Posts by Brent Ozar

One of the sweet things about telecommuting is the ability to pack up the tents and head off to a new location for a while.  Erika’s never seen a real winter, so we’re moving up to my hometown of Whitehall, Michigan.  We’re staying in the Colby State Park – not a real state park, of…

I had a burst of creativity and suggested to my Twitter peeps that they write short IT horror stories, 140 characters or less, and identify them with #ITBoo.  You can find ’em here on Search.Twitter.com by searching for #ITBoo.

Tulsa Tech Fest is a ginormous cross-discipline tech event that drew over 800 people to two days of fun sessions at OSU-Tulsa.  I learned so much from so many different people that I can’t even begin to lay it all out, but I’m going to throw in the highlights here. Tulsa developers “get” social media.…

#TulsaTechFest @msftguy keynote on Live platform – blog to follow Brian is a great presenter, but my problem with the entire Live platform can be summed up in this one slide. This slide shows all the different Live services, including Virtual Earth, Search, Hotmail, MSN, SkyDrive, etc. It’s hard to see with my iPhone camera’s…

Earlier, I blogged about the upcoming Kilimanjaro and Gemini releases from Microsoft: self-service BI tools that are delivered inside Excel.  David Stein left a comment which prompted me to write this separate blog entry about self-service BI in general.  Basically, David’s comment was that the quality of data won’t be as good because the end…

At the BI Conference in Seattle, Microsoft unveiled some components of project code name Kilimanjaro, a sort of R2 release for SQL Server expected in the first half of 2010.  Here’s a couple of relevant news sources: Doug Henschen on Intelligent Enterprise – “Microsoft Will Bow In-Memory Analysis, Appliance-Ready Database in 2010” Short Kilimanjaro posts…

Robert X. Cringely is a columnist for PBS – you know, the worldwide authority on hot information technology issues.  You might recognize some of their other experts like Norm Abrams and Big Bird.  Cringely’s just like them, only with less name recognition. In his latest blog, Cringely explains how cloud computing is going to make…

Microsoft License Plate Frame Picked this up at the Microsoft company store this week in Redmond. Looks great with my SQL license plate!  The only downside is that it blocks out the “Lone Star State” line.

Last week I posted a poll asking DBAs when they would use SQL Server 2008 in production.  Here’s the results after one week: In the next 3-6 months. (40%, 8 Votes) Not planning it yet. (30%, 6 Votes) In the next month or two. (20%, 4 Votes) Already done. (10%, 2 Votes) This week, I…

A database administrator asked me, “If I’ve been working at a company subject to Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, and I needed to learn what was different about HIPAA regulations, what would be the difference between the two?” First, in my answer, don’t think about credit card data or customer social security numbers.  That has its own security…