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

Get your brain ready by taking the classes in order.

I recommend that you take the classes in this order:

1. How to Think Like the Engine
2. How I Use the First Responder Kit
3. Fundamentals of Index Tuning
4. Optional: Fundamentals of Columnstore (you can skip this one, though - it's only for people who want to use columnstore indexes. The rest of the classes below aren't dependent on this one. This one also has its own separate prerequisites: it requires the much larger Mastering class VM.)
5. Fundamentals of Query Tuning
6. Fundamentals of Parameter Sniffing
7. Fundamentals of TempDB

Get your computer ready too.

All of the Fundamentals courses except Fundamentals of Columnstore have the same prerequisites, so if you've set up for any of 'em, you're ready to go.

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 the 50GB Stack Overflow 2013 database. I’ll be using the medium-sized 50GB StackOverflow2013 database, and it's vital that you use the same one. Query tuning and parameter sniffing is all about getting different behavior based on your query's parameters, so I need you to have the exact same data distribution that I'll be working with onscreen.

Install SQLQueryStress for load testing.

SQLQueryStress is an easy, free, open source load testing utility. Download the latest version (the latest SQLQueryStress.zip is the one you want) and extract it to a folder. You don't have to run a setup or anything - it's just a single .exe file that you can run whenever you want to do a load test.

Then, download my load test files and extract those to the same folder.