Hi, Brent here! I’m really excited to welcome you to class.

If you want to follow along with the demos, set yourself up a SQL Server:

• SQL Server 2017 or newer, either Developer Edition or Evaluation Edition. Download pages are linked from SQLServerUpdates.com. Express Edition, Azure SQL DB, and Amazon RDS won't work, unfortunately.
• Use the default collation during install, SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS (don’t get fancy with binary collations)
• Apply the latest Cumulative Update
• Install the most recent SQL Server Management Studio

To follow along with the demos, download one of the Stack Overflow databases. In this particular class, to make it easy for folks just getting started, I’ll be using the medium-sized 50GB StackOverflow2013 database. It's the same database we'll use for later classes like Fundamentals of Index Tuning. However, if you're really starved for space, any of the sizes will get the basic ideas covered from the class.