LearnQuest blog

Five Maven Tips and Tricks

Shekhar Gulati of Javalobby put together a helpful list of Maven tips that we thought might be helpful to our clients and readers. Here's an example:

1. Maven rf option
Most of us work in a multi-module environment and it happens very often that a build fails at some module. It's a big pain to rerun the entire the build. To save you from going through this pain, Maven has an option called rf (i.e. resume) from which you can resume your build from the module where it failed. So, if your build failed at myproject-commons you can run the build from this module by typing:

1.mvn -rf myproject-commons clean install

You can read the rest of the tips over at Javalobby, or for more resources to fine-tune your Java knowledge, LearnQuest has a full library of training courses in all different areas for all different knowledge levels. Please visit our website to find out what solution works best for you!

Exchange 2010 SP1's Top Ten Features

As you may or may not know, Microsoft recently released their brand spankin' new Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack, and InfoWorld has put together this convenient list of the top ten best features:

1. Public Folder permissions through the EMC
Public Folders may have been deprecated in Exchange 2007, but many companies still use them and plan to do so for as long as possible. Now, with SP1, you can see and configure permissions on those folders through the EMC (Exchange Management Console). This replaces the annoying method employed by the RTM version, freeing you from having to use the EMS (Exchange Management Shell) or having to work through Outlook to make permission changes.

2. Retention Policies and Tags go GUI
While Managed Folders (MRM 1.0) have been relegated to the EMS with SP1, Retention Policies (MRM 2.0) have been pulled out of the EMS and into the GUI to allow for easier MRM (Messaging Records Management). Moreover, you now have a variety of preconfigured Retention Policy Tags to get you started, as well as a couple of Retention Policies. Having this in the GUI will make it much easier for admins to make real use of MRM 2.0.

3. Deployment switch for roles and features
This is a nice option you can select when performing an Exchange installation, as it removes the need to manually install these roles and features through Server Manager or to run prerequisite commands in PowerShell. I tried it during my own deployment, and it didn't quite get me all the way through, as I had hoped. Some aspects of IIS weren't installed, forcing me to resort to PowerShell anyway. But I'm still putting this one on my list.

4. Federation with self-signed certificates
With SP1, a self-signed certificate will work for a federation trust with the Federation Gateway. Before SP1, demoing Federation (Organization Relationships and Sharing Policies) required getting not one third-party CA certificate but two to show how it worked between two domains. Now you can test this out using the self-signed cert.

5. RBAC (mostly) manageable through ECP
You can now create role groups through the ECP (Exchange Control Panel) and assign roles, role assignment policies, and so forth for RBAC (Role Based Access Control). You still need to create new roles through the EMS and custom write scopes in the EMS as well, but this is one step closer to a fully functional graphical RBAC.

Read 6 through 10 after the jump!

Five Questions You Will Probably Be Asked on an Oracle Database PL/SQL Job Interview

James Koopmann of Database Journalwas kind enough to share five questions that he has been asked when interviewing for DBA positions as well as PL/SQL developer positions:

When interviewing for a PL/SQL developer position, the interview quite possibly could turn into a quiz on writing SQL and extracting information from a set of tables. The following set of questions are actual questions presented to the author when interviewing for both DBA and PL/SQL developer positions.

1. Identify the primary key and foreign keys within the table structures.
2. Where might I put the total amount of an order (which table)? Why?
3. If I were writing an application what would have to be the order of population for this set of tables?
4. For the following SQL (A through F) identify which SQL is the best for displaying the customers that have placed an order.
5. If you had to put any indexes on these tables, where would you put them?

For the article in it's entirety, click here, or to brush up on your SQL skills, visit LearnQuest and browse through our extensive catalog of Databases Training and get the skills you need to land that killer job.

The Seven Skills Every IT Manager Will Need to Survive the '10's

Last week we brought you an article from InfoWorld listing the five IT skills you'll need in the future. This week, they give us the seven must-have skills an IT manager will need to survive the 2010's. From InfoWorld's Rusty Weston:

As companies emerge from the recession, IT managers need to rethink their careers, especially as businesses recast IT's role more as growing the business than running the operations. The old approaches to career growth won't work. Instead, IT managers -- and those who aspire to be managers -- should focus on seven key skills for the new era.

Although no single set of skills can bulletproof your career in this decade and beyond, the foremost of these seven is the ability to continuously learn and possess a broad range of valuable tech and leadership capabilities, according to IT experts interviewed by InfoWorld.com.

"Thesurvival skill for an IT manager is the ability to think about where you develop your career," contends Kathryn Ullrich, an executive IT recruiter and author of "Getting to the Top" (Silicon Valley Press, 2010). "How do you stay on the cutting edge of tech so you're continuing to develop your skill set? And career resilience? If you're developing into a manager, director, or VP, it is about adding leadership skills."

Although IT managers can't be proficient in everything, they are expected to have fluency in major business and technology issues. "Unless they want to be order-takers, [IT managers] should have a point of view on the business -- its strategy, its operations, and how it can be improved," says Hank Leingang, an IT strategy consultant and former CIO at Bechtel and Viacom.

Many IT managers focus solely on mastering new tech skills to increase their value to their employers -- a strategy that makes perfect sense, but only up to a point. Once you reach that point, you can damage your career by becoming viewed as only technically proficient and being perceived as unskilled in business planning and learning how to communicate and collaborate well with customers, coworkers, and service providers. But if you have a balance of these "hard" technology skills and "soft" business and people skills, you can go a long way toward insulating your career from recessionary woes.

Here are the seven essential survival skills for IT managers seeking to reinforce their position or springboard to greater responsibility.

Jump in for the complete list!

Top 10 Productivity Tips for Microsoft Access 2010

If you're either already working with the new Microsoft Access 2010 or are looking to dive in, the people over at Database Journal put together this helpful list of the top ten productivity tips:

1) Hide/Show the Ribbon

Unless you've adopted Access 2007, you'll find the ribbon to be a bit irritating. Menu options aren't where you left them in Access 2003. Moreover, the thing takes up so much space it infringes on your work area. You can "minimize" the ribbon quite simply by double-clicking on one of the tabs and Access remembers your selection for future sessions.

2) Get used to Right-Clicking

Maybe it's just me but the simplest things have become hard. The old menu options for going "into design mode" still exist, but if you've minimized the ribbon (see tip # 1), then it's going to take an extra click ... or two to get there. In Access 2003, one click could toggle you between Form View and Design View. Now, after showing the ribbon (first click), the default view is "Layout View" so you must click (second click) on the drop down arrow to see the Design View option (third click).

I suppose I'm just lazy but I've taken to using the Right-Click menu. You can right-click a form, report or query to expose the View menu. That makes it a consistent 2-click process. However, there's another discrete little toolbar in the lower right corner that exposes the available View Menu options. This is a "one-click" solution I can live with, once I get used to looking there for it.

As for opening things in the Access Navigation bar at the left, the only two ways I know of is to double click the object (which opens it) or to right-click and choose the type of view you wish. Like I said, get used to right-clicking.

 Check out numbers three through seven after the jump!

Dealing with a Storage Capacity Crisis

Running out of storage mid-project is all too common of a dilemmain today's world of enterprise data explosion. So what do you do? A quick fix might mean shooting yourself in the foot and creating an even bigger mess to deal with in the long-run. Luckily Matt Prigge of InfoWorld (not to be confused with the famous Philadelphia Weekly film critic) has some tips to deal with your crisis while keeping a cool head:

The trick to avoiding quick fixes is discipline. Management may clamor for a quick solution, but be steadfast, rearrange your work schedule, and dedicate yourself to fixing it the right way. That's the only way to avoid anguish in the long run.

The "right way" doesn't always need to take much longer than the "wrong way," either. Here are two real-life examples of capacity emergencies and an expedient ways to fix them that won't haunt you forever.