Ready for Training: The Instructors

Yesterday I started my 5 day series about next week’s SQLskills training by reviewing the content that will be covered during the Performance Tuning class. Today I want to talk about the instructors, Kimberly Tripp ( b | t ), Paul Randal ( b | t ) and Jonathan Keyahias ( b | t ). I’ve attended training sessions from all three, and as stated in yesterday’s post, I am really excited about the topics we will cover.  But it is not just because of the content itself, but because of the real-world experience of the people presenting it. As consultants, Kimberly, Paul and Jonathan all work with clients and I know they have great stories regarding issues they have seen in the field and what they did to solve them. But in addition to that, they each provide another perspective.

Kimberly has been working with SQL Server for almost 20 years and has seen the product evolve in a myriad of ways. She has the background and depth that is infrequently matched. It’s cool when she talks about how the product worked in the 6.5 or 7 release…cool because she worked it with then and can tell you what it did (and why they changed behavior in later releases); she isn’t just telling you what she read somewhere.

Paul worked on the SQL Server product team at Microsoft – there’s a lot of code that he wrote, and a lot that he just knows about internal workings because he knows how it was written. Over the weekend I was asking about the sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats DMV, and he tweeted:

Paul says...

 Now, I’m certain there are a lot of things that Paul cannot share because of NDA, but when he can share that information?  Awesome.

Before joining SQLskills, Jonathan was a DBA for a hospital in Florida. He can provide the DBA perspective, which is valuable to me because I work with a lot of DBAs. Jonathan also had a wide range of responsibilities as a DBA and I’m very interested to hear him talk about his work with storage and architecting solutions for the various applications he had to support.

I have a whole week to ask questions – before, during or after class. (In case you’re wondering, I do not have a list of questions already lined up.) The big benefit here is that there is time for discussion. When you ask questions during a User Group, SQL Saturday, SQL Rally or even PASS Summit session, there is sometimes not enough time to answer the question to the level that you hope. I don’t see that being a problem next week.