Posts by Brent Ozar

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,…

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…

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…

I’m going to show how to use a new feature in SQL Server 2008 Management Studio: the ability to query groups of servers simultaneously. In Registered Servers, right-click on a group of servers and click New Query. What comes up will look like a normal query window, but pay close attention to the very bottom…

I haven’t been doing a lot of in-depth technical blogging here lately because I’ve been working on a very big problem: the state of SQL Server training today.  DBA training today has all kinds of problems: I’d go buy a book, but books take forever to come out. I’d like to learn about SQL Server…

Want to meet your mostest favoritest Houston tweeps and talk trash about your leastest favoritest ones?  Coffee Groundz in Midtown is hosting a Twitter party on Sunday, November 2nd from 2pm to 6pm. Those of you who follow me on Twitter or on BrightKite know that I’m here all the time – I’m typing this…

Psst – want $25 off the SSWUG Virtual Conference, bringing it down to only $75? I got a promo email today from my employer (see, when it comes from the people who pay your check, you can’t call it “spam”) that says to enter VIPVC2510 in the VIP code field.  For all I know, this…

One of the sweet things about telecommuting is the ability to pack up the tents and head off to a new location for a while.  Erika’s never seen a real winter, so we’re moving up to my hometown of Whitehall, Michigan.  We’re staying in the Colby State Park – not a real state park, of…

I had a burst of creativity and suggested to my Twitter peeps that they write short IT horror stories, 140 characters or less, and identify them with #ITBoo.  You can find ’em here on Search.Twitter.com by searching for #ITBoo.

Tulsa Tech Fest is a ginormous cross-discipline tech event that drew over 800 people to two days of fun sessions at OSU-Tulsa.  I learned so much from so many different people that I can’t even begin to lay it all out, but I’m going to throw in the highlights here. Tulsa developers “get” social media.…

#TulsaTechFest @msftguy keynote on Live platform – blog to follow Brian is a great presenter, but my problem with the entire Live platform can be summed up in this one slide. This slide shows all the different Live services, including Virtual Earth, Search, Hotmail, MSN, SkyDrive, etc. It’s hard to see with my iPhone camera’s…

Earlier, I blogged about the upcoming Kilimanjaro and Gemini releases from Microsoft: self-service BI tools that are delivered inside Excel.  David Stein left a comment which prompted me to write this separate blog entry about self-service BI in general.  Basically, David’s comment was that the quality of data won’t be as good because the end…

At the BI Conference in Seattle, Microsoft unveiled some components of project code name Kilimanjaro, a sort of R2 release for SQL Server expected in the first half of 2010.  Here’s a couple of relevant news sources: Doug Henschen on Intelligent Enterprise – “Microsoft Will Bow In-Memory Analysis, Appliance-Ready Database in 2010” Short Kilimanjaro posts…