What a year, am I right? Are we all happy it's nearly over, on a number of levels?
The SQL Server community went through some serious turmoil, too, and I hope we come out better on the other side of all of this.
But that does not mean there is nothing to celebrate. I have still seen a tremendous level of contribution across our family of professionals, during a time where cutting back would be understandable and perhaps even expected. This relentless generosity is why I started recognizing people a few years ago for their heroic efforts in helping and influencing others. Previous nominees:
This year, some of you will not be surprised by my choice. And while I usually wait until after Christmas, I wanted to get this out now to give everyone a little pick me up while the ick of 2020 is still on us. My recipient of this year's Community Influencer of the Year is:
Taryn Pratt
Working with the great team over at Stack Overflow, Taryn (@tarynpivots) helps maintain the premier Q & A resource on the planet. Keeping it up and responsive, and being transparent when there are issues, helps us all. She was (finally) awarded Data Platform MVP earlier this year, not just for her work and for maintaining the Stack Exchange Data Dump (a resource many of us use for demos and presentations), but also for her thorough blogging. She recently wrote about her take on synchronizing logins across availability replicas and her SQL Server toolbox.
Taryn is also a damned fine woodworker (@tarynbuilds), and will build you a cutting board so gorgeous you'll only want to use it for show.
Please join me in recognizing Taryn as a top-tier contributor to the SQL Server community!