Posts by Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar

2448 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.

New Stack Overflow Public Database Available (2017-06)

Last Updated July 6, 2017

Brent Ozar

Stack Overflow

Nick Craver and the kind folks at Stack Overflow publish their data export periodically with your questions, answers, comments, user info, and more. It’s available as an XML data dump, which I then take and import into SQL Server for teaching performance tuning. You can download the 16GB torrent (magnet), which gives you a series of 7Zip…

Introducing sp_AllNightLog: Log Shipping at Scale, Open Source

Last Updated June 30, 2017

Brent Ozar

Backup and Recovery, First Responder Kit, kCura Relativity

In our Faux PaaS project, we need a backup plan – or rather, a restore plan. On each SQL Server instance, clients can create as many databases as they want, anytime they want, with no human intervention. We need those databases covered by disaster recovery as quickly as practical. SQL Server’s newer disaster recovery options – Always On Availability Groups and…

Announcing Expert SSIS Training with Andy Leonard

Last Updated June 22, 2017

Brent Ozar

Company News

SQL Server Integration Services has changed a lot over the last decade, but one thing has remained the same: Andy Leonard has been the go-to name in the business. I’m excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Andy for online delivery of his master-level course, Expert SSIS Training. Here’s the abstract: Data integration is the…

Does Separating Data and Log Files Make Your Server More Reliable?

Last Updated June 24, 2017

Brent Ozar

Architecture

The old advice went something like this: “Put your data and log files on separate drives and your server will be more reliable. If you lose the data drive, you can still do a tail-of-the-log backup, and you won’t lose any data.” It’s advice. But is it actually good advice? Let’s think through it. If…

24 Hours of PASS: Last Season’s Performance Tuning Techniques

Last Updated June 22, 2017

Brent Ozar

#SQLPass

Brent, last season (and I have so many good bad photos to share) I’m excited to announce that Erik and I are presenting the opening session at this year’s free online 24 Hours of PASS webcasts! Here’s our session: Last Season’s Performance Tuning Techniques You’re kinda-sorta comfortable doing performance tuning on SQL Server. You’ve read…

Builder Day: Doing a Point-in-Time Restore in Azure SQL DB

Last Updated June 20, 2017

Brent Ozar

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Backup and Recovery

We’re trying something new at the company: Builder Day. We define a slightly-out-of-the-norm task, and then the team splits up and tackles the task on different cloud platforms, writing it up as we go. These posts aren’t going to make you an expert on the topic – they’re just meant to let you skim through…

New #SQLPASS Summit Pre-Con: Expert Performance Tuning for SQL Server 2016 & 2017

Last Updated October 6, 2017

Brent Ozar

#SQLPass, Company News

Going to the PASS Summit in Seattle this year? Join me & Erik Darling on Tuesday, the day before the conference, at our pre-con session, Expert Performance Tuning for SQL Server 2016 & 2017. Your job is making SQL Server go faster, but you haven’t been to a performance tuning class since 2016 came out.…

New Class: Data Science Fundamentals with R

Last Updated June 15, 2017

Brent Ozar

Company News, Data Science

Now that SQL Server ships with R, and you can use R code in T-SQL, your managers might be asking, “Hey, can you start doing some analysis and visualization?” Good news! We’ve got a new class for that. Come learn the fundamentals of analysis & machine learning in R, and how to operationalize your work.…

New Class: Always On Availability Groups: The Senior DBA’s Field Guide

Last Updated June 10, 2017

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups

Availability Groups are all the rage right now, especially since they’re included with SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition. Our Availability Groups blog post category is one of the most popular on the site, and in my 4-day Senior DBA class, people have always been asking for more in-depth coverage of clustering and AGs. Let’s get together for a…

Ola Hallengren’s Maintenance Scripts are Now on Github.

Last Updated June 17, 2017

Brent Ozar

Backup and Recovery, Ola Hallengren's Database Maintenance Scripts

For some of you, the headline is self-explanatory, and you just want the URL, so here it is: https://github.com/olahallengren/sql-server-maintenance-solution For the rest of you, here’s what it means. What are Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts? Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts are a widely used replacement for maintenance plans. His backup, integrity check, and index optimization stored procedures are…

4 DBA Resume Anti-Patterns

Last Updated June 3, 2017

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

Every now and then, clients ask me to interview candidates for their open DBA positions. I get to see a lot of resumes, and there are a few warning signs that pop up regularly. 1. The Keyword Encyclopedia. I get it: you’ve opened SSMS before, and you clicked on all the options and wizards, and…

Why Your Biggest Query Plans Don’t Show Up in Some DMVs

Last Updated May 26, 2017

Brent Ozar

Bad Idea Jeans, Execution Plans

SQL Server has three ways to get execution plans from the plan cache: sys.dm_exec_query_plan – around since SQL Server 2005 sys.dm_exec_text_query_plan – added in 2005 SP2 sys.query_store_plan – new in SQL Server 2016 And there’s an important problem with the first one. To show it, let’s take one of my many bad ideas, building queries that take 12+…

Announcing sp_BlitzBackups: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself.

Last Updated May 26, 2017

Brent Ozar

First Responder Kit

If one of your SQL Servers went down at some point over the last week: What’s the most data you could have lost? What’s the longest you would have been down for? To find out, Erik and I (mostly Erik) wrote sp_BlitzBackups (sure, blame me for everything. –ED). Download the latest First Responder Kit including the…

Building a Faux PaaS, Part 3: What the Ideal Engineering Team Looks Like

Last Updated June 8, 2017

Brent Ozar

Architecture, kCura Relativity, Microsoft Azure

Background: I’m working with kCura to build a Faux PaaS: something akin to Microsoft’s Azure SQL DB, but internally managed. You can catch up with what we’ve discussed so far in Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. In the last post, I talked about measuring backup and restore throughputs across different instance types, regions, storage configs, and backup locations.…

#DevIntersection Keynote Notes: Jeffrey Snover on Azure Stack

Last Updated May 22, 2017

Brent Ozar

Microsoft Azure

Preface: data professionals, if you’re in a hurry, skip this post. Nothing in here is directly relevant to your career in the next couple of years. I found it interesting because it explains where Microsoft’s developer story is going, though. At DevIntersection/SQLIntersection today, Microsoft’s Jeffrey Snover (@jsnover) talked about Azure Stack, something data professionals haven’t…

This Year is Your Best Chance to Speak at the PASS Summit.

Last Updated May 22, 2017

Brent Ozar

#SQLPass, Writing and Presenting

Me presenting, photo by John Martin The call for speakers at the PASS Summit is open now. As of this writing, there are less than 120 sessions submitted. To put that in perspective, in 2016, there were 758 sessions submitted overall, and about ~175 general session spots. Your chances have never been better. Get in…

Building a Faux PaaS, Part 2: Choosing and Testing a Cloud Vendor

Last Updated June 8, 2017

Brent Ozar

Cloud Computing, Microsoft Azure

Background: I’m working with kCura to build a Faux PaaS: something akin to Microsoft’s Azure SQL DB, but internally managed. In Part 1 of this series, I talked about why we’re building it, and today, I’ll talk about where. The database team rarely gets to pick the cloud vendor. The choice between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft is…

Will SQL Server Always Do Index Seeks on Numbers?

Last Updated May 11, 2017

Brent Ozar

Indexing

I often get the question of “Will SQL Server do an index seek with ____?” Another way to phrase it is, “Is this query sargable?” We throw the term “sargable” around to mean that SQL Server can do an index seek to satisfy your search arguments. (We’re specifically talking about index seeks here, not scans – not…

Group Post: If I Took Another DBA Job, My First Question Would Be…

Last Updated May 10, 2017

Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration, Professional Development

“Question 1: how do you predict how long a rollback will take?” Brent says: “How many people are in the on-call rotation with me, and can I give them each a technical test?” Once you get out of the on-call rotation, it’s really hard to go back to the electronic tether. I’d be willing to…

Building a Faux PaaS, Part 1: The SQL Server DevOps Scene in 2017

Last Updated June 8, 2017

Brent Ozar

Architecture, kCura Relativity

In the cloud, treat your servers like cattle, not like pets. Rounding up a herd of servers in Texas In the cloud, systems administration is very different than the on-premises stuff you’re used to. When you build VMs in the cloud with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS, meaning AWS EC2, GCE, or Azure VMs), you expect them to…