Voice of the DBA

The oldest article we have on the site is Tame Those Strings! Part 4 – Numeric Conversions, by me. It’s dated 2001-04-18, though I think that’s a date we picked when we converted all the content from one database to another. The founders agreed sometime during Feb 2001 to jointly run SQL Server Central. Since we each owned the copyright of our articles from another site, we migrated several articles to build up our content library. This was back when Andy, Brian, and I all had full-time jobs and managed the site during breaks, nights, and weekends.

That was 25 years ago.

Twenty. Five. Years.

It’s incredible to think that almost half my life has been spent working with this community. That joint effort morphed into a full-time job for me sometime in late 2003 or 2004. I took a pay cut to run the site, though as we grew from one to two to five to six newsletters a week, we started to make enough money to make up the difference. I was a horrible salesman, but fortunately, we had a great site that kept growing week after week, and we didn’t need to rely on my salesmanship. The site grew from dozens of users when we started to thousands in a few months to tens of thousands in a year. Eventually, we reached a million registered users, which was quite a milestone for us.

Apart from the site, we published books and gave out copies at our annual party during the PASS Summit. That party was one of the highlights of my year. We also used to publish a magazine in partnership with the PASS organization. That was a stressful time, with me trying to manage an every-other-month schedule for the magazine, which had to be laid out, printed, and shipped to subscribers. While that was going on I had to keep a couple of yearly book projects going and still get daily articles published.

I started writing these editorials because I was a little bored with the job. I never imagined how popular these pieces would become and how many people would read them. I suppose I should have as I was the one who negotiated and paid for our emailing software. We used to pay for Lyris Listmanager, which cost a few thousand dollars when we started. As we grew, we needed to send more emails overnight. One year I received a quote from Lyris for a few hundred thousand dollars to add the additional sending capacity. When I called the sales rep, he told me the only small companies sending more emails than us were the porn people. Needless to say, Andy took that as a challenge, not wanting to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for email software.  we designed a system using an SMTP component that would let us send a lot more emails. At our peak, we were sending over 8 million emails a week.

I had to learn a lot about running this site, from SMTP tricks and the how CAN-SPAM act applies to negotiating advertising contracts with customers. I had to manage hosting locations in the early 2000s. We first rented a VM, but they were too small after about six months. We moved to the house of a friend of mine, where he had 3Mbps broadband connection (this was 2002). At the time, I only had an ISDN connection, which wouldn’t cut it. We migrated through a few different co-location facilities in the Denver area that I had worked with as a corporate employee. Those moves entailed me physically moving servers into cages (or partial cages) in cold rooms, re-configuring our switch and firewall, and ensuring everything connected to the Internet. I even had an account at Dell as we regularly upgraded hardware.

When we sold the site to Redgate, some of those hassles went away, and I could focus on just being the editor of the site. I no longer had hosting responsibilities or even coding ones. Things were good and bad with that change . Good as I had developers to whom I could send bugs, but bad in that they had other, higher priorities. In the last few years, I’ve struggled to get things enhanced or fixed on the site, though I’ve been promised that is changing this year.

Despite all the changes over the years, I’m still thrilled to be the editor of SQL Server Central and glad that Redgate continues to run and support the community. Most of my time is spent doing other work with Redgate, but managing this site continues to be a significant portion of my work week.

And I still enjoy it.

I want to thank everyone who has read an article, asked or answered a question, syndicated their blog, tried the Question of the Day, written an article, or just left a comment on a piece. This has been an amazing community where many of you learned to be a better data professional. Lots of you asked, debated, and shared your knowledge with others in an extremely neighborly way. It’s been a joy to see this community grow into one where we appreciate, value, and love each other. I’ve made many friends here, met many of you in person, and seen you get a value from this community that cannot be measured. The success of this community is because of all of you.

I’m blessed to have joined you here for 25 years, and I look forward to many more.

Steve Jones

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