Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

2789 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.

Thoughts About Stack Overflow’s Annual Developer Survey

Last Updated July 24, 2024

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

Every year, Stack Overflow runs a developer survey about technology, work, community, and more. This year’s results include 65,437 responses from developers around the world. The results are biased towards the kinds of developers who use Stack Overflow – 76% of the respondents reported that they have a Stack Overflow account. I would guess that…

[Video] Office Hours in a Mexican Hot Tub

Last Updated July 30, 2024

Brent Ozar

Videos

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…

Query Exercise Answer: Fixing a Slow Computed Column

Last Updated July 18, 2024

Brent Ozar

Query Exercise Answers

In last week’s Query Exercise, we added a user-defined function to the Users table to check whether their WebsiteUrl was valid or not. I noted that even with an index on Reputation, SQL Server 2022 simply ignored the index, did a table scan, and spent 2 minutes of time calling the user-defined function on a…

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 Updated July 19, 2024

Brent Ozar

Backup and Recovery, Cloud Computing

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,…

[Video] Office Hours in My Backyard

Last Updated June 30, 2024

Brent Ozar

Videos

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?…

Query Exercise: Fix This Computed Column.

Last Updated July 23, 2024

Brent Ozar

Query Exercises

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,…

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. 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…

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. Office Hours…

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: 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…

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. 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…

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…