Un-SQL Friday: My Tech Giants

It’s Friday, the end of another long work week, and just as we have the monthly T-SQL Tuesday in which all SQL people are encouraged to post something related to a particular topic, the female half of Midnight DBA, the dazzling newly-minted MVP Jen McCown (blog | twitter) has declared this Friday, “Un-SQL-Friday”. For this Un-SQL-Friday, she asked us:

“Read this blog, and then write whatever you want about Tech Giants. Be sure to mention in your blog that you’re writing for Un-SQL Friday, and link to this post. Oh, and have it up any time before the weekend (Saturday Jan 22) hits, mmkay?”

Well, that’s an interesting question. I suppose another way to put it is,

“If you were asked to fill the shoes of __<name of tech giant>_ , could you do it?”

I think the picture to the right answers the question quite succinctly as “Well, I can plug the top of his boot, but I’ll need a lot of other material to fill the rest.”  That is, I may not be at the same skill level on that topic as the one who wrote the book on it, but with enough effort and time I could get there. Much of the “greatness” comes from that person having researched and documented something that I haven’t yet encountered. The "SQL Gurus” are the ones who wrote the books I’m buying or actually worked on making SQL server what it is today.

I could rattle off a litany of names (as some of the other un-SQL participants did), or I could

SELECT TOP 10 GuruName FROM SQLServerGurus

and see what that returns to me. Or I could direct you to the listing on the right-hand side of my blog which includes links to many of the SQL blogs that I frequent. Either way, you’ll see that there is no shortage of knowledge available and I thank each and every one for all of the information that they’ve freely provided which has made my job much easier to do.