Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

1845 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.

European Union Folks: Wanna Attend Mastering Index Tuning?

August 10, 2020

Brent Ozar

SQLBits

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You need to speed up a SQL Server app, but you only want to make index changes. You don’t want to buy hardware, change SQL Server, or change the code. I’ll teach you the most important advanced lessons in one day. In my one-day Mastering Index Tuning online workshop at SQLbits, you’ll learn: My D.E.A.T.H.…

SQL Server Cumulative Update Documentation Is Going Downhill, Fast

August 7, 2020

Brent Ozar

SQL Server 2019

Microsoft appears to have given up on patch documentation, and that’s kinda scary for a product that costs thousands of dollars per core. Yesterday’s SQL Server 2019 Cumulative Update 6 launched with the worst documentation I’ve seen yet. It’s been steadily going downhill, but CU6 represents a new low. For years, we’d complained that the…

SQL Server Problems We Don’t Have Anymore

August 5, 2020

Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration

We have completely new problems today. I was cleaning out a folder of presentations and I realized there are a whole slew of problems that we had to worry about ten years ago, and they just hardly ever come up today. Virtual Log Files (VLFs) – it’s been years since I’ve run across a server…

Date Tables are Great for Users, but Not So Great for Performance

August 4, 2020

Brent Ozar

Execution Plans, Videos

Date tables help users filter data based on day of week, holiday, this year vs last year, and other kinds of filters that business users usually wanna add to their reports. If you haven’t used a date table before, here are a couple of primers on how to create one and use it: Creating a…

[Video] The Top 10 Developer Mistakes That Won’t Scale on Microsoft SQL Server

August 3, 2020

Brent Ozar

Development, Videos

You’re a C# or Java developer building an application that stores data in Microsoft SQL Server, and you want to avoid common pitfalls that will cause you scalability problems down the road. In this session from my live stream, you’ll learn why you probably want to avoid triggers, SELECT *, user-defined functions, dynamic SQL, big…

A One-Slide Summary of the Differences Between TDE and Always Encrypted

July 31, 2020

Brent Ozar

Development

The folks on Twitter liked this, so sharing it here: It’s a one-slide summary from a SQL Critical Care client’s deck, so obviously it’s abridged, but I think it does a pretty good job of summing things up. Some highlights of the conversation: A solid 20 minutes of my talk from last year’s Summit, summed…

Remember “Nothing Stops a Hekaton Transaction?” Yeah, About That.

July 29, 2020

Brent Ozar

In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton)

When In-Memory OLTP first came out, Microsoft liked to go around bragging at conferences that “Nothing stops a Hekaton transaction.” I remember hearing that and kinda chuckling at the time, and I was reminded of it by a recent client who was running into blocking issues with…yep, Hekaton. To reproduce it: Do a large insert…

What SQL ConstantCare® Has Been Finding In Your Servers Lately

July 28, 2020

Brent Ozar

SQL ConstantCare

SQL ConstantCare® analyzed over 3,000 of your SQL Servers this month. Here are the things we check for and the number of servers where we found this problem this month: Backup Back Up Your TDE Certificate – 137 servers affected Take a Full Backup – 370 servers affected Take a Log Backup – 353 servers affected…

[Video] How to Think Like Clippy (Subtitle: Watch Brent Wear Another Costume)

July 27, 2020

Brent Ozar

Indexing, Videos

Remember Clippy, the Microsoft Office assistant from the late 1990s? He would pop up at the slightest provocation and offer to help you do something – usually completely unrelated to the task you were trying to accomplish. Sadly, the Office team told Clippy that he didn’t make the stack rankings cut, so he relocated over…

How to Install Azure Data Studio to Work with SQL Server

July 22, 2020

Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration

Download Azure Data Studio on your desktop. Do this on your desktop, not the SQL Server itself. You always want to run management tools from your own machine to reduce the overhead on the SQL Server itself. After it downloads, install it – just accept the defaults. During the installation process, it may ask: You…

How to Get Started with SQL Server Management Studio

July 21, 2020

Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration

In the big picture, you need to: Download the free Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and install it, accepting the defaults Connect to your SQL Server Create a low-privileged login so that you don’t accidentally drop objects Learn to switch back & forth between the low-privileged account and your regular one Let’s get started! 1.…

Announcing Saturday & Sunday Office Hours.

July 20, 2020

Brent Ozar

Videos

During the quarantines, I’m doing free training. It looks like we’re going to be stuck inside here for another long while, so for the next couple of months, I’m bringing back Office Hours, but on a different schedule. Every Saturday & Sunday morning from 6AM-8AM Pacific (iCal), you can catch me on my Twitch, YouTube, or Facebook…

Get Alerted When Your SQL Server Restarts with sp_SendStartupMail

July 15, 2020

Brent Ozar

Monitoring

sp_SendStartupMail

When your SQL Server restarts, how do you find out? I’ve seen a few senior DBAs do a really smart trick: they write a stored procedure to send them an email, and then they mark that stored procedure as a startup stored procedure so that it runs automatically whenever SQL Server starts up. (You could…

What If You Really DO Need to Shrink a Database?

July 14, 2020

Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration

You’ve heard that shrinking a database is bad because it introduces both external and internal fragmentation, it causes blocking, it causes transaction log growth while it runs, and it’s slow and single-threaded. You understand that if it’s just a matter of 10-20-30% of a database, and the database is only 100-200GB, you might as well…

Where is the SQL Server Community Networking Online?

July 13, 2020

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

You’ve stumbled upon this blog, and you’re having a pretty good time. Now you’re wondering, “Where else can I network with database folks, get to know them, and talk shop?” You’re not getting out due to the quarantines, so your local user group isn’t fulfilling your networking cravings. You wanna know what else is going…

Updated First Responder Kit for July 12, 2020: Fixing sp_BlitzFirst @ExpertMode

July 12, 2020

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates

I don’t normally do multiple releases per month, but sp_BlitzFirst had a pretty big bug in the last release for those of us who do live performance tuning. In the July release, a well-meaning contributor tried to make sp_BlitzFirst faster when @OutputType = ‘NONE’, but inadvertently also made it faster when @ExpertMode = 1 – by…

Want Your Own Private Conference?

July 9, 2020

Brent Ozar

Company News

Your team has been reading my blog, watching my free public streams, and using the First Responder Kit scripts for years. They’ve gone as far as they can go on their own, learning from Google, and now they’re ready for the next level. I can bring the conference to you – except way better than a…

The 201 Buckets Problem, Part 2: How Bad Estimates Backfire As Your Data Grows

July 8, 2020

Brent Ozar

Statistics

In the last post, I talked about how we don’t get accurate estimates because SQL Server’s statistics only have up to 201 buckets in the histogram. It didn’t matter much in that post, though, because we were using the small StackOverflow2010 database. But what happens as our data grows? Let’s move to a newer Stack…

The 201 Buckets Problem, Part 1: Why You Still Don’t Get Accurate Estimates

July 7, 2020

Brent Ozar

Statistics

I’ll start with the smallest Stack Overflow 2010 database and set up an index on Location: Transact-SQL USE StackOverflow2010 GO CREATE INDEX Location ON dbo.Users(Location); GO SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Users; GO 123456 USE StackOverflow2010GOCREATE INDEX Location ON dbo.Users(Location);GOSELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Users;GO There are about 300,000 Users – not a lot, but enough that it will…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for July 2020

July 6, 2020

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates

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This month, 15 community folks contributed code – I think that’s an all-time high for a single month’s release! Good work, y’all. Thanks for payin’ it forward. The bad news is that they’re almost all bug fixes, hahaha. I do love that, though – given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. If you’re working directly…