This Week I Learned - Week #162

This Week I Learned -

* Azure SQL Database Advisor and the Performance dashboard are now generally available in the Azure portal. Database Advisor helps you to improve the performance of your databases by providing intelligent tuning recommendations that are based on historical usage. To get recommendations a database needs to have about a week of usage, and within that week there needs to be some activity. There also needs to be some consistent activity as well. The SQL Database Advisor can more easily optimize for consistent query patterns than it can for random spotty bursts of activity.

* Only business entities in Australia & China  can create services in the Australia Azure regions & China Azure regions respectively. Companies not doing business in Australia or China cannot create resources in those Azure regions.

* Most cloud vendors including Azure only charge for egress (outbound) data and not ingress (inbound). Primarily it removes barriers for customers to move data into the cloud which then encourages applications to be placed in the cloud service to use the data and of course encourages even more data to be placed. Azure charges for data storage and the services running in Azure using that data. This is known as "data gravity", the services follow the data. Additionally most customer data is egress, for example a request is made to a site which is very small but the returned data is much larger - Windows IT Pro

* On May 10, 2016, Azure became generally available from datacenters in Toronto and Quebec City

* Stack Overflow Q&A is deploy roughly 25 times per day to development (our CI build) and to production about 5-10 times on a typical day.

* Microsoft Cognitive Services is the new name for Project Oxford

* Nice disclaimer in the free eBook from Microsoft Press, Migrating SQL Database to Azure - "Azure is evolving rapidly, as is SQL Database. Therefore, the screenshots and all information regarding the pricing, the capacity limits, and the features are accurate only as of the date this content is written"

* This 28-page document from Facebook details how both editors and computer algorithms play roles in the process of picking what should appear in the “Trending Topics” section of users’ Facebook pages.

* While algorithms determine the exact mix of topics displayed to each person, based on that user’s past actions on Facebook, a team of people is largely responsible for the overall mix of which topics should — and more important, should not — be shown in Trending Topics - NY Times

* Amazon's video posting ser­vice is de­signed for “pro­fes­sional video pro­duc­ers,” but its only re­quire­ments are that the videos be high def­i­ni­tion and have closed-cap­tion­ing for the hear­ing im­paired.

* Snapdeal currently covers 28,000 pin codes in India

* About a year into its app-only experiment, Myntra, widely seen as India’s top online retailer of fashion apparel and clothes, has announced it is reversing that strategy to allow users the flexibility of shopping on its website once more - Forbes

* 38 executives of HDFC Mutual Fund and 15 execs at ICICI MF earn Rs 1 crore or more.

* "One second, while I pull up yet another app!" - National Informatics Centre (NIC) is developing  a mobile application that will allow automobile owners to display their vehicle registration certificate, driving licence and insurance documents on their smartphones. NIC is working on M-Parivahan, an app which is touted as having better features than the Telangana transport department's MWallet (developed by Radikal Tribe, currently has 5,692 users). The app is likely to be rolled out pan-India in six months - ET

* ..genius lies not in simply being able to execute the complex but in imagining the simple path no one else had discovered

* "Google has provided enormous benefits to the society, but there are also enormous risks with it. All of our devices spew so much metadata now that it's all swept up and correlated." - Douglas Crockford

* From the movie "Ship of Theseus":
- You think you are a person but you are a colony. A microcosm which has ten times more bacteria in its body... than it has human cells.
- A monk goes to a sandwich seller and says, "Make me one with all"
- Which email can attain cyber enlightenment? One with no attachments