Posts by Brent Ozar

The morning after the Data TLV Summit in Tel Aviv, I stood out on the balcony and answered a few of your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento, rapid-fire style: Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Intros 00:47 cyrpl: Hi Brent from PEI, Canada. A support person told me today that when creating a table, an ID column…

[Video] Office Hours in Tel Aviv, Israel

Last Updated September 19, 2022

Before speaking at the Data TLV Summit, I sat by the Mediterranean Sea and discussed the top-voted questions you posted at https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:55 Manikandan GS: As postgres being one among the RDBMS lane, do you think postgres is having more features and flexibility compared to MS-SQL Server? 02:46 PaginationWoo!:…

New Online Class: Running SQL Server in AWS and Azure

Last Updated September 21, 2022

Cloud Computing

You’re used to managing your own SQL Servers in VMs, but now they’re asking you to work with the cloud. You’re already comfortable installing, backing up, and performance tuning “regular” SQL Servers, and you just need to catch up with what’s different about the cloud. You don’t want hype – you just want honest opinions…

Office Hours: Gif Reactions Edition

Last Updated September 17, 2022

Some of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are open-and-shut cases. I was going to do a one-word-answers edition, but I think this is even better: gifs. GI Joe DBA: Thoughts about IT professionals Unionizing? IT professionals are in demand. Because of our demand, should we use this leverage to unionize, raise the bar, force…

Most DBAs Say They’re Encrypting Personally Identifiable Data. Most.

Last Updated September 11, 2022

Despite the continuous stream of data breaches, ransomware, and GDPR violations, some companies still aren’t encrypting personally identifiable information (PII) inside our databases or backups. I see this all the time when working with clients, but I can’t exactly talk about that or give numbers, so I decided to take a highly unscientific poll on…

[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About SQL Server and Azure

Last Updated September 11, 2022

Got questions about the Microsoft data platform? Post ’em at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me cover. Today’s episode finds me in my home office in Vegas: 00:00 Intros 02:10 GeorgeDAX: Hello Brent, I’m a dealing with a huge sales table which contains around 500 columns with 50m rows. Business asks…

Community Tools Month: Using sp_WhoIsActive to Catch ASYNC_NETWORK_IO

Last Updated September 11, 2022

Monitoring

When your SQL Server’s top wait stat is ASYNC_NETWORK_IO, that indicates SQL Server is waiting on the app to ask for the next part of the result set. This is a real pain in the rear to troubleshoot because often these waits happen for really short duration each time – think milliseconds, not seconds. It’s…

[Video] Office Hours: Hotel Balcony Edition, Part 2

Last Updated September 5, 2022

Post your questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me cover. In today’s episode, I sit down on a quiet hotel balcony and talk through a bunch of interesting questions: Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Introductions 00:59 Haydar: What tools do you like to use when troubleshooting azure sql db query…

[Video] Office Hours: Hotel Balcony Edition, Part 1

Last Updated September 5, 2022

Post your questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me cover. In today’s episode, I sit down on a quiet hotel balcony and talk through a bunch of interesting questions: Here’s what we covered today: 00:00 Introductions 00:25 Kebros: Hi Brent.My manager wants me to summarize sql health into a number…

Community Tools Month: Choose Your Character

Last Updated September 5, 2022

Professional Development, Tools

This month on the blog is Community Tools Month, and I’m going to be talking about some of the most useful and influential tools out there. You can’t learn them all – *I* can’t learn them all – because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do your work, keep your skills sharp,…

Office Hours, Short Text Answers Edition

Last Updated September 5, 2022

Not all of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento require long, thought-out answers. Some are just one-line specials, like these: F’legend: Hi Brent, in reply to a question talking about database restores for 1TB+ you also touched on scrubbing or synthetic data as a way to populate dev environments. Are there any resources/tools you would…

Who’s Hiring in the Database Community? September 2022 Edition

Last Updated August 30, 2022

Who's Hiring

Is your company hiring for a database position as of September 2022? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let’s set up some rapid networking here. If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules: Your comment must include the job title, and either a link to the full…

[Video] Fragmentation Explained in 20 Minutes at SQLBits

Last Updated August 30, 2022

Index Maintenance, Videos

What does fragmentation mean? How does it happen? Can you fix it with fill factor? Should you rebuild your indexes to fix it? At the SQLBits conference, I tried a new way of explaining it using markers and pieces of whiteboard paper as database pages, and doing inserts live on the fly. What you see…

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Summer 2022

Last Updated August 29, 2022

SQL Server Population Report

Ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out in the summer 2022 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report. Out of the 3,151 servers sending in data recently, the most popular version…

Drawing Entity Relationship Diagrams with Stable Diffusion

Last Updated August 29, 2022

Humor

Documenting your database and code is such a pain in the rear. Wouldn’t it be awesome if artificial intelligence could help? Good news! There are a bunch of AI systems like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E that will draw things based on your text prompts. Forget the slow, tedious task of sketching out the relationships between your…

PSPO: How SQL Server 2022 Tries to Fix Parameter Sniffing

Last Updated August 24, 2022

Parameter Sniffing, SQL Server 2022

Parameter sniffing is a notorious problem for Microsoft SQL Server because it tries to reuse execution plans, which doesn’t work out well for widely varying parameters. Here’s a primer for the basics about how it happens. SQL Server 2022 introduces a new feature called Parameter Sensitive Plan optimization. I’m not really sure why Microsoft capitalized…

What’s New in SQL Server 2022 Release Candidate 0: Undocumented Stuff

Last Updated August 25, 2022

SQL Server 2022

Microsoft has an official list of what’s new in 2022 overall, but here I’m specifically focusing on system objects that might be interesting to script developers like you and I, dear reader. New stored procedure sp_get_table_card_est_and_avg_col_len – I assume the “card” refers to statistics and cardinality, not Hallmark. SQL Server has historically struggled with memory…

How to Install SQL Server 2022 Release Candidate 0

Last Updated August 24, 2022

SQL Server 2022

SQL Server 2014’s end of support date is coming in less than two years: July 9, 2024. I know that sounds far-off right now, but consider the work you have to do between now and then: Pick a new version to migrate to Set up development SQL Servers for that new version Start developing &…

[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About SQL Server

Last Updated August 12, 2022

Post your Microsoft data platform questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me answer. I sat down by the pool in Cabo with a cup of coffee to go through ’em: Here’s what we covered in this episode: 00:00 Introductions 00:43 MergeItLikeItsHot: Hi Brent, do you have any good resources to…

Your Turn: I’m Not Answering These 13 Office Hours Questions

Last Updated August 18, 2022