Posts by Brent Ozar

SQL ConstantCare, Wait Stats

When we started building SQL ConstantCare®, one of my early decisions was to focus on a text-based interface. I wanted to just simply tell you what I’d do in your shoes. If users wanted to see more evidence behind the recommendations, I’d show it – but otherwise, I’d hold off and let them ask. The experience has…

Does an Index on Just The Clustering Key Ever Make Sense?

April 20, 2018

Indexing

Say you’ve got a table – in this case, I’m using the Stack Overflow Posts table, which holds all of the questions and answers: StackOverflow.dbo.Posts See the clustered index at the bottom? It’s on the Id field, which is an identity – starts at one and goes up to a bajillion. So it would be…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: The Database

April 16, 2018

I bet, dear reader, that this is the post you’ve been really curious about in my behind-the-scenes posts. Back in the post about the data we collect, you may remember that our initial goal was to analyze high-priority issues like missing backups or corruption check, priority boost on, offline NUMA nodes, etc. To do that,…

Training Week: Data Science Fundamentals with a Real Project

April 13, 2018

When Steph Locke first ran her Data Science Fundamentals with R class, I was amazed at the work she put into the hands-on labs for the students. They had real challenges to help them learn how to model different kinds of data and learn answers from it. I immediately said to her, “Hey, I wanna give…

Training Week: Announcing Ben Miller’s PowerShell for DBAs: Level 2

April 12, 2018

Drew Furgiuele‘s PowerShell for DBAs class has been getting rave reviews, including: “Fantastic class! This is the best online training I’ve ever taken. Very slick setup using the webinar for learning, an AWS VM for labs, and slack for interacting with the class. This course teaches more than just PowerShell for SQL Server – the…

Training Week: Announcing Edwin’s New Class on Failover Clustered Instances

April 11, 2018

Clustering, Company News

This week, we’ve got a bunch of announcements about new training classes. Next up, Edwin Sarmiento: his 3-day Always On Availability Group class has been getting great reviews: “This class is fantastic. There is no filler, and no needless repetition, so be prepared to pay attention the entire duration. Edwin clearly is very passionate about…

Training Week: PASS Summit 2018 Pre-Con: Performance Tuning in 21 Demos

April 11, 2018

#SQLPass, Company News

Performance Tuning in 21 Demos You’re a developer or DBA who wants to tune indexes and queries to make your application go faster. You don’t like learning by watching slides or reading white papers – you want to jump right into the code and see what happens. You’re the kind of person who loves watching…

Kalen Delaney SQL Server Internals Training

Training Week: Announcing a New Instructor: Kalen Delaney!

April 10, 2018

Kalen Delaney has been a Microsoft MVP for SQL Server since 1993. She is the author of several highly regarded books, including Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Internals, SQL Server Concurrency, SQL Server MVP Deep Dives, and SQL Server Internals of In-Memory OLTP. Somewhere around a decade ago, she sold a training video CD that was the first SQL Server…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: 10% of you have Priority Boost on.

April 5, 2018

One of my favorite things about my job is being able to take the pulse of how real companies are managing their databases. I don’t wanna be locked in an ivory tower, preaching down to you, dear reader, about how you should be doing five million things a day – when in reality, you’re struggling…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: The Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

April 3, 2018

When you wanna build something, how early do you let the public in? Where do you draw the lines with the features you absolutely have to have – versus the stuff you just want? Code is never really done. The lines are so blurry these days with labels like Alpha, Beta, Private Preview, Public Preview,…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: What Data We Collect (and What We Avoid)

April 2, 2018

Next up in my series of behind-the-scenes posts about our new SQL ConstantCare®, let’s talk about the kinds of SQL Server diagnostic data we’re gathering, why, and what data we’re steering clear of for now. (Psst – read through to the end for a huge, crazy discount today, too.) We – you and I – are…

[Video] Office Hours 2018/04/01 with guest host Nigel Foulkes-Nock

April 1, 2018

Humor

Today’s Office Hours is brought to you by NigelDBA.com: Nicely done, @nigelDBA. Nicely done.

“But I don’t need to back up that database.”

March 30, 2018

Backup and Recovery

You’ve got this database that you swear doesn’t need to be backed up, like: Read-only databases Schema-only databases with no data in ’em Archive databases that haven’t changed in years Maybe even system databases like master/model/msdb And you think you’re going to save some time in your maintenance windows by skipping backups and corruption checks…

Office Hours Guest Instructor Month

March 28, 2018

Andy Leonard In our weekly Office Hours, we hang out and answer questions from you, dear reader. In April, we’re trying something new: guest hosts. If you’ve got a topical question or something you want to ask a specific person, now’s your chance: April 4th – let’s talk about performance tuning with @PinalDave April 11th…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Product, Packaging, and Pricing

March 26, 2018

Our new SQL ConstantCare® is our first paid online service – it tells you what you should do next on your SQL Servers. I’ve written about the vision and the architecture design, and this week I’m continuing to share the behind-the-scenes planning. When you buy it, how exactly should we charge you? There’s a few options: Priced…

Why Multiple Plans for One Query Are Bad

March 21, 2018

Development, Execution Plans

I’m going to demo this using the Stack Overflow public database. We’ll use the Users table – which has exactly what you think it has, everyone who’s asked/answered/commented at StackOverflow.com. I need to search for people by their DisplayName, so I’ve created an index on that: Transact-SQL CREATE INDEX IX_DisplayName ON dbo.Users(DisplayName); 1 CREATE INDEX…

Azure SQL Managed Instances and Database Corruption

March 19, 2018

Backup and Recovery, Managed Instances

Disclaimer: I love Azure SQL Managed Instances (MIs) so far. They’re really cool, and I’m having a fun time playing with them. I’m about to describe a bug, and I’m sure this bug will be fixed soon, so it shouldn’t stop you from previewing Managed Instances. This post is not “MIs are t3h suxxors” –…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: The Serverless Architecture

March 19, 2018

Architecture, SQL ConstantCare

Our new SQL Constant Care® is an online service that analyzes your SQL Server’s diagnostic data, then gives you personalized advice on what you should do to make your database app faster and more reliable. I blogged about the vision last week, and today let’s talk about the things that drove our architecture decisions way back in…

Azure SQL Managed Instances Brain Dump on CPU, Memory, HA/DR, and Backups

March 16, 2018

Managed Instances

Normally when we write blog posts, we try to explain something or tell a story. If you’re looking for a solid educational post, stop here, mark this one as read, and go on about your day. This post is just a brain dump of unorganized notes from our experimenting with Azure SQL DB Managed Instances…

How to Restore a SQL Server Database into Azure SQL DB Managed Instances

March 16, 2018

Backup and Recovery, Managed Instances, Microsoft Azure