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.