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.

You may have noticed a change in the theme for the blog theme.  I’ve ditched the gray font on white background, which was a bit terrible.  Leave a comment if you like the new theme or if there are other changes I can make to help the reading experience.

Most Popular Article Shared

Last weeks most popular link is a post by Erik Darling from Brent Ozar Unlimited.  It’s an interesting post on some missing index recommendations that were generated in the process of creating indexes.  Something to take a look at and highlights a bit of how SQL Server goes about building indexes.

Last Week’s Popular Posts

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

1. 31 Days of SSIS – The Introduction (578)
2. 31 Days of SSIS as a Book (294)
3. Get Just The Tools: SSMS Download (267)
4. 31 Days of SSIS – Raw Files Are Awesome (1/31) (264)
5. The Side Effect of NOLOCK (186)
6. Looking to SQL Server 2014 High Availability In Standard Edition (155)
7. XQuery for the Non-Expert – Value (140)
8. Security Questions: What permissions are required to create temporary tables? (125)
9. Security Questions: Difference Between db_datawriter and db_ddladmin? (85)
10. 31 Days of SSIS – Generating Row Numbers (23/31) (84)

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. Indexes Helping Indexes [39 clicks]
2. Columnstore Index: What is new in SQL Server 2016? [34 clicks]
3. SQLFamily, I Have An Idea and I Need Your Help [33 clicks]
4. New SSMS Features: Click + Drag and Click + Mouse Scroll [32 clicks]
5. Training Plan for Junior DBAs Learning SQL Server [24 clicks]
6. Explicitly using tempdb with ##tables [23 clicks]
7. How to Parse DBCC MEMORYSTATUS via Powershell [23 clicks]
8. SQL 2016 – It Just Runs Faster: Instant File Initialization [17 clicks]
9. 5 Factors to Consider before Pouring Data in your Data Lake [16 clicks]
10. Advanced Accidental Database Design [16 clicks]
11. New course: Understanding and Using DBCC Commands [16 clicks]
12. PASS Board 2016: Update #2 [16 clicks]
13. SQL Server 2016 features: Live query statistics [15 clicks]
14. VMware CPU Co-Stop and SQL Server Performance (continued) [15 clicks]
15. Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition is now free [15 clicks]
16. Performance Surprises and Assumptions : DATEADD() [15 clicks]
17. XP_CmdShell isn’t Evil [14 clicks]
18. Generate stored procedure that imports array of JSON object in table [12 clicks]
19. SQL Server 2016 outperforms other RDBMS for Data Warehouse [11 clicks]
20. SQL Server 2005 Modernization Checklist [10 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. Not. Quite. There. This Time I Failed the Lab (2011-05-17)
2. Security Questions: What permissions are required to create temporary tables? (2013-05-21)
3. Security Questions: Grant Permissions to All Stored Procedures (2013-05-22)
4. Security Questions: Differences between “Grant” and “With Grant?” (2013-05-23)

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. Drone Over a Middle Ages Festival Taken Down by A Spear | Nerdist [22 clicks]
2. The Privilege of Buying 36 Rolls of Toilet Paper at Once [19 clicks]
3. Eight Things You Probably Didn’t Know You Could Stream On Spotify [17 clicks]
4. This chart shows the age when most people feel the least happy [14 clicks]
5. Mastodon scraps revise US prehistory [13 clicks]
6. IBM’s phase-change memory is faster than flash and more reliable than RAM [12 clicks]
7. Why You Should Be Planning Your Meals [12 clicks]
8. This Incredible Full Scale Lego X-Wing Is the Largest Model In History [12 clicks]
9. Your Cell Phone Absolutely Will Not Give You Brain Cancer [12 clicks]
10. Port Solar Charger [11 clicks]
11. A Step-By-Step Guide to Meal Planning and Prep (2/2) [8 clicks]
12. Creating Your Personal Elevator Pitch [8 clicks]
13. Tesla paid $55 per hour to factory builders [8 clicks]
14. My Most Important Productivity Method [8 clicks]
15. Tesla to raise $1.4 billion with public offering to fund Model 3 production [6 clicks]
16. How to Win Games and Beat People [5 clicks]
17. Tesla will make sure ‘the right thing happens’ after report of underpaid foreign workers [5 clicks]
18. UPS now lets you track packages for real — on an actual map [5 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?