Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

1710 posts

https://www.brentozar.com

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

[Video] What’s New in SQL Server 2019

October 14, 2019

Brent Ozar

SQL Server 2019, Videos

We must be getting pretty close to the official release of Microsoft SQL Server 2019. There are less than 80 days left in the year. (Interestingly, it’s been almost 60 days since Release Candidate 1 shipped – that’s unusually long for a delay between builds. Hmm.) With the clock ticking down, now’s a good time…

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine: Adding an ORDER BY

October 10, 2019

Brent Ozar

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine

We started out the How to Think Like the Engine series with a simple query with a WHERE clause: Now let’s add an ORDER BY: Transact-SQL SELECT Id FROM dbo.Users WHERE LastAccessDate > '2014/07/01' ORDER BY LastAccessDate; 1234 SELECT Id FROM dbo.Users WHERE LastAccessDate > '2014/07/01' ORDER BY LastAccessDate; Here’s the updated plan – note…

Why Query Plans Can Look Different on Different Servers

October 9, 2019

Brent Ozar

Execution Plans, How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine

In the first post in my How to Think Like the Engine series, I started by doing a pretty simple query: But I noted that if you were following along on your computer, you might see a different execution plan. If I tweak just one thing about my SQL Server, I see a different plan:…

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine

October 7, 2019

Brent Ozar

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine

You’re a developer or a DBA, and you’re comfortable writing queries to get the data you need. You’re much less comfortable trying to design the right indexes for your database server. In the next several posts, you’ll learn: The differences between clustered and nonclustered indexes How (and when) to make a covering index The basics…

I’m coming to Gothenburg & Oslo next summer.

October 1, 2019

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

The Nordic countries are some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Erika and I are scheduling a few trips over there in 2020, and the first one I can announce is SQL Saturday Gothenburg and SQL Saturday Oslo. I’m teaching my one-day workshop before each event: Performance Tuning in 21 Demos. You’re a…

New Free Azure and SQL Server 2019 Training from Microsoft

September 30, 2019

Brent Ozar

Microsoft Azure

Folks often email me and ask, “Brent, why don’t you do training classes on Azure?” The answer is simple: the products change faster than I can recoup the cost of building the training material. By the time the class gets enough revenue to pay off the downtime for building an Azure (or AWS or Google)…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for September 2019

September 24, 2019

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates

This month’s release has a lot of new feature goodness: the Consultant Toolkit can automatically upload the results to Amazon S3, plus sp_BlitzCache adds a new sort order to better catch unparameterized queries burning up CPU, a new warning for selects that are doing writes (other than >500MB spills, which we’ve been warning you about…

DBA Training Plan 23: Congratulations! Now, It’s Your Turn.

September 23, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Professional Development

I bet you think you suck at databases. You’re sitting there on your computer, reading all kinds of blogs, watching presentations online, and you’re thinking, “Everybody knows more about databases than I do.” We all feel that way. There’s even a name for it: Impostor Syndrome. I have it too. For example, about a decade…

DBA Training Plan 22: Where to Learn More

September 17, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Professional Development

Whew. We’ve worked through a couple dozen posts together in this DBA Training Plan, and you’re still just getting warmed up. First, pick your specialty. Here’s some of the more popular specializations in the SQL Server business: Production administration – managing uptime, building new boxes, troubleshooting clusters, setting up storage, designing virtualization infrastructures Performance tuning…

DBA Training Plan 21: Building a New SQL Server

September 16, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, High Availability

I have a secret setup checklist. Oh sure, our free First Responder Kit has a SQL Server setup checklist that walks you through a few things you need to do before you install, plus a few things to do immediately afterwards. That’s good. It’s actually pretty darned good. But it’s not the secret checklist. Gather round and cover your…

DBA Training Plan 20: Planning Your Next Server

September 12, 2019

Brent Ozar

Architecture, DBA Training Plan

When the business decides it’s time to give up fixing the old server because it’s not fast enough or reliable enough, stop. The worst thing you can do is jump directly to the hardware vendor’s site, check a few boxes, and order a new shiny server that ends up with exactly the same problems as…

How to Set Up Your Own Mastering Class VM

September 11, 2019

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

When you buy one of my Live Class Season Passes, you can save a lot of money by building your own VM to follow along with the labs. Or, you might just wanna re-run the labs later to see if you can do a better job, or if you’re still mastering a concept. You’re going…

#TSQL2sday: I Just Wish SQL Server Could Restore a Single Object from Backup.

September 10, 2019

Brent Ozar

Backup and Recovery

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Kevin Chant asked us to dream up our fantasy SQL Server feature. I’m sure people are gonna ask for flying cars and gene splicing, and that’s awesome. I’m excited to hear the kinds of things they dream up. Me? I’ve got a really simple ask. (When you’re talking to Microsoft…

What’s It Like to Have a Live Class Season Pass?

September 9, 2019

Brent Ozar

Company News

I don’t usually post product reviews here on the blog, but Vadim Kulikov (aka BlondeDBA in Slack) recently finished all of the Mastering classes, and he took the time to write a really detailed review. Here it is, unedited: I heard some folks refer to Brent’s training as “Brent Ozar’s Full Experience”. I really like…

DBA Training Plan 19: The L-Word, Licensing

September 6, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Licensing

You’ve gotten through a lot of this training. You’ve tried fixing the problem with indexes, query tuning, and judicious application of various configuration switches. You’ve been watching webcasts and using free scripts, but… Things just aren’t getting better. Before you start browsing your cloud vendor’s sizing price list or your favorite server vendor’s build-and-price site,…

Mitch Bottell is preparing to take an exclusive lock on some BBQ.

DBA Training Plan 18: Managing Concurrency

September 4, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Locking, Blocking, and Isolation Levels

Locking isn’t a problem – queries are gonna lock data. As long as nobody else wants the lock, you can take your sweet time locking it, and it won’t show up as a problem. (That’s one of the many reasons queries work so well in development, and then hit performance issues in production.) Blocking, now…

DBA Training Plan 17: Should You Partition Your Tables?

September 3, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Partitioning

In the last episode, I talked about knowing when it’s time to scale out: identifying when our data is getting to be so large that we have to split it across multiple servers, and I explained why that is so challenging. But what about table partitioning – SQL Server’s ability to break up a single…

What Are Your Coworkers Learning Right Now?

September 2, 2019

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

Not a poll, no fixed list of answers, just totally open comments. What are the developers, sysadmins, and data professionals on your team learning these days? Any particular topics that they’re really excited about? Let me know in the comments. (I think this is the shortest post I’ve ever written, hahaha!)

I would like to scale out my Porsche collection.

DBA Training Plan 16: Is It Time to Scale Out?

August 30, 2019

Brent Ozar

Architecture, DBA Training Plan

In our last episode, we found out what your server was waiting on. In the closing remarks, I mentioned that you should find out which queries are causing the problem, and focus your mitigation efforts there. You might have circled back to the episode where we covered sp_BlitzCache, used a @SortOrder parameter that lines up…

DBA Training Plan 15: What’s Your SQL Server Waiting On?

August 29, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Wait Stats

You’re here, dear reader, because you weren’t “classically trained” as a database administrator. You didn’t graduate from the University of Sciencing Computerses with a Master’s of Transactional Processing. You probably got your start as a developer or sysadmin, and gradually fumbled your way here. You’re used to monitoring stuff from the OUTSIDE using things like…