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keys

Here is choice of links for this week.

SQL Server:
- Phil Factor’s Primary Key Primer for SQL Server is an excellent primer on choosing primary keys for SQL Server databases. It also includes links to several related and relevant resources.
- Brent Ozar’s The Secrets of TempDB is a very interesting video on TempDB, one of SQL Server’s system databases. The video covers multiple aspects related to TempDB, presenting its purpose, how SQL Server uses it, how it should be setup and how it can affect SQL Server performance. The post also includes a link to multiple valuable TempDB related resources.
- Jez Schultz Borland’s Filtered Indexes vs. Table Partitioning explains some of differences between filtered indexes and table partitioning and suggests use cases for both. It also includes links to additional resources on both subjects.
- Thomas LaRock’s Doing it Right: Performance Monitoring and Troubleshooting compares tracing and polling as strategies for collection performance metrics in terms of advantages, disadvantages and risks and advises a strategy that includes both, while stating his preference for polling for regular monitoring.
- Brent Ozar’s How to Build a SQL Server Support Matrix presents his version of a SQL Server support matrix and, in a very interesting post, explains how it can be used and some of the advantages that it can bring about.
- Glenn Berry’s General Database Server Build and Deployment Instructions provides a useful build checklist for setting up new SQL Server instances.
- Jack Li’s How Simple Parameterization works addresses query parameterization, explaining how SQL Server versions since 2005 includes two modes of parameterization (simple and forced), how SQL Server behaves in each and how it can be determined whether a given query is being parameterized or not.
- Karen Lopez’s 10 Tips for the Minimalist DBA presents a set of 10 tips about concerns and skills needed for anyone in a DBA role.
- Bill Karwin’s How to Design Indexes, Really, is a very good presentation on index design that, although addressing MySQL indexes, can also be of valued for anyone designing indexes for other database management systems.

Web Design and Development:
- Kevin Lamping’s Stop Hitting Yourself: CSS Design Patterns That Scale is a very good presentation on using CSS design patterns that can be effectively used on the design of very big websites. It addresses mostly patterns that can be reused, enabling scaling.
- Sergey Bolshchikov’s Ember Reusable Components and Widgets is a video presentation addressing the design of complex user interfaces with the combination of Handlebars templates with Ember.view.
- Anastasios Karafillis’s Efficiently Simplifying Navigation, Part 1: Information Architecture is the first of two articles on simplifying a website’s navigation experience. This article addresses content structuring and navigation options explanation, using labels, pictures and descriptions.
- Craig Buckler’s Easier Ajax With the HTML5 FormData Interface presents, in a simple way, how the HTML5 Ajax FormData interface can be used to simply form handling.
- Caitie McCaffrey’s A WebSocket Primer is a very good primer on using the WebSockets protocol.

Big Data / BI :
- Seth Proctor’s Do All Roads Lead Back to SQL? addresses “NewSQL” type products and why such products are bringing back SQL – think transactional support and the ability to scale better than traditional RDBMS implementations.
- Ritu Saxena’s 9 NewSQL Databases For OLTP Needs Of Cloud And Web Apps presents 9 NewSQL based database management systems that can be used in OLTP scenarios.
- Buck Woody’s Data Science Laboratory System – Graph Databases provides an introduction to graph databases and provides a quick guide to setting up Neo4j, a graph database.
- Arshad Ali’s Getting Started with Microsoft Power Query for Excel provides an introduction to Microsoft’s Power Query, showing how to install it and starting to use it, with links to further resources on the subject.

Cloud Computing:
- Courtenay Bernier’s Multi-Factor Authentication… the simple way shows how to setup, enable and use Windows Azure Multi-Factor Authentication.
- Troy Hunt’s Working with 154 million records on Azure Table Storage – the story of “Have I been pwned?” is an excellent and detailed article on how the author used Azure Table Storage to efficiently store and retrieve 154 million email records and how little it costs do to so.

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

Here are my chosen links for this week, covering SQL Server (with an emphasis on SQL Server 2014), web development, software development and big data.

SQL Server:
- Thomas LaRock’s SQL Server Troubleshooting useful links presents a set of useful resources to use when troubleshooting SQL Server performance issues. The set includes blog posts, books, videos and whitepapers.
- Microsoft’s SQL Server Team Boosting Transaction Performance in Windows Azure Virtual Machines with In-Memory OLTP presents recommended scenarios for the use on In-memory optimized tables in Azure Virtual Machines. It also offers recommendations regarding VM size and configuration, for optimized in-memory tables performance.
- Aaron Bertrand’s Hekaton with a twist: In-memory table-valued parameters raises the possibility of big improvements in performance when using memory-optimized table-valued parameters.
- Daniel Farina’s Updating statistics for Memory-Optimized tables in SQL Server addresses the lack of auto-updating statistics for memory optimized tables in SQL Server 2014. The article explains the reason for this absence and provides advice on how to handle situations where the data in the tables as changed in such a way that updating statistics would be recommended.
- John Daskalaskis’s SQL Server default settings that you might want to change presents several SQL Server defaults that may be useful to change, to achieve better performance.

Web Design and Development:
- Victor Savkin’s Contrasting Backbone and Angular is an interesting article that compares how regular web development tasks can be achieved with the Backbone,js and Angular JS Javascript frameworks.
- Steven Bradley’s Mobile Up, Widescreen Down, or Somewhere In-Between? compares the mobile up and widescreen down approaches, when designing a responsive website and provides advice on which to use considering the designer’s experience.
- Rob Dodson’s A Guide to Web Components addresses Web Components, a set of web standards with the goal of allowing the bundling of markup and styles into custom HTML elements, that fully encapsulate the HTML and CSS. An excellent read.
- Mike Wasson’s Single-Page Applications: Build Modern, Responsive Web Apps with ASP.NET shows how to build a Single Page Application (SPA) using Visual Studio 2013 and the ASP.NET Web API, while using Knockout.js and Ember.js for the front-end.

Software Development:
- Hadi Hariri’s Refactoring to Functional–Why Class? is a thought-provoking critique of object-oriented programming.
- Ulf Eriksson’s 6 Practical Agile Techniques You Can Start Using Today suggests 6 agile techniques that can be used to improve the any development process.
- Lukasz Szyrmer’s The Best Process Is No Process is another interesting and thought-provoking reflection, this time addressing process and process debt.
- Cecily Carver’s Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code is yet another very interesting article on the lessons learned from experience, regarding “how to code”.

Big Data / BI :
- Craig S. Mullins’s A Primer on the Basics of NoSQL Databases provides a brief overview of the basics of NoSQL databases.
- Cindy Gross’s Your First HDInsight Cluster–Step by Step provides a simple tutorial on getting started with Hadoop, through a HDInsight cluster installation on Azure.
- Arshad Ali’s Understanding Microsoft Power BI – Self Service Solutions addresses Microsoft Power BI, a set of tools based on the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel, for data discovery, analysis and visualization. The article also includes links to relevant documentation on how to use the different Power BI components.
- Matt Asay’s Python Displacing R As The Programming Language For Data Science explains why Python has becoming a more common option for data science, increasingly replacing R.

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

R4

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

Tag Archives: Azure

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