Live Class Justification Email for Disgruntled DBA

I’d like to register for Brent Ozar’s Live Class Season Pass 2026 before the 50% launch sale ends on July 10. https://training.brentozar.com/p/live-class-season-pass The regular price is $4,395/person, but the launch sale price is $2,197.50 through July 11, and registration closes until October if we miss this first rotation.

The short story: this is live SQL Server performance tuning training that will help me troubleshoot production issues faster, make better indexing and query tuning decisions, and reduce the chances that we solve database problems by adding more hardware, more cores, more memory, or more cloud spend. It’s Monday-Friday, 4 hours per day, and I’ve checked my calendar.

The even shorter story: I need something different to happen in my workday before I merge emotionally with the ticket queue. I am tired of looking at the same slow queries, the same missing index requests, the same 14-step deployment process, and the same Teams messages that begin with “quick question” and end 47 minutes later with everyone agreeing to “circle back.”

These classes would give me 4 hours a day, on specific scheduled weeks, where I can do something productive, useful, and technically enriching instead of quietly wondering whether the blinking cursor in SSMS is trying to communicate with me. I’m not asking to disappear into the woods and start a goat farm. I’m asking to learn performance tuning from Brent Ozar, who has 25+ years of SQL Server experience, has trained over 18,000 students, and uses the full-size Stack Overflow database instead of the tiny demo databases that lie to us and say life is simple.

The next rotation is Fundamentals Week on July 13-17, Mastering Index Tuning on Aug 31-Sept 4, Mastering Query Tuning on Sept 28-Oct 2, and Mastering Server Tuning on Oct 19-23. Each class is 4 hours per day. I will still keep up with urgent work as needed, although I would like to formally define “urgent” as something more serious than “the report took 11 seconds and Steve frowned.”

There are cheaper recorded options, but recorded training requires me to find free time, and my free time currently exists in the same magical realm as perfect estimates, clean vendor schemas, and developers who include actual row counts in bug reports. With live classes, I can ask questions, block the calendar, and get through the material before my soul finishes migrating to read-only mode.

Please approve this before July 10 so we can get the 50% launch sale price and I can get into the first rotation. Otherwise, I may be forced to pursue other opportunities, such as professional birdwatching, lighthouse maintenance, or literally any job where nobody asks me why CPU is high without first telling me what changed.