Posts by Brent Ozar

CHECKDB and Corruption, SQL Server

Let’s just get one thing out of the way first. Yes, I understand that you, dear reader, probably hate maintenance plans. You associate them with everything dumb that you did early on in your career, like setting up a single plan that reorganized indexes, then rebuilt them, then updated their statistics. You are older and…

What to Do When DBCC CHECKDB Reports Corruption

Last Updated April 13, 2018

Backup and Recovery, CHECKDB and Corruption, Processes and Practices, SQL Server

The instant you encounter corruption in a production SQL Server database, stop. Read this entire article first to understand the big picture, and then come back here to take action. First, understand that you shouldn’t start by trying to repair the corruption. You may be facing a storage subsystem problem where your storage is corrupting…

SQL Interview Question: “Talk me through this screenshot.”

Last Updated May 20, 2016

After writing about “For Technical Interviews, Don’t Ask Questions, Show Screenshots”, lots of folks asked what kinds of screenshots I’d show. Here’s this week’s example. I show each screenshot on a projector (or shared desktop) to the candidate and say: What’s this screen from? What does the screen mean? If it was a server you inherited from…

What I Look For When I’m Hiring Database Professionals

Last Updated April 7, 2016

Matan, Guy, and I recording the podcast On today’s episode of the SQL Server Radio podcast, I talk with Guy Glantser and Matan Yungman about what we look for when we’re hiring. In the broadest sense, don’t think junior or senior: I’m hiring someone for what they already know, or I’m hiring someone for their…

Creating Tables and Stored Procedures in TempDB – Permanently

Last Updated November 4, 2020

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor, Parameter Sniffing, SQL Server, TempDB

No, not #tables – actual tables. Here’s how: Transact-SQL USE tempdb; GO /* This one is only available during my session: */ CREATE TABLE #myTempTable (ID INT IDENTITY(1,1), Stuffing VARCHAR(100)); GO /* This one is global, meaning it's available to other sessions: */ CREATE TABLE ##myTempTable (ID INT IDENTITY(1,1), Stuffing VARCHAR(100)); GO /* You can…

SQL Interview Question: “Talk me through this query.”

Last Updated April 24, 2016

Last month’s post “For Technical Interviews, Don’t Ask Questions, Show Screenshots” was a surprise hit, and lots of folks asked for more details about the types of screenshots I’d show. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share a few more. Normally I’d show this query as a screenshot, but for easier copy/pasting into comments, I’m…

SQL Server 2016 Release Date: June 1, 2016

Last Updated May 2, 2016

It’s the news we’ve all been waiting for! Microsoft just announced the SQL Server 2016 Release Date: June 1, 2016. This PDF lays out the differences between editions, and here’s a few points that stand out: Standard Edition now goes up to 24 cores, and still just 128GB max memory Query Store is Enterprise Edition…

Updated the StackOverflow SQL Server Database Torrent to 2016-03

Last Updated April 9, 2017

The StackOverflow XML Data Dump was recently updated with 2016-03 data, so I’ve updated our torrent of the SQL Server database version of the Stack Overflow data dump. Fun facts about the database and its real-world-ness: 95GB in size 29,499,660 posts spanning 2008-07-31 to 2016-03-06 5,277,831 users spanning ages from -972 to 96 (just like real world…

My Favorite Database Disaster Stories

Last Updated February 11, 2017

Backup and Recovery, Clients and Case Studies, Processes and Practices

The statute of limitations has passed, so this week on SQL Server Radio, I get together with Guy Glantser and Matan Yungman to talk about our favorite oops moments. I talked about my very first database disaster ever – done back when I was in my 20s and working for a photo studio, using Xenix, long…

When Should You Hire a Consultant for Amazon RDS?

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS), SQL Server

Powered By Somebody Else’s Database on Somebody Else’s Computer You’re hosting your SQL Server databases in Amazon RDS, and performance has been getting slower over time. You’re not sure if it’s storage IOPs, instance size, SQL Server configuration, queries, or indexes. What’s the easiest way to find out? Ask a few questions: Are you using…

[Video] Office Hours 2016/04/20 – Now With Transcriptions

Last Updated April 9, 2017

SQL Server, Videos

This week, Brent, Erik, Jessica, Richie, and Tara discuss database modeling tools, how to learn about database corruption, the new cardinality estimator, and the only question that will be on our certification exams. Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our podcast to listen on the go. What ERD Tool…

Breaking News: Query Store in All Editions of SQL Server 2016

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Execution Plans, Query Store (QDS), SQL Server

Bob Ward talking Query Store at SQL Intersection Onstage at SQL Intersections in Orlando this morning, Bob Ward announced that Query Store will be available in all editions of SQL Server 2016. This is awesome, because Query Store is a fantastic flight data recorder for your query execution plans. It’ll help you troubleshoot parameter sniffing…

Looking for a New Challenge? kCura is Hiring a DBA.

Last Updated April 14, 2016

I’m a big kCura Relativity fan – it’s an application that really pushes SQL Server hard, written by people who are a ton of fun to work with. If you’re looking for a challenge in a really cool environment, check out what they’re looking for: A Production Database Administrator with a deep demonstrated knowledge of MS…

How to Run DBCC CHECKDB for In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton) Tables

Last Updated February 15, 2019

CHECKDB and Corruption, In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton), SQL Server

tl;dr – run a copy-only full backup of the Hekaton filegroup to nul. If the backup fails, you have corruption, and you need to immediately make plans to either export all your data, or do a restore from your last good full backup, plus all your transaction log backups since. Yeah, that one’s gonna need a…

Breaking News, Literally: SQL CLR Support Removed from Azure SQL DB

Last Updated September 21, 2017

Breaking News, Microsoft Azure

In the on-premises, boxed-product version of SQL Server, you can build your own CLR assemblies and call them from your T-SQL code. For years, this feature was missing from Azure SQL DB – Microsoft’s platform-as-a-service database offering – and users voted that they wanted it. In December 2014, Microsoft brought SQL CLR code to Azure SQL…

I’m on the RunAsRadio Podcast

Last Updated April 6, 2016

Pixelated for your pleasure It’s always fun to talk to Richard Campbell about what’s going on, and this time around, it’s SQL Server 2016: Listen to me chat with Richard about what’s coming in vNext. We’re now in the second quarter of the year, and we still don’t have pricing, licensing, or edition/feature lists. Normally,…

For Technical Interviews, Don’t Ask Questions. Show Screenshots.

Last Updated February 14, 2017

When you’re hiring a DBA, sysadmin, or developer, you’re not paying them to answer Trivial Pursuit questions all day long. You’re hiring them to look at a screen, connect a few dots, and interpret what’s happening. So for a position, I build a PowerPoint deck with a bunch of screenshots from the actual environment they’ll be…

SQL Server 2005 support ends next week. Here’s my tribute to it.

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Humor, SQL Server

I remember the first time I used SQL Server 2005. Did you know SQL Server has an expiration date on the bottom of the box? Also, this one is curdled. I was a database administrator working on a new-build data warehouse project in Miami. Both our data warehouse and SQL Server 2005 were looking like…

Microsoft Discontinues SQL Server Support for Windows

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Humor

Microsoft announced today that the forthcoming SQL Server 2016 version won’t just run on Linux – it will only run on Linux. Mark Souza, Microsoft “When we started developing the Linux port of SQL Server, we weren’t really serious about it at all,” confessed Mark Souza, lead documentation author for the project. “But after a couple of weeks, we…

Happy Fifth Birthday to Us, 50% Off for You.

Last Updated April 9, 2017