R4 | Random Ramblings (on Technology, Programming and Databases,) by Rui Ribeiro

Here is my choice of links for the past week.

SQL Server:
- Jez Schultz Borland’s SQL Server Indexed Views: The Basics is a rather comprehensive post, as is usual the case with Simple Talk posts, explaining what indexed views are, the benefits that can result from its use, some requirements to ensure SQL Server actually uses the view and the impact an indexed view may have on operations on the underlying tables.
- Robert L. Soldier’s Why is Your SQL Server Slow? Here’s a Hint and Why is Your SQL Server Slow? All-for-one and One-for-all provide suggestions on things that may slow down a SQL Server. The first article addresses query hints and the second, the need for file segregation.
- Klaus Aschenbrenner’s DELETE operations on tables addresses the physical effects of DELETE operations on tables.
- Michael J Swart’s Troubleshooting Concurrency – A Demo is the 3rd in an interesting series of posts about concurrency testing on SQL Server.
- Todd Fifield’s Calendar Tables shows how to create and use Calendar tables, which can be quite useful to avoid date calculations and thus improve performance in situations where such need arises.
- Selcin Turkarslan’s Application Patterns and Development Strategies for SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines is a very interesting article covering multiple application patterns that can be used when developing solutions that use SQL Server in Azure VMs.
- Mavendra Singh’s Recover deleted SQL Server data and tables with the help of Transaction Log and LSNs shows up deleted data can be recovered from the transaction log.
- Juergen Thomas’s New functionality in SQL Server 2014 – Part 5 – Backup/Restore Enhancement is part of a series covering new features in SQL Server 2014. This post covers the enhancements in backup and restore features, including encryption and backup and restore using Azure.
- Mike Wood’s Automating the Retrieval of SQL Backups from Windows Azure BLOB Storage shows how a backup made on Azure can be retrieved using different tools, from Cerebrata Azure Explorer to Powershell.
- Daniel Farina’s Workaround for lack of support for constraints on SQL Server Memory-Optimized Tables suggests several ways to overcome SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP tables lack of support for constraints other than NOT NULL and Primary Key.

Web Design and Development:
- Robert Morris’s Page Speed and Business Metrics: The Relationship shows that page speed can have a great impact in how users respond to even a well designed UI.
- Peter Cooper’s Building rich web UIs with knockout.js includes links to several resources on Knockout.js, including an introductory video presentation from Steve Sanderson.
- Gabriele Romanato’s Creating A Client-Side Shopping Cart shows how to create a shopping cart using the W3C session storage.
- Adam Kaplan’s GRID, A simple guide to responsive design is a very interesting guide to responsive design, using a mobile first approach.
- Louis Lazaris’s Setting CSS3 Border-Radius with Slash Syntax covers the CSS3 border-radius property, showing how it can be set using “slash / sintax” to obtain corners with different values for vertical and horizontal radii.
- Johnny Simpson’s CSS Button Hover Effects shows some nice effects that can be used with buttons, using CSS.

Software Development:
- Troy Hunt’s Your API versioning is wrong, which is why I decided to do it 3 different wrong ways is an interesting discussion regarding API versioning, using Have I Been Pwned‘s API as the test case.
- Peter Vogel’s Offloading Work from Your Application with a Queue illustrates how to offline some processing to a queue, thus improving application response time.
- Frans Bouma’s Fetch performance of various .NET ORM / Data-access frameworks, part 2 compares the performance of fetch performance of various .net ORM frameworks. Interesting info, when deciding which ORM to use.
- Olivier Gourment’s Implementing Agile Code Reviews is an interesting presentation on Agile code reviews adoption.
- Ben Linder’s Applying Use Cases in Agile: Use Case 2.0, Slicing and Laminating discusses some ways to apply use cases for requirements management in agile.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading.

Here is my choice of links for the past week.

SQL Server:
- Paul Randal’s Avoiding Knee-Jerk Performance Troubleshooting warns against superficial analysis of performance problems and offers examples of situations where that can happen, related to wait statistics.
- Kendra Little’s Statistics Matter on Temp Tables, Too shows that statistics are relevant in temp tables too and suggests a way to change the threshold for statistics to update automatically.
- Alex Grinberg’s Sending a Variable Number of Elements in a Parameter presents three ways to send multiple rows of values, as parameters to stored procedures.
- Jeremiah Peschka’s Using SQL Server’s Table Valued Parameters goes a bit deeper with tabled value parameters than the previous article from Alex Grinberg, showing how they can be used from C# and addressing some of the gotchas of using them.
- Joe Celko’s SQL Server SEQUENCE Basics explains how Sequences can be used in SQL Server 2012. It also provides a historical justification for the use of IDENTITY columns and explains why they shouldn’t be used for primary keys, while sequences should.
- Tibor Nagy’s SQL Server Security Checklist provides advice on the security configuration of a SQL Server production server.
- Sanjay Mishra’s AlwaysOn Availability Groups: Comparing On-Premises Deployments and Azure VM Deployments explains the differences in deploying AlwayOn Availability Groups between on-premises and Azure VMs.
- Francesco Diaz’s Configuring SQL Server Database Mirroring across two Windows Azure datacenters shows how database mirroring accross Windows Azure datacenters can be setup.

Web Design and Development:
- Jeremy Likness’s 10 Reasons Web Developers Should Learn Angular offers 10 reasons for web developers to adopt Angular.JS, from data-binding, to dependency injection, filtering of output, and advanced templating.
- Lara Swanson’s Responsive Web Design Performance argues for a mobile (and performance) design first approach and offers good reasons for that.
- Scott Hanselman’s Checklist: What NOT to do in ASP.NET offers advice on anti-patterns to avoid in ASP.NET development, with an interesting set of links to further reading (and viewing) on the subject.
- Gavyn McKenzie’s One Solution To Responsive Images presents an interesting solution for the responsive images problem.
- Jimmy Bogard’s Rendering ASP.NET content as PDF shows a quick way of obtaining a PDF printout, from ASP.NET MVC pages, but the approach can be extended to other scenarios.

Big Data:
- James Kinley’s The Lambda architecture: principles for architecting realtime Big Data systems presents the principles of the Lambda architecture, proposed by Nathan Marz and James Warren in their Big Data book.
- Soren Riise’s NoSQL Vs. RDBMS for Interactive Analytics: Leveraging the Right and Left Brain of Data provides some interesting advice on NoSQL vs. RDBMS choices.
- Alex Giamas’s Interactive SQL in Apache Hadoop with Impala and Hive compares some aspects of current interactive SQL choices for Hadoop installations.

Software development:
- Yaniv Yehuda’s The Secrets of Database Change Deployment Automation presents the difficulties associated with database change deployment and argues for a better solution to the problem of database change deployment than the traditional versioning or compare and sync tools.
- Scott Ambler’s Architecture and Design Are So Important is a presentation on the importance of architecture and design and how they are integrated in a daily agile approach.

That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading.

R4

Random Ramblings (on Technology, Programming and Databases,) by Rui Ribeiro

My links of the week – February 16, 2014

My links of the week – February 9, 2014