Or, as you should tell your boss, 24 hours of free training by many of the leaders of the industry presenting original sessions that will teach you about topics from SSIS to Spatial Data to Index Selection to CLR performance to… well, you get the idea. This shouldn’t be a hard sell for anyone to their boss. “Hey, remember that problem we had the other day with the database that was in simple recovery mode? Yeah, well, Kalen Delaney is presenting for an hour on just that topic.” Your follow-up question to the boss, should then be, not, can I, but “Do you want me to get a meeting room and project this for everyone?”
Developers, designers, architects, administrators, and managers are going to be able to find something interesting to learn about during this 24 hours of intense training. You won’t be alone while attending. I’ve heard that upwards of 3000 people have registered and that number is growing. You can even watch and listen with people like Tom LaRock, who is planning on hitting all 24 sessions and blogging, tweeting, whatever, live as he does it.
Get over to the registration page and pick the sessions that look best to you.
I’m even presenting one sessions at Noon GMT (8 AM EST) on Query Performance Tuning 101. I’ll try to give you the basics for going back & tuning your database, from identifying what is running slow and why, to figuring out how to see where the problems are, to fixing the query/index/table/whatever. It’s a 50,000 foot introduction to performance tuning and optimization. It’s based on the work I did recently for Rob Walter’s new book “Beginning SQL Server 2008 Administration“. You can get even deeper into the subject by hitting my last two books “SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled” and “Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plans.”
And after the 24 hours, have another chat with your boss. You want to attend the PASS Summit in November so that you can get even more time with all these great people and many, many more. If you need help selling him, check out the return on investment page for some great ideas. Come on. If 24 sessions is great, how mind-numbling fabulous will 160 sessions be?