Year 2011 in review, SQL Server, blogging, and random thoughts…

Another year behind us

I’d like to take the opportunity to say thank you to all of the folks who happened to have stumbled upon my site over the past year, and I appreciate the emails, feedback, and comments.  When I started blogging a few years back, I had originally used my site to post assignments and lectures from my classes at North Lake College. I quickly found that I really liked jotting down things that I had worked on throughout the day working with SQL Server, so I started blogging.  It’s been nice to receive a note from someone thanking me for helping them solve a problem. Here are a few of my thoughts and feelings about our landscape as we work with our great product and head towards Microsoft SQL Server 2012.

Job/Work, and stuff

I’m not consulting anymore, and am enjoying the good life. Consulting is great, but it gets old after awhile. Nice to have a place to call home. I’m working at a small company in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex, and enjoy casual dress every day, a group of cool developers to work with, and bleeding-edge technology. I’m the only database guy here, so I get to do what I like, which happens to be anything from performance tuning, to SSIS, to Mirroring…really, just about anything in the database space I guess.  The devs are also going to give me some assignments programming middle-tier business objects in c#, something that I’ve always found fascinating.

Blogging and content at my site

Blogging has been fun again as always.  I enjoy adding posts and hope that I am able to help someone out somewhere down the road. The traffic on this blog is incredible, and I want to thank you for stopping by. Send me an email and loop me in on what you’re working on…I’d be interested in hearing of others’ experiments or proof of concepts.

As I am always quick to point out, I am no self-proclaimed expert. I’m not a Microsoft MVP or MCM now, and probably never will be. I don’t hobnob with the guys over on SQLBlog.com, nor am I personal friends with the pros over at SQLSkills.com.  I was an acquaintance with a guy up in Redmond on the SQL engine team, but I think I bugged him too much with so many questions that he quit answering my emails. I speak some at events, but haven’t in the past couple of years. I am, though, a SQL Server guy with about 15 years experience, including 8 years with a global app-dev shop building some really great database applications for large companies around Dallas. I also like to geek with SQL Server and always enjoy expanding my own ideas or those of others. Not everything you read here has been proven-out, so take the ideas at face value, and test and expand on them within your own environments.

Observations and Outlook

SQL Server guys are still very passionate about what they do no doubt! I get a kick out of the messages in forums, and emails in the SQL users groups. I hope that for this next year we continue to take that compassion and excitement and build for the good of the entire SQL Server community. We have a great group among us.

Goals for 2012

Here’s my short list of goals for 2012:

• Get better at SSAS and improve on what I learned in 2011
• Pass the SQL 2012 certs when they come out
• Make it to some the SQL Server User Group meetings in Dallas
• Blog lots on SQL Server 2012
• Work more with Hadoop
• Virtualize my entire network. I just got my Active Directory box on a .vhd :)
• Build a server with 32 GB RAM :)

Things are getting better each day

For those readers allowing me to come into their domain, I am thankful for the opportunity and appreciate your stopping by. I wish you and yours the best in 2012 and hope to meet you down the road at an event.

Thanks for reading,

Lee Everest

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