0.1 Prerequisites Before the Class

Hi, Brent here! I’m really excited to welcome you to Mastering Index Tuning.

Read this whole page: there’s a lot of stuff in here for you.

Watch How to Think Like the Engine and Fundamentals of Parameter Sniffing.

Before we get started, I need to make sure that we’ve covered the basics:

• How to Think Like the Engine – free 90-minute class that covers the foundations of clustered and nonclustered indexes, statistics, memory grants, and sargability.
• Fundamentals of Parameter Sniffing – 1-day class that covers what parameter sniffing is, and how to write queries that are susceptible to it.

Armed with the material in those two classes, you’ll be well-equipped to keep up in this Mastering class.

Now, get your computer ready for the webcast.

To ask questions and talk to the other attendees, go to https://www.brentozar.com/slack/ to get an instant invite, then join the #BrentOzarUnlimited channel. This way attendees can help each other with their questions during the live labs. (We don’t use the GoToWebinar Q&A or chat because you can’t see each other’s chats.)

The slide deck (2MB PDF) is here (last updated 2020-05-27) but it’s just a few slides that I use at the beginning of the class, not very useful for note-taking. The real meat is in the demo scripts in each module, and of course those are all here on the site.

If you didn’t buy a lab VM, or if you want to run the demos after the class finishes, read the scripts and databases setup.