Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

2779 posts

https://www.brentozar.com

I make Microsoft SQL Server go faster. I love teaching, travel, cars, and laughing. I'm based out of Las Vegas. He/him.

Updated, Larger Stack Overflow Demo Database

Last Updated July 16, 2024

Brent Ozar

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow publishes a data dump with all user-contributed content, and it’s a fun set of data to use for demos. I took the 2024-April data dump, and imported it into a Microsoft SQL Server database. It’s an 31GB torrent (magnet) that expands to a ~202GB database. I used Microsoft SQL Server 2016, so you…

[Video] Office Hours in Bulgaria

Last Updated June 30, 2024

Brent Ozar

Videos

I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento while in front of the National Gallery for Foreign Art in Sofia. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 03:12 MyTeaGotCold: If all of my columns are nvarchar, is there a performance benefit to always wrapping strings in N”? My tests have been inconclusive. 03:50 SadButTrue: Hey…

Announcing Free SQL Server Monitoring.

Last Updated July 17, 2024

Brent Ozar

SQL ConstantCare

You already use sp_Blitz and the rest of the free, open source First Responder Kit to give your SQL Servers a health check now and then. But let’s be honest: you don’t do it often enough. You wish you had an easier way to know when your backups stop working, when corruption strikes, when a…

Use “We” Not “You”. #tsql2sday

Last Updated July 2, 2024

Brent Ozar

Consulting Lines

For T-SQL Tuesday this month, Louis Davidson suggested we give our past self some advice. I’d tell myself, “Use ‘we’, not ‘you’.” For years, when I gave advice, I’d say things like: “You’re doing A, when you should really be doing B instead.” “Your code has a problem right here.” “Your network settings are wrong,…

[Video] Office Hours in Sofia, Bulgaria

Last Updated June 30, 2024

Brent Ozar

Videos

I was honored to speak at the Present to Succeed conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, run by a former SQL Server MCM. Sofia is a beautiful city, and the gorgeous Patriarchal Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky (Wikipedia) was close to my hotel, so I dragged my tripod over there for an Office Hours session. Here’s…

Save $350 on the PASS Summit if You Register Now.

Last Updated June 30, 2024

Brent Ozar

#SQLPass

Next Tuesday, pricing on the 3-day tickets for the PASS Data Community Summit goes up to $2,095. But if you register right now, plus use coupon code BRENTO24, it’s just $1,745. It’s one in-person conference that covers Microsoft SQL Server, Azure, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Oracle, and more. So many of us (me included!) are working with…

Does Bit Column Order Matter in Tables?

Last Updated June 30, 2024

Brent Ozar

Development

At the PGConf.dev, where Postgres developers get together and strategize the work they wanna do for the next version, I attended a session where Matthias van de Meent talked about changing the way Postgres stores columns. As of right now (Postgres 17), columns are aligned in 8-bit intervals, so if you create a table with…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for July 2024

Last Updated July 1, 2024

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates

The next release would normally be August, but I’m doing a release a little early in order to fix 2 issues with the Consultant Toolkit. The May release broke the ability to automatically upload results to Amazon S3, and didn’t include all of sp_BlitzLock’s results. Those are now fixed, so I wanted to get another…

[Video] Office Hours: I Don’t Have All the Answers

Last Updated June 5, 2024

Brent Ozar

Videos

When I went through the top-voted questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, I didn’t have all the answers today: Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:48 MyTeaGotCold: I increased my RAM from 16 GB to 32 GB and my buffer pool has grown, but my PAGEIOLATCH_SH waits went up by two percentage points. What might that indicate? 01:46…

Join Me in Seattle for Watch Brent Tune a Query in SQL Server 2022

Last Updated June 19, 2024

Brent Ozar

#SQLPass

The PASS Data Community Summit session lineup for Nov 4-8 in Seattle was just announced, and I’ve been selected for a general session! Watch Brent Tune a Query in SQL Server 2022: Ever wonder how somebody else does it? In this all-demo session, watch over Brent Ozar’s shoulder while he takes a slow stored procedure in…

The SQL Language is Just a Hurdle You Gotta Overcome.

Last Updated June 25, 2024

Brent Ozar

T-SQL

I’m not talking just about Microsoft SQL Server specifically here, nor T-SQL. Let’s zoom out a little and think bigger picture for a second: is the SQL language itself a problem? Sometimes when I talk to client developers, they gripe about the antiquated language. The order of a SELECT statement doesn’t make any sense. You…

[Video] Office Hours: Database Answers from a Hotel Room

Last Updated June 5, 2024

Brent Ozar

Videos

I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento before heading out to PGConf.dev in Vancouver. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:43 Poul J: Hi Brent. Can you give some examples of how a CHECK() constraint is used by the optimizer. Is it similar to a filtered index… Or is there more to it? 03:54…

Query Exercise Answer: Beating ChatGPT at Finding Good Question Times

Last Updated June 15, 2024

Brent Ozar

Query Exercise Answers

For this week’s Query Exercise, I asked you to write a better query than ChatGPT wrote. Your goal was to find the best days and times to post questions on Stack Overflow. I found it interesting that a lot of the initial answers focused on the times when there were the most questions, or which questions…

Join Me in San Diego for SQL Saturday!

Last Updated June 18, 2024

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

I’m coming to San Diego on Sept 13-14 for SQL Saturday San Diego! I’m teaching a one-day pre-conference workshop on Friday, September 13th. Tuning Databases In One Day – You’ve got production databases in SQL Server or Azure SQL DB, and you want to make ’em faster. You need to identify the database’s bottleneck, prove…

[Video] Creepy Office Hours in Vancouver

Last Updated May 24, 2024

Brent Ozar

Videos

While in a hotel room in Vancouver for PGconf.dev, I strapped on my Apple Vision Pro headset to take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Somehow, the latest Vision OS update gave me a 1980s 3rd Bass haircut. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:03 MyTeaGotCold: Have you ever seen SSISDB migrated on to a new…

Query Exercise: Beat ChatGPT at Finding Good Question Times

Last Updated July 3, 2024

Brent Ozar

Query Exercises

What are the best days of the week and times of the day to post a question at StackOverflow.com? It seems like a simple question, but it’s surprisingly nuanced. I asked ChatGPT’s latest version, 4o, and its answer made me laugh out loud. First off, the T-SQL is terrible: it creates a completely unnecessary temp…

I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT ... actually I'm going to keep taking it because I get paid to take it

There’s a 6-Month Statute of Limitations on “The Last Person.”

Last Updated May 23, 2024

Brent Ozar

Processes and Practices

“The last person must have set it up that way.” “The last person wrote that code.” “The last person just didn’t configure it right.” You can use that excuse for 6 months. For six months, you’re allowed to get up to speed on the company’s politics, the intricacies of the app, and the responsibilities of…

[Video] Office Hours in a Hotel Room

Last Updated May 16, 2024

Brent Ozar

Videos

While in Nashville for a creators conference, I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:38 Bisal Basyal: What is the best way to manage roles in sql server in Azure VMs (multiple). We want separate logins for each users but it should be same on all Azure SQL…

Ola Hallengren job configuration with @NumberOfFiles = 4 parameter

Two Tweaks for Faster Backups with Ola Hallengren’s Scripts

Last Updated May 23, 2024

Brent Ozar

Backup and Recovery

Ola Hallengren’s free maintenance solution is widely used as a replacement for SQL Server maintenance plans. It’s a more powerful, flexible tool for backups, corruption checking, and index & statistics updates. If you’re using it for backups, there are two quick, easy changes that can dramatically reduce your nightly job runtimes. First, set @NumberOfFiles =…

Who’s Hiring in the Microsoft Data Platform Community? June 2024 Edition

Last Updated April 24, 2024

Brent Ozar

Who’s Hiring

Is your company hiring for a database position as of June 2024? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let’s set up some rapid networking here. If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules: Your comment must include the job title, and either a link to the…