2018 Year in Review

Andy Levy
meta, professional-development
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As we open 2019, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the past year.

Blogging

2018 was my biggest year of blogging yet! I published 28 posts and got more traffic than I ever thought possible, thanks in no small part to being linked by Brent Ozar’s (blog|twitter) newsletter.

I also moved my blog to its own domain (which you’re looking at now), with independent hosting. I’d been putting this off for over a year. The old Wordpress subdomain name was clunky and I don’t feel like it properly reflected the direction I’ve taken since setting it up. I’ve had a few bumps along the way which I can’t quite explain (and as a result, didn’t get a post out for New Year’s Eve as I’d hoped), but I’m enjoying the freedom of having my own domain and full control of what I do in managing the site.

The top 5 posts I published this year:

Rank Post
5 Quick Table Info Export with PowerShell
4 T-SQL Tuesday #104 - Code You Would Hate to Live Without
3 Becoming a Production DBA - A Family Decision
2 Thread-safe PowerShell Logging with PSFramework
1 Triggers vs. Constraints: Choose Wisely

I wrote three posts in the #sqlcareer challenge from Steve Jones (blog|twitter); there will be a fourth in 2019 to round it out!

Other Online Activity

  • I was invited to appear [on the SQL Data Partners podcast]/2018/03/08/appearance-sql-data-partners-podcast/) to talk about SQL Saturday
  • I gave my first presentation in over three years (and first online presentation) when I participated in the first PSPowerHour

At Work

I don’t post a lot of detail about what I do at work, but my teammate and I accomplished a few things this year, some of which seem mundane on the surface but have had a big impact.

  • Converted to MinionWare’s Minion CheckDB for doing our database integrity checks. This has let us double the number of times we can run those checks every week, with a smaller maintenance window each day.
  • Upgraded (replaced) the physical servers hosting our production SQL Server environment
  • Reduced our CPU core count (and thus licensing costs) thanks to the metrics collected by SentryOne
  • Completed about 75% of the first phase of a data type optimization project across our environment. This is letting us get more aggressive with indexing, which in turn has solved some performance issues for some of our larger customers. I’m looking forward to completing this in the next month or two.
  • Upgraded to SQL Server 2016 (I’ll be blogging about this in detail soon)

I’m looking to do more in 2019, and have a few items in the publishing pipeline to wrap up activities that happened in 2018. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!