Interview with SQL Server Master Trainer Scott Whigham, Owner of LearnSQLServer.com

Which versions of SQL Server to you cover in your videobooks?

SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005. I thought about putting a few 7.0 and 6.5 examples up there (like how to upgrade from 7.0 to 2005) but it’s just been so long since either of those were released that I just decided to focus on 2000/2005.

So you have any videos covering SQL Server  performance tuning or clustering?

Performance tuning is one of my favorite topics since I’ve focused my consulting on performance tuning for so many years. We have several videos up on the site now focused on query tuning, indexing, query plans, and the various SET STATISTICS/SET SHOWPLAN options. One of the challenges of producing the videobook is getting all the content up, and that’s certainly an area where I’ll be putting a lot of focus in the future. As for clustering, we don’t have any as of this writing (August, 2006), but it’s planned. The hard part is getting a cluster setup to record the videos on! Do you know anyone with a “production” cluster who will let me sit down and record videos?

Do you offer any free sample videos?

Definitely – and anyone can download them instantly without any “nagging”; i.e. we don’t ask for your email address, for example, before you watch our videos and you don’t have to wait for the snail mail to arrive with your demo. Check out http://www.learnsqlserver.com/FreeVideos and you’ll see the current crop of freebies.

We also rotate our free videos each month. If you’ll look on the top right side of the page, you’ll see the next rotation date. Put it on your calendar and come back to get five new ones. These are just random videos that we pull from our list of subscriber videos; we don’t change them in any way.

How much does it cost to subscribe?

Just speaking for LearnSqlServer.com, it’s only $29.95 and you can download every single video on the site. Each videobook has it’s own pricing model but, as a rule, they’re designed to be the same price as a book on the same topic. You can’t beat it!