Live Class Enrollment Closes July 12. Here’s Why.

Years ago, when I used to sell a Live Class Season Pass, I sold it year long.

All year long, you could hop into my online store and enroll in my live classes. From the moment you enrolled, you could immediately start attending the very next online class, no matter what the topic was, or how senior it was.

That sounds like a good time, but it would backfire.

A student’s accounting department might suddenly buy them a membership right before my Mastering Server Tuning class, the very pinnacle of my classes that required knowledge of all the prerequisite classes. That student would hop right into the live class, all excited to join in – only to be completely overwhelmed with information. They’d be unable to keep up, and they would slow down the other students with questions that were addressed in much earlier classes in the rotation, classes they should have taken first.

It would be like a student signing up for college and trying to take senior-level classes first. It just doesn’t work, and it harms everyone else’s experience too.

I’m fixing that with class rotations.

The first rotation is:

• July 13-17: Fundamentals Week
• Aug 31-Sept 4: Mastering Index Tuning
• Sept 28-Oct 2: Mastering Query Tuning
• Oct 19-23: Mastering Server Tuning

Enrollments are open now, but on July 12th, they’ll be closed again, PERIOD.

I will not be accepting live students again until October 24th. I don’t care how frantically you wave your credit card, you’re not getting in, because it’s not good for the other students’ experience. We’ll have a waitlist to join the next rotation, and when it opens up, you can swipe your manager’s credit card and hop into the club.

I’ve learned over time that each rotation of students builds a bond together as they chat in Slack during the live classes, talking about their experiences, sharing their pains, and working together on their class lab homework. Students are encouraged to share their homework in Slack so that they can compare their answers, see the creative solutions that other folks came up with, and be proud of their own work.

I understand that emergencies happen.

You might have a production emergency on September 3-4, and have to miss the second half of Mastering Index Tuning, for example. No problem! That’s why my Live Class Season Pass also includes access to the recordings, and the recordings go up online every single day as the classes finish. You can hop into the recordings, catch up on what you missed, and be ready for the next class.

Heck, you could miss an entire week altogether, and still catch the recordings of that class to get up to speed.

Or heaven forbid, your company might acquire another company, and you might be yanked out of training altogether. No problem! People who buy a Live Class Season Pass for this rotation also have access to the next rotation of live classes too, which runs Nov 2, 2026 through Feb 12, 2027.

I know it’s fun to revisit material, too!

One of my favorite experiences from past Live Class Season Passes is that people would show up to class over and over, and they would just let the live streams play on another monitor while they worked. They would listen in, reinforcing concepts, sometimes even trying hands-on lab homework assignments again to see if they could do better this time.

As time passed, and as the material sank in, and as they got experience with it in their own production environments, it would start to mean more. I would get so excited when I saw people doing genuinely better each time they took the class, going from struggling to succeeding. But the key to all of it was taking the classes in order.

So that’s why I’m putting my foot down. If you wanna attend the first rotation of my Mastering 2026 classes, you gotta register by next Friday. Get those registrations done, use my justification letters to get it approved, and I’ll see you in class!