This post is my contribution to T-SQL Tuesday #204 – Are Blogs Still Relevant?, hosted by Jeff Iannucci (b | li ). Please check Jeff’s invitation post for the rules.
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blogging event in the SQL Server community, started by Adam Machanic in 2009 and now maintained by Steve Jones. Each month, a different community member hosts the event by proposing a topic, inviting SQL Server professionals and enthusiasts to share their experiences, knowledge, and thoughts through blog posts.
It’s a great way to learn from others, discover new voices in the community, and keep the spirit of knowledge sharing alive.
This month’s topic is: Are blogs still relevant?
It’s hard to tell whether people in the technology community still read blogs as much as they used to. With AI tools becoming more accessible, someone can simply ask ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI assistant a question and get an answer in seconds.
Why spend time searching through blog posts when you can just ask AI?
If we’re talking about popularity, I don’t think blogs have the same presence they had back in the 2010s. There are so many other ways to consume information now. YouTube, podcasts, social media, newsletters, and AI assistants have all changed how we learn and discover things.
But if the question is whether blogs are still relevant, I would say yes.
There’s Still Value in Reading Someone Else’s Experience
One thing I appreciate about technical blogs is that they often come from someone who actually encountered a problem, spent time figuring it out, and decided to share what they learned.
Take SQL Server, for example.
You can ask AI how to troubleshoot a slow-running query, how to interpret wait statistics, or how to configure a particular SQL Server feature. It will probably give you a reasonable starting point.
But there’s a difference between getting an answer and understanding how someone arrived at that answer.
A blog post can explain what the author tried, what worked, what didn’t, and why a particular approach made sense in their environment. Sometimes, the most useful part isn’t even the final solution. It’s the troubleshooting process that got them there.
And that’s something I still enjoy reading.
I’ve come across plenty of situations where I thought I understood a particular SQL Server behavior, only to discover something different when I started testing it myself. Reading about someone else’s experience can give you a different perspective and sometimes save you hours of investigation.
Of course, not every blog post is accurate, and not every solution applies to every environment. That’s part of being a technology professional. We still need to validate what we read and understand how it applies to our own circumstances.
AI Has Changed How We Write
Here’s another thing I’ve been thinking about.
I keep writing blog posts whenever time permits. And honestly, there are fewer excuses now for not putting something out there.
One of the hurdles for many people who want to blog is writing itself. They might know the technology, understand a particular problem, and have something valuable to share, but putting those thoughts into a well-written article can be difficult.
Grammar, sentence construction, organization, and simply finding the right words can get in the way.
I’ve been there myself.
Now we have AI tools that can help organize our thoughts, improve sentence construction, check grammar, and make an article easier to read.
That doesn’t mean we should let AI do all the thinking for us. We still need to bring our own experience, technical knowledge, research, and judgment to the table.
I’ve started using AI in my own writing and technical experiments.
For example, in my recent post about When Do You Reach For A #temp Table?, I used Claude Code to help generate test scenarios. That saved me time setting up the experiments so I could concentrate on examining the behavior and explaining what I found.
AI helped with the process, but I still needed to understand the SQL Server behavior, review the results, and decide what was worth sharing.
I think that’s a pretty good way to use these tools.
If you know something worth sharing but struggle to put it into words, there’s no reason to let grammar or writing skills stop you. Let AI help you communicate what you know.
We Should Be Seeing More Quality Technical Content
If AI makes writing easier, shouldn’t we be seeing more blog posts from the technology community?
I think so.
There are plenty of SQL Server professionals out there with years of experience. They have dealt with production outages, performance problems, migrations, database corruption, security issues, and all sorts of situations that don’t always have a straightforward answer.
Those experiences are worth sharing.
Imagine how much more we could learn if more people took the time to document what they encountered and what they learned along the way.
We don’t all have to write comprehensive technical guides. Sometimes a short post explaining a particular problem, a useful script, a troubleshooting tip, or a lesson learned from a production incident is already valuable.
And you don’t have to be a well-known name in the community to have something worth sharing.
Someone might be troubleshooting the exact same problem months or even years from now. Your post could be the one that helps them move forward.
That’s one of the things I like about blogging. A post can continue to be useful long after you publish it.
So, Are Blogs Still Relevant?
For me, absolutely.
Are blogs as popular as they were in the 2010s? Probably not. Do I expect people to spend hours browsing through technical blogs when they can ask an AI assistant for an answer? Probably not either.
But I don’t think those things make blogging any less valuable.
AI is another tool we can use to learn, research, and communicate. It can make finding information and putting our thoughts into words easier. But there’s still value in reading about the experiences and discoveries of people who work with the technology every day.
As for me, I’ll keep writing whenever time permits. I don’t expect every post to get hundreds of views or generate a lot of discussion. If someone finds an article useful, learns something new, or approaches a problem differently because of something I wrote, that’s already a good reason to keep doing it.
And if AI can help me spend less time worrying about grammar and more time sharing what I’ve learned, I’ll gladly take that help.
Now, I’d like to hear from the rest of the community.
Are you still reading technical blogs? Have you changed how you learn because of AI? And if you’ve stopped blogging, what’s holding you back?
Let’s keep sharing what we learn.
Happy T-SQL Tuesday!
