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Three blog posts a week, plus a Monday roundup of my favorite database news from around the web. No fluff, occasional jokes.
Recorded classes
The Fundamentals of Index Tuning, Query Tuning, and Server Tuning have all been updated as of July 2026, reflecting the latest advancements in the First Responder Kit, AI, and SQL Server 2025. They're perfect for folks who have never been to a formal training class, but are responsible for performance on SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and Amazon RDS.
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Need hands-on help? SQL Critical Care® — my 2-day server assessment that finds the root cause and hands you the fix.
See consultingOn Wednesday, registration opens for the next round of my live training classes, and you can get access to all my live classes & recordings for just $995. So, what's been changing with databases & classes lately?
This year, I rebuilt the classes with a new focus:
A couple times a year, I go away for a week to think about what's working well, what I need to change, where our industry is going, and how I need to react. I usually do it on a cruise because the crappy internet makes it easier to disconnect and reflect, hahaha, and that's where…
I hope you never have to look for another job.
However, if you do, I wanna give you as much reinforcement as I can. If you're the kind of person who attends my live classes, pays attention, asks questions, and does the lab homework, you deserve to be able to brag about that. You deserve a public record of your work, something you can point to on my site that links directly to your LinkedIn, and a certificate you can put on your LinkedIn.
You're looking at page split numbers in a monitoring tool or Perfmon, and you've heard that page splits are bad, so you're lowering fill factor, expecting your page splits to go down.
You're monitoring the wrong number.
