Sixth Blog Birthday

Every year on December 30th (or thereabouts) I write a blog post summarising what I’ve been up to this year, to mark this blog’s birthday. Today is my blog’s sixth birthday which, to be honest, I find pretty amazing – but then every year I’m amazed at how long I’ve kept at this! I only wish I could apply the same kind of willpower to making cash (I’d be a billionaire by now) or dieting, exercise or anything else…

From a blog point of view, the big change this year was moving away from Windows Live Spaces, where I’d started out, to WordPress. I’d been wanting to make the move for ages but had been too lazy to do so, and also unwilling to lose all my old posts and traffic; luckily when MS made the decision to retire Live Spaces they made sure it was very easy to migrate all my old content to WordPress and for that I’m very grateful – it almost makes up for the shabby treatment Live Spaces users had been getting in the preceding years.

I also got one of my biggest ever days from a blog traffic point of view during the controversy over the future of SSAS at PASS; I’m not even going to link to that particular post because it still gets plenty of hits and it’s something I’d prefer to move on from. It’s better to look forward to the undoubtedly cool stuff that will be coming with Denali rather than brood over any disappointment about what has happened, and one thing I’m certainly relieved about is that in 2011 there will be lots of cool stuff to blog about – at some points in the last year I’ve struggled to find anything new or interesting to blog about for SSAS (although as Greg Galloway has just shown, there’s still lots of interesting SSAS topics to blog about if you look). Bring on BISM!

Professionally things go from strength to strength and I’m going to be busier in the first half of 2011 than I’ve ever been in January/February, which are usually relatively quiet times for me. Again, with significant new technology arriving in the BI stack in Denali I would expect a lot of consultancy and training work to follow; I’m going to be expanding my training activities in other ways next year too, and I’ll be making a separate announcement about that here any day soon. SQLBits also continues to grow and grown, and I’m really excited about the plans for SQLBits 8 in Brighton this April. Since it doesn’t look like there’s going to be a PASS Europe this year I would say that anyone who’s serious about SQL Server in Europe should plan to come to what’s going to be the biggest and best SQL conference in Europe bar none; and even if you live outside Europe, but fancy a vacation, why not come too? We have an ever increasing number of US attendees and speakers!

Anyway, it’s time for me to go and do some real work and stop being self-indulgent. I hope everyone reading this has a great 2011. Thanks for reading!