Posts by Brent Ozar

Tara Hunt blogged about the Boutique Generation, saying: “You may be a member of the Boutique Generation if you: Enjoy shopping at your local pharmacy, grocer, clothing store where you know the owners and feel yourself going out of your way to give them business even if their prices are higher because you prefer to…

Ben and I finishing the Run for Miracles I ran a 5k this morning in Delray Beach with Ben, the guy from work who got me started on the whole running thing. At our post-race breakfast at Cracker Barrel (helllooo, calories), I said that I don’t enjoy running at all, but I’m doing it for…

Word is getting out at the office about me using a Mac, and at least once a week now, someone comes over to my cube to ask a few questions. Here are the most common ones: Q: Is that your personal computer, or your work one? It’s my work one, and it’s the only computer…

DBAs need an in-office computer to run overnight and weekend performance logs, traces, and long-running queries. For example, let’s say you need to run a long series of maintenance queries to rebuild indexes over the weekend. You shouldn’t be remote-desktopping into your production servers to run this query: instead, you just need a simple workstation…

It’s that beautiful time of year when everybody watches the colors. No, not the changing browns and reds of the foliage, but the red and black numbers on P&L statements. That’s right – it’s budget time. In order to build a good database budget, we have to ask our managers a few key questions: Are…

The ever-brilliant Jeff Atwood wrote a fascinating blog post about why building software is hard: it’s never been built before.  He was following up on a similar blog post, but in a nutshell, software projects are harder than construction projects because they’re nothing like projects at all.  Every time we build a new piece of…

I finished my first 5k race last night, and I look forward to more of ’em. My official time was 37 minutes 46 seconds. I placed 40th out of 42 in my division (30-34 year old males), 415th out of 496 males, and 866th overall out of 1163 runners. The average male ran 30 minutes…

Today, I signed up for my first 5k race – well, my first race period – the 12th Annual Fantasy of Lights 5k. While this will technically be a race, I will in no way be judging my results by the time it takes me to finish, or where I finish in the pack.  I…

The below screenshot is what you see when you try to go to Google.com with Flock: When I go to a web site, and software tries to hijack my session to go to a different web site, that’s bad software. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned the offer is – if the software has the gumption…

This weekend, I was determined to set up my Cingular 8125 PocketPC phone to play movies, TV shows, and music videos. It was faster and easier than I’d even expected. Step 1: get the free PocketDivxEncoder. Install this on your desktop computer. It converts your existing videos to PocketPC-friendly formats that take less space, and…

Upon viewing The Sheep Market, Erika remarked: “People on the internet will work for nothing, and they buy everything.” I got a good laugh out of that. It’s pretty much true, and The Sheep Market is a great piece of evidence. Aaron Koblin used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to get 10,000 drawings of sheep at a…

Tara Hunt posted her BayCHI presentation notes, and she touches just a bit on why startup companies (heck, any companies) need to focus on building active user communities and listening closely to them. The community phenomenon is something that everyday project planners need to recognize and acknowledge. Internal IT projects benefit by building this kind…

You wonder why I’m so damn chipper on the mornings of Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays? Blame Penny Arcade, my favorite web comic. It’s chock full of in-crowd jokes, but the commentary by the authors is almost – but not quite – accessible to everybody. Take a line from today’s commentary where Tycho is talking about…

I’ve had so many hilarious things going on lately, I don’t even know where to begin. Last weekend, IBM Director started emailing us that a couple of servers were overheating. In a matter of minutes, the heat problems were spreading across different racks, and the IT crew all started driving into the office simultaneously. Our…

I try not to wear too many computer-related t-shirts because they emphasize my fashion ineptitude, but when Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog came out with their logo t-shirts, I could not resist. The logo is great, the blog is funny and spot-on, and let’s face it, every geek should have at least one good inside…