Posts by Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration

In a recent Office Hours post, David Reabow suggested letting ChatGPT answer a few of the questions y’all posted at http://pollgab.com/room/brento/. Brilliant! Let’s see how it does. I purposely cherry-picked the questions that I thought ChatGPT would have the easiest time answering. Rollback is single threaded asks: Hi Brent! An update statement has blocked all…

[Video] Office Hours: Ten Minutes of SQL Server Answers

Last Updated January 16, 2023

ChatGPT, Resource Governor, manually created stats, Always Encrypted, and as always, fragmentation: let’s answer your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Here’s what we covered today: 00:00 Start 01:13 Timbalero: Hi Brent. my friend knows your view on rebuilding indexes. He also thinks that external index fragmentation affects pretty much only readahead scans. For scientific purposes, what metrics…

Bite-Sized Office Hours: Q&A on TikTok

Last Updated January 16, 2023

Company News

Wanna learn about SQL Server and the Microsoft data platform, but you don’t wanna sit through long videos? Enjoy short videos on TikTok? I’ve got just the thing: I’m taking the best Q&A from Office Hours and putting ’em out as individual videos. That way, as you’re swiping through practical jokes, friendship goals, candid idiocy, music…

[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About SQL Server

Last Updated January 14, 2023

Y’all just never run out of interesting questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento! I’m impressed, got another great round today. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:25 Chrisbell: Recently we’ve been facing thread starvation issues. How can we troubleshoot it when even sp_whoisactive ( even with DAC ) is unresponsive and takes forever to return a result set…

The 20th Anniversary of the SQL Slammer Worm

Last Updated January 10, 2023

SQL Server

Twenty years ago this month (next Wednesday to be exact), sysadmins and database administrators started noticing extremely high network traffic related to problems with their SQL Servers. The SQL Slammer worm was infecting Microsoft SQL Servers. Microsoft had known about it and patched the problem 6 months earlier, but people just weren’t patching SQL Server. There…

[Video] Office Hours: Back Live on Twitch Again

Last Updated January 14, 2023

After I stopped selling live classes, I took some time off all live broadcasting period. It was a nice couple of months over the holidays, had a good time with the family, and now I’m starting to fire up my Twitch channel again. I’m not setting a schedule yet, just broadcasting when I have time…

How to Install SQL Server and the Stack Overflow Database on a Mac

Last Updated January 16, 2023

SQL Server 2022

To follow along, you’ll need: An Apple Mac with an Apple Silicon processor (M1, M2, etc – not an Intel or AMD CPU) Azure Data Studio Docker Desktop 4.16.1 or newer An Internet connection In Docker Desktop, go into Settings, Features in Development, and check the box for “Use Rosetta.” That’s the new 4.16 feature that…

[Video] Office Hours: Bad Hair Edition

Last Updated January 9, 2023

I am waaaay overdue for a haircut, but instead of being a responsible adult, I stopped to take your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. 00:00 Start 00:43 Mike: We have 3 Dell PowerEdge R630 servers with SQL Server installed. Everything functions for 3.5 years straight. How long is it expected to work? 01:30 Shalom: What are the…

Office Hours: Bad Questions Edition

Last Updated January 5, 2023

Normally, y’all post and upvote great questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, but in today’s episode, y’all upvoted some stinkers. Buckle up. 00:00 Start 00:47 SQLKB: Hi, according to sp_BlitzCache I usually have more than 260k plans in cache, created in the past 1 hour, is it a big number? Comparing number of plans from exec_query_stats vs exec_cached_plans…

3 Ways to Debug T-SQL Code

Last Updated January 6, 2023

Writing new code = bugging. That part’s easy. Taking those bugs back out, that’s the hard part. Developers are used to their tools having built-in ways to show what line of code is running now, output the current content of variables, echo back progress messages, etc. For a while, SQL Server Management Studio also had…

How to Find Missing Rows in a Table

Last Updated December 26, 2022

When someone says, “Find all the rows that have been deleted,” it’s a lot easier when the table has an Id/Identity column. Let’s take the Stack Overflow Users table: It has Ids -1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … but no 6 or 7. (Or 0.) If someone asks you to find all the Ids…

The SQL Server Posts You Read the Most in 2022

Last Updated December 26, 2022

Company News

Here’s what I wrote in 2022 that gathered the most views: #10: Who’s Hiring in the Database Community? February 2022 Edition – I saw the success of Hacker News’ “Who’s Hiring” monthly posts, and I blatantly stole the idea for the Microsoft data platform community. It works out well, very popular, very popular. #9: PSPO:…

Announcing the 2023 Data Professional Salary Survey Results.

Last Updated January 2, 2023

Salary

Are your peers being paid more this year? Are they switching job roles? Are they planning on leaving their companies? To find out, I run a salary survey every year for folks in the database industry. Download the raw data here and slice & dice ’em to see what’s important to you. Salaries are on…

Who’s Hiring in the Microsoft Data Platform Community? January 2023 Edition

Last Updated February 8, 2023

Who's Hiring

Was your New Year’s resolution to get a new job? Heads up: the comments in this post are for you. Is your company hiring for a database position as of January 2023? 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…

[Video] Office Hours: Holiday Speed Round

Last Updated December 20, 2022

Beep beep! Here’s a speed round of Office Hours where I rip through a dozen questions in under ten minutes. Want to see your own questions answered? Post ’em and upvote the ones you like at https://pollgab.com/room/brento. 00:00 Start 00:22 DB-A-Team: Love and appreciate your work and please don’t make fun of my question. I…

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Winter 2022

Last Updated December 25, 2022

SQL Server Population Report

Ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out in the winter 2022 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report. Out of 3,679 monitored servers, here’s the version adoption rate: The big ones:…

[Video] Office Hours: Ham Pillow Edition

Last Updated December 17, 2022

Y’all post questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me discuss, and then I artfully dodge giving you answers. At least, that’s how it feels sometimes, hahaha: Here’s what we discussed in today’s episode: 00:00 Start 00:20 Piotr: Do many of your clients disable SA account for security? What are your…

Should You Use SQL Server 2022’s GREATEST and LEAST?

Last Updated December 15, 2022

SQL Server

If you’ve been following along with this week’s posts on DATETRUNC and STRING_SPLIT, you’re probably going to think the answer is no, but bear with me. It’s Christmas week, right? The news can’t all be bad. GREATEST and LEAST are kinda like MAX and MIN, but instead of taking multiple rows as input, they take multiple columns.…

Should You Use SQL Server 2022’s STRING_SPLIT?

Last Updated December 16, 2022

SQL Server 2022 improved the STRING_SPLIT function so that it can now return lists that are guaranteed to be in order. However, that’s the only thing they improved – there’s still a critical performance problem with it. Let’s take the Stack Overflow database, Users table, put in an index on Location, and then test a…

Should You Use SQL Server 2022’s DATETRUNC?

Last Updated December 16, 2022