The time change this morning kicked me hard. I went to bed too late last night to start with, and sailing through timezones and losing an hour did not help much.
I did finally get a chance though to sit and have breakfast in the Haven’s private restaurant. It was nice to watch the waves role by and have a more gentle start to the day.
Rare photo of Sean McCown actually writing
We started with an “office hours” session discussing Availability groups in detail and some great info came from that. It made me want to go home and setup a few availability groups on my home test environment just to get more familiar with it. The setup of an office hours to accommodate the hour change in the morning was a brilliant idea by Tim (blog | twitter) . Even though this office hours was not the normal type, I still feel that it is one of the best things about SQL Cruise.
Once everyone arrived we concluded Sean McCown’s (blog | twitter) session on being an enterprise DBA. The knowledge provided was invaluable and as far as I’m concerned made the cruise completely worth
while and worth the cost. I even had the thoughts that SQL Cruise could be done now and I will have gotten more information and assistance than I had been able to get through the last few months of study. But, I am glad the cruise continued and with even more great info being shared!
After Sean finished up we took a quick bio break and then had Ryan Adams (blog | twitter) present Active Directory and SQL Server. This was a great look into how the active directory works with SQL and gave some fantastic info about Kerberos that I was not aware of. It is pretty cool and I am going to read up some more on it when I get home.
We finished up the SQL day with a class outside with Tim (blog | twitter) leading an open discussion on metadata, based on questions provided by SQL Cruisers on cue cards he had handed out earlier in the week. I couldn’t think of any questions to ask at the time, but the ones asked and the answers provided by the collective of the instructors and students were great and helpful for future things. Tim’s session conveniently blended into the cocktail hour tonight which included yet another group shot on the back deck in Spice H2O. The folks in the hot tub behind the photo got a little rowdy, but we warned them not to get into a competition with a bunch of DBAs who get to have a few drinks for free. The classic don’t get into a fight you can’t finish, or even compete with.
The evening capped off with my family and me going to ‘la Cucina’ Italian restaurant. We got to watch the moon rise over the ocean and had some great Italian food. Well worth the additional price of admission ($15 I think). The meal was on par with something that would have easily cost >$50 / person at home. This is one of the many reasons we love cruising. Once we finished dessert we headed back to the room to rest and prepare for 2 days of no SQL sessions. We were going to be in port tomorrow at Jamestown and we had no real plans. We will probably wander into town, and maybe down to the beach for a while. Either way it will be nice to get off the ship for a while, and to get some down time to help reset my brain for the rest of the SQL training coming back in a couple of days.