It’s Meme Monday. This is LaRock’s (blog | @SQLRockstar) brainchild. Its idea is to spur all of us to write something, and my sister agrees that this is a good idea. So, here I am, writing about this month’s topic, which is: what #sqlfamily means to me.

So, what does #sqlfamily mean to me? I love these guys. All of them. Even the ones that don’t follow me back on Twitter and/or think I’m a total muppet (for the record, I don’t care at all if you don’t follow me on Twitter. Alternatively, if you’re not on Twitter at all, I think you’re broken, but that’s a different story). I would say that I love these guys like family, but that would be pretty obvious.

See, the deal is, I’m not a big family type of guy. I don’t know why that is. My family is just as crazy as everyone else’s; nothing special there. Maybe it’s the part about how everyone just expects you to show up for things just because it’s a family function. If that is the case, one of the reasons that #sqlfamily is better is because nobody expects that. We all have lives outside of any one particular thing that we do, so for each thing, there’s always other stuff that we could be doing. We’re all the same in just the right ways, so everyone understands.

That’s another thing—we’re all the same in just the right ways. Tammy and I basically can’t talk about what we do with our family and a lot of our friends, because they just don’t get it. We can’t be like, “yeah, so the business today wanted this report deployed with no filtering in place—all 20,000 rows of it,” because nobody will really get it. Sure, the SQL Community is pretty heavily-weighted towards the Engine side of things, and we’re mostly BI people these days, but pretty much everyone understands at least a little bit. So, what does #sqlfamily get us? People who understand.

Most everyone knows by now (well…umm…) about the wedding at PASS. Like we’ve said before, that was pretty nerdy, pretty over-the-top, and more than a little weird. That description fits us pretty well, so I thought it worked out alright. You know who else fits that description pretty well? Yeah, a lot of #sqlfamily. And guess what? These people understand.

Hopefully you’re getting the theme. That’s what SQL Family means to me: People, friends, family who understand.

There are lots of days where that’s all I am looking for. Thanks, guys <3