Choosing the right indexes - You will learn when to use heaps, clustered, nonclustered, filtered, and covering indexes so you can speed up data retrieval in real workloads instead of guessing.
Effective index maintenance - You will learn how to detect fragmentation, missing indexes, and unused indexes, so you can make informed maintenance decisions instead of running expensive routines blindly.
Using AI for SQL tuning - You will see how to apply AI tools to analyze indexes and performance, helping you produce useful recommendations faster and reduce the time spent on troubleshooting.
Reading query plans - You will learn how to interpret operators and key execution plan properties, so you can pinpoint bottlenecks on your own and better understand optimizer behavior.
Fixing performance issues - You will practice solving issues such as parameter sniffing, poor cardinality estimates, and bad cached plans, so you can stabilize performance much faster in production.
Working with statistics - You will learn how to create, update, and maintain statistics, and how they affect the Cardinality Estimator, so you can diagnose slow queries with much better accuracy.
Monitoring key metrics - You will use Activity Monitor, Query Store, and essential DMVs in a practical way, so you can locate pressure points faster, follow trends, and base decisions on evidence.
Vectors in SQL Server 2025 - You will gain practical basics of vector types, embeddings, and similarity metrics, and see how to connect SQL Server 2025 with Hugging Face and OpenAI use cases.
Basic T-SQL - You should be comfortable writing simple SELECT, JOIN, WHERE, and GROUP BY queries, so you can focus on tuning techniques rather than learning SQL Server syntax.
Relational database basics - You should understand tables, keys, relationships, and core relational concepts, so you can quickly assess how indexes and statistics affect query behavior.
SQL Server experience - You should have basic hands-on experience with SQL Server or SSMS, so you can run queries, read results, and complete the performance exercises efficiently.
Query analysis basics - You should know that the same query can behave differently depending on data and the execution plan, so performance diagnostics and tuning will be easier to follow.
