I know it’s late but I’ve been away, I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year.

I try and regularly review my skills as a DBA but more so at the start of a new year. You know the type of questions:-

• Have I improved my overall skillset over the last year?
• What areas have I worked specifically on?
• How do my skills in those areas compare to last year?
• Are there any areas in which I need to improve upon?
• What can I do over the next week/month/year in order to keep improving?

2014 was a pretty exciting year for me. I moved to Dublin to work and looking back, it was the completely correct decision. I’ve been involved in a major project over the last few months and all in all (with few exceptions) everything has gone well. Highlights for me include setting up a brand new production environment, migrating our old databases (goodby SQL 2005!) and then learning how to configure our brand new SAN. SAN administration is completely new to me and it’s been fun. Challenging but good fun.

As DBAs we have to constantly keep learning in order to not be left behind. 2014 was no exception, a new version of SQL came out with a bunch of brand new features (think buffer pool extensions and In-memory OLTP). I don’t know about you but I’ve been reading about and experimenting with SQL 2014 like crazy.

So what am I looking forward to doing in the new year? Well, here’s the top three things I want to get done this year:-

• Implement Always-On availability groups for diaster recovery
• Further work with In-Memory OLTP (get a lab up and running and do some benchmarking)
• Completely review replication (I haven’t used it in a production environment, so I have to keep going back over it)

There’s no way that that list will stay as is but it’s good to have something to start with. I bet you’ve all got similar lists, either written down or just in your heads. So here’s to 2015! Let’s hope it’s as exciting and challenging as 2014!