Brian Knight is the author of several SQL Server books, one of the founders of SQL Server Central and founder of Pragmatic Works. He recently took some time from his very busy schedule to talk about how he got to where he is today.

Kathi: Brian, you are very well known in the SQL Server community for so many things. How did you get your start?

Brian: I entered the SQL Server as a DBA in the early .com boom days, when you could say the word database and get a job. At the time, the job was quite slow, giving me time to learn all the ins and outs of the platform in my boredom by using what was on the web. As I got better, I felt I owed a huge debt to the community for the help they gave me and frankly for me being lucky enough to land a job.  Most of what I learned I learned by answering questions on forums.

I got started in the community in the SQL Server 6.5 days as an author and eventually editor of a website called SWYNK.com. The site was run by Steve Wynkoop, who now runs SSWUG. This was the .com boom and eventually the site was purchased, leaving the authors who were hooked on writing a bit stranded. That’s when I decided to start SQLServerCentral.com with a few of the other SWYNK.com guys like Andy Warren and Steve Jones and a $50 investment from each of us. We thought the site would likely get a few thousand users at best and a few years later, we crossed more than a million members thanks to some amazing users.

Kathi: How did you involved with your first book?

Brian: I lost a bet. No seriously, Mark Chaffin was working on project at a company I was at and he invited me to join him in a DTS book. I was already writing articles and I thought it’d be like a big article. I was badly mistaken! 4-6 months later I came out of it like a bad hangover saying I would never do it again. Also like any bad hangover, I keep writing for some reason.

Kathi: Everything you touch seems to turn to gold. Is there anything that you wish you hadn’t done?

Brian: I wouldn’t say that everything turns to gold per-say. I’ve had a lot of luck on some of the things I’ve been a part of and had great people supporting me. My biggest failure in business was with my video community website JumpstartTV.com. This was not a failure from a community perspective by any means as it helped a lot of people but I had high hopes of seeing tens of thousands of how to videos. Looking back, I should have taken investment capital to really grow the site when no one had such an idea. It’s a real common idea now though to produce videos for the web.

Kathi: Your company, Pragmatic Works, was started and has thrived during the recent poor economy.  How did you make the decision to leave a steady job and paycheck and take such a big gamble?

Brian: My big catalyst to create Pragmatic Works at the time was the number of DTS migration projects I was being put on by my previous employer. I though there had to be a better way. That’s when we spent the 6 month of development effort to work on DTS xChange while I was doing the consulting for the company. I always wanted to make a company that was quite a bit different; one that focused on growth of the customer and employee at its core purpose. So as we doubled in size this each year and tripled this year, we made sure that each employee is mentored and have a growth strategy to take them to the next level. We also focus on that with our customers, teaching each customer “how to fish” as part of our core engagement. I didn’t want to be a consulting company that focused on deploying an army of consultants and setting up a condo near an organization. We want to build a relationship with companies that will no longer need us if we do our job right.