You already ask AI about your queries. Then you copy, paste, and hope. In this course I show you how I work now: AI runs the queries, reads the plans, tests the rewrites, and checks its own work, and you decide what's worth fixing.
About 4 Hours, Streamed
Pre-sale price: $250 until December 1, 2026, then $500.
Buy now and you get in the day it opens.
I've spent a long time teaching people to tune queries and indexes by hand. Open SSMS, read the plan, write a DMV query, test a rewrite, repeat. Nobody wants to learn that way anymore, and I don't blame them. I don't work that way anymore either.
These days I have AI do the annoying stuff, and I spend my time deciding what's worth doing. This course shows you how I set that up, one step at a time, on a server you're allowed to break.
Yes, AI gets things wrong. So do people. Ask someone to write a DMV query from memory and they'll get columns wrong too. Let them run it, read the error, fix it, and look at the results, and they get there. AI works the same way. The more you let it get into things, the better it gets at catching its own mistakes.
So we let it into things. Responsibly.
Chat Window vs. Agent: the same question in a chat window, then in an agent that can run what it writes. Same model, very different day.
Make It a Copy of You: your rights, reservations, and restrictions. A login with the permissions you'd give a new DBA, an instructions file and a skill that say how you work, and a hook that blocks the things it never gets to run.
Your Monitoring Data Through MCP: AI reading waits, top queries, blocking, and query history from Performance Monitor, and knowing that "nothing collected" and "nothing happened" are two different answers.
Plans Without the Squinting: AI reading execution plans with tools built around the exact ways models misread them. Nobody has to open SSMS.
Reproduce It: a repro of the slow query, with the parameter values that hurt and the plan you got in production, so you have something real to test against.
Let the Robot Do Permutations: rewrites and index options, written, run, checked for the same results, and timed. When I built this one, two of the four rewrites Claude wrote were wrong, and one of them only on four rows out of 613. Nobody catches that by reading. You catch it by running it.
Lab, Your Slowest Query: one of your own queries through the whole loop. Thirty seconds to ten seconds. Cool! Where are those ten seconds going?
Where It Still Goes Wrong: eight times it went wrong while I built this course, and what caught each one.
Pick the Model, Watch the Bill: cheap models for grunt work, expensive ones for the hard parts, and how to measure cost per change you kept, with my real numbers.
Wrap-up: what to set up on Monday.
About 4 hours of video
Every script from the videos
A starter kit: a sample instructions file, a tune-a-query skill, permission rules, and a hook that blocks SQL writes anywhere but your test copy
The harness that checks every rewrite returns the same results, and times each one
An exercise for each module, with answers
A setup guide and a setup script, so your demos work the way mine do
A SQL Server you're allowed to break. Developer Edition is free, and 2022 or later is best.
The StackOverflow2013 database, which is free.
An AI agent that can run commands, and your own subscription to it. I use Claude Code. Any agent that can run sqlcmd and read the results works for most of it.
Three free tools of mine: Performance Monitor Lite, Performance Studio, and the query plan plugin for Claude Code.
Python 3, for the hook.
Enough SQL Server to tell when the robot is wrong. Somebody has to keep the robots in check, and that's you. If you can read a query and you know what an index is for, you're ready. If you're not there yet, my other training gets you there.
Want your whole team working this way? I teach it live as a one-day workshop, built around your queries, your plans, and the AI tools you already pay for.
I've worked with 600+ SQL Server clients. I use this setup every day: I build Performance Monitor, Performance Studio, and a set of Claude Code plugins with it. The tools in this course are the ones I use, and they're free.
When do I get access? On December 1, 2026. Pre-sale buyers pay now and get in the day it opens.
Do I have to use Claude Code? No. The videos use it, and the plan plugin works in Copilot CLI too. Any agent that can run sqlcmd and read the results works for most of the course.
Is this the same as Get AI-Ready With Erik? No. That course is about building vector search into SQL Server. This one is about using AI tools to do your database work.
What about PostgreSQL? Every demo in the videos is SQL Server.