This week is my annual Black Friday sale, and over and over, folks buy the Fundamentals & Mastering Bundle because it’s such a good deal.

But then they let it sit in their accounts.

Time flies by, and next thing you know, an entire year has gone by and they haven’t watched any of the videos. So, with that in mind, here’s a planning guide to help you understand what you need to budget for time, and what you’re going to learn month by month.

• December: Fundamentals of Index Tuning and Fundamentals of Query Tuning – December is a slow month in many companies, with a lot of folks taking holiday time.
• January:
  • Performance tuners watch Fundamentals of Columnstore and Fundamentals of Parameter Sniffing – I was going to say that report tuners should watch the columnstore one and OLTP tuners should watch the sniffing one, but honestly, they’re both relatively short courses, and you should be able to knock them both out.
  • Production DBAs watch Fundamentals of Azure Networking and Fundamentals of PowerShell – these can go in either order, so pick your favorite one to start with in case you run out of time for your January learning.
• February: Running SQL Server in AWS & Azure and Fundamentals of TempDB – both of these are useful for all database folks. There’s interesting things in here for production DBAs, development DBAs, and database developers.
• March-April: Mastering Index Tuning – now we’re into the Mastering classes, and these are 3 days of lectures & labs. When you’ve got a full time job, it really is hard to knock out 3 days worth of training in a 2-month time span, and these aren’t classes you can cram – at least, not if you’re going to do the hands-on labs as intended.
• May-June: Mastering Query Tuning
• July-August: Mastering Parameter Sniffing
• September-October: Mastering Server Tuning

That’s 11 straight months of training, without a month off or a break. Honestly, it’s hard to knock out 98 hours of videos in a single year while you’re still doing your job. That’s over 8 hours of videos per month on average, not including bio breaks or time for you to do the labs!

Now you start to see why
you gotta make a plan.

Every year – every single year – I get a flood of emails in October and November that all say, “Brent, life got in the way, and I just need another week to finish all of the classes. Can you extend my training by a week?” And that’s simply not realistic, because if you mainline Red Bull and prop your eyelids open with toothpicks, you’re not really going to absorb the training material. It’s just too hard.

So you either gotta make a plan and set aside a couple of afternoons every month, or plan ahead and buy the Lifetime bundle for $1,795. That way you can take your time, and if life interrupts you for a month or two, you don’t fall too far behind. Plus, you can revisit the material over and over for years – and trust me, you will. I hear from students all the time that they jump back to a particular module when they’re facing an unusual problem at work.

Let’s make 2025 the year that you really amp your skills up.