Sep 22

My links of the week – September 22, 2013

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.