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Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar
2451 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.

What If You Knew The Server Would Crash Today?

Brent Ozar
SQL Server
7 Comments
This morning you woke up with a terrible premonition – you were absolutely sure your most important production database server was going to crash today. What would you do? Step 0: stop for coffee, because it’s gonna be a long day. Here’s a quick list of places to start: Identify where the most recent backups…
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Satya Slips a SQL Server Standard Secret?

Brent Ozar
SQL Server
3 Comments
Everybody wants to know the next SQL Server release date, pricing, and feature lists, but anybody who knows those facts is bound by non-disclosure agreement and can’t say it publicly. Every now and then, though, we get lucky and someone from Microsoft slips up. That’s why I pay particular attention to Microsoft interviews as we…
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What Do You Ask the Leaving DBA?

Brent Ozar
SQL Server
9 Comments
The last DBA had an unfortunate accident in Alaska. When the database administrator turns in her notice, what questions should you ask her in her last couple of weeks? I’m assuming, of course, that it was a friendly departure and you’ve got the full two weeks to have good conversations. Or maybe the DBA is…
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Watch Brent Tune Queries

Brent Ozar
SQL Server, Videos
17 Comments
Ever wonder how someone else does it? There’s no right way or wrong way, but in this 20-minute session, you can peer over Brent’s shoulder (virtually) while he takes a few Stack Overflow queries, tries various techniques to make them faster, and shows how he measures the before-and-after results. For the links and scripts, check…
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How to Query the StackExchange Databases

Brent Ozar
SQL Server
27 Comments
Update – October 2015 – You can download a Torrent of a database (rather than a data dump) now. Most of my demos involve my favorite demo database: Stack Overflow. The Stack Exchange folks are kind enough to make all of their data available via BitTorrent for Creative Commons usage as long as you properly attribute…
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Careful Adding Indexes with Always On Availability Groups

Brent Ozar
Always On Availability Groups, SQL Server
19 Comments
In theory, you can add indexes online with SQL Server Enterprise Edition. In theory, with AlwaysOn Availability Groups, you can add and drop indexes on the primary replica whenever you want. In theory, you can perform read-only queries on the secondaries whenever you want, and nobody gets blocked. In practice, these things don’t always add…
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You Won the Tribal Awards With Us

Brent Ozar
Blogging, SQL Server
4 Comments
The Simple-Talk Tribal Award Winners are out, and we won in two categories – Blog of the Year for the Brent Ozar Team Blog, and me as the Person You’d Most Like to Have a Beer With. See, now we’re having a beer virtually. It’s almost like – no, it’s nothing like. We need real…
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How to Cache Stored Procedure Results

Brent Ozar
SQL Server, T-SQL
23 Comments
Say you run an online store, and on each item’s page, you need to show related items that people purchased. Let’s take an Amazon page for my favorite rechargeable AA batteries: Frequently Bought Together In a perfect world, we would cache this data in the web/app tier – but back here in the real world,…
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Meet Doug Lane (Video)

Brent Ozar
Company News, SQL Server
0
Our mysterious employee #2 – where did he come from? How did he get into SQL Server? What does he want to learn in his first year at work with us? The answers to those questions, and more, will reveal themselves in this webcast recording:
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Vote for yourself in the new Tribal Awards.

Brent Ozar
SQL Server
0
When you vote for us in Simple Talk’s new Tribal Awards, you’re voting for yourself. Best Free Script – sp_Blitz® – Sure, I started this all by myself a few years ago, but it’s grown into something huge. Scroll down through the change log and get a load of the dozens of contributors who have helped…
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Auto-Scaling SQL Server Always On Availability Groups with Virtualization

Brent Ozar
Always On Availability Groups, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Virtualization
8 Comments
Time for a thought exercise. Thought exercises are hard. You’ve got a database application that has bursty and unpredictable loads. Out of nowhere, you’ll suddenly get socked with a large amount of SELECT queries. Due to the way the app is written, you can’t cache the query results – the queries keep changing, and the business…
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Always On Availability Groups, Backup Checksums, and Corruption

Brent Ozar
Always On Availability Groups, SQL Server
15 Comments
The latest version of sp_Blitz® alerts you if you haven’t been using the WITH CHECKSUM parameter on your backups. This parameter tells SQL Server to check the checksums on each page and alert if there’s corruption. But what about corrupt backups? Books Online says: NO_CHECKSUM – Explicitly disables the generation of backup checksums (and the validation…
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Interview with Me on SQL Server Radio

Brent Ozar
SQL Server
1 Comment
At SQL Rally Amsterdam, I sat down with Matan Yungman for a half-hour interview for the SQL Server Radio Podcast. The podcast is usually in Hebrew, but Matan was nice enough to let me stick with English, heh. Matan and I had a great time. He came with a list of really good questions, and he…
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The Evolution of the Company Logo

Brent Ozar
Company News, Consulting
11 Comments
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a subtle change to our site, swag, and PowerPoint templates over the last few months. Here’s the evolution as seen in our company coffee mugs: Brent Ozar Unlimited® Caffeine Delivery Devices Far left, the one with the heart, is the current one, but the transition is a funny story. Our…
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