This week provided quite a few interesting reads, so it wasn’t easy to pick just a few of them. Not really able to pick a favorite, as there quite a few good posts and no clear “winner”. Anyway, here we go.

• Jnan Dash’s RDBMS vs. NoSQL: How do you pick? brings back the issue of choosing between RDMBS and NoSQL technologies. It provides some insightful advice on making such a choice. It covers relevant issues to consider, from the nature of data, to operational issues like performance, scale or availability. Although a brief article, it covers the most relevant criteria to consider when making such a choice and it is a very interesting read.

• Continuing with NoSQL / Big Data articles, Chris Stucchio’s Don’t use Hadoop -your data is not that big is a witty article on how “hot” keywords can cloud anyone’s decision making. It analyses a few scenarios where using Hadoop doesn’t make much sense, even if you would be led to think otherwise, due to Hadoop’s increasing popularity.

• J.D. Meier’s Cloud Scenarios at your fingertips provides a few decision making points and links to further readings, on the subject of evaluating Cloud Computing as a viable option to be considered for enterprises.

• Moving to SQL Server performance related articles, The SQL Server Customer Advisory Team blog post When To Break Down Complex Queries provides a few anti-patterns to watch when writing queries, with suggestions to solve the associated performance issues. It’s a very interesting article.

• Marcus Winand’s Myth: Dynamic SQL is Slow debunks the myth that dynamic SQL is slow, unless you do it wrong, of course.

• Grant Fritchey’s Why the Lazy Spool is Bad analyzes the lazy spool operator, concluding that it is not bad, after all, and includes links to more information on spools.

• Danny Dover’s The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet 2.0 is a very comprehensive SEO cheat sheet, that can be downloaded as a very useful PDF file to keep within easy reach, as it can be very, very useful.

• Anders Andersen & Tobias Järlund’s Addressing The Responsive Images Performance Problem: A Case Study is a very well written and interesting article that provides a solution they developed to eliminate performance issues when serving images to mobile devices. A must read.

• The Visual Studio Developer Center .NET Framework SDKs and Targeting Packs for Visual Studio 2012 provides a useful list of resources related to Visual Studio and .Net Framework.

• Cathy Sullivan’s Notifications in Visual Studio 2013 provides a good overview on Visual Studio 2013 notifications features.

• Bruce Schneier’s How to Remain Secure Against the NSA provides a detailed description of several strategies that anyone can use to foil the NSA’s eavesdropping abilities. A must read.

That’s it for the week.