Top 10 Reasons to Buy Autodesk Maya 2009

1 Proven Solution
Autodesk® Maya® software has been the 3D tool of choice for companies producing the top film, games, and television content all over the world for the last decade. It has been extensively used on all but one of the 27 nominees and winners for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects since 1999, and by three-quarters of the top 20 selling games publishers world wide. Meanwhile, award-winning commercials facilities like The Mill and Psyop count Maya among their toolset, as do top broadcasters like the BBC, NHK, and Turner. From Hollywood to Helsinki, from Soho to Singapore, from New York to New Delhi, the world’s top production companies rely on Maya.
2 Features
At the cutting edge of innovative feature development for over ten years, Maya 2009 is packed with tried and tested features that speed your project from initial concept to finished renderings: from polygon and NURBS modeling, UV mapping and texturing, animation and rigging (including new Animation Layers in 2009), the full gamut of dynamic simulation tools—including rigid bodies, soft bodies, fluid dynamics, cloth, fur, hair, and new nParticles— to toon shading, tools for generating plants and other natural detail, and a choice of four built-in renderers including mental ray® renderer, all accessible through a powerful new Render Pass architecture.
3 Performance
Through a combination of multi-threading, algorithmic tuning, sophisticated memory management, and tools for segmenting scenes, Maya 2009 is engineered to elegantly handle today’s increasingly complex data sets without slowing down the creative process.
4 Productivity
Increased competition and tighter deadlines, combined with higher audience expectations for quality, mean that every job requires artists to produce more creative output in less time than ever before. Maya 2009 maximizes productivity with optimized workflows for everyday tasks, opportunities for collaborative, parallel workflows, and automation through scripting for repetitive tasks, while new Animation Layers and Render Passes enable artists to re-use existing data and minimize the iterative process.
Top 10 Reasons to Buy Autodesk Maya 2009
Image courtesy of EFE.X S.A
Image courtesy of Duckling A/S
Image courtesy of Asylum Visual Effects
Image courtesy of 2K
5 Interoperability
From the most complex, proprietary pipelines, to the single user working from home, Maya is rarely used in isolation to create the finished job. Whether you are painting textures in Adobe® Photoshop® software, compositing shots in Autodesk® Toxik™ software, or bringing in cleaned motion capture data from Autodesk® MotionBuilder® software, Maya 2009 makes the task as seamless as possible, minimizing errors and reducing iterations. Included free with Maya, the Autodesk® FBX® technology supports the exchange of 3D data with over 30 professional applications, allowing assets created outside of Maya to be re-used, and offers a software developer kit (SDK) to assist studios with pipeline integration.
6 Extensibility
Maya is a total solution out of the box, but for companies wishing to tightly integrate it with their existing pipelines, or to add differentiated new feature development on top, Maya offers many avenues for customization. Built from the ground-up with its own embedded scripting language Maya Embedded Language (MEL), Maya 2009 also offers Python® scripting language, and an extensive, well-documented C++ application processing interface (API).
7 Platform Choice
Whether you are a fan of Windows®, a Mac® aficionado, or a Linux® operating system lover, Maya 2009 runs on the platforms you choose. And it’s ready to handle the massive amounts of memory that today’s large scenes require, with 64-bit executables for both Windows and Linux.
8 Talent Pool
With thousands of artists graduating from Maya programs each year in numerous countries worldwide, customers using Maya are able to find the talent they need to staff their projects. On the other side of the coin, individuals buying licenses of Maya are making an investment in their future careers by gaining skills and experience that are highly marketable to an installed base that continues to see healthy growth.
9 Autodesk Subscription and Support
For an affordable annual fee that lets you plan your budget ahead, Autodesk® Subscription
for Maya entitles you to all new releases and extensions offered during the subscription period. In addition, subscription members have access to an online technical knowledge-base and learning resources, and can manage their licenses through the subscription center. Adding Gold support to Autodesk Subscription provides you with access to knowledgeable support experts via telephone or web, and a mechanism to track and report issues.
10 Services
When a production requires more than an out of the box solution, Autodesk’s custom development center is standing by with a range of offerings, including custom code development, on-demand bug-fixing (even on prior versions) and a ‘Production Assurance’ menu of services that will make sure you can get precisely the help you need, when you need it most.
Courtesy:autodesk.com

Top 10 Reasons for poor Oracle performance

   1.   Bad Connection Management

The application connects and disconnects for each database interaction. This problem is common with stateless middleware in application servers. It has over two orders of magnitude impact on performance, and it is totally unscalable.

    2. Bad Use of Cursors and the Shared Pool

Not using cursors results in repeated parses. If bind variables are not used, then there is hard parsing of all SQL statements. This has an order of magnitude impact in performance, and it is totally unscalable. Use cursors with bind variables that open the cursor and execute it many times. Be suspicious of applications generating dynamic SQL.

         3. Getting Database I/O Wrong

Many sites lay out their databases poorly over the available disks. Other sites specify the number of disks incorrectly, because they configure disks by disk space and not I/O bandwidth.

         4. Redo Log Setup Problems

Many sites run with too few redo logs that are too small. Small redo logs cause system checkpoints to continuously put a high load on the buffer cache and I/O system. If there are too few redo logs, then the archive cannot keep up, and the database will wait for the archive process to catch up.

         5. Serialization of data blocks in the buffer cache due to lack of free lists, free list groups, transaction slots (INITRANS), or shortage of rollback segments.

This is particularly common on INSERT-heavy applications, in applications that have raised the block size to 8K or 16K, or in applications with large numbers of active users and few rollback segments.

         6. Long Full Table Scans

Long full table scans for high-volume or interactive online operations could indicate poor transaction design, missing indexes, or poor SQL optimization. Long table scans, by nature, are I/O intensive and unscalable.

         7. In Disk Sorting

In disk sorts for online operations could indicate poor transaction design, missing indexes, or poor SQL optimization. Disk sorts, by nature, are I/O-intensive and unscalable.

         8. High Amounts of Recursive (SYS) SQL

Large amounts of recursive SQL executed by SYS could indicate space management activities, such as extent allocations, taking place. This is unscalable and impacts user response time. Recursive SQL executed under another user ID is probably SQL and PL/SQL, and this is not a problem.

         9. Schema Errors and Optimizer Problems

In many cases, an application uses too many resources because the schema owning the tables has not been successfully migrated from the development environment or from an older implementation. Examples of this are missing indexes or incorrect statistics. These errors can lead to sub-optimal execution plans and poor interactive user performance. When migrating applications of known performance, export the schema statistics to maintain plan stability using the DBMS_STATS package.

Likewise, optimizer parameters set in the initialization parameter file can override proven optimal execution plans. For these reasons, schemas, schema statistics, and optimizer settings should be managed together as a group to ensure consistency of performance.

        10. Use of Nonstandard Initialization Parameters

These might have been implemented based on poor advice or incorrect assumptions. In particular, parameters associated with SPIN_COUNT on latches and undocumented optimizer features can cause a great deal of problems that can require considerable investigation.