Brent Ozar, Author at Brent Ozar Unlimited®

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Winter 2026

January 14, 2026

It's time for our quarterly update of our SQL ConstantCare® population report, showing how quickly (or slowly) folks adopt new versions of SQL Server. In short, people are replacing SQL Server 2016 and 2017 with 2022!

SQL Server 2025: 0% (but it's 10 servers)
SQL Server 2022: 29%, up from 25% last quarter
SQL Server 2019: 43%, no change
SQL Server 2017: 9%, was 10%
SQL Server 2016: 10%, was 13%
SQL Server 2014 & prior: 6%, no change
Azure SQL DB and Managed Instances: 2%, no change

Announcing the 2026 Data Professional Salary Survey Results, And They’re Great!

January 13, 2026

The results are in! You can download the raw data in Excel for all 10 years and do some slicing and dicing to find out whether you're underpaid, overpaid, or what it looks like for folks who are out there looking for work. This year, I added a couple of new items to the survey…

Should There Be Ads in SSMS?

January 8, 2026

Some folks are seeing an ad at the top of their SSMS v22, like this one reported in the feedback site:

Today, Microsoft's using this to test ads for an upcoming conference. Interesting that they give deeper discounts to Reddit readers as opposed to SSMS users, but I digress. Tomorrow, they might be pushing SQL Server 2025 upgrades, or Microsoft Fabric, or Copilot, or whatever.

T-SQL & Development

New Year’s Task: Quick, Easy Prep for a Raise

January 7, 2026

You're busy, so I'll keep this short.

Several months from now, you're gonna have a salary review. Your manager is going to ask what you've been up to, and you're not going to have a lot of great answers. Copilot isn't tracking your successes for you.

Database Development with AI in 2026

January 6, 2026

This seems like the appropriate first BrentOzar.com blog post in the year 2026, eh?

In the PollGab question queue for Office Hours, MyRobotOverlordAsks asked a question that merited a full blog post answer:

[Video] Office Hours in Osaka, Japan

January 1, 2026

The Dotonbori area of Osaka is like a video game version of Japan: wild, over-the-top neon signs, awesome street food, cool street markets, Kabuki theater on a revolving stage, and more. It's very touristy, but as touristy places go, it's fantastic. Last year when I was here, I filmed Office Hours at the river, but this time around let's go into one of the side streets where the food vendors gather.

Your Favorite Posts From This Year

December 30, 2025

Reading is fundamental, and fundamentally, here are the 2025 blog posts that y'all read the most this year. (This list doesn't include the most popular timeless posts overall.)

10. Free Spring Training Webcasts - I've noticed that people have near-zero interest these days in paying to attend live online classes, but they're still really interested in free ones, and they still pay for recorded classes. Weird. I'm guessing that's a Zoom fatigue thing.

[Video] Office Hours in Zhengzhou, China

December 25, 2025

I really wanted to film Office Hours on the Great Wall of China, but the instant I got out there, I realized it was a lost cause. That place was SO overwhelming - tons of people, frigid winds, heights, totally overwhelming in every way. So, instead you get a nice peaceful park in downtown Zhengzhou,…

Known Issues So Far in SQL Server 2025

December 24, 2025

Whenever a brand spankin' new version of any software comes out, there are bugs, and SQL Server is no exception. This has led to a mentality where folks don't wanna install a new version of SQL Server until the first couple of Cumulative Updates come out, hopefully fixing the first big round of bugs.

So... are there bugs this time around?

Thoughts On the Unemployed Salary Survey Responses

December 23, 2025

In this year's data professional salary survey, I added a new response type for folks who are unemployed and looking for data work. The survey is still in progress, but you can view the data as it's coming in, and I wanted to take a few minutes to read through the responses of folks who are unemployed.

[Video] Office Hours at the Last Spike

December 18, 2025

I drove the Graffiti Gulf out to The Last Spike (video) outside of Las Vegas and took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcNJVJ1-XaE

T-SQL & Development

Identity Columns Can Have Gaps, and That’s Okay.

December 17, 2025

Say you've got a table with an identity column, something that's supposed to start at 1 and go up to a bajillion:

[crayon-6ab406ba1e4d4884412379/]

Production DBA

Let’s Build a Better KILL. What Do We Need to Consider?

December 16, 2025

When there's a performance emergency, a lot of us perform the same manual tasks over and over. We run sp_BlitzWho or sp_WhoIsActive, look for blocking, long-running or out-of-control queries, and kill them. I'm going to build a new sp_kill for the First Responder Kit to make that easier, faster, and safer, and I want your…

News & Opinion

Watch My Training Classes Offline with the Latest Teachable App

December 15, 2025

If you're the kind of person who likes to learn on the go, my training provider Teachable just updated their apps.

Now, both the Android and iOS apps let you download classes ahead of time and watch 'em disconnected.

[Video] Office Hours: Everything’s Gone Wrong Edition

December 11, 2025

I threw in the towel on my workday at 3PM when everything started going wrong in the Ozar home office, so I switched to answering your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7-Bq9qmDX8

T-SQL & Development

Update: SQL Server 2025’s REGEX Performance Isn’t So Bad!

December 10, 2025

Back in March 2025 when Microsoft first announced that REGEX support was coming to SQL Server 2025 and Azure SQL DB, I gave it a quick test, and the performance was horrific. It was bad in 3 different ways:

The CPU usage was terrible, burning 60 seconds of CPU time to check a few million rows
It refused to use an index
The cardinality estimation was terrible, hard-coded to 30% of the table

[Video] Office Hours: Fireside Chat Edition

December 4, 2025

It's the perfect time of year in Las Vegas when we can chill outside by the fire, enjoy a glass of wine, and go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esMYx_mbfqo

Get ChatGPT’s Advice On Your Queries with sp_BlitzCache.

December 2, 2025

First off, I understand if you read the headline and you have a knee-jerk reaction. I totally understand that there are a lot of people out there who hate AI, and believe me, I hate most uses of it. Lots of its advice can be misleading at best, and absolute garbage at worst. However, if…

Performance Tuning

Query Exercise Answer: Generating Big TempDB Spills

November 26, 2025

In last week's Query Exercise, I challenged you to play some code golf to generate big spills with tiny T-SQL.

Today, I'm going to walk you through my thought process - the initial attempts I tried and failed with, and the discoveries I made along the way, because I think it makes for fun storytelling.

Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for November 2025

November 25, 2025

This quarter's release includes new checks for SQL Server 2025's new memory pressure warnings, Azure SQL DB's operations in progress, accurate CPU usage on Docker containers, warnings about not using partitioned statistics where appropriate, and much more. If you'd like to thank me for my work in maintaining the First Responder Kit, the best way…