It's the end of another year, 2009 is closing out and we're about to enter 2010. Since I will likely be up late tonight and not any more interested in working tomorrow than the rest of you, I decided to run the Friday poll a day early and close out the year.
I typically do something with regards to New Year's resolutions, and this year is no different. However I'm looking to get you to focus a bit more this year on something that I think is valuable for everyone: professional development. No matter where you are in your career, working on improving some aspect of your work will help you to continue to move forward. For this Friday's poll, I'm asking this question:
What aspect of your SQL Server skills are you looking to improve in 2010?
This is to inspire many of you to actually improve some part of your technical arsenal in the coming year. It also will let many of us know what the community thinks is important. So be sure and let us know if this is something that specifically will help you at work, or if it's something you'd just like to learn more about in anticipation of future needs at this, or another, job.
I've worked in lots of areas of SQL Server, but none on a production basis in years. The puttering around that I've done with SQL Server is mostly testing code, or experimenting for my own benefit rather than writing something that will get used by other people. I had wanted to actually write some real code last year, and listed that as a goal, but I didn't complete it. It was one of those things I kept putting off, spending more of my time doing presentations than actually building something.
So in 2010 I'm setting a goal to really dive into Reporting Services. I've rarely used it since SQL 2000, not really having the need to present data to anyone else, and preferring to deal with raw numbers in SSMS or Excel. It's much quicker to get at data that way.
I see SSRS as being an important part of and DBA's skillset since most of the time we do need to present data to others. Even if it's monitoring data on our servers, it's valuable to be able to display it in a good looking manner when asking for new hardware. I'd like to take some of the data I have here at SQLServerCentral and build reports that will be available for others to look at. I don't know that I'll have an SSRS instance you can access, but I'd like to build the reports and then present them as HTML, PDF, Excel, or maybe all three! I might even include some of those cool new charting controls from SQL Server 2008 R2!
I would expect that SSRS, SSIS, and SSAS are likely very popular areas, but let us know this Friday Thursday which area of your SQL Server skillset you plan to improve in 2010.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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