Did You Read It? for April, 2012

This blog post mentions a few of the most interesting articles that I have read recently, or recently-ish, with a little bit of my commentary on each article.

What's the difference between a temp table and a table variable in SQL Server? This is the best answer I have seen.

Here is a short and sweet bit of PowerShell code that can make a persons life a little more enjoyable by providing some feedback to long-running processes.
This is from 2010, but I'd never seen it until now. I would temper it with Malcolm Gladwell's view that it takes 10,000 hours to become expert at something. (I am not sure if Mr. Gladwell originated that thought, but he has popularized it.) I'm not so sure that 'polyglot developers' will know everything there is to know about all of the languages on their resume, plus Active Directory administration, plus database clustering, plus SAN administration, plus VMWare, plus being up on the latest half-dozen NOSQL darlings, but maybe they don't need to be. Do we really need all of the hyper-specialization that we have bred into IT in the last 20 years? Perhaps we are only ensuring that specialists have a hard time pulling their narrowly-defined career out of the weeds when their chosen technology becomes obsolete or when that up-and-coming thing fizzles out. What if we just invest in smart people that are quick learners?
This caught my eye. Microsoft is doubling down on getting more businesses to put their data on Azure. Small businesses aren't usually the ones who are concerned with certifications. Medium and large businesses are.