Month: June 2011

Your Job Isn’t To Make Your Boss Happy

Last Updated June 22, 2011

You might be surprised to learn that my goal as a consultant isn’t to deliver recommendations to my customers. Instead, my goal is to deliver recommendations that help my customer’s teams be better customers to each other after I’m gone. This is a fancy way of saying my recommendations need to be practical. I don’t…

Iomega StorCenter PX4-300d NAS Review: iSCSI Monster

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Storage

I wanted to love this monster from the moment I read the spec sheets: Iomega StorCenter PX4-300d NAS Network attached storage device with 4 or 6 hot-swappable drive bays Available empty (so you can bring your own drives, including SSDs) iSCSI server with 2 network ports, jumbo frame support, VLANs Official VMware ESX/ESXi, Hyper-V, Windows…

Ozar’s Hierarchy of Database Needs: a 6-Month DBA Training Plan

Last Updated September 21, 2022

Brent Ozar

Processes and Practices

You need to poop. Maybe not right now, but in general, you need to breathe, eat, drink, sleep, and poop. If you can’t do any of those things, then the rest of your needs will take a back seat until you can accomplish the basics. Psychology professor Abraham Maslow designed Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to…

Nine Reasons Developers Should Learn SQL

Last Updated June 13, 2011

Jeremiah Peschka

Let’s face it, there are a lot of cool new things you could be learning right now. It seems like there’s a new technology coming out every 12.8 seconds. Why the hell would you want to spend your free time learning a crufty old language like SQL? My reasons, let me show you them. It’s…

How to Get Budget Approval for Conferences

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar

#SQLPass

If you’ve never been to a conference before, the PASS Summit and Dev Connections events seem like things that happen to Other People. This year, I wanna help make you one of us. You’re a geek, right? Let’s break this down into numbers. Lightning Talks at the PASS Summit What It Costs to Attend a…

Resolving Conflicts in the Database

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Jeremiah Peschka

Replication

Anyone who has worked with replication has run into problems caused by conflicting data. I’ve lost enough sleep over replication to know that having an effective plan for conflict resolution is important to keeping replication running and healthy. What Causes Conflicts? There are a few ways that conflicts can show up in a database. In…

Should SQL Server Denali Run on Windows XP?

Last Updated June 11, 2011

Brent Ozar

Microsoft’s Dan Jones wants your opinion. Right now, here’s the status of the next version of SQL Server: The current support matrix for OSes is as follows: Windows Vista SP2 or later Windows Server 2008 SP2 or later Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or later Windows 7 SP1 or later The installer is going to…

Scaling SQL Server: Growing Out

Last Updated June 7, 2020

Jeremiah Peschka

SQL Server

Scaling up is hard, scaling out is even harder. We all know that we can scale reads by adding some kind of replication or read-only copies of databases or using a massive caching layer. What happens when we have to scale writes? Borrowing Brent’s grocery store metaphor, a database that is effectively scaled for reads…

Fixing SQL Server Management Studio’s Tab Text

Last Updated June 7, 2011

Brent Ozar

I hate the way SSMS tabs look by default. Check this out: SSMS Tab Defaults That’s nearly useless. The tabs are wide, but they still don’t show useful information. Even worse, I’ve got more tabs than I can fit in the window, so the rest hang out in a meaningless dropdown. To fix it, click…

How to Design Multi-Client Databases

Last Updated December 2, 2025

Brent Ozar

Architecture, ISV and SaaS Database Design

When you’re building an application for lots of clients, there are two common ways to design the database(s): Option A: Put all clients in the same database Option 2: Build one database per client (There are also hybrids, and I actually prefer one of the hybrid approaches, but I’m keeping this simple for the sake…

SQL Server Locking and You!

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Jeremiah Peschka

Locking, Blocking, and Isolation Levels, SQL Server

Did you know that SQL Server’s locking has a name? It’s called two-phase locking. If we’re really getting specific about it, SQL Server uses what’s called strong strict two-phase locking or SS2PL. We’ll get there in a few minutes, right now we’re going to take a look at what makes up two-phase locking. But First,…