I was going about my own business today when I got an e-mail from Brent Ozar (twitter, blog) who is the editor-in-chief of SQLServerPedia. Apparently a wiki article that was made from my blog posts on shrinking has received the honor of being the first to receive the “Wiki of the month” recognition.
Great honor as there are a lot of great articles on this site. Which brings me to the point of my post. Do you use community resources? There are some truly great blogs and edited sites with content for the SQL Server space.
I learned a long time ago that the true expert is not one who has all of the answers. It’s someone who is not afraid to admit they don’t know something, knows where to go and gets excited to continue learning.
This is not an exhaustive list and I am sure I am missing some great resources but some of the free places I frequently go for SQL Server content include:
- SQLServerPedia –> Great blog syndication, wiki articles and sources of some great webcasts. Quest Software puts this out free to the community (and the site is not marketware for Quest. It exists for us in the SQL community. That is pretty neat)
- SQL Server Central –> Published articles from the community (including one on troubleshooting by yours truly), very helpful forums, some great blogs.
- SQLBlog –> Group of SQL gurus blogging about a wide range of topics
- SQLSkills –> Some great bloggers. Most notably Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp with very frequent posts.
- MSDN Forums –> Got a question? Ask for some help and you’ll get a response (usually). Please test your answers first. Or you’ll get to hear me rant about empirical evidence…
Alright now I am going to play around on the Quest “Experts Community” that I get to go at and start figuring out where to hide the box of SWAG that is en route to my house (sorry Mrs. Walsh, more junk in the house… The same kind I brought back from PASS… Maybe there will be another monitor brush or squishy ball. More stuff for the kids to play with, more T-Shirts for me to mess up the closet with) = )
