Hi, Brent here! I'm really excited to welcome you to How I Use the First Responder Kit.

To prep, watch How to Think Like the Engine.

Before we get started, I need to make sure that we've covered the basics. In my free 2-hour How to Think Like the Engine class, you'll learn the foundations of clustered and nonclustered indexes, statistics, memory grants, and sargability.

That alone doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to keep up in class, of course - but if you hadn't at least learned this much before starting, then you'd have been totally screwed, hahaha.

Pick a production SQL Server to follow along.

The goal of this class is to do a health check on an existing production SQL Server. It needs to be a production server, not development or testing, because SQL Server's diagnostic data is kept only in memory. If you try to analyze a development server, it won't have diagnostic data about the workloads that are actually running in production.

You'll need sysadmin (SA) level access on the server to see the live diagnostic information. Install the First Responder Kit scripts on the server - preferably in the master database, but they can work from other databases as well. (In Azure SQL DB, you can put it in your user database.)