It is once again time to come together as a community and talk about a common theme.  This monthly gathering of the community has just reached it’s 5th anniversary.  Yes, that’s right.  We have been doing this for 60 months or five years at this point.  That is pretty cool.

This month Chris Yates (blog | twitter) has taken the helm to lead us in our venture to discuss all the wonderful things that we have learned.  Well, maybe not all the things we have learned, but at least to discuss something we have learned.

Here are some details from the actual invite that you can read here.

Why do we come to events, webinars, sessions, networking? The basic fundamental therein is to learn; community. With that said here is this month’s theme. You have to discuss one thing, few things, or many things on something new you’ve learned recently. It could be from a webinar, event, conference, or colleague. The idea is for seasoned vets to new beginners to name at least one thing; in doing so it might just help one of your fellow SQL friends within the community.

The topic is straight forward but can be a bit difficult at times.  This is a pretty good topic to try and discuss.  I know I have been struggling for content for the topic.  Which makes it that much better because it provides a prime example of how to think about and discuss some pretty important things, while trying to compile that into a recap of one’s personal progress.

Let’s think about the topic for a bit and the timing of the topic.  This comes to us right on the heels of PASS Summit 2014 and in the middle of SQL Intersections in Las Vegas.  We might as well throw in there all of the other things like SQL Saturdays that have been happening leading up to and following those major conferences.

There has been ample opportunity over the past few weeks to learn technical content.  When networking with people there are ample opportunities at these major conferences to also learn about other people and about one’s self.  A good example of that can be seen in a blog post I wrote while attending PASS Summit, which you can read here.

The biggest learning opportunity that evolved from PASS Summit 2014 for me was the constant prodding in various sessions to break out the debugger and become more familiar with what is happening in various cases.  I saw the debugger used in three of the sessions I attended.  There are some great opportunities to learn more about SQL Server by taking some trinket of information from a session and trying to put it to use in your development environment.  This is where learning becomes internalized and gives a deeper understanding.

I hope you have been able to pick up on some tidbit that can be used to your advantage to get a deeper understanding of SQL Server.