The Data Platform blog of the year 2017

I am not a fan of the awards & prizes (and there will be soon a blog post on this topic), but there is something important I wanted to share and for a good reason.

There is a huge lack of creativity and true effort in the Data Platform community – not many people create new original content or to bring their own point of view on some old matters. Some people keep on presenting official Microsoft slides (even though they do not work for Microsoft), repeating marketing materials and repeating Build/Ignite/Channel 9 presentations. Some people will go as far as taking other’s work and present as their own, without even giving the credit. Way too many presentations & blog post do not bring the critical view, but just one huge hype where everything is fine and there is nothing else to improve, even though anyone with a critical view will challenge in a couple of minutes. In the world of “retweets”, there is even bigger need for the original material.

If any technology works as advertised, it simply means that you are not pushing it to the limits well enough.

In the middle of all this, every new honest blog is a breath of fresh air, every dive into the internals of any technology is a like a cold bath in the middle of the summer heat.
It is so much desired, it is so much needed.

Let me declare the new blog of the year 2017 – Joe Obbish’s incredible effort – the https://orderbyselectnull.com where he exposes the Query Optimiser functionality through his tests and observations.
His writings are fresh and the problems he is tackling are highly interesting – it is largely about high-scale systems and how SQL Server behaves when facing them.

I was playing with the idea in the being of January of writing about Joe Obbish‘s work, but decided that it would not be the best idea.
Why I decided to write about this after all ?
I talked to a friend and told him my view on Joe’s efforts and how high I value them, sharing that I almost wrote a blog post about them – and surprise, he argued that it would be a good idea, convincing me to go ahead with this.
Promoting a great effort and motivating someone to keep an amazing work is worth an investment.

There are 2 other Query Optimiser greats that I can compare his work with – Paul White and Dmitry Pilugin. This is how high I appreciate Joe’s effort. If I ever to publish the top 3 Query Optimiser authors – well, I just did it :)

I do not have a favourite post of Joe’s work, I do not necessary agree with all of them, but most importantly – I love what he is doing.
For all good reasons, we need him to carry on. If you are using Microsoft Data Platform (SQL Server, Azure SQL Database) – his influence is well beyond obvious. He tackles the problems most of us are not facing currently, but one day in the future we all shall face. And advancing the development is essential. Challenging the current implementations will help us all to have more interesting problems to solve.

What Joe Obbish is doing is an art.
An art of Query Optimisation analysis.
If you never did, now it is time to visit https://orderbyselectnull.com!
Oh and if you did, it is about time to revisit it again. :)