Last month, I joined forces with Andy Warren (Blog – Twitter) and Jeremiah Peschka (Blog – Twitter) to recognize you, dear blogger, for doing such a great job with your blogs. We wanted to give thanks to the community for churning out so much top-notch material, and there were definitely a lot of great nominations. We spent hours reading and rereading some really phenomenal blogs. Just because you don’t see your name here doesn’t mean you weren’t good – some of these came down to tenths of a point out of a 30-point scale.

With no further ado, here’s the best of the blogs this year:

Best Blog Series (Multiple Posts):

• Winner: Kendal Van Dyke for Disk Performance Hands-On Series (Blog – RSS – @SQLDBA)
• Runner-Up: Tie:
  Aaron Alton for SSMS Series (Blog – RSS – @AaronTheHobt)
  Aaron Bertrand for Bad Habits to Kick Series (Blog – RSS – @AaronBertrand)

Best Business Intelligence Blog Post:

• Winner: Chris Webb for Implementing SSRS Drilldowns (Blog – RSS)
• Runner-Up: Michelle Ufford for Using Variables in SSIS (Blog – RSS – @SQLFool)

Best New Blog:

• Winner (Tie):
  Aaron Alton for The Hobt (Blog – RSS – @AaronTheHobt)
  Michelle Ufford for SQLFool (Blog – RSS – @SQLFool)
• Runner-Up: Jorge Segarra for SQLChicken (Blog – RSS – @SQLChicken)

Best Professional Development Blog Post:

• Winner: Kendal Van Dyke for Off-Hours Work Guide for Managers (Blog – RSS – @SQLDBA)
• Runner-Up: Sean McCown for Landing That Job (Blog – RSS – @MidnightDBA)

Best T-SQL Blog Post:

• Winner: Aaron Bertrand for Stored Procedures Best Practices Checklist (Blog – RSS – @AaronBertrand)
• Runner-Up: Grant Fritchey for Unpacking the View (Blog – RSS – @GFritchey)

Best Unusual Blog Post:

• Winner: Alex Kuznetsov for Reproducing Deadlocks with One Table (Blog – RSS)
• Runner-Up: John Magnabosco for Encrypting Large Values (Blog – RSS)

We’re going to put together a badge for the winners to display on their blogs, and we’ll be doing some email interviews with the winners. If you’re at #SQLPASS this week, congratulate these bloggers for the killer work they’ve put out, and if you’re not, take a moment to subscribe to their blogs and send them a congratulatory tweet. They’re doing this just for the love of the community, helping out folks like you and me, and we need to recognize them for working so hard.