...we're on the same team here Matt! ;-)
EDIT
Apparently, the ColdBox framework includes a refactor.xml ANT task which includes a target that refactors the ColdBox code to use a different absolute path as a base along with several other useful refactoring targets. So problem solved for ColdBox users.
Looking at the build.xml for Mach-II (1.6 and 1.8) I don't see any target in there that would allow me to refactor the code. I thought about creating a feature request ticket for such a task for Mach-II but frankly I don't think creating such an ANT task is a big priority for the MachII team since the need really only relates to either
a) users of ColdFusion versions below 8
b) someone who wants to use multiple Mach-II versions in the same application, a use I doubt they want to support
The ColdSpring code I have doesn't come with any ANT tasks at all, although I do have unit tests, and I bet if I poked around the SVN I'd find a few build scripts.
Using Ant tasks to refactor and retest the code, or the simpler (and sort of cop out) solution of creating a separate ColdFusion instance for the application are the best answers I've been able to come up with. I don't need this application to exist in the shared scope of other applications, so my first solution is going to be to try and get a dedicated CF instance for this application.
I'm also going to look at the ColdBox refactor.xml ANT task however and see if I can modify it to work generically to recognize and refactor CFC references with modified absolute paths. If I complete this task I'll be sure to post the code somewhere and edit create an answer to link to it. If anybody else wants to take a crack at that or help me out with it feel free.
Until then I'll leave this question open and see if someone comes up with a better solution.
Fusebox is not so strict, I think.
In XML mode (maybe I call this not 100% correcly, just mean using the Application.cfm) it's just proper include in index.cfm, something like:
<cfinclude template="fusebox5/fusebox5.cfm" />
In non-XML mode it will need proper extending in the root Application.cfc:
<cfcomponent extends="path.to.fusebox5.Application" output="false">
All you need is to know the path.
Perhaps you could create a symbolic link and let the operating system resolve the issue for you?
I've been playing with FW/1 lately, and while it may look like you need to add a mapping and extend org.corfield.framework, you can actually move the framework.cfc file into your web root and just extend="framework". It's dead simple, and gets you straight into a great framework with no mess and very little overhead.
It should be as simple as dropping the 'MachII' folder at the root of your domain (i.e. example.com/MachII). No mappings are required to use Mach-II if you just deploy at the root of the domain of your website.
Also:
Please file a ticket for the ANT task you mentioned in your question. Team Mach-II would love to have this issue logged:
Enter a new ticket on the Mach-II Trac
If you want to tackle an ANT task for us, we can get stuff like this incorporated into the builds faster than waiting to for a Team member to work on the ticket. Code submissions from the community are welcome and appreciated.
We don't keep an eye on Stack Overflow very often so we invite you to join our official community group at called "Mach-II for ColdFusion" at Google Groups. The Google Group is the best place to ask questions or comments like this if you want feedback from the Team.