Month: January 2014

The last DBA had an unfortunate accident in Alaska. When the database administrator turns in her notice, what questions should you ask her in her last couple of weeks? I’m assuming, of course, that it was a friendly departure and you’ve got the full two weeks to have good conversations. Or maybe the DBA is…

Everyone wants reports but nobody wants to build out a separate reporting server. What options do you have short of throwing up your hands in defeat? Join Jeremiah to learn about four SQL Server technologies that help with reporting in production. This session is for DBAs and developers looking for a place to get started…

Check out SQLServerBuilds.blogspot.com, a site that lists cumulative updates and service packs. Here’s a remixed version: SQL Server Service Pack Release Dates The first service pack seems to come out fairly quickly, but after the first one, it’s a year or more. Makes sense – you find a lot of bugs quickly, right? Microsoft released…

When is a “Full Scan” not a Full Scan? The performance counter “Full scans/sec” sounds pretty scary. If you see spikes in this counter, you’re likely to think that your queries are madly scanning all the data in your tables– there are no stylish, well performant seeks, just drunken queries spewing IO everywhere. If you…

Update – October 2015 – You can download a Torrent of a database (rather than a data dump) now. Most of my demos involve my favorite demo database: Stack Overflow. The Stack Exchange folks are kind enough to make all of their data available via BitTorrent for Creative Commons usage as long as you properly attribute…

Here’s a SQL Server Management Studio trick that comes in super handy when you’ve got long pieces of code. I almost never see anyone use this, and I think the reason is that few people know about it. When I’m working on a stored procedure, sometimes I want to add in a new variable or…

While working on some DMV scripts, I came up with a lazy way to have a user definable sort order in the query that seemed like pure genius. I showed it to the team and they’d never seen anything like it before. The Situation Users like to be in control. They want to define custom…

The year: 2005. What was happening with the Brent Ozar Unlimited® crew? I was working on the help desk for a small company while attending Fox Valley Tech College to earn my associate degree. I think I still wanted to go into programming at that point in time! I’d never been to a user group…

SQL Server has amazing instrumentation. Dynamic management views and functions give you great insight into what’s happening in your SQL Server and what’s slowing it down. Interpreting these views and functions takes a lot of time, but with practice and skill you can use them to become great at performance tuning. But nothing’s perfect. Some…