[Video] Office Hours in My Backyard
Let's hang out in the backyard - as recently seen on Zillow Gone Wild - and take your top-voted questions from https://PollGab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKd30ILb7ys
Author: Brent Ozar
I make Microsoft SQL Server go faster. I love teaching, travel, cars, and laughing. I'm based out of Las Vegas. He/him.
Performance Tuning
Query Plan Pop Quiz Answers 2 and 3: I’ve Got Good News and Bad News.
In the Query Plan Pop Quiz, questions 2 and 3 asked you about what the sizes of arrows on query plans meant. The good news is that almost all of you got Question 2 right, but the bad news is that the vast majority of you got Question 3 completely incorrect, and the saddest part of that is that you've been using that inaccurate knowledge to guide your query tuning - and wasting your time.
Performance Tuning
TempDB Filling Up? Try Resource Governor.
TempDB is one of the banes of my existence.
Anybody, anybody who can query your server can run a denial-of-service attack in a matter of seconds just by filling it up with a simple query:
Performance Tuning
Query Plans Pop Quiz Answer #1: Costs are Garbage.
In last week's Query Plans Pop Quiz, the first question was, someone hands you these two queries and you get their estimated plans to decide which query to tune. Perhaps you get the estimated plans from SSMS, or from sp_BlitzCache, or from your monitoring tool. The question was, which query should you focus on tuning?…
SSMS v22 Query Hint Recommendation Tool: The Invasion of the Query Hints
SQL Server Management Studio 22 Preview 3 is out, and it brings with it a new Query Hint Recommendation tool. Start by highlighting the query you want to test, then click Tools, Query Hint Recommendation Tool. It slides out a new pane on the right hand side: The maximum tuning time defaults to 300 seconds,…
News & Opinion
Announcing Free MASTERING Week 2025!
You’ve been working with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, or Amazon RDS SQL Server for years.
You’re jaded. You’re confident. You’re pretty sure you know what you’re doing.
[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About Microsoft Databases
I'm back at home in Vegas, taking your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento on a hillside enjoying the fall desert weather.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXwD-nJ2K3c
Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for October 2025
This quarter's release includes new checks for SQL Server 2025's new memory pressure warnings, Azure SQL DB's operations in progress, warnings about not using partitioned statistics where appropriate, plus bug fixes.
To get the new version:
Performance Tuning
Query Plans Pop Quiz: Three Simple Questions
Question 1: Pick the Problematic Plan: someone hands you a pair of queries, and you get the estimated query plans. (Perhaps you get the estimated plans from SSMS, or from sp_BlitzCache, or from your monitoring tool.) Which one of these two should you focus on tuning first, Query 1 or Query 2?
Question 2: on an estimated plan, what does the thickness of the colored arrow represent?
T-SQL & Development
Which Should You Use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?
Your queries won’t tune themselves. My 2027 Live Class Season Pass is $995 (normally $4,395), with live Fundamentals and Mastering classes plus recordings. Register by October 31 to join Fundamentals Week, November 2–6. See the pass.
You're building a new table or adding a column, and you wanna know which datatype to use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?
Production DBA
Set MAXDOP in Azure SQL DB or You’ll Get This Cryptic Error.
Max Degrees of Parallelism (MAXDOP) tells the database engine, "If you decide to parallelize a query, go parallel with this many worker threads."
(It's a little more complex than that - there is also a coordinating thread, plus a single plan might have multiple parallel zones that each consume MAXDOP worker threads, but for the sake of this blog post, let's keep it simple.)
News & Opinion
Here Are the YouTube Channels We Both Loved.
Last week, I announced that we've hit 50,000 YouTube subscribers, and I celebrated by letting y'all submit your favorite YouTube channels in the comments, and 5 of you would win my Fundamentals & Mastering Class Bundle.
You did not disappoint.
News & Opinion
We Hit 50,000 YouTube Subscribers! Let’s Run a Contest.
This is kinda amazing to me: our YouTube channel has broken the 50,000 subscriber mark!
That's wild to me because I don't put "please like and subscribe" type stuff in the videos, and I don't try to build viral content. I just show up every week and publish answers to y'all's questions from PollGab. And yet, our subscriber growth is slow and steady over time, growing by about 10% per year:
Microsoft Now Recommends You Set Max Memory to 75% and Min Memory to 0%.
Your queries won’t tune themselves. My 2027 Live Class Season Pass is $995 (normally $4,395), with live Fundamentals and Mastering classes plus recordings. Register by October 31 to join Fundamentals Week, November 2–6. See the pass.
Somehow I missed this a few years ago, and I bet a lot of y'all did too. Note the new "Recommended" column in the memory settings documentation:
[Video] Office Hours: Database Questions & Answers
In between clients, I hopped onto my Twitch channel to take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. If you'd like to get notified whenever I do one of those live streams, you can follow my channel for free and you'll get email notifications automatically. I do 'em whenever I have time, usually about once a week when I'm at home.
Career & Community
Your Developers Need Cheap SQL Training.
Your developers haven't ever been to formal Microsoft database training on SQL Server or Azure SQL DB.
They're struggling with trying to tune queries and indexes. Your apps keep getting slower as the data grows, and your queries keep getting more complex.
SQL Server 2025 Makes Memory Troubleshooting Easier.
SQL Server 2025 introduces a new sys.dm_os_memory_health_history view to make it easier for meatbags like you and robots like Copilot to know if the SQL Server has been under memory pressure recently.
To show how it works, let's run a bunch of simultaneous high-memory-grant queries in the Stack Overflow database:
[Video] Office Hours on the Beach in Cancun
In retrospect, I should have put on sunscreen - even for just a 20-minute Office Hours session on the beach! Dang, that sun is powerful. Let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. This is a 360-degree video, so if you watch it on YouTube, you'll be able to pan the camera around and take a little virtual vacation with me.
T-SQL & Development
No, Accelerated Database Recovery Doesn’t Fix NOLOCK.
I have never seen a T-SQL feature that people love as much as NOLOCK.
I keep thinking I've written enough blog posts about it, but a client came up with a new one:
Home Office Studio Tour
Ever wonder what it takes to do this stuff behind the scenes? I'll show you.
If you're thinking about getting started with live streaming or training videos, don't be intimidated by this setup. There's a lot of gear involved, but it's because I've been doing this for years, and I've accumulated a lot of gear that works well for me. You can start with much less gear!
