General

It’s half way through 2008 and I’m not sure where the year went. It feels like it was Christmas just the other week. Being half way through the year, I thought I’d do a quick look back over what has happened so far.

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Just a very quick post, so no one thinks I fell off the edge of the planet.

This blog just passed 2000 hits today. Considering the 1000 mark was passed just over a month ago, that’s really, really good. I’m also up to 15 rss readers, which is quite encouraging

On the downside, I’m swamped with real work, work for university,  prep for my roleplaying game and an assortment of other stuff. Hopefully there’ll be a post up by end of week.

This site hit 1000 reads yesterday. Not bad for a blog that’s about 4 months old. In other news, I’m also now blogging from grounding.co.za, although less regularly than here.

Thanks everyone.

A happy new year to everyone. All of the best for 2008.

May your databases be normalised, your queries be fast and your servers always on-line

I thought I’d take a quick look back over the last two months, see how I faired on what I set out to do.

• Finish 2 database books by the end of the year – I didn’t manage to finish either, though I started both the ones I said I’d read, and a third one. Part of the problem is that I was studying for an exam until mid december

• Write at least 1 blog post a week here – Looking back I see that I wrote 8 posts in 8 weeks, however one was decidedly not SQL related and a second was just a comment on an exam. Not too bad.

• Listen to at least 1 SQL related podcast a week – This one was easy. I listened to a mixture of sswug.org, SQL Down Under and some HanselMinutes, just for a change.

Now for the next 6 months.

• Read and finish one database book every 2 months. I don’t think I’m going to be able to do more than this, especially since I have a thesis to write.
• Read at least one C# book
• One blog post a week
• One SQL or development related podcast a week.

We’ll see in 6 months how well this goes.

So…

I issued some of my colleagues a challenge this morning.In the vein of the ‘Become a better developer in 6 months’ idea that was going around the net a few months back, I asked them what they were going to do in what’s left of this year to become better DBAs.

Following the idea of ‘make something public and you’ll go through with it’ idea, here are my intentions for the remainder of the year:

• Finish 2 database books by the end of the year. The two I’m looking at are ‘Guru’s guide to SQL architecture and internals’ and ‘Practical troubleshooting’, The first is written by Ken Henderson, the second is edited by him
• Write at least 1 blog post a week here. This is the one I’m most likely to have trouble with.
• Listen to at least 1 SQL related podcast a week. I’m open to suggestions for good SQL-related podcasts.

I finally set up an Feedburner account, as you may notice in the sidebar.

Anyone who’s got already got a subscription, please could you change your feed reader to look at the new address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SqlInTheWild

Thanks, and apologies for any inconvenience

I’ve been considering a blog for a while and I decided to finally take the plunge.

So, what’s this blog all about?

Well, mainly it’s going to be about SQL Server. I’m a SQL developer and my main interest is around performance tuning and optimisation. Other people make the database work, I make it work fast.

There will be occasional diversions into other interests from time to time, but mainly I’ll be writing about SQL Server

Let’s get this show on the road and see how it turns out.