Posts by Brent Ozar

I dropped out of college over a decade ago without having a personal direction in life. Every now and then, other people ask why I don’t go back to college. Last night and this morning, I had the opportunity to do college homework – albeit somebody else’s. More out of curiosity than anything else, I…

There’s a new blog about Dimensional Data Warehouse Architecture & Design written by Nick Galemmo, and his recent entries caught the eye of one of my coworkers. Galemmo asked “What on Earth is a Data Mart?” and comes to the answer: “The Great Truth in Dimensional Data Warehousing boils down to this: To achieve success…

Chris Messina noted Google’s purchase of Measure Maps and blogged about it: Kind of makes you wonder: is there room for the independent in The Acquisition Economy 2.0? …Especially when you can buy just an employee and leave his company behind? I saw that and just had to respond, especially with my employer in the…

Database admins should run regular traces (aka profiles) on all of their database servers. Audit all login/logout events just to be aware of who’s logging into each server, from which machines, and how often. Today, I caught one of the production application servers logging into a development database server – a bad combination. I checked…

Remember The Milk Remember The Milk is the killer to-do list app, period. It’s a free web site to help you manage your to-do list. There’s tons of similar task management web apps out there, and here’s why this one is different: I can set up multiple lists like work, personal, vacation planning, grocery list,…

With Microsoft touting Intellisense in just about all of their products, including Visual Studio, one would assume it’d show up in their flagship database product, SQL Server 2005. Unfortunately, the SQL Management Studio still doesn’t offer any prompting as you type in code, even though it’s based roughly on Visual Studio 2005. Enter PromptSQL, an…

My jaw hit the floor on this tech note from Microsoft: with SQL Server 2005 and a SAN, you can have multiple SQL servers hitting the same read-only reporting database. This is really only a solution for reporting loads that require more work from the CPUs than they do from the drive arrays. If the…

Hi. I’m Brent. I’m the owner of the black Jeep. I went out this morning to go to work, and I got nervous when I put the key in the passenger side door and it turned way too easily, meaning it was already unlocked. Then I noticed the pennies you scattered all over the passenger…

Me talking to my developers: “Well, guys, I’ve got good news and bad news. Bad news first: looks like somebody forgot about today’s scheduled outage, and they were trying to load data when the network admins shut down the database server. The ETL database is now trying to recover the messy transactions, and the server…

My former manager asked why I use UltraEdit for all of my SQL Server coding, and after pouring out the answer, I figured I should post it here as well for posterity. There’s so many advantages you just take for granted after a while. I had to open it and do some editing to remember…

Ebay just announced they’re buying Skype for $2.6 billion dollars. Here’s the press release. For those of you who don’t know what Skype is…exactly. That’s the point. Skype is a free (FREE) online phone service so you can instant message with people, except you’re actually talking to each other instead of typing. It’s like free…

The first thing administrators want to monitor is their resources: file servers, database servers, app servers, etc. That’s understandable, since they’re system administrators. In order to be really successful with monitoring, though, we need to think like customer administrators – for both our internal and external customers. Forget the hardware, and think about the people.…

Erika made me do it.

I can say with absolute certainty that our ittle Ernie is the most adorable little dog on the planet. Period. Several times a week, Erika and I try various tricks to get her ears to pop up. Ernie quickly gets accustomed to these efforts like a virus resisting penicillin, and adapts her state of relaxation…

Brent Cantori here for the Panic Channel. The 11am advisory has come out, and the Panic Center is forecasting a large “H” in our immediate vicinity. Don’t be fooled by the bright sunshine outside, the cloudless sky, or the fact that when I walk Ernie in a few minutes, I’ll be wearing flipflops, shorts, a…

I’ve been waiting to blog about this for a little while, but had to hold off while we got a few things handled. Now it’s official – we’re moving to Miami! Erika’s going to quit work and go to school full time for the next couple of years. Why Miami? The school had specific advantages,…

I gotta confess that I don’t really give a rip whether my site is popular or not. I rarely look at my web site statistics. Every now and then I pull it up just out of curiosity to see what people find interesting about my site. The statistics packages I use gives me a vague…

I was leaning back yawning when my browser opened, and I saw my own image on my webcam. Hello. Had to grab a copy of that. Yes, it’s 3:36pm, and I’m dead tired. Not a good week. Having a rough time at work. I’ve always made a policy of not discussing work stuff here on…