It’s Monday time for this week’s blog and twitter round-up for last week. If you haven’t already, follow me on twitter (@StrateSQL). This is a good chance to catch up on data platform technology and career related information I’ve shared in the last week and activity on this blog.

Most Popular Article Shared

Last week’s most popular link is an article from Redmond Magazine on some changes coming to Microsoft IT stack.  The changes have been in the works for a while, and realistically, if you aren’t haven’t noticed yet, the boat has sailed on PowerShell and if you haven’t started learning it, the time is now.

Last Week’s Popular Posts

The most popular posts on this blog in the week are:

1. 31 Days of SSIS – The Introduction (906)
2. 31 Days of SSIS – Raw Files Are Awesome (1/31) (383)
3. Get Just The Tools: SSMS Download (307)
4. 31 Days of SSIS as a Book (293)
5. Looking to SQL Server 2014 High Availability In Standard Edition (171)
6. 31 Days of SSIS – Using Breakpoints (2/31) (135)
7. XQuery for the Non-Expert – Value (131)
8. The Side Effect of NOLOCK (125)
9. Security Questions: Difference Between db_datawriter and db_ddladmin? (98)
10. Determining Filegroup for a Table (87)

Last Week’s Top 20 “Reading” Links

Along with the most popular link, here are the top twenty items relating to SQL Server, technology and careers that were shared last week. If you missed them throughout the week, here’s the opportunity to get caught up on some items that other’s read after I linked them out.

1. Major Changes Coming from Microsoft Will Impact Your Career [71 clicks]
2. Microsoft is done playing catch-up with AWS [52 clicks]
3. What end of support for SQL Server 2005 means for CIOs [39 clicks]
4. The Surprising Danger of Being Good at Your Job [37 clicks]
5. The Dangers of Indexing Temp Tables [33 clicks]
6. Letting Good People Go When It’s Time [30 clicks]
7. DBA Morning Checklist with PBM 3.0 [17 clicks]
8. Sell Your Time, or Sell a Solution, But NEVER Both [16 clicks]
9. Congrats to Our PASS Booth Prize Winner [16 clicks]
10. Is My SQL Server Too Big for Virtualization or the Cloud? [15 clicks]
11. #datahug [14 clicks]
12. SQL Server DBAs: Today, Let’s Thank Steve Jones. [14 clicks]
13. Poor Data Modeling – T-SQL Tuesday #72 [12 clicks]
14. Deep Habits: Three Recent Daily Plans [10 clicks]
15. When You Should Design “Badly” On Purpose [10 clicks]
16. Azure SQL Database Threat Detection now in Public Preview [10 clicks]
17. 7 Times You Need to Slow Down to Reduce Stress [10 clicks]
18. Load data into Azure Search with zero code required [9 clicks]
19. Visual Awesomeness Unlocked – The Word Cloud [8 clicks]
20. Leaders in the oil and gas industry are looking to IoT to overcome the economic pressures of the oil price downturn [8 clicks]

Last Week’s Posts From Previous Years

Sometimes the most useful content on a blog wasn’t written in the past week, it’s often other articles shared in the past that resonate with readers. Check out the following links that I published in past years over the past week:

1. XQuery for the Non-Expert – Exist (2010-11-23)
2. XQuery for the Non-Expert – Resources (2010-11-24)
3. Do You Protect Your Passwords? (2010-11-26)
4. Querying Performance Counters in SQL Server (2012-11-27)
5. Lost in Translation – Deprecated System Tables – sysreferences (2012-11-28)
6. Lost in Translation – Deprecated System Tables – sysremotelogins (2012-11-29)
7. Lost in Translation – Deprecated System Tables – sysservers (2012-11-29)
8. Lost in Translation – Deprecated System Tables – sysprotects (2012-11-30)

Other Items Shared

Of course, no week would be complete without a few off-topic links. These have nothing to do with technology or your career, but they are interesting and worth a second look.

1. Microsoft cuts thousands of movies and games to 10 cents for Windows 10 [33 clicks]
2. Japanese Department Store May Want to Look Up the Word ‘Fucking’ [30 clicks]
3. Jenna Coleman has left Doctor Who, here’s who should replace her [16 clicks]
4. World’s Ten Most Dangerous Volcanoes Identified [13 clicks]
5. Millenium Falcon in gingerbread [8 clicks]
6. Bungie Weekly Update – 11/25/2015 [7 clicks]
7. 4 Ways To Get People To Care About The Ocean [6 clicks]
8. Quadruple Amputee Veteran Doesn’t Lose Optimistic Outlook On Life [5 clicks]
9. This robot is learning how to say “no” to humans [3 clicks]
10. ‘Do You Fear Intelligent Robots?’ [0 clicks]

Got something you think I should read and share, leave a comment below. Also, if you want to see all of the links that were tweeted out last week?