T-SQL Tuesday #38 – Standing Firm

Introduction

Welcome back for the 38th installment in the wildly popular blog party for the SQL Server community.  This is the party that happens on the second Tuesday of each month.  The party was started by Adam Machanic (B|T) just over three years ago.

Each month a new host selects a theme and announces it about a week in advance.  And this month I will be hosting.

Theme

To kick off the new year (2013), we must first adhere to a little tradition.  This is not a T-SQL Tuesday tradition.  It is more of an annual tradition for all to welcome the new year.  Feel free to click the link and sing along!!

Now for the theme.  A common thing for many people to do this time of year is to do a little self reflection.  Some set meaningful goals for themselves.  Fewer actually accomplish those goals or even follow-up after initially setting the goal.

We are not going to set goals as a part of this T-SQL Tuesday – unless you want to.  I want to take a little different spin on the New Year’s “resolution” tradition.  So the theme this month is “Standing Firm.”

The idea for this theme is to start with a little self reflection.  Then to come up with a story relating to one of these words: resolve, resolution, or resolute.  Here are some examples of how these stories may be portrayed.

• Resolve:  A system outage occurred and you “resolved” it.
• Resolute:  You made an executive decision and did not waver from it.
• Resolution:  You discovered a bug and documented a work-a-round resolution for it.
• Resolution:  You have discovered certain T-SQL skills are fuzzy and want to sharpen your ability in that area.
• Resolute:  You are determined to improve performance in your application.

All of these words are very closely related.  It is up to you to determine how you would like to apply them to your T-SQL world.  Your experiences and stories can be loosely or tightly coupled to T-SQL, it is up to you.

And since the theme requires a little bit of self-reflection first, bonus kudos to those that can tie a past experience to a future plan.

The Rules

I know, parties are not supposed to have rules.  Sadly, all parties have some rules – you just may not know them.  These rules are very simple.

1. Your post must go live between 00:00:00 GMT on Tuesday the 8^th of January 2013 and 00:00:00 GMT on Wednesday the 9^th.
2. Your post has to link back to the hosting blog, and the link must be anchored from the T-SQL Tuesday LOGO (found above) which must also appear at the top of the post.
3. Trackbacks should work. However, all comments and trackbacks are moderated, so give me a few minutes. If you think you waited long enough and still don’t see yours, leave a comment below.
4. Tweet your post to the #TSQL2sDay hash tag.
5. Have Fun writing and participating.

Follow these rules, and your post will be included in the roundup that will be posted on the 15^th or 16^th of January.