Here are my choice of links for the past week.

• SQL Server:
  • Brent Ozar’s What’s the Smallest SQL Server You Should Build? provides some advice on the hardware configuration for a “small” SQL Server that gets the best value from the licensing costs of SQL Server 2012, considering both the Standard and Enterprise Editions and physical and virtual servers.
  • Klaus Aschenbrenner’s Why Transaction Log Auto Growths are degrading your performance explains why transaction log auto growth can bring performance problems 
  • Michael J. Swart’s SQL Simplicity Methods recommends that SQL is kept simple and provides some advice on how that can be achieved.
  • Erin Stellato’s Performance Issues: The First Encounter provides a list of what to looks for when confronted with a performance issue in an unfamiliar environment.
  • Jeremiah Peschka’s Dynamic Sorting presents an uncommon way to sort a query by a user specified criteria.
  • Greg Low’s Reliably Dropping a Database in a T-SQL Script is Too Hard addresses the issue of ensuring a reliable way to drop a database using only T-SQL.
  • Basit Farooq’s Understanding SQL Server Query Optimization – Part 4 addresses query optimization using the Database Engine Tuning Advisor.

• Web Design and Development:
  • Tero Piirainen’s Frameworkless JavaScript, in a very interesting post, explains the reasons for choosing not to use a Javascript framework when building Moot.
  • Rob Eisenberg’s Durandal: Quick Start provides a brief introductory tutorial to Durandal.
  • Derick Bayley’s SOLID JavaScript In A Wobbly World (Wide Web) provides a set of resources, including a video on applying SOLID principles to Javascript development.
  • Aurelio De Rosa’s Managing Custom Data with the HTML5 Dataset API explains what the HTML5 data attributes are and how the Dataset API allows programmatic access to such attributes.
  • Gabrielle Gosha’s 20 Distinctive Navigation Menu Designs provides links to 20 very interesting navigation menu designs.

• Software Development:
  • Tim Bray’s Software in 2014 provides an interesting analysis of the software development scenario, both server and client side as we enter 2014.
  • Shivprasad Koirala’s SOLID architecture principles using simple C# examples presents and exemplifies, in a simple away the application of the SOLID architecture principles, using C# as the implementation language.
  • David Budgen’s Design Patterns: Magic or Myth? describes an attempt to find an answer to whether design patterns are an effective way to exchange design knowledge and whether they help create designs that are simple to understand and maintain. The perceived reply, specifically to the second question, is not that clear.
  • Neil Potter’s Scrum Lessons from the Trenches tries to address some of the challenges facing Scrum application by project teams.

• Big Data / BI:
  • Mike Wood’s An Introduction to Windows Azure Table Storage provides a good introduction to using Azure’s Table Storage, a key-value pair, non relational, storage. 
  • James Kobelius’s What Koby’s tea leaves foretell for big data in 2014 presents some predictions on what may happen in multiple big data related technologies in 2014.
  • James Serra’s Business Intelligence/Data Warehouse Assessment provides the author’s view on how the steps needed to conduct a BI / data warehouse assessment.

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