Posts by Brent Ozar

My first blog entry from a Cingular 8125

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Take two. It’s hard to write a glowing review of a piece of consumer electronics when the damn thing crashes every half hour or so. As I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted by a frozen screen, my new Cingular 8125 has everything from WiFi to Bluetooth to a full-blown keyboard. Make that…
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Teaching people programming

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My new job’s going extremely well, having the time of my life. I’m working with a group of very competent programmers who’ve produced a whole lot of code, but without the luxury of having their own database administrator. As a result, the database is in truly horrendous shape. As an example, I spent about an…
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My new humble abode

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Change of plans. Southern Wine & Spirits, where I’ve been consulting since October, decided at the last minute that they wanted to bring me on permanently to work directly for them. They’re a fantastic group of people, and they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Pictured here is my new cube. It may not…
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Hiring the Best DBAs: From a DBA Perspective

Professional Development
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A few more collected notes from my recent interviews: Sell Them On Your Company Right Away In your company’s reception area, have a few pieces of relatively up-to-date reading material about your industry, or even better, about your company in specific.  The company I ended up choosing, had a great marketing booklet describing the relationships…
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It’s official: Apples run Windows

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It’s official: Apples run Windows. Apple’s newest machines use Intel processors, just like regular PC’s from Dell and HP. That meant in theory, we could have Apples that run both Apple software and Windows software. In reality, it took some time and about $13k of bounty money to make the whole thing actually happen. After…
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Blogging, privacy, and my new job

Blogging
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Yesterday, one of my soon-to-be-former coworkers, Kiran, tipped me off to an NPR story on blogging and privacy. Steve Inskeep spoke with a grad student who writes a few Myspace blogs with his personal journal, political ramblings, and – whee – a blog about blogs. The student observed that he doesn’t know anyone who’s been…
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Segway is doomed

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I get a kick out of seeing quarter-million-dollar cars put in completely mundane positions. I’m not talking about things like Wrecked Exotics, a site that features expensive car accidents, but more like day-to-day tasks like a Rolls Royce at a parking meter. Sitting at a traffic light today, watching a man load his dry cleaning…
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Software that makes my job easier

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The Kanbay-Adjoined merger just got finalized, and the IT staff is asking us to prep our laptops for replacements. I figured I’d make a list of the programs I typically install when I first get a new machine. I’m not including the Microsoft stuff (Office, SQL Server, Visual SourceSafe, etc) that every SQL Server DBA…
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Living on jambalaya out of the box

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True story: we were talking entry-level salaries today at work when one of my coworkers said, “I don’t know how anybody can possibly live on $X here in Miami.” My salary: about $5k below $X. I immediately busted out laughing and admitted what I make, because I’ve never been the secretive type. And besides, he…
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Doing college homework

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I dropped out of college over a decade ago without having a personal direction in life. Every now and then, other people ask why I don’t go back to college. Last night and this morning, I had the opportunity to do college homework – albeit somebody else’s. More out of curiosity than anything else, I…
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Resistance to blogging

Blogging
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I’ve encountered two instances this week where people dug in their heels and refused to even think about blogging as a communications medium. #1: A Michigan friend of mine has been struggling with web development for years while trying to build a site to document his sailing travels. He wants a simple site – the…
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Data mart limbo: how low can you go?

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There’s a new blog about Dimensional Data Warehouse Architecture & Design written by Nick Galemmo, and his recent entries caught the eye of one of my coworkers. Galemmo asked “What on Earth is a Data Mart?” and comes to the answer: “The Great Truth in Dimensional Data Warehousing boils down to this: To achieve success…
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Good employees: cheaper by the dozen?

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Chris Messina noted Google’s purchase of Measure Maps and blogged about it: Kind of makes you wonder: is there room for the independent in The Acquisition Economy 2.0? …Especially when you can buy just an employee and leave his company behind? I saw that and just had to respond, especially with my employer in the…
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Run traces on your ‘bases

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Database admins should run regular traces (aka profiles) on all of their database servers. Audit all login/logout events just to be aware of who’s logging into each server, from which machines, and how often. Today, I caught one of the production application servers logging into a development database server – a bad combination. I checked…
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Remember The Milk Review

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Remember The Milk Remember The Milk is the killer to-do list app, period. It’s a free web site to help you manage your to-do list. There’s tons of similar task management web apps out there, and here’s why this one is different: I can set up multiple lists like work, personal, vacation planning, grocery list,…
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Notes from our Caribbean cruise

Personal
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We’re back! We’re back at home with our beloved Ernie, on our beloved land. We had a pretty good and extremely relaxing time on our cruise. The thing I like about cruising is that it’s so stress-free. We pull into the cruise port, unload our luggage, and we’re done working for ten days. By day…
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SQL Server 2005 Intellisense

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With Microsoft touting Intellisense in just about all of their products, including Visual Studio, one would assume it’d show up in their flagship database product, SQL Server 2005. Unfortunately, the SQL Management Studio still doesn’t offer any prompting as you type in code, even though it’s based roughly on Visual Studio 2005. Enter PromptSQL, an…
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