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.