I was wondering what would be the correct deployment workflow for customization under AX 2009. For AX 2012 I found a nice whitepaper Deploying Customizations Across Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Environments .
But this doesn't help much because with AX 2009 there is no concept of model store deployment (unless I'm mistaken).
Are XPOs the way to go with AX 2009? If someone could point me in the right direction this would be great.
XPOs can and do work, but there are some issues using them. From most of what I've researched, when it comes to SOX compliance the best way to migrate code changes is by moving the binary server files - the .aod, .ahd, etc files - that are stored in the application directory of the server. Since these files are the compiled versions of the application code, it is easier to prove that the modifications that were created in a development environment are the same modifications deployed to the production environment. XPOs are plain text and can be manipulated in a text editor, making it more difficult to prove this, though not impossible.
I actually did a writeup of what we have done to manage our code deployments if you are interested. It covers XPO vs Layer file migrations, and ultimately describes our process for automated builds and deployments. Since we put it in place our auditors have been very happy when it comes to auditing our system.
I hope this question isn't too obtuse; however, I couldn't find anything specific. I'm a web-developer and I have an MSDN Subscription that gives me access to any SQL server edition I want. As a developer, I would like to know what I should choose to install on a dev machine based on this criteria (which other developers may relate to):
I need access to all the tools for SQL and T-SQL programming (I think all editions come with this?)
I want it to be efficient--I don't want it to take up too much ram\cpu processing time. My queries will not be very heavy so I'd rather trade off longer queries than to have the server taking up valuable resources.
I am programming for an enterprise sql version hosted somwhere else, but I don't need more than 1 Gigs of space, 1 CPU core support,
I never really worked with reporting tools, but would as a developer (Aka, non-DBA) would I ever need them on a dev machine?
Best integration with VS2013
I know that the SQL Server Developer edition is basically Enterprise, but without the liscence to use it for non-dev purposes. Based on the above criteria is there any sense for me to install it? Or should I choose SQL Express with Advanced Services? Perhaps Web?
Thanks for all your help,
All editions come with all the tools (unless you get into the BI side of things, then I think Express won't come with all of those tools).
In general, the edition won't make your local development environment any different in terms of resource usage. There are a few things that Enterprise / Developer have (like online index rebuild, certain optimizations etc.) that can make some operations more efficient, but these are highly unlikely to impact your day-to-day work or really change the number of resources SQL Server uses (these are very easy to cap through configuration anyway, e.g. if you don't want SQL Server to use more than x GB of memory, you can set that).
If you don't need more than 1 GB / 1 CPU in the ultimate deployment, you should probably develop on Express. This will prevent you from using Enterprise features inadvertently (which can happen if you use Developer). The down-side is that if you later do need features that aren't in Express (say you have another project where you will be deploying to Enterprise), you'll need to add an instance (with or without removing the old one). Given that you have access to MSDN, maybe the best solution is to install two instances - one Express, and one Developer, and then you can target the edition you want by using the appropriate instance locally.
I think that Express with Advanced Services come with these things, but I'm not an SSRS guy, so I'm not sure.
No single aspect of integration with Visual Studio should be edition-dependent.
Also, Web is not an edition that is suitable for your workstation - try to find a license somewhere. This edition is exclusively for web hosts and resellers who offer SQL Server as part of their hosted offerings.
I have a Visual Studio 2010 Professional license so Ultimate is a long way off and all I want it for is load testing for a few weeks or so.
Is there a cheaper way of getting just the load testing part of VS2010 ultimate or an alternate load testing tool with decent metrics of how the load testing is doing? I'd like to know pages/sec, page speed, database connections and less important: CPU, memory, errors.
I have always found that the Radview Webload tool gives a good alternative but you will probably need to set up performance counters for CPU etc... and tie the data together yourself. Have you considered using an evaluation version of Ultimate to check if that would meet you needs? ;)
We developed a free Fiddler extension for load testing called StresStimulus. It replays sessions recorded in Fiddler under varied load levels and measures performance metrics. It is not nearly as complete as testing tools in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, but satisfies some of your requirements. You can get requests per/s and response times. The interface with PerfMon is not ready yet, so Windows performance counters should be tied manually.
Maybe you can set up Instrumentation on your app?
I have read this article from High Scalability about Stack Overflow and other large websites. Many large high traffic .NET sites such as plentyoffish.com, MySpace and Stack Overflow all use .NET technologies and use SQL Server for their database. In the article it says a source in Stack Overflow said:
As you add more and more database
servers the SQL Server license costs
can be outrageous. So by starting
scale up and gradually going scale out
with non-open source software you can
be in a world of financial hurt.
Why don't these sites use MySQL instead of SQL Server?
Adding into what AJ said... Remember Facebook also pays C programmers to hack up MySQL code and also PHP code to get things to really work "well" for the amount of traffic they get.
Facebook already made statements in the past and this year about having wished they made a better choice.
As a matter of fact, for coding they're now compiling their PHP down to C++ code using HipHopPHP and about 90% of their servers are running the C++ binaries instead of the PHP scripts.
Their MySQL database might save them a dime or two, but the costs to maintain it, scale it, etc. is extremely intense.
A product like Oracle however would really allow you to scale seamlessly compared to MySQL.
I have a site right now that uses a lot of bandwidth on my database, large number of queries, and the truth is, scaling is a pain in the neck with MySQL and their Clustering product isn't that great and requires a license. Oracle right now has the best "grid" database setup but the costs are insane there...
Also, I code C# as well.. Let me tell you it's MUCH easier to integrate enterprise level sites with SQL Server compared to MySQL.
I would guess that it's probably because it's really really easy to get started making a site with ASP.NET hooked into SQL Server. And for the sites you mentioned, speed to market was probably more important than getting the architecture "right" (not to say that SQL Server is or isn't the right choice - just that speed to market is the priority). Remember that a developer's job is to release software.
So long as one avoids using too many database specific features, it will be relatively straightforward to switch to a different database with moderate effort. But why bother unless your site becomes super-popular?
Edit: And if you become super-popular, you may even want to venture into the land of NoSQL.
While this doesn't directly answer your questions I really have to refute your comment about outrageous licensing costs. ALL ENTERPRISE grade commercial software comes with a high price tag because it has the VALUE for it. If it doesn't have that value, it wouldn't be a successful product.
SQL Server's pricing is extremely competitive and has a very substantially lower TCO than Oracle. Another reason a decision to use MS SQL Server would be made is that most shops that develop on the Microsoft stack are Windows Server shops. MS SQL Server is built specifically for Windows Server so it can integrate as flawless as possible with the operating system. Many other products are not primarily and solely developed for Windows Server so this results in feature differences and environmental bugs.
These enviromental issues can be further compounded with the fact that large scale shops will employ primarily system administrators that have long backgrounds in that specific stack so in a .NET shop most system administrators are all most fluent in Windows Server, having to support multiple operating systems becomes a large cost especially in the risk management side when you're a large scale business.
To repeat what others have said. I work in a corporation and money, so to speak, does not matter that much when it comes to these matters. Decisions are made on the basis of "What kind of support can we get from the vendor", "How many skilled people are in the market", "What are the vendors reputation", etc.
I think there are two distinct groups for adopters of MySQL or SQL Server.
Large websites that are privately owned that does not have additional financial resources. These websites will typically run MySQL. Naturally.
Large websites built by corporations. These sites will run whatever is the accepted database technology within the corporation. Money does not dictate this decision, but more of who can support this software and development.
No Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. For real. A lot of stuff is done there instead of raw SQL that happens in Open Source software world.
Things are much easier to deal with when the technology stack is homogeneous.
If you want MySQL support for Linq-to-SQL, good luck. It's still very much immature. With SQL Server, it's a matter of drag and drop. Literally.
You can also conduct Database queries from within Visual Studio for SQL Server. I've never tried it for any other database, but I'm not convinced you'd be able to.
It's great to say 'Oh, MySQL is so much cheaper than SQL Server.' Yes, it is. But I'm not sure the integration costs are worth it; not to mention having to rely on Yet Another Vendor to provide support if something goes wrong.
You use what you know...
(IMHO) The Microsoft tool stack is brilliant. It works well, we learn with it and grow with it, as the technology grows. It becomes easier to use as you become accustomed to it (its quirks and idiosyncrasies).
MySQL is also a brilliant tool. It works, and works well. We could all have religious wars as to what tool is best, but remember it is just a tool to get a job done.
Now let's factor in the cost of the software - Plenty of Fish 2 years ago made $7M, do you really think they care how much their database/server software costs? SO is on BizSpark $0 cost for 3 years (that's got to hurt).
For the sceptics, FaceBook runs MySQL on/for 30K servers and MySQL Enterprise Unlimited Licences cost $40k so this is not necessarily cheap either.
I don't know about you, but for me when I make a ton of cash, I really won't care how much it "costs", because I am making more with it, than without it!
I would say because of the following:
Microsoft is very well integrated while used with Microsoft products ;
Though using SQL Server, a free Express edition is available and can be used to host sites ;
With the .NET Framework coming through, Microsoft gained a lot of terrain over its competitors in schools an so, thus making SQL Server a well known database engine ;
Microsoft products works better with other Microsoft products ;
There are two ways of licensing SQL Server, per client (CAL), and per server processors or something like that. For sites hosts, perhaps is there an advantage of using SQL Server this way ;
Other database engines such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, etc. all have their syntaxic differences, thus making SQL Server TSQL somehow a wise choice as for the number of persons being able to interact with SQL Server more easily ;
There might be some other politic related reasons for using SQL Server over other less costly solutions.
I would like to mention that some are using SQL Server, yes, but they use SQL Server Express Edition. Though they are whether aware or not that publishing or commercialising a solution with SQL Server Express Edition makes, according to the EULA of Microsoft for this product, your solution a free solution as well, as the EULA states that you need to provide your solution to your customer, and your customer is free to share your commercial solution with whom who wishes because it is sat on SQL Server Express. Although this is stated, some continue to use SQL Server Express without informing their customers about this information. Most of common clients won't know about this and they will respect their contract with the solution's supplier.
Furthermore, as I think I have above-written, some don't care about the price, but they have political reasons for using commercial products such as SQL Server and other software products. There are some places where the money isn't the most important factor, but service after sale, etc. They want specialized engineers or support teams directly, not necessarily what offers MySQL-like communities.
Hope this enlights a bit.
It's just culture. People group themselves. It's natural. People who prefer open-source, will naturally choose LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) for the same kind of project that people who prefer corporate support choose Microsoft IIS, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft .NET for. There is a good deal of human psychology involved in this, make no mistake about it. There is nothing prohibiting one from using IIS with PHP and MySQL, or Apache with Microsoft SQL Server, but the way it goes is as described above.
Shorter put, large sites do use either, but yes, not often the two you mentioned together.
I believe George has it on mark: "homogeneous".
Most of Microsoft's technologies are built to work together. There are direct hooks between .NET and SQL Server to provide additional functionality like cache management that just don't exist between .NET and MySQL.
IIRC, MySQL doesn't have built in cache management which is why Ehcache and memcached exist.
re Joshua's comment: "A product like Oracle however would really allow you to scale seamlessly compared to MySQL." Years ago, Sabre picked MySQL over Oracle for some high scale projects based on cost and feature set. AFAIK, it's still picked over Oracle unless you can prove through cost/benefit analysis why Oracle is the better choice for a project.
I think it really boils down to functionality, user knowledge base and interoperability.
Sometimes SQL Server is the better match, sometimes it's MySQL, sometimes it's Oracle.
Less compatibility issues when you single source.
MS SQL Server is the "default" database for ASP.NET apps (see LINQ to SQL, ADO.NET, ApplicationServices etc)
Immature .NET tools for other databases. For example, you don't have to worry about a feature or functionality not being supported if you stick with MS SQL Server, other databases might not have full support (e.g. DbLInq, etc.).
MS SQL Server is also free to get started, (SQL Server Express) and once you're ready to go public, it's hard to change the Data layer.
I'm in the process of writing an ASP.NET MVC2 site with MySQL as the backend (mainly due to licensing costs) I've implemented DbLinq, but it also means writing a custom Membership/Role provider, and general tweaking of the data layer. It's definitely doable, but it's not as simple as sticking with MS SQL Server. I'm also hoping to move the site over to Mono 2.7 (once it's released) running on a Linux server to sidestep the server licensing issues as well.
The real reason is people usually go with MS SQL Server as .NET comes from the same brand. For instance PHP people always prefer MySQL over other databases. It's all mind set and people don't want to take any risk.
Any large enterprise site isn't going to care about licensing costs that much. What they want is fast, reliable data access and access to company technical support. They also want something that can easily be partioned to scale and that is designed for huge databases. They also want the easy availablity of performance tuning specialists, datawarehousing and Business Intelligence specialists, database developers, and database administrators. SQL Server and Oracle both meet these criteria. I really don't see MySQL as having as many people qualified to design and monitor large systems. I am Not sure how it stacks up on the partitioning and scalibility though.
Well, for one thing there are other, better, free databases (e.g., PostgreSQL). For another, the Microsoft ecosystem is designed to suck you in, getting you to spend more and more with the guys from Redmond.
I am tasked with improving the performance of a particular page of the website that has an extremely high response time as reported by google analytics.
Doing a few google searches reveals a product that came with VS2003 called ACT (Application Center Test) that did load testing. This doesn't seem to be distributed any longer
I'd like to be able to get a baseline test of this page before I try to optimize it, so I can see what my changes are doing.
Profiling applications such as dotTrace from Jetbrains may play into it and I have already isolated some operations that are taking a while within the page using trace.
What are the best practices and tools surrounding performance and load testing? I'm mainly looking to be able to see results not how to accomplish them.
Here is an article showing how to profile using VSTS profiler.
If broken it is, fix it you should
Also apart from all the tools why not try enabling the "Health Monitoring" feature of asp.net.
It provides some good information for analysis. It emits out essential information related to process, memory, diskusage, counters etc. HM with VSTS loadtesting gives you a good platform for analysis.
Check out the below link..
How to configure HealthMonitoring?
Also, for reference to some checklist have a look at the following rules/tips from yahoo....
High performance website rules/tips
HttpWatch is also a good tool to for identifying specific performance issues.
HttpWatch - Link
Also have a look at some of the tips here..
10 ASP.NET Performance and Scalability secret
Take a look at the ANTS Profiler from Red Gate. I use a whole slew of the Red Gate products and am very satisfied!
There are a lot of different paths you can go down. Assuming a MS environment you can leverage some of the team system tools such as MS Team Tester to record tests and perform load testing against your site. These can be set to run as part of an automated build process.
A list of tools is located at: http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html#LOAD
Now, you might start off simple. In this case install two firefox plugins: Firebug and YSlow for Firebug. These will give stats and point out issues such as page size, the number of requests made to get the page, etc. They will also make recommendations on some things to fix.
Further, you can use unit tests to execute a lot of the code behind to see what functions are hurting you.
You can do all sorts of testing if u have full MS dev system with TFS and Visual Studio Team Edition. Based on what I see here
I recently had a nice .Net bug which was running rampant. This tool sorta helped, but in your case, I could see it working nicely..
http://www.jetbrains.com/profiler/
Most of the time we've used WCAT from Microsoft. If your searches where bring up ACT then this is probably the tool you want to grab if you are looking for requests per second and the such. Mike Volodarsky has a good point pointing the way on how to grab this.
We use it quite a bit internally when it comes to testing our network infrastructure or new web application and it is incredibly flexible once you get going with it. And it seems every demo Microsoft has done for us with new web tech they seem to be busting out WCAT to show off the improvements.
It's command line driven so it's kinda old school, but if you want power and customization it can't be beat. Especially for free.
Now, we use DotTrace also on our own applications when trying to track down performance issues, and the RedGate tools are also nice. I'd definitely recommend a combination of the two of them. They both give you some pretty solid numbers to track down which part of your app is the slowdown and I can't imagine life without DotTrace.
Visual Studio Test Edition (2008 or 2010) comes with a very good load testing component for ASP.NET apps.
It allows you to get statistics for all the perfmon stats for a server (from basics like CPU and disk waits to garbage collection and SQL locks)
Create a load test for the page and run it, storing the stats in a database for the base line. Subsequent runs can be compared.