Year in review

Well... 2011 is about to end and what a year it's been. Solved some major headaches at Quantum Digital by implementing some features in SQL Server. Probably the biggest issue we were having was some intermittent blocking due to the way some of our processes were written. I implemented read committed snapshot isolation and 99.9% of our blocking issue disappeared. A big win for the database team.

On the performance tuning front, I optimized a process that was maxing out our CPU. Due to the way the query was written I modified and removed some redundancies and the query ran with minimal impact on the production environment.

If you've never worked with geospatial datatypes... You should. I began working with them late last year and it was the best move that I could have made. I took a query that would have been extremely difficult and complex and with the aid of geospatial datatypes rewrote that query to be extremely simple to understand and considerably quicker too. I wrote about that here.

At a personal level, I am getting more and more involved in the local SQL Server community by attending the Capitol Area, Central Texas Users of SQL Server otherwise known as (CACTUSS). I learned more in the few months of attending CACTUSS meetings than I did working on the job. I attended SQLSaturday in Austin a few months ago. What a blast that was. Met some fantastic people and learned a great deal of knowledge from folks I consider experts in the SQL Server community.

My wife and I also had our second child this year. Needless to say, that has kept me very busy but I wouldn't give it up for the world. My other little 'baby' is now 6 years old. Woah! Life moves so fast; it's simple hard to believe how big they are getting.

I'm looking forward to what I hope will be a very exciting 2012. Now I have to come up with some resolutions for next year;)

J.D.