Interesting Stuff - Week 11

Throughout the week, I read a lot of blog-posts, articles, etc., that has to do with things that interest me

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.

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.

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!

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.