Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

1968 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.

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

Last Updated June 10, 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…

How to Patch SQL Server

Last Updated June 4, 2021

Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration

Microsoft releases SQL Server Cumulative Updates about every 60 days. This is a part of your job that you’re going to be doing a lot, so let’s get good at it! Here’s the strategy I like to use. Pick what patch you’re going to apply. Generally speaking, you should be on the most recent Cumulative…

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

Last Updated May 30, 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…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for June 2021

Last Updated June 1, 2021

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates

If you want to quickly understand the top health and performance issues on your SQL Server, there’s no better, easier, free-er way to do it than the open source First Responder Kit. When you find a bug or want something changed, read the contributing.md file. Wanna watch me use it? Take the class. To get…

Announcing My 2021/2022 Training Class Schedule

Last Updated June 13, 2021

Brent Ozar

Company News

If you want to attend my live online classes, it’s really easy: just buy a Live Class Season Pass and you can drop in on any class that works for your schedule. I recommend attending ’em in this order: Fundamentals, required, in this order: Index Tuning, Query Tuning, Parameter Sniffing Fundamentals, optional: Columnstore, TempDB (can be…

Do You Have to License Your Standby SQL Server?

Last Updated May 27, 2021

Brent Ozar

Licensing

Businesses who need high availability and disaster recovery usually want three servers: A primary SQL Server where all the writes & reads take place A high availability SQL Server sitting right next to the primary, in the same data center, keeping up with its writes, and A disaster recovery SQL Server sitting in another city…

Free Webcast: Architecture Design for SQL Server High Availability & Disaster Recovery

Last Updated May 26, 2021

Brent Ozar

Architecture

You’re building a new SQL Server, and you need to protect it. You want to learn when it’s right to use clustering, AlwaysOn Availability Groups, virtualization, or storage replication. You don’t have an unlimited budget, either, so you need to learn how SQL Server licensing impacts these choices. Or maybe you’re not doing it yet…

Is that a date I see in that varchar column?

You Captioned This Pic and Won Free Stuff.

Last Updated May 23, 2021

Brent Ozar

Humor

Last week, over 600 of y’all captioned this picture, and we had a lot of laughs: My favorite caption overall was from Aart Bluestoke, who won a Live Class Season Pass for this: The funniest part to me was that I’ve had that exact experience several times with several different data type combinations, and I think…

9 Signs Your T-SQL Might Fail a Code Review

Last Updated May 17, 2021

Brent Ozar

T-SQL

It’s hard to set absolute rules about, “Feature X should absolutely never be used.” However, there are some features that set off alarm bells when I see them. Usually, when I start asking more questions about when we’re using those particular features, I get answers of, “Oh, I didn’t know that was a problem.” As…

Contest: My Favorite Caption Wins a Live Class Season Pass

Last Updated May 24, 2021

Brent Ozar

Company News, Humor

649

Update 2021-05-24: the contest is over, and the winners are here. Let’s have a few laughs this week. In the comments, write a caption for this: Prizes: My favorite caption overall wins a Live Class Season Pass Runners-up get both a Recorded Class Season Pass: Mastering Classes and Recorded Class Season Pass: Fundamentals Classes Honorable…

I’m on the KasperOnBI Podcast Talking About Careers and the Future of SQL Server

Last Updated May 13, 2021

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Videos

I sat down with Microsoft’s Kasper de Jonge this month for an hour-long conversation about how I got started speaking, careers, and the future of SQL Server: You can also listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. In the podcast, we talk about my Epic Life Quest – that’s over here. If you’ve got followup questions,…

Free Video: Deadlocks: Let’s Do One, Understand It, and Fix It

Last Updated May 10, 2021

Brent Ozar

Deadlocks, Videos

You keep getting warnings and emails about deadlocks, but let’s be honest: you’re not really sure how they happen or what to do about it. In this one-hour session from the SQLBits conference, I will show one, use sp_BlitzLock to analyze it, then fix it. If you like this video, check out the SQLBits YouTube…

What’s the Buggiest Feature in SQL Server?

Last Updated May 5, 2021

Brent Ozar

Execution Plans, SQL Server

Not the one you like the least, or the one that requires the most work. What’s the one that you can’t use because it’s just flat out busted? For me, it’s SSMS’s Live Query Statistics, aka live query plans. The idea is so awesome – you click Query, Include Live Query Statistics, and then when you…

If You Could Only Say One Thing About Writing Good Queries…

Last Updated May 4, 2021

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

If you could give just one piece of advice about writing good queries, what would it be? I asked Twitter yesterday because I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything in a new training course I’m working on, and the replies were fantastic. Here were some of my favorites: As you’re writing a query,…

Execution Plans Don’t Have the Yellow Bang They Really Need.

Last Updated April 29, 2021

Brent Ozar

Execution Plans

When SQL Server is purely making an estimate up out of thin air, with no freakin’ idea what the real answer is, it doesn’t give you any kind of warning. It just produces an estimate that looks scientifically accurate – until you know how it’s actually getting calculated. Let’s ask SQL Server how many users have…

Announcing Fundamentals Week: May 10-14, $295

Last Updated April 27, 2021

Brent Ozar

Company News

You love learning from me. You’ve attended some of my free online streams, read my blog posts, and you use the First Responder Kit. You enjoy my laid-back, humorous approach to sharing what I’ve learned over the years. You love live classes. You’ve tried watching recordings or stepping through demos yourself, but…you just can’t block…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for April 2021

Last Updated April 20, 2021

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates

This month’s release has two gems for SQL Server 2019 users. First, thanks to Greg Dodd, when you’re dealing with parameter sniffing issues, sp_BlitzWho can now show you the cached and live parameters for running queries. This lets you quickly see when the parameters may be wildly different, leading to issues like incorrect memory grants…

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

Last Updated April 29, 2021

Brent Ozar

Who's Hiring

I’ve gotten a lot of emails from friends lately who are looking for work. It seems that as some companies go back to the office, some people are realizing they want to work remotely forever. And on the flip side, other folks are realizing they desperately want to get back into an office, but their…

Free TempDB Training Class Next Monday

Last Updated April 19, 2021

Brent Ozar

TempDB

You’ve been working with Microsoft SQL Server for a couple of years, and you know a little bit about TempDB. You’ve heard that temp tables and table variables have different performance characteristics than regular user database tables, and you’ve heard that you’re supposed to have multiple data files. You’re wondering what exactly goes on behind…