It’s amazing how natural it feels to write out 2010 on checks this first week of the new year. Usually it takes me at least a month. Maybe that’s a sign of good things to come this year. Probably like many of you, I look forward to the clean slate that the start of a new year brings, although intellectually I know it’s an arbitrary marker in time. Nonetheless, I am excited by the new year and the plans that are underway. One of my resolutions is to blog more. With the upcoming release of SQL Server 2008 R2, there will be plenty to blog about. However, I’m currently heads down on writing a course and co-authoring two books that deal with the BI features in R2, so I won’t start blogging in earnest until I can get past my current set of deliverables. Which will be soon. Very soon. Consider this a teaser!

Meanwhile, my daughter Erika has decided to launch her blog at http://erikasblog.datainspirations.com/. I do believe we are the first mother-daughter BI consulting team, but I could be wrong. At any rate, I think we make an awesome team and no doubt am biased about that. Erika started working with me just 3 days after she graduated from MIT in June 2008, and she immediately started helping me with work on one of the hardest BI projects I have ever encountered. Nothing like trial by fire! She has come through that project (and a few others since) with flying colors and can write some incredible MDX. It’s been interesting to observe her learning process. Typically, I have 1-3 days to teach someone MDX and I don’t get to track their growth after the class is done. Erika didn’t have any T-SQL baggage to unlearn as she tackled MDX, but I suppose being a theoretical math major doesn’t hurt. We hope to leverage her experience into some new ways of explaining MDX this year.