The Ebb & Flow of Community Participation

It’s an interesting moment when you discover the SQL community (or any other I suppose). It’s the moment of finding the door in a dark room that leads to the next level of the career game. Easy to find once you know it’s there, but until you find it not obvious at all. Joining is easy, […]

Worth Reading – Something I learned while unemployed by Rod Falanga

SQLServerCentral recently published Something I learned while unemployed. Written by Rod Falanga, it has lessons worth learning about making time to stay current and the difference between knowing concepts and implementing them.

SSC Editorial: How to Keep Up with SQL Server

How to Keep Up With SQL Server ran as the editorial of the day on July 31st. Modest amount of comments, but in particular I made a note to come back to the topic of early adopters vs being stuck with a late/never adopting employee. Both are interesting scenarios. Imagine though that SQL Server ends […]

Editorial: Cloud Skills

Cloud Skills is the editorial today, thinking about the changes we see in the boxed product versus the cloud and asking – which way do we go if we want to stay relevant, not just now, but in five years. Is our path safe and sure? Or is there a fork in the road? I […]

SSC Editorial: The Product Centric Career

The Product Centric Career is my latest editorial for SQLServerCentral, this one from the perspective of my own career and how I sort of made decisions that led me to focus on SQL Server.

Skills I Used Last Week

Ever thought about what your average week looks like? What are the real core skills your environment uses every day or every week? I tried to write down all the variations I did last week, during an admittedly slow week: Adhoc full backup of a database Restore database with different name on same server Restore […]

Back to Plan A

At the end of April I posted a bit on my change in plans and what I thought I’d be doing for the next few months, with part of that being some uncertainty on both sides about what the work would be and if it would be a good fit. The initial work went very […]

Looking Forward

For the past couple months I’ve been looking forward to a 5 week break, a chance to think about what I’ve learned and what I want to do next. I haven’t take 2 weeks in a row off in almost 3 years, so a nice vacation, some thinking, some yard work, that seemed like a […]

Looking Back-Part 2

As I re-read the original Looking Back post I realized I didn’t include anything about the fear part – stepping away from an established career focus to do something else for a while. I’ve been a SQL guy for a long time, I started using SQL Server in 1998 and I was working with data […]

MVP Status: Renewed

I was just answering an email and realized I’m behind on posting on a few topics, one of them the notification last week that I was renewed as a SQL Server MVP for another year. Always nice to be recognized, nice to have something for the resume, and of course the other SQL MVP’s make […]