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.