ISRO unveils mapping application 'Bhuvan'

ISRO will unveil its version of Google Earth, the iconic mapping service for the common man to zoom into any part of the world on their personal computer using satellite images.

However, the new mapping service -- Bhuvan, which means earth in Sanskrit -- will allow users to have a closer look at any part of the subcontinent barring sensitive locations such as military and nuclear installations.

ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair will unveil the Bhuvan webportal at a function here tomorrow in the presence of Minister of State in the PMO Prithviraj Chavan.

Bhuvan will use images taken by ISRO's seven remote sensing satellites at least a year ago. These eyes in the sky can capture images of objects as small as a car on the road to build three-dimensional map of the world.

http://bhuvan2.nrsc.gov.in

Google Chrome Operating System

Google Chrome has always been a little more than a browser: it's optimized for running web applications, each tab runs as a separate process, the interface is minimalistic and there's even a task manager. "We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build," said Google in September 2008.

Google's blog announces a natural extension of the Chrome project: an operating system for netbooks. "Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. (...) Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel."

As people use more and more web applications, the operating system becomes less important and it makes no sense to pay for it. The desktop mail client could be replaced by Gmail, the calendaring application could be replaced by Google Calendar, the office suite has lightweight alternatives: Google Docs and Zoho, it makes more sense to use an online feed reader like Google Reader, your scientific calculator is less powerful than Wolfram Alpha and you'll rarely need a video player when you have YouTube, Hulu and other video sites.

This idea is not new and there are already operating systems optimized for the browser. For example, Good OS announced last year Cloud, an operating system that "integrates a web browser with a compressed Linux operating system kernel for immediate access to Internet, integration of browser and rich client applications, and full control of the computer from inside the browser". If Google manages to create a great user interface, the new operating system could be very successful.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

Gmail in 5 Indian Languages Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam

It's hard for me to imagine going without email for a day. It's such an easy and convenient way to communicate with my friends and family. However, there was one limitation that bothered me: my family members and friends who prefer to communicate in Hindi did not have an easy way to type and send email in their language of choice. I am extremely happy to announce the launch of a new feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type email in Indian languages.

When you compose a new mail in Gmail, you should now see an icon with an Indian character, as the screenshot below shows. This feature is enabled by default for Gmail users in India. If you do not see this function enabled by default, you will need to go the "Settings" page and enable this option in the "Language" section.

When you click the Indian languages icon, you can type words the way they sound in English and Gmail will automatically convert the word to its Indian local language equivalent. For example, if a Hindi speaker types "namaste" we will transliterate this to "नमस्ते." Similarly, "vanakkam" in Tamil will become "வணக்கம்." We currently support five Indian languages -- Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam -- and you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon.

They built this new feature using Google's transliteration technology, which is also available on Google India Labs, Orkut, Blogger and iGoogle. I hope you find this feature useful to communicate with those of your friends and family who prefer to write in their native language, and it will be available soon to businesses and schools using Google Apps. Now back to replying to all those Hindi emails I got from my family and friends today!

How to Minimize SQL Server Blocking

By default, blocking locks do not time out. The waiting connection waits until the lock is released, and the block is over. If you like, you can set a lock time-out so that a connection does not wait indefinitely for the blocking lock to be released. This is accomplished using the LOCK_TIMEOUT setting.

When the LOCK_TIMEOUT setting is used to set a maximum amount of time that a connection can wait for a blocking lock to go away, the connection with the lock that is causing the blocking problem is not affected, but the connection waiting for the block is halted and an error message is received. When this happens, error message 1222, "Lock request time-out period exceeded," is sent to the application.

This means that the application needs to include the appropriate error-handling code to deal with this situation and take the appropriate action, which includes rolling back the transaction. If the application does not know how to deal with this error message, and the transaction is not rolled back, it is possible that the application can continue as if the transaction was not automatically cancelled. Because of this, you should not use the LOCK-TIMEOUT setting unless your application(s) that will be affected by it know what to do when they receive this message from SQL Server.

The syntax for the SET LOCK_TIMEOUT is:

SET LOCK_TIMEOUT timeout_period

Where timeout_period is the number of milliseconds that a connection waits for a blocking lock to go away before an error is returned from SQL Server to the application. A value of -1 is the default, which means to wait indefinitely. A value of 0 tells SQL Server not to wait at all, and to return the error immediately.

This command is based on a per connection basis, and stays with the connection until the connection is broken, or a new SET LOCK_TIMEOUT command is issued. [7.0, 2000]

A view runs on our development server in 30 seconds, but it takes over 10 minutes on the production server. Why?

ProblemThere are two SQL Server servers, both with virtually the same hardware. One is a development server, where we create and test Transact-SQL code, and the other is production SQL Server. Here's my problem. When a particular view runs on the development server, it takes about 30 seconds. But when the identical view on the production server, the view takes over 10 minutes to run. The databases on both servers are almost identical. Periodically copy the production database to the development server so that we are working with the same data and the same indexes. What could be causing the difference in time for this particular view to run?

Solution
Assuming that the servers and the databases are virtually the same, and the statistics have been updated on both of them, here's what is suggestted you to check. First, do an Execution Plan of the view that is causing the problem on the development server. Find out if this particular view is using parallelism as part of the execution plan. I am guessing that this is the case.

Now, do an Execution Plan of the view on the production server. Find out if this particular view is using parallelism as part of the execution plan. My guess is that it is not.

If I am write so far, then check the SQL Server Parallelism setting for each server. I bet that it is set to "Use All Available CPUs" on the development server, and set to use only one CPU on the production server. If I am right, then set the production server to "Use All Available CPUs," and the performance difference of the same view on both servers should be resolved, and performance should be virtually identical on both servers.

By default, SQL Server is set to use "Use All Available CPUs" on a server. If this is not your current setting, then this has been changed by someone.

Essentially, this setting tells SQL Server whether to attempt to execute queries in parallel using multiple processors. If the default "Use All Available CPUs" option is selected, then SQL Server will attempt to run queries in parallel, using multiple CPUs. This can sometimes result in dramatic performance differences in a query's performance. But if this option is turned off, then SQL Server will only use one CPU to execute a query, which can be much slower.

Keep in mind that if SQL Server is set to use parallelism, that it may not always use it. If the server is very busy, it may not be used, but when the server is less busy, it may be used. This means that sometimes the view will be fast, and other times, slow (depending if parallelism is being used or not).

On the other hand, sometimes parallelism can cause queries to take longer to execute than if parallelism is not used. In these cases, you can use a Query Hint to turn off parallelism for the odd-acting query.

SQL Server Transact-SQL DML

Generally, it is better to perform multiple UPDATEs on records in one fell swoop (using one query), instead of running the UPDATE statement multiple times (using multiple queries).

For example, you could accomplish this two different ways:

USE Northwind
UPDATE Products
SET UnitPrice = UnitPrice * 1.06
WHERE UnitPrice > 5

GO

USE Northwind
UPDATE Products
SET UnitPrice = ROUND(UnitPrice, 2)
WHERE UnitPrice > 5

GO

Or

USE Northwind
UPDATE Products
SET UnitPrice = ROUND(UnitPrice * 1.06, 2)
WHERE UnitPrice > 5

GO

As is obvious from this example, the first option requires two queries to accomplish the same task as the second query. Running one query instead of two or more usually produces the best performance. [6.5, 7.0, 2000, 2005]