Posts by Brent Ozar

On my trip to DC this week, I ran across a couple of Nintendo Wiis in stock at Target.  For those of you who don’t follow video games, the Nintendo Wii is a notoriously hard-to-find game system.  It’s been out for months, but you still can’t walk into a store and just buy one.  Prospective…

My blog has been quiet the last few days because I’ve been in Washington DC visiting my Mom and my sister Emily.  I wanted to sneak in a quick visit between jobs.  I took the opportunity to redo both of their wireless networks and achieved a 0% success rate – I had to get two…

I have a new job, and lemme just tell you, it feels like my whole career has prepared me for this one. I spent several years at UniFocus, a hospitality software company that relied on SQL Server. I honed my SQL skills, but probably more importantly, I managed a small team of programmers. I worked…

The new Caroline Collective space is bringing coworking to Houston, and if my job hunt works out the way I hope this week, I’ll be one of the anchor tenants. People who telecommute can feel isolated without the fun personal interaction with creative, dynamic people.  Coworking aims to solve that by offering desks and offices…

Joe Webb gave a presentation on “Tips & tricks for writing better queries” for the Nashville PASS chapter, and it’s a great read.  Developers and DBAs should all read this for a clear, concise refresher. A video of the presentation would be even better, but for the most part, the slide deck speaks for itself. …

When you’re building a consolidation plan, stop to think about when each database will be migrated to a newer version of SQL Server. With SQL Server 2008 coming fast, some content owners will want to move their databases to 2008 as soon as it comes out in order to take advantage of things like the…

Database administrators touch a lot of servers in their day-to-day duties.  We do a lot of troubleshooting, security testing, and run a lot of utilities for everything from performance monitoring to development servers. In a perfect world, the database admin changes their domain password frequently.  When the password changes, the DBA knows pretty quickly if…

SQL Server Magazine just posted an interview with Billy Bosworth about the Quest Association for SQL Server Experts.  One of the quotes that stood out for me was: “We want real people who do real jobs . . . that can interact with us very early in the process of building a product. That helps…

When we moved from Miami to Houston for Erika’s new job as an air traffic controller, my employer wasn’t too sure whether or not telecommuting would work out. Southern Wine currently doesn’t have a pro-telecommuting policy by any means: one company exec stood up at a company meeting and said they would “never” allow it,…

In today’s SQL newsletter from SQL-Server-Performance.com I was horrified to find the following tip: When you specify a server in an ADO.NET connection string, use the server’s IP address, not the server’s DNS name. By using an IP address instead of a DNS name, name resolution does not have to occur, reducing the amount of…

IBM Director is a decent tool to manage firmware & driver versions, but it doesn’t have a nice report to show the firmware & driver versions for things like the RSA, raid card, network cards, etc.  I wrote the below T-SQL query to list out the most commonly needed versions & IP addresses after I…

When developers and SQL Server database administrators work together to make an app faster, it shouldn’t just be the DBA working alone in the dark.  If the DBA takes the slow code, goes into his cube, tweaks it (and indexes) and comes back out with a faster system, that fixes the problem once – but…

Kevin Kline put together a great paper on the new features in SQL Server 2008 called “Worth the Wait: Why SQL Server 2008 is Great” and it’s a good read.  It’s the best DBA-focused paper I’ve seen on the topic.  People have asked me what’s coming, and this is probably the best handout to use…