Launch week: the Season Pass & Fundamentals Week are 50% off — ends in 18d 03h 28m — See the sale
BRENT OZARUnlimited

Live Class Justification Email for Manager with a Training Budget

Cartoon Brent Ozar shouting and gesturing

Please register _EMPLOYEE_NAME_HERE_ 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. Registration for the first rotation closes at the same time, and if we miss it, registration closes until October. To get that discount, we have to use a credit card or purchasing card. If we ask for a PO or invoice, it’s full price.

Use their name & email as the buyer info. The receipt will go there, and tell them to forward it to you for accounting.

 

The background: I’m approving this as a focused use of training budget for a skill set that directly affects production performance, user experience, infrastructure costs, and incident response. SQL Server performance tuning is one of those areas where better training can pay off repeatedly across projects.

The next rotation of classes is:

  • Fundamentals Week: July 13-17 (which includes index, query, and server tuning)
  • Mastering Index Tuning 2026: Aug 31-Sept 4
  • Mastering Query Tuning 2026: Sept 28-Oct 2
  • Mastering Server Tuning 2026: Oct 19-23

Each class is Monday-Friday, 4 hours per day. I’ll clear their calendar for the class times on those dates so they can focus on the training while still being available for urgent issues as needed.

This is a good fit because it is not generic professional development. It is practical, production-focused SQL Server performance tuning. The skills apply directly to slow queries, indexing decisions, production troubleshooting, hardware sizing, cloud spend, and the day-to-day work of keeping applications fast and reliable.

The goals are faster queries, happier users, lower overhead, fewer performance emergencies, and stronger in-house troubleshooting skills.

There’s cheaper recorded training options, but we’ve found that the team just doesn’t complete that training. With live classes, they can ask questions, stay focused, and block the time on their calendar. The live format creates the urgency and structure to actually get through the material. If they miss a class, though, like if an emergency pops up, they also get access to the recordings through the end of the year.

Brent has 25+ years of real-world SQL Server performance tuning experience, has trained over 18,000 students, and teaches with the full-size Stack Overflow database instead of tiny demo databases. That matters because this is not certification-style training or toy examples. It is based on the kind of real-world SQL Server problems teams actually run into.

The classes also cover practical troubleshooting with the free open source First Responder Kit tools like sp_Blitz, sp_BlitzCache, and sp_BlitzIndex. Those can help us identify which queries and indexes are causing the most pain, prioritize the work, and make better use of the monitoring and diagnostic data we already collect.

One other thing I like: the training itself is built and taught by a real human being, and Brent says none of the training material is generated by AI. At the same time, the classes include practical use of AI tools because that’s where SQL Server troubleshooting is headed in 2027 and beyond. I want our team to learn how to use AI effectively and cost-effectively, with the right guardrails, instead of either blindly trusting it or ignoring it completely.

Please get this registered before July 10 so we can get the 50% launch sale price and get into the first rotation.