I think I'm fitting the OLD in GrumpyOldDBA
I try to keep up with a posts on a number of blogs both SQL Server and Windows and it's interesting to see the same subjects being raised time after time in, especially, the SQL Blogs. Now I don't see this as bad, other than it's duplication, but what I realise is that there are constantly new users to SQL Server who don't have the benefit ( ? ) of having worked through several versions of SQL Server, from 6.0 for me.
This means I guess the same questions are endlessly asked resulting in generally the same answers, but not always! So does this mean that documentation and training courses don't really cover what I see in many cases as quite basic fundamentals? Maybe training is out of fashion and all you could ever want to know is available via your favourite search engine.
I rarely use BOL as I find it irksome to navigate and usually doesn't clearly cover or answer what I'm looking for. Just to be grumpy here I also find it extremely irritating when blogs or articles on web sites merely reproduce the content of BOL, usually the T-SQL with different wording, I usually find that any examples for a feature never actually use it like I want to - partitioning back in sql 2000 was a fine example where it seemed every writer assumed you'd only ever want to partition by date, usually year or month.
I used to answer questions on forums, back in SQL 2000 I was using quite large boxes with lots of memory ( for then ) and I remember seeming to constantly be answering the same questions about awe and the 3gb switch and how and what they did - and fighting against the incorrect answers who got it wrong every time. The trouble with forums is that just like blogs others can pick up your posts/code and present it as their own - I recently found a word for word blog post for a well known MVP posted on another site - it was somewhat obscure and a couple of years old.
However it does illustrate the problems of presenting information - my plan for www.grumpyolddba.co.uk was for me to be able to put all my working documents in one place in an orderly fashion, however it takes time to convert large word docs which contain lots of screen shots and code, it took me some time to find a ultility which allowed me to put correctly formatted T-SQL into this blog for example.
Ah well back to grindstone! I have some posts concerning some interesting aspects of tuning to come soon once I've changed all the client data names and such to obscure their data.