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Month: January 2009

StackOverflow adds “bounty” for answering questions

Last Updated January 28, 2009

I thought StackOverflow was addictive before, but now it’s electronic crack. The latest feature is a reputation bounty. If you want a question answered faster, you can offer a portion of your own reputation score as a bounty. The question stays open for 7 days, and it’s on the Featured Questions tab of the site. …

How To Become an MVP? Measure Your MVP-ness

Last Updated January 12, 2010

Not Much MVP-ness There’s been a lot of talk lately about how to become a Microsoft MVP (Most Valued Professional). I’m not an MVP, and I don’t know exactly how to become an MVP, but I know people, and I’m going to let you in on a little secret: it all boils down to a…

WhiteHouse.gov is not a blog.

Last Updated February 13, 2017

I keep hearing people patting themselves on the back saying, “Look – our President has a blog!” Hmmm. It doesn’t smell like a blog to me because: There’s no comments There’s no trackbacks There’s no personal touch – it’s very, very clearly written by marketers (and certainly not the President himself) If the White House…

The Microsoft Certified Master Certification Target Audience

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Jay Grieves (aka Big Swinging Developer) gives 3 steps to manage developers: Find out what success means to your team. Determine how each team member can be a valuable part in making that happen. Monitor. For me, this was the most important part of the article: The secret to being a Big Swinging Developer is…

New StackOverflow database server coming

Last Updated February 9, 2017

SQL Server for StackOverflow Today, Jeff Atwood blogged about StackOverflow’s new SQL Server hardware: a Lenovo RD120, the artist formerly known as an IBM x346. Notice the big heart on the box. Servers run faster with love. Next, I’m aiming to do log shipping from the box pictured here over to Amazon S3. The StackOverflow…

Switching from coffee to tea

Last Updated September 5, 2009

As a telecommuter, I drank a lot of coffee. When I worked from home, I polished off a pot before noon, and when I worked from coffee shops I’d drink a couple of large lattes before lunch. This presented a few problems: Caffeine makes me cranky (when consumed in these kinds of quantities) Lattes have…

PerformancePoint is very important to us, so…

Last Updated January 23, 2009

At a former company (not Quest), a memo came out from the head honcho. It went a little something like this: Training is really important to us. We have to make sure absolutely everybody in every department of the company is fully trained. It should be completely ingrained in what every department does. In order…

Running a Contest with SQL Server

Last Updated January 22, 2009

If you ever need to run a random drawing contest with a SQL Server database back end, here’s one way to do it: Create a table to hold each person’s name and email address. We use EntryID as a primary key, not their name or email, because a person can enter more than once. Transact-SQL…

Top 10 SQL Server DBA Interview Questions

Last Updated April 10, 2017

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

Looking for someone with more than a couple years of experience? Here’s how to find out if they’re bluffing. Includes questions like, “I’m a developer – explain why I need a unique key on my table.” Of course, I don’t include the answers – that would make it too easy for people to read this blog and fake it!

Spring SSWUG Virtual Conference

Last Updated September 5, 2009

Ah, spring – that time of year when young men’s thoughts turn to T-SQL. The next SSWUG V-Conference will be April 22-24th, and I’ll be giving a few sessions: Log Shipping To The Cloud (300-level) In an ideal world, we’d have a standby SQL Server in a disaster recovery datacenter, but we can’t always afford…

Free SQL Server code repository on Live Mesh

Last Updated January 21, 2009

Whoa – Jamie Thomson had a brilliant idea, and it has nothing to do with selling Twitter shirts. (Did I mention I got zero sales from that little endeavor? Expect a Lessons Learned post in the next few days.) SQL Server Scripts on Live Mesh He established a SQL Server code repository on Live Mesh.…

What do DBAs learn in their spare time?

Last Updated April 19, 2009

I got a question from a junior SQL Server DBA who wanted to make his way up to expert level. He wanted to know if it would help his career to learn the free/express versions of other database platforms – MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, etc – or if it would be a distraction. I have mixed…

Dopplr annual reports are – PDFs?!?

Last Updated January 20, 2009

My Dopplr Annual Report I use Dopplr.com to store my travel plans online so other travelers, like Quest employees and Twitter folks, can see when our schedules overlap. It’s a fun way to meet up with people you might not otherwise get a chance to see. They just put out annual reports for travelers summing…

Partition alignment in virtual machines

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Partition alignment is a setup trick for disk-intensive apps like Exchange and SQL Server that can have a 30% or more performance impact on your server. The setup information is in my SQL Server Setup Checklist, and Jimmy May has more details on the mechanics of partition alignment. If you run SQL Server in VMware,…

Wordle for BrentOzar.com

Last Updated January 17, 2009

Michelle Ufford of SQLFool tagged me in her latest post, asking me to produce a Wordle map of BrentOzar.com. You go to Wordle.net, put in your blog URL, and they produce this beautiful map of your most commonly used words from your RSS feed. Wordle Map of BrentOzar.com Faithful readers of my blog will recall…

Amazon Web Services Explained

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS), SQL Server

Amazon Web Services When I talk to database administrators, I hear a lot of questions like: What is Amazon S3? What is Mechanical Turk? How do these things matter to a real business? I’ve got a story I like to tell around how to use these services, but for a couple of years I’ve held…

Top 10 Questions To Ask During an Interview

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

#SQLPass, Professional Development

Before YOU take a job, here’s what you should ask. Have there been any layoffs in the last year? What’s the on-call policy like? Finding out these answers before it’s too late will save you from taking a really bad job. Believe me – I’ve been there.

Interview Tip: Don’t Stress Out

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Professional Development

I was just talking to a fellow blogger who’s going through an interview process, and we touched on something that bears repeating here. Interviewers don’t always expect you to know the answers. Sometimes they ask you a string of ugly, nasty technical questions that you can’t possibly have seen before. They might not be testing…

Why back up? Ask JournalSpace.

Last Updated April 19, 2009

When your managers ask you that question, point them to the sad story of JournalSpace.com. The company evaporated on December 30, 2008 because they didn’t have a backup. They were relying on their RAID drive mirrors to keep their data safe, but that only protects you from hard drive failures – not from application errors…

Ozar Family Portraits

Last Updated January 1, 2009

The Ozars We had a photographer come to Dad & Caryl’s house over the holidays while we were there with my sister and her stepson, and you can check out our family portraits on Flickr. The amazing part: this is the first actual picture of Erika (my better half) that I’ve been allowed to post…