RDBMS | R4

happy-holidays

Here are the most interesting links I read or viewed during the past week.

SQL Server:
- Paul Randal’s SQLskills holiday gift to you: all 2012 Insider videos includes a link to all the 25 videos made available with the SQLskills Insiders newsletter during 2012. A great set of videos to watch during the upcoming holidays (or whenever you want to).
- Brent Ozar’s How Would You Change Windows Azure SQL Database? asks the question – “what would Microsoft have to do to get you into Windows Azure SQL Database?” and there are some interesting answers. Although the cloud will gain a lot more importance in the coming years, I am not sure WASD is that interesting right now.
- Kurt Survance’s The Tipping Point – Understanding how SQL Server’s query optimizer makes decisions is an older article, but a very good one explaining some of the reasons behind query optimizer’s choices on which indexes to use (or not).
- Keeping with oldish articles, Phil Factor’s Temporary Tables in SQL Server is a very good article on temporary tables (and a contender in the 2013 Tribal Awards).
- Aaron Bertrand’s Improve SQL Server Efficiency by Switching to INSTEAD OF Triggers suggests the use of INSTEAD OF triggers as an alternative to AFTER triggers, when enforcing integrity rules, to avoid the need to rollback if the validation fails. By avoiding the need to log and rollback, INSTEAD OF triggers can offer performance improvements over AFTER triggers.
- Patrick Keisler’s Collecting Historical Wait Statistics presents a script that allows for wait statistics persistence even with service restarts.
- As it suits an end of year post, Jayleen Heft’s SQL Server Predictions for 2014 offers SQL Server predictions for 2014 from Brent Ozar, Denny Cherry, Tim Ford, Jen Underwood and Mark Kromer.

Web Design and Development:
- Matthew Beale’s Complex Architectures in Ember is a video presentation covering message passing in Ember.
- Frederik Dohr’s Developing Modular JavaScript Components presents a strategy to evolve unstructured Javascript code to modular, reusable components.
- Bipin Joshi’s 5 HTML5 Features Every Developer Should Know How to Use covers 5 features that are new in HTML5 and should be known by web developers: audio, video and canvas elements, new input types, some miscellaneous form features and custom data attributes.
- Brock Allen’s CORS Support in ASP.NET Web API 2 presents some basic concepts on Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) and explains ASP.NET Web API 2 support.

Big Data / BI :
- Lukas Eder’s Don’t jump the SQL ship just yet addresses some interesting subjects, including “scaling up” vs. “scaling out”, use of in memory databases, centralized vs. distributed architectures, data access from JAVA, dislike of ORM’s, RDBMS evolution and the ubiquity of SQL. A very interesting read.
- Michael Hausenblas’s Open Source SQL-in-Hadoop Solutions: Where Are We? provides a status update of SQL support in available Hadoop solutions.
- Rajesh Makhija’s Microsoft SQL Server: Faster Insights from Any Data presents a technical whitepaper on Microsoft’s BI related technologies.

Software Development:
- Allen Holub’s OO as a Prerequisite to Agile discusses the need to have a model based approach to be successful implementing Agile, the benefits of using such an approach and some of the pitfalls that may result otherwise.
- Mark Levison’s A Tale of Two Daily Scrums reminds of the Daily Scrum’s goals and the need for it not being a simple checklist, but being about team collaboration. It includes links to several other interesting articles on the daily scrum.

Random Interesting Stuff:
- Scott Hanselman’s Scott Hanselman’s 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows is a great, extensive and comprehensive list of software tools for Windows developers and power users.
- Phil Factor’s IT Aphorisms presents an interesting list of, well, IT aphorisms, that can be put to good use in multiple occasions.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading and Happy Holidays.

Here is my selection of the links from the past week.

SQL Server:
- Last week was T-SQL Tuesday week, Waits being this month’s subject. Robert L. Davis was the host, and several interesting posts are included in his roundup: T-SQL Tuesday #49: Wait For It Roundup.
- Basit Farooq’s Understanding SQL Server Query Optimization – Part 3 is the third of a series of four articles on query optimization. The previous 2 articles can be found here and here.
- Jeremiah Peschka’s Keep it Constrained addresses unique, primary key and check constraints in SQL Server, including a smart way to deal with NULLs in unique constraints.
- John Sterrett’s Throwback Thursday #3: SQL Server & Disks presents several very interesting articles on disks,storage systems and SQL Server.
- Tracy McKibben’s Don’t Get Slimed By Bad Parameter Sniffing addresses parameter sniffing, explaining what it is, how it can create performance problems what can be done to overcome such problems.
- Kenneth Fisher’s A better way to find missing indexes presents an interesting script to find missing indexes and present them alongside the queries where their absence can make a difference.
- Jonathan Allen’s I Thought Everyone Did It Like That – SSMS Templates is an interesting article that covers SQL Server Management Studio Templates, showing how they can be useful, how they can be customized through the use of parameters, and how new templates can be added.
- Microsoft’s SQL Server Team SQL Server 2014 Hybrid Cloud Scenarios: Migrating On-Premises SQL Server to Windows Azure Virtual Machines presents one of the new wizards in SQL Server 2014 SSMS,that assists in the deployment of a database to a Windows Azure VM and gives a step by step description of the deployment process, using the wizard.

Web Design and Development:
- Sara Souiedan’s Creating Non-Rectangular Layouts with CSS Shapes is a very detailed and interesting article on CSS Shapes, a current W3C Draft meant to allow inline content to wrap around floats of shape other than the regular floats’ bounding box.
- Sorin Pintilie’s The Line Of Least Resistance is an excellent article that addresses the importance of context in designing an enjoyable experiences for users.
- John Tabita’s How to Keep Web Projects Moving Forward, Part 1 and How to Keep Web Projects Moving Forward, Part 2 addresses common difficulties in web projects and provides advice on how to overcome those difficulties.
- Andi Smith’s Make better websites with browser developer tools provides a set of interesting tips and tricks to help developing better websites, using a varied assortment of tools.
- David Paquette’s Browser Link–Tracking Unused CSS shows how Browser Link, a new feature of Visual Studio 2013, can be used to identify unused CSS in a website.

Software Development:
- Monjurul Habib’s Agile software development methodologies and how to apply them provides an introduction and overview of development methodologies based on Agile.
- Damien Guard’s Probable C# 6.0 features illustrated presents some of the probable new features for the 6.0 version of C#.

Big Data / BI :
- Doug Turnbull’s Codd’s Relational Vision – Has NoSQL Come Full Circle? is a very interesting article that goes back to the original Codd’s work on relational databases, analyzing Codd’s criticism of the database systems that existed at the time, to raise the question of whether we have come full circle. Codd’s original arguments that lead to his proposal ofthe relational database model, are used to warn about the risks of denormalization, while taking advantage of that very denormalization in NoSQL databases.
- Software Engineering Radio’s Episode 199 is a podcast, featuring Michael Stonebraker, a leading MIT database reasearcher. The podcast covers multiple database related subjects of great interest, including “NewSQL” databases.
- Andrew Burst’s Predicting Big Data’s 2014 presents a few predictions about what 2014 can bring to Big Data, from a set of companies working in the field.

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

R4

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

Tag Archives: RDBMS

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