Posts by Brent Ozar

[Video] Office Hours in a Mexican Hot Tub

Videos
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While taking a dip in Cabo, I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Office Hours in Cabo San LucasWatch this video on YouTube Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:00 OpportunityKnocking: What are your thoughts on when to implement a NoSQL strategy over traditional RDBMS for large enterprise-wide database platform solutions? I see scalability…
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I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT ... actually I'm going to keep taking it because I get paid to take it

Today’s a Good Day to Talk to Your Manager About Disaster Recovery.

Last night, two major IT disasters struck: Microsoft Azure’s Central region went down for about 4 hours. The official post-mortem isn’t out yet, but rumor has it that while decommissioning legacy storage services, the product group deleted the wrong thing. Crowdstrike pushed a bad update, leading to blue screens of death on Windows systems worldwide,…
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[Video] Office Hours in My Backyard

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On a pleasantly mild morning, I sat down on the patio and took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Office Hours in My Backyard: SQL Server Q&AWatch this video on YouTube   Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:56 MyTeaGotCold: When going in to a database blind, do you worry at all about its compatibility level?…
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Query Exercise: Fix This Computed Column.

Query Exercises
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Take any size of the Stack Overflow database and check out the WebsiteUrl column of the Users table: Sometimes it’s null, sometimes it’s an empty string, sometimes it’s populated but the URL isn’t valid. Let’s say that along the way, someone decided to ask ChatGPT to build a function to check for valid website URLs,…
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[Video] Office Hours in Bulgaria

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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. Office Hours in Sofia, BulgariaWatch this video on YouTube   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…
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Use “We” Not “You”. #tsql2sday

Consulting Lines
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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,…
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[Video] Office Hours in Sofia, Bulgaria

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

#SQLPass
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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…
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Does Bit Column Order Matter in Tables?

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

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When I went through the top-voted questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, I didn’t have all the answers today: Office Hours: I Don't Have All the AnswersWatch this video on YouTube 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…
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The SQL Language is Just a Hurdle You Gotta Overcome.

T-SQL
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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…
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[Video] Office Hours: Database Answers from a Hotel Room

Videos
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I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento before heading out to PGConf.dev in Vancouver. Office Hours: Database Answers in VancouverWatch this video on YouTube 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…
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Join Me in San Diego for SQL Saturday!

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…
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