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Here is my choice of links for this week. Subjects include SQL Server, web development and design, software development, cloud computing and big data / business intelligence.

SQL Server:
- Brent Ozar’s Update on Stack Overflow’s Recovery Strategy with SQL Server 2014 is an excellent post on Stack Exchange’s recovery strategy and their migration to SQL Server 2014.
- Gareth Marlow’s Cloud Services for the DBA is an excellent and comprehensive view of how the cloud can be used to maintain data and how it can affect the job of a DBA.
- Thomas LaRock’s Virtualizing SQL Server: 8 Things to Avoid provides 8 pain points to avoid, when virtualizing SQL Server.
- Sanjay Mishra’s SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn High Availability and Disaster Recovery Design Patterns provides a comparison of the most frequent High Availability and Disaster Recovery design patterns.
- Steve Jones’s Backups and Consistency addresses the need of transactionally consistent backups and alerts to some backup strategies that do not ensure it.
- The SQL Server 2014 links page, here, saw a few additions, this week. Some of the most interesting additions are:
  - Mike Weiner’s SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP discussions at PASS Summit 2013 provides answer to some of the most frequent questions on Hekaton made to the SQL Server CAT during the PASS Summit 2013.
  - Daniel Farina’s Workaround for lack of support for constraints on SQL Server Memory-Optimized Tables provides some strategies to overcome the lack of constraints in Hekaton’s memory optimized tables.
  - Greg Low’s SQL Server 2014 Hybrid: Storing data files in Azure storage – Bizarre or not? presents two scenarios where SQL Server 2014 option of having a database file on the cloud could make sense.

Web Design and Development:
- Carrie Cousins’s 10 Crucial Elements for Any Website Design provides a list of 10 key aspects that need to be considered when building a website.
- Alejandro Hernandez’s An Introduction To Full-Stack JavaScript presents full stack Javascript (in a short way, an architecture where the front-end, the server side dev and even the database are all programmed in Javascript) as set of technologies that allows several development advantages. A very interesting read.
- Alex Matchneer’s Angular JS from an Ember.js perspective provides a good comparison between the two popular Javascript frameworks.
- Keeping with the Javascript there, both Scott Hanselman’s Introducing node.js Tools for Visual Studio and Bart Read’s Node.js Development in Visual Studio – Life After Visual Node with Node Tools for Visual Studio provide good presentations of the Visual Studio tools for node.js.
- Sean Fioritto’s The Future Of Video In Web Design means to answer the question “How do you add video to a design?”. It tries to do that through a custom, presented, “micro framework”, using Charlie.js. Besides guiding the reader on how to deal with multiple issues, from choosing HTML5 vs. Flash or Silverlight, to controlling animations with Javascript, it also provides useful links to useful, relevant additional resources. A very good read.

Software Development:
- Alex Kuznetsov’s Lessons Learned from Six Years of Agile Database Development is an excellent article on how agile principles and tools can be used to improve database development
- Eli Weinstock-Herman’s Software, You’re Doing it Wrong explains how the purpose of software is to do work for people and systems and gives some examples that is often lacking in real software.
- Ally MacDonald’s Polyglot Programming: What Is It and Why Should You Be Using It? is a very interesting podcast featuring Neal Ford, on polyglot programming – what it is, what benefits can result from its use and multiple other interesting aspects related to the subject.

Cloud Computing:
- Brad Anderson’s Success with Hybrid Cloud: The Components of a Hybrid Cloud provides an excellent overview of a hybrid could, using Microsotf Technologies.
- Claire Broadley’s A Beginner’s Guide to Cloud Storage Encryption addresses the issue of data encryption, when using cloud services, a topic that has acquired renewed interested, due to the revelations of NSA’s monitoring of multiple cloud services providers.
- Jouni Heikniemi’s Windows Azure poster November 2013 edition is an excellent poster on Azure’s features, as of November 2013. A link to a downloadable PDF is included.

Big Data / BI :
- Microsoft’s Power BI Team’s Combine Data from Various Sources with Power Query and Create a Killer Visualization with Power Map is a video that presents some of the new capabilities available in the Power BI for Office 365 Preview.
- Aaron Kimbal’s Understanding What Big Data Can Deliver presents Big Data as a set of strategies and techniques that allow data professionals to focus on the details of a data set, this focusing having been made possible by improvements in hardware capability. The article suggests that the increased data now available can be used to pick better models, resulting in more accurate predictions.
- Adrian Bridgwater’s Amazon To Developers: Real-Time Big Data For Everyone, presents Amazon Kinesis a developer-focused tool designed to handle real-time data as it is created. It includes a link to register for access to the limited developer preview.

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

Here are my personal choice of links for the week ending today.

SQL Server:
- Courtenay Bernier’s Virtualizing SQL Server on Hyper-V and on Windows Azure VMs addresses Hyper V / Windows Server 2012 capabilities that need to be considered, when contemplating SQL Server virtualization. The article also addresses Azure as another possibility for SQL Server virtualization and covers some of the resulting limitations and advantages. Includes multiple links for additional relevant information. It’s an interesting resource to keep bookmarked.
- Bruno Terkaly’s and Ricardo’s VillaLobo’s Migrating Database Workloads to the Cloud discusses several scenarios for SQL Server migration to Azure including Windows Azure SQL Server databases or the use of an Azure VM.
- Mary Hutson’s Top Support Solutions for Microsoft SQL Server provides a considerable number of links to Microsoft’s support solutions on the most frequent issues experienced with SQL Server.
- Microsoft’s SQL Server Team’s IO Resource Governance in SQL Server 2014 addresses changes introduced to SQL Server’s Resource Governor in SQL Server 2014 and shows how the changes can be used to control resource usage in a SQL Server instance. This article was also added to my list of SQL Server 2014 links.
- Jez Schultz Borland’s Document Your SQL Server Databases with Extended Properties shows how extended properties can be used to document multiple database objects, with examples of T-SQL to create, update and delete such properties. The comments to the article also provide useful information on other ways to use extended properties for the same or other purposes, especially if you use SSDT.
- Simon Liew’s Different Ways to Restore a SQL Server Database provides examples of the multiple alternatives to restore a database using the full recovery model to a specific point in time, from the full, differential and transaction log backups available.
- Thomas LaRock’s SQL Server Plan Cache: The Junk Drawer for Your Queries explains what the SQL Server plan cache is and presents a few queries that can be used to determine plans that are similar, used only once or plans that may need tuning. Such plans can provide performance improvement opportunities and can thus be part of the tools used by a DBA to keep a server optimized for the best possible performance.
- Mark S. Rasmussen’s SQL Server Corruption Recovery – When All Else Fails presents some corruption recovery techniques, based on his own OrcaMDF, a C# MDF parser, available on GitHub. These techniques have the possibility to minimize data loss, if no other recovery strategies work or are unavailable.

Web Design and Development:
- Julien Knebel’s An In-Depth Introduction To Ember.js is an excellent introduction to one of the most popular Javacript framework for front-end development, Ember.js. The goal of the article is to provide an easier start for developers beginning with Ember and it is very good at that.
- Lauren Orsini’s What You Need To Know About Node.js gives a few the reasons for Node.js’s increased popularity and provides a link to a good introductory tutorial.
- Andy Leverenz’s The beginner’s guide to Sass provides an easy to read guide to Sass, explaining it’s advantages, providing examples of different possible syntaxes supported and presenting Sass’s features, like variables, operations and functions, nesting and mixins.
- Dudley Storey’s Better Pop-Up Windows With JavaScript and CSS3, Part 1 is the first article in a series that addresses the design of popup windows combining the best of Javascript and CSS3.
- CJ Gammon’s Killer Responsive Layouts With CSS Regions presents Regions, a new part of the CSS specification that has been seeing increased support by more browsers. Regions features and advantages are explained and demoed, especially from a responsive design perspective. Links and suggestions for further reading are included, as well.
- The Visual Studio 2013 Resources post, includes several updates to the Visual Studio 2013 links and videos.

Software Development:
- Ivar Jacobson et al.’s Agile and SEMAT – Perfect Partners addresses how combining SEMAT (Software Engineering Method and Theory) with Agile, can help developers and teams improve their own software development practices. A very interesting article, from the creator of Use Cases.
- Zain Naboulsi’s The Case For Agile Over Waterfall addresses the question of whether Agile still holds advantages over the classic waterfall approach to software development. The doubt was raised on the author from interactions with customers. The article presents links and data that back the idea that Agile is, of course, still advantageous, even if it seems there are many holdouts out there.
- Josh Symonds’s What Makes a Good Programmer Good? addresses some of the qualities exhibited by good programmers and I cannot but agree with him.

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

R4

Random Ramblings (on Technology, Programming and Databases,) by Rui Ribeiro

Category Archives: Software

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