Posted in Blogging, Professional Development, SQL Server, T-SQL Tuesday

T-SQL Tuesday #185 – Video Edition

Happy T-SQL Tuesday! This month (April 2025), Erik Darling asked us to record a video. Enjoy my take!

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Posted in Blogging, Speaking

2024 Year End Round Up

It’s time for that end of year wrap up – everyone’s favorite post!

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On a more serious side, it is good to look at what I’ve been doing, check in and see what exactly I’ve been able to accomplish. I have to confess that I see what others in the community are doing and feel like I’m not doing enough. I’m not sure how some of you find the time to do everything and I’m in awe. I’m just here doing what I can.

There is a AI that compiles your LinkedIn activity and comes up with an end of year summary. There is a different one that did something similar for your Bluesky posts. The one thing that stands out is that both of them noted the importance of supporting the community based on my posts. According the LinkedIn site, my superpower is “Bridging technical expertise with community learning” and my top quote is “The best part is all of the amazing conversations I had with wonderful people who are passionate about the data platform.” I love this because I feel those statements are pretty accurate about who I am and who I strive to be.

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Posted in Blogging, Professional Development

Looking Forward

It’s the end of the year so it seems appropriate that there be a look back. But I’m going to take things back a bit farther than 2023.

I was going through old digital files and cleaning them up. (No really – I was doing digital clean up. I have witnesses!!!) And I ran across this gem of a document: “Deb_the_DBA persona”. I started it back at the beginning of 2012. I think there had been one or two SQL Saturday Bostons at this point but I wasn’t really going to user group meetings even though I knew when they were. But I was starting to keep track of the community and learning who to follow so I could learn more. I kept seeing others blog and their online “personas” and kept hearing those people say “start a blog!” and finally thought to myself: if I were to do this, how would I do that? 

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Posted in Blogging, Speaking, WIT

A Woman in SQL 2023

When I started this blog back in 2016, I wanted to make sure I wrote a blog post every March in honor of Women’s Month. I missed it last year but I want to get back in the routine. I figure as long as it was about by the end of the month, I’m good, right?

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This particular post took me a long time to put together. I actually started putting it together well over a year ago. I’m not sure why it’s taken so long to hit “Post”. Perhaps because I don’t like what it says but I feel it needs to be done anyway.

I see a lot of conversations on social media related to diversity at events. It bubbles up every couple of months or so. Some organizers are great about making sure they have a diverse pool of speakers but aren’t always able to get there. Other times, the conversation is criticizing organizers who are falling short of the goal. But there seems to be a general sense that we aren’t as diverse or representative as we want to be. So I wanted to take a look to see if this is an accurate assessment.

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