January Competition: Enter today for the chance to win Redgate goodies and books!

Roseanna

Hello all,

Happy New Year! The Redgate Forum competition is back for 2020.

Each month, we'll be giving you the chance to win a Redgate goodie bag filled with treats. Included in this month's goodie bag is Grant Fritchey's SQL Server Execution Plans, Third Edition, plus your choice of the classic novel about DevOps, The Phoenix Project, or the follow-up book, The Unicorn Project. The first is a great introduction to DevOps and the second dives into a little more technical detail.

To enter this month's competition, please answer this question: What do you want to achieve at work in 2020?

Share your answers below by 2 February. The winner will be randomly selected from all the entries received. 

Best wishes,

Roseanna 

JCitro

I want to know what steps it will take to become a Senior DBA at my current company and to read The Phoenix Project. I just purchased it.

Joshua_Higginbotham

I want to continue to work towards a solid Data Governance solution to protect our customers as well as adding in the PowerShell Bulk API to our CI/CD process to ensure our Data Catalogs are kept up to date with any new columns or tables.

ben_b

I'm starting a new job at the end of Feb - In the new role I want to focus on helping create a 'high performing team'. 

on the technical side, one thing I will probably do is to demo a few different products and get the team to decide upon their DevOps toolchain as a group.

DerFredo

I definitely plan to catch up on mastering the Microsoft Power platform tools.
Maybe I'll also get to read Grant's book and apply that knowledge, who knows...

caufrl01

i definitely want to build up continuous integration with sql change automation and source control.

Stefano_Torelli

I would like to learn how I can fast clone and obfuscate Production databases on Dev and Test environments.

ALPHONSODELARD

What do you want to achieve at work in 2020?
This year I want to learn as much as possible about the non db engine products supplied with SQL Server, AS, IS, RS etc. Plus as much Azure info as I can soak in.
Need to expand my product knowledge as a DBA.

SQL_Padre

Last year, I was able to pass all the required exams to earn my MCSE.  That's it I'm done, no mas!  No more learning!!

If this were true, I would be out of a job in a few years.  Our company is opening up Azure to our data needs.  I need to learn Azure and my bucket list for years is to learn powershell.

dplaut

Talk my bosses boss into hiring a consultant to configure our next SQL Server. There is no internal expert knowledge and we've been flying by the seat of our pants for years.

LAtkinson

I want to finish what I failed to complete in 2019 with taking and passing Microsoft exams 70-767 and 70-768. I also want to start blogging or submitting articles regarding some of the script tasks and transforms I have written for SSIS processing. Also, its time to start learning Azure.

Luther

Paul_M

I want to play with a Data Lake and author a PowerBI report from it.

paul_goldy

In 2020 I would like to migrate our "on prem" (really on virtual machines) SSIS packages to Azure Data Factory and our "on prem" SQL DBs to Azure DW.

oi_bill

I want to learn the right DBA defensive and monitoring techniques so I can sleep at night without wondering what the next crisis might be, and share that knowledge with others in the organization. And I want to determine how to regression test our reporting queries so one mod doesn't break anything.

Yasin

To delve deeper into the Power Platform components and really make it sing!

Jason_A

Right now my short-term goal for the year is to get my instances up into our new cloud environment.  Once that's been accomplished, most likely will be start migrating to SQL2019, standing up a SQL monitoring solution and possibly pivoting from the Ola scripts for backups to something I can pretty much just throw someone at to check if backups run successfully.

vjacob1

Setup a true SSRS, Visual Studio, Power BI Development environment as currently we have no development servers and separation of concerns currently everything is running off of one server and would like to move away from that model to better development model with Production, QA, and Dev environments each on their own servers....

Miguel61

I want to learn more about how SQL works and how to query tune

bjones

Become the subject matter expert at work and a leader on the team, while also learning more about other languages and areas of the application.

dadavis

I want to continue to grow my and my team's technical knowledge -- I need to get a much better understanding of SOLID principles.

Cinruskin

We would like to implement a DevOps program.

at2k21

I would like to step up my query tuning game.

chuckredgate

I would like to get the Azure Developer certification

KenneyHill

I am replacing our current WSFC servers hosting our SQL FCIs and replacing them with new OS and SQL versions and making the configuration and drive letters consistent among them.  As well as setting up the clusters so that they are not overloaded when a role fails over to a different node.

Rvieira55312

I would like to structure policy that outlines good database design and highlights best practice when it comes to coding standards. This policy will be used as a guideline that we as a data team will interface with and enforce in an effort to create long standing, scalable and optimal data driven solutions. 

wittyslogan

This year I'm going to go through all the Stairways articles.  Hopefully it will make me a stronger DBA

Roseanna

The competition is now closed. Thank you for all your entries. We've really enjoyed reading them and hearing about your professional goals for 2020.

The winner for the January competition is...Cinruskin! Congratulations! I'll email you directly with further details.

Wishing everyone all the best with achieving your 2020 professional goals. There are thousands of learning resources available on the Redgate Hub to help you on your journey. The next forum competition will be published shortly - stay tuned!

Best wishes,

Roseanna 

Joshua_Higginbotham

Congratulations Cinruskin, good luck with your DevOps journey.

Cinruskin

Thank you Redgate! And thank you Joshua for the well wishes! I look forward to reading the books, learning, and participating here on the Redgate forums. I wish everyone a happy and productive February!