Alternative to Crystal Report?

A couple of days back, I faced a problem deploying my asp.net web application. The application uses Crystal Reports, and there is no support for Crystal Report at the hosting (Our hosting company does not provide Crystal reports anyway).

After finding around for some free reporting tools I found LogiReport (support?) and then I gave up. And finally thought to use Reports provided by .net (RDLC), after ignoring it for a long time. Who wants to buy Crystal Report redistributable license?

If you have been working with Crystal Reports, you will find it difficult to us! But it worths it.

So my answer to "Alternative to Crysal Reports" is "Reports provided by .net"

I am Back!

P.S.: Title says it all.

New Year Resolution

Something which has more worth than "php5 running IIS"

Beginning with no end in mind is a road to nowhere so mission statements are like a tree with a deep roots …once planted at new years …would be ready to give the fruit by the time it ends……and from the past year experiences I have learnt that there are those hard moments in which there is a conflict between doing the right thing and doing the easier thing so my this year's resolution would be prioritizing my work according to the most important things that matter to me and then setting my targets to achieve them whether it be learning php during the regular university chores….setting out my plans for my final year projects or the love and care my family and my friends expect from me time to time ….I will be willing to get out of my COMFORT ZONE and jumping into the CONTROL ZONE of my life car as someone once said "its not the mountain we conquer but ourselves so this year I plan to conquer it all.

Credits : SGM

Long time no see...

My last post was on Eid day, i had been thinking to post something but did not find anything special to post here.

Exams finished 2 weeks back, and right after that my Internship at PSO started.

Did 9 projects at RAC, the 9th one i did last night and it was pretty simple one.

Started playing with php. I will post "Installing php5 running IIS" right after this post. I started php with Zend enginer, which is not doubt the best php IDE, but I decided to do it on my own, and uninstalled Zend Engine. Tried few times following steps given on various websites. Only the last one worked perfectly.

Eid Mubarak !

Eid Mubarak !

Friday, November 04 2005 - 7:41AM ;) few minutes in EID Prayers and i am blogging for nothing :D

Using Windows Fax Service

I didnt get chance before to try Windows Fax Service, today i got to use it, actually my fax wasnt working and Haroon bhai was waiting for the fax. So i asked him to hold a minute. I installed "Windows Fax Service" from Windows XP CD (its an additional component and doesnt get installed automatically).

I had been trying to send the scanned document from a wrong way. I always ended up on sending only the cover page.

And finally, i found the correct solution to that. All you need to do is, whatever your document / image is right click on the object and select Print. In the Printing Options, select FAX, instead of a printer :) and you are done. Write the Name and Telephone number of receiver, [optional] attach Cover page, SEND !!!

One thing i didnt mention, you definitely need a working telephone line connected to your modem ;-)

So now, i can send / receive fax through my Computer.

Yahya Panday

Yahya Panday

copyright (C) 2005

12 October 2005

1 Down ! 10 more to go. Todays paper, MPBS, went fine. Nothing special, it was average.

One thing i finshed writing today, is the user manual for Van Management System i developed. And i am really happy with that.

Will start LCS by tomorrow, LCS is quite tough, but the good part is that there is 4 days gap before LCS paper :D

The Big Boss

It is when we start thinking that we are invincible ----
that He shakes us up to remind us who's the boss.

credits : http://lifemeansdrama.blogspot.com/

PakHero (CNG) AutoRikshaw

yeh rikshaw hai toofani
Pak Hero Pakistani
____ sab ki jani
yeh hai 4 stroke
na machaey ziyada shor
na koi dhuan na koi dhool
na yeh piyay petrol
yeh hai CNG se chalta
na hi lagay ga koi jhatka
...

great naa ???

misunderstood...

it's all good if i m not understood, but its bloody annoying if i'm misundestood... :'(

Credits: http://lifemeansdrama.blogspot.com/

to my dear NED with Love ...

Being almost for 3 years in NED , i found out that

"NED aik aisa bargad ka darakht hai, jiske neechay saray gadhay bandhay hain"

The problem (i think) with NED is, that we have good courses - but not good teachers to teach those good courses.

I want to tell you my Dear NED, that your yearly examination system Sucks. Not to mention, this is one of the things which i hate about you.

One of the thing that happened this year and i liked it most, other than last day festiv :P was Silent Polling ( dont know whether it will have some effect or not)

- your lover

Transporter 1 & 2

Rule 1 : Never change the deal
Rule 2 : No Names
Rule 3 : Never look in the package

Rule 4 : Rules are made to be broken

Yahya.Age.Years.Count++

19th September 2005 - Happy Birthday to Me

Kashif wished me first through hi5 !! :) though it was too early (18th Sep). Then i got an e-card from Sabrina ( after few minutes of Kashif's msg )

Faisal and Fahad were with me at 19th September 0000 hours :)

Yahya.Age.Years.Count++ ; //Optimistic
Yahya.Life.Years.Count--; //Pessimistic

Welcome Back

After a long time, i am blogging - reason ? nothing special, my internet + busy schedule + lack of interest + (add whatever you like, i wont mind)

• Moonsoon rains are back in Karachi. Heavy rains in past few days, but today was a Sunny day, really burning hot
• Awesome Annual Dinner - 3rd Sep
• Great Last Day festiv - 10th Sep
• Shani Strawberry Drink's Birthday and Treat - 10th Sep
• 4th anniversary of GroundZero - 11th Sep
• Started working on Software Engineering Project ( will post details sometime later)
• My internet has been down :(
• I think there are still many things left which need to be in this list....WHATEVER !!!

INETA Pakistan

After long time, INETA Pakistan [dot] org is up. And you can find me there at profiles section.

The website is cool, but some features are missing. Signup is not working, it is actually the beta version.

Adnan Bhai did great work. I liked the outlook of website very much.

Muhammad Saqib Ilyas (MVP) ;)

a must see blog

Storage and Querying of E-Commerce Data

Here is the summary (written by me) of this paper.

Summary of Paper

Storage and Querying of E-Commerce Data

Muhammad Yahya

Computer and Information System Engineering Department

NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi.

muhammad.yahya@gmail.com

1 Abstract

New generation of e-commerce applications require data schemas that are constantly evolving and sparsely populated. The conventional horizontal row representation fails to meet these requirements. The Horizontal Data can be transformed in to Vertical representation, in which each row has Object Identifier and attribute name-value pair.

2 Introduction

In Large e-commerce systems, attributes in some table keeps on increasing with new items. And so the performance was becoming bottle-neck as most of the columns had no values. This problem was also giving rise to change the schema again and again to accommodate new commodities.

2.1 Issues

The following problems were faced in horizontal representation

· Large number of columns: As many columns required as the attributes of objects, and this count keeps on increasing with new objects

· Sparsity: Nulls in most of the fields

· Schema Evolution: Frequent alteration would be required in the design

· Performance: Only few columns are required from wide records

2.2 Vertical Representation

As a solution of above problem, Vertical representation was proposed to be used in large e-commerce systems. And the table will have the following columns in it.

Oid

Key

Val

Oid: Object Identifier

Key: Attribute Name

Val: Attribute Name

The vertical table contains tuples for only those attributes that are present in an object. Writing SQL queries against this vertical representation was difficult and error-prone. Also most of the tools written are for Horizontal representation.

The basic idea behind this research was to develop a logical layer over Vertical data, i.e. horizontal data would be visible to the user, and there would be no need to re-design previously built systems. Few alternatives to this design are given in paper.

Horizontal Oid A1 A2 A3 1 a b - 2 - c d 3 - - a 4 b - d - corresponds to null value

Vertical Oid Key Val 1 A1 a 1 A2 b 2 A2 c 2 A3 d 3 A3 a 4 A1 b 4 A3 d

The approach is to define a horizontal view; over a vertical table. The user poses regular SQL queries over these views, which are translated into queries that run against the underlying vertical table. Transformations are given in the form of Relational Algebra. Some standard algebraic operations are needed to be re-written. All the transformations and Re-writings are done without assumptions, so they all are valid and proved.

2.3 Alternative Representations

Following were the alternatives present

· Split a horizontal table into as many 2-ary tables as the number of columns i.e. as many tables as the number of columns

· Create one table for each new category

· Create one table for common attributes and per category separate tables for non-common attributes.

· Represent you data in 3-ary table i.e. the Vertical Representation

3 Transformations

The view to user is Horizontal, and all the queries made by user are against that view, behind this logical view is the vertical representation. This vertical view is transparent to the user.

A Transformation is made to these queries that allow fetching of data from vertical table. In this manner the user and the old running systems are saved from re-writing the queries.

4 Implementation

A non-intrusive enablement layer is built on top of the database engine.

The enablement layer parses the SQL query, validates it, and transforms it to another SQL query that runs against the underlying vertical table.

Three types of implementations are proposed that work with Vertical representation.

· Vertical SQL

· Vertical UDF

· Schema SQL

5 Performance Experiments

Very Large numbers of experiments were performed on different alternatives, and results for projection, selection, join and aggregation operations are given in [1], and the results are shown with the help of graphs.

The performance results showed that VerticalSQL uniformly outperforms HorizontalSQL but slightly under performs Binary. The vertical representation uniformly outperforms horizontal representation for sparse data

The performance of the vertical representation is sensitive to the choice made for clustering the data. Clustering on Key has much higher performance than clustering on Oid.

The Vertical representation can outperform binary representations for other operations as well, if table function could provide some extra functionality.

6 Conclusion

Emerging applications such as e-commerce and portals are creating new threats and opportunities for database technology.

The new generation of applications requires data schemas that are rapidly evolving and sparsely populated.

The flexible design of vertical representation makes it easily manageable as compared to sparsely populated horizontal table. Design of an enablement layer hides the complexity of the queries over the vertical table and gives a horizontal view of the vertical representation to the user (application).

The performance of Vertical System also depends on the type of clustering of data.

Comparison of the three representations

	Horizontal	Vertical	Binary
Manageability	+	+	-
Flexibility	-	+	-
Performance	-	+	+

The following enhancements[1] can improve the performance of Vertical representation.

· Partial indices

· Enhanced table functions

· First class treatment of table functions

· Native support for v2h and h2v operations

7 References

[1] Storage and Querying of E-Commerce Data

Rakesh Agrawal Amit Somani Yirong Xu

IBM Almaden Research Center

650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/software/quest/Publications/papers/vldb01_ecom.pdf

---

[1] See [1] for description of these capabilities

Rock the Party !!

My beloved (and the only) sister Dr. Tamkeen going to get married with Dr. Numeri this sunday, in-sha Allah on 7th August 2005.

We (Bhai log) did alot of fun today, we sang songs and danced. This was just a practice for parties of 3rd and 5th ! :) [...I have seen a million face, and i have rocked them all !!]

To my dear sis , "we will miss you alot :'( "

the end of me

i wanted to say all this from quite long time....didnt want to say all this to someone personally.
i wanted to SAY !!!

I expected very little from very few people in my life. Now i have been given reason to expect even less from fewer people.

When Friends dont take your side and call themselves "diplomatic".....silently label them "traitor" instead.

When someone tell me that they love me, that they would never hurt me...I assumed not betraying me, lying to me, avoiding me etc. comes with the package.
Apparantley...it doesnt.

last and least

Sometimes i feel that one tragic day, my own thoughts will be the end of
me