Brent Ozar, Author at Brent Ozar Unlimited®

1494 posts, 6331

https://www.brentozar.com

I make Microsoft SQL Server faster and more reliable. I love teaching, travel, and laughing. I live in California with my wife Erika.

A Presenter’s Guide to the Stack Overflow Database

August 17, 2018

Brent Ozar

Stack Overflow

No Comments

The place that saves your job You present on SQL Server topics at user groups and conferences, and you’ve been wondering how to get started with the Stack Overflow public database. Here’s a quick list of things to know. For stable demos, use StackOverflow2010. This smaller 10GB database has data from the first years of…

How Trace Flag 2335 Affects Memory Grants

August 15, 2018

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

This trace flag is documented in KB #2413549, which says, “Using large amounts of memory can result in an inefficient plan in SQL Server.” The details are a little light, so let’s run a quick experiment with: SQL Server 2017 CU 8 (14.0.3029.16) VM with 4 cores, 32GB RAM, max memory set to 28GB Stack Overflow…

The First 3 Things I Look At on a SQL Server

August 10, 2018

Brent Ozar

Processes and Practices

No Comments

1. Are backups and CHECKDB being done? Before I step out on the wire, I want to know if there’s a safety net. If there’s a recoverability risk, I don’t stop here – I keep looking because the rest of the answers affect the safety net we’re going to put in place. “10TB of data…

How to Check for Non-Existence of Rows

August 9, 2018

Brent Ozar

Execution Plans, T-SQL

You’re writing a query, and you wanna check to see if rows exist in a table. I’m using the free Stack Overflow database, and I wanna find all of the users who have not left a comment. The tables involved are: In dbo.Users, the Id field uniquely identifies a user. In dbo.Comments, there’s a UserId field…

A Visual Guide to Choosing an Index Type

August 7, 2018

Brent Ozar

Indexing

Warning: I’m about to overly simplify a whole lot of topics to make things easy. Armchair architects, warm up your flamethrowers. Your table has rows and columns kinda like a spreadsheet: In most applications, your users care about all of the rows, and all of the columns. However, they put certain columns in the where…

Two Important Differences Between SQL Server and PostgreSQL

August 6, 2018

Brent Ozar

PostgreSQL

SQL ConstantCare® uses PostgreSQL as a back end – specifically, AWS RDS Aurora – so I’ve spent a lot of time writing Postgres queries lately. Here are some of the things I’ve noticed that are different. CTEs are optimization fences. In SQL Server, if you write this query: Transact-SQL With AllPosts AS (SELECT * FROM StackOverflow.dbo.Posts)…

How to Check Performance on a New SQL Server

August 3, 2018

Brent Ozar

Processes and Practices, Production Database Administration

So you just built a brand new SQL Server, and before you go live, you wanna check to see if it’s going to perform as well as your existing server. The easy way: test your maintenance jobs I’m just asking for the chance to test it, that’s all It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3:…

How I Configure SQL Server Management Studio

August 1, 2018

Brent Ozar

SQL Server Management Studio

Ever go into Tools-Options? SSMS has a stunning number of options these days. Here are some of my favorites: Documents options On the Documents options, I uncheck “Check for consistent line endings on load” because I constantly get scripts with all kinds of wacko line endings. That warning is a pain in the butt. On…

Database DevOps Featuring Microsoft SSDT

New Classes: Dashboard in a Day, Database DevOps, tSQLt, SQL Server Internals, and Avoiding NOLOCK

July 30, 2018

Brent Ozar

Company News

No Comments

We’ve got a few new goodies, and they’re 50% off for a limited time! Dashboard in a Day – A hands-on workshop using Power BI to rapidly produce great looking interactive reports and dashboards. Your instructor, Microsoft MVP Steph Locke, has a decade of BI and data science experience. Learn more and register. Database DevOps Featuring…

[Video] “Actual” Execution Plans Lie for Branching Queries

July 27, 2018

Brent Ozar

Execution Plans

In which I show why you can’t trust “actual” execution plans for branching stored procedures, and you’re better off using sp_BlitzCache to figure out what branches you need to tune: Demo code: Transact-SQL CREATE TABLE dbo.TableA (ID INT); CREATE TABLE dbo.TableB (ID INT); CREATE TABLE dbo.TableC (ID INT); CREATE TABLE dbo.TableD (ID INT); CREATE TABLE…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: What Mentoring Is (and Isn’t)

July 23, 2018

Brent Ozar

SQL ConstantCare

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When we built SQL ConstantCare® as a mentoring – not monitoring – product, I really meant the word mentoring. A lot of us are loners – the only SQL Server person in the office. Nobody really understands what we’re doing, and … we’re not even sure we understand, either. We were self-taught, and we didn’t…

How to Test Disaster Recovery Before You Go Live

July 20, 2018

Brent Ozar

High Availability

When I build a server, success means not touching the server again for 2-3 years. I already have enough crappy, unreliable servers that fall over when someone walks past. I only wanna build good, permanent stuff going forward. So when I build disaster recovery for something, I want to test it 3 ways: Planned failover…

Election Injection

July 20, 2018

Brent Ozar

Development

cyber-trickery

Setting politics aside (Lord knows I’d like to), this ABC 7 Chicago news story covers how Russians hacked the Illinois State Board of Election in 2016: SQL, an acronym for Structured Query Language, is a database programming language. An “SQL injection” is a common piece of cyber-trickery used to illegally gain access to government, financial,…

Announcing “Great Post, Erik” – A Book of Erik’s Best Work

July 19, 2018

Brent Ozar

Company News

Erik Darling blogs a lot. Not lightweight stuff, either, but ambitious posts with a lot of demo scripts, screenshots, and detailed explanations about why SQL Server does what it does. So as he approached his 300th blog post, we decided to build a best-of book with his favorites. There’s no new content here: if you’ve…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: What Cloud Hosting Costs

July 16, 2018

Brent Ozar

Amazon Web Services (AWS), SQL ConstantCare

In our behind-the-scenes posts about building SQL ConstantCare®, I’ve written about how we picked serverless architecture for the application layer, and how picked AWS Aurora for the database layer. Hosting costs were a big driving factor in those decisions – so how has that worked out? Presented for your enjoyment, here are our total SQL…

What Do You Want to Learn This Fall?

July 16, 2018

Brent Ozar

Company News

No Comments

New class survey We’re designing a new round of courses for the fall. Let us know what you want to learn in this short survey. After you take it, you get to see the answers, too, so you can learn what other folks wanna learn.

[Video] SSIS Design Patterns: Extract, Load, and Transform – and Save 50% on Training

July 13, 2018

Brent Ozar

Videos

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This week, we’re sharing Instant Replay videos from our training classes. Last but not least this week, Andy Leonard is talking about the Extract-Load-Transform design pattern in SSIS – different from the old Extract-Transform-Load: That video is from the Instant Replay recordings of Andy’s 2 1/2 day class, Expert SSIS Training. The reviews are great.…

[Video] Installing SQL Server Updates in an Availability Group, and Save 50% on Training

July 12, 2018

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups, Videos

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This week, we’re sharing Instant Replay videos from our training classes. Today’s Instant Replay is Edwin Sarmiento talking about how he approaches applying service packs and cumulative updates on Always On Availability Groups: That video is part of the Instant Replay recordings of Edwin’s extensive live 3-day Senior DBA’s Guide to Always On Availability Groups.…

[Video] Interpreting Missing Index Recommendations

July 11, 2018

Brent Ozar

Indexing, Videos

No Comments

This week, we’re sharing Instant Replay videos from our training classes. Next up is Pinal Dave talking about missing index requests from the dynamic management views. It doesn’t matter whose script you use – they’re all built atop SQL Server’s missing-index DMVs, and they all have the same limitations. Treat the missing index requests the…

[Video] PowerShell Functions and Parameters, and 50% Off Training Classes

July 10, 2018

Brent Ozar

Processes and Practices, Videos

No Comments

This week, we’re sharing some of the Instant Replay videos from our training classes. First up is Drew Furgiuele talking about PowerShell functions and parameters: That’s module 4.1 of Drew’s PowerShell for Database Administrators class. It’s 2 days of lectures and labs – Drew talks about how to do something, then gives you a challenge for…

Posts by Brent Ozar