Choosing a model - Tabular vs. Multidimensional

Understand the limitations of the Tabular model and when Multidimensional model implementation is more appropriate.

It isn't as simple as Distinct Count = Tabular, Parent-Child = Multidimensional...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh994774.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh212940.aspx

If you're still using Office 2007 or SQL 2008 R2, it might be a bit easier to make a choice...

Turing SQL Server - Is your power model sucking performance?

As stated in this hilarious Knowledge Base article, changing your power options to “High Performance” (an option Microsoft conveniently hides under a “more” menu to prevent you from accidentally finding it) resolves this issue by using more power all the time. In return, you need to accept that global warming is entirely your fault. Amazingly, no performance analyser of SQL server suggests you change this option.

Sometimes the simplest things can drastically change performance.  There should be an interview-style wizard or report for those who are new to setting up a server that would interrogate WMI to find out which settings may be sub-optimal for your usage scenario.

http://www.masterofmalt.com/software-development/blog/why-microsoft-windows-server-2012-produces-slow-and-inconsistent-sql-query-speeds/

cURL Super Powers

cURL is an extremely powerful tool that you can use, available on many platforms including Linux or Windows (via tools like Cygwin). It's powered by libcurl. Wget is another like-minded utility to download files recursively.

Here's an example to parallel download all 150+ Microsoft eBooks available from this site.

curl http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mssmallbiz/archive/2013/06/28/almost-150-free-microsoft-ebooks-covering-windows-7-windows-8-office-2010-office-2013-office-365-office-web-apps-windows-server-2012-windows-phone-7-windows-phone-8-sql-server-2008-sql-server-2012-sharepoint-server-2010-s.aspx | grep -o -E "http://ligman.me/[0-9A-Za-z]+" | uniq | xargs -P 5 -n 1 wget --content-disposition

So what's it doing?

First, download (or curl) the url specified.
Second,search the second URL for a matching regular expression.
Third, uniq(ue) the resultset.
Fourth, xargs to deal with the large parameter list
Fifth, wget to download the resulting URLs in a parallel fashion.

Why use both tools when they appear to do similar things?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/636339/what-is-better-curl-or-wget

If you're a Windows user, and can't install Cygwin, Powershell can do some of the things that wget can do.

http://superuser.com/questions/25538/what-is-the-windows-equivalent-of-wget

(new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('http://www.xyz.net/file.txt','C:\tmp\file.tx‌​t')

Here's a ton of GNU manuals, including wget.