In March of 2001, Brian Knight, Andy Warren, and I started this site. We had a few other partners as well that we eventually bought out, but in one of the first evolutions of this site we had 4 members. As we started to load articles, answer questions on our forums, and get the site to grow, we watched the member number grow almost hourly. That number, which has always been on the home page, was a motivating factor for all of us to answer questions during breaks at work and go home to write articles at night.

We used to keep those numbers monthly as a way of tracking progress and the old site had an administrative report that showed these. A few of the numbers that were there from the end of some months:

After that we were really committed and driven to build the site. As we moved along, we used to dream about 100,000 members, and it was amazing when we got there. I still remember getting to 1,000 forum posts and wondering how long it would take to get to 2,000. I remember when we struggled to find content from 20 or 30 authors and often had to stay up late to write something ourselves for the next week. I remember when we could literally answer every post on any day between Andy, Brian, and myself. That's not possible as yesterday we had over 800 posts.

As I've watched the site grow, I remember sending out gift cards and shirts at some of our milestones, one of which was reached in late September 2007 when we hit 500,000 members. It took six and a half years to reach 500,000 and then less than 18 months to get the next 500,000. It's truly amazing to think about that growth and all of the efforts that have gone into the site. It's not just my efforts, it's actually the work of many people in the community that have enjoyed this site as a place to discuss SQL Server and related, and sometimes not related, issues.

Seeing a 1,000,000 users on the site yesterday was an exciting moment for me and one that I really feel proud of. Thanks to everyone that sent in nice notes or posted something and I hope you've enjoyed this site as much as I have.

I'm looking forward to the next  million and hope to see it sometime in the next few years.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.mevio.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.

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Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

I really appreciate and value feedback on the podcasts. Let us know what you like, don't like, or even send in ideas for the show. If you'd like to comment, post something here. The boss will be sure to read it.