Big Data | R4 | Page 3

The most visited post here is the one on my experience with performance on Azure, using WA SQL and VMs. There seems to be a lot of interest in the subject, so in the links for this week, there are quite a few links to articles by the Microsoft SQL Server Support Team on Windows Azure SQL Server. Articles on jQuery, CSS and scalabilty are also featured.

Microsoft SQL Server Support Team’s Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD) Primer is the first of a series of articles on what is known as Windows Azure SQL – the Azure hosted Platform as a Service version of SQL Server. This first article presents some of the terminology used on the article series on WASD and includes some reference links that help understanding the differences between WASD and a “normal” SQL Server installation.

Is my query running fine in the cloud? is another of the articles in the series. Addresses several resources that can be used to determine causes of performance issues with WASD – available DMVs, performance, connectivity and resource usage related, execution plans. Again, it includes references to other relevant articles. It should also include a link to scripts to collect DMV info, updated for WASD, but I couldn’t find the article.It is still very informative, even without the link.

Do I need to upgrade my DBA skills for the cloud?, yet another article in the series, addresses some of maintenance / administration tasks needed, once the database is online. The series includes two more articles, on firewall configuration to secure access to the database and on getting a database to Azure, that are accessible from any of the articles in the series.

Keeping up with the WASD subject, Thomas LaRock’s How to: alter table in windows azure sql database without filling up your transaction log describes an approach to deal with transaction log size limitations in WASD, specifically when dealing with table changes in tables with a very big number of records. Such changes can cause the 1GB limit log size change per transaction and the articles suggests a strategy to avoid that.

Slightly changing subjects, Brent Ozar’s What Developers Need to Know About SQL Server presents advice gathered through a Twitter session on what DBA’s think developers need to know about SQL Server. It has very interesting advice for developers using SQL Server for persistence.

Dwain Camps’s Performance of the SQL MERGE vs. INSERT/UPDATE analyzes the MERGE statement in terms of performance and concludes that the added flexibility comes with a small price in terms of performance.

Joe Celko’s Window Functions in SQL addresses the whole range of windowing functions in SQL, from aggregate to ranking and analytic functions, with some examples included. A very interesting read.

Pinal Dave wrote a series of 21 articles on the basics of Big Data. Big Data – Learning Basics of Big Data in 21 Days – Bookmark is an index to all the articles in the very informative series.

Changing subjects yet again, Yogesh Mankani’s Best jQuery Tutorials of Year 2013, presents multiple very interesting jQuery usage tutorials.

Rajni Setia’s Useful Cheat Sheets for Designers and Developers presents a large and useful set of cheat sheets for web designers and developers.

Martin Angelov’s 12 Awesome CSS3 Features That You Can Finally Start Using presents 12 CSS 3 features that are now supported by all major browsers (which include IE 10 and later, only, which means IE 9 is out of this group).

Craig Butler’s CSS3 Inheritance Tips and Tricks presents some usually overlooked cascading features in CSS3.

Jeremy Girard’s Selling Responsive Web Design To Clients, starting with a situation where a customer wasn’t interested on having a website redesign, presents a few benefits of responsive design, that usually are not primary motivators for responsive design adoption and concludes that these benefits can be, by themselves, a good way to sell responsive design.

Finally, Thierry Schellenbach’s Design Decisions For Scaling Your High Traffic Feeds presents the author’s experience while building the feed system at Fashiolista to sustain high traffic conditions.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading.

The image used on this post was originally posted on Wayne Walter Berry’s Inside Windows Azure SQL Database

This week provided quite a few interesting reads, so it wasn’t easy to pick just a few of them. Not really able to pick a favorite, as there quite a few good posts and no clear “winner”. Anyway, here we go.

Jnan Dash’s RDBMS vs. NoSQL: How do you pick? brings back the issue of choosing between RDMBS and NoSQL technologies. It provides some insightful advice on making such a choice. It covers relevant issues to consider, from the nature of data, to operational issues like performance, scale or availability. Although a brief article, it covers the most relevant criteria to consider when making such a choice and it is a very interesting read.

Continuing with NoSQL / Big Data articles, Chris Stucchio’s Don’t use Hadoop -your data is not that big is a witty article on how “hot” keywords can cloud anyone’s decision making. It analyses a few scenarios where using Hadoop doesn’t make much sense, even if you would be led to think otherwise, due to Hadoop’s increasing popularity.

J.D. Meier’s Cloud Scenarios at your fingertips provides a few decision making points and links to further readings, on the subject of evaluating Cloud Computing as a viable option to be considered for enterprises.

Moving to SQL Server performance related articles, The SQL Server Customer Advisory Team blog post When To Break Down Complex Queries provides a few anti-patterns to watch when writing queries, with suggestions to solve the associated performance issues. It’s a very interesting article.

Marcus Winand’s Myth: Dynamic SQL is Slow debunks the myth that dynamic SQL is slow, unless you do it wrong, of course.

Grant Fritchey’s Why the Lazy Spool is Bad analyzes the lazy spool operator, concluding that it is not bad, after all, and includes links to more information on spools.

Danny Dover’s The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet 2.0 is a very comprehensive SEO cheat sheet, that can be downloaded as a very useful PDF file to keep within easy reach, as it can be very, very useful.

Anders Andersen & Tobias Järlund’s Addressing The Responsive Images Performance Problem: A Case Study is a very well written and interesting article that provides a solution they developed to eliminate performance issues when serving images to mobile devices. A must read.

The Visual Studio Developer Center .NET Framework SDKs and Targeting Packs for Visual Studio 2012 provides a useful list of resources related to Visual Studio and .Net Framework.

Cathy Sullivan’s Notifications in Visual Studio 2013 provides a good overview on Visual Studio 2013 notifications features.

Bruce Schneier’s How to Remain Secure Against the NSA provides a detailed description of several strategies that anyone can use to foil the NSA’s eavesdropping abilities. A must read.

That’s it for the week.

R4

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

Tag Archives: Big Data

My links of the week – November 3, 2013