Many of you reading this probably work primarily in SQL. Even if you are a developer whose main language is something else, you write a lot of SQL. Even if you have an ORM writing the SQL that goes into production, I bet a lot of you are writing queries against a database to check that the data coming back in your application is correct.

As for me, I mostly work in SQL, with PowerShell and Python being second and third. I tried R for a while, but I think Python does everything R can do and it's much cleaner. I find R very cumbersome. I rarely write C# or experiment with anything else, but that's the nature of my job. PowerShell is important, as I do a bunch of DevOps and PoSh is a good choice to work with on the command line for gluing processes together.

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The pandemic forced many events online, which has worked fairly well inside many companies and certainly spurred some technological advances in how we meet and share information. With the pandemic ending or at least entering an endemic phase, there are many live events now, as well as some attempting to embrace a hybrid philosophy.

I went to two conferences in 2022 that embraced the hybrid concept: SQL Bits and the PASS Data Community Summit. I was just a speaker at the former, and mostly a speaker at the latter, though I saw quite a bit of the behind-the-scenes action from the organizers' perspective at the Data Community Summit.

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The US was hit with a number of storms over the Christmas holiday weekend. This disrupted air travel for many airlines and their customers, but one of the worst hit was Southwest Airlines. They accounted for most of the cancellations, over half of their scheduled flights at one point.

A number of places reported talking with Southwest employees who blamed the lack of tech investment by Southwest over time, noting this caught up with them. The Chief Operating Officer disagreed, saying that their scheduling system is the best in the world, even as the CEO noted that their scheduling software couldn't keep up and they fell back to manual operations.

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There was an article on the worst technology of 2022 from the MIT Technology Review. I was hoping to get some sense of what was really useful or failure-prone technology, but it seems that the article delves into decisions on how to run technology or policy more than the actual technology.

The list is here, with my short comments on those that might apply as actual technology items:

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The world of technology has undergone an amazing revolution in my lifetime. Things that I thought were incredible in my youth have come and gone in the world. I'm sure that there were dramatic changes in technology across lots of other generations, but I wonder if they were as dramatic for others as they feel for me.

As I watch older movies, I'm amazed at the evolutions. I was watching an older sitcom recently and saw someone using a cordless phone. While we have these cordless mobile devices, there was a time when having a phone in my house that wasn't tethered to a spot on the wall was incredible. And I haven't seen one of these in years.

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This is the last workday of 2022. Next week starts a new year, and as I've often done, I wanted to look back at the year. This time I decided to look back month by month, at some of the headlines and memorable data-related topics. I'm tackling things month-by-month.

In January there was a set of "tech experts" who shared their thoughts on the best database management systems. This one is worth a read for the humor involved. I wouldn't really consider many of these to be DBMSes. I thought about including this one as an April 1 joke, but it was a real story. I get asked for my opinion at times by writers researching a topic they don't understand. I hope I don't come across like a few of these people.

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This month's T-SQL Tuesday invitation asked about end-of-year operations that you might take on your databases. I don't know how many of you follow any specific end-of-year routine, but you may.

However, that got me thinking about an end-of-year career evaluation. It's not something I've done, but I do often look back and forward and build some career goals. That has been helpful in ensuring I do some work on my career each year, even though I'm much closer to the end than the beginning.

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This weekend is Christmas, and likely many of you are not working hard today and will enjoy a long weekend until Tuesday. There are many other holidays at this time of year as well, and I hope you are enjoying the season with loved ones. I want to take a moment to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday season.

As we come to the end of this year, it's a good time to take stock of life. Work slows down for many of us, and it's a time we think about family and friends. My wish is that you find yourself in a better position than last year. You are hopefully finding ways to cope and enjoy this world.

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I expected this to be an article from Glenn Berry. He often tries to convince me to upgrade. I think so he can justify buying his own new hardware.

In this case, however, this is a note from Tom's Hardware that it's a great time to upgrade your CPU. The article is a few weeks old, referencing Cyber Monday deals, and it notes that CPU sales are at a 30-year low. This means there's a lot of supply and retailers are trying to clear out stock.

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Ever since I heard about the SQLOS and all the work that went into producing an operating system for SQL Server inside of the host OS, I've thought that perhaps there might be value in specializing the environment for a database platform. Given the importance of databases, especially relational ones, and the need to get every bit of performance out of hardware, I wondered if we wouldn't see a version of SQL Server that is installed directly on the hardware, without a host OS.

In some sense, I guess that's what a PaaS database is in Azure, but I thought we might see that for the download-and-install version. I doubt that will ever happen now with the growth of the cloud.

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