Something new for 2011: bunches of little stuff

OK, it’s the last day of March, and I’m phoning in this blog post.  It’s not that I haven’t spent a lot of time learning something new this month, it’s that I’ve got a pile of stuff to get through before leaving on vacation next week, and I really just don’t have more than 15 minutes to write up some of the things I’ve been working on.  So, here’s a short list with some links, and a commitment to do better next month.

Data Modeling

I spent a lot of time working on revisiting Data Modeling and Use Case Diagramming.  Although I’m still not a fan of UML, I have come to appreciate the benefit of simplifying the language we use to describe things to do.  I’ve been working a lot with someone who is very detail-oriented; as a conceptual person, it’s a challenge at times to bring those two paradigms together.

XQuery

I recently presented at SQL Saturday 70 on FLWOR, so I had to really brush up on my skills using XML.  I wanted to be able to answer all kinds of questions, so I did a deeper dive into the functions, and really focused on how to do some basic queries with XQuery in SQL Server.  I’m working on a blog series for this, but just haven’t found the time to put my fingers on the keyboard.

SSIS/StreamInsight

I’ve said it before; I’m probably the only ETL guy that uses SQL Server, but not SSIS.  A recent project at work caused me to have to build a small prototype using SSIS, and I learned quite a bit (and some newbie “gotchas”; again, I smell a blog post in the works).  Julie Smith, Rob Volk, and Andy Leonard all pointed me in the general direction of an interesting new product from Microsoft: StreamInsight.  I built the demos, and played with it, but I’ve got a long way to go before I can actually do something with it.

Anyway, sorry for the lack of insight; I need to dedicate more time to actually writing stuff down when I learn it, but perhaps that’s a lesson in and of itself.