Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

2781 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 First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for January 2021

Last Updated January 21, 2021

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates, Videos

You know how a lot of app release notes say “bug fixes and improvements”? We’re not gonna lie: this one’s all bug fixes. Huge shout out to the community contributors for catching stuff and contributing fixes. New behavior for SQL Server 2008 & R2 users: sp_BlitzLock has never worked on SQL Server 2008, but starting…

We Lost Gareth Swanepoel.

Last Updated January 14, 2021

Brent Ozar

Community

Thirteen years ago, I met Gareth Swanepoel (@GarethSwan) for the first time, interviewed him for his first real sysadmin job, and … turned him down. Gareth Swanepoel circa 2007 Thankfully, my manager overruled me and hired him anyway. Thank goodness – and thank goodness Gareth forgave me for my incredibly bad judgment, hahaha. Gareth proved…

Which Microsoft Certification Should You Get?

Last Updated January 4, 2021

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

You work with data, and you’re thinking about getting a Microsoft certification. Which one should you get? If you need the certification to get a job… Then get the certification you see mentioned the most often in the descriptions of the job you’re looking for. This is just a little tricky because certifications shown on…

Want to Avoid Deployment Downtime? Replication Probably Isn’t the Answer.

Last Updated January 6, 2021

Brent Ozar

Architecture

You’re tired of taking outages to deploy changes to your database schema. Wouldn’t it be cool to have two different SQL Servers so that you could: Point your customer traffic at ServerA Apply your deployment scripts to ServerB (which isn’t taking any customer traffic) Point your customer traffic over to the newly deployed ServerB Apply…

Are You Underpaid? Find Out in the Data Professional Salary Survey Results.

Last Updated January 4, 2021

Brent Ozar

Salary

We asked what you make, and 1,747 of you in 69 countries answered. Altogether, you made $171,879,034 this year. Hubba hubba, there’s some earning power in this audience. Download the Data Professional Salary Survey results (XLSX). A few things to know about it: The data is public domain. The license tab makes it clear that…

Your Ten Favorite Blog Posts from 2020

Last Updated December 31, 2020

Brent Ozar

Company News

The most popular posts this year were when I ran my Fundamentals classes for free throughout the year. I ran a different class per month, and posted signups and videos here on the blog. I’m setting those aside, though, because they’re not evergreen: they’ve since disappeared since I only ran ’em free for a limited…

[Video] Office Hours: SQL Server Career Q&A, Part 3

Last Updated December 28, 2020

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Videos

Here’s the last video in my vacation series with the answers to your most-upvoted professional development questions. Enjoy! I won’t be taking new questions in the comments, but I’m leaving the comments open on this post so that y’all can discuss the video together with each other. Just be mindful that your name will be publicly…

As an Attendee, What’s Important to You In a New Data Community?

Last Updated December 28, 2020

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

With PASS shutting down, it’s time to think about what the community builds in its place. There are a lot of efforts going towards building replacements for PASS, including Microsoft’s own efforts. Because these efforts are often led by active community volunteers, they’re very well in touch with what event organizers, sponsors, and speakers want…

[Video] Office Hours: SQL Server Career Q&A, Part 2

Last Updated December 16, 2020

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Videos

Last week, I posted a call for questions about SQL Server careers and professional development, and y’all asked a lot of good ones. Here’s the next video with the questions you upvoted the most, and I’ll post the last round of ’em next week. I won’t be taking new questions in the comments, but I’m leaving…

How to Batch Updates A Few Thousand Rows at a Time

Last Updated December 17, 2020

Brent Ozar

T-SQL

You’ve got a staging table with millions of rows, and you want to join that over to a production table and update the contents. However, when you try to do it all in one big statement, you end up with lock escalation, large transaction log usage, slow replication to Availability Groups, and angry users with…

The End of the Professional Association for SQL Server #SQLPASS

Last Updated December 18, 2020

Brent Ozar

#SQLPass

This afternoon, PASS announced that their operations will cease in January: We are saddened to tell you that, due to the impact of COVID-19, PASS is ceasing all regular operations, effective January 15, 2021. We encourage you to take full advantage of any access that you have to PASS content between now and January 15,…

Frequently Asked Questions from Office Hours

Last Updated December 17, 2020

Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration

In my Twitch & YouTube live streams, some questions seem to come up every week. I’m not expecting this post to stop ’em by any means – most folks on the live stream don’t seem to read the blog regularly – but I thought I’d share ’em here. Q: Why is the same query sometimes…

[Video] Office Hours: SQL Server Career Q&A, Part 1

Last Updated December 16, 2020

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Videos

I posted a call for questions about SQL Server careers and professional development, and y’all asked a lot of good ones. Here were the questions you upvoted the most, and I’ll post another round of ’em next week. The audio on this isn’t up to my usual home-studio quality, of course! I won’t be taking…

Wanna Ask Me Anything About Careers & Professional Development?

Last Updated December 17, 2020

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

I’ll be answering your questions from right here. Ever wanted to ask me questions about careers or professional development? Now’s your chance. Post your questions here (update: questions are closed)– and you may wanna use a fake name if you’re asking something that’s a little revealing about your current job or employer. Don’t have a question?…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for December 2020

Last Updated December 11, 2020

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates

sp_BlitzLock gets better identification of parallel deadlocks, sp_DatabaseRestore uses Ola’s scripts for logging, and lots of bug fixes this month. Watch and learn 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. PowerShell users: run Install-DbaFirstResponderKit from dbatools Download the…

Free Webcast: 3 Ways to Prove Your SQL Server Storage is Slow

Last Updated December 11, 2020

Brent Ozar

Storage

Your users are complaining that their queries are slow. You’ve tried changing SQL Server settings, tuning indexes, but the problem just won’t go away. You’ve got a hunch that it’s a storage problem, but you need real, empirical proof. You need numbers that no one can argue, and you need to know acceptable targets for…

Are You Underpaid? Let’s Find Out: The Data Professional Salary Survey is Open.

Last Updated January 2, 2021

Brent Ozar

Salary

It’s time for our annual salary survey to find out what data professionals make. You fill out the data, we open source the whole thing, and you can analyze the data to spot trends and do a better job of negotiating your own salary: We pay Richie in query bucks Take the Data Professional Salary…

New Class: Fundamentals of TempDB – Instant Replays Ready Now

Last Updated December 7, 2020

Brent Ozar

TempDB, Videos

Yesterday, I taught my first Fundamentals of TempDB class, and as always, you can watch the Instant Replays right after class completes. Here’s the abstract: You’ve been working with Microsoft SQL Server for a couple of years, and you know a little bit about TempDB. You’ve heard that temp tables and table variables have different…

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Fall 2020

Last Updated December 7, 2020

Brent Ozar

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 summer 2020 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report. Out of the 3,650 servers sending in data recently, the most popular version…

Autoparameterized Trivial Queries May Not Get Partition Elimination

Last Updated November 26, 2020

Brent Ozar

Partitioning

How’s that for a niche topic? You’re probably never going to know this, but since I had to figure it out the hard way, I’m writing this down so I don’t forget it: queries that get trivial optimization may not get partition elimination. This post is going to be a little on the long side…