Posts by Brent Ozar

[Video] Office Hours: Ten Minutes of SQL Server Answers

Videos
2 Comments
ChatGPT, Resource Governor, manually created stats, Always Encrypted, and as always, fragmentation: let’s answer your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Here’s what we covered today: 00:00 Start 01:13 Timbalero: Hi Brent. my friend knows your view on rebuilding indexes. He also thinks that external index fragmentation affects pretty much only readahead scans. For scientific purposes, what metrics…
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Bite-Sized Office Hours: Q&A on TikTok

Company News
9 Comments
Wanna learn about SQL Server and the Microsoft data platform, but you don’t wanna sit through long videos? Enjoy short videos on TikTok? I’ve got just the thing: I’m taking the best Q&A from Office Hours and putting ’em out as individual videos. That way, as you’re swiping through practical jokes, friendship goals, candid idiocy, music…
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Office Hours - ask me anything.

[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About SQL Server

Videos
3 Comments
Y’all just never run out of interesting questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento! I’m impressed, got another great round today. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:25 Chrisbell: Recently we’ve been facing thread starvation issues. How can we troubleshoot it when even sp_whoisactive ( even with DAC ) is unresponsive and takes forever to return a result set…
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The 20th Anniversary of the SQL Slammer Worm

SQL Server
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Twenty years ago this month (next Wednesday to be exact), sysadmins and database administrators started noticing extremely high network traffic related to problems with their SQL Servers. The SQL Slammer worm was infecting Microsoft SQL Servers. Microsoft had known about it and patched the problem 6 months earlier, but people just weren’t patching SQL Server. There…
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[Video] Office Hours: Back Live on Twitch Again

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After I stopped selling live classes, I took some time off all live broadcasting period. It was a nice couple of months over the holidays, had a good time with the family, and now I’m starting to fire up my Twitch channel again. I’m not setting a schedule yet, just broadcasting when I have time…
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[Video] Office Hours: Bad Hair Edition

Videos
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I am waaaay overdue for a haircut, but instead of being a responsible adult, I stopped to take your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. 00:00 Start 00:43 Mike: We have 3 Dell PowerEdge R630 servers with SQL Server installed. Everything functions for 3.5 years straight. How long is it expected to work? 01:30 Shalom: What are the…
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Office Hours: Bad Questions Edition

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Normally, y’all post and upvote great questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, but in today’s episode, y’all upvoted some stinkers. Buckle up. 00:00 Start 00:47 SQLKB: Hi, according to sp_BlitzCache I usually have more than 260k plans in cache, created in the past 1 hour, is it a big number? Comparing number of plans from exec_query_stats vs exec_cached_plans…
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3 Ways to Debug T-SQL Code

T-SQL
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Writing new code = bugging. That part’s easy. Taking those bugs back out, that’s the hard part. Developers are used to their tools having built-in ways to show what line of code is running now, output the current content of variables, echo back progress messages, etc. For a while, SQL Server Management Studio also had…
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How to Find Missing Rows in a Table

T-SQL
21 Comments
When someone says, “Find all the rows that have been deleted,” it’s a lot easier when the table has an Id/Identity column. Let’s take the Stack Overflow Users table: It has Ids -1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … but no 6 or 7. (Or 0.) If someone asks you to find all the Ids…
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The SQL Server Posts You Read the Most in 2022

Company News
3 Comments
Here’s what I wrote in 2022 that gathered the most views: #10: Who’s Hiring in the Database Community? February 2022 Edition – I saw the success of Hacker News’ “Who’s Hiring” monthly posts, and I blatantly stole the idea for the Microsoft data platform community. It works out well, very popular, very popular. #9: PSPO:…
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[Video] Office Hours: Holiday Speed Round

Videos
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Beep beep! Here’s a speed round of Office Hours where I rip through a dozen questions in under ten minutes. Want to see your own questions answered? Post ’em and upvote the ones you like at https://pollgab.com/room/brento. 00:00 Start 00:22 DB-A-Team: Love and appreciate your work and please don’t make fun of my question. I…
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Brent Ozar Webcast

[Video] Office Hours: Ham Pillow Edition

Videos
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Y’all post questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me discuss, and then I artfully dodge giving you answers. At least, that’s how it feels sometimes, hahaha: Here’s what we discussed in today’s episode: 00:00 Start 00:20 Piotr: Do many of your clients disable SA account for security? What are your…
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Should You Use SQL Server 2022’s GREATEST and LEAST?

SQL Server
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If you’ve been following along with this week’s posts on DATETRUNC and STRING_SPLIT, you’re probably going to think the answer is no, but bear with me. It’s Christmas week, right? The news can’t all be bad. GREATEST and LEAST are kinda like MAX and MIN, but instead of taking multiple rows as input, they take multiple columns.…
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Should You Use SQL Server 2022’s STRING_SPLIT?

T-SQL
2 Comments
SQL Server 2022 improved the STRING_SPLIT function so that it can now return lists that are guaranteed to be in order. However, that’s the only thing they improved – there’s still a critical performance problem with it. Let’s take the Stack Overflow database, Users table, put in an index on Location, and then test a…
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Should You Use SQL Server 2022’s DATETRUNC?

T-SQL
10 Comments
SQL Server 2022 introduced a new T-SQL element, DATETRUNC, that truncates parts of dates. For example: SELECT DATETRUNC(year, '2017-06-01'); 1 SELECT DATETRUNC(year, '2017-06-01'); Truncates everything in that date other than the year, so it returns just 2017-01-01 00:00: You might ask, “Well, why not just use YEAR()?” That’s a good question – there are times…
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[Video] Office Hours: Great Questions, Part 2

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Every time I think, “There can’t be any more SQL Server questions left,” y’all post more great ones at https://pollgab.com/room/brento! Here’s what we covered: 00:21 MattC: Hi Brent. Have you check out ChatGPT’s ability to write SQL code. VERY impressive and in some cases faster than a stackoverflow question. In fact stackoverflow have had to…
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