One of my training class attendees had an interesting observation:
“All this week, when questions have come up about niche topics, you’ve been able to immediately give the name of one person who specializes in that topic. For example, when columnstore indexes came up, you immediately referred us to Niko Neugebauer’s blog post series. When Extended Events came up, you referred us to Jonathan Kehayias’s blog post series. If we wanted to start blogging about something, what areas are wide open for the taking?”
With every release of SQL Server, Microsoft brings out cool new features. No one person can possibly cover all of them, and heck, the entire community isn’t even big enough to cover ’em all. This leaves some open topic niches:
On-premise blog topics that need lovin’:
- In-memory OLTP (Hekaton) practical use cases and performance tuning
- R – the language itself has some exposure out there, but there’s zero coverage around practical use cases inside SQL Server and performance tuning it
- PolyBase
- Always Encrypted
- Distributed Always On Availability Groups (or for that matter, even single Availability Groups, or the new Standard Edition basic version)
- Enterprise automation with PowerShell (Mike Fal specializes in this, but doesn’t blog too often)
Basically, go through the What’s New in SQL Server 2016 (or even 2014) and you’ll find a ton of stuff that the community just hasn’t been writing about. In addition, cloud coverage is wide open too: we just don’t see a lot of practical hands-on posts about Azure SQL DB, Azure Data Warehouse, PowerBI, or Amazon RDS SQL Server.
Having said that, there’s a reason some of these topics are open:
- They’re relatively new – not a lot of people have real, hands-on experience with these (although we see a few armchair architects regurgitate stuff out of Books Online)
- They’re relatively unproven – they may not ever get adopted or improved
- They’re changing fast – especially the cloud topics
When you invest a ton of your time into building expertise and material for one of these new topics – like Jonathan did for XE, and Niko did for columnstore indexes – you’re basically gambling your time. Either they’re going to catch on and you’re going to have fame and fortune, or you’re going to be the guy with a book on Service Broker. (And you’ll notice that his awesome new site doesn’t focus on Service Broker, either.)
Choose wisely.