Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

1923 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.

“But Surely NOLOCK Is Okay If No One’s Changing Data, Right?”

January 27, 2021

Brent Ozar

Locking, Blocking, and Isolation Levels

Some of y’all, bless your hearts, are really, really, really in love with NOLOCK. I’ve shown you how you get incorrect results when someone’s updating the rows, and I’ve shown how you get wrong-o results when someone’s updating unrelated rows. It doesn’t matter – there’s always one of you out there who believes NOLOCK is okay…

Free Webcast: Help! My SQL Server Maintenance is Taking Too Long!

January 26, 2021

Brent Ozar

Backup and Recovery, Company News, Index Maintenance, Production Database Administration

“Time for a smoke break.” You manage growing SQL Server databases with shrinking nightly maintenance windows. You just don’t have enough time left each night to do the necessary backups, corruption checking, index maintenance, and data jobs that your users and apps want to run. Cloud storage isn’t helping the problem, either. Stop playing Tetris…

What SQL Server Feature Do You Wish Would Go Away?

January 22, 2021

Brent Ozar

Humor

I asked a two-part question on Twitter: if you could only remove one feature from SQL, why would it be cursors? If you could only remove one feature from SQL, why would it be cursors? — Brent Ozar (@BrentO) January 20, 2021 The responses were great: Auto-shrink does not agree — Warner Chaves (@warchav) January…

Query Hints You Can Use to Avoid Blocking

January 21, 2021

Brent Ozar

Locking, Blocking, and Isolation Levels

No, not NOLOCK. You get the wrong query results, even when your query results aren’t supposed to be changing. I’m talking about when you need to do writes, but you want your query to get along with others in high concurrency environments, without creating a blocking firestorm. SET LOCK_TIMEOUT 1000 – if you run this…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for January 2021

January 19, 2021

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates, Videos

No Comments

You know how a lot of app release notes say “bug fixes and improvements”? We’re not gonna lie: this one’s all bug fixes. Huge shout out to the community contributors for catching stuff and contributing fixes. New behavior for SQL Server 2008 & R2 users: sp_BlitzLock has never worked on SQL Server 2008, but starting…

We Lost Gareth Swanepoel.

January 14, 2021

Brent Ozar

Community

Thirteen years ago, I met Gareth Swanepoel (@GarethSwan) for the first time, interviewed him for his first real sysadmin job, and … turned him down. Gareth Swanepoel circa 2007 Thankfully, my manager overruled me and hired him anyway. Thank goodness – and thank goodness Gareth forgave me for my incredibly bad judgment, hahaha. Gareth proved…

Which Microsoft Certification Should You Get?

January 12, 2021

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

You work with data, and you’re thinking about getting a Microsoft certification. Which one should you get? If you need the certification to get a job… Then get the certification you see mentioned the most often in the descriptions of the job you’re looking for. This is just a little tricky because certifications shown on…

Want to Avoid Deployment Downtime? Replication Probably Isn’t the Answer.

January 6, 2021

Brent Ozar

Architecture

You’re tired of taking outages to deploy changes to your database schema. Wouldn’t it be cool to have two different SQL Servers so that you could: Point your customer traffic at ServerA Apply your deployment scripts to ServerB (which isn’t taking any customer traffic) Point your customer traffic over to the newly deployed ServerB Apply…

Are You Underpaid? Find Out in the Data Professional Salary Survey Results.

January 4, 2021

Brent Ozar

Salary

We asked what you make, and 1,747 of you in 69 countries answered. Altogether, you made $171,879,034 this year. Hubba hubba, there’s some earning power in this audience. Download the Data Professional Salary Survey results (XLSX). A few things to know about it: The data is public domain. The license tab makes it clear that…

Your Ten Favorite Blog Posts from 2020

December 31, 2020

Brent Ozar

Company News

No Comments

The most popular posts this year were when I ran my Fundamentals classes for free throughout the year. I ran a different class per month, and posted signups and videos here on the blog. I’m setting those aside, though, because they’re not evergreen: they’ve since disappeared since I only ran ’em free for a limited…

[Video] Office Hours: SQL Server Career Q&A, Part 3

December 30, 2020

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Videos

No Comments

Here’s the last video in my vacation series with the answers to your most-upvoted professional development questions. Enjoy! I won’t be taking new questions in the comments, but I’m leaving the comments open on this post so that y’all can discuss the video together with each other. Just be mindful that your name will be publicly…

As an Attendee, What’s Important to You In a New Data Community?

December 28, 2020

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

With PASS shutting down, it’s time to think about what the community builds in its place. There are a lot of efforts going towards building replacements for PASS, including Microsoft’s own efforts. Because these efforts are often led by active community volunteers, they’re very well in touch with what event organizers, sponsors, and speakers want…

[Video] Office Hours: SQL Server Career Q&A, Part 2

December 23, 2020

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Videos

No Comments

Last week, I posted a call for questions about SQL Server careers and professional development, and y’all asked a lot of good ones. Here’s the next video with the questions you upvoted the most, and I’ll post the last round of ’em next week. I won’t be taking new questions in the comments, but I’m leaving…

How to Batch Updates A Few Thousand Rows at a Time

December 22, 2020

Brent Ozar

T-SQL

You’ve got a staging table with millions of rows, and you want to join that over to a production table and update the contents. However, when you try to do it all in one big statement, you end up with lock escalation, large transaction log usage, slow replication to Availability Groups, and angry users with…

The End of the Professional Association for SQL Server #SQLPASS

December 17, 2020

Brent Ozar

#SQLPass

This afternoon, PASS announced that their operations will cease in January: We are saddened to tell you that, due to the impact of COVID-19, PASS is ceasing all regular operations, effective January 15, 2021. We encourage you to take full advantage of any access that you have to PASS content between now and January 15,…

Frequently Asked Questions from Office Hours

December 17, 2020

Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration

In my Twitch & YouTube live streams, some questions seem to come up every week. I’m not expecting this post to stop ’em by any means – most folks on the live stream don’t seem to read the blog regularly – but I thought I’d share ’em here. Q: Why is the same query sometimes…

[Video] Office Hours: SQL Server Career Q&A, Part 1

December 16, 2020

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Videos

I posted a call for questions about SQL Server careers and professional development, and y’all asked a lot of good ones. Here were the questions you upvoted the most, and I’ll post another round of ’em next week. The audio on this isn’t up to my usual home-studio quality, of course! I won’t be taking…

Wanna Ask Me Anything About Careers & Professional Development?

December 15, 2020

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

I’ll be answering your questions from right here. Ever wanted to ask me questions about careers or professional development? Now’s your chance. Post your questions here (update: questions are closed)– and you may wanna use a fake name if you’re asking something that’s a little revealing about your current job or employer. Don’t have a question?…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for December 2020

December 14, 2020

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates

sp_BlitzLock gets better identification of parallel deadlocks, sp_DatabaseRestore uses Ola’s scripts for logging, and lots of bug fixes this month. Watch and learn To get the new version: Download the updated FirstResponderKit.zip Azure Data Studio users with the First Responder Kit extension: ctrl/command+shift+p, First Responder Kit: Import. PowerShell users: run Install-DbaFirstResponderKit from dbatools Download the…

Free Webcast: 3 Ways to Prove Your SQL Server Storage is Slow

December 11, 2020

Brent Ozar

Storage

Your users are complaining that their queries are slow. You’ve tried changing SQL Server settings, tuning indexes, but the problem just won’t go away. You’ve got a hunch that it’s a storage problem, but you need real, empirical proof. You need numbers that no one can argue, and you need to know acceptable targets for…