This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Tracy McKibben (blog | twitter) and is all about heroes (not the TV show).

Ada Lovelace has been an inspiration to many. In keeping with my blog theme, let’s call her a hero. We all have our heroes, those people who we admire, who inspire us, who we strive to be like. Who is your hero?

Your assignment is to acknowledge, in writing, your hero (or heroes). You don’t have to mention them by name if you’re not comfortable doing so, but you do have to tell us how you met them, how they have inspired you, and what qualities or traits of theirs you have striven to adopt.

I was thinking for the past week about my heroes and I decided to give you a shortlist of SQL Server people who had some influence on me during my BI career.

• Jamie Thomson (blog | twitter) aka SSISJunkie. When I started out with BI and mainly SSIS, his blog taught me a lot about SSIS. I still use his naming conventions every day in my SSIS packages.
• Chris Webb (blog | twitter). He was the first “international” speaker I saw live on a SQL Server conference. He lives and breathes SSAS and his little pinky toe knows more about MDX than I ever will (that isn’t hard to accomplish though
• Steve Jones (blog | twitter), Grant Fritchey (blog | twitter), Gail Shaw (blog | twitter) and Jeff Moden + other regulars at the SQLServerCentral forums. Their knowledge and untiring effort on the forums still amazes me day after day. Special thanks to Jeff, Jedi of set-based thinking and master of the tally table, for teaching me through his articles how to make my queries a thousand times faster.
• Rafal Luckawiecki (blog | twitter) and Buck Woody (blog | twitter) because they are such amazing speakers. Their level of expertise in bringing a message across to an audience is what I strive to have someday. If you are on event and one of them are speaking, try the catch a session, you won’t regret it.
• Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) and Thomas LaRock (blog | twitter). Both have – in my opinion – awesome blogs. Not only by content, but also by having very strong online branding. If I ever started my own blog site, I would try to take it to their level. Brent is also a great speaker. I watched some of his sessions – despite the DBA content – to learn more about speaking. And Thomas because, well … bacon of course.
• All the other people of the #sqlfamily for making this community so great. You know who you are