Posts by Brent Ozar

So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star

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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…
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New SQL Server 2008 Compliance Guide

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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…
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What would you ask Microsoft and PASS?

#SQLPass
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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…
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Steve Jones on Twitter, private Twitter and Yammer

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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…
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Tony Davis disses StackOverflow.com

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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…
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StackOverflow’s SQL 2008 FTS issue solved

Stack Overflow
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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…
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Moved to Michigan and got older

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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…
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Whoops! The SQL DBA Quiz

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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,…
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Barack Obama’s campaign let Twitter down

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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…
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Houston Tweet-Up: The Morning After

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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…
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Somebody created a Halloween monster #SQLputdowns

Humor
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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…
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Before you upgrade to SQL Server 2008…

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

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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,…
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Want to stop Windows from locking your screen?

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

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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…
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