This Thursday gone, (June 18th) I went to a hotel near Heathrow airport in London for what was titled a “SQL Server MasterClass” and I was not disappointed.

I have attended several taught MCP SQL Server training courses over the years and several conferences including SQL Bits and this MasterClass taken Paul Randal and Kimberly L Tripp has to be the best training/knowledge transfer day I have been on. Kimberly and Paul have an amazing knowledge of SQL Server and such a great presentation style that makes this day a must for any SQL Server professional.

The agenda looked something like this:

1. KEYNOTE Bridging the gap between Developers and DBAs – The crux of this was that Developers need to write code that scales to a high volume production environment, thus helping out the DBA and DBA’s need to be flexible and help Developers with training and advice. The key to achieving the utopia was communication and team work and this set the tone for the rest of the day.

2. This took us onto a “SQL Server Mythbusters” session. This session was based around a series of blog posts @PaulRandal (Blog) wrote in April 2010 where he gave an insight and cleared up many myths around SQL Server. If you follow the link to Paul’s blog you can read much of the subjects covered on the MasterClass. You can’t beat hearing this stuff explained to you ‘straight from the horses’ mouth’ so to speak, but it is well worth reading if you were not able to attend.

3. Partner Presentations – This session was held by two of the third party sponsors, Idera and BakBone, where they demonstrated two excellent third party tools that could be useful in managing your SQL Server environments

4.The first session after lunch was titled a ‘Database Recovery Techniques - Demo Fest’ and it lived up to its name, Paul and Kimberly, amongst other things showed how,if you really really need to can access the systems tables in 2005 and 2008 and how  to simulate a disk failure and how to recover from it.

5. Kimberly took the fifth session and it was all about GUIDs:Use Abuse and how to move forward. This was an excellent session that provided some excellent information.

6. The final session titled “Essential Database Maintenance” was a joint session that counted down a top 10 of essential maintenance tasks. The guys said they could talk for a week on this subject so condensing this information into an hour session must have been impossible.

This is must attend event for any SQL Server professional. It was a fantastic day that I’m really pleased I was a able to attend and I would recommend it to anybody working with SQL Server.