Here is my selection of the links from the past week.

• SQL Server:
  • Last week was T-SQL Tuesday week, Waits being this month’s subject. Robert L. Davis was the host, and several interesting posts are included in his roundup: T-SQL Tuesday #49: Wait For It Roundup.
  • Basit Farooq’s Understanding SQL Server Query Optimization – Part 3 is the third of a series of four articles on query optimization. The previous 2 articles can be found here and here.
  • Jeremiah Peschka’s Keep it Constrained addresses unique, primary key and check constraints in SQL Server, including a smart way to deal with NULLs in unique constraints.
  • John Sterrett’s Throwback Thursday #3: SQL Server & Disks presents  several very interesting articles on disks,storage systems and SQL Server.
  • Tracy McKibben’s Don’t Get Slimed By Bad Parameter Sniffing addresses parameter sniffing, explaining what it is, how it can create performance problems what can be done to overcome such problems.
  • Kenneth Fisher’s A better way to find missing indexes presents an interesting script to find missing indexes and present them alongside the queries where their absence can make a difference.
  • Jonathan Allen’s I Thought Everyone Did It Like That – SSMS Templates is an interesting article that covers SQL Server Management Studio Templates, showing how they can be useful, how they can be customized through the use of parameters, and how new templates can be added.
  • Microsoft’s SQL Server Team SQL Server 2014 Hybrid Cloud Scenarios: Migrating On-Premises SQL Server to Windows Azure Virtual Machines presents one of the new wizards in SQL Server 2014 SSMS,that assists in the deployment of a database to a Windows Azure VM and gives a step by step description of the deployment process, using the wizard.

• Web Design and Development:
  • Sara Souiedan’s Creating Non-Rectangular Layouts with CSS Shapes is a very detailed and interesting article on CSS Shapes, a current W3C Draft meant to allow inline content to wrap around floats of shape other than the regular floats’ bounding box. 
  • Sorin Pintilie’s The Line Of Least Resistance is an excellent article that addresses the importance of context in designing an enjoyable experiences for users. 
  • John Tabita’s How to Keep Web Projects Moving Forward, Part 1 and How to Keep Web Projects Moving Forward, Part 2 addresses common difficulties in web projects and provides advice on how to overcome those difficulties.
  • Andi Smith’s Make better websites with browser developer tools provides a set of interesting tips and tricks to help developing better websites, using a varied assortment of tools. 
  • David Paquette’s Browser Link–Tracking Unused CSS shows how Browser Link, a new feature of Visual Studio 2013, can be used to identify unused CSS in a website.

• Software Development:
  • Monjurul Habib’s Agile software development methodologies and how to apply them provides an introduction and overview of development methodologies based on Agile.
  • Damien Guard’s Probable C# 6.0 features illustrated presents some of the probable new features for the 6.0 version of C#.

• Big Data / BI :
  • Doug Turnbull’s Codd’s Relational Vision – Has NoSQL Come Full Circle? is a very interesting article that goes back to the original Codd’s work on relational databases, analyzing Codd’s criticism of the database systems that existed at the time, to raise the question of whether we have come full circle. Codd’s original arguments that lead to his proposal ofthe relational database model, are used to warn about the risks of denormalization, while taking advantage of that very denormalization in NoSQL databases.
  • Software Engineering Radio’s Episode 199 is a podcast, featuring Michael Stonebraker, a leading MIT database reasearcher. The podcast covers multiple database related subjects of great interest, including “NewSQL” databases.
  • Andrew Burst’s Predicting Big Data’s 2014 presents a few predictions about what 2014 can bring to Big Data, from a set of companies working in the field.

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