Welcome to this weeks weekly round up of links, SQL Server and other news. Its been a busy week on the work front but still made time for some reading. The #Build2016 announcements were very interesting and the most interesting are included here.

David is currently in the process of updating his eBook on the Azure SQL Databases to reflect the changes in the new portal. He will have an initial draft soon and we'll have a blog post announcing the release when its available. Stay tuned…

This weeks links include

SQL Server

SQL Server Developer Edition has been made free. SQL Server developer edition is a fully featured version of SQL Server, basically its Enterprise edition but not licensed for production. There has until this week been a small charge for the edition approximately $/£/€50 it has now be announced this will free. SQL Server 2014 developer edition and the up and coming SQL Server 2016 developer edition will be free.

Dan Buskirk talks about querying SQL Server data from Spark with Scala -

An interesting read on indexes helping indexes

Big Data and Analytics

Some useful R-Studio add-ins

Cloud

Amazon RDS for SQL introduces support for Windows Authentication 

Micrsoft Azure database team host an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session this Friday 8th April

Other

The might Newport County are 'probably' safe but a 1-0  defeat away at Yeovil was very disappointing