Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

1948 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.

Azure SQL DB Frequently Asked Questions

April 15, 2021

Brent Ozar

Azure SQL DB

I’ve seen your search history. Let’s get you some answers. Is Azure SQL DB PaaS, IaaS, or SaaS? Azure SQL DB is platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Microsoft manages most common database tasks for you, and they act as your DBA. This also means that like a DBA, Microsoft will tell you “no” if you try to implement…

Your Top 10 Ideas for SQL Server

April 13, 2021

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

You’ve submitted thousands of bug reports and feature requests at feedback.azure.com, and here’s what you’ve voted as the top 10 requests right now: #10: MIN/MAX as non-aggregate functions. PostgreSQL and Oracle have the GREATEST/LEAST functions that work like COALESCE, allowing you to pass in a list of values and get the top or lowest. Sounds…

Pop Quiz: What Do These Things Cost Today?

April 8, 2021

Brent Ozar

Hardware

Price check on Aisle 2021. My main consulting job is a 2-day SQL Critical Care® where I help turn around slow SQL Servers. Companies come to me because they’re not sure if it’s a hardware problem, a database configuration issue, bad app code, or what, and they’ve been getting conflicting answers from different teams. Before…

Never, Ever, Ever Start T-SQL Comments with Two Dashes

April 6, 2021

Brent Ozar

T-SQL

There are two ways you can write comments in T-SQL: --By starting a line with two dashes, or /* By framing it on both sides like this */ 123 --By starting a line with two dashes, or /* By framing it on both sides like this */ Never, ever use two dashes. Never. The problem is that…

Free Columnstore Training Class on Tuesday

April 1, 2021

Brent Ozar

Columnstore Indexes

Your report queries are too slow. You’ve tried throwing some hardware at it: your production SQL Server has 12 CPU cores or more, 128GB RAM, and SQL Server 2016 or newer. It’s still not enough to handle your growing data. It’s already up over 250GB, and they’re not letting you purge old data. Will columnstore…

How My Attitude and Branding Changed Over 20 Years

March 30, 2021

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

This month, to mark the 20th anniversary of BrentOzar.com, I’m stepping back and looking at the big picture rather than blogging about database problems & solutions like I usually do. It wouldn’t be a good navel-gazing series without a couple thousands words looking inward at myself. When I first got started writing online, I was…

Sale Closes Wednesday: Save 75% on My Training Classes, and the EU/UK Can Buy Too.

March 29, 2021

Brent Ozar

Company News

Good news, party people: we’re finally selling to the EU/EEA/UK again! To celebrate, during March you can use coupon code Happy20th to save 75% off my Live Class Season Pass, Recorded Class Season Pass Fundamentals, or Masters recordings, or any of my online classes. You can also buy my classes now in Euros, GBP, or…

Free Live Webcast: The First SQL Server Webcast You Should Ever Attend.

March 25, 2021

Brent Ozar

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine

When you pass in a query, how does SQL Server build the results? It sounds really simple, but we all take so much for granted. SQL Server stores most data in 8KB pages – kinda like spreadsheet pages. For example, here’s a simulated 8KB page from the dbo.Users table in the Stack Overflow public database:…

The Way Developers and Users Interact is Broken.

March 24, 2021

Brent Ozar

Azure Data Studio, SQL Server Management Studio

This month, to mark the 20th anniversary of BrentOzar.com, I’m stepping back and looking at the big picture rather than blogging about database problems & solutions like I usually do. Twenty years ago, I tried to switch to Linux. Again. That wasn’t my first attempt, nor was it my last – there were so many…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for March 2021

March 23, 2021

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates

Brad McGehee speaking to the Red Gate PASS party, 2011 Ten years ago, I unveiled sp_Blitz at the 2011 PASS Summit, in front of a live audience. Remember the PASS Summit? Remember live audiences? <sigh> Anyway, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of BrentOzar.com, I’ve thinking back about the last couple of decades to reminisce about what I’ve…

Our Monday Links Email is 10 Years Old.

March 22, 2021

Brent Ozar

Company News

I’ve been celebrating the 20th anniversary of BrentOzar.com, but it just so happens that this year marks another fun anniversary. Ten years ago, way back in 2011, I wrote: You’re overworked. You don’t have the time to sit around reading blogs, keeping up on the latest industry news, and reading web comics. That’s where we…

Where I See Databases Going in the Next 10 Years

March 18, 2021

Brent Ozar

Architecture, SQL Server

This month, to mark the 20th anniversary of BrentOzar.com, I’m stepping back and looking at the big picture rather than blogging about database problems & solutions like I usually do. I’m going to generalize a little by decade here to keep things simple. In 1990-2000, databases were mostly tied to specific development languages. When you…

It’s Been Decades. Why Don’t Databases Manage Themselves Yet?

March 17, 2021

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

This month, to mark the 20th anniversary of BrentOzar.com, I’m stepping back and looking at the big picture rather than blogging about database problems & solutions like I usually do. A much younger me When I started working with databases, we had to: Provision the right CPUs and memory Provision the right storage throughput and…

What Does a Database Administrator Actually Do?

March 16, 2021

Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration

BrentOzar.com is 20 years old, and I’m celebrating by being a little retrospective and future-looking this month. Today, I’m publishing a post that I could have published 10 years ago, or maybe 20 years ago, and maybe even 10 years from now. How much of this would have changed in the past? How much will…

#TSQL2sday 136 Wrap-Up: Your Favorite (and Least Favorite) Data Types

March 15, 2021

Brent Ozar

Development

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I asked you to blog about your most-loved and least-loved data types. Crazy, right? How could people possibly love or hate data types? Well, if you’ve been working with them for a while, I figured you’d have built up an array of tips or pain points, and y’all delivered with…

How I Worked Toward GDPR Compliance: The Really Long Story

March 12, 2021

Brent Ozar

Company News

BrentOzar.com is 20 years old, so I’m spending 20 days reflecting. Yesterday, I wrote about how my online classes are available to Europeans now, and today I’m going to talk about why that was a problem for a while, and how I solved it. The short story is that I outsourced the whole thing to…

Wow: BrentOzar.com is 20 Years Old.

March 11, 2021

Brent Ozar

Company News

My first avatar, by Jin Wicked In 2001, I was a developer, and I liked to write. I’d had web sites for a number of years, but in 2001, I decided to switch from wickedlife.com (archive) over to BrentOzar.com. I wanted a domain name that would more appropriately reflect my interests as they changed over…

Save 75% on My Training Classes – Europeans Too!

March 10, 2021

Brent Ozar

Company News

Good news, party people: we’re finally selling to the European Union, European Economic Area, and the United Kingdom again! To celebrate, during March you can use coupon code Happy20th to save 75% off my Live Class Season Pass, Recorded Class Season Pass Fundamentals, or Masters recordings, or any of my online classes. You can also…

4 Things I Love About Integers #TSQL2sday

March 9, 2021

Brent Ozar

Development

#tsql2sday

I love integers. Furthermore, I think we’ve all been taking them for granted. Integers are clean, elegant datatypes that do exactly what they’re supposed to. They’re the Golden Retrievers of the database world: they have a few shortcomings, but so, so few. And so for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I wanna share my love for…

Download the Current Stack Overflow Database for Free (2021-02)

March 5, 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…