Posts by Brent Ozar

How to Pick a Monitoring Tool

Monitoring
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Step 1: Make a list of 5 problems you’ve faced in the last couple of months that you needed alerting on. If you’ve got a help desk ticket system, look at the ticket types that occur most frequently and cause the most outage times. For me as a DBA, that might be: SQL Server service…
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A Manager’s Guide to Tuning Code

SQL Server
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In your business application, you have a slow screen or function. Your team is pointing fingers between the application code, the database, and the hardware. To make it go faster, here are your main options: Tuning Options – Mark All That Apply Check all of the options you’re willing to consider, and X out all…
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What Amazon RDS for SQL Server Users Need to Know about Multi-AZ Mirroring

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports multi-availability-zone SQL Servers. This means you can have a primary database in one data center, and a secondary replica in another data center. Those Portland folks were always a little bit backwards anyway. When your primary server goes down, OR when the entire AZ goes down, you can fail…
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Tiering kCura Relativity Databases (Or Any SaaS Product)

When you’re the database administrator working with a software product that stores every client’s data in a different database, the sheer number of databases can be intimidating. As you grow from dozens to hundreds to thousands of databases, you can’t treat all of them equally. Start by making a graph of the database sizes –…
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Microsoft Cloud Rebranded as Microsoft Pale Blue

SQL Server
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It’s time to learn another new set of acronyms. Effective today, Microsoft’s as-a-service brand is changing names again. As recently as last week, the product’s name had been changed from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure, but industry observers noted that Microsoft’s web pages actually referred to a different name – Microsoft Cloud. “Our research found that the…
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How to Add Nonclustered Indexes to Clustered Columnstore Indexes

SQL Server 2012 introduced nonclustered columnstore indexes, but I never saw them used in the wild simply because once created, they made the underlying table read-only. Not a lot of folks like read-only tables. (Bad news, by the way – that limitation hasn’t disappeared in 2014.) SQL Server 2014 brings clustered columnstore indexes, and they’re…
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After You’ve Been a DBA, What Do You Do?

You’ve been managing database servers for a few years. Now what? Get more technical – every time a new project comes in, sharpen your skills. Get more involved in failover clustering, storage, virtualization, or the cloud. Write technical presentations to teach your own company’s staff, and then the public. Business intelligence – if you’re constantly…
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When Do You Fire the DBA?

SQL Server
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I know a lot of DBAs, but it’s really, really rare that I’ve seen one get fired. I don’t think it’s ever happened during one of my consulting engagements, and I’ve seen some incredibly horrific database disasters (not to mention a whole lotta ugly near-misses). So I asked Twitter: Thinking about a blog post. When…
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The Worst Database User

SQL Server
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“Can you tell me a little about this code?” I asked, keeping my best poker face on. “I’m really proud of it. It gathers a whole bunch of stuff from accounting, human resources, manufacturing, you name it. I want to be able to track how we’re doing over time.” He nearly hovered in his chair…
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San Diego Class Recap

SQL Server
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We had a lot of fun this month teaching SQL Server classes at the San Diego Harbor Hilton. (We wrote about how we picked the cities earlier.) Even when we teach, we learn, and then we share what we learned, so here we are. San Diego Harbor Hilton We like to try new things with our…
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