Posts by Brent Ozar

Microsoft Technology Center: The DBA Experience

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Our contacts at Microsoft offered us the services of a Microsoft Technology Center to do a two-week lab exercise on our data warehouse. We’d kept piling one application after another on our data warehouse SQL Server until the poor thing was plain out of maintenance windows and couldn’t keep up, and we needed info from…
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At Microsoft’s Technology Center in Chicago

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Carlos and I flew into Chicago midday yesterday, and a winter storm came in right after us. We’re at Microsoft’s Technology Center on Wacker drive, and our work area on the 23rd floor has a wall of windows with a great view of the city.  We watched the sky get darker in the afternoon as…
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SQL Performance Tuning: Estimating Percentage Improvements

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When I’m doing performance tuning on an application in the early stages of its lifecycle (or any app that’s never had DBA attention before), I end up with a ton of recommendations within the first day of performance tuning.  The resulting to-do list can seem overwhelming to project managers and developers, so I include one…
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Sunday Buffet at The Lady & Sons

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As part of our road trip this week to Oklahoma City, we stopped at Paula Deen’s The Lady and Sons in Savannah. For those of you unfamiliar with The Food Network, Paula Deen and her two sons are food celebrities, great people with a great story. The restaurant doesn’t take advance reservations: instead, hopeful diners…
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PASS Summit 2007: Day Three Notes

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Bill Baker: Keynote on Office PerformancePoint 2007 Bill’s a fantastic speaker, and this is an interesting product, but our organization’s BI isn’t mature enough to take on this product yet. The product has a lot of potential; in a nutshell, it combines the flexibility and agility of Excel with the data safety & consistency of…
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PASS Summit 2007: Day Two Notes

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Tom Casey: Keynote Tom covered basic SQL Server marketing slides about the BI stack. Yawn. Good presenter, but couldn’t overcome the dry material. Then he handed it off to a Dell woman to announce that they’ll be selling packaged BI solutions with hardware, software, storage, etc all in one bundle. They’re targeting customers in the…
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PASS Summit 2007: Day One Notes

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My notes on the sessions I’ve attended so far: Ted Kummert: Keynote on SQL 2008 I’d already seen most of this PowerPoint deck during a South Florida SQL meeting at Microsoft, but the demos kicked butt.  Finally, we have Intellisense in Management Studio!  Woohoo!  There was other fun stuff, but I’ve already forgotten it. One…
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In Denver for SQLpass 2007 Summit

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I splurged and forked over $180 for a first class upgrade for my flight from Miami to Denver. It’s been years since I’ve flown, and it was scheduled to be a four hour flight, so it seemed like a good – albeit decadent – option. Turned out to be a lucky gamble: the plane was…
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Registered for the SQLpass Summit

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I’ll be attending the SQLpass Summit 2007 in Denver in a couple of weeks.  It’s an annual conference for Microsoft SQL Server database administrators with seminars like “Managing Large Data Warehouses” and “Plan Cache Analysis in SQL Server 2005.”  I’m excited because this is the first national SQL conference I’ve been able to attend. I’m…
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Ugly month of outages

Hardware, Storage, Virtualization
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The past month has been a real challenge, filled with 70-80 hour weeks and clawing back from one disaster after another. In late June, IBM recommended that we upgrade the firmware on our DS4800 SAN controllers to fix some problems. We obliged, and two days later, our Exchange cluster rebooted without warning. We’d been having…
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In line at Apple South Beach

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In line at Apple South Beach I wasn’t going to wait in line, but I came past here after work a few minutes ago and there’s maybe a hundred people in line, tops, so I figured what the hell. I won’t be broken hearted if they run out – I can wait a while.
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Bought a new Honda Mini-Minivan

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Honda Fit at Miami Ink After the Jeep developed a transmission problem last weekend, Erika and I decided to take the plunge. We traded in the Saturn for a new Honda Fit. Our plan had always been to have one really reliable car and one fun car, and for a couple of years, the Jeep…
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The Jeep takes a road trip – without us

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The Jeep is going on its own Memorial Day weekend road trip – to the dealer. Last night, Erika and I tried to take it to P. F. Chang’s for our payday Friday ritual only to find the shifter wasn’t connected to anything. I could slide it around freely between R, N, D, 3, 2,…
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My experience at the Apple Genius Bar

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Apple retail stores have a Genius Bar where you can get tech support.  I walked over to the Apple Store on Lincoln Road (damn, I love living in Miami Beach) and bellied up to the bar.  The bartender, wearing a black t-shirt with the label “Genius” on the front, helped out a couple of customers. …
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Take Your Kids To Work Day

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Yesterday was Take Your Sons and Daughters To Work Day, and I got roped into leading sessions. I ran a presentation on desktops & servers: we opened up desktops, explained what the parts did, showed off a couple of servers, and finished things off with a round of LAN games. We were a big hit…
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