Company News

Because learning SQL Server is painful, we’ve been experimenting with new topics, new guest instructors, new ways of talking to other students during class, and much more. In addition to our new live class lineup covering PowerShell, Linux, Always On Availability Groups, SSIS, and analytics, I’ve also got something wildly new. I’ve got a new…

Blogs are free, but they’re bite-sized. They’re great when you’ve only got a few minutes, and you wanna learn a single small thing. But they’re not organized in any kind of flow at all – you’re jumping around all over the place, learning random small things. You’re not really mastering a topic start to finish. “Wait…

Our recent class lineup did pretty well, so now we’ve got a new round: Always On Availability Groups: The Senior DBA’s Field Guide with Edwin Sarmiento – December 20-22, $2,995 – Learn clustering, design, topologies, readable secondaries, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Expert SSIS Training with Andy Leonard – December 4-5, $1,995 – For SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)…

“Now I just need a big enough drink glass” For the next 10 days, we’ll still be publishing scheduled blog posts, but we’ll be responding a little slower than usual, and probably a little more relaxed as well. That’s right – it’s time for our annual company retreat. This year, we’re back aboard a cruise…

Me, Damian Widera, and Kamil Nowinski in Wroclaw On my Poland trip, I sat down with Kamil Nowinski and Damian Widera to talk about how I got started with presenting, why I don’t use PowerShell (but you should), how sp_Blitz ended up on Github, my work/life balance, the Microsoft Certified Master exam, and a lot…

I had a great time in San Diego over the last couple of weeks teaching classes. I’d love to be able to have every training class where we can do breakfast & lunch outdoors! Performance Tuning Class, San Diego, March 2017 Buuut, we gotta move classes around, so here’s our upcoming lineup: Performance Tuning (4 days,…

We’ve been selling training videos for a few years now, and we’ve figured out that we have two kinds of buyers: Price-sensitive short-term customers – who are often paying out of their own pocket because their company won’t pay, and they want to learn as much as they can in a short period of time…

“Who replaced my SQL Server book with a cookbook?” When we launched our self-paced online training classes, we packaged them as focused courses that addressed a single pain point like: How to Tune Indexes and Speed Up SQL Server How to Read Query Plans DBA’s Guide to High Availability and Disaster Recovery Virtualization, SANs, and Hardware…

With fifteen years of blog posts, we’d accumulated a lot of junk around here. “Did I really write a blog post about buying pantyhose for turtles?” Recently we cleaned out a lot of the trash – old personal posts about boring stuff – and categorized the remaining ~2k posts to make it easier to find…