Hi, Brent here! I’m really excited to welcome you to Mastering Query Tuning.

Watch How to Think Like the Engine.

Before we get started, I need to make sure that we’ve covered the basics:

• Required: How to Think Like the Engine – free 90-minute class that covers the foundations of clustered and nonclustered indexes, statistics, memory grants, and sargability.
• Recommended: Fundamentals of Index Tuning – one-day class that covers how to index for WHERE, ORDER BY, and JOINs, and covers how to pick the field order for indexes.
• Recommended: Fundamentals of Query Tuning - one-day class that introduces cardinality estimation and how to improve it.
• Optional, but recommended: take Mastering Index Tuning. This class will assume you already know these topics. You’ll be able to keep up without it, but you’ll find that you can really absorb queries much better if you’ve already mastered indexing.

Armed with the material in those classes, you’ll be well-equipped to keep up in this Mastering class.

Set up your lab class VM.

Read these instructions on how to set up a Mastering class VM. It'll take several hours. (The great news is that once you've set up a VM once, you're good to go for all of my Mastering classes - the setup is the same for all of them.)