Over the past week, I’ve been attending the IE2 Course, held by SQLSkills, in Bellevue (near Seattle). It’s been a really intense week, covering a lot of really deep technical stuff.
However, I’m not going to talk about that. The benefits of training by some of the leading SQL Server people in the world should be obvious. Also, my poor brain needs time to assimilate everything that’s been hosed into it.
It has, however, been a great honour to spend time with the great people on this course, and I mean the other attendees (such as Kendra Little, Jes Borland, Tim Ford and Dan Taylor among others) as well as the Instructors (Paul Randal, Kimberly Tripp, Jonathan Kehayias and Joe Sack).
A couple of the most impressive nuggets of knowledge I’ve gained over the past week:
sys.login_token – Gives you a list of the Active Directory groups against a SQL login
SQLIO Analyzer – David Klee has written a website that will analyze the output from SQLIO
Adventure Works Workload Generator – Jon Kehayias has a SQL workload generator.
There are a great many other bits of knowledge I’ve gained, but these, so far, are the most immediate, quick wins, if you see what I mean…
It was a hard flight over here, 9.5 hours, on a plane that was an hour late departing, but I had the SQL Internals book to keep me occupied (between films, Marvel The Avengers, and The Hunger Games…).
I’d like to thank my employers, TAH Ltd (twitter|web), for sending me on the course, I hope that the benefits of this training, will continue to be obvious for many moons.
More importantly, I’d like to thank my wife, Emma, since without her support, I’d never have had the confidence to travel 4500 miles for a training course.
Thank you, to everyone on the course, for making it a great learning experience.
ps. Sleeplessness, since the majority of the week here, I woke up at 3am, almost every day, for no apparent reason.
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