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.

Fundamentals Week 2025 is Coming This Month! Get Your Tickets Now.

Free Fundamentals Classes Are Coming Next Week! Register Now.

Last Updated September 25, 2025

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

You’re a developer, analyst, database administrator, or anybody else working with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, or Amazon RDS SQL Server. You want to learn how to make your databases go faster. Good news! Next week, I’m teaching totally free half-day versions of my classes from 9AM-1PM Eastern time, 8AM-Noon Central, 6AM-10AM Pacific: Monday: Fundamentals…

Who’s Hiring Microsoft Data People? October 2025 Edition

Last Updated September 30, 2025

Brent Ozar

Who's Hiring

Is your company hiring for a database position as of October 2025? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let’s make a love connection. I think YOU should apply. If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules: Your comment must include the job title, and either a…

Which Should You Use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?

Last Updated September 28, 2025

Brent Ozar

Development

You’re building a new table or adding a column, and you wanna know which datatype to use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR? If you need to store Unicode data, the choice is made for you: NVARCHAR says it’s gonna be me. But if you’re not sure, maybe you think, “I should use VARCHAR because it takes half…

The request limit for the database has been reached

Set MAXDOP in Azure SQL DB or You’ll Get This Cryptic Error.

Last Updated September 9, 2025

Brent Ozar

Azure SQL DB

Max Degrees of Parallelism (MAXDOP) tells the database engine, “If you decide to parallelize a query, go parallel with this many worker threads.” (It’s a little more complex than that – there is also a coordinating thread, plus a single plan might have multiple parallel zones that each consume MAXDOP worker threads, but for the…

Here Are the YouTube Channels We Both Loved.

Last Updated September 28, 2025

Brent Ozar

Company News

Last week, I announced that we’ve hit 50,000 YouTube subscribers, and I celebrated by letting y’all submit your favorite YouTube channels in the comments, and 5 of you would win my Fundamentals & Mastering Class Bundle. You did not disappoint. First, I’m giving 5 Fundamentals Bundles to these 5 folks who suggested channels that already…

We Hit 50,000 YouTube Subscribers! Let’s Run a Contest.

Last Updated September 28, 2025

Brent Ozar

Company News

176

This is kinda amazing to me: our YouTube channel has broken the 50,000 subscriber mark! That’s wild to me because I don’t put “please like and subscribe” type stuff in the videos, and I don’t try to build viral content. I just show up every week and publish answers to y’all’s questions from PollGab. And…

Microsoft Now Recommends You Set Max Memory to 75% and Min Memory to 0%.

Last Updated September 3, 2025

Brent Ozar

Configuration Settings

Somehow I missed this a few years ago, and I bet a lot of y’all did too. Note the new “Recommended” column in the memory settings documentation: These recommendations are also set by the SQL Server 2022 setup wizard if you choose the recommended settings on the memory step. The documentation change was made in…

Announcing Free Fundamentals Week 2025!

Last Updated September 16, 2025

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

You’re a developer, analyst, database administrator, or anybody else working with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, or Amazon RDS SQL Server. You want to learn how to make your databases go faster. Good news! In October 13-16, I’m teaching totally free half-day versions of my classes from 9AM-1PM Eastern time, 8AM-Noon Central, 6AM-10AM Pacific: Monday:…

[Video] Office Hours: Database Questions & Answers

Last Updated September 11, 2025

Brent Ozar

Videos

In between clients, I hopped onto my Twitch channel to take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. If you’d like to get notified whenever I do one of those live streams, you can follow my channel for free and you’ll get email notifications automatically. I do ’em whenever I have time, usually about once a week…

Your Developers Need Cheap SQL Training.

Last Updated September 16, 2025

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

Your developers haven’t ever been to formal Microsoft database training on SQL Server or Azure SQL DB. They’re struggling with trying to tune queries and indexes. Your apps keep getting slower as the data grows, and your queries keep getting more complex. They’ve exhausted their free resources like YouTube videos and blogs, and they’re just…

SQL Server 2025 Makes Memory Troubleshooting Easier.

Last Updated September 15, 2025

Brent Ozar

SQL Server 2025

SQL Server 2025 introduces a new sys.dm_os_memory_health_history view to make it easier for meatbags like you and robots like Copilot to know if the SQL Server has been under memory pressure recently. To show how it works, let’s run a bunch of simultaneous high-memory-grant queries in the Stack Overflow database: Transact-SQL SELECT TOP 101 *…

Free Webcasts Tomorrow & Wednesday

Last Updated September 5, 2025

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

I’m teaching my two most important classes live, online, completely free! These are the two fundamentals classes that I think everybody should start with, regardless of their experience with SQL Server or Azure SQL DB. I’ll teach you the most important parts about how the database engine works, plus how to use free scripts to…

[Video] Office Hours on the Beach in Cancun

Last Updated September 6, 2025

Brent Ozar

Videos

In retrospect, I should have put on sunscreen – even for just a 20-minute Office Hours session on the beach! Dang, that sun is powerful. Let’s go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. This is a 360-degree video, so if you watch it on YouTube, you’ll be able to pan the camera around and take…

No, Accelerated Database Recovery Doesn’t Fix NOLOCK.

Last Updated August 19, 2025

Brent Ozar

Development

I have never seen a T-SQL feature that people love as much as NOLOCK. I keep thinking I’ve written enough blog posts about it, but a client came up with a new one: We use SQL Server 2022’s Accelerated Database Recovery, which keeps copies of versions inside the table. Plus, we don’t use transactions –…

Home Office Studio Tour

Last Updated October 28, 2025

Brent Ozar

Home Office

Ever wonder what it takes to do this stuff behind the scenes? I’ll show you. If you’re thinking about getting started with live streaming or training videos, don’t be intimidated by this setup. There’s a lot of gear involved, but it’s because I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve accumulated a lot of gear…

[Video] Office Hours Back at Home in Vegas

Last Updated August 23, 2025

Brent Ozar

Videos

I’m back in Vegas, at least for the moment, so let’s hang out in my home office and talk through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. There’s a lot of good questions this week! Office Hours: Half-Hour Hangout in My Home OfficeWatch this video on YouTube Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 02:26 Eric M: I’ve…

Who’s Hiring in the Microsoft Database Community? September 2025 Edition

Last Updated June 23, 2025

Brent Ozar

Who's Hiring

Is your company hiring for a database position as of September 2025? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let’s make a love connection. If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules: Your comment must include the job title, and either a link to the full job…

Free Live SQL Server Classes This Month!

Last Updated September 5, 2025

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

This month, I’m teaching two of my classes live, online, completely free! These are the two fundamentals classes that I think everybody should start with, regardless of their experience with SQL Server or Azure SQL DB. I’ll teach you the most important parts about how the database engine works, plus how to use free scripts…

[Video] Office Hours in Icy Strait Point, Alaska

Last Updated August 28, 2025

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

For the last couple of months, I’ve been trying to get my on-location Office Hours episodes filmed with an Insta360 so you can pan the camera around to see the sights. Folks, I’ve finally pulled it off! If you watch the video on YouTube (rather than here on the blog), you can move the camera…

Why Aren’t People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore?

Last Updated August 27, 2025

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

Steve Jones recently posted an update about SQL Saturday’s status, and it includes some news we need to talk about: However, this year the number may stagnate or even decline slightly. Running events has become challenging for many communities. Organizers are busy, space is hard to find, and costs are rising…. The biggest challenge in…