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Conferences and Classes

We Lost Gareth Swanepoel.

January 14, 2021

Thirteen years ago, I met Gareth Swanepoel (@GarethSwan) for the first time, interviewed him for his first real sysadmin job, and … turned him down. Gareth Swanepoel circa 2007 Thankfully, my manager overruled me and hired him anyway. Thank goodness – and thank goodness Gareth forgave me for my incredibly bad judgment, hahaha. Gareth proved…

As an Attendee, What’s Important to You In a New Data Community?

December 28, 2020

Conferences and Classes

With PASS shutting down, it’s time to think about what the community builds in its place. There are a lot of efforts going towards building replacements for PASS, including Microsoft’s own efforts. Because these efforts are often led by active community volunteers, they’re very well in touch with what event organizers, sponsors, and speakers want…

The End of the Professional Association for SQL Server #SQLPASS

December 17, 2020

This afternoon, PASS announced that their operations will cease in January: We are saddened to tell you that, due to the impact of COVID-19, PASS is ceasing all regular operations, effective January 15, 2021. We encourage you to take full advantage of any access that you have to PASS content between now and January 15,…

Free Webcast: Why is the Same Query Sometimes Slow?

November 6, 2020

Conferences and Classes

I can smell your parameters from here You swear nothing has changed, but all of a sudden, out of nowhere, queries that used to be fast are suddenly slow. Even weirder, you take the slow query from the application, run it in SSMS, and it’s totally fast! What’s going on? You restart SQL Server or…

Why I Teach Training Classes on Weekends (the next one starts Friday)

November 3, 2020

Company News, Conferences and Classes

You have a day job. And your day job comes with two big problems. Problem #1: it’s hard to pay attention during the week. Your calendar has tons of meetings scheduled for the foreseeable future, and you can’t just reschedule them whenever you want. Even when you’re not booked in a meeting, people are constantly…

How to Learn SQL Server in One Year

October 26, 2020

Conferences and Classes

You’ve been using Microsoft SQL Server for a few years, and it’s becoming increasingly important to your job. You can write a query, but… You feel like something’s missing. You attended a few local user groups or meetups before the quarantines hit, but you were disappointed at how scattered the sessions were. The material was…

Free Webcast on Wednesday: The New Robot DBAs in SQL Server 2017, 2019, and Azure

October 5, 2020

Conferences and Classes

The robots are really just people wearing metallic masks. You’ve been hearing about all these robots that are coming to take your job. They’re going to automate all the performance tuning and make your life way easier, right? Or harder, I guess…since you’ll be looking for a job. Thing is, most of that is just…

Mastering Index Tuning

European Union Folks: Wanna Attend Mastering Index Tuning?

August 10, 2020

You need to speed up a SQL Server app, but you only want to make index changes. You don’t want to buy hardware, change SQL Server, or change the code. I’ll teach you the most important advanced lessons in one day. In my one-day Mastering Index Tuning online workshop at SQLbits, you’ll learn: My D.E.A.T.H.…

Things To Consider When Submitting Sessions to Paid Online Conferences

June 29, 2020

Conferences and Classes

Lots of paid conferences are happening online these days, so some of you will be presenting an online session or pre-con for the first time. I’ve done a bunch of these and been burned in a bunch of ways, so lemme save you some time and heartache. Does the conference own the recordings? And if…

How Doug Lowing Gets the Most Out of His Live Class Season Pass

June 18, 2020

Conferences and Classes

With my Live Class Season Pass, students have the ability to attend as many of my live online classes as they want for an entire year straight, plus they can view the instant replay recordings whenever they want. Doug Lowing, one of the students, shared with me how he gets the most out of his:…

Recorded Class Season Pass

Attention Season Pass Holders: New Fundamentals of Parameter Sniffing Videos Available!

May 27, 2020

Conferences and Classes

If you’ve got a Recorded Class Season Pass or Live Class Season Pass, time to get your learn on: yesterday’s Fundamentals of Parameter Sniffing class recordings are now available in your account here. As a reminder, here’s the class abstract: Sometimes the exact same query goes slow out of nowhere. Your current fix is to…

Announcing Two New Parameter Sniffing Classes

May 5, 2020

Company News, Conferences and Classes

During the quarantine downtime, I’m working on a couple of new classes that I think you’re gonna like. Both of them are 100% demos, no slides (other than introductions at the start of the day), complete with hands-on lab assignment challenges for you to solve. They’re both half off this month to celebrate the launch,…

Free Webcast on Dynamic SQL Pro Tips

May 1, 2020

GroupBy Conference, T-SQL

Dynamic SQL is one of the most powerful tools in the database developer’s arsenal. When you need a complex search stored procedure that takes all kinds of parameters (price, category, location, color), dynamic SQL can run extremely quickly by leveraging better indexes. However, when done wrong, it’s extremely painful to troubleshoot. I’ve been working with…

Live Class Season Pass

Want SQL Server Training? Copy/Paste This Email To Your Boss.

April 8, 2020

Company News, Conferences and Classes

Well, that escalated quickly, huh? Just a few short months ago, we were all making plans about what we wanted to learn in 2020. We sketched out our goals, our conference plans, maybe even how we wanted to do our first user group presentations or SQL Saturday presentations. These days: The events you wanted to…

Fundamentals of Index Tuning

Announcing Two Free Live Fundamentals Courses This Wednesday & Thursday

April 6, 2020

Conferences and Classes

During the quarantines, I’m trying to keep you busy with free online training. Last week, I unveiled the new free Quest Database Training Days, and this week, I’ve got another one. I’m going to teach my Fundamentals classes live, free! Wednesday, Fundamentals of Index Tuning – 9:00-5:00 Eastern (13:00-21:00 UTC) – click to see in your own…

Brent Ozar

Announcing Quest Database Training Days: Free Live Training with Me, Janis, and Pinal

March 30, 2020

Conferences and Classes

During the quarantines, I’m trying to find as many ways as possible to get y’all free training. Today & tomorrow are the last days that you’ve got free access to the recordings of my Fundamentals of Index Tuning and Fundamentals of Query Tuning classes – get those while you can, because they’ll disappear when March…

How COVID-19 Affects Conferences

March 11, 2020

Conferences and Classes

SQLBits just postponed their event, and I’m stepping out of SQL Saturday Iceland as well. I’ve had the unusual position of being a conference attendee, speaker, and sponsor, all at different times of my life, so I wanted to do a quick brain dump explaining some of the gotchas involved behind the scenes. Canceling a…

What Should I Submit to the PASS Summit?

February 12, 2020

Our industry’s biggest conference, the PASS Summit 2020, just opened their pre-conference workshop call for speakers. I’m going to submit a couple of sessions, but I want to hear from you first: if you were going to try to convince your boss to buy you a pre-conference workshop at Summit, what would be the topics…

How to Pick a 2020 Microsoft Database Conference

February 10, 2020

Conferences and Classes

As a consultant and speaker, I’m lucky enough to go to a crazy number of SQL Server conferences. Here’s what I think of each mainstream conference out there – who they’re for, and who they’re not for. SQL Saturdays 2020 dates: all over the world, size varies by city, typically 200-300 attendees Length: Friday pre-conference…

Voting Open for #SQLBits Sessions, and Here’s My Oddball Idea

December 19, 2019

Voting is open now for SQLBits sessions, and I have to warn you that there are a LOT of sessions to choose from. Bits doesn’t just flat out take the top vote-getting sessions – they use votes as part of the session selection factor – and I don’t want you to think I’m campaigning for…

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