I attended my first SQL Skills event in December 2011.  Due to a big project at work I was able to work in week three of the Immersion Events which is HA/DR “High Availability and Disaster Recovery”.  Although I am taking the training out of sequence my hope is to be able to attend IE2 later this fall.  IE2 is the performance tuning session.

Expectations are high when you attend an Immersion Event.  Many will argue that it is the best training available.  I haven’t attended every possible training out there but I have attended training from the numerous “training centers”, attended a lot of SQL Saturday’s and three PASS Summits.  Of all the training I have attended, the Immersion Events are the best.

Anytime that you put Paul Randal, Kimberly Tripp, Joe Sack and Jonathan Kehayias in the same room talking about topics they love you are in for a treat.  I will tell you that topics range from consolidation, virtualization, backups, restores, clustering, mirroring, replication, design options and more.  The fact you can find this information at SQL Skills I don’t mind sharing it.

For me, each day I was able to learn something pretty significant that will have direct impact at work, thus each day the cost of the training was justified.  How cool is that.

Thursday night at these events are community night.  Several attendees get to present a 15 minute session.  I was fortunate to be able to be one of those.  I presented “Getting Involved and Getting Ahead”, my session was on all things SQL Community.

If you ever have a change to attend, you are well feed both physically and intellectually.  Don’t miss the chance to get immersed in SQL Server.