Posts by Brent Ozar

I’m spending a few days in St. Petersburg, Russia to visit Quest’s office.  Sure, I have the regular touristy photos, like myself in front of old buildings: But what I really like about overseas travel is that everything looks and feels different, and it forces me to look at the design and user interface for…

In today’s hiring market, DBAs get a lot of emails from recruiters that say things like: “I am curious to know if you would be interested in (or know someone who is interested in) relocating to Big Falls East for the position discussed below….” The job description never includes the salary range, and it rarely…

Sean McCown at Infoworld wrote a blog post today that said some negative things about Quest and LiteSpeed, and I had to respond. He’s switched away from using LiteSpeed, and he had an interesting set of reasons. “I just don’t need the centralized repository in my lab, and I do enough demos that having native…

Mark Garner came across a great list of free SQL Server tools & utilities.  I took one look at that page, bookmarked it, and realized it’s going to take me a week to go through that list!  Good stuff.

At this week’s Customer Advisory Board at Quest, I’ve had a great time sharing war stories with other database administrators.  One theme keeps popping up again and again: developers don’t trust DBAs and seem to refuse to take the DBA’s word for anything.  It seems that developers just want to keep learning things the hard…

I’m staying at an oceanside hotel in Laguna Beach, California for a meeting with some of our customers.  When I say oceanside, I mean oceanside: there’s a huge wave break about a hundred feet from my balcony, just two stories down.  The waves are deafening. It’s a really romantic setting, but I was still surprised…

It’s the morning after the Caroline Collective grand opening party. The place was absolutely packed with interesting people, and that’s my definition of a success. For images of the evening, check out the Caroline Collective Flickr pool. Seemed like everybody I talked to wanted to get in on the coworking action, and they had the…

I know, I just told you guys that I got all settled in at Quest and I’m loving it and everything, but I just had the most unbelievable offer come in. It just came out of nowhere straight into my email, and what can I say – I just can’t pass it up. It’s perfect…

One of my articles just got posted up at SearchSQLServer. I cover some of the pros and cons of backing up data warehouses with SAN snapshots. I wrote that just after we got done with a NetApp deployment at Southern Wine. The funny part is that we deployed the QA environment pretty quickly, but months…

I moved my gear into my desk at Caroline Collective today – well, actually, it was more of a buy-and-move. Most of this stuff is a new copy of the gear I use at home. The grand opening will be Saturday, June 7th from 7pm til 10pm. The invite reads as follows: “We are (collectively)…

Junior DBAs, warm up your printers. The Microsoft SQL Customer Advisory Team, aka SQLCAT, has published a flowchart explaining how to troubleshoot performance issues with SQL Server. This is by far the best visual representation I’ve seen into how a senior DBA’s brain works: SQL Customer Advisory Team’s Troubleshooting SQL Server 2005/2008 Performance and Scalability…

Yesterday afternoon, I stopped by the Caroline Collective and signed a lease on my very own desk.  Sounds odd to lease a desk, eh?  Especially sight unseen – there’s no actual desks in the space, just a big empty room with concrete floors, white & blue walls, and fluorescent lights dangling from a low ceiling.…

I’m testing the new builds of LiteSpeed and Toad.  I’m not to the point where I’m using my L337 SQL skillz yet because I take a very basic ground-level approach to testing. I go through an entire program and click on every menu item. Everywhere that it lets me add something, I add it, and…

When DBAs ask where to go for simple, straightforward SQL Server tips, I usually point them to SQL-Server-Performance.com.  That site puts out a fantastic daily newsletter with SQL notes, questions & answers, and general tips. I’m not wild about daily email newsletters, but this one’s a gem.  It’s gotten even better since Peter Wardy started…