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The Third Edition of Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial is Available on Amazon!

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The most widely known way (which is also often described as the best way) to learn Ruby on Rails is the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl. Its third edition, which covers Rails 4, has been available as both a digital book and video screencasts for several months on Hartl’s Rails Tutorial website, but was just released in print form yesterday. I received mine from Amazon today, and was pleased to find my review (of the Second Edition, though it certainly holds true for the Third even more so!) printed just before the title page.

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Quick Fixes on SSIS with Oracle Data Sources

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I’m currently in the process of building out an ODS (Operational Data Store) that will integrate data from multiple systems and make that data available for reporting using Spotfire and other BI tools.

Both the ODS DBMS and the first system that will be used as a source for the data in the ODS run on Oracle Database. I am using Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 64-bit to build an SSIS package to flow the data from the source into the ODS.

In debugging the SSIS package, I’ve run into a few things that make troubleshooting much easier. The first thing to know is that the Oracle Database (in this case) is a 32-bit system. The first thing that must be done after loading the SSIS package into Visual Studio is making sure that the Run64BitRuntime setting is set to False in the project’s Properties box. (This can be found in the PROJECT menu.)

Since the data sources for the ODS are Oracle, the SQL queries used to pull data must conform to Oracle syntax. To prevent things like SSIS automatically adding semicolons to the queries (and preventing me from adding them myself), I set the BypassPrepare property to True. This should allow the query to run the same way in SSIS as it does in SQL Developer. (If this is set to False, SSIS will parse the query rather than passing it to Oracle.) This setting made writing queries much easier, as I could test them in SQL Developer and paste them into SSIS without having to rewrite them to conform to SSIS.

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Completing the Core iOS 7 Code School Course Using XCode 6.x

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One of the classes that must be completed on the iOS Path for Code School is Core iOS 7. When this course was published, version 7 was the most recent iOS release and the IDE used was XCode 5 from Apple.

This course may be done using XCode 6.x, and most of the exercises will run on the iOS 8/8.1 Simulator that comes with this version of XCode. However, due to some changes between iOS 7 and iOS 8, some of the exercises will successfully compile and run, but the associated tests will fail.

The solution to this problem is that the iOS 7.1 Simulator must be added to XCode 6.x. This is done through XCode Preferences on the Downloads tab. If you are using a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, make sure that it is plugged in before attempting to download anything through the XCode Preferences interface. If you are running on battery, the download never starts and no error message or warning is given.

Also, before selecting Test in your application, make sure that the active scheme is a device running iOS 7.1. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus options only run on iOS 8, so choosing “iPhone 5s (7.1)” should work fine.