Here is how you can do it, go to https://ads.twitter.com/, sign in with your twitter username and password. click on the Analytics tab on the tab of the page (see image below)

Here is what you will see if you pick timeline activity

Looks very nice and clean, you can see how many followers you got and also how many people unfollowed you. The number of favorites, retweets and clicks is also available. If you have tweets that have a higher than usual reach it will be highlighted. The dashboard is realtime, if you tweet something it will be visible within a second or so

You can also see followers, here is what it looks like

You can also download the data in csv or XLS format

If you pick the XLS format, you will see something like this

Very nice indeed, now let's see if facebook, google+, pinterest and others will follow suit

This site was started by some friends and myself. Initially we were just people who met online, after starting the site we decided to meet in person. Here is a picture of one such meeting, as you can see we are all the same height :-)

Even though we have forums, a wiki and blog on this site, the blogs turned out to be the most visited.
All in all we have over 2000 blog posts on this site. I will leave you with the 10 most popular blog posts, which one is your favorite?

That is it for this post, see you again in 5 years?

We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.

Damn, I love my Google reader. Today my fellow LessThanDot member damber told me about feedly

Feedly exists for the following platforms and browsers

Feedly for iOS
Feedly for Android
Feedly for Chrome
Feedly for Firefox
Feedly for Safari

Feedly will connect to Google Reader and import all your stuff.
I decided to give the Chrome plugin a try, here is what it looks like

I also like the way you can organize the feeds, much better than Google reader IMHO

I am also very happy that the j and k keyboard shortcuts work

If you want to know more about feedly, check out this post http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/

Read more technical books
I only read one technical book so far, this book is
The Well-Grounded Java Developer: Vital techniques of Java 7 and polyglot programming. I have reviewed the book here: Review of The Well-Grounded Java Developer. In a couple of weeks I will have the opportunity (some people will call it a misfortune, misfortune being the commute not the reading part) to read a lot more since I will be commuting 2 hours a day on the lovely NJ Transit Northeast Corridor train.
Depending what happens in the next couple of weeks the technology stack is not yet certain for me, this is why I have not purchased any books yet, I hope to have this sorted out by April 1st.

Get into different technologies
As you might have noticed I did a bunch of posts about technologies besides SQL Server, I did a couple of Oracle posts as well as a couple of Scala posts. I also did a bunch of posts about MongoDB, as a matter of fact I blogged 15 times about MongoDB, you can find the MongoDB posts below

Install MongoDB as a Windows Service
UPSERTs with MongoDB
How to sort results in MongoDB
Indexes in MongoDB: A quick overview
Multidocument updates with MongoDB
MongoDB: How to include and exclude the fields you want in results
MongoDB: How to limit results and how to page through results
MongoDB: How to backup and restore databases
MongoDB: How to restore collections
MongoDB: How to backup all the databases with one command
MongoDB: Exporting data into files
MongoDB: How to drop databases and collections
MongoDB: Creating capped collections
MongoDB: Returning documents where fields are null or not existing
MongoDB: Using the web-based administrative tool

Write more blog posts and contribute more to the wiki
I think that I did really well here, I wrote 47 posts so far this year, this is more than half of all the posts that I wrote in 2012. I said my goal was to blog 150 times this year, I am almost 30% done with that goal. I actually decided to bring my total posts to 750, this means I still have to write 198 posts this year to hit that goal. We will see if I make it or not. Here is where you can find all the posts I have written broken down by year: http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/All/?disp=authdiryearly&author=4

I am not checking up on the other goals because I have not done anything about them yet

If this trend continues then I should hit 3 million views by next February, it should take between 11 and 12 months

Enough of the self-congratulatory tone of this post, lets see what the most interesting post were that I wrote between hitting the first million views and today. Here are 5 of them that I think are worthy

How much longer will the SQL Server database restore take
I probably look at this post every couple of weeks to grab this query because I need to run it. Many people have thanked me for this query as well because now they can have an answer instead of telling people that it will take a while for the restore to finish

SQL Advent 2011 Recap
This is not really one post but a collection of posts I did highlighting the new things in SQL Server 2005 and 2008

Why do you need additional privileges for truncate table compared to delete?
This post explains why you need to be part of at least the db_ddladmin fixed database role in order to do a truncate and how to give users permissions without making them part of the db_ddladmin fixed database role

SQL Advent 2012: Recap
Another year, another collection of posts, this time it was focused on best practices

Setting up SQL Server Database Mail with gmail
It can be a challenge to set up SQL Server Database Mail with gmail, this post shows you how you can easily accomplish this

A list of all the 550+ posts I have written as well as the total number of views can be found here: http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/All/?disp=authdir&author=4

That is all for this short post, I hope you have enjoyed the posts so far, there will be many more to come.

Read more technical books

I read a decent amount of books every year, in 2012 I managed to read 51 books, you can see all of them here http://pinterest.com/denisgobo/books-i-read-in-2012/
What you will notice is that there is only one technical book on that list, that book is The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers by Robert C. Martin (AKA Uncle Bob). Of course I have been reading technical stuff during the year but I have not read any other technical book cover to cover. I will pick up a book, read the chapters that are of interest and be done with it for the time being. There are books that I reference over and over as well, I like these books.

The latest book I picked up is The Well-Grounded Java Developer: Vital techniques of Java 7 and polyglot programming. This is a fantastic book and I will put up a review once I am done with the book

Get into different technologies

I will try getting into a couple of different things this year. In terms of SQL Server I got back into replication after a 8 year hiatus, even though it is the same product I have been using for a while now, I consider this different technology. Everything outside your comfort zone I will consider new or different. So what will I be looking for in 2013. Well, how boring really but I will take a closer look at Big Data. There I said it the buzzword of the day...Big Data. Of course you might be asking yourself what I mean by Big Data, how can you get into Big Data? I will start messing around with Hadoop, Cassandra, HBase and perhaps MongoDB, I want to get a feel for these technologies. Besides Big Data I will also start getting more involved with Java and the Java stack. Scala looks like something interesting as well. Informatica is something I will be using as well for ETL this coming year. If Microsoft releases a public CTP of the next version of SQL Server then I will definitely take a look at Hekaton, this is the in memory technology for the next major release of SQL Server

Write more blog posts and contribute more to the wiki

In 2012 I only wrote 74 posts, that is a new low point for me. In 2009 I wrote 139 posts, that is almost double the number of 2012. The goal for this year is to write 150 posts. On the wiki I haven't done too many articles this year. I would like to change that, I will document all the new stuff I will be learning this year and will use the wiki as a cheat sheet of sorts. Since I will be adding Oracle, Informatica and Java to the skills I will be using at my job this year, expect content in those technologies as well. Having said that the main focus of the blog will still be SQL Server of course.

Go places

I plan to see more of the world this year. Our three kids are going to be nine and six years old this year. I am planning to take the family for a 2 week visit to Amsterdam this summer. I took that picture in Amsterdam in 1997, I grew up in Amsterdam, my father still lives there, I speak the language so it should be a nice trip. While in Amsterdam I also want to make a quick visit to either Germany or Belgium, this should be pretty easy since you are in either country in less than two hours. Hopefully my kids will appreciate seeing old buildings, the canals and the museums/musea. Of course we have to see the wind mills as well as the cheese market in Alkmaar. The weather in Amsterdam can be really crappy at times, I hope it doesn't rain every single day while we are there. It will be interesting to see how the kids will act while on the first plain trip. This trip takes about 8 hours and luckily going there it is at night, if they sleep through it I will be much easier for those restless kids.

Be healthier

I guess you saw this one coming, didn't you? Most people have this resolution, if you are gym member you will notice how packed the gym is between January 1st and January 15th. This is when people get the free trial passes to the gym, after the pass is done, so are most of the people who had those passes. My goal is to get back into running this year, nothing major, maybe twice a week for 40 minutes or so. I prefer running outside compared to a treadmill. I will be more conscious of the food I eat and how much I eat of it as well. Trying to eliminate as much sugar as possible is another of my goals. I heard it is tough for the first couple of weeks but after that your body won't miss it. I eat all kinds of vegetables like kale, Swiss chard, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and more. I don't think I need to add much more to my diet.

Conclusion

There are more goals I have, I don't think it is worth sharing those, the other goals are personal or family oriented so I won't bother you with those.

What about you, any goals or resolutions for this year?

Mobile Devices

This table list all the mobile devices that accessed this site aggregated over the whole year. No surprise, the iPad is number 1, the iPhone is number 2

Browsers

Internet and Firefox both lost to Chrome, Chrome now has a 15 point lead against the number 2 browser. Here is the 1 year chart

Here is just the data for January and December so that you can see the difference between the beginning and the end of the year

Operating Systems

In the operating system space, windows is still king, Windows phone is still a very niche player as well. Here is the one year chart for the operating systems

Here is just the data for January and December so that you can see the difference between the beginning and the end of the year

Mobile OS

Here is the data for mobile operating systems, I just picked the top 3 and only picked January and December so that you can see the difference between the beginning and the end of the year

Next year will be very interesting, we have to see what will happen in terms of new android and iOS devices. Will the Surface Pro help Microsoft win some tables market share or will the partners have to step up and come out with some cool Windows 8 tables? Time will tell......

In this post we will be looking at the searches, the content and the countries that visitors came from

Content

Here are the top 25 most visited pages on this site during the year 2012.

Searches

Here is a list of the most used search terms, as you can see it is mostly SQL related, this makes sense since most of the content is SQL related

sqlcop
ssis interview questions
sql mean
operand type clash: date is incompatible with int
string or binary data would be truncated
operand type clash: int is incompatible with date
cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation
lessthandot
wizard
programmer vs developer
sql 2008 backup compression log
sp_change_users_login
bi interview questions
sql 2000 pivot
alter column datatype in sql server 2008
cidaemon.exe server 2003
lessthandot + sqlserver
sql server geography
sql server activity monitor capture data
ssis delayvalidation
sql server mean
annot define primary key constraint on nullable column in table
mean sql
msforeachdb
code katas

Countries

Below is a list of the top 25 countries that visitors came from. Not surprisingly the United States is number 1, India is number 2. China is absent from this list, the other Asian country is the Philippines. The percentage are for the top 25 only not for the whole list.

Here is the breakdown by continent

Cities
A map of the cities can bee seen below

Here is the list of the top 15 cities, you can also see those in the map above
01. London
02. New York
03. Bangalore
04. Chennai
05. Hyderabad
06. Sydney
07. Chicago
08. Pune
09. Mumbai
10. Toronto
11. New Delhi
12. San Francisco
13. Melbourne
14. Paris
15. Singapore

That is all for this post, tomorrow we are going to look at Mobile Devices, Operating Systems and Browsers

2008 104
2009 139
2010 82
2011 106
2012 68

Here are all the stats and posts: http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/All/?disp=authdir&author=4

Ouch, looks like I only blogged half as much in 2012 compared to 2009. Now, what do you write for a post like this? A couple of w00ts? I can do that. Some balloons, I can do that as well. But I won't do that, as far as I know I am only half way done from my goal of 1000 posts, the goal which I just created 3 minutes ago that is. Unlike some other people, I have nothing to give away as part of this post. However, stay tuned for the 5 year anniversary there will be some prizes...that will be sometimes in late spring 2013

If I had to pick a favorite post, that would be very difficult, however, it seems that these two posts have helped a bunch of people

Create XML Files Out Of SQL Server With SSIS And FOR XML Syntax
The Ten Most Asked SQL Server Questions And Their Answers

I think that is it for this post, I have to get going on post number 23 of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts now.

See you in another 500 :-)

In chapter 1, section know your field, a list of artifacts is mentioned that you should know as a programmer. If you don't know these things then apparently you suck, so let's see how many of these do you know?

• Parnas Tables
• Nassi-Schneiderman Charts
• UML
• Data Flow Diagram
• Structure Charts
• Petri Nets
• State Transition Diagrams and Tables
• Flow Charts
• Decision Tables
• Tramp Data

What is your count? Leave a comment with your count, it will be interesting to see how many people actually know all these things.

I knew only six of these things by name. However when I looked them up I realized that I have used or seen almost all of them, even though I did not know what the correct name was for them

Tramp Data was an interesting one, I did not know that term. Tramp Data is data which is passed from one function to another, and not used by the first function.

What do you think, should all programmers know all of these artifacts?