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

Watch How to Think Like the Engine and Fundamentals of Parameter Sniffing.

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

• How to Think Like the Engine – free 2-hour class that covers the foundations of clustered and nonclustered indexes, statistics, memory grants, and sargability.
• How I Use the First Responder Kit - so you understand how to use the open source scripts.
• 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.
• Fundamentals of Query Tuning - one-day class that introduces cardinality estimation and how to improve it.
• Fundamentals of Parameter Sniffing - 1-day class that covers what parameter sniffing is, and how to write queries that are susceptible to it.

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.)