Over the years as a technology professional, a handful of resources in the SQL Server community have been instrumental in improving my database skills. Brent Ozar was a big influence on me early on, and his practical approach to troubleshooting and performance still shapes how I work. Alongside that, Erik Darling’s performance tuning work, Adam Machanic’s WhoIsActive stored procedure, Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts, and Redgate’s suite of tools have all been go-to references for monitoring, maintaining, and strengthening systems.
| Portal | Description |
|---|---|
| https://www.brentozar.com/ | Brent Ozar – BrentOzar.com is the home of Brent Ozar Unlimited, offering practical SQL Server performance tuning help through free tools (including the First Responder Kit), blog posts, training classes, and consulting. Focused on making Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and Amazon RDS faster and more reliable with clear, no-fluff advice. |
| https://erikdarling.com/ | Eric Darling – SQL Server performance tuning consultant and trainer. Founder of Darling Data. Known for deep query optimization work, execution plan analysis, and free diagnostic tools such as sp_PressureDetector. |
| https://github.com/amachanic/sp_whoisactive Documentation | Adam Machanic – WhoIsActive (sp_WhoIsActive) – The most widely used free stored procedure for real-time activity monitoring on SQL Server. Shows what’s running, blocking, waits, query text, plans, and more. |
| https://ola.hallengren.com/ | Ola Hallengren – Creator of the free and industry-standard SQL Server Maintenance Solution. His scripts handle backups, integrity checks, and index/statistics maintenance and are used by thousands of DBAs worldwide. |
| https://stackoverflow.com/ | Stack Overflow – The largest and most widely used question-and-answer site for programmers and technology professionals. It’s the go-to place for practical solutions to coding, database, scripting, and system administration problems. |
| https://www.red-gate.com/ | Redgate – One of the most popular company for database tools. I found that the SQL Prompt, SQL History, and SQL Search invaluable in my daily tasks. |
| https://www.quest.com/products/spotlight-on-sql-server-enterprise | Quest Spotlight for SQL Enterprise – My choice for managing database servers across the systems. I found this tool invaluable as it provided Monitoring, diagnostics, playback, reporting, and query tuning for all my database servers. Plus it has a great GUI interface to see the current state of the database servers |
| https://a.co/d/0e83kxkg | T-SQL Fundamentals (Developer Reference) – I found this book to be invaluable. Not just for me to learn from, but to train employees and beginners how to write SQL. Nearly all the trainee’s that used this book said it was easy to understand and helped them hit the ground running. |
| https://a.co/d/06Xni9LB | The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers – Truly a must have book for those that code neatly. My pursuit to clean coding started at Rutgers where my teacher just naturally wrote clean, readable code. This book was a great way to extend need for clean code so code was easier to manage, update, and maintain. |
| https://learn.microsoft.com/ | Microsoft Learn – Microsoft Learn is the central, free place Microsoft provides for documentation, hands-on skill-building, and earning recognized credentials. I recently used this site to study and learn Azure cloud. I found it to be very useful to pass the AZ900 exam. |
