"Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive." - Miracle Max, The Princess Bride
A new year is upon us and that inevitably means that there must be a second Tuesday of the month again. Which means it's T-SQL Tuesday again.David Howard (blog|twitter) is acting as the Master of Ceremonies for the start of the 2012 volume of T-SQL Tuesday and his topic is "Second Chances", much like Westley got in the scene from "The Princess Bride" mentioned at the top. The theme this month is to revisit any of the previous 25 topics and write a little about one of them - without recycling your own or someone else's previous musings.
Before I begin, let me tell you a little story. Once upon a date/time, a young DBA was faced with a Puzzling Situation. He had been having a rough time with this Relationship with his I/O subsystem. For all the Reporting he'd been doing trying to work out what was wrong, he hadn't had much luck. He felt like such a BLOB. He didn't really care though, because it was Summertime, and after picking up his kids from Getting Schooled, he was off for some good old fashioned Beach Time. He had all of his vacation plans Indexed and organized and even had the Misconception that his DBA Skills wouldn't be needed while he was away. However, the Business Wants what the Business thinks it wants and apart from these Resolutions, he was soon paged by his Automated Systems, and had to get on the phone and Aggregate and APPLY his knowledge to help fix a problem with a misbehaving CTE. Thankfully there weren't any Disasters while was away because of the Best Practices he employed - making sure that there was not any Crap Code in the system really helped. His monitoring data was nicely Presented and Joined with some clever Procedures and Functions he was able to Trick his way to a good vacation.
OK, it's a convoluted and long winded story, but hidden in the links above you'll find all 25 of the previous topics embedded for your reference :) Most of them link directly to the roundup / summary but there's one or two where I just couldn't find the darn thing.
As you might have guessed from the topic, I was thinking I might revisit #14 (Resolutions). Being that it's the start of a new year, visiting the list of "Technical Resolutions" is probably not a bad way to get the show on the road. So, what are my technical resolutions for 2012?
- Attend PASS Summit 2012 - My first ever PASS Summit was 2011 and I came away with such a mental overload that I've probably forgotten half of what I learned. Which leads nicely into ...
- Review the PASS Summit DVD's - I have all eight of them on my desk (they arrived last Tuesday as I was writing the draft of this post). I need to pay particular attention to the sessions I was in and go over all of it again - and then go over the sessions I did NOT attend.
- Try to be more active on this blog, making at least one post a week.
- Upgrade my Oracle credentials. (It's T-SQL post, but this is definitely on my list of things to do this year). Currently sitting certified for 9i, should really try to upgrade to at least 10g, if not 11g.
- I really need to try to get to the local user group meetings this year. I made plans to go about 4 times in 2011, and every time work got in the way. I need to try to tell myself that unless it's a real Priority One issue, that it can wait 3 hours while I drive over and attend a 2 hour user group meeting! (already blown this one for January, thought it was *next* week, turns out it was *yesterday*... Eleven out of Twelve, maybe?)
- Learn some Powershell. I've heard so many people evangelizing this tool, that I really need to suck it up and at least learn the basics!
- Read some, if not all of the tech books I've bought. I have four sitting on my desk, with ebook versions of three of them as well. Time to put my Kindle Fire that Santa brought me to use and get them read! (This doesn't include the shelf full of other books that I've bought and pick through as I need the relevant parts of them)
What remains to be seen is, this time next year, how many of these have check marks next to them and how many have big red crosses.
