Live Class Justification Email for Tired Firefighters with Performance Emergencies
Please register _EMPLOYEE_NAME_HERE_ for Brent Ozar’s Live Class Season Pass before registration closes. https://training.brentozar.com/p/live-class-season-pass
To get the price on the site, 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 because we need stronger SQL Server performance troubleshooting skills in-house. When production performance problems happen, I want us to be able to recover faster, gather better evidence, and avoid guessing our way through emergencies.
The Season Pass includes these live classes:
- Fundamentals Week (which includes index, query, and server tuning)
- Mastering Index Tuning
- Mastering Query Tuning
- Mastering Server Tuning
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 SQL Server performance emergencies are expensive even when they do not look like a formal outage. Slow queries mean unhappy users, delayed releases, escalations, distracting war rooms, and people trying random fixes under pressure. I want us to have someone who can walk into those situations with a repeatable troubleshooting process.
The goals are faster emergency recovery, better prioritization, less guessing, and fewer situations where we have to immediately escalate to outside help or throw hardware at the problem.
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 production emergencies do not happen on tiny, clean demo databases. They happen on real data, with messy queries, bad estimates, blocking, memory pressure, tempdb problems, and execution plans that are not obvious at first glance.
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 quickly identify which queries, waits, indexes, and server issues are causing the most pain, so we can focus on the right problem first.
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. 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 registration closes so they can get into the next rotation.