ISUG and eLearnIT started their online training offerings with a comprehensive training program for PowerBuilder, and are now adding a new ASE training course. 5 Minute Briefing: Sybase talks with Mike Harrold, executive director of ISUG, about the training and why it's needed.
Why is ISUG introducing this new ASE training?
Harrold: One of the things that we were asked immediately when we announced the PowerBuilder training is when would be producing training for ASE. The biggest obstacle we faced with this was that the strength of Yakov Werde, president of eLearnIT LLC, is in PowerBuilder, so we needed to seek out and find a qualified instructor to create the course and put it together for us. We completed that process earlier this year.
Who will be the instructor for the new course?
Harrold: The instructor is Brian Lefevre, a former Sybase employee. Brian spent more than a decade as an instructor so he has a tremendous amount of knowledge on this subject. He was able to take his extensive knowledge and create this new course for us completely from scratch.
Which areas of the ASE technology will the course focus on?
Harrold: Because ASE as a database has a massive ecosystem, with so many pieces and parts to it, we needed to do some research before starting. We sought feedback from members and partners on where to concentrate our efforts in ASE. All of them had pretty much the same thing to say. The number-one request was for training on monitoring and diagnostics, and therefore that is what this course is about. Brian Lefevre created this brand-new course targeted very specifically on troubleshooting performance and bottlenecks within queries within the database.
Will the PowerBuilder class be continued as well?
Harrold: We have had good feedback on the PowerBuilder course and just recently put an update into that course to cover some PowerBuilder 12 material. We plan are to provide more detailed training on PowerBuilder 12 with a slightly different format than the original course. That will be forthcoming in the next few months.
Since the scope of the first ASE course is limited, will there be additional ASE classes to cover other aspects of the database?
Harrold: We are currently looking at a migration course from ASE 12.5 to ASE 15. There are a lot of organizations out there that are still in the 12.5 world. There is a wealth of material from Sybase on upgrades and migrations but among the consultants that are out in the field that have run into problems with migrations, there is a fairly common denominator among what they are seeing. We are collecting a lot of feedback and our instructor, who has also been consulting out in the field, has seen this, too. It all comes down to the same things so we will be targeting that when we get to the next course.
Are you open to suggestions for other course topics as well?
Harrold: Yes. This is market-driven. We think that with the first courses we identified very much a need. With the migration course we think we have identified another need, but if people have requests about areas where they would see the most benefit, then clearly we would entertain that as well.
To learn more about the course, go here.