Free SQL Server Training Videos
We speak at SQL Server user groups and live events, and we record presentations and post them here whenever possible.
Every Tuesday at 11:30AM Central, we run a free webcast covering SQL Server, virtualization, storage, and more. If you can attend live and ask questions, that’s great! You can register for our upcoming webcasts, and add a recurring calendar reminder so you can make it each week. If you have to miss a webcast, we post recordings to the blog each week.
Want to automatically get new videos and set up easy viewing on your tablet or phone? Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Pop some popcorn and turn down the lights….
SQL Server Performance Tuning Tutorials
- SQL on SSDs: Hot and Crazy Love – Brent Ozar talks about the attractions and perils of super fast storage
- Developers, Performance, and the SQL Server Transaction Log – Kendra Little talks about how application patterns impact performance of the transaction log
- DBA Darwin Awards: Index Edition - Brent Ozar shows you common mis-steps people make with indexes.
- There’s Something About NOLOCK - Kendra Little shows you some surprising performance implications of the NOLOCK hint.
- How to Tell When TempDB is a Problem – Jeremiah Peschka helps you figure out if tempdb is dragging down your SQL Server performance.
- How Stack Overflow Scales with SQL Server - Brent Ozar gives the real-life goods on how a high demand website gets loads of performance out of SQL Server.
- How to Design Smarter Indexes – Kendra Little gives you a method and scripts to performance tune your indexes.
- How to Prove it’s a SAN Problem – Brent Ozar shows you how to get down with disk testing tools.
- How to Use Denali Windowing Functions – Speed up your aggregates and reports with Jeremiah Peschka.
- Five Ways to Fight Blocking – Kendra Little gives you big picture ways to get ahead of those blocking chains.
- Completely Legal Performance Enhancements - Jeremiah Peschka discusses persisted computed fields, indexed views, 64-bit OS’s, and more.
- Index Tuning for SQL Server – learn how to add, remove, or monitor indexes.
- Performance Monitor 101- explains how to use Perfmon and Profiler.
- Lose Waits Fast with Wait Stats – in which Brent dresses up as Richard Simmons to explain how to use wait stats and free tools like sp_WhoIsActive, SQLdiag, and SQLnexus.
- T-SQL Tuning for Formula 1 Race Car Drivers – they have more in common than you might think.
- Playing Doctor with the DMVs- how to find hyperactive files & filegroups, catch potential partitioning pitfalls, sniff out heaps, and use a Central Management Server to triage your servers.
Professional Development Videos
- How to Get Your First Job as a DBA – Kendra Little helps you get your foot in the door
- How to Get Money From Managers – Brent Ozar helps you advance your career by getting the right tools for your environment
SQL Server DBA Tutorial Videos
- SQL Server Storage: Files and Filegroups – Brent Ozar explains why you might want to think carefully about how you lay out your SQL Server database files.
- What’s Going On In My SQL Server? Kendra Little shows you tools to see what activity is running in your SQL Server. The first step to performance tuning is to know what’s running!
- DBA Darwin Awards – Log File Edition. Brent Ozar tells you about common configuration errors which may cost you a lot.
- SQL Server Change Control - Jeremiah Peschka explains why if you aren’t managing database changes effectively, though, disaster may strike.
- SQL Server First Responder Kit – Kendra Little gives you the tools to respond to a crisis and come out on top.
- Hadoop Basics for SQL Server DBAs - Microsoft have made announcements about bringing Hadoop to Windows, but what does that mean for SQL Server? Jeremiah Peschka explains.
- SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery webcast – Brent Ozar tells you what all your options are, and how to make the right choice when it comes to HA.
- A DBA’s Guide to ORM’s – Jeremiah Peschka gives you a guided tour of the Object Relational Mapping tools which are ever more frequently used to generate SQL code running against your databases– nHibernate and Entity Framework are some well known examples of ORMs.
- Anatomy of the SQL Server Database: Settings and Secrets – explore some of the critical but lesser known settings for SQL Server databases with Kendra Little.
- Virtualization and SAN Basics for DBAs – these two technologies can really impact your SQL Server performance.
- How to Plan a SQL Server Virtualization Project – Brent Ozar shows you how to save time and money with the right plan.
- Configuring SQL Server in Amazon’s EC2- Jeremiah Peschka shows you the secrets of setting up your SQL Server to perform well in Amazon’s cloud.
- What People Are Finding with sp_Blitz – Brent Ozar shows you how to run his free sp_blitz procedure to find out what may be wrong with your SQL Server.
- BLITZ! SQL Server Takeovers – you’re sitting in your cubicle, minding your own business, when someone hands you a SQL Server. Learn how to take it over quickly to assess risks within a matter of minutes.
- SP_Who Replacements – learn better ways to find out what’s going on inside your SQL Server with sp_WhoIsActive, DMVs, and more.
- SQL Server Consolidation – before you pile lots of instances or databases onto a single physical server, learn the top five things you should know before undertaking a consolidation project.
- SQL Server Disaster Recovery Basics – learn the pros and cons of log shipping, database mirroring, etc.
- The Mystery of Query Timeouts – Kendra Little shows you how to triage query timeouts like a pro.
Microsoft Certified Master of SQL Server Training Videos
Want to be come a Microsoft Certified Master of SQL Server? Get started with your training for free courtesy of videos Brent recorded for Microsoft. On each page, you can also download the WMV/iPod/etc files for playing later, too:
- Virtualization - how VMware and Hyper-V change CPU, memory, and monitoring.
- Storage: Core Concepts - covering the types of drives (magnetic vs SSD), how they’re attached to our servers, and how this influences where we store SQL Server data and logs.
- Storage: Guidelines - about RAID levels, shared vs dedicated storage, and general best practices for SQL Server storage.
Buck Woody and Brent Ozar (channeling his inner Richard Simmons)
- Storage: DAS vs SAN Architecture - we explain what storage pathing is and why it’s so important.
- Storage: Testing and Monitoring - how to get started monitoring your existing SQL Servers and how to test before you even install SQL.
- Clustering: Introduction - the concepts behind active/passive (single-instance) and active/active (multi-instance) clustering.
- SQLOS - learn how NUMA and hyperthreaded CPUs affect the way SQL Server schedules work.
- Multi-Server Management - covering the Central Management Server, Management Data Warehouse, Utility Control Point, and Data-Tier Applications.
- Policy-Based Management - the features and limitations of PBM and how to expand it.
- Policy-Based Management Demos - my GUI, let me show you it.
- Baselining and Benchmarking - how to use Perfmon and Profiler, which counters to monitor, and how to slice and dice Profiler results.
