There has been a great deal of good opportunities in the last few months for SQL Server training. If you were fortunate enough to attend, we saw another SQL Skills Immersion Event in August. There is something to be said about going to an event in which the top SQL Server Professionals are the trainers. I feel it is nearly a priceless experience and impact on personal gain of skills and knowledge. I encourage all of you to go see when the next Immersion Event is schedule for and get your employers to get you there!
SQL Server User Groups are always a strong, monthly event. I was honored to present for the inaugural Fox Valley SQL Server User Group or FoxPASS, this past week. There was a great showing of DBAs, Developers and some management level professionals in attendance. This weekend, SQL Saturday in Kalamazoo, MI is kicking off. I’ve heard nothing but great feedback on how well this SQL Saturday is run and the quality that comes out of it. If you can get to this event this weekend, I encourage you to do so. The speaker lineup is nothing short of excellent.
The 24 hours of pass just closed and as the previous events, this one was just as good. I’d like to take special mention to the session Erin Stellato (B | T) did, “DBCC, Statistics, and You”. I truly hope everyone caught this session. Erin has always been one of my favorite presenters and really is one of the best I’ve seen. This session gave us a remarkable flow that started in DBCC definitions to Statistics and taking a look at exactly where they live and managing them, ending with CHECKDB. CHECKDB isn’t a faint of heart topic to present on and Erin knocked it out of the park. I can honestly say, this is one of the best hour long sessions I’ve seen in many years and I can’t wait to see Erin present again. Also, special thanks to Aaron Bertrand (B | T) for tackling dozens of questions as they came in, while Erin kept the valued content flowing to us. Aaron answered and kept answering questions from the attendance at a rate that would have been very difficult for many.
Pushing forward into next week and continuing the rate of SQL Server Events, SQL Saturday in Minnesota will be September, 29th. Last year, I attended and presented for this SQL Saturday and, as far as SQL Saturdays go for organization and quality of training, this is one very high on my list. This year I'll be extending the event with a pre-conference training session on Query Tuning. The pre-conference will start out by taking a look at the relationships we need to create between Developers and DBAs so we can bridge the gap between ownership and using all of our skills effectively. We'll dive into exactly how a transaction flows through and is optimized after that and then the rest of the day will be spent learning how to read execution plans, finding executions plans and where to spend energy in tuning them in order to make the best impacts for improving performance. We'll go over monitoring the plan cache with automation techniques, scripts that are readily available to us from SQL Server Experts around the world and even take a dive into some internals on page storage and index analysis. I'm looking forward to this pre-conference and interacting with a great group of SQL Pros!
Following the pre-conference, I’ll be presenting two great sessions. Merge Replication for Offline Data Mobility and Co-Presenting with the awesome, Hope Foley (B | T) on Consulting The Good, The Bad, The Ugly. I have the utmost respect for Hope. She is at the top of her game with SQL Server and Consulting. These are the sessions that I find myself wanting to sit in the room and learn from it as well as be up front presenting. That isn’t the end of the day! During lunch, I’ll be Moderating a lunch session on Indexing. It will be my job to keep everyone in line. 😉
Remember, SQL Server Training is literally right next door and commonly, something you can easily find monthly at little to no cost. Take advantage of these experts sharing their knowledge so we can all build on this great community and bucket of skills we all have to offer each other.
