Welcome to SQL University Troubleshooting Week. For anyone unfamiliar with SQL University, it is a project created by Jorge Segarra (Blog|Twitter) to give people a free way to learn SQL Server from the ground up. The professors at SQL University are bloggers with one or more of them getting a week to cover their topic.

I am honored to close out the final week of the Spring 2011 semester with a topic that I really enjoy: Troubleshooting. I really enjoy solving problems and that has caused me to get pulled into many situations where I could use and develop my troubleshooting skills. I hope to share the things I have learned here this week to speed everyone along in the process, hopefully avoiding some of the pitfalls that I had along the way.

I tried to keep the posts short and easily digestible but I will warn you now that there are one or two that are a bit long. Here is what I have planned for this week:

I hope to cover something useful for every level this week. Even as I wrote these posts I was reminded of things I could have done better in recent situations. Look for the “Communication” post tomorrow with “Keeping an Open Mind” on Thursday and “Having a Plan for Every Situation” on Friday. Friday’s post is quite long so it will make for good weekend reading.