At TechEd, a couple of folks came up to me and asked “we see around at conferences and read your blog, but when are you going to offer any…ahem… *public* classes, already?” I see you were a “special guest” at a training event back in March, but we couldn’t afford to go to Amsterdam. Well…SQLskills will be giving a series of public training events starting in July. I’m participating in the Chicago and New York city events, and a 1-day’er in Reading. And we’re scheduling 2007. Check it out on the website. We enabled signup on the website just recently. And there are specials.
My topic/track for the event is “Building Scale-Out Applications with SQL Server 2005”. Reason for the sudden focus on ends (apps) rather than means (features) is the revelation that all the “nice features” of SQL Server, that is T-SQL enhancements, SQLCLR, and XML are really “enabling technologies” for scale out applications that can handle all types of data.
If you liked these as nice features in a vacuum, they’re even better when implemented in concert. The glue that ties all these together is the Service Broker feature. In conjunction with replication and distributed query/transactions (used sparingly), scale-out requires (cries out for) asynchrony and data-directed routing (aka data-dependent routing) and this is where broker comes in.
But isn’t broker only between SQL Servers? That’s where using SQL Server’s HTTP endpoint as a gateway comes in. But, we won’t forget the XML data type and queries, SQLCLR, T-SQL, or related technologies. After all, your service has to do something besides add 2 numbers together. And it must be fast, in messages/sec.
The other thing that’s exciting about the SQLskills immersion idea (see Kim’s blog post) is that we invite folks to “bring their own problem”. That’s cool, as a consultant, I’m always the one who “makes things work”. That’s (making things work) is part of what I’ve been doing lately. Mostly, I took I year-long “hiatus” from public classes; my last official class for [previous company] was July 2005. For the two years before July 2005, I was mostly “Mr Yukon Ascend”, not a lot of public there either. Since August 2005, I’ve worked on SQL Server 2005 launch, finished the book, and did a few private offerings. Not exactly retirement, but…
Hiatus over.