From time to time you run across something that demonstrates perfectly exactly what the industry needs.  As I sit here at the PASS day-3 keynote I’m watching Dr. DeWitt talk about how the query optimizer finds query plans.  This is a very complicated topic under the covers and he’s covering some of the really complicated aspects.  He’s already explained the different types of histograms and how they work (I’m sure only at a high level), and he got into selectivity, etc.  And the thing is, he’s explaining this stuff in such simple terms and making it so easy to understand, it just hit me like a ton of bricks;  why isn’t this material being taught everywhere? 

This is one of the things I’m always talking about when I say there’s no really good training out there.  There are plenty of people out there teaching queries and tuning techniques, but nobody is bothering to break this stuff down so that people actually understand the terms and what they really mean.  Most of the time what they do is just define some terms briefly and then move on and expect everyone to be able to go back home and apply this stuff.  But without this background of how this stuff actually works and how the terms really fit together and how you get bad plans, etc, then people aren’t going to be nearly as successful as they could be.  Dr. DeWitt is clearly concerned with teaching people how to think instead of just what to think.

This is always the type of training I move towards because I find I never commit anything to memory unless I understand how it all works and fits together.  So what I’d like to see happen is for someone to put something like this together in a video series, or in a pre-con… something.  That’s a pre-con I’d actually pay for out of my own pocket.  A whole day of someone dedicated to making sure I understand how this stuff works… Hell Yeah!  But seriously, where does someone go to learn stuff like this?  Because this info isn’t out there in any human readable form.  And it’s apparently not just me either, cause he’s been brought back by overwhelming request, so I’d say the better part of the room is also screaming for this type of info.