Random Blogging Challenge Results

The winner is: Everyone.

Hey, the challenge was random. I didn’t promise a prize or a winner. Instead, I suggested everyone blog based on an image of the great Tom Baker:

In no particular order we have:

Persist and Aggregate Index Stats Across Server Restarts by Eric Cobb
Nice use of the image, incorporating it into an interesting technical post on how to persist your index usage stats. Useful information since this DMV is reset when you restart the server (or fail it over or…). Good technical blog on a useful topic, data about your system.

Working with SQLSaturday SpeedPass by Wayne Sheffield
+10,000 points for both using the image well and for the PowerShell. -10,000 points for making me comment on a post about PASS (I’m the EVP of Finance, so I have to be careful what I say about the organization). Nice community friendly post, well worth a read if you are currently helping to manage a SQLSaturday event.

Goals, Strategy, Plans and the Art of Playing the Long Game by Tim Ford
Tim is someone I admire because he so frequently, and seemingly effortlessly, is on top of the situation. This despite real adversity in his life (not recapping it here). This blog post is a great read and well worth your time. Tim however does get an “F” for failing to actually use the image of the greatest Doctor. We’ll forgive him though.

Permissions to Revoke Permissions by Shane O’Neill
Ha! Marvelous. Just go and read it. Rating it a 4.0 for technical content and for excellent use of the image.

SQL Server Fixed Role Permissions by Jason Brinhall
Granny?
Anyway, security is actually a weakness of mine. I rely on people like Jason (and others) to take care of these things for me. This is a well written blog post covering an area of knowledge that’s probably not documented as thoroughly as it could be.
I do object to how he’s referring to Tom Baker.

I Am Watching You by Arun Sirpal
I think this was the first blog post put together based on my challenge. Evidently he set the tone since there’s a lot of security stuff here. I like this one. Arun is using Extended Events to track users. That’s actually a very frequent question out on the forums, so now we have a good post to point people to. Arun has the image well displayed.

DBA 101: File Growth by Daniel Janik
I love introductory content. There are so many people just getting started in IT and in the data profession and, more specifically, in SQL Server. You just can’t go wrong, nor does Daniel, in explaining stuff to them that we’ve all had to figure out the hard way. I also like how he used the image.

Thanks everyone for playing. While this is a random collection of information, it gives you a good representation of the knowledge and talent that’s available out there on SQL Server and the related data platform.

UPDATE: Edited to get Arun Sirpal’s full name on here.