I am honored to be hosting the 99th installment of T-SQL Tuesday. Can you believe this monthly blog party has been going on, month in and month out, since 2009? This is a great way for a bunch of us to get together, every four weeks or so, and blog about something along the same topic. What a great idea by Adam Machanic and now, looking back, I feel a bit guilty for not hosting until now!

Gretzky's jersey number, #99, is retired by the entire sport.

Getting to this month's topic, when I think of the number 99, I think of a variety of things. As a Canadian who has collected hockey cards since age 5, though, the strongest association I have is with Wayne Gretzky. I don't expect there's a massive overlap with hockey fans in this audience, but I have to imagine most of you know who he is, and how much he has meant to the sport. The card pictured here is not a particularly valuable card, but it is one of my most prized possessions. It has always been one of my favorite cards of #99, and whenever I see it, I get this huge wave of nostalgia from my childhood winters – playing hockey, watching Hockey Night in Canada, and cracking open a few packs of hockey cards with whatever was left of my allowance.

Anyway, I was torn when thinking about the topic. I feel like there have been a lot of professional development flavors in recent months, which kind of distances the content from its namesake. At the same time, those types of posts tend to draw a lot of interest, and in the end give us all greater insights into the personalities and opinions of other folks in the community. They almost force us all to get to know each other better, and I think that's a great thing. Are you with me so far, #SQLFamily?

So here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to offer you a choice.

Behind door #1:

In the spirit of my revelations about still being a hockey card nerd after all these years, and after seeing Drew Furgiuele's great post on #sqlibirum, I would love to hear about something you are passionate about, outside of the SQL Server or tech community. Bonus points if it's a passion that might surprise the rest of us. Play the Zeusaphone? Excel in Segway Polo? Forge Samurai swords? Coach a chess boxer or extreme ironer? Maybe you dabble in toilet seat art? Tell me about it! Show me proof! If you choose door #1, I hope your post is full of pictures or other media, and not just a wall of text. Let's keep it PG, though, OK?

Behind door #2:

Since many of you might be uncomfortable talking about your non-technical passions, I'll give you an escape pod back to the more familiar. I have a long laundry list of T-SQL bad habits (there's a big index here). What's your favorite one? Which one do you disagree with most vehemently? What bad habits are missing from my list? This is not entrapment; I promise I'm not going to bait you into writing something just so I can argue with you. I'm really interested in reading your opinions and, also, to have more material I can point to when I talk about bad habits and/or best practices.

The Rules

Like all the T-SQL Tuesdays that have come before (and that one time we did it on a Wednesday – yes, really), the usual rules apply:

• Publish your post on or after midnight, UTC, on Tuesday, February 13th, and before midnight, UTC, on Wednesday, February 14th. For those of you familiar with my datetime rants, you know that that can only be expressed in one way:
   

  WHERE PublishDateUTC >= '20180213' 
    AND PublishDateUTC <  '20180214';
  -- BETWEEN does not work here, at least not reliably

• Feature the T-SQL Tuesday logo. You can copy Michael Swart's high-quality image above, but please don't hot-link.
• If you tweet about your post, use the #TSQL2sday hash tag. If you are new to blogging, please also feel free to use the #SQLNewBlogger hash tag.

Once your post is complete, leave a comment here. Don't trust that I'll see your tweet; I'm still catching up on twitter from last week.

As you probably expect, I'll write a roundup post after the deadline, and then we can all wait with crazy anticipation for Adam's invitation for #100!