Friday, 30 December 2016

As one year ends another one starts...


My last post was my thoughts around SQL Server over the past 12 months and looking forward to 2017. This post, the last one of 2016, is about what I am planning to be doing next year and what direction I hope to be moving DTA towards.
Firstly there’s SQL Clarity, the humble little blog that hit well over 20k views this year. OK, that number might seem insignificant compared to some but for me it was a huge milestone; especially considering the amount of time I spent away from writing.
So what about 2017? Well the first thing to spring to mind is the monitoring script series to conclude. It’s at a nice halfway point at the moment with a couple of parts on wait statistics to publish very soon. Next year will see more series posts as I have a couple of topics that I really want to put out there as soon as I can! I’ll also be linking more to articles that I’ve been reading and really getting a wide range of content out there.
There will be the welcome return of the Q&A sessions. I had always hoped these would be much more of a regular feature, the feedback was always positive and there were certainly a lot of awesome people interested in doing them and once more, huge thanks to Kevin and Sergey for contributing!! If you are interested then keep a look out as I will be reaching out to the SQL community for volunteers very soon!
There is also an announcement which I am really excited about that I could be making as early as the beginning of January so keep your eyes peeled for that.
Then there is DTA; not to be confused with the tuning advisor by the way! For those that don’t know I entered the world of consulting this year finally fulfilling a long term ambition of mine. I’m delighted to have got to this point and if I had to thank everyone who has helped me on the way we would be here for a long time. Anyway, I hope you know who you are and how grateful I am.
DTA itself will start to build next year. There are a couple of areas that we will be focusing on to begin with but before anything else happens the online presence needs to be put into place so that will be happening very early on next year. It will be a very separate entity to the SQL Clarity blog; the latter will be much more from a personal perspective. Needless to say, there will be lots happening over the next couple of months as far as DTA is concerned.
As for technology, there is so much to be looking into its difficult to pin down a specific plan at the moment (I am after all reading three books in parallel!). Obviously SQL2016 comes with lots of bells and whistles to look into and get accustomed to using. vNext as well is something I will be spending lots of time with, the adaptive query processing features are a particular area I want to keep a keen eye on.
There's also R. I've spent a little bit of time using R this year and already I'm hooked. My personal opinion is that there will be another BI explosion next year so it makes sense to hone those skills in that area.
All in all it has been an amazing year and a big personal wish of mine is to be much more involved in the SQL community over the next year, whilst it might seem that I have enough on my plate I’m sure that isn’t the case, so I am looking forward to seeing what is in store on that front!
So all that is left is for me to say a huge thank to everyone. I really hope you all have happy and successful 2017’s!
All the very best,
David.
 
 
 
 

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