Review of the Autumn
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-12-22 19:49:58 - Graham EllisThis has been a very busy Autumn for Well House Consultants. In October, Lisa and I took a week away from presenting courses to attend a conferenece with speakers including the originators of Perl, PHP and MySQL ... yet still our October business level didn't dip. November was our best month ever, and every possible training day (right up to today) has been given over to training in December; after today, we're stopping training until the next (private) course on 4th January.
Rather like coming to the end of a long school term, there's a slight tiredness creeping in; last night, I elected to stop in a hotel only 60 miles from home to ensure that I'm in good shape and fresh for the last day of training in the year, whereas normally I might have commuted. And I'm glad I'm not doing a five full days for once. And yet - as soon as I get in front of a group of trainees what a pure pleasure it is to be able to introduce them to highlights and hidden gems in the subjects they're learning - help get them off to a flying start in the new year!
The three days this week (three one-day private sessions) have all been concerned, one way or another, with MySQL. On Monday, we were looking at complex joins and how to write them efficiently, and also how to design table structures to aid this - how to set up indexes, and whether some data denormalisation might be called for. Tuesday, the course covered Linux admin and backup procedures, and we included such topics as scheduling regular mysqldumps in order to ensure that the total system backups included good SQL information even if the system was live while backups were taken. Today (Wednesday) was a more general MySQL day - and overview of the topics covered on the public course, but with a group of 5 trainees it was much more effective for me to run a private course in Oxford.