This week brought one of the highest achievements in my career and community work. On June 23rd it was announced by Red Gate and SQL Server Central that I had made it into the finalists for the Exceptional DBA of the Year award. WOW! Every time I say it, I still get that feeling in my gut only certain things that you are truly emotional about can bring.

Welcome to the last day of Community Service week for SQL University. Before we get started, I’d like to say it has been nothing short of a pleasure writing the last two weeks for SQL University. All of the discussions and topics we a lot of fun to go over and I’m looking forward to hearing from everyone how they were able to use them. Don’t forget to pass SQL University and the community itself on to the person to your side that may not be aware of them. Let’s keep building this community together!

SQL University is one of the greatest concepts I've seen in the SQL Community. Thanks to Jorge for coming up with it and organizing it. Today we are going to talk about something dear and close to the concept of SQL University. Blogging! Blogs are an important part of the concept of SQL University. With them we can easily bring this wealth of knowledge in the course syllabus format with writers from the SQL Community in a vast geographical range and range of expertise.

We're devoting an entire class to technical forums this week. Forums have been around as long as most of the online community services have been. They offer (mostly) unsolicited help at (mostly) no charge to the person requesting the help. The word mostly worked its way into that last statement quite a bit. There are resources out there that will allow the solicitation of the members and will charge for help. This class is not going to discuss any of those services. Why? Because we are discussing the SQL community and this community truly puts itself out in front of everyone in need wit...

Tuesday marked the day that I presented on SSIS basics. The night went really good and the group and I had a great time during the discussion. Kim Young (needs to be on twitter) started us off with stored procedures and error handling and moved into Wendy plugging PASS and the community.