Here is my choice links for the past week.

• SQL Server:
  • Kendra Little’s UPDATE STATISTICS: the Secret IO Explosion shows how updating statistics can cause a bit of IO and suggests ways to accomplish it in a lighter fashion.
  • Gregory Larsen’s Stairway to Advanced T-SQL Level 2: Writing Subqueries is a rather comprehensive presentation of subqueries in T-SQL.
  • Aaron Bertrand’s Best approaches for grouped running totals presents multiple approaches for calculating grouped running totals and compares them in terms of performance.
  • Joe Celko’s Nesting Levels in SQL is a very interesting article on the structured nature of SQL leading to the use table expressions and it’s ability to replace actual tables in a SQL statement, enabling the use of derived tables, CTEs and Lateral tables.
  • Brent Ozar’s Watch Brent Tune Queries is an interesting video of on query tuning.

• Web Design and Development:
  • Louis Lazaris’s The Current Generation of CSS3 Selectors addresses the CSS selectors added after CSS 2.1 and, given they are supported by all latest generation browsers (including IE 9), recommends their use.
  • The Ultimage Guide to CSS is a complete guide on CSS support by every browser currently available.
  •  Jon Galloway’s Looking at ASP.NET MVC 5.1 and Web API 2.1 – Part 3 – Bootstrap and JavaScript enhancements presents some of the client side improvements in the ASP.NET MVC 5.1 update.
  • Dmitri Lau’s Six Things You Might Not Know About Promises presents 6 interesting aspects of Javascript promises.

• Cloud computing:
  • Dan Fay’s Cloud Design Patterns now available presents the Cloud Design Patterns Guide from Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices Group, which can be of great use when designing apps to be deployed on Windows Azure.
  • Mike Wood’s An Introduction to Windows Azure Service Bus Brokered Messaging provides an introduction to  how Azure’s Service Bus Brokered Messaging.
  • Troy Hunt’s Azure will save you from unexpected Godzilla attack part 1: SQL Azure export will save you from yourself addresses how Azure’s geo redundancy features provides protection even from a disaster of catastrophic proportions and how it can be couple with other features, such as SQL Azure export, to protect against less dire but nonetheless menacing threats, such as developer error.
  • Brady Gaster’s Managing Web Sites from Web Sites using the Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET shows how to create prepare an azure web site so that it then can use the Windows Azure Management Libraries to perform multiple azure management functions such as creating an Azure SQL database or an Azure storage account.

• Big Data / BI:
  • Dattatrey Sindol’s Big Data Basics – Part 3 – Overview of Hadoop provides a good overview of Hadoop’s architecture, characteristics and some advice on when to use it.
  • Robert Sheldon’s Five SQL Server 2012 business intelligence features presents some of SQL Server’s Business Intelligence features.
  • Charles Menguy’s Big Data: Do Languages Really Matter? is an interesting discussion on the importance of languages (or the lack of it) in big data implementations.

• Software development:
  • Nicolas Gouy’s Agile with Guts – A pragmatic guide to value-driven development is a freely downloaded e-book on value driven development.
  • Ben Linders’s Documentation in Agile: How Much and When to Write It? provides a ser of useful links on the subject of Agile documentation.