Product has been added to your cart.

Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar
2375 posts
https://www.brentozar.com
I make Microsoft SQL Server go faster. I love teaching, travel, cars, and laughing. I'm based out of Las Vegas. He/him.

So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star

Brent Ozar
6 Comments
I loved the flash-in-the-pan band Semisonic, best known for – okay, only known for – their hit song Closing Time. I thought the rest of their stuff was just as brilliant (She’s Got My Number is one of my favorite songs ever), but I was in the minority, because they disappeared off the rock radar…
Read More

New SQL Server 2008 Compliance Guide

Brent Ozar
3 Comments
A while back, Bryan Oliver, David Gugick and I went to Redmond to take part in a SQL Server 2008 auditing and compliance lab.  JC Cannon and other Microsoft SQL Server 2008 pros talked about the new 2008 features that help DBAs with their SOX/HIPAA/PCI/etc compliance needs. I’ve dealt with some of these regulations in…
Read More

What would you ask Microsoft and PASS?

Brent Ozar
#SQLPass
3 Comments
What if you could sit down with these guys and ask ’em any questions you wanted: Tom Casey, Microsoft SQL Server BI General Manager. Tom’s giving the Thursday keynote about SQL Server’s business intelligence strategy beyond SQL Server 2008.  My guess (and this is only a guess, not based on any behind-the-scenes info) is that…
Read More

Steve Jones on Twitter, private Twitter and Yammer

Brent Ozar
4 Comments
In the latest Voice of the DBA podcast (love the outtakes at the end, totally awesome), Steve Jones of SQLServerCentral talks about his use of Twitter.  Like a lot of folks I know, he’s struggled to find the real-world benefit of it, and I really applaud his honesty.  Twitter’s one of those things like MySpace…
Read More

Tony Davis disses StackOverflow.com

Brent Ozar
16 Comments
How many of you work only with Microsoft SQL Server?  No other technologies – not Windows, not IIS, not Visual Studio, not Java, not JQuery, just purely SQL Server and absolutely nothing else? Show of hands? Not too many, I bet.  Heck, my job title is SQL Server Expert, but on any given day, I’m…
Read More

StackOverflow’s SQL 2008 FTS issue solved

Brent Ozar
Stack Overflow
31 Comments
Whew – the Microsoft folks really came through on this one and tracked down the problem pretty quickly.  I want to personally thank Denis Churin, Nikita Shamgunov and Sundaram Narayanan for their detailed investigation into the issue and helping us get it fixed. I’m going to explain the issue to help anybody else get through…
Read More

Moved to Michigan and got older

Brent Ozar
9 Comments
Home Sweet Home Erika and I drove up to Michigan this weekend and started moving into our family’s house on White Lake near where I grew up.  I went to high school near here, and I’m pretty familiar with the rough winters.  On our drive up, we drove through freezing rain and snow – Erika’s…
Read More

Whoops! The SQL DBA Quiz

Brent Ozar
10 Comments
Chris Shaw started a new blog quiz for SQL Server DBAs: name two mistakes you’ve made in your career.  I’m glad he restricted it to two entries, or else I’d have had to start a whole separate blog category just for this. Mistake #1: deleting without a where clause. You’ve heard that horror story before,…
Read More

Barack Obama’s campaign let Twitter down

Brent Ozar
5 Comments
So it’s the day after a really historic election: the first guy with a Twitter account to be elected as president! What an awesome chance to send 140 characters of hope, change, dreams, opportunity, you name it. It’s so exciting!  Me personally, I’d have picked “Yes We Did!”  That would have been so cool, and…
Read More

Houston Tweet-Up: The Morning After

Brent Ozar
4 Comments
Yesterday afternoon, the Houston tweeps converged on Coffee Groundz.  I had a great time and got to finally meet some of the folks I’ve Twittered with for months. Photos from around the web: David Harrold’s photos on Flickr ETee’s photos on Flickr SEvatt’s photos on Flickr BrightKite’s Coffee Groundz stream And for your notes, the…
Read More

Somebody created a Halloween monster #SQLputdowns

Brent Ozar
Humor
5 Comments
I think Tim Ford aka SQLAgentMan was the first with this, but now it’s turned into a monster.  On Twitter, we’re trading SQL putdowns.  You can find ’em on search.twitter.com by searching for #SQLputdowns. Here were my personal favorites from the chatter: Yo mama so dumb she separates statements with STOP. – JCumberland Yo mamma…
Read More

Before you upgrade to SQL Server 2008…

Brent Ozar
10 Comments
This month’s Redmond Mag glows about some new features in SQL 2008, and yes, it does have a lot of cool tricks up its sleeve.  But before you go upgrading your servers to get those new features, there’s one thing you need to know. New versions of SQL Server are not always faster for every…
Read More

Office in the web + BI in Excel != SSAS DBA jobs

Brent Ozar
6 Comments
Add these two things together: SQL Server’s Project Gemini is moving BI into Excel. The next version of Office will be available inside the browser. If that doesn’t scream hosted-BI, I don’t know what does. This is more fuel for Jason Massie’s belief that cloud services will kill the DBA, and I gotta tell you,…
Read More

Want to stop Windows from locking your screen?

Brent Ozar
3 Comments
I work for a company whose IT department has a group policy enforced so that our screens lock after 10 minutes of inactivity.  That’s great in theory, but I run my corporate workstation inside VMware, which means I’m back and forth between different windows all the time.  When I go away from my Windows VM…
Read More

Welcome to the Social…Hell! (My Zune experience)

Brent Ozar
1 Comment
I bought a Microsoft Zune 8 to test the new SQLServerPedia video podcasts and the user experience was so unpolished, so unprofessional that I just had to bang out a blog about it.  Looking at the iPod Nano next to the Zune 8, I could never understand why somebody would buy the Zune 8.  Now…
Read More