Just two days left in 2019, and I thought this would be a good day to look back at the year. It's been a busy and long year, but a great one for me. I hope many of you feel the same, but if it's been a hard year, I hope next year is better.

I started the year doing more learning for myself and some coaching 13 year old kids at volleyball. Those tasks kept my busy for the first third of the year, and I managed to get through a few books, learn a few skills, and enjoy some time with SQL Server. It was still busy, as I didn't get a weekend off between Jan and April with either my daughter's team or mine playing in a tournament.

After April, I picked up the pace with events. I'll close out the year with 9 SQL in the City Summits and 7 SQL Saturdays. That was most of my year traveling, apart from the pre-con days at the PASS Summit. I normally go to a few more conferences, but decided not to this year. This was not as much speaking, but a lot of travel. This was my biggest year, where I flew over 140,000 miles and spent nearly 90 nights away from home. Fortunately, about 40 of those were with my wife, which makes it much more enjoyable.

This year saw a new release of SQL Server, one that I think is a milestone and will change the way we look at the platform. It will take a decade before most of our instances are at the 2019+ level, but this is the start of new ways to look at the platform with containers and scale out clusters. I'm excited by the possibilities and I look forward to how people will build systems in the future.

It seems that security was less of a news item this year, though there were still plenty of incidents. I was amazed that after all the press about security issues that so many Elasticsearch servers are still out there with no password. There really is not good reason for this. I'd like to think that this is the line in the sand, and if you install a server with no password after today, you're just terminated. Or arrested. That happened this year.

Redgate turned 20 this year, which was amazing for me. I've known the company for 18 years and watched it grow and change in that time. I've worked there for 12 years, and hope to see 20. Next up is 20 years for SQLServerCentral, which will be just over a year away.

I had a great year overall, and I'll write more on my blog if you're interested. I am looking forward to 2020, and I hope you are as well.