Happy 2019!

As I’m writing this it’s actually still 2018, so this is both my last blog post of the year and the first blog post of the new year 🙂

I’d like to take the opportunity to wish everyone a great start in this new year, and that everything you wish for – professionally and personally – may come true.

2018 was a great year professionally:

• I started working with new technologies, like AWS, Pentaho and Snowflake, allowing me to broaden my horizons. I also learned to program (a little) in Python and I explored Neo4j a little bit.
• I gave sessions at Techorama, the Belgian SQL user group, SQLSaturday Holland and Dataminds Connect.
• I started working more with Microsoft technologies in the Azure cloud, such as Azure Data Factory, Logic Apps, runbooks and so on.

Looking back, these were the three most popular blog posts in 2018:

1. The Wait Is Over – SSIS 2017 Is Here! First by a very large margin. People are still confused about which SSDT (or was it SSDT-BI, or BIDS?) to use. And there were also a lot of of issues with the BI tools in Visual Studio this year. A lot.
2. Dynamically Changing Shapes in Power BI. I was trying to solve some scenario and I whipped out quite some mess in R to get it done. People are apparently trying to solve the same problem, but I’m not sure the proposed solution is a good one. The follow-up blog post has much better alternatives.
3. SQL Server Data Tools 2017 and TFS Integration. This one goes hand in hand with the first blog post. Because if something was infuriating this year, it was getting TFS to work decently with VS 2015/2017.

An honorable mention for the blog post Fix for Blurry SSMS in Windows 10, because it gets the most comments: people thanking me for posting the solution to get your SSMS crystal clear again. You’re welcome.

Alright, let’s make sure 2019 is even better than the last year. I hope to see you at one of the community events and thanks for reading!