Posts by Brent Ozar

YO! DBA Raps

Humor
1 Comment
Now, here’s a little story I got to tell About two bad bloggers you know so well Michelle Ufford is the @SQLFool And Ward Pond, he’s a twit, but of course he’s cool She don’t have a horsey named Paul Revere But she drops mad lyrics, you can see ’em here They’re good stuff, but…
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Bloggers: Don’t Focus Too Much on Search Terms

Blogging
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When blogging, it’s tempting to use your web analytics software to examine what people are searching for, and then build your new blog posts around the search terms people are using.  After all, if people are searching for that, it’s a popular topic, so you should write about it, right? Wrong. You already wrote about…
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Optimists, Pessimists and Technology People

Humor
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Pessimist: “The glass is half empty.” Optimist: “The glass is half full.” Database Administrator: “The glass is sized correctly for peak loads.” Virtualization Admin: “This person should be sharing a Dixie Cup with the guys in accounting.” Business Intelligence Admin: “How can we upsell this customer to bottled water?” Security Admin: “Whose glass is this?…
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New SQL Server Editions – #sqleditions

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In the Quest booth at the SSWUG Virtual Conference, somehow we got started naming new editions of SQL Server, and I just had to move the discussion into Twitter to let everybody else in on the fun. Here’s been some of the funny ones: SQL Server MVP Edition: <NDA> (sorry I can’t tell you what…
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How do you name your computers?

28 Comments
I name my computers after Sesame Street and Muppet Show characters.  Big Bird has historically been my workstation – at the moment, it’s an Apple Macbook Pro from 2008, the original all-silver design.  The rest are a revolving mix: Gonzo – a Dell Latitude D830 laptop that acts as a backup workstation. CookieMonster – a…
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Starting the SQL Journey

8 Comments
Jorge Segarra aka @SQLChicken tagged me in a quiz asking how DBAs got started in the business, and I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about this earlier.  Great question. I Started as a Developer That’s right – I was one of THEM. But wait – it gets better.  I started as a VBscript classic ASP…
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Book Review: The Whuffie Factor

Book Reviews
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You, dear reader, probably don’t work in the marketing department.  The vast majority of my readers are information technology professionals, and the rest are my family.  (Hi, Mom!) Today, you can’t get a job like mine without knowing how whuffie works. In the not-too-distant future, you may not even be able to get a job…
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Oracle buying Sun

Oracle
2 Comments
Oracle is buying Sun, the owner of Java, MySQL and Solaris. Oracle is now the enterprise equivalent of Apple: a single vendor with a start-to-finish closed loop from the hardware to the OS to the applications. Another way to look at it: they now own a top-to-bottom development stack like Microsoft’s: OS (Solaris, and no,…
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PowerShell poll results

5 Comments
In my SQL Server CMDB webcast this week, I ran a poll: how many of the ~100 attendees had worked with PowerShell? No, but plan to – 40% No, and don’t plan to – 40% Yes, for 0-6 months – 10% Yes, for 6 months or more – 10% I’m rounding those percentages.  The short…
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No, I’m not an MVP.

4 Comments
I ran an April Fool’s post about becoming a Microsoft Natural Keyboard MVP, and things spun a little out of control.  The MVP announcements actually did come out on April 1, so some folks saw the blog post (“I’m Finally a Microsoft MVP!”) and congratulated me without actually reading the article.  I think I caught…
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Latest Quiz: Great Leaders in My Career

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Chris Shaw tagged SQL Server DBA bloggers and asked, “Who has been a great leader in your career and what made them a great leader?” I’ve been fortunate to work for a stream of really, really good managers, but “leader” means something else, as Chris explained.  I even had to hit the dictionary because I…
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Virtualization Survey

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Are you devoted to virtualization?  Are you avoiding it like the plague?  Or somewhere in the middle? Jay Grieves, the author of Big Swinging Developer and one of the uber-cool Houstonians I met back at the Caroline Collective, emailed me about doing a survey to find out some truths from people who’ve been managing large…
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Getting the most recent record

SQL Server
24 Comments
Sounds simple, right?  Just grab the max.  But what if you want to use a single T-SQL operation to fetch the most recent record and some of its attributes? StorminSpank asked: @BrentO SQL Question. 4 columns, ID, Date, Info1, Info2. ID has multiple entries. Want Latest Date for Distinct ID, but also info1 and 2.…
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What Is A CMDB?

9 Comments
Big enterprise shops aspire to build a Configuration Management DataBase that will track their IT assets, how they’re configured, who relies on them, what applications live on them, and so on. Let’s take a simple web application as an example: what would it take to document its components and configuration?  We would want to know:…
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Best Practices are Meaningless to Your Manager

6 Comments
That’s right, you heard me. Your manager doesn’t care about best practices.  You can beat your chest and wail about putting the SQL Server data and log files on separate arrays, and your manager doesn’t care.  The instant you’re out of earshot, your manager starts complaining to his manager about how you won’t shut up…
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