Category: Company News

We're discontinuing our apps (not the First Responder Kit scripts, just the apps), which means I'm laying off Richie Rump, my developer that's worked with me for the last decade.

Calling him "my developer" doesn't do justice to Richie's role here, and he's really humble, so I wanted to lay out the top 5 reasons you should hire him.

Reading is fundamental, and fundamentally, here are the 2025 blog posts that y'all read the most this year. (This list doesn't include the most popular timeless posts overall.)

10. Free Spring Training Webcasts - I've noticed that people have near-zero interest these days in paying to attend live online classes, but they're still really interested in free ones, and they still pay for recorded classes. Weird. I'm guessing that's a Zoom fatigue thing.

If you're the kind of person who likes to learn on the go, my training provider Teachable just updated their apps.

Now, both the Android and iOS apps let you download classes ahead of time and watch 'em disconnected.

You’ve been working with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, or Amazon RDS SQL Server for years.

You’re jaded. You’re confident. You’re pretty sure you know what you’re doing.

Last week, I announced that we've hit 50,000 YouTube subscribers, and I celebrated by letting y'all submit your favorite YouTube channels in the comments, and 5 of you would win my Fundamentals & Mastering Class Bundle.

You did not disappoint.

This is kinda amazing to me: our YouTube channel has broken the 50,000 subscriber mark!

That's wild to me because I don't put "please like and subscribe" type stuff in the videos, and I don't try to build viral content. I just show up every week and publish answers to y'all's questions from PollGab. And yet, our subscriber growth is slow and steady over time, growing by about 10% per year:

Deadlocks used to scare me.

I'd get the alert from a monitoring tool, and I'd look around to see if anyone was watching me. If the coast was clear, I'd... delete the notification.

The year is coming to a close, so it's time to look back on your favorite stuff from this year.

2024 Blog Posts with the Most Comments

In my PollGab room where y'all can ask questions, Chocolate Thunder wrote:

I do genuinely wish that I could do two things at the same time:

Our annual Black Friday sale launches this Friday and runs all month.

For those of you who are early birds, the folks who move quickly when the sales open on Friday, I've got a special bonus for you.

So you're thinking about picking up some of my training & online services, and you're wondering - do people actually buy this stuff?

Here are just a small sampling of some of the companies who've bought recently from me  - forgive the sloppy logo arrangement:

I recently asked you to leave a comment with your biggest database regret, and the comments were great! Here were my favorites:

Runners-Up

We all make mistakes.

I certainly have.

Black Friday is coming.

Every November, we run a big sale on our training & apps. It's a really big deal for us - and for you. I like to think of it as a reward for my long-term readers who can hold out, make plans, and budget to buy at a specific time of year.

So you've got an iPhone or iPad or Vision Pro, and you bought one of my training classes or the Fundamentals or Mastering passes, and you wanna watch the classes while you're offline. Perhaps you wanna learn on the train ride in to work, or perhaps on the weekends, you like to completely disconnect from the world and retreat into a bunker lined with a Faraday cage. I won't judge.

Some of you are staring longingly at my training classes. You don't get a training budget at work, so anything you invest in your own career has to come out of your own pocket.

Good news: we now offer buy-now-pay-later! It's perfect for one-time purchases like the Lifetime Fundamentals & Mastering Bundle. (We only offer buy-now-pay-later on one-time purchases, not subscription products.)

It's pretty cool to look at a blog post and see, "Last updated: 21 years ago."

It's pretty fun to see old pictures of me in the media library, too.

It's time for summer school!

I'm doing live streaming on my Twitch channel on Wednesdays & Thursdays this summer, and the recordings will go live later on my YouTube channel. I'll take questions from PollGab, do live coding, work on the First Responder Kit, and write blog posts.