How this All Plays Out At Home (SQLSkills Immersion Training Wrap Up)

This blog has some reflections on SQLSkills Immersion Training on Internals and Performance in Dallas, TX. For more about the training, see my first and second posts.

A question everyone should ask about training and conferences is, “how will this change my daily life?”

Ask this before the training, and then take a look afterward as well. Often, a training which seems to be somewhat conceptual may turn out to be extremely practical. Or a conference might have some sessions you hadn’t considered which get you interested in a new topic, or change how you think. And sometimes things just aren’t as good as you’d hoped.

Learning is About Surprise

The best thing about learning is the feeling of the world being larger than you thought, and getting a view of how part of it is laid out. That sense of wonder is a big indicator to me that I’m learning something valuable.

A Little Time Travel

Once upon a time, I took a class where I first learned about how write-ahead logging and indexes work. (We won’t say how long ago this was, but in geologic time it’s very brief.) The class was taught by Kimberly Tripp (blog | twitter) of SQLSkills.

I’d been a database administrator for a few  years and I knew a bit about how to manage a database environment, handle system administration, and write SQL queries. I didn’t understand much at all about how things worked internally. I didn’t have much information to put together to figure out how to make things perform better.

I was just amazed by the class. And I was so very excited. Kimberly is very passionate and enthusiastic about topics when she teaches, and everything just made so much more sense. I scrambled to make as many notes as I could, but my mind could hardly keep up:  it was too busy fitting together the things I already knew with the new framework I already saw. And I was just amazed  how big the scope of things were to figure out.  The class was incredibly useful, and I knew I’d only absorbed about 25% of the content– but that was plenty for me at the time.

What Happened this Time

These days, I read a lot of blogs. I think a lot about SQL Server. I’ve learned a lot in the undisclosed amount of time since that class.

And the world still got quite a bit bigger this time.

Since the class ended, I’ve found myself discussing the following topics without having to work hard at all to recall the details:

• the difference between page and row compression
• -E (the feature which has no name), contiguous fill, and file/filegroup layout
• transaction savepoints and rollbacks
• off-row data
• different effects on the plan cache from using EXEC() and sp_executesql

This is really pretty awesome. These are topics I knew some things about, but they weren’t in the “normal”/”casual conversation” parts of my brain. These have now moved in and other, even weirder, geekier stuff  is out there on the frontiers.

What’s Different

The difference is that I already knew how to swim this time, so I got to learn and emulate expert swimming techniques.

I did, once again, come home with a practical task list of specific things I  know I want to look at in my environment to make sure they’re not an issue. But I also came back with new thoughts about how to articulate and critique database design best practices, how to handle transactions and optimize performance, and how to lay out physical storage. I don’t know if I can ever learn too much about those things– they’re really big, deep areas. That’s why they’re so much fun!

This all means that deep, quality training really does suit people at different levels in their career. When you have great content and passionate instructors, you’re going to absorb as much as you can in that amount of time— and wherever you are in your career, it’ll make a big difference in your life.