Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

2787 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.

[Video] Office Hours in North Bay, Canada

Last Updated April 6, 2025

Brent Ozar

Videos

Every year, Aaron Bertrand runs a curling tournament up in scenic North Bay where he grew up. I joined in this year, and before the tournament, sat on the shores of Lake Napissing to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Office Hours in North Bay, CanadaWatch this video on YouTube Here’s what we covered: 00:00…

Tap Tap Tap – Short, Silent SQL Server Tutorials

Last Updated April 7, 2025

Brent Ozar

Videos

One of the things I love about TikTok is that it exposes me to wildly new video ideas like this: @tiipititap ? original sound – tiipititap There’s a whole genre of videos in that style – people using tapping plastic pointer fingers on a grainy screen with no voiceover. One sub-genre (like the video above)…

Free Webcast: Avoiding Deadlocks by Query Tuning

Last Updated April 7, 2025

Brent Ozar

Company News

Deadlocks used to scare me. I’d get the alert from a monitoring tool, and I’d look around to see if anyone was watching me. If the coast was clear, I’d… delete the notification. Deadlocks were a mystery to me because I didn’t know how I was supposed to fix them. Sometimes the same queries could…

[Video] Office Hours in My Vegas Backyard

Last Updated March 16, 2025

Brent Ozar

Videos

I’m doing a lot of travel this month, but I took a break in my Vegas backyard to go through the top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Office Hours in My Vegas BackyardWatch this video on YouTube Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:29 Nick H: I’m a new starter at an organisation who have lots of…

Fundamentals Week 2025 is Coming This Month! Get Your Tickets Now.

Last Updated February 28, 2025

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

You’ve attended some of my free online streams, read my blog posts, and you use the First Responder Kit. You enjoy my laid-back, humorous approach to sharing what I’ve learned over the years. You love live classes. You’ve tried watching recordings or stepping through demos yourself, but…you just can’t block out the time, and you…

What’s New in SQL Server 2025

Last Updated April 1, 2025

Brent Ozar

Humor

This year’s release of Microsoft’s enterprise-grade relational database focuses on the most highly requested features from customers. Highlights include: Tooling support for SSMS like adding the debugger back in and executing the query where your cursor is on Production DBA enhancements like the ability to restore a single table from backup, and automatic background corruption checks…

[Video] Office Hours: Back in the Home Office

Last Updated March 6, 2025

Brent Ozar

Videos

I’m back home after a 2-week Iceland vacation. Let’s catch up with your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Office Hours: Back Home After IcelandWatch this video on YouTube Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 02:04 Suresh: Hi Brent . Question about 128 GB memory limit for SQL server standard edition.If I set ‘Max SQL Server Memory’…

Query Exercise Answer: Finding Email Addresses

Last Updated March 20, 2025

Brent Ozar

Query Exercise Answers

For this week’s Query Exercise, your mission had two parts: Do a first pass search through the Users table looking for columns where people had snuck in email addresses where they didn’t belong Write a more high-quality query to identify exactly which rows we needed to handle I wrote the challenge that way because in database…

Why Your Azure SQL DB Hyperscale Bill is Higher Than You’d Expect

Last Updated March 23, 2025

Brent Ozar

Azure SQL DB, Hyperscale

tl;dr: if you use Azure SQL DB Hyperscale’s auto-scaling, it’s probably not cutting your bill down because like SQL Server, Hyperscale doesn’t automatically relinquish memory, and it’ll be up to you to manually manage your own memory if you wanna cut your bill. Now for the long story. Microsoft’s Azure SQL DB Hyperscale has an…

[Video] Office Hours: Waiting for the Hot Tub to Fill

Last Updated March 5, 2025

Brent Ozar

Videos

While waiting for my Husavik hot tub to fill up, I took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Office Hours: Waiting for My Icelandic Hot Tub to FillWatch this video on YouTube Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:28 1440×1080: always on with 2 nodes 1db, readable secondary. I’ve optimized both nodes to a point where…

T-SQL Has Regex in SQL Server 2025. Don’t Get Too Excited.

Last Updated December 10, 2025

Brent Ozar

SQL Server 2025, T-SQL

Regular expressions are a way of doing complex string searches. They can be really useful, but they have a reputation: they’re hard to write, hard to read, and they’re even harder to troubleshoot. Once you master ’em, though, they come in handy for very specific situations. This post isn’t about their complexity, though. This post…

Query Exercise: Looking for Email Addresses

Last Updated March 15, 2025

Brent Ozar

Query Exercises

“They put their password WHERE?!?” Personally identifiable information (PII) is freakin’ everywhere. When companies first start looking to identify and lock down their data, they think it’s going to be as easy as identifying common columns like EmailAddress, DateOfBirth, SocialSecurityNumber, and so forth. They think, “We’ll just encrypt those columns and we’ll be fine.” Ho…

What’s Coming in SQL Server 2025, DMV Edition

Last Updated March 5, 2025

Brent Ozar

SQL Server 2025

As we approach the first public releases of SQL Server 2025, it’s fun to start spelunking through things Azure SQL DB has today – announced and unannounced – that aren’t yet present in the boxed product version of SQL Server. Microsoft staff used to say that Azure SQL DB is “the next version” of the…

Announcing Fundamentals Week 2025!

Last Updated April 14, 2025

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

[Video] Office Hours: Philosophical Questions at the Waterfall of the Gods

Last Updated February 25, 2025

Brent Ozar

Videos

I’m in Iceland this week, land of fire and ice, a place I keep coming back to over the years. It’s one of my favorite places on earth with stunning scenery, nice folks, and great restaurants. I paused at Godafoss to take your top-voted questions from Pollgab.com/room/brento. Office Hours: Philosophical Tech Questions at the Waterfall…

Who’s Hiring in the Microsoft Data Platform Community? March 2025 Edition

Last Updated December 23, 2024

Brent Ozar

Who's Hiring

Is your company hiring for a database position as of March 2025? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let’s set up some rapid networking here. If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules: Your comment must include the job title, and either a link to the…

Office Hours: Unusual Beach Chair Edition

Last Updated February 20, 2025

Brent Ozar

Videos

When you think ‘beach chair’, this probably isn’t what you think. I’m at a black sand beach on the south coast of Iceland, answering your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Office Hours: Unusual Beach Chairs EditionWatch this video on YouTube 00:00 Start 02:28 BoBo: Let us rate Brent’s shirts – I will start. “Morally flexible” and…

Finding Out What Changed in a Cumulative Update

Last Updated March 2, 2025

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

Over the last several years, Microsoft has been putting less and less effort into Cumulative Update documentation. We used to get full-blown knowledge base articles about fixes, but these days, we get a collection of footnotes with deceiving hyperlinks that look like they’re going to lead to more information – but they simply lead back to…

Vertical Partitioning Is Almost Never the Answer. Here’s Why.

Last Updated February 25, 2025

Brent Ozar

Partitioning

You’re looking at a wide table with 100-200 columns. Years ago, it started as a “normal” table with maybe 10-20, but over the years, people kept gradually adding one column after another. Now, this behemoth is causing you problems because: The table’s size on disk is huge Queries are slow, especially when they do table…

[Video] Office Hours: We’ve Got the (Honda) Beat

Last Updated February 11, 2025

Brent Ozar

Videos

Meet my latest toy, a 1991 Honda Beat! I introduce it, then take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Office Hours with my Honda BeatWatch this video on YouTube Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 02:17 Pro: Are sessions sleeping during transactions harmful, and do they prevent the transaction log from truncating? If so, how can’t…