Here’s what we discussed:

• 00:00 Start
• 01:06 Bar next to the office does the breakfast tequila: What is your estimate for how many people in the English-speaking world are performance tuners at a level either at or beyond where your Mastering classes get them? Judging by YouTube and blog view counts, I worry it’s far under 20,000.
• 04:55 If gamers can…: If you somehow obtained a SQL Server 2025 decompile, what things would you look up first?
• 06:37 Fable 2: In the Postgres community, I hear a lot about sharding. In the SQL Server community, I do not. Why?
• 08:49 MyTeaGotCold: I see offerings that use cloud-managed Postgres for OLTP and their own software for OLAP. Databricks calls it their “lakebase” and ClickHouse just calls it “ClickHouse Managed Postgres”. Do you know of any collective nouns for these dbs and do you have any opinions on them?
• 10:41 TheCosmicTrickster: SQL Server has any number of parameters that can be tweaked. How often do you find you have to tweak any of them to resolve an issue? What is the most esoteric thing you’ve had to tweak?
• 13:51 TeaEarlGrayHot: I vaguely remember undocumented AAG tuning guidance (guidance in support case?) that helped AAG replication latency with low trans log bytes size, high trans rate, but without CPU, Disk or Network contention. I think it was “railcars” or “rails.” Do you know a blog I can find it?
• 16:47 Burnt out DBA: How do you deal with an enviro where users write reports against the DWH but it’s completely overwhelmed. We are always tuning queries/indexes and get good results but it feels like no sooner have we fixed it, users are throwing in new queries at a pace we can’t keep up with
• 22:52 Ethiopiawi: Hi Brent ,do you have any plan to add more advanced Postgres courses like we have for mastering sql server ? Thanks!

“I thought I understood Index and query tuning before I started the fundamentals course, but I was wrong. Thanks to Brent, I’ve cleared a bunch of dead wood from my indexes and managed to reduce my overall database size to half of what it once was. The query tuning knowledge I gained allowed me to get a 20% increase in performance from our application.”
— Mark Voisine, Fundamentals Week 2026, 2026-11-11

“In the past, I attended your freeware version of Fundamentals Week. I had an awareness of how it works (to be honest, I had no opportunity to use it). But this week was so amazing. I obtained a lot of information in more detail. The bonus is that I used your information directly in my projects immediately. I really appreciate that your examples are very simple and understandable. Also, typing the code directly through the class is very teachable. All the informations those I noticed that week is very usable to me.”
— Martin Starzyk, Fundamentals Week 2026, 2026-11-11

“Reading Execution Plans – One of the most valuable takeaways from the Fundamentals classes has been a better understanding of how to read execution plans and address the issues they reveal. Finding troublesome queries is one thing; knowing how to fix them is another. These classes have given me greater confidence in my ability to do both. I recognize that I still have a lot to learn, and I’m looking forward to building on that knowledge in the Mastering classes.”
— Kelly Windsor, Fundamentals Week 2026, 2026-11-11

“After taking this class, I feel more confident about troubleshooting problem SQL Servers. The class armed me with a set of tools to use as well as a general process to follow which will be very helpful to apply at my job.”
— Phillip Litchfield, Fundamentals Week 2026, 2026-11-07

“I now understand execution plans, and I have less fear of reading them. Earlier it was always a huge amount of info which I didn’t understand.”
— Rohan Purane, Fundamentals Week 2026, 2026-11-07

“Hi Brent! Thanks for the opportunity to learn more about SQL Server. I’ve been a physical DBA for many years (building systems and infrastructure, backups/recovery, high availability, etc) and never spent the time and effort to focus on index and query tuning. While I’m not feeling expert level, yet, I now have a methodology that I can follow to troubleshoot indexes and queries. With practice and the upcoming mastering classes I am looking forward to embracing with gusto this additional facet of the DBA life.”
— Randy Loeschner, Fundamentals Week 2026, 2026-11-08

“Eye opening learning and recommend for any SQL Server DBA.”
— Suren Gupta, Mastering Server Tuning 2026, 2026-10-28

“I feel I have a better grasp on using the First Responders tool kit more effectively to tune queries. I need practice, practice, practice though. The way SQL Server creates execution plans can be a bit cryptic to say the least. You brought some clarity to that. I didn’t realize how bad my ability to interpret them was until I took your class. I need to go back and review and continue improving the skill.”
— Dan Griswold, Fundamentals Week 2026, 2026-11-09

“I am better in analyzing the server. I am more confident in creating indexes and tuning queries. I know the tools with which I can try to get accurate estimates. I know the lies in the execution plan and what I can believe there and what I should better ignore.”
— Ozan Kahraman, Fundamentals Week 2026, 2026-11-09

“This is for the whole collection of tuning classes, not just Mastering Server Tuning. After the foundation and mastering classes, I better understand how to read the query plans. I understand how bad estimations in those plans can create bad plans and ways to fix them. I know about forced parameterization, how it can help group query plans so you can find the problems, how it can reduce CPU usage, and how it can blow up in your face when parameter sniffing becomes a problem. This isn’t an extensive list, just what jumps to mind.”
— Samuel Swanner, Mastering Server Tuning 2026, 2026-10-24

These classes are wildly different than any other SQL Server courses you might have taken before, either in-person or online. We have fun, and we learn practical stuff that you can use the very next day to make your servers go faster.

Right now, my classes are on sale for their lowest price all year: the recordings start at $295, and a Live Class Season Pass for $995 lets you attend my live classes all through 2027. See you in class!

In dark mode too:

Here’s how:

1. Download the free ClaudiaIDE extension for Visual Studio. It’s a VSIX file. Put it in your downloads folder.
2. Technically, extensions aren’t supported by SSMS v22 yet, so you’ll have to run this PowerShell script to install it. SSMS will relaunch with ClaudiaIDE’s default background image.
3. Go into C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 22\Release\Common7\IDE\Extensions\ClaudiaIDE\Images – or wherever your SSMS is installed – and drop the images you’d like to use there. Ideally, it’s PNG files with transparencies, so they’ll work in both dark & light mode.
4. In SSMS into Tools, Options, ClaudiaIDE, dark/light themes. You can set a single image, use slideshow to have it rotate through the images, and even use animated movies or gifs like Tom Hardy standing in front of a burning plane.

My favorite source for short loops like that is /r/Cinemagraphs, like winter in Kyoto, a racing Ducati, or that burning plane from Dunkirk.

Or if you’d like to stare at me all day – and who wouldn’t – then here’s a zip file of transparent images of me to rotate through in slideshow mode. The default rotation of 1 minute feels a little frantic though – I’d do 10 minutes. Set the stretch mode to “None” for these so they stay on the bottom right side of your editor. Enjoy!

As an author, yes, because:

• Blogs provide a written proof of what you were doing, at various points in time
• Blogs provide social proof that managers will see when they Google your name
• Blogs sharpen your technical skills – because nothing teaches you something better than having to teach it to someone else
• Blogs sharpen your communication skills – because AI writing is terrible, and everybody recognizes it from a mile away, and if you’re relying on that to save you, you’re going to be in for a rough decade

As a reader, yes, because:

• Blogs provide fast-breaking news of edge case issues
• Blogs provide answers to questions you wouldn’t have thought of asking
• Blogs provide personal opinions from experienced individuals

They’ve never been the only way for writers and readers to achieve these objectives. There have always been other ways to do it, like presenting, podcasting, streaming, social media, building scripts & tools, etc, and there will continue to be new ways in the future. Almost 20 years ago, I wrote that blogging isn’t the way to make money immediately or build up name recognition quickly. It’s never been. It’s a personal investment of your time in order to gain long-term career traction.

Followup Questions

“Are blogs less relevant for authors?” It can be frustrating in the sense that AI models are trained on your work, and you don’t get paid for that. Plagiarism has long been a problem in the blogging community. I’ve kinda made my peace with that – like I said earlier, tech writing as an income strategy hasn’t been a good idea for decades. However, if your goal is to help people, then blogs are more powerful than ever, because their advice spreads further & faster. If you’re doing this to help, they’re just as relevant as ever.

“Are blogs less relevant for readers?” Unquestionably yes, because people are getting advice directly in their IDEs and LLMs. There’s a good chunk of tech workers who simply don’t wanna learn, and just wanna hit Execute and have the thing work. I don’t blame them. Technology is awful. Those people are less likely than ever to visit blogs.

“Are blogs less relevant for hiring managers?” No, they’re more relevant than ever to help sift out the signal from the noise. They’re a clear, time-archived track record of things that someone knew – or, in the case of AI-written blog posts, something they’re bluffing about. An AI-written blog isn’t doing you favors in the year 2026, and yes, we know which blog posts are AI slop versus which ones you crafted by hand.

“Are there less blogs around now?” Yes, over the last several years, a lot of the Microsoft SQL Server community members have moved on to other technologies, had family changes, reprioritized their work/life balance, or just gotten burned out. There are way, way less bloggers and blog posts around here than there used to be. I partially blame myself, too, because I used to bang the “you-should-blog” drum a lot around here, and I haven’t been doing it over the last decade. I’m still banging out 3-4 blog posts per week, so I’m leading by example, but I should probably be advocating for others to write more.

Today, in particular, is an interesting day to discuss this because right now, as this goes live, Microsoft is delivering the keynote session at the PASS Data Community Summit in Seattle. I’m there in the audience, listening in. In the past, this is the kind of thing I would have liveblogged. The event used to have a blogger’s table where a couple dozen of us would have all been typing away, getting the news out to our readers. I realized while writing this post that conferences haven’t had bloggers’ tables since the pandemic, and it hasn’t even occurred to me to liveblog these events anymore. The big reason behind that isn’t that blogging isn’t relevant – it’s that the keynote speeches have mostly turned into marketing spam, trying to pass long-since-announced features off as “new”, because event keynote schedules just don’t line up well with software releases anymore. The world is moving faster – but that doesn’t make blogs less relevant, it makes them more relevant since it’s one of the places you can find hot takes on this new stuff, like my hot take on Microsoft Database Hub, which I’m sure they’re gonna try to pass off as “new” again in this keynote, if they’re not deprecating it already.