Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

1985 posts

https://www.brentozar.com

I make Microsoft SQL Server go faster. I love teaching, travel, and laughing. I live in Iceland with my wife Erika.

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

Last Updated July 28, 2021

Brent Ozar

Videos

Erika and I are on the road in Iceland, roaming around the countryside, and I’m taking you with us. This week, we’re in Siglufjörður, a beautiful little oceanfront fishing village in the north. In the mornings, before Erika wakes up, I’m filming Office Hours videos to answer your questions that you post here. The first…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for July 2021

Last Updated July 25, 2021

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates

I’m slowing the First Responder Kit update frequency down to once every 2 months. I know from firsthand experience working with clients that folks just can’t patch quickly enough, hahaha. Folks who want to be on the bleeding edge updates can always use the dev branch in Github, too, getting every new fix the moment…

Upcoming Office Hours: Get Your Questions In Now

Last Updated July 27, 2021

Brent Ozar

Company News

From time to time, when my incredibly busy (cough)vacation(/cough) schedule permits, I do a live Office Hours stream where I take your questions and answer ’em live. I’m going to do a couple of them this week, but I’m going to do them disconnected. I’ll be recording them on the road – Erika and I…

Tweets You Missed

Last Updated July 16, 2021

Brent Ozar

Humor

You don’t follow me on Twitter because you’re not on Twitter, and I can’t say that I blame you. It’s a bunch of people yelling at each other. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure why *I’m* on there. But anyway, here are a few things I’ve said on there lately that you’ll…

Database Performance Tuning is Getting Much Harder.

Last Updated July 16, 2021

Brent Ozar

Cloud Computing

For the last twenty years, SQL Server performance tuning has relied on a few facts: SQL Server provided a lot of performance metrics with thorough documentation from both Microsoft and the community. You could fetch those metrics in a variety of ways, like Perfmon counters and dynamic management views. Many of the metrics were cumulative…

Why Are Linked Server Queries So Bad?

Last Updated July 15, 2021

Brent Ozar

Development

No, I don’t want to be your valentine. Remember when you were in school, and you had a crush on someone? You would write a note asking them to be your valentine, and you’d ask a mutual friend to pass the note over to them. The adult equivalent is linked server queries. When your query…

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Summer 2021

Last Updated July 12, 2021

Brent Ozar

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 2021 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report. Out of the 3,808 servers sending in data recently, the most popular version…

Who’s Hiring in the Database Community? July 2021 Edition

Last Updated July 16, 2021

Brent Ozar

Who's Hiring

Is your company hiring for a database position? 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 job description, or the…

Get Ready: SQL Server 2016 Mainstream Support Ends in One Week.

Last Updated July 6, 2021

Brent Ozar

SQL Server 2016

Brent Ozar, bearer of bad news Who am I kidding? You’re not really going to get ready, but let’s talk about this anyway. SQL Server 2016 mainstream support ends Tuesday, July 13, 2021. According to Microsoft’s SQL Server support policy, that means from here on out, Microsoft will only deliver security patches, not functional, performance,…

Stop Procrastinating: Master Index Tuning in 1 Month for $195.

Last Updated July 10, 2021

Brent Ozar

Indexing

You’ve conquered my Fundamentals of Index Tuning and Fundamentals of Columnstore classes, and you’re ready to take it to the next level. It’s time for you to join my Mastering Index Tuning class. When I teach it live – the next one is July 19-21 – it’s 3 days of lectures and hands-on labs where you learn: How to…

Store Files in a File System, Not a Relational Database.

Last Updated July 1, 2021

Brent Ozar

Architecture

Since the dawn of time, database vendors have called out to developers, “Store everything inside the database. You know you want to. Here, we’ll make it easy for you by adding data types like binary and features like filestream.” Ah, but this siren song leads you to your eventual doom. Users wanna store historical versions…

Lock Escalation Sucks on Columnstore Indexes.

Last Updated June 29, 2021

Brent Ozar

Columnstore Indexes

If you’ve got a regular rowstore table and you need to modify thousands of rows, you can use the fast ordered delete technique to delete rows in batches without hitting the lock escalation threshold. That’s great for rowstore indexes, but…columnstore indexes are different. To demo this technique, I’m going to use the setup from my…

Learn Fundamentals of Columnstore for $1.

Last Updated July 3, 2021

Brent Ozar

Columnstore Indexes

Last week, I gave you a 1-week, $1 deadline, and 777 of you took me up on it. That’s awesome! I love having fun with stuff like this. Let’s do it again! You’ve got 1 week to learn the Fundamentals of Columnstore for $1, and sales close Saturday. Here’s the abstract: Your report queries are…

Free Video: 500-Level Guide to Career Internals: Building a Brand

Last Updated June 24, 2021

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Videos

Last week, I shared my 300-Level Guide to Career Internals post & video. We talked about how the world is changing so quickly, and how it’s a great time to adapt your career to accomplish the things in life that are important to you. One of the possible outcomes that we discussed was working for…

Adding Managed Instances to SQL Server Distributed Availability Groups

Last Updated June 20, 2021

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups, Managed Instances

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups help you build a more highly available database server by spanning your database across two or more SQL Server instances. When the primary goes down, the secondary can take over. You can also scale out reads to the secondary servers. Distributed Availability Groups take this a step further and…

Learn Fundamentals of Index Tuning for $1.

Last Updated June 26, 2021

Brent Ozar

Indexing

You’re lazy and overconfident. You’ve been reading this blog for a while, and you’ve been telling yourself, “Yeah, I’m pretty good at this database thing. I’ve got years of experience under my belt. I know the fundamentals.” You’ve told yourself, “Yeah, someday I’ll get to Brent’s How to Think Like the Engine class,” but…you’ve never…

Free Video: 300-Level Guide to Career Internals: Planning Your Career

Last Updated June 17, 2021

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Videos

Erika applies a mask to me at the Blue Lagoon Hi. I’m writing this from a cottage in Iceland, in the midst of a 9-month digital nomad stint. I’m teaching classes and doing client work for 1-2 weeks, then Erika and I take off and hit the road for 2-3 weeks at a time, driving…

What does SET NOCOUNT ON do?

Last Updated June 4, 2021

Brent Ozar

T-SQL

When you’re working with T-SQL, you’ll often see SET NOCOUNT ON at the beginning of stored procedures and triggers. What SET NCOUNT ON does is prevent the “1 row affected” messages from being returned for every operation. I’ll demo it by writing a stored procedure in the Stack Overflow database to cast a vote: CREATE…

Download the Current Stack Overflow Database for Free (2021-06)

Last Updated June 17, 2021

Brent Ozar

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow, the place where most of your production code comes from, publicly exports their data every couple/few months. @TarynPivots (their DBA) tweets about it, and then I pull some levers and import the XML data dump into SQL Server format. Stack Overflow’s database makes for great blog post examples because it’s real-world data: real data…

“I’m getting index seeks. Why are my row estimates still wrong?”

Last Updated June 6, 2021

Brent Ozar

Execution Plans

If you’ve got good indexes to support your query, and statistics to help SQL Server guess how many rows will come back, how can SQL Server still come up with terribly incorrect row estimates? To demonstrate, I’ll use the 2018-06 version of the Stack Overflow database, but any recent version will work as long as…