Massoud Mazar

SQL Server Reporting services provides a decent reporting framework, and in 2008 release of SQL server, it is even better than previous versions. SSRS allows you to use many different types of data sources in your reports, but when I decided to add some reports with MySql sources, it was lacking data source type for it. With some research on the net, I realized it should be possible to add MySql data sources to both Visual Studio report designer and to the reporting services itself. More...

nagios, nagios, Reporting Services, SSRS, Reporting Services, SSRS ssrs, ssrs, reporting services. mysql, reporting services. mysql

if you already have nagios setup to monitor your servers, it's a good idea to use it to monitor your hadoop data nodes as well. you can use nrpe to call your dfs monitoring plugin. I found this blog post about setting up nrpe on CentOS extremely useful. The only trick to get it to work was to also setup rpmforge repositories for yum, so it finds the nrpe packages (nagios-nrpe and nagios-plugins-nrpe). 

The next step was to add monitoring script for hadoop dfs, which I found here. Since I was using hadoop 0.20.2, I had to make some changes to the script to correctly parse values out of the dfs report:More...

hadoop, nagios hadoop, nagios

In a previous post I showed how to setup Hadoop/Hive to use Derby in server mode as the metastore. Many believe MySQL is a better choice for such purpose, so here I'm going to show how we can configure our cluster which we created previously to use a MySQL server as the metastore for Hive.

First we need to install MySQL. In this scenario, I'm going to install MySQL on our Master node, which is named centos1. More...

hadoop, hive, mysql hadoop, hive, mysql

If you are reading this post chances are you are trying to setup a hadoop/hive cluster. I hope these instructions save you some time with your installation.

Install CentOS:

I assume you are starting from scratch and want to setup a small cluster with minimum OS components (as far as I could minimize it). To start, download the OS setup media, and boot each machine with it. Go through the More...

hadoop hadoop centos hive

After realizing that asp.net menu is generating a huge HTML and causes the application pages to be large and slow, I decided to use CSS friendly control adapters. It reduced the page size by 50 KB, but I had some challenges to get it to show the way I wanted it. Here I want to share some of the things I learned along the way:More...

Chrome, CSS Friendly css friendly, control adapter, asp.net menu

SQL Server Reporting Services ReportViewer control has a toolbar that is not displayed correctly in Google Chrome browser. You will see something like this:

 

 The correct display looks like this:

 

A workaround I'm using is to use JavaScript to find DIV and TABLE elements in the above toolbar and change their "display" style to "inline-block".

Following code can be added to the bottom of the page to accomplish this:More...

Chrome, ReportViewer chrome, reportviewer

TreeView server control in asp.net can use AJAX behind the scenes to populate child nodes when user clicks on the expand icon next to each node. If the loading process is fast, it works perfectly. But when child nodes are generated by a slow process (like a slow database query) then user experience is unacceptable. User would click on the expand and nothing would happen for a long time, leaving user wondering if the click really did anything.

In such scenarios, an animated icon that lets user know data is being loaded would help a lot. More...

TreeView treeview, populateondemand, animated, progress

This past week I tried to use Google GeoMap visualizations API to display some values on a map. The JavaScript part was easy, but I could not find good sample code for providing JSON data asynchronously from .net, so I thought I should build a sample here to save others some time. More...

Google API google api, geomap, visualization, json

I was experimenting different themes with my BlogEngine blog and noticed not all of them show the correct color coding of my source code examples. There is a simple fix for that which is to copy the section of style.css file related to "Syntax Highlighter" from a working theme to the style.css of the theme you like. That should do the trick.

blogging, BlogEngine blogengine, codeformatterextension

Suppose you want to start your SysTray application at installation time and remove it when your application is uninstalled. Here is one way to do this:

Add an Installer Class to your project, and overwrite the Install and Uninstall methods. For Example, assuming your SysTray program is named "My SysTray": More...

SysTray, Installer installer, systray