Posts by Brent Ozar

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Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

1745 posts

https://www.brentozar.com

I make Microsoft SQL Server go faster. I love teaching, travel, and laughing. I live in California with my wife Erika.

DBA Training Plan 21: Building a New SQL Server

September 16, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, High Availability

I have a secret setup checklist. Oh sure, our free First Responder Kit has a SQL Server setup checklist that walks you through a few things you need to do before you install, plus a few things to do immediately afterwards. That’s good. It’s actually pretty darned good. But it’s not the secret checklist. Gather round and cover your…

DBA Training Plan 20: Planning Your Next Server

September 12, 2019

Brent Ozar

Architecture, DBA Training Plan

When the business decides it’s time to give up fixing the old server because it’s not fast enough or reliable enough, stop. The worst thing you can do is jump directly to the hardware vendor’s site, check a few boxes, and order a new shiny server that ends up with exactly the same problems as…

How to Set Up Your Own Mastering Class VM

September 11, 2019

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

When you buy one of my Live Class Season Passes, you can save a lot of money by building your own VM to follow along with the labs. Or, you might just wanna re-run the labs later to see if you can do a better job, or if you’re still mastering a concept. You’re going…

#TSQL2sday: I Just Wish SQL Server Could Restore a Single Object from Backup.

September 10, 2019

Brent Ozar

Backup and Recovery

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Kevin Chant asked us to dream up our fantasy SQL Server feature. I’m sure people are gonna ask for flying cars and gene splicing, and that’s awesome. I’m excited to hear the kinds of things they dream up. Me? I’ve got a really simple ask. (When you’re talking to Microsoft…

What’s It Like to Have a Live Class Season Pass?

September 9, 2019

Brent Ozar

Company News

I don’t usually post product reviews here on the blog, but Vadim Kulikov (aka BlondeDBA in Slack) recently finished all of the Mastering classes, and he took the time to write a really detailed review. Here it is, unedited: I heard some folks refer to Brent’s training as “Brent Ozar’s Full Experience”. I really like…

DBA Training Plan 19: The L-Word, Licensing

September 6, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Licensing

You’ve gotten through a lot of this training. You’ve tried fixing the problem with indexes, query tuning, and judicious application of various configuration switches. You’ve been watching webcasts and using free scripts, but… Things just aren’t getting better. Before you start browsing your cloud vendor’s sizing price list or your favorite server vendor’s build-and-price site,…

Mitch Bottell is preparing to take an exclusive lock on some BBQ.

DBA Training Plan 18: Managing Concurrency

September 4, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Locking, Blocking, and Isolation Levels

Locking isn’t a problem – queries are gonna lock data. As long as nobody else wants the lock, you can take your sweet time locking it, and it won’t show up as a problem. (That’s one of the many reasons queries work so well in development, and then hit performance issues in production.) Blocking, now…

DBA Training Plan 17: Should You Partition Your Tables?

September 3, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Partitioning

In the last episode, I talked about knowing when it’s time to scale out: identifying when our data is getting to be so large that we have to split it across multiple servers, and I explained why that is so challenging. But what about table partitioning – SQL Server’s ability to break up a single…

What Are Your Coworkers Learning Right Now?

September 2, 2019

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

Not a poll, no fixed list of answers, just totally open comments. What are the developers, sysadmins, and data professionals on your team learning these days? Any particular topics that they’re really excited about? Let me know in the comments. (I think this is the shortest post I’ve ever written, hahaha!)

I would like to scale out my Porsche collection.

DBA Training Plan 16: Is It Time to Scale Out?

August 30, 2019

Brent Ozar

Architecture, DBA Training Plan

In our last episode, we found out what your server was waiting on. In the closing remarks, I mentioned that you should find out which queries are causing the problem, and focus your mitigation efforts there. You might have circled back to the episode where we covered sp_BlitzCache, used a @SortOrder parameter that lines up…

DBA Training Plan 15: What’s Your SQL Server Waiting On?

August 29, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Wait Stats

You’re here, dear reader, because you weren’t “classically trained” as a database administrator. You didn’t graduate from the University of Sciencing Computerses with a Master’s of Transactional Processing. You probably got your start as a developer or sysadmin, and gradually fumbled your way here. You’re used to monitoring stuff from the OUTSIDE using things like…

DBA Training Plan 14: POP QUIZ!

August 28, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan

AH-HA! You didn’t know there would be one of these, did you, hotshot? You’ve been reading along in the series, just smiling and nodding, pretending you’re keeping up, but not really doing the homework. BUSTED! Put your books away and get your pencils out. Backup & Recovery Questions: How many production SQL Servers do you…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for August 2019

August 27, 2019

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit, First Responder Kit Updates

sp_DatabaseRestore can now restore to Azure blobs and change the database owner after a restore, and everything else gets bug fixes. To get the new version: Download the updated FirstResponderKit.zip Azure Data Studio users with the First Responder Kit extension: ctrl/command+shift+p, First Responder Kit: Import. Download the updated Consultant Toolkit in your account EU customers:…

DBA Training Plan 13: Why Do Cached Plans Go Bad?

August 26, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Execution Plans

It’s a little bit of a trick question: what could make a good query plan turn bad? In the last episode, we used sp_BlitzCache to spot the most resource-intensive, longest-running query plans in your server’s cache. Go run those queries again, right now, and I bet you’re going to see plans in the cache that…

Research Paper Week: Constant Time Recovery in Azure SQL DB

August 23, 2019

Brent Ozar

Azure SQL DB, Backup and Recovery

Let’s finish up Research Paper Week with something we’re all going to need to read over the next year or two. I know, it says Azure SQL DB, but you boxed-product folks will be interested in this one too: Constant Time Recovery in Azure SQL DB by Panagiotis Antonopoulos, Peter Byrne, Wayne Chen, Cristian Diaconu, Raghavendra…

Research Paper Week: In-Memory Multi-Version Concurrency Control

August 22, 2019

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

If you’ve been doing performance tuning for several years, or graduated from my Mastering Server Tuning class, you’ve come across Read Committed Snapshot Isolation, aka RCSI, aka multi-version concurrency control, aka MVCC, aka optimistic concurrency. It’s not the way SQL Server ships by default, although it is the default for Azure SQL DB, and it’s part…

Research Paper Week: Automatic Indexing in Azure SQL DB

August 21, 2019

Brent Ozar

Architecture, Azure SQL DB, Indexing

Before I give you the link to the next research paper in this week’s series, I wanna give you a few questions to think about: If you had to build something to automatically add indexes to SQL Server databases, where would you start? What data would you use to make your decisions? How would you…

Research Paper Week: Query Execution in Column-Oriented Database Systems

August 20, 2019

Brent Ozar

Columnstore Indexes

This week, I’m sharing some of my favorite papers that I’ve read. Sometimes they’re about future technologies that haven’t shipped yet – and may never ship! Sometimes, like this one, they’re not from Microsoft at all, but from someone else in the industry who’s explaining a problem that we face in SQL Server. SQL Server…

Research Paper Week: Plan Stitch: Harnessing the Best of Many Plans

August 19, 2019

Brent Ozar

Execution Plans

Those of you who follow me on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook know I’m taking most of August off for vacation. Erika and I spent the last couple of weeks in Telluride, had a brief stop in Sacramento for SQL Saturday, and this week we’re touring wineries in Napa and Sonoma. As part of recharging, I…

DBA Training Plan 12: What Query Plans Are In Cache?

August 15, 2019

Brent Ozar

DBA Training Plan, Execution Plans, sp_BlitzCache

In the last episode, while talking about the basics of executing queries, I said that SQL Server caches execution plans in memory, reusing them whenever the same query gets executed again. I’ve also talked about the dynamic management views (DMVs) that let you query what’s in SQL Server’s memory. Let’s put those two things together…