I thought I'd better leave this until 3rd April or it would have seemed too much like an April Fool's joke. That's the first version of the course slides finished now.
It's a relief given the amount of work involved and Monday's impending deadline, but note that I used the words 'first' and 'version'. I'm already unsure about the slides but I still have a week or so to do more work on the demos, which I'd already been developing on and off over the previous couple of months, so hopefully they'll add some value to the course. The problem is that calling anything a 'Master-class' fills me with dread. If people expect some deep-dive into optimiser internals a la Jonathan Lewis or three hour bind variable presentations in the style of Tom Kyte then they're going to be disappointed!
I found myself covering more 'traditional' tuning features than I expected, but it makes sense in retrospect. All of the new features are really the natural development of what's gone before and my experience is that people often get the fundamentals wrong and getting the best use out of any performance analysis tool or method is best achieved by applying a sensible approach. Better to understand what performance analysis is all about before getting bogged down in data and pretty screens! (But I must say, they are *very* pretty!)
I also found myself wanting to cover more 11g features than I could squeeze in, but I can see the course mutating into a 10g/11g course over the coming months.
Regardless of my feelings about the technical balance of the material, I must say I'm really excited about teaching again. It's one of my favourite activities. I've been able to keep it up a little through events at work, but two full days teaching a bunch of people I haven't met before is always inspiring and I'm sure to learn something new too, based on the questions that will be asked.
My current site have been good enough to let me teach a dry run of the course next week which will help me nail down the timings and iron out any bugs before it hits paying customers (well, they are paying really, but not as much!), then it's off to Prague a week on Sunday. I would have liked to have spent more time there, as Tim Hall suggested, but I'm afraid time is money and I already take enough days off going to conferences and the like. Prague is going nowhere soon and I'd rather go back with Mads, rather than through work, and enjoy the place properly.
I've hit a couple of trivial issues whilst putting the demos together so I'll probably blog about them over at the other place. I expect things will pick up a bit over there. I've had some ideas rattling around my head recently but I delayed them until the course was done.
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