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

Watch How to Think Like the Engine and Fundamentals of Index Tuning.

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

• How to Think Like the Engine – free 90-minute class that covers the foundations of clustered and nonclustered indexes, statistics, memory grants, and sargability.
• 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.
• Optional: How I Use the First Responder Kit – students who haven’t used sp_BlitzIndex and sp_BlitzCache before will find this helpful, but it’s not required.

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

If you're attending a live class, join the Slack chat.

To ask questions and talk to the other attendees, go to https://www.brentozar.com/slack/ to get an instant invite, then join the #BrentOzarUnlimited channel. This way attendees can help each other with their questions during the live labs.

Audio will come through your computer speakers, so you’ll want clear speakers or a set of headphones. (You don’t have to worry about a microphone or webcam – other attendees won’t see or hear you.)