Posts by Brent Ozar

Salary

It’s time for our annual salary survey to find out what data professionals make. You fill out the data, we open source the whole thing, and you can analyze the data to spot trends and do a better job of negotiating your own salary: We make Stacks of Sacks Take the Data Professional Salary Survey now.…

“Surely this one will get a clustered index scan.”

December 7, 2018

Execution Plans

I love building demos for our training classes because I’m constantly in a battle of the minds with SQL Server. I try to guess what he’s going to do next, and I love it when he surprises me. I started by building a new parameter sniffing demo with the Stack Overflow database, and in this…

Azure SQL DB is Slow: Do I Need to Buy More DTUs?

December 6, 2018

Microsoft Azure

You’ve got an Azure SQL DB, and your queries are going slow. You’re wondering, “Am I hitting the performance limits? Is Microsoft throttling my queries?” There’s an easy way to check: run sp_BlitzFirst. sp_BlitzFirst is our free performance health check stored procedure that analyzes a lot of common performance issues and then gives you a…

How to Log Active Queries with sp_BlitzWho

December 3, 2018

Monitoring

Queries are running when you’re not around. They’re wreaking havoc – maybe they’re filling up your TempDB, or causing blocking, or flushing your buffer pool out. When I wanna see what queries are running, I run sp_BlitzWho: That shows me who’s running the query, what it’s been waiting on over time, memory grants, blocking, and…

What Is SQL Injection?

December 1, 2018

T-SQL

Say we have a stored procedure that queries the Stack Overflow database. We have two separate parameters, @DisplayName and @Location, so folks can search for people by name, location, or both. For performance reasons, we decide to build dynamic SQL: Transact-SQL CREATE OR ALTER PROC dbo.UserSearch @DisplayName NVARCHAR(40) = NULL, @Location NVARCHAR(100) = NULL AS…

How to Troubleshoot Blocking and Deadlocking with Scripts and Tools

November 28, 2018

Deadlocks, Monitoring, sp_BlitzLock

When you need to find which queries are blocking other queries, your decision comes down to when the blocking happened. Is it happening now, recently, or coming up soon? During a live emergency, start with sp_WhoIsActive. Adam Machanic’s excellent free sp_WhoIsActive replaces Activity Monitor, sp_who, and sp_who2, and it’s way more powerful. The documentation is extensive –…

Congratulations to the Scholarship Class of 2019.

November 22, 2018

To celebrate the holiday season each year, we give back to those who spend the entire year giving back in their own communities. We go looking for data professionals who make a difference, and we try to make a difference in their lives too. This year, we’re proud to announce a new round of winners.…

A Lot of Your SQL Servers Are Unsupported.

November 21, 2018

Production Database Administration, SQL ConstantCare

I’m almost afraid to look into the SQL ConstantCare® client base to see the answer to this, but let’s put on a pair of rubber gloves and go find out. SQL Server 2016: <1% out of support. I LOVE YOU PEOPLE. However, you’ve had the luxury of time here: SP1 came out in November 2016,…

Psst – it’s holiday card time. Update your address.

November 19, 2018

SQL Server

Last year’s Christmas card We’re getting ready to send out our annual holiday cards to folks who shopped with us this year. If you’d like to get one, make sure you set up your billing address in your account to reflect your current address. Happy holidays!

How Much Memory is “Normal” for SQL Servers?

November 19, 2018

SQL ConstantCare

When I look at a SQL Server, one of the first things I check is, “How much memory does this thing have relative to the amount of data we’re hosting on here?” I’ve long used some seat-of-the-pants numbers, but armed with data from SQL ConstantCare® users who opted into public data sharing, let’s do a…

PASS Summit 2018 Keynote Day 2: Live Blog

November 8, 2018

#SQLPass

Today is the second day of the 2018 PASS Summit, the largest annual gathering of Microsoft data professionals. Yesterday, we got the marketing keynote that caught attendees up with the current state of SQL Server 2019 and Azure services. The attendees I talked to yesterday were impressed with the demo amounts & topics, too. Today is…

PASS Summit 2018 Keynote Day 1: Live Blog

November 7, 2018

#SQLPass

Today is the opening day of the 2018 PASS Summit, the largest annual gathering of Microsoft data professionals. Every year, thousands of us gather at the Seattle Convention Center to connect, learn, and share. On this first day of the conference, all the attendees go to the same room to watch the keynote speech. To…

What’s New in SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.1: Faster Functions

November 7, 2018

SQL Server 2019, T-SQL

A while back, we talked you through a public whitepaper about how Microsoft was working on making user-defined functions go faster. Now that the next preview (CTP2.1) of SQL Server 2019 is out, you can start getting your hands on Froid, the performance-boosting feature. Here’s the documentation on it – let’s see how it works.…

Picking #PASSsummit Sessions to Attend

November 5, 2018

#SQLPass

So you’re going to the PASS Summit in Seattle this week, and you’re overwhelmed with the number of session choices. You’re not alone – it overwhelms me too. There are some slots where I wish I could clone myself and attend several sessions at once. Here’s how I do it. First priority: paying back your…

Save 50-75% Now: The 2018 Black Friday Sale is On!

November 1, 2018

Five years ago, I had a crazy thought. I liked bargain shopping during Black Friday sales, picking out a new TV or holiday vacation. Why not run a Black Friday sale here on our stuff, too? Over the years, it’s turned into one of my favorite times of the year. We used to only run…

How Check Constraints MIGHT Improve Your Queries and Missing Index Requests

October 31, 2018

Execution Plans, Indexing

The more SQL Server knows about your data, the better your query plans can get. Say you’ve got an app that’s designed to store multiple companies in a single database – but you don’t actually use it that way. All of the data in a given database is actually for the same company. We’ll use…

You read reviews before you buy training, right?

October 29, 2018

Confession time: I love buying stuff. It’s not so much the buying as it is the comparing. I go to The Wirecutter, I read every review on Amazon, and I make little Excel spreadsheets to show differences between products. So what about when you buy database training? Do you read the reviews? If you’ve been…

How to See Execution Plans in Azure Data Studio

October 23, 2018

Azure Data Studio, Execution Plans

Azure Data Studio is Microsoft’s cross-platform tool for T-SQL developers. It’s still relatively young, so it has some missing areas of functionality. When you run DMV queries to look at query plans, they show up as XML, which isn’t very friendly. For example, here I’m running sp_BlitzCache in my Azure SQL DB: It works, but…

You probably didn’t go to a training class this year. Again.

October 23, 2018

Professional Development

“Can someone just give me a tl;dr?” The year is drawing to a close, and you didn’t go to a training class. Again. Your skills aren’t keeping up. You keep bookmarking blog posts about new database stuff, interesting scripts you want to run, and techniques you want to try. Your list of stuff to read…

Announcing The Team Membership

October 22, 2018