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.

Things To Consider When Submitting Sessions to Paid Online Conferences

Last Updated June 28, 2020

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

Lots of paid conferences are happening online these days, so some of you will be presenting an online session or pre-con for the first time. I’ve done a bunch of these and been burned in a bunch of ways, so lemme save you some time and heartache. Does the conference own the recordings? And if…

Sit Down. We Need to Talk About Your Scalar Functions.

Last Updated June 25, 2020

Brent Ozar

Development, SQL Server 2019

Thanks for coming today. I apologize for baiting you in here with a picture of toilet paper. That’s not even in the US – that’s from my Iceland trip, before I flew back here to the US. Look, we all make mistakes. That’s not the point of this post. You see, I’ve been reading this…

How to Upgrade SQL Server Evaluation Edition to Developer Edition

Last Updated June 14, 2020

Brent Ozar

Licensing

Six months ago today, you installed SQL Server Evaluation Edition. You told yourself you’d take care of that sooner or later, and…you forgot. Now, your SQL Server won’t start: Error 17051: SQL Server evaluation edition has expired. Awww, shucks. Good news though! You don’t have to uninstall & reinstall from scratch – there’s an easier…

Bad Idea Jeans: Building Big Query Plans

Last Updated June 23, 2020

Brent Ozar

Bad Idea Jeans

When you build a monitoring tool that sends advice via email, you discover two things: Some people have really, really big execution plans Email servers have reasonable limits on file attachment sizes Add those two things together, and Richie found himself working on a new feature for SQL ConstantCare® that would automatically break up advice…

Finally, You Can Buy Brent Ozar Unlimited Swag.

Last Updated June 22, 2020

Brent Ozar

Company News

When I’m doing a webcast, the same question always comes up: “Hey, how do I get one of those coffee mugs?” We used to give ’em away during our in-person live training classes, but since I stopped doing those, we needed to come up with a plan B. Now you can buy Brent Ozar Unlimited…

How Doug Lowing Gets the Most Out of His Live Class Season Pass

Last Updated June 18, 2020

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

With my Live Class Season Pass, students have the ability to attend as many of my live online classes as they want for an entire year straight, plus they can view the instant replay recordings whenever they want. Doug Lowing, one of the students, shared with me how he gets the most out of his:…

Page Life Expectancy Doesn’t Mean Jack, and You Should Stop Looking At It.

Last Updated June 17, 2020

Brent Ozar

Monitoring

Page Life Expectancy is a Perfmon counter that’s supposed to track how long pages stay in memory before they get flushed out to make room for other pages that are needed instead. Paul Randal has blogged this a few times, and rather than rehash ’em, I’d rather point you to a couple of his roundups:…

What Was the Worst Database Decision You Ever Made?

Last Updated June 16, 2020

Brent Ozar

Processes and Practices

101

I’m not talking about “oops” mistakes. I’m talking about things you decided to do on purpose, and then deeply regretted later. Me personally, my biggest database regret was that time almost twenty years ago when I ran a Profiler trace from my desktop computer. My very slow desktop computer. Which was connected to production over…

[Video] How to Find Queries Using OPTION RECOMPILE (And Their Parameters)

Last Updated June 23, 2020

Brent Ozar

Development, Videos

For years, I hated troubleshooting servers with high CPU usage caused by queries constantly asking for new execution plans. Hated it. SQL Server just doesn’t make it easy to find queries with recompile hints. Then Erik Darling’s sp_HumanEvents came along. And now troubleshooting frequent compilations is as easy as this: Transact-SQL EXEC dbo.sp_HumanEvents @event_type =…

A Single Database View Cost Me $50/Day for Months.

Last Updated June 11, 2020

Brent Ozar

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Our SQL Server monitoring product, SQL ConstantCare®, uses Amazon Aurora on the back end. I blogged about our choice of database back in 2018, and at the time, I said: I know, I know. The Microsoft geek in you – and me – wants us to use SQL Server on the back end, but here’s…

When a Columnstore Index Makes Your Query Fail

Last Updated June 8, 2020

Brent Ozar

Columnstore Indexes

If you wanna count the number of rows in a table, I’ve usually said, “It doesn’t matter what you put inside the COUNT() – it can be COUNT(*), COUNT(Id), COUNT(1), or COUNT(‘Chocula’), or even COUNT(1/0) – it all works the same.” And that was true right up until I added a columnstore index. Start with…

How to Make Online Presentations Fun and Interactive with OBS Scenes

Last Updated October 29, 2020

Brent Ozar

Home Office, Streaming, Writing and Presenting

In my recent post about how I use OBS for training classes & webcasts, I mentioned that to keep things lively, you wanna have a variety of scenes that you can switch between to keep the viewer engaged. Imagine a TV show or sporting event that only used one camera angle and screen layout for…

[Video] Top 3 Pitfalls of Managing Your Azure SQL DB Costs

Last Updated June 23, 2020

Brent Ozar

Azure SQL DB, Videos

You manage servers, not invoices. Your company has started to move their databases into Azure, and they’re asking questions that you’re just not ready to answer. How big does your server need to be when you’re moving an existing database up to the cloud? How are servers measured? How do you measure to know if…

Attention Live Class Season Pass Holders: New Mastering Parameter Sniffing Videos Available!

Last Updated June 4, 2020

Brent Ozar

Company News

Time to get your learn on: this week’s Mastering Parameter Sniffing class recordings are already available in your account here if you’ve got a Live Class Season Pass. (What’s that? You don’t have one yet? Well, tell you what: click here and I’ll make you a special deal.) Just to give you a taste, the…

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for June 2020

Last Updated June 2, 2020

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit Updates

If you’re saving the contents of sp_BlitzFirst, sp_BlitzCache, and sp_BlitzWho to tables every 15 minutes, you should definitely install this month’s updates. There are several key improvements for you in here to help make it easier to troubleshoot plan cache rollover due to unparameterized queries, plus way easier to gather query plans that are having…

Updating Statistics Causes Parameter Sniffing.

Last Updated June 3, 2020

Brent Ozar

Parameter Sniffing, Statistics

In my free How to Think Like the Engine class, I explain that SQL Server builds execution plans based on statistics. The contents of your tables inform the decisions it makes about which indexes to use, whether to do seeks or scans, how many CPU cores to allocate, how much memory to grant, and much…

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Spring 2020

Last Updated June 1, 2020

Brent Ozar

SQL Server Population Report, Videos

Ever wonder what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out in the spring 2020 version of our population report. Our SQL ConstantCare® service lets users send data in about their SQL Servers and get health & performance advice via email. Users can opt in to…

[Video] Watch Brent Write Queries

Last Updated June 23, 2020

Brent Ozar

Videos

This morning, I wanted to write a few new “background noise” queries for my Mastering classes. In those classes, the students run live workloads against the Stack Overflow database and troubleshoot performance issues, and the more of a varied workload I’ve got running, the more realistic it feels. For this session, I specifically wanted to…

Attention Season Pass Holders: New Fundamentals of Parameter Sniffing Videos Available!

Last Updated May 27, 2020

Brent Ozar

Conferences and Classes

If you’ve got a Recorded Class Season Pass or Live Class Season Pass, time to get your learn on: yesterday’s Fundamentals of Parameter Sniffing class recordings are now available in your account here. As a reminder, here’s the class abstract: Sometimes the exact same query goes slow out of nowhere. Your current fix is to…

SQL ConstantCare® Now Tells You Which Indexes to Drop.

Last Updated May 25, 2020

Brent Ozar

Indexing, SQL ConstantCare

Indexes slow down data changes. SQL Server doesn’t have the concept of asynchronous indexes – copies of the data that it could update later when it’s bored. It has to keep every nonclustered index up to date, every single time you change data, like a delete/update/insert. Mo’ indexes, mo’ problems. That’s why in my Mastering…