{"id":2920,"date":"2020-12-30T16:27:23","date_gmt":"2020-12-31T00:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/kimberly\/?p=2920"},"modified":"2021-02-02T16:11:58","modified_gmt":"2021-02-03T00:11:58","slug":"introducing-the-sqlskills-blackbelt-badge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/kimberly\/introducing-the-sqlskills-blackbelt-badge\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing the SQLskills Blackbelt Badge"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\"\"\"\"Well, it’s the 30th of December and as I look back over the year, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in thinking that I’m soooo glad that 2020 is almost over. <\/span>Good riddance!<\/strong> Don’t let the door hit you on the way out! ;-) <\/span><\/p>\n

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The only small silver-lining <\/span>in having been home for our (Paul and I) longest stretch EVER – is that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about our training platform and the options we offer. We’ve completely updated our website (thanks to the amazing folks at Papersword B2B<\/a>), we’ve added verifiable badges so that you can better show off your achievements<\/a> (we’ll be releasing “partner badges” soon too<\/em>), and over the last few months we’ve converted all of our LIVE training from our September and October 2020 deliveries into online streaming courses. It took a massive team effort and a lot of testing \/ tweaking but now we’re finally ready (and continually improving the platform)! The best part is that we’ve decided to start off the New Year RIGHT by ADDING to and extending our discounts through the month of January. Look, we’ve all had a heck of a 2020 and we’re all looking forward to 2021 bringing us back up to a more normal pace again (I am truly hopeful for this). And, for those of you who want to ramp up some of your skills, we’re introducing both the Blackbelt Badge and our Blackbelt training bundles.<\/span><\/p>\n

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What is the Blackbelt Badge?<\/h2>\n

This is our most demanding verifiable-badge. To achieve this badge, a SQL Server professional has to have attended more than 150 hours of deep-technical SQLskills training across a variety of disciplines with primary focus on performance tuning and troubleshooting as well as appropriate design and configuration from an on-premises SQL Server to an Azure VM | MI (and know when each is appropriate) to Clustering and AGs to designing for VLTs (very large tables) and optimizing both OLTP and Decision Support \/ Relational Data Warehousing. IEPTO1 and IEPTO2 must be on SQL Server 2019 and at least half of the remaining courses must be on SQL Server 2019 as well. If you have already attended some of the required short courses on SQL Server 2017, they will apply!<\/p>\n

The courses required to achieve this badge are:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>IEAzure: Immersion Event on Azure SQL Database, Azure VMs, and Azure Managed Instance<\/a><\/h3>\n