Hi and welcome to the Azure SQL query tuning course. As the course name suggests, we'll be looking at how to improve your databases' performance, particularly in the area of data retrieval using queries.

In this course, you will see that how a query is structured is important but is definitely not the most important factor in how quickly and efficiently it can pull requested data. The database and tables structure is of greater importance. No matter how clever or optimized your query is, if the underlying data is structured in an inefficient way, then there is no hope of obtaining the best possible data retrieval performance.

With that in mind, to get the most out of this course, not only should you be familiar with SQL query syntax, but also SQL data types and table structure. So, while this might not seem like a beginner's course, primarily due to the prerequisite knowledge, it is important to understand sooner rather than later how to build a database that is efficiently structured.

My name is Hallam Webber and I will be your instructor for this course. We welcome all comments and feedback, so please feel free to reach out to us at support@cloudacademy.com with any questions or comments. Let's get started.