Skillsmatter RavenDB Course Review

On Feb 28th and 29th of February I attended the Skillsmatter RavenDB course in London with Itamar Syn-Hershko, course details here.

Itamar is a developer on RavenDB and works with Oren aka Ayende from Hibernating Rhinos in Israel and this was a chance to learn from one of the guys who works on RavenDB.

The course was a 2 day course covering a wide range of features of RavenDB including:-

• Principles of RavenDB
• Getting started with RavenDB
• CRUD operations
• The basics of querying
• Advanced querying
• Document based modeling
• Using Includes for better performance
• Caching and cache utilization
• Creating static indexes
• Map/Reduce
• Extending RavenDB
• Replication, Sharding & Scale
• Full text search

The course covers a lot of content and you’re given exercises to do which was very useful in finding out how to properly use parts of RavenDB as well as learn how to go about a certain task the recommended way.

I have come away from the course with a much better understanding of the how and why and that’s the main reason why I wanted to go on the course in the first place and I cant wait to get started using RavenDB on our upcoming project.

From asking a number of questions about RavenDB its clear to me that RavenDB has a lot to it, there is a lot to learn about it but it has a number of great features which are very powerful and yet very simple to use, some of the things that stood out for me where the following:-

• Safe by default – this means that it stops the user from writing code that is requesting too much data, and limits the number of requests that each session is allowed to make.
• Lucene – searching using Lucene provides a fantastic way to search and in Raven we can utilise the power of Lucene to even have full text search capabilities.

The course itself cost £1250 and was well worth it – anyone thinking about going on the upcoming courses I would recommend it to them for definite, details on the next RavenDB course they are hosting can be found here.