Here’s what I wrote in 2022 that gathered the most views:
- #10: Who’s Hiring in the Database Community? February 2022 Edition – I saw the success of Hacker News’ “Who’s Hiring” monthly posts, and I blatantly stole the idea for the Microsoft data platform community. It works out well, very popular, very popular.
- #9: PSPO: How SQL Server 2022 Tries to Fix Parameter Sniffing – I was so pissed off when I wrote this, and I’m sure y’all could tell.
- #8: SQL Server 2022 Tells You Why A Query Can’t Go Parallel – such a simple thing, and so desperately needed.
- #7: The Top Feature Requests for SQL Server – I publish these every now and then, but this year I managed to work in a few zingers at the end of the post.
- #6: SQL Server 2022 Release Date: November 16, 2022 – this is one of those posts that will always get a lot of hits because people Google for it a lot.
- #5: Breaking News: SQL Server 2019 CU16 Changes Backup Formats, Can Break Log Shipping – makes sense as to why this was popular because a lot of people still rely on log shipping.
- #4: Columnstore Indexes are Finally Sorted in SQL Server 2022 – WHAT?!? How on earth did this end up in the top 10? I kinda think of columnstore as a niche topic.
- #3: Designing a Data Model for Gender and Sexuality (Oh And Also, I’m Pansexual) – can’t imagine how this went viral. Was also the top-commented post of the year. Thank y’all for your support and kind words.
- #2: Here Are The Results of the 2022 Data Professional Salary Survey – I’ll hazard a guess that a lot of y’all were switching jobs or asking for raises this year.
- #1: Buckle Up: October is Free Fundamentals Month! – when I published this, I told readers to bookmark this page, and then come back every day to link to whatever video was free today. I didn’t realize people would absolutely hammer that page, hahaha!
Evergreen Posts You Kept Reading
These aren’t posts I wrote in 2022 – they’re older posts that have stood the test of time, and keep showing up in Google results. These tutorial posts aren’t often the favorites of readers when the post first goes live, but they’re the kinds of posts that bring in new readers over time. I’ve gradually updated a lot of these (even if I wasn’t the original author) because they’re consistently popular.
- #10: How to Make SELECT COUNT(*) Queries Crazy Fast (2019)
- #9: Cheat Sheet: How to Configure TempDB for Microsoft SQL Server (2016)
- #8: Implementing Snapshot or Read Committed Snapshot Isolation in SQL Server: A Guide by Kendra Little (2013)
- #7: The Elephant and the Mouse, or, Parameter Sniffing in SQL Server by Jes Schultz (2013)
- #6: How to Move TempDB to Another Drive & Folder (2017)
- #5: How to Pass a List of Values Into a Stored Procedure (2020)
- #4: How to Download the Stack Overflow Database (2015)
- #3: How to Select Specific Columns in an Entity Framework Query by Richie Rump (2016)
- #2: How to fix the error “String or binary data would be truncated” (2019)
- And the #1 most popular post over time: How to count the number of rows in a table by Jes Schultz (2014)
Not only is it hard to write posts like this initially, but it takes work to continue to refine the content over time, adding in the kinds of key words and content that people are searching for. I actively prune some of ’em, and some of them were perfect when they were published.
Top YouTube Videos You Watched
My YouTube channel got 560,871 views in 2022, with 101,500 watch hours and 39,000 subscribers. I have to confess that I do a terrible job of reminding viewers to smash that like button and hit the bell to be notified when new posts go live. I’m just not that kind of host – yet, hahaha.
- #10: Office Hours on June 21, 2022 – I’m consistently amazed at how many thousands of people watch these videos every week, and I’m even more stunned that one of ’em cracked the top 10 overall!
- #9: Execution Plan Operators by Doug Lane – part of a longer training class Doug was building. We ended up not shipping, so we just published what we did for free on YouTube.
- #8: Identifying and Fixing Parameter Sniffing Issues – recorded live at SQLDay Poland 2017.
- #7: Backups: 3 Common Strategies – VSS snapshots, native full backups, and log backups.
- #6: What’s New in SQL Server 2019 – I should probably do one of these for 2022, come to think of it.
- #5: An Introduction to Microsoft SQL Server’s Statistics – my attempt to be Alton Brown with overhead cameras, playing cards, and a notebook.
- #4: Watch Brent Tune Queries at SQLSaturday Oslo – delivered remotely, recorded.
- #3: Blocking and Locking: How to Find and Fight Concurrency Problems – recorded live at SQLDay Poland 2017.
- #2: How to Think Like the Engine, Part 1 – a live version.
- #1: Microsoft SQL Server Performance Tuning, Live – recorded live at Microsoft Ignite in 2015. I think it’s probably due to the title, which tells me I should do an updated one of these.
Here’s to a productive 2023 where I share a lot and y’all learn a lot!
3 Comments. Leave new
Still no one complains if I read brentozar.com at work. I will start logging it as work hours. And no one will complain
@Brent – To your response about Coumnstore. Our developers go crazy with them. I have 17,893 Columnstore indexes across all our environments across 7170 databases. I am sure 97% of those don’t qualify for CS per your recommendations but we are production support DBAs, we aren’t involved in the design.
How is it working out for them? Genuine question 🙂