Next week I am heading to Seattle for 5 days of SQLskills training. In honor of the event (yes, I’m that excited about it and I’ve deemed it an event), I thought I’d do 5 days of posts covering what I’m looking forward to and why.
I. The Content
For anyone not familiar with SQLskills and their offerings, you can get all the details here. I am attending the Performance Tuning session which will be taught by Kimberly Tripp ( b | t ), Paul Randal ( b | t ) and Jonathan Keyahias ( b | t ).
I have not attended a true SQLskills Immersion event before, but I was fortunate enough to have had 5 days of teaching by Kimberly and Paul in 2009 when my company brought them onsite. They covered many of the topics that they go over in the first Immersions course, Internals and Performance. We focused on internals, indexing and design, and maintenance strategies specific to our customer base.
Two years ago I was at the point where I knew enough about SQL Server Internals that everything really started to come together during the week that Paul and Kimberly were teaching. Afterward, I had much more confidence about the guidance we provided to our customers, and I could provide better consulting because of what I knew.
As I think about next week, I am very much looking forward to the topics that will be covered. Performance Tuning was one of the first things that I did with SQL Server, and even though I’ve been doing it for a while, I am certain there is so much more that I need to know. The topics where I’m really hoping for “a-ha” moments like last time are I/O, storage and the SQLOS. I don’t know much about Extended Events so I am looking forward to learning a lot about the subject and figuring out where I can use it best. And added benefit is that Paul, Kimberly and Jonathan will cover Baselines, Collecting and Analyzing Performance Data and DMVs…subjects which are the core of one of my presentations at the PASS Summit in October. I am sure I will learn new information that will help improve my presentation.
To say I’m looking forward to everything I will learn is an understatement. This week will be busy for me, as I try to get my team set up for my absence. This means I don’t plan to check emails during the day when we’re in training, and I will only spend time answering emails that are urgent in the evenings. I realize I’m creating quite a workload for myself when I return, but I think it’s worth it. What I learn can be put to use immediately and benefits me, my team and our customers.
I will be exhausted at the end, but I can’t wait.
