Recommended Intel Processors For SQL ’14, Should Indexes Be In The Key Or Included, Comparing Windows Azure VM Performance

Grouped Concatenation in SQL Server and Grouped Concatenation: Ordering and Removing Duplicates
In these two related blog posts, Aaron Bertrand ( b | t ) of SQL Sentry takes on the safest and most efficient ways to perform grouped concatenation in SQL Server. Then he follows up with a closer look at some additional requirements for typical grouped concatenation queries in SQL Server.

Recommended Intel Processors for SQL Server 2014 Workloads
Glenn Berry ( b | t ) of SQLskills continues his series on hardware selection, outlining his recommended processors from Intel for your SQL Server 2014 workloads. Especially interesting to me were the details showing which processors excelled at serial performance while showing other processors that excelled at parallel performance.

Should new index columns be in the key, or included?
Erin Stellato ( b | t ) of SQLskills compares the performance impact of adding additional columns to an index, either as an added column in a composite key or as an added column without statistics in an INCLUDE list – with interesting results.