00 Prerequisites Before the Class - Brent Ozar Unlimited®

Hi, Brent here! I’m really excited to welcome you to class.

Get your brain ready by taking the classes in order.

Before you take this class, take my free How to Think Like the Engine class.

I have a ton of other classes around fundamentals, like index & query tuning, but you don’t have to take those first. This class stands by itself.

Get your computer ready too.

All of the Fundamentals courses except Fundamentals of Columnstore have the same prerequisites, so if you’ve set up for any of ’em, you’re ready to go.

Set yourself up a SQL Server:

SQL Server 2017 or newer, either Developer Edition or Evaluation Edition. Download pages are linked from SQLServerUpdates.com. Express Edition, Azure SQL DB, and Amazon RDS won’t work, unfortunately.
Use the default collation during install, SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS (don’t get fancy with binary collations)
Apply the latest Cumulative Update
Install the most recent SQL Server Management Studio

To follow along with the demos, download the 50GB Stack Overflow 2013 database. I’ll be using the medium-sized 50GB StackOverflow2013 database, and it’s vital that you use the same one. Query tuning and parameter sniffing is all about getting different behavior based on your query’s parameters, so I need you to have the exact same data distribution that I’ll be working with onscreen.