Seventh Blog Birthday

So here we are again, yet another blog birthday – the seventh anniversary of my first ever post on this blog and a chance to review 2011.

From a technical point of view this year has been dominated by learning SSAS 2012 Tabular. I’m right in the middle of writing a book about it with Marco and Alberto, and it’ll be published sometime in the first half of next year. As usual writing a book turns out to be ten times more effort than I’d originally planned but it is undoubtedly the best way of learning a new technology: however well you think you know a product, you always find gaps in your knowledge when you have to write about it. My opinion of Tabular continues to grow the more I use it and DAX so I’m feeling very positive about the future and I’m interested to see what the uptake of it will be like after RTM. I’m also very excited to see how Microsoft’s cloud-BI strategy pans out in the next year: products like Data Explorer suggest that Microsoft is serious about this area and, more importantly, coming up with innovative new solutions to its challenges rather than just producing cloud-hosted versions of the software we’ve already got. There are going to be a lot of cool blog posts to write in 2012…

Business-wise I’ve continued to spend more and more time running training courses and a few months ago launched my new training website Technitrain to market not only my SSAS and MDX courses but those run by other well-known SQL Server pros. Our first third-party course with Christian Bolton went well, and next year we’ve got several others booked in. You can see the full course catalogue here; I’d also like to point out the new, lower prices on Jeremy Kashel’s Master Data Services course and Andy Leonard’s SSIS course. Frankly £1248 for a full week of training, let alone from someone of the calibre of Andy Leonard, is a bargain… although I’d argue it only looks that way because we’re too used to the inflated prices of most traditional training companies. More course dates will be announced very soon.

As far as the SQL community goes, I’m very busy speaking at user groups and helping to run SQLBits. The two SQLBits conferences last year in Brighton and Liverpool were great successes, and I still can’t believe we had Steve Wozniak turn up to speak at Brighton; SQLBits 10, which will be running from the 29th-31st of March next year, is already looking like it will beat all previous records for attendance (we’ve got 582 registrations at the time of writing) and will be the biggest and best yet. Next month I’ll be speaking in the UK at the Southampton SQL Server User Group on January 11th, and on January 12th I’ll be speaking at the PASS BI Virtual Chapter so I hope to see some of you there.

Anyway, that’s enough of me going on – it’s time to get back to my writing. Happy New Year everyone!