Back to business as summer heats up

You may have noticed that my blog’s been pretty quiet in June and empty in July. May and June were frenetic travel and work months for me, with two two-week teaching trips to the UK and producing two training courses for Pluralsight. Then at the end of June, Kimberly and I took the kids to Scotland for all of July, including us going to the spectacular Norwegian Arctic for two weeks to photograph polar bears, walrus, and other wildlife. Look out for some photo posts coming over the next month!

Online training

I’ll be blogging about what’s happening with Pluralsight next week sometime (it’s very exciting!), but in the meantime you can check out our courses: Myths and Misconceptions, Troubleshooting Using Wait Statistics, Collecting and Analyzing Trace Data, Transact-SQL Basic Data Retrieval.

In-person training

Now we’re back at work and gearing up for our main event of the year: five week-long classes over the next four weeks in Bellevue, WA. Week 2 will be especially cool as the entire team (7 full-time now – wow!) will be together for a week, including our newest team member, Erin Stellato, who starts work with us today!

These are our last public classes this year, as we have a bunch of onsite classes for private clients and a host of other projects we need to spend time on. We’ll be announcing our 2013 class calendar at the end of August – watch this space…

Blogging

And one of those projects is to get back into my regular blogging groove – I’ve got a bunch of things to blog about, including the results from the latch waits survey I did a few months back and some cool uses of fn_dblog and fn_dump_dblog. Kimberly and I retired our weekly SQL Server Magazine blog at the end of July, after two years, so we can focus more on deeper posts on our SQLskills blogs.

Health checks special offer

Over the last few months the team has significantly expanded the depth and breadth of our signature semi-automated server health checks and as we get back into the swing of things again we’d like to extend an offer to you to take advantage of our health check service at a discount. For new clients, we’ll do each 8-hour health check for the flat-rate price of 6 hours (US$1950) – saving you 25% off the regular rate. You can read all about the health check process here and all you have to do to get the special pricing is sign up in August. You can be anywhere in the world, as we don’t need direct access to your servers to perform the health check.

Summary

It’s been a pretty wild year so far, with Kimberly and I being away from home more than 75% of the time and we’re looking forward to being here without flying for the next few months.

As summer starts to heat up here in Redmond, I’m looking forward to blogging for you, training some of you in August, recording more courses, and helping you get your servers healthy!

2 thoughts on “Back to business as summer heats up

  1. I’m looking forward to your "deeper posts ". Just finished reading through your CHECKDB articles. Bring it on! cant wait! :-)

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