Nov 03

My links of the week – November 3, 2013

 

wasd

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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

Oct 27

My links of the week – October 27, 2013

 

Hekaton

Here are my favorite links from  the last week, on SQL Server, database design and web design . There are a few great articles on Hekaton, its advantages, compromises and even a guide on how to convert stored procedures to take advantage of its huge performance improvement.

  • Merrill Aldrich’s Why Hekaton In-Memory OLTP Truly is Revolutionary provides an excellent analysis of the most relevant features of the in memory OLTP engine component in SQL Server 2014 and explains why he considers them truly revolutionary – “the most significant change in database tech I have seen”.
  • Tony Davis’s What the Hekaton? addresses the compromises required to achieve the huge performance improvement brought by Hekaton, especially those related to referential and data integrity and suggests a possible strategy to use Hekaton without compromising data integrity.
  • To conclude the list of articles related to Hekaton, Daniel Farina’s Migrate to Natively Compiled SQL Server Stored Procedures for Hekaton addresses the issue of migrating stored procedures that reference memory-optimized tables to native compiled ones. The articles gives a full explanation of why this migration should be done, what can be and cannot be done with a natively compiled stored procedure and multiple other things to know about this type of stored procedures. It is an excellent read.
  • Michael Zilberstein’s sys.dm_exec_query_profiles – FAQ provides some answers to questions about the sys.dm_exec_query_profiles DMV in SQL Server 2014, that generated quite a bit of excitement about its potential to provide information about queries as they are executed. The implementation of the DMV both in CTP1 and CTP2 seems to have failed expectations, but there is hope for CTP3.
  • Jason Strate’s Webcast Follow Up: Choosing Your Clustered Index provides a set of resources on choosing clustered indexes, including a recording of the original webcast, a link to the presentation materials and code and the post webcast Q&A. Very interesting material.
  • Solomon Rutzky’s Disk is Cheap! O RLY?, although originally written in 2010, is very much relevant still. The article analyzes the actual cost that may be incurred by choosing the wrong data types, both financially and in terms of performance. The author provides a detailed rationale for being frugal with data types and provides a few simple but valuable recommendations for table design. Really.
  • Mansi Narula’s A Middle Approach to Schema Design in OLTP Applications addresses the need felt by eBay to find a way to respond to a huge growth in the transactional demands on eBay’s databases. The solution chosen was a schema redesign, involving denormalization, that resulted in meaningful performance improvements. The author analyzes the vantages and disadvantages of denormalization and proposes a middle approach, considering the lessons learned during this process. An interesting read.
  • Moving to the area of web development and design, Matthew Carver’s Master responsive design with Modernizr explains how the Javascript library Modernizr can be used to help building a web site that provides the best possible response for whatever browser the visitor may be using, with very little effort.
  • Thierry Koblentz’s Challenging CSS Best Practices is a very interesting and controversial article, where some of the standard practices in web design, based on the “Separation of Concerns” principle are shown to have problems. The author provides alternative solutions to address the perceived problems. The discussion that ensues in the comments to the article is also very interesting.
  • Shawn Jansepar’s Automate Your Responsive Images With Mobify.js discusses possible solutions to the problem of providing images optimized to the device being used to access a website. The element as possible solution is shown to create a different set of problems, and that leads to the API in the Javascript library Mobify.js. The advantages resulting from the combination of Mobify.js and the element are also discussed. A very interesting read.
  • Nick Pettit’s Bootstrap 3: Why all the hype? describes some of Bootstrap 3 most impressive features, in the author’s opinion. These include the new flat design, the new grid system with different levels of “responsiveness”, the Carousel slider, the responsive models and the possibility to disable the responsive features, if anyone would ever want that. A good read.
  • Just before concluding this week’s selection of links, Phil Factor’s A Knight’s Tale addresses some of the lessons to be learned from Knight’s Capital loss of almost half a billion dollars,as a result of a succession of IT bad practices, culminating with a deployment gone wrong.

That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading.