The end of the year 2010 is coming up, this is an excellent time to review my 2010 goals. In this post 2010 Goals For SQLDenis I have outlined a couple of things I wanted to accomplish in 2010. Here is a list of those goals

Upgrade our servers to SQL Server 2008

Read 2 books per month

Be more active in the SQL community

Watch more television

Play more computer games

Now let’s see how I did

Upgrade our servers to SQL Server 2008

This was done and we are all on SQL Server 2008 now. No more replication, we can now use all the fancy T-SQL….everyone is happy

Read 2 books per month

I didn’t quite make it but I also read parts of technical books, I decided not to include those since I didn’t finish those. Here is the list of books that I did finish.

Stephen King: Just After Sunset

This is a collection of short stories, the stories I liked the most were The Gingerbread Girl, Graduation Afternoon and Stationary Bike. I liked the book and I recommend it

Stephen King: The Cell

This book is about cell phones turning people into zombies. The story is okay, a little too long in my opinion

Daniel Suarez: Daemon

I liked this book a lot and have even blogged about it here: Daemon by Daniel Suarez is a book every programmer will love

Daniel Suarez: Freedom

Freedom is the follow up to Daemon and has all the elements that made Daemon such a great book. This is the first book I read on my Nook Color and I finished it in two days..highly recommended..you do need to read Daemon first, otherwise you will be missing parts of the story

Dan Brown: The Lost Symbol

This is probably the best book by Dan Brown. It has a very interesting ending, highly recommended.

Michael Pollan: In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

Read this on my way to the 2010 MVP summit. If people would read this book they wouldn’t eat all that modified stuff that the stores are filled with nowadays

Stephenie Meyer: Twilight

Stephenie Meyer: New Moon

Stephenie Meyer: Eclipse

Stephenie Meyer: Breaking Dawn

Why oh why did I start this series, the first two books were fine but then it became ridiculous. Renesmee really…? Renesmee is a vampire/human hybrid member of the Olympic Coven. She is the daughter of Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, and the imprintee of Jacob Black

Of course after I ‘invested’ all the time into the books so far I had no choice to finish it. I do not recommend this

Peter Benchley: Jaws

The movie was good, the book is even better. The book has a chapter which is not in the movie, in this chapter Brody’s wife and the scientist have an affair. I highly recommended this book.

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner: SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

These two books are very similar, an interesting read, check it out if you are bored.

Ian Ayres: Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart

Interesting book, it shows you all the different ways that companies use numbers/statistics to make decisions. Recommended.

John M. Barry: The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history

This was very interesting, the book has a nice history about medicine and hospitals in the US in addition to covering the plague. Highly recommended.

Max Brook: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

A fun book if you want to escape from reality.

Frank W. Abagnale: The Art of the Steal: How to Protect Yourself and Your Business from Fraud, America’s #1 Crime

Frank Abagnale is the person who wrote “Catch me if you can”. This book details how fraud happens and what can be done to stop it. Now more important than ever with identity theft and lost data all over the place. A must read.

Ron Suskind: The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism

This was an interesting story about culture clashes, cover ups, infiltration and manipulation. If you are into politics then I would say that you should read this book.

Geoff Colvin: Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else

A very interesting book, yes Tiger Wood is good..not because he has talent but because he started playing and practicing while he could barely walk. The same is of course true for programming..the people who are in front of the computer 16 hours a day solving problems will be many times better than the ones that just do a 9 to 5 stint. I recommend this book!

Bill Bryson: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America

I love Bill Bryson’s writing. The first book I read by Bill Bryson was A walk in the woods and I loved it. This book is funny, it is entertaning and you will also learn some facts about the USA. Highly recommended.

Ian Stirk: SQL Server DMVs in Action: Better Queries with Dynamic Management Views

If you want to learn about DMVs then this is the book for you, I have been reading this book while it was being written, it is not released yet.

Be more active in the SQL community

I wrote only 76 blog posts this year but I did write a bunch of Wiki articles, here are 2 examples Store More SQL Agent Job History Than The Default and How to prevent a trigger from firing when doing an insert into a table in SQL Server

I was also active in the forums on this site and also on StackOverflow, my stats can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/users/740/sqlmenace

Watch more television

I did watch more television this year. I watched the following series

Spartacus

True Blood

Dexter

Californication

The Event (even though some people did not recommend it)

Big Brother (Who put that here?)

Boardwalk Empire

My favorite show is probably Boardwalk Empire

Play more computer games

Here I failed miserably..pretty much the only game I played this year was Angry Birds on my wife’s Droid X

So that is what I accomplished, I will put up my 2011 goals by January 3rd

So now it is time to tag some people to see how they did with their goals. I am tagging Ted Krueger, Brent Ozar, Aaron Bertrand and you the reader of this post.