Posts by Brent Ozar

Me talking to my developers: “Well, guys, I’ve got good news and bad news. Bad news first: looks like somebody forgot about today’s scheduled outage, and they were trying to load data when the network admins shut down the database server. The ETL database is now trying to recover the messy transactions, and the server…

My former manager asked why I use UltraEdit for all of my SQL Server coding, and after pouring out the answer, I figured I should post it here as well for posterity. There’s so many advantages you just take for granted after a while. I had to open it and do some editing to remember…

Ebay just announced they’re buying Skype for $2.6 billion dollars. Here’s the press release. For those of you who don’t know what Skype is…exactly. That’s the point. Skype is a free (FREE) online phone service so you can instant message with people, except you’re actually talking to each other instead of typing. It’s like free…

The first thing administrators want to monitor is their resources: file servers, database servers, app servers, etc. That’s understandable, since they’re system administrators. In order to be really successful with monitoring, though, we need to think like customer administrators – for both our internal and external customers. Forget the hardware, and think about the people.…

Erika made me do it.

I can say with absolute certainty that our ittle Ernie is the most adorable little dog on the planet. Period. Several times a week, Erika and I try various tricks to get her ears to pop up. Ernie quickly gets accustomed to these efforts like a virus resisting penicillin, and adapts her state of relaxation…

Brent Cantori here for the Panic Channel. The 11am advisory has come out, and the Panic Center is forecasting a large “H” in our immediate vicinity. Don’t be fooled by the bright sunshine outside, the cloudless sky, or the fact that when I walk Ernie in a few minutes, I’ll be wearing flipflops, shorts, a…

I’ve been waiting to blog about this for a little while, but had to hold off while we got a few things handled. Now it’s official – we’re moving to Miami! Erika’s going to quit work and go to school full time for the next couple of years. Why Miami? The school had specific advantages,…

I gotta confess that I don’t really give a rip whether my site is popular or not. I rarely look at my web site statistics. Every now and then I pull it up just out of curiosity to see what people find interesting about my site. The statistics packages I use gives me a vague…

I was leaning back yawning when my browser opened, and I saw my own image on my webcam. Hello. Had to grab a copy of that. Yes, it’s 3:36pm, and I’m dead tired. Not a good week. Having a rough time at work. I’ve always made a policy of not discussing work stuff here on…

The photo’s courtesy of Mom, who is playing around with picture mail on her phone. Nice picture, actually. I don’t remember this one. Got a busy weekend planned. This morning I’m helping clean up the neighborhood by doing a trash walk down Airline in front of our subdivision, picking up trash with a few neighbors.…

My purchasing philosophy is to either buy the best designed product out there, something that’s going to last ten or twenty years, or else buy the all-out cheapest thing that meets my needs. Everything in between usually involves too many compromises, and I end up wishing I’d saved my money or else I pine for…

Been a long couple of weeks. Ernie’s doing well, but battling a touch of diarrhea. Okay, more than a touch – more like she got pounded with a diarrhea stick, but you get the idea. For three days I’ve been following her around the house with a spray can of Woolite Heavy Traffic carpet cleaner.…

Ernie’s settling into her new home and getting used to the place. Her comfort level is indicated by her newfound confidence in chewing on magazines, which we’ve always kept in a basket in the living room on the floor. That will probably need to change. I’d rather remove the temptation than try to explain to…

I still need to get better photos of our new little family member, but as I was going through my checklist this morning, one of the items was getting the webcam working again. Ernie always wants to climb up in my lap while I’m working, make herself as comfortable as possible, and then fall asleep.…

When a mission-critical server dies at a business, the timeline can best be described using the first thing that a person says when they call your cell phone. It went something like this: Day 1: “I wouldn’t be calling you at 5 AM unless it was really important….” Day 2: “You won’t believe this, but…

Total Commander 6.5 came out yesterday from Ghisler. It’s my favorite Windows shell program – it replaces Windows Explorer, and it’s a lot like the old Norton Commander from the DOS days. I wrote a review of Total Commander a while back when I was writing for HAL-PC Magazine, and I’m an even bigger fan…

Picked up a drafting table last night for $25 off CraigsList, an online classified system. I’ve always wanted one of these: I like to work standing up, and this will let me set my laptop and some papers out in a comfortable way. It’s got tons of character, too – the last guy who had…

When I was in high school in Michigan, we had a black Jeep CJ7. I loved it – I thought it was fun, rambunctious, and laid-back. I remember driving Melinda Scott around in the snow, thinking I was king of the world. A few years ago, when I moved to Texas, I briefly owned a…