I am taking a day off from curation today due to extended travel. Curation will proceed tomorrow as normal.

Merry Christmas to all.  If Christmas isn’t your bag, happy Monday.

Curation resumes tomorrow with a few long-read items, and then resumes for real on Wednesday.

Because today is Thanksgiving, there will be no curation.  Curated SQL will return either tomorrow or Monday, depending upon when I wake up from my turkey coma.

Happy 4th of July.  Because today is a day for eating hot dogs and blowing stuff up, our normally scheduled curation is on hold.  We’ll pick up once more tomorrow.

In the meantime, stand by for a couple larger links.

It’s Memorial Day in the US today, so Curated SQL will go into holiday mode, where we cover old but good works.  We’ll be back tomorrow with the normal fare.

Today is New Year’s Day observed, so instead of linking to blog posts, there will be a couple links to academic papers coming up.

Today marks the last day of PASS Summit for 2016.  Unfortunately, the curation staff became wrapped up in the excesses of this conference and will wake up in a couple hours wondering why the alarm clock is going off so early.  Curation will continue this upcoming Monday.

Today is Labor Day in the United States.  Because most Curated SQL readers have the day off, I’m going to link to some longer-form and more timeless material.

Curated SQL is on semi-holiday for Memorial Day.  Instead of posting new links to items of interest in the wide world of data, I want to point out a couple longer works that I normally would not be able to talk about given the site’s motif.  If you’re in the office on a slow day, here are a few items that will get you through.

Tony Davis tells us what makes for a compelling article:

As an author, it’s a mistake to make wild assumptions about what the reader already knows about the technology, and why it’s useful. Don’t just ‘show the rooms’, but explain why they are interesting and how they might be used.

Beyond these fundamentals, I’ve written before about the simple ‘rules’ for writing a compelling blog post, and of the need to avoid hyperbole, colloquialisms, and acronym-overload, in favour of simple, plain English that can be understood internationally.

I’ll take a moment to talk about what makes you likely to show up on Curated SQL.  My expected reader is someone who has a few minutes to kill during the day and is looking for technical content.  They might occasionally have more time to dig into interesting topics, but more frequently, I’m imagining somebody on a pre-lunch coffee break.  To make things easier for those readers, I’m looking for four things:

1. Is the post concise?  Coffee breaks won’t last long enough to watch a webinar.  This is most flexible criterion; if it’s interesting but a bit lengthy, I’m still liable to include it.
2. Is the post technical?  We’re geeks; we want to learn something even on coffee break.  Non-technical posts can be great, but they aren’t really in the Curated SQL purview.
3. Is the post at least somewhat novel?  If I’ve linked to someone taking a cursory look at Querystore, I’m probably not going to link to another overview of that product unless there’s something new in there.  With that said, “novel” is a hard goal; what’s new to me might be old hat to you, so there’s a balancing act here.
4. Is the post well-written?  Poor writing makes technical content more difficult to understand, so sometimes I’ll skip an otherwise-interesting technical post and wait for somebody else to post a better version.

With that said, I gladly accept submissions via Twitter (@curatedsql).