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Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar
2345 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.

Changing Companies

Brent Ozar
2 Comments
When we moved from Miami to Houston for Erika’s new job as an air traffic controller, my employer wasn’t too sure whether or not telecommuting would work out. Southern Wine currently doesn’t have a pro-telecommuting policy by any means: one company exec stood up at a company meeting and said they would “never” allow it,…
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Don’t specify IP’s in your SQL connection string

Brent Ozar
2 Comments
In today’s SQL newsletter from SQL-Server-Performance.com I was horrified to find the following tip: When you specify a server in an ADO.NET connection string, use the server’s IP address, not the server’s DNS name. By using an IP address instead of a DNS name, name resolution does not have to occur, reducing the amount of…
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Querying IBM Director 5.2 for firmware versions

Brent Ozar
2 Comments
IBM Director is a decent tool to manage firmware & driver versions, but it doesn’t have a nice report to show the firmware & driver versions for things like the RSA, raid card, network cards, etc.  I wrote the below T-SQL query to list out the most commonly needed versions & IP addresses after I…
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SQL performance tuning: it’s about training too

Brent Ozar
1 Comment
When developers and SQL Server database administrators work together to make an app faster, it shouldn’t just be the DBA working alone in the dark.  If the DBA takes the slow code, goes into his cube, tweaks it (and indexes) and comes back out with a faster system, that fixes the problem once – but…
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SQL Server 2008 new feature recap

Brent Ozar
1 Comment
Kevin Kline put together a great paper on the new features in SQL Server 2008 called “Worth the Wait: Why SQL Server 2008 is Great” and it’s a good read.  It’s the best DBA-focused paper I’ve seen on the topic.  People have asked me what’s coming, and this is probably the best handout to use…
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Behind the times or ahead of the curve?

Brent Ozar
1 Comment
I have this strange personality quirk – I can’t decide whether I’m behind the times or ahead of the curve.  I found out about Dinner With The Band, an HDTV podcast where a music-savvy chef (Sam Mason) cooks for a band, and then they play a couple songs in his NYC apartment.  It’s a slick…
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SQL Backup Software: Part 4 – Features Still Missing

Brent Ozar
Backup and Recovery
1 Comment
In this issue of my multi-part series about SQL Server backup compression software, I’m going to talk about some features that database administrators might find useful, but don’t yet exist in the current generation of backup software. In-Depth Backup & Restore Progress Monitoring On multi-terabyte data warehouses – especially those running new backup compression software…
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What’s the Largest Database You’ve Worked With?

Brent Ozar
Professional Development, SQL Server
12 Comments
When hiring a production DBA, I start by asking them, “In terms of file size, what’s the largest database you’ve worked with?” In a perfect world, we’d only hire very experienced candidates, people who’ve worked with larger databases than we’re dealing with. In reality, though, we can’t always afford those candidates – if they’re even…
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SQL 2008 release date pushed back

Brent Ozar
0
Remember all the hoopla when SQL 2005 came out? Microsoft swore we’d get more frequent releases because the 5-year lag after SQL 2000 meant it wasn’t worth paying for Software Assurance on SQL Server. They promised we’d get new stuff faster. Fast forward to today’s announcement: “Microsoft is excited to deliver a feature complete CTP…
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Dell EMC AX150i review

Brent Ozar
Storage
15 Comments
Dell AX150i The iSCSI EMC AX150i is resold by Dell, and refurbished versions are available pretty inexpensively through the Dell Outlet. We just picked up our second AX150i with 12 500gb SATA drives for around $6,000 total, or about $1,000 per raw terabyte. It’s a great deal for lab or development storage, but there are…
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Microsoft Technology Center: The DBA Experience

Brent Ozar
4 Comments
Our contacts at Microsoft offered us the services of a Microsoft Technology Center to do a two-week lab exercise on our data warehouse. We’d kept piling one application after another on our data warehouse SQL Server until the poor thing was plain out of maintenance windows and couldn’t keep up, and we needed info from…
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At Microsoft’s Technology Center in Chicago

Brent Ozar
0
Carlos and I flew into Chicago midday yesterday, and a winter storm came in right after us. We’re at Microsoft’s Technology Center on Wacker drive, and our work area on the 23rd floor has a wall of windows with a great view of the city.  We watched the sky get darker in the afternoon as…
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SQL Performance Tuning: Estimating Percentage Improvements

Brent Ozar
1 Comment
When I’m doing performance tuning on an application in the early stages of its lifecycle (or any app that’s never had DBA attention before), I end up with a ton of recommendations within the first day of performance tuning.  The resulting to-do list can seem overwhelming to project managers and developers, so I include one…
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Sunday Buffet at The Lady & Sons

Brent Ozar
2 Comments
As part of our road trip this week to Oklahoma City, we stopped at Paula Deen’s The Lady and Sons in Savannah. For those of you unfamiliar with The Food Network, Paula Deen and her two sons are food celebrities, great people with a great story. The restaurant doesn’t take advance reservations: instead, hopeful diners…
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