Job Specifications: SQL DBA

WHERE Training = ‘Visual’
AND Volume = 11 AND Cost = 0

Just as caterpillars become beautiful butterflies, some of our events and trainings become archived videos.

Start with these dozens of hours of free videos, and if you need more, contact us to sign up forCritical Care: four days of personalized training.

• Backup and Recovery
• Certifications
• Cloud, Hadoop, and Alternative Databases
• Developer Training on SQL Server
• Indexing
• Load Testing and Benchmarking
• Log Files (LDF)
• Performance Tuning
• Professional Development
• Setup and Management
• Storage: SAN and SSDs for DBAs
• TempDB Training Videos
• Troubleshooting Outages
• T-SQL Tips and Tricks
• Virtualizing SQL Server

DBA Performance Tuning Tutorials

• Spotting Trouble and Help in Execution Plans – Jes Schultz Borland guides you through the warning signs.
• What the Execution Plan Doesn’t Tell You – Jes tells you how to dig into these problems and fix them.
• There’s Something About NOLOCK – Kendra Little shows you some surprising performance implications of the NOLOCK hint.
• How Stack Overflow Scales with SQL Server- Brent Ozar gives the real-life goods on how a high demand website gets loads of performance out of SQL Server.
• Does Your SQL Server Need Critical Care®?- Brent Ozar explains what our SQL Critical Care® service does and who should sign up for it.
• Performance Monitor 101- explains how to use Perfmon and Profiler.
• Lose Waits Fast with Wait Stats – in which Brent dresses up as Richard Simmons to explain how to use wait stats and free tools like sp_WhoIsActive, SQLdiag, and SQLnexus.
• A DBA’s Guide to ORM’s – Jeremiah Peschka gives you a guided tour of the Object Relational Mapping tools which are ever more frequently used to generate SQL code running against your databases– nHibernate and Entity Framework are some well known examples of ORMs.
• T-SQL Tuning for Formula 1 Race Car Drivers – they have more in common than you might think.
• Tuning T-SQL with the Plan Cache – Brent introduces how the plan cache works and how to catch slow queries with the latest sp_Blitz®.
• How to Manage Vendor Databases – If you touch them, you might lose support – but the users are frustrated. We can’t make everybody happy, but we can make them less miserable.
• What’s Coming in SQL Server 2014? – Jes Schultz Borland introduces you to Hekaton, clustered columnstore indexes, T-SQL improvements, and more.

Developer Training Videos on SQL Server

• Developer’s Guide to Understanding DBAs – Doug Lane tells you what DBAs really want.
• The Use and Abuse of RECOMPILE – Kendra Little explains the impact on query execution of recompilations.
• Refactoring T-SQL with Windowing Functions – detailed demos from Doug Lane.
• Saving Session State – Jeremiah explains why you don’t really want this in SQL Server, and where you should put it instead.
• SQL Server Change Control – Jeremiah Peschka explains why if you aren’t managing database changes effectively, though, disaster may strike.
• IO for Developers – developers frequently tune out on discussions of storage performance. Don’t fall into this trap!
• 1TB Databases for Developers – Brent explains what you need to know when you get into terabyte territory.
• The Basics of Database Sharding – Jeremiah explains this flexible way of scaling out a database.
• Let’s Talk About Joins – Jeremiah Peschka covers the nested loop join, merge join, and hash join.
• How to Use SQL Server 2012 Windowing Functions – Speed up your aggregates and reports with Jeremiah Peschka.
• Stages of Database Development – Jeremiah Peschka says strong development practices don’t spring up overnight – you have to work at it.
• How to Succeed in Database Development Without Really Trying – Jeremiah Peschka covers core skills and books he recommends.
• The Basics of Execution Plans – Jeremiah shows you how to easily identify bottlenecks.
• SQL Server Table Partitioning Tutorial: Video and Scripts – Kendra Little teaches you how to get your hands dirty with Table Partitioning

Developer T-SQL Tips and Tricks

• Don’t Fear the Execution Plan! – Jes Schultz Borland shows you how to read them and spot common problems.
• Why Parameter Sniffing Slows Down Queries – Got queries that sometimes run fast, and sometimes run slow, and it’s hard to tell why – even for the same values?
• 5 T-SQL Features You’re Missing Out On – the OUTPUT clause, OVER and PARTITION BY, APPLY, EXCEPT, INTERSECT, and the magic of indexed computed columns.
• Five Ways to Fight Blocking – Kendra Little gives you big picture ways to get ahead of those blocking chains.
• Completely Legal Performance Enhancements – Jeremiah Peschka discusses persisted computed fields, indexed views, 64-bit OS’s, and more.
• The Basics of Execution Plans – Jeremiah gets you started on reading SQL Server’s roadmaps to query execution.
• Developer’s Guide to Dangerous Queries – Jeremiah Peschka shows you some things you probably don’t want to mess with.

DBA and Developer Index Training Webcasts

• Back to Index Basics – Kendra Little explains what indexes are and how SQL Server uses them.
• The Top 3 Indexing Mistakes – including why you might not want to add that recommended missing index.
• The Okapis of SQL Server Indexes – Jes Schultz Borland introduces filtered indexes and indexed views.
• Heaps in SQL Server: Performance, Maintenance, and Your Sanity – Kendra Little shows how heaps behave differently than tables with this demo-intensive session.
• DBA Darwin Awards: Index Edition- Brent Ozar shows you common mis-steps people make with indexes.
• How to Design Smarter Indexes – Kendra Little gives you a method and scripts to performance tune your indexes.
• How Does SQL Server Store Data? – Brent introduces the data file and log file internals.
• Index Tuning for SQL Server – learn how to add, remove, or monitor indexes.
• Table Partitioning Tutorial – start-to-finish explanation videos with example scripts from Kendra Little.

DBA TempDB and System Databases Training

• Temp Tables vs Table Variables vs Memory Optimized Table Variables – when should you use each?
• The Secrets of TempDB – Brent explains what uses TempDB, how to configure it for peak performance, and how to tell when it’s a problem for your server.
• Sizing Up TempDB Best Practices – Kendra Little shows you when you need more – or less – TempDB files.
• How to Tell When TempDB is a Problem- Jeremiah Peschka helps you figure out if tempdb is dragging down your SQL Server performance.
• Bob Dylan Explains TempDB – Brent busts out another costume to explain SGAM contention.
• Introducing the System Databases: Master, Model, MSDB – What gets stored here, what processes use them, and should you restore them?

DBA – Storage, SSD, and SAN Videos

• How to Prove it’s a SAN Problem – Brent Ozar shows you how to get down with disk testing tools.
• SQL on SSDs: Hot and Crazy Love – Brent Ozar talks about the attractions and perils of super fast storage
• How to Use SQLIO for Storage Testing- Brent Ozar shows you how and gives you his testing scripts.
• Virtualization and SAN Basics for DBAs – these two technologies can really impact your SQL Server performance.
• SQL Server Storage: Files and Filegroups – Brent Ozar explains why you might want to think carefully about how you lay out your SQL Server database files.

DBA Virtualization (VMware and Hyper-V) for SQL Server Training

• Making SQL Server Work in VMware and Hyper-V – which servers should you virtualize first, how should you license them, and how many vCPUs do they need?
• How to Plan a SQL Server Virtualization Project- Brent Ozar shows you how to save time and money with the right plan.
• SQL Server Consolidation – before you pile lots of instances or databases onto a single physical server, learn the top five things you should know before undertaking a consolidation project.
• Virtualization Q&A Session – Brent talks for an hour with the PASS Virtualization chapter about VMDK vs RDM, how licensing works, and more.

DBA Troubleshooting Videos

• SQL Server First Responder Kit – Kendra Little gives you the tools to respond to a crisis and come out on top.
• What’s Going On In My SQL Server? Kendra Little shows you tools to see what activity is running in your SQL Server. The first step to performance tuning is to know what’s running!
• Treasure Hunt: SQL Server Error Log – Jes Schultz Borland explains what to look for, how to search it, and how to get alerted for problems.
• BLITZ! SQL Server Takeovers – you’re sitting in your cubicle, minding your own business, when someone hands you a SQL Server. Learn how to take it over quickly to assess risks within a matter of minutes.
• SP_Who Replacements – learn better ways to find out what’s going on inside your SQL Server with sp_WhoIsActive, DMVs, and more.
• Bad SQL Server Advice for DBAs – Brent explains the most common bad advice he sees and explains why it’s wrong.
• The Mystery of Query Timeouts – Kendra Little shows you how to triage query timeouts like a pro.

DBA Backup and Recovery Training Videos

• How to Use Our HA/DR Planning Worksheets – to put your company’s RPO and RTO goals in writing.
• Backup to Basics – Jeremiah Peschka gives you three company scenarios and asks you to pick the right backup strategy for each.
• SSRS Encryption Keys – Doug Lane talks about the time he deleted the key and what it took to fix the damage.
• Log Shipping Part 1: Preparing for Disaster – Log shipping is a tried and true method of keeping your data on a secondary server.
• Log Shipping Part 2: When Disaster Strikes – Sure, you got log shipping set up, but are you monitoring it, and do you know how to react to problems?
• Minimal Logging – Doug Lane explains what it is, how to turn it on, and how to tell if it’s working.
• AlwaysOn Availability Groups Lessons Learned – We’ve deployed AlwaysOn AGs at companies around the world, and we’ve learned some expensive lessons.
• Mirror Mirror, On the Server Part 1 – how to set up database mirroring like a boss.
• Mirror Mirror, On the Server Part 2 – how to handle planned and unplanned mirroring failovers.
• SQL Server Disaster Recovery Basics – learn the pros and cons of log shipping, database mirroring, etc.
• SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery webcast – Brent Ozar tells you what all your options are, and how to make the right choice when it comes to HA.
• Questions and Answers About Clustering, Mirroring, Replication, and More – our readers brought their questions, and we brought the answers.
• How to Make Backups and Restores Faster – Brent Ozar shows two surefire ways to improve backup performance.
• Planning for AlwaysOn Availability Groups – Brent Ozar lays out your choices for multiple availability groups, service accounts, IP addresses, and failover.
• How to Test Availability Groups – Kendra Little shows how to build a virtual lab for learning this high-end feature.

DBA Load Testing and Benchmarking

• Demystifying Benchmarking – Kendra Little explains how to use TPC-C benchmarks on your SQL Server.
• How to Measure T-SQL Performance Improvements – Kendra Little shows how to use STATISTICS IO and STATISTICS TIME.

DBA Log File (LDF) Explanation Videos

• How the SQL Server Log File Works – Jes Schultz Borland busts open the LDF file.
• Developers, Performance, and the SQL Server Transaction Log – Kendra Little talks about how application patterns impact performance of the transaction log
• DBA Darwin Awards – Log File Edition. Brent Ozar tells you about common configuration errors which may cost you a lot.

DBA SQL Server Setup and Management Tutorials

• The Day the SQL Server Quit – Doug tells about a SQL Server that got fed up with being misconfigured and did something about it.
• Introduction to Extended Events – Jeremiah Peschka shows you the replacement for Profiler that does so much more.
• Change Management: 3 Best Practices – whether you’re planning a major migration, a code release, or a Windows patch, there’s a risk.
• SSMS: More than Meets the Eye – no matter how long you’ve been using Management Studio, you’ll learn new tricks in this video.
• Documentation – It Doesn’t Suck! – Jes Schultz Borland explains what you need to capture and how to get started.
• The Not-So-Secret SQL Server Agent Jes Schultz Borland shows you how to set up job steps, schedules, and notifications.
• SQL Server Installation Best Practices- Brent Ozar tells you what to do before you run setup.exe.
• Anatomy of the SQL Server Database: Settings and Secrets – explore some of the critical but lesser known settings for SQL Server databases with Kendra Little.
• Things Every DBA Should Know – Brent Ozar covers basic questions that business users surprise DBAs with.
• SQL Server Max Memory Myths – Jes Schultz Borland uncovers the truth about what SQL Server is doing with its single-page allocations and multi-page allocations.
• Playing Doctor with the DMVs- how to find hyperactive files & filegroups, catch potential partitioning pitfalls, sniff out heaps, and use a Central Management Server to triage your servers.
• How to Manage Vendor Databases – if you work with SharePoint, Dynamics, SAP, or other ISV apps, here’s how to get them to perform without losing your support.

Cloud and Alternative Database Videos

• Configuring SQL Server in Amazon’s EC2- Jeremiah Peschka shows you the secrets of setting up your SQL Server to perform well in Amazon’s cloud.
• Hadoop Basics for SQL Server DBAs – Microsoft have made announcements about bringing Hadoop to Windows, but what does that mean for SQL Server? Jeremiah Peschka explains.
• Hive Data Warehouse Lessons Learned – Your company is considering a data warehouse and you’re unsure where to start; with so many tools on the market, it can be difficult to pick a solution. Jeremiah Peschka has designed and deployed several data warehouses using Hive to scale flexibly with data volume and query complexity.

Professional Development Videos

• Bad DBA Job Detector Test – See if Kendra describes your job, and discover what you should do to fix it.
• DBA Job Interview Live- We give you some of our toughest job questions. See if you figure out what we’re looking for.
• How to Get Your First Job as a DBA- Kendra Little helps you get your foot in the door
• Resume Tune-Up- We review several resumes and suggest how to improve ‘em.
• How to Get Money From Managers – Brent Ozar helps you advance your career by getting the right tools for your environment
• You Can Give a Technical Presentation – Jes Schultz Borland shows you how.

SQL Server Certification Training Videos

• SQL Server 2012 Certification Changes – Kendra Little explains the new MCSA, MCSE, and MCSM certifications.
• What Certifications to Take and How to Prepare – Kendra Little shows the SQL Server 2008 cert list and how she recommends studying for the exams.

Attend Our Live Webcasts

Every Tuesday, we hold a free 30-minute training session. Here’s how to join:

• Add an Outlook calendar invite
• Register for this week’s webcast
• Sign up for our free 6 Month DBA Training Plan emails – every Wednesday for six months, you’ll get an email taking you from building a server inventory all the way to future-proofing your databases.