The past few months I have been pretty busy.  December is no exception to that.  Between normal work, moonlighting as a general contractor on my own basement, and trying to keep up with my family – it almost seems like the month has barely even been a blink.

Other than the highlights of the holidays and finishing a room in the basement, I did have some SQL related highlights.

The first highlight came with notice of having won a contest – yay.  I entered into the SafePeak performance story contest back in September.  The contest closed out in November and the winners announced the first part of December (maybe the end of November).

For that contest, I submitted this story.  In that story, I showed how duplicated business logic can prove detrimental to query performance.  By deduping the business logic, I was able to realize a significant performance gain.

As a reward for winning that contest, I received an IPAD2.  That prize came the week just before Christmas.  Now, we use the IPAD as an extra incentive with the children for improved behavior (they really like the IPAD).

The other highlight came at the beginning of the month when I presented a new topic for the S3OLV User Group.  That new topic was on SSRS and customizing Sorts, Groupings, Display Order of Columns, and a few other tricks.  The custom sorts, groupings etc can all be driven based on parameters and prompts.

It was a pretty decent presentation.  The demos worked relatively well.  There didn’t seem to be any hiccoughs with technology.  I do wish more people had attended – but we are working on that.  I plan on sharing a few articles about the very topics discussed during that presentation.

I like presenting and think I need to find more opportunities to do that during the upcoming year.  Let’s hope I actually publish my goals this upcoming year (unlike 2011 where I started writing out my goals and the post remains unpublished).