My company cut the training budget this year, and it’s not that uncommon for that to happen anymore. However, I’m still getting my week of training in, and more, without paying much.

Blogs of people who talk too much – FREE

There’s so much for free online, but you’re reading my blog so I don’t have to dive too deep here. Follow a couple blogs in an RSS reader, and make sure you sign up for freebies they may offer like Paul Randal giving away training!

Personally, I try to read a majority of everything written by:

• Brent Ozar
• Kendra Little
• Jeremiah Peschka
• Jes Borland
• Doug Lane
• Tom LaRock
• Paul Randal
• Kimberly Tripp
• Jonathan Kehayias
• Joe Sack
• Glenn Berry
• Erin Stellato
• Bob Beauchemin
• Grant Fritchey

You can include me on this list if you’re feeling generous. However, they’re all smarter than me, and I’ll understand if you don’t.

Local User Groups – FREE

I know most DBAs don’t go to the local user groups. Some never go, some go when the topic is right, but you can benefit from these every time.

Even the presentations that are outside of your normal job duties are valuable. If someone’s teaching SSIS and you don’t use it, knowing what you can learn from an hour-long presentation will put you in a situation to have more intelligent conversations when these topics come up. Read over job descriptions, they expect DBAs to know everything, and here’s your chance to know a little about it.

Also, you can learn from every presentation. I don’t care if you could give that presentation, people in a field known for introverts could use practice and examples of how to present ideas to others. You’ll see good, you’ll see bad, and you’ll be better because of it. Also, one or two small details you might pick up on a topic you know extremely well will make a big difference.

Speaking of our field being known as introverts, this is your opportunity to step out of your comfort zone and present. That’s what I did. Some present because they were born to do it, and I started presenting because I was born to blend into a cube farm! I’ll be presenting at my local user group in April, have already done a SQL Saturday this year, and would like to do at least two more SQL Saturdays, which drags me (kicking and screaming) into improving my soft skills where a typical DBA, like me, is behind the curve.

Our last presentation by Bill Wolf was an excellent presentation on avoiding common coding mistakes. It wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch for me to make a similar presentation, but I still learned a couple things and met some good people. The next meeting on March 25th will be about the interdependency between SQL Server and .NET, which would be amazing for any DBA or .NET developer to go to, even if Dell wasn’t giving away free laptops as door prizes!

Finally, the presentations aren’t the real reason you’re going there, are they? You’re getting to know the other DBAs in the area, and you’re sitting there talking person-to-person to the ones that want to share everything they know with you. You get to know them, they get to know you, and when one of you wants a new job or new coworker then you have a better chance at finding a good fit that you can be comfortable with from the start.

If you’re not sure where your local user group is or if you even have one, start by looking at this link.  Most groups are affiliated with PASS, and that means they’ll be listed there.

SQL Saturday – $10 Lunch

SQL Saturday is a cross between the local user group and the PASS Summit. In fact, the last one I was at has been referred to as a mini PASS Summit because of the number of high-quality speakers there, including multiple names from the list of bloggers I mentioned above.

The cities that host these events typically do so as an annual event, and there’s probably one not too far from you each year. I live in Pittsburgh, PA, which hosts one just a couple minutes from my house. I’m also trying to make it to ones reasonably close to me such as Cleveland, OH a couple weeks ago that’s about 2 hours away, Philadelphia, PA coming up in June that’s a 5 hour drive where I have family I can stay with. I think I’ll skip Columbus, OH because it’s the week after Philly and I have three small kids. Although I won’t make it this year, I may go to Richmond, VA, which is a 6 hour drive where I also have family to stay with.

It’s been a cold winter here in Pittsburgh, and now I’m starting to think about how much I miss my relatives in Texas, California, Florida and South Carolina. It knocks this idea out of the free or low cost training blog post, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.

While my company did cut the budget, they still paid mileage and gave me Friday off as a travel day. Even without a budget, still ask to see what you can get.

Virtual PASS Chapters – FREE

Pass also does virtual online events. I know I’m risking making this sound like a PASS commercial doing the local PASS chapter, the PASS SQL Saturdays, now the Virtual PASS chapters, but it’s hard to talk about free or low cost SQL Server training without talking about these people. So, why would I avoid this sounding like a commercial for them? They deserve to be known, and with all this free junk they can’t have much of an advertising budget!

Anyways, the virtual chapters each have their own focus, and I’m a member of the PowerShell, Performance, Database Administration, and I think a couple others. They do presentations about once a month, and I try to watch them when I have time. Worst case, they usually make the recordings available later.

There are also a couple “24 hours of PASS” events throughout the year where there are 24 back-to-back sessions. The next one on the schedule is the Russian version, which I’ll pass on.

BrentOzar.com – FREE

In addition to their blogs, the Brent Ozar Unlimited team (Brent’s just a member, not their leader!!!!) does weekly webinars that are usually very useful to me. I’d say I watch 3 of them a month, missing one either due to my schedule or because it’s a rare one that I don’t feel bad about missing. They put up the recordings later, although I have to admit I usually don’t watch them if they aren’t live. I know I don’t make any sense, but you’ll get used to it.

Twitter – FREE

Seriously, if you can fit your question and #sqlhelp in 160 characters or less, you’ll have someone pointing you in the right direction within minutes. They’ll point you to the posts that you didn’t know what key words to Google to find, but keep in mind that they’re doing this for free. Always be grateful, and understand when they say that digging into the issue would mean a trip to the consultant.

The End – Sad, but still free

So, yeah, my company cut my training budget. That means that so far this year (March 3rd here) I had to stick to learning from Steve Jones, Grant Fritchey, Erin Stellato, Stacia Misner, Tom LaRock, and others in-person. Then I watched free videos by Jes Borland, Jeremiah Peschka, Brent Ozar, Kendra Little, and Doug Lane. I have a free month of the SQL Skills Pluralsight classes with a code that Paul Randal personally emailed me, with which I’m in the middle of a class by Jonathan Kehayias right now. I’m planning on taking full advantage of this trial with classes by Joe Sack, Erin Stellato, Paul Randal, Bob Beauchemin, and Kimberly Tripp, although I’ll end up running out of time and buying a subscription for $30 / month.

So, is a lack of a training budget stopping you? You can say it is, but it’s not.

I gave you a lot and I missed a lot. This is not all-inclusive, and a quick look around the internet will prove that point. There are still Free e-Books and many other resources out there. I have to start skipping stuff or this post will never make it out to you, and what good would that be?

Hey, look!!! There’s a section right below here marked “Comments” that’s perfect for your addition to the list. Maybe it can be all-inclusive!!!