SQLskills.com | Immerse Yourself In SQL Server

SQLskills Immersion Events - The Best SQL Server Training Around!

Our Immersion Events are in high demand around the world but in 2010 our busy schedule is only permitting us to schedule three sets of public classes:

Boston, MA, US: April 2010
Dublin, Ireland: June/July 2010
Bellevue, WA, US: August 2010
BI Immersion Event: Bellevue, WA, US: October 2010

NEW BI class! We've added a 5-day BI-focused class taught by our well-known BI expert Stacia Misner. Stacia teaches the Microsoft internal BI classes and is a regular on the BI conference circuit. Kimberly and I will be sitting in this class to learn BI!

The goal of an Immersion Event is to provide you with an intense and focused week of training taught by the best and most experienced people in the business. We explain everything we teach to whatever depth you want to go.

SQLskills.com is owned and run by world-renowned SQL Server experts Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp. The husband-and-wife team have over 30 years combined experience working with all sizes of SQL Server databases, in organizations as diverse as Fortune-100 companies to small, single-database businesses. Together they teach the storage internals, performance tuning, database design, database maintenance, and disaster recovery sections of Microsoft's most advanced course - Microsoft Certified Master - SQL Server.

Here are some testimonials from MVPs and Microsoft Certified Masters who've attended our classes, people who are used to presenting themselves and have high standards:

Greg Gonzalez, President and CEO of SQL Sentry wrote a long blog post about the Immersion Event he attended in Boston in April:

"When it comes to the instructors themselves, Kimberly and Paul simply have no equal. Not only are they both ultimate authorities, but they have endless enthusiasm about the material, and spot on delivery. If either ever got tired they never showed it, even after going all day and all week. We witnessed countless demos over the course of the week, some extremely involved, multi-step processes, and I can’t recall a one that didn’t go the way it was supposed to."
"These are not beginner presenters, and they put an extreme amount of preparation and attention to detail into everything that they do. Completely, utterly professional."
"You might think that with this extreme level of skill comes extreme levels of egotism and lack of patience. Nothing could be further from the truth. ... They simply know how to teach, and are approachable, humble, and patient."

Fellow-MVP Aaron Bertrand discussing the same Immersion Event:

"The additional insight around what's printed in the book or in Books Online is invaluable; and the experience Paul and Kimberly have had with real live customers yields a lot more information and things to watch out for than you'd ever get from the documentation alone."

Newly-minted MCM Robert Davis of Microsoft explaining how the previous training he'd received from us at Microsoft helped him pass his MCM certification (which we also teach):

"I try to take the SQLSkills classes when I can. I highly recommend to everyone that they take advantage of any training opportunities that they see from this group."

Newly-minted MCM Brent Ozar of Quest (now with SQLskills.com)summing up the first week of the recent MCM class that we taught:

"To call them good trainers is an epic understatement. They know how to deliver very, very technical material in ways that illustrate it well. I had to stop Paul at one point and ask him how long it took to build a particular slide because the animations were so good at conveying a hard-to-describe process."

Bellevue, WA, US: October 25-29

Even with little to no knowledge of BI, this course will provide you with immediately-usable, production-level knowledge of BI. The course has been designed to take you from installation to configuration to application and integration – for all facets of the BI stack (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, PowerPivot, and SharePoint) - it is meant for anyone who wants to get involved in BI. Our first thought was to create a class for DBAs who want to better understand their environment, but the course content is just as valuable whether you’re new to BI or ready to expand your skills. This class might be the perfect way to advance your career and dig deeper into topics that don’t typically get covered in most BI classes.

Maybe you accomplish quite a bit with Excel - but how do you get the data there? Quite a few folks use cut-and-paste, or import from a CSV - but of course there's a much better, and much more scalable and robust way using SSIS! Relational data warehousing – with lots of aggregate tables – helps you keep your data organized for Excel or any other type of reporting or analysis tool that you might want to use, but some types of business questions are answered more easily when you move your data from the data warehouse into SSAS cubes. Whether you store data in tables or cubes, you have a variety of options in the BI stack to access and analyze the data, but which is best? Learn how to choose the right tool for the task and how to manage a secure and scalable environment for reporting and analysis.

The course starts out in the 100-200 range on Day 1 but moves into the 200-300 range for the remainder of the week. For each technology in the BI stack, you’ll learn basic usage and design principles, followed by more coverage of configuration, performance tuning, and other management tasks than you’ll find in most BI end-to-end classes. The course will not only bridge the gap in your BI knowledge, but will continue on to take you a lot further. If you’ve always wanted to immerse yourself into BI, figure out the end-to-end story, and go behind-the-scenes to learn how to install, configure, and deploy BI solutions, this is the place to be!

The BI Immersion Event this Fall in Bellevue, Washington will be a full 5-day class, pulling in the best content on the following topics:

What is Business Intelligence?
Building a Business Intelligence Infrastructure
Relational Data Warehousing
Integration Services
SSIS Package Reliability and Performance
Managing SSIS in Production
Analysis Services
Designing Aggregations
Using MDX to Enhance a Cube
Managing SSAS in Production
Reporting Services
Developing Reports
Managing SSRS in Production
Excel and PowerPivot for Excel
SharePoint 2010
PerformancePoint Services
PowerPivot forSharePoint

You can see a much more detailed agenda here.

Event details:

Class will run from 9:00am-5:30pm Monday through Thursday and 9:00am-3:30pm on Friday.
You will receive printed materials for all of the lecture content + demo scripts and a hands-on lab DVD that you can use to work through self-paced exercises covering much of what we talk about. Additionally, after the event ends, we will provide all classroom demo content on our website as a zip of demo scripts.
Also included in your registration fee are coffee, breakfast, snacks and lunch. On the registration page, please let us know if you have special dietary requirements. Click here to see our tentative menu.

Location details:

The Immersion Event will be held in the Marriott Courtyard Bellevue Downtown.
This hotel is central to downtown Bellevue, packed with restaurants, shopping, and entertainment!
The hotel has a special rate of $159/night Sunday through Thursday (departing Friday). The group code to use is SQLSQLA and you can access this rate by using THIS LINK.

Pricing details:

Full price for the Immersion Event is $3,200.
Early-bird rate is $2,600 for registrations received before midnight PST Friday September 17th

Cancellation policy:

Cancellations prior to September 18th: fully-refunded minus $100 administration fee and any applicable credit-card processing charges.
Cancellations from September 18th to October 10th inclusive (PST): 50% cancellation charge.
Cancellations from October 11th to October 25th inclusive (PST): 100% cancellation charge.

Registration details: Click HERE to go to our registration page.

For more information, please contact paul@SQLskills.com.