January is a great time of year to raise your head and take a look around. Looking back at what has been, where we’re going, and the technical and mental debt which needs a clear out. I skipped this Year in Review last year due to other commitments, so there’s a little more ground to cover this time out.
Personal things
The last couple of years have seen a couple of big shifts.
From a career perspective, I’ve shifted into an Azure-first engineering role. This has transitioned my historically on-prem skills into their cloudy equivalents and opened the doors to all the opportunities and challenges which come with it. It was a steep learning curve. I discovered that in the cloud, infrastructure is the bedrock for a solid platform, and there were skill gaps I needed to fill.
Alongside this I also freshened up and sold up my place – along with sorting, packing, and storing 15 years of stuff – before a painstaking wait whilst we found our forever home. After a lengthy search we found our small project, dived into that for a couple of months before moving in, and we’re so fortunate to find our patch.
Between the two of these, my learning became primarily job focussed, rather than future facing. Time was a precious resource so some content was delayed, but I also found time to dive deeper into some existing topics. The breadth and depth of these learnings was reflected in more nuanced content for the blog.
The community
Speaking of the blog, I’m still filling my little corner of the internet with various content. This post will be 210 back to back weekly posts spanning the last 4 years.
Traffic is around 20x that of 2023 which I can take minimal credit for. Kevin at CuratedSQL has consistently persisted with me and promoted my content which I’m ever thankful for, and SQLServerCentral‘s newsletter has shared my content with a vast audience. On top of that I’m honoured to have had Erik Darling jump into the comments with examples recently, and being featured in Brent Ozar‘s Weekly Links on a few occasions has been a particular highlight.
I’ve also participated in a variety of the T-SQL Tuesday invitations, with my particular favourites being:
- T-SQL Tuesday #176 – One Piece of Advice You Wish Past You Had (Wrap-up)
- T-SQL Tuesday #180 – Good Enough is Perfect (Wrap-up)
- T-SQL Tuesday #181 – The Festive Tech Calendar ft. Query Store (Wrap-up)
- T-SQL Tuesday #189 – Me, Myself, and AI (Wrap-up)
- T-SQL Tuesday #193 – A Note to the Past and a Warning to the Future (Wrap-up)
The content I put out there is for the community to do as they wish with. If its useful and shared, I’m proud to be doing my small part for the wider community.
I need to finally credit my team – in the guise of AI. They’ve continually supported the blog through critical reviews, fact checking, proof reading, and image generation. To be fair, they had little choice in the matter. None of the content here is written by them – I don’t think it ever should be – but they’ve been able to add both depth and polish which I wouldn’t have had the time to achieve myself.
Blog highlights
Looking back personally over the last two years of posts, here are a few of the highlights which stand out to me, either for their variety, impact, or what I discovered along the way:
- My background in SSIS featured heavily – from identifying bottlenecks, knowing where to look for solutions, to solving blocking, and optimisations including buffer sizes, caching, more caching, and even more caching
- I enjoyed looking at more obscure topics – application locks, the Halloween problem, database snapshots, linked servers into Azure, and obscure implicit conversion issues
- Internals are always interesting to dig into – join operators are common but the internals are eye-opening
- Regular Expressions are my jam from my C# days – great to see the functionality in SQL Server 2025 and then went SQL CLR for T-SQL Tuesday #191 – Art of the Parsable
- Lastly, one I still refer back to – one of my go-to scripts to get basic details when diving into a new database
As I mentioned above, writing has also been my avenue to learning so I’m happy with the depth its brought to the content, as well as the variety which has led to connections between various topics.
A side note: I looked at the stats for posts too, and ironically one of the simplest has been the most popular: Every Stored Procedure Should Start with a Header. That may be related to being top of Brent’s weekly links though 😅
Where we’re going
Looking forward I’ll maintain consistency with the blog, and likely similar topics for the immediate future. But I’d like a more structured path. Steve’s recent post resonated about finding a North Star.
In all honesty I’m still not back in a groove after the house move and personal goings on this year. I know, life doesn’t stop, and there needs to be balance. I’m looking ahead to a good break and a reset later this month.
As of yet I don’t know what the North Star looks like for me. Deliberate exploration is the starting point, with the goal of evolving into depth and mastery. Of something yet to be defined.
For everyone who made it this far (and those who didn’t I suppose), I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I have. I wish you all a very happy and productive new year and look forward to what 2026 has in store for us as a data community. Now, let’s get after it folks.
Andy Brownsword 