It’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog post.  After the new year, I had been trying to decide on a better way to share the Monday and Friday blog posts that I’ve done for the last couple of years.  Of course, analysis paralysis and my lacking php skills got in the way with coming up with a good solution.  Fortunately, a little Coke and a long evening finally solved that issues.  And the result is this new weekly post that combines both of the posts into a single post.

The nice thing about getting this piece done for the blog is that I’ve gotten a few other things taken care of and will be posting updates to my monthly checklist and indexing scripts fairly soon.

If you like the content you see here, follow me on twitter (@StrateSQL). This is a good chance to keep the conversation going on the data platform technology and career blogs and articles that appear in this summary post throughout the week.

Most Popular Article Shared

Last weeks most popular link is an interview questions article by Zoe Henry that appears on Inc.  In her article, Zoe focuses on some of the stealthy, or less position specific questions that sometimes come up in interviews.  The point of these questions is not to find the right answer, but to understand how you as an interviewee responds and thinks through the questions.  If you are interviewing, on either side of the table, check these out because building teams is often more about how a person addresses a problem than the expertise they have in the subject.

Reading: "8 Stealth Interview Questions That Reveal True Character" http://t.co/o22PcSSUTu #career

— Jason Strate (@StrateSQL) April 24, 2015

Last Week’s Popular Posts

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

1. Get Just The Tools: SSMS Download (720)
2. 31 Days of SSIS – The Introduction (568)
3. 31 Days of SSIS as a Book (404)
4. 31 Days of SSIS – Raw Files Are Awesome (1/31) (354)
5. The Side Effect of NOLOCK (168)
6. Looking to SQL Server 2014 High Availability In Standard Edition (166)
7. Determining Filegroup for a Table (164)
8. XQuery for the Non-Expert – Value (162)
9. Security Questions: Grant Permissions to All Stored Procedures (158)
10. 31 Days of SSIS – Generating Row Numbers (23/31) (137)

Last Week’s Top 5 “Reading” Links

Along with the most popular link, here are the top five 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. 8 Stealth Interview Questions That Reveal True Character [45 clicks]
2. Working with 154 million records on Azure Table Storage – the story of “Have I been pwned?” [24 clicks]
3. 2015 Program Committee [17 clicks]
4. Azure A-SERIES, D-SERIES and G-SERIES: Consistent Performances and Size Change Considerations [15 clicks]
5. Azure Stream Analytics Overview [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. Analyze This – Analyze Your Indexes – Part 2 (2009-04-20)
2. Analyze This – Analyze Your Indexes – Part 3 (2009-04-21)
3. Chapter Review – MVP Deep Dive Chapter 11 (2010-04-21)
4. The Power of N (2010-04-22)
5. What is the size of your index? (2009-04-23)
6. Analyze This – Analyze Your Indexes – Part 4 (2009-04-23)
7. Restoring Azure SQL Database to a Local Server (2013-04-23)
8. 5 SQL Server White Papers Every DBA Should Read (2013-04-25)
9. Find Query Plans That May Utilize Parallelism (2009-04-27)

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. Details of ‘Star Wars: Rogue One’ revealed [19 clicks]
2. Giant 6ft Water Balloon – The Slow Mo Guys [18 clicks]
3. Wonder Bomb [14 clicks]
4. Everyone Invited To 10-Year-Old’s Shakopee Birthday [13 clicks]
5. Melon Fragmentation at 2500fps – The Slow Mo Guys [8 clicks]
6. An Oiled Up Go-Go Dancing Jason Statham Cannot Be Unseen [6 clicks]
7. Hawaii Chair Infomercial [4 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?