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I got off to a late start on this one. Life, stuff and things kind of got in the way of my getting to write and post to the newest Un-SQL Friday topic started by Jen McCown (blog|twitter).

Jen asks “Who are the IT giants you talk to/read that make you feel like a technical poser?” and instructs that invoking Paul Randal (blog|twitter) is not allowed. Per Jen’s instructions saying everybody is also not acceptable. As such I had to sit down and figure out who I could add on the list.

My First Thoughts

When Jen originally mentioned this on Twitter I came up with a few names on the spot

That’s a pretty good list right there and one worth sticking with.

Who Are These Folks?

In no particular order:

• Jonathan Kehayias (blog|twitter) – A SQL Server MVP I’ve found Jonathan’s posts always interesting and yet half the time I find myself going “wait, what?” and then after re-reading going “oh duh”. If you’ve not read them go to his blog and read his series 31 Days of Extended Events
  
• Aaron Bertrand (blog|twitter) – Another SQL Server MVP, Aaron is a senior consultant for SQL Sentry. He frequently posts on various items, but what really makes him stand out to me is his being able to quickly get a handle on new features that are available. He has already written a whole host of entries about SQL Denali
• Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) – Yet another SQL Server MVP (I’m seeing a trend here) Adam would easily make this list for sp_whoisactive alone, but that would do a disservice to all of the other performance and parallelism things he posts (not to mention being the brains behind T-SQL Tuesday).
• Buck Woody (blog|twitter) – Not an MVP is Buck, however I believe the only reason for that is that he works at Microsoft. Buck is first and foremost a teacher. He officially teaches at the University of Washington but his love of imparting knowledge rings through in every post. Spend a week reading his Carpe Datum  blog, you’ll be better off for it.
• Glenn Berry (blog|twitter) – Oh hey, a SQL Server MVP. Glenn is all about performance, be it from tuning your SQL to make it faster to getting the right hardware at the right price. Glenn is so passionate about the hardware side of things that he has a book coming out next month just about SQL Server Hardware. I used to think I knew my hardware up until I started reading Glenn’s blog.
• Sean McCown (blog|twitter) – He’s a SQL Server MVP and a prolific writer. Funnily I was reading Sean’s stuff years ago and didn’t realize it was him until I was looking for a specific article recently. Sean has an education mission. He writes, blogs, creates videos, does webcasts, presents and cooks. Sean can take something complex and really break it down well so it’s understandable. Wish I had half of his ability to do that.
• Grant Fritchey (blog|twitter) – Grant recently announced he was going to go work for Red Gate Software, a great pickup adding a SQL Server MVP to their ranks. Query performance is where I find Grant to be the go to guy. He’s even written books about SQL Server Execution Plans and SQL Server Query Performance Tuning that I would highly recommend to anyone, beginner to expert.
• Don Jones (blog|twitter) – One more to add to the MVP list here. Don has written a ridiculous number of books and articles about a wide range of subjects, but it’s his blogs on PowerShell that really stand out to me. Check out his book Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches and make take in more than just calories.
• Conor Cunningham (blog) – Conor isn’t as prolific a writer as many of the other folks listed here however when he writes something you are darn well going to read. His Conor vs series isn’t the first that I go to in my RSS reader just because I know if there is something new it’s going to take me a while to read and digest it. I was really disappointed to have missed Conor speaking at the PASS Summit 2010.
• Paul White (blog|twitter) – Paul happily states that he’s not an MCM, MVP, MCITP or MCTS. I can categorically state that Paul’s blog is probably the best constructed and well written I’ve read on SQL Internals. Just go and read some of his writings where he dissects the optimiser. I dare you not to be impressed and amazed.
• Linchi Shea (blog) – I really don’t know anything about Linchi. There’s no about page on his blog. The only thing I know is that Linchi needs to write more frequently as I love the way that the blog posts pull apart items and really get to the root information.

Who Else?

I could easily write another 15-20 names here. I currently have 65 SQL bloggers in my RSS reader. Each one of them at one time or another has made me feel like a tech poser.

It’s actually great to have all these folks out there writing their stuff as any time I think about getting complacent in one area or another I just have to pull up a random post from anyone, read it and say to myself “you’ve got a lot to learn yet kid”.