I just sent this off to a fellow DBA who wanted some resources. You may also be one of those, so here you go…
Here are a few of the better resources, just off the top of my head:
- www.MidnightDBA.com, of course! All our tutorials are free and online.
- www.NTSSUG.com is the (Dallas) local user group; they meet the third Thursday of the month at the Microsoft campus (161 and 114)
- www.SQLSaturday.com is a free one-day conference that happens throughout the year in different cities. It’s run entirely by volunteers, and draws some of the very best speakers in SQL Server – authors, MVPs, MCMs, and Microsoft guys. I can’t recommend attending one of these enough. (The next one in driving distance is in Oklahoma City on August 25; Sean and I are speaking there).
- For performance tuning, I highly recommend Grant Fritchey’s “Query Performance Tuning“. He’s a great writer and speaker; don’t be surprised if you bump into him at a conference or SQL Saturday.
- We also run a book and product review site: http://www.itbookworm.com/ If you want to see what I think of a tech book, look here first.
- You can learn a ton from reading www.SQLSkills.com, but it’s easy to become overwhelmed. I recommend digging through some of Kimberly Trip’s indexing articles on the site. Paul has some great stuff on backups, and they all do a ton of internals.
- If you register on www.SQLPASS.org you have access to recent recordings of 24 Hours of PASS sessions.
- If you’re really feeling ambitious, get an account on Twitter and start following some of the SQL Server authors and speakers (including myself, Grant, Kimberly, Paul, Itzik, and others). You can use the hashtag #sqlhelp to get help with SQL problems; people are monintoring it at all times. For an introduction to Twitter, see Brent Ozar’s Simple Twitter Book: http://www.brentozar.com/twitter/book/
There’s a ton more, but that’s more than enough to get you started.
Happy days,
Jen