Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

2787 posts

https://www.brentozar.com

I make Microsoft SQL Server go faster. I love teaching, travel, cars, and laughing. I'm based out of Las Vegas. He/him.

Important SQL Server Data Services warning

Last Updated November 1, 2009

Brent Ozar

An important email just came out from the Microsoft SSDS team about this week’s upgrade. The second bullet point in the impact alert is especially important, and everybody needs to take note. Here’s a screenshot: Got that? Good. To be a good DBA, it’s important to be able to read Wingdings.

Tracking the Chicago-Mac race with GPS

Last Updated September 5, 2009

Brent Ozar

A friend of mine is competing in the 100th annual Chicago-Mac race, a sailboat race up Lake Michigan from Chicago to Mackinac Island. This year they gave out GPS tracking devices so you could follow your favorite boat’s progress during the race. Now I’m not saying anybody cheated, but the route of the Hannah Frances…

The Wine Trials: a wine book for donut lovers

Last Updated August 24, 2009

Brent Ozar

Last night, the author & editor of The Wine Trials held a release party at the Caroline Collective, the Houston coworking office where I lay my weary laptop. Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch talked vino, signed books and raised glasses. I liked them, and I liked the book, and I’ll tell ya why. I’m just…

Storage virtualization for SQL Server: friend or foe?

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Storage

Storage virtualization is a really slick SAN technology that does for SANs what VMware did for servers: it abstracts away the underlying hardware to make management easier. Multiple SANs can be swapped around back and forth behind the scenes without affecting any servers that store data on those SANs. It’s nowhere near common yet –…

Yes, SQL injection attacks do exist

Last Updated July 17, 2008

Brent Ozar

And here’s a Craigslist ad to prove it:

Coding Horror post about normalization

Last Updated July 15, 2008

Brent Ozar

I’m a DBA, not a programmer, but I subscribe to Jeff Atwood’s excellent Coding Horror blog because it’s well-written, funny and teaches good lessons. In his latest post, he talks about database normalization – when to do it and when to avoid it. Pay particular attention to the links to HighScalability.com – they have great…

Software Development Meme

Last Updated July 7, 2008

Brent Ozar

Jason Massie tagged me, so it’s my turn to answer the questionnaire…. How old were you when you first started programming? Dad and Mom upgraded us from an Atari 2600 to a Commodore 64 when those came out, so I must have been around 9-10. I don’t remember much from those early attempts at programming,…

AMD triple-core servers and SQL Server 2005

Last Updated July 2, 2008

Brent Ozar

If you’re using AMD Phenom 3-core processors, SQL Server 2005 won’t install without going through some hoops first. Microsoft just published a knowledge base article on SQL 2005 errors on 3 and 6 core servers. I don’t usually blog about knowledge base articles, but I got such a laugh out of that one that I…

Transparent Data Encryption in SQL Server 2008

Last Updated March 10, 2021

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

I played around with TDE a couple of weeks ago, and I was surprised by how difficult it is to implement. I’d expected to be able to check a box, put in a password, and click OK, but it’s nowhere near that easy. Restoring encrypted databases from one server to another can also give DBAs…

Russia as seen from my hotel bathroom

Last Updated June 25, 2008

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…

Quickly replying to recruiter emails

Last Updated September 1, 2009

Brent Ozar

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…

Quest LiteSpeed isn’t right for everybody

Last Updated October 23, 2009

Brent Ozar

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…

Free SQL Server tools and utilities

Last Updated October 5, 2008

Brent Ozar

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.

Developers: sometimes you just gotta trust the DBA

Last Updated June 18, 2008

Brent Ozar

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 have big hands

Last Updated June 17, 2008

Brent Ozar

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…

SQL Server Partitioning: Not the Best Practices for Everything

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Partitioning, SQL Server

When SQL 2005 was in beta, I clapped my hands and jumped for joy the first time I played with partitioning. I’ve done a lot of data warehouse work, and partitioning lets the DBA break down massive tables into smaller, easy-to-manage chunks. We can put heavily accessed parts of the table onto fast storage, and…

Caroline Collective: The Morning After

Last Updated January 29, 2009

Brent Ozar

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…

Time for a career change

Last Updated June 6, 2008

Brent Ozar

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…

SQL Server backups using SAN snapshots

Last Updated April 19, 2009

Brent Ozar

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…

Caroline Collective grand opening coming June 7th

Last Updated May 26, 2008

Brent Ozar

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)…