Today, more blog from SQLSkills Immersion Training on Internals and Performance in Dallas, TX. For more about the training, see my prior post.

Where We’ve Been

We’ve moved through most of Module 8. We’ve been through the land of the transaction log, locking and blocking, isolation and versioning, table design and partitioning, and many neighborhoods of index internals.

A Sample Case

I love learning about how the transaction log works. I know a bit about how the log operates, and as a DBA I keep this knowledge pretty fresh. So I was looking forward to yesterday’s session on transaction logging quite a bit.

This week, I’ve learned a lot about the internals of how the log works with crash recovery, as well as how log buffers work in general. (And I mean a lot. Pages and pages of notes.)

Looking over my notes, what makes me happy is how much I was able to note down and absorb much more than I have been in trainings previously. This is attributable to three things:

• A lot of time devoted to the topic;
• Plenty of room for questions (and there were lots!) with lots of rich data in the answer;
• A good context for the information.

I’m really proud that I know enough now that I’m able to understand and note this level of detail. That’s a great feeling.

The magic of the Self Assigned Lab

When I’m in a great session or a good conversation and I learn something that works differently than I thought, or something very interesting, I made a note to myself with a “To Do”. These are basically self-assigned lab assignments: I’ve learned from blogging and presentations that I learn a ton by setting up my own scenarios and working to show that something works (and look at how it works), or the opposite.

I already have enough self-driven labs to keep me learning, and blogging about the best parts, for several months. Here are a few:

1. ToDo: find an automation opportunity with DBCC PAGE WITH TABLERESULTS
2. ToDo: create a scenario where you can’t get rid of a secondary filegroup without unusual operations.
3. ToDo: Look at/experiment with transaction savepoints

There are lots more good ones, but I’m hoarding quite a few of them. (I have 41 at the time of this writing.)

That’s the magic of great training– not only do you pick up a lot and you receive pre-designed labs you can learn from, but you also find paths you hadn’t imagined to explore and create tools on your own. And you’re inspired to go there.