I made y’all a SQL Server style Valentine’s day present: a new FREE online training course.

Course info: Troubleshooting Blocking & Deadlocks for Beginners

You need to prove if blocking is killing the performance on your SQL Server. Learn to set up simple, lightweight monitoring using free tools and scripts to find the queries causing your blocking and deadlock problems.

Here’s how the course is laid out…

• Welcome! Here’s what you need to get started (2 minutes)
• Wait stats, alerts, and troubleshooting blocking live (43 minutes)
• Troubleshooting blocking that happens when you’re away from your desk (31 minutes)
• Capture and prevent deadlocks (29 minutes)
• Interview questions (21 minutes)
• Learning plan (3 minutes)

Lessons in these modules are each between 5 and 15 minutes on average, so you can easily move through the course in short sessions.

Take this course for free.

What students have said about this course

I gave an hour version of this course at the SQL PASS Summit in 2016. Here’s what students wrote in their session evaluations:

• “This session was hyper-approachable and gave me a lot of tools I can use to improve on a place I’m weak on.”
• “Great Info and demos”
• “Moar dinosaurs! Excellent tips. Always great to find more free tools to help diagnose issues.”
• “Speaker was excellent. Very knowledgeable. Learned a lot of very useful information that I can take back to the workplace. "
• “I’m well versed with blocking, deadlocking, and resolution.  This session was a good review of key points but still contained information that I hadn’t yet been aware of.  "
• “The description of how to read a deadlock graph was one of the best I have ever heard.”
• “Kendra was a delight to listen to.  She supplied useful information in an easy to learn fashion.”
• “Kendra had some great examples of everything she was talking about. That helped a lot in learning how to deal with blocking and deadlocks.”
• “It was great to see something that I understood previously but from a different perspective. Everything was thoroughly explained and related in ways that made sense and painted a picture, literally there were pictures in the slides.”

I’m getting a little choked up reading those comments– man, what an awesome audience that was. Happy Valentines Day to me!

Here’s the link again if you don’t feel like scrolling up.