I saw a great movie recently called “The Great Buck Howard” starring John Malkovich. He is portraying the Amazing Kreskin of the 70’s and always starts his “mentalism” show with “I love this town!”.
When I am on the road teaching, that’s kind of how I feel. I enjoy seeing new places and meeting new people. The onsite courses, where the customer requests a dedicated class on their premises, are always the best (read – most challenging). The audience is almost always super- advanced and experienced but I enjoy that environment. When tough questions come up I love to research issues and solve real problems. There’s only so much time you can spend in AdventureWorks so sharing those experiences keeps me honest and engaged.
My philosophy is that everyone brings unique experiences to the table so the class is really a framework of sharing knowledge. Ironically, as a trainer, I always learn something new when I am teaching. Hopefully my students learn more, but I always pick up a nugget of information during a session. It is usually an interesting question or war-story which peaks my interest and has me searching through the SQL Server magazine archives or MSDN knowledgebase to get more background on a solution.
One such question in one of my early classes unveiled the fact that to shrink a log file to the maximum, you needed to run a log backup and shrinkfile operation together TWICE. Unbelieving, I tested it out and found out it was true and that Books Online actually documented this behavior. Who knew?
Another observation was that almost all the SQL Server 2008 new features were in the Enterprise Edition and not in the Standard Edition. OK, so there is a price freeze but Microsoft definitely is eyeing that upgrade fee. Since we use the Developer Edition exclusively in class (equivalent to the EE but for development and testing only), I had glossed over that.
Or that upgrading a SQL Server 2000 View to SQL Server 2005 or 2008 caused unpredictable sorts.
Or how do you populate a slowly changing dimension? This was something that was not covered in any of the Microsoft training courses but was a valid question. Enter the “Slowly Changing Dimension Wizard” in SSIS. Research, demo, develop lab and solution. It’s now part of every Business Intelligence course I teach.
Or how do you rebuild the system databases in SQL Server 2008? It is different from 2005 which is different from 2000. Watch out!
In the movie, Buck Howard’s saving grace was his final trick which always came off and impressed regardless of all the cheesy tricks that came before. In the same vein, good trainers don’t know all the answers but always come up with solutions in the end.
Cheers
Brian
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