Just read through this. Very good stuff. I've unwillingly become a part-time accidental DBA at work and deal with a my share of failing SQL instances. This will be good stuff to have in my back pocket.
"I cant stress enough the importance of switching from a sequential files mindset to set-based thinking. After you make the switch, you can spend your time tuning and optimizing your queries instead of maintaining lengthy, poor-performing code."-- Itzik Ben-Gan 2001