I have seen a few recap posts bouncing around the net and started thinking about my own blog.  So out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at my top 5 posts for 2011.

So, since I already subscribe to Google Analytics, I decided to check the stats in there.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t give me good information on what has been read through a feed reader.  For those views, I have only been able to track down the info for the past 30 days.  So for the fun of it, (and even though the numbers don’t match the feeds) let’s take a look at the most popular posts for the past year – based on Google Analytics.

5.  Activity Monitor and Profiler – This is a post where I talked about using Profiler to discover the behind-the-scenes queries that Microsoft wrote in order to give us the Activity Monitor tool.

4.  SQL Bitwise Operations – I have a few posts similar in nature to this one.  As the name implies, I demonstrate the use of bit-wise operations within SQL Server

3.  A little Dance with SSIS and Informix – This one is rather surprising.  This was written in July of 2010.  Yet, it makes the Top 5 list for 2011.  This article follows my trials with working out an SSIS package that required connecting to Informix.  I think this article is a very useful one in troubleshooting those pesky packages that involve Informix.

2.  SQL 2008 DTS – Starting to see a trend here.  This is another one of those articles I wrote as I was troubleshooting DTS backwards compatibility.  This has been a very handy reference for myself.  As luck would have it, this was also written in July 2010.

1.  70-450 Study Guide – The most popular post of the year (according to Google) was my little study guide.  This study guide merely gives links back to various topics as outlined on the Exam page on the Microsoft site.  There is useful content there to help learn some of the material for being a better DBA – and yes it will help in studying for the exam.  But the guide is designed as a high-level overview and does not delve into specifics.

When I take a look at the feed stats for the past 30 days, I get a much different picture than what Google Analytics provides me.  I am sure if I had the proper tools or even the proper configurations, I probably could see an entirely different story for the entire year.  As it is, these are five useful articles and worth the read.