Here are my chosen links for this week, covering SQL Server (with an emphasis on SQL Server 2014), web development, software development and big data.

• SQL Server:
  • Thomas LaRock’s SQL Server Troubleshooting useful links presents a set of useful resources to use when troubleshooting SQL Server performance issues. The set includes blog posts, books, videos and whitepapers.
  • Microsoft’s SQL Server Team Boosting Transaction Performance in Windows Azure Virtual Machines with In-Memory OLTP presents recommended scenarios for the use on In-memory optimized tables in Azure Virtual Machines. It also offers recommendations regarding VM size and configuration, for optimized in-memory tables performance.
  • Aaron Bertrand’s Hekaton with a twist: In-memory table-valued parameters raises the possibility of big improvements in performance when using memory-optimized table-valued parameters.
  • Daniel Farina’s Updating statistics for Memory-Optimized tables in SQL Server addresses the lack of auto-updating statistics for memory optimized tables in SQL Server 2014. The article explains the reason for this absence and provides advice on how to handle situations where the data in the tables as changed in such a way that updating statistics would be recommended.
  • John Daskalaskis’s SQL Server default settings that you might want to change presents several SQL Server defaults that may be useful to change, to achieve better performance.

• Web Design and Development:
  • Victor Savkin’s Contrasting Backbone and Angular is an interesting article that compares how regular web development tasks can be achieved with the Backbone,js and Angular JS Javascript frameworks.
  • Steven Bradley’s Mobile Up, Widescreen Down, or Somewhere In-Between? compares the mobile up and widescreen down approaches, when designing a responsive website and provides advice on which to use considering the designer’s experience.
  • Rob Dodson’s A Guide to Web Components addresses Web Components, a set of web standards with the goal of allowing the bundling of markup and styles into custom HTML elements, that fully encapsulate the HTML and CSS. An excellent read.
  • Mike Wasson’s Single-Page Applications: Build Modern, Responsive Web Apps with ASP.NET shows how to build a Single Page Application (SPA) using Visual Studio 2013 and the ASP.NET Web API, while using Knockout.js and Ember.js for the front-end. 

• Software Development:
  • Hadi Hariri’s Refactoring to Functional–Why Class? is a thought-provoking critique of object-oriented programming. 
  • Ulf Eriksson’s 6 Practical Agile Techniques You Can Start Using Today suggests 6 agile techniques that can be used to improve the any development process. 
  • Lukasz Szyrmer’s The Best Process Is No Process is another interesting and thought-provoking reflection, this time addressing process and process debt.
  • Cecily Carver’s Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code is yet another very interesting article on the lessons learned from experience, regarding “how to code”.

• Big Data / BI :
  • Craig S. Mullins’s A Primer on the Basics of NoSQL Databases provides a brief overview of the basics of NoSQL databases.
  • Cindy Gross’s Your First HDInsight Cluster–Step by Step provides a simple tutorial on getting started with Hadoop, through a HDInsight cluster installation on Azure.
  • Arshad Ali’s Understanding Microsoft Power BI – Self Service Solutions addresses Microsoft Power BI, a set of tools based on the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel, for data discovery, analysis and visualization. The article also includes links to relevant documentation on how to use the different Power BI components.
  • Matt Asay’s Python Displacing R As The Programming Language For Data Science explains why Python has becoming a more common option for data science, increasingly replacing R.

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