Throughout the week, I read a lot of blog-posts, articles, etc., that has to do with things that interest me
- data science
- data in general
- distributed computing
- SQL Server
- transactions (both db as well as non db)
- and other “stuff”
This is the “roundup” of the posts that has been most interesting to me, this week.
Distributed Computing
- From Microliths to Microsystems: Jonas Bonér at QCon London. Jonas Boner discusses micro-services and points out that quite a few micro-services are really microliths (mini monoliths). A micro-service needs to be designed as a distributed system.
- Concurrent and Distributed Programming in the Future. Joe Duffy, who previously was Director of Engineering for Languages and Compilers at Microsoft, gives a keynote at QCon London where he talks about concurrent programming. I am so looking forward to the video and slides of this keynote.
- Joe Duffy’s Blog. So I didn’t come across this blog this week, but having mentioned Joe Duffy above, I have to point out his blog which is a goldmine if you are interested in concurrent programming and distributed systems. His series of posts about Midori is a must read.
- Conference Recap: Google Cloud Next. As the title says; a recap of Google’s Cloud Next conference.
SQL Server
- SQLskills SQL101: Temporary table misuse. A post in the SQLSkills SQL101 series, by Paul Randal, about temp-tables and how they can be mis-used.
- Comparing performance of data access libraries using StackExchange/Dapper benchmark. Disclaimer: I detest ORM’s with a vengeance. So, some benchmarking by Jovan Popovic, from Microsoft, comparing different data access libraries. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, but I am a happy “bunny”.
- The Vietnam of Computer Science. A post I read a long, long time ago - but as it has some touch-points with the post above I thought I’d share it. Ted Neward, an ex colleague of mine, wrote this post back in 2006 where he compared ORM’s with the Vietnam war.
- SQLskills SQL101: Indexing Basics. Another post from the SQLSkills SQL101 series. This one is by Kimberly Tripp, and it talks about indexes.
- #TSQL2SDAY: The string length server. A tongue in cheek entry for T-SQL Tuesday by Ewald. As a side note, as I wrote in lasts week roundup, read his blog if you want to get into the “nitty gritty” of SQL Server internals.
- Microsoft SQL Server R Services - Internals I. This post is part 2 of my series about Microsoft SQL Server R Services. This post is about the internals, more specifically about what happens in the SQL engine when you execute
sp_execute_external_script.
Streaming
- Big Data Processing with Apache Spark – Part 1: Introduction. This article is the first in a series named “Big Data Processing with Apache Spark”. A lot of very useful articles!
Data Science
- Neural Networks: How they work, and how to train them in R. Neural networks are so “in” at the moment in the data science world. This post by Revolution Analytics summarizes various R packages useful for neural networks and points to a video about neural networks.
- Microsoft Data Amp—where data gets to work. Information and registration for an upcoming Microsoft virtual conference about Microsoft’s data platform.
- Monte Carlo Planning Improves Decision Making. An article which discusses some innovative uses for Monte Carlo simulation.
- doAzureParallel: Take advantage of Azure’s flexible compute directly from your R session. This post introduces doAzureParallel, an R package which allows R users to scale up their work to take advantage of cloud compute.
That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoy what I did put together. If you have ideas for what to cover, please comment on this post or ping me.