Final December Giveaway!

Today I'm giving away the book Professional SQL Server 2012 Internals and Troubleshooting. If you live outside the continental US, I'll instead send you a 25$ card to amazon to use however you wish. Congratulations to all the winners we've had so far! Do not forget to post here! If you win, I'll need to have an E-Mail address to contact you for either your address to mail the book or with what country you're in to E-Mail you the gift card. Good luck to you all and have a happy New Year!

Let's talk about some New Years resolutions? I've had a few this year.

Build a presentation and get it ready for my local SQL Users Group.

I have a presentation I plan on doing over Fill Factor and some of the Pros and Cons about it. There is a demo component, but it will stay out of the 300 level realm. This is more for generalization and concept understanding of something people far too often change hoping it fixes something it won't.

Start blogging and trying to speak in a public setting.

I will have over 40 posts this year. That's good considering I started really blogging in November. I have proven to myself that I can write. This coming year I plan on increasing the quality of what I write.

Start getting more involved in my SQL community.

I was made a Vice President at my local User Group recently. I've either been involved as a volunteer or helped setup the last 3 years of SQL Saturdays here in OKC. Each year we find new things that are troublesome, but I've yet had an experience bad enough to ever compare to all the good we get from the event.

Try and give something back.

With the help of Pluralsight, I've been able to give away 4 months of free training. The best part was, I didn't ask them for that. I asked to purchase the cards to give away. I think that's a good sign for our community.

Better my T-SQL skills.

I'm rather happy of how far my coding has come... that is until I look at my normal blog posts of the day. I have a lot to work on here still, but It's nice to see improvement anyways.

Get back into training more.

I broke down and got the year subscription to PluralSight during the black Friday sale they had. I am buying the pass 2013 summit videos as well soon. Now if only I had more time to actually watch them.

What are some of your New Years resolutions? What ones did you complete?