I am very excited to be able to announce that Microsoft has made me a Data Platform MVP. This is a big thrill. The right words escape me, I will have to make do with these.

If I Only had a Brain

I love this song from the Wizard of Oz.  Unfortunately, the scarecrow never gets a brain, instead he gets a honorary degree.  I wish having an MVP award would make me smarter, but unfortunately, it does not do that.  Frankly it means I am in very intimidating mental company as when I wrote this, there were only 370 Data Platform MVPs. Most likely I need to learn a lot more and maybe write a book so I can keep up.

One thing I do try to do is share what I know by blogging and speaking, if for no other reason than I don’t want to be a hypocrite.  When I was learning SSIS, the person leading the project was tuning SSIS and he would not show me how.  He obfuscated, and made SSIS tuning out to be wizardry. I thought to myself at the time, that he should tell me what he knows as I would do that.  Later I found out the rules, and gave a few talks about SSIS, including one for the PASS Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Virtual Chapter which was recorded here.  If I learn something, I want to tell other people, which is why I blog and speak.  I think this is the greatest profession in the world and I feel bad for people who have chosen to do something else as the data platform stuff and they are missing out.

Keeping Up

There are a ton of new technology things to learn coming up all the time. I keep up as much as I can and when I do learn something, I tend to blog or speak about it.  If you subscribe to this blog or follow me on twitter, hopefully keeping up will be easier.  I don’t want Microsoft to think that they made a mistake, so I plan on trying to increase the number of blog posts and speak when I am afforded the chance.

SQL Saturday Phoenix

I wanted to make sure to talk about the next place I will be speaking, SQL Saturday Phoenix, the largest data related technology event in the state of Arizona.  I know it is going to be a great event thanks to Joe Barth and the rest of us on the organizing committee who have volunteered to make this a great event.  The Arizona SQL Server Users Group was where I learned about the SQL Server Community and was where I started to really get motivated to start learning and I am happy to be a part of it. I hope to see you there.

Yours Always

Ginger Grant

Data aficionado et SQL Raconteur