At conferences and events I have found that the vast majority of sessions are one hour long. Sometimes events have experimented with 75 or 90 minute sessions, but the majority of talks I've heard were an hour, short enough to get an idea of how to use a feature or have an idea about why you might use something, but too short for in depth learning. More in depth sessions are usually all day sessions, or multi-day classes, which are very focused, and expensive. It seems that it's rare the many employees get the chance to attend this type of training.

This year the Summit is trying something new, with a few half day sessions that should provide a deep dive in a number of areas during one focused three hour time slot. There are sessions on a variety of topics including performance tuning from Tom LaRock, and Scaling SQL Server from Glenn Berry. The sessions take place on Wed and Thur in the afternoon, so check the schedule if you're interested.

Read the rest of "The Half Day Experiment" at SQLServerCentral.