T-SQL Tuesday 14, hosted by Jen McCown

Resolutions… For a long time, I thought 1600 x 1200 to be the ideal, but with the proliferation of widescreen—oh…wait…not that kind of Resolution? Sorry. My bad.

It’s that time again: the monthly blog party known as T-SQL Tuesday. This month is #14, hosted by the deservedly newly-minted Microsoft MVP Jen McCown (blog | @MidnightDBA). The topic this time around is “Resolutions,” originally, “techie resolutions have you been pondering, and why.”

In my 2011 “Goals” post, I talked about one of the things I need to do this year: something about my career direction. I’ll take this opportunity to elaborate a little bit on what that means for me this year. The part about needing to pick one of two directions still applies, but the work that I need to do for each of those is pretty different.

If I stay a DBA…

If I stay a DBA, what I need to work on the most can be summed up fairly simply: Catch up.

Since I work with SQL 2000 almost exclusively these days, there are a lot of current bits of technology that I need to spend time working on and learning:

• DMVs
• Policy-Based Management
• T-SQL advancements (Actually using Try/Catch, TVPs, etc)
• PowerShell

That’s just a few things that I can pull off the top of my head; I know there are more that I should know and be able to use at this point. Not having the opportunity to use these features day-to-day doesn’t exactly help me learn and keep these skills sharp 😉

If I want to be one of the cool kid DBAs on Twitter, 2011 is a year in which I have to do a lot of work on these topics.

Less BI-Curious and more BI-…uhh…Pro?

The other choice I have is to do awesome Business Intelligence work. I’m still turned on by a lot of these technologies and the power that they can put into the hands of business users at all levels of an organization. A change in direction at my current job to a more BI-focused role has yet to fully materialize, and as for right now I’m still somewhat impatiently watching that carrot out there.

Whether I do it in my current position or choose to take something new, changing direction to full-time BI work comes with its own set of topics that will need lots of attention from me:

• Improve dimensional modeling skills (I do some of this already)
• Actually learn how to do work with SSAS
• PowerPivot
• Get better at talking to non-geeks!

There are lots more topics than those three here, too. However, BI in and of itself is a pretty wide field, so the specific topics that would need attention would be dictated by the flavor of BI work that I was doing and my involvement on such a team.

Actually making this stuff happen

Like all resolutions, this is, of course, the hard part. Making this happen isn’t going to be easy for me, either, but the rewards should be very well worth the effort required. Unfortunately, since knowing is half the battle, and I don’t have that taken care of yet, the near-term has the potential to be pretty rough.

At the absolute bare minimum, I resolve to do my best to take care of “knowing” in the first quarter of the year.

(Also, I’m sorry about that screen resolution thing at the beginning; couldn’t help myself)