Team Photos from the Company Retreat
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For this year’s company retreat at the Oregon coast, we asked awesome photographer Justin Bailie to shoot updated team pictures for the site and this year’s Christmas cards. Enjoy:
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Back up every database on the production server. No exceptions.
Before our consulting engagements start, we send clients a couple of queries to run. One of them outputs a list of databases, and the last backup date for each. You wouldn’t believe how often this query produces surprises like: “Wait – your script must be wrong. I swear we’re backing things up. We’ll fix that.”…
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How Do You Manage DBAs? Part 2: Training Budgets
In part 1 of this series, I explained how to measure your DBAs. Today, let’s talk about how to make those measurements better. Your DBA wants to get better at what they do, but … they don’t know exactly what it is they do, or how to get the business to pay for it. Here’s how.…
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Consulting Lines: “I have a hard stop at…”
This has grown to become one of my favorite consulting lines. I don’t use it often, but used judiciously, it’s a lifesaver. I use it a few different ways: Using This Line at the Start of the Meeting If you know in advance that the organizer (or some of the attendees) tend to ramble on…
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When Did My Azure SQL Database Server Restart?
In Azure SQL Database, no one can hear you scream query common system objects that tell you when a restart happened. You don’t get the access you need to sys.dm_os_sys_info, sys.dm_exec_sessions, sys.traces, or sys.databases. The closest I’ve been able to get is to query sys.dm_os_wait_stats for several common wait types that seem to correspond with…
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Consulting Lines: “Write this down, because I’m not going to write it.”
Before I became a consultant, I was on the other side of the conference room table – we would bring in consultants, and I’d be amazed at all the cool lines they whipped out. Now that I’m the one giving advice, I like sharing some of my favorite consulting lines that you can use in…
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Why Nobody Ever Patches Their SQL Servers
I saw a DBA.StackExchange.com question and had to laugh out loud: “Is there a cool way of performing CU updates for SQL Server on hundreds of machines?” Patching got me like No, and it has nothing to do with technology. Which servers are mission-critical 24/7 and can’t go down? Which servers can only be taken down…
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Consulting Lines: “I’d be a bad consultant if I didn’t put that in writing.”
I have to deliver a lot of bad news. It’s pretty much my full time job. Nobody calls us when things are going well. (Well, they tweet us, because that’s free.) Sometimes, that bad news is very dangerous – especially for the company as a whole, or its customers. In today’s consulting line, I’m working…
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Office Hours is Moving to Wednesdays
For the last few years, we’ve hosted a Tuesday webcast to talk SQL Server. We’re giving it a vacation in August, and then starting September 2, Office Hours is coming back on Wednesdays. This is easier for us because of the way our SQL Critical Care® service works. We’re typically working with clients interactively on Monday and…
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I’m Presenting at kCura Relativity Fest 2015 in Chicago
This sounds really cheesy, but I’m honestly excited to be presenting again this year at kCura Relativity Fest 2015. Here’s what I’ll be talking about: How to Check Your SQL Server’s Health The Abstract: You’re a system or database administrator responsible for the uptime and performance of Relativity’s SQL Servers, but you’ve never received professional…
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Out of Office: Time For the Brent Ozar Unlimited Retreat
Thank you for your web visit. We’re out of the office and will be back on Monday, August 3. During this period we will have limited access to our email. We’ll still have full access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. We apologize in advance about that, because we’re going to be posting a lot of…
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New Cardinality Estimator, New Missing Index Requests
During some testing with SQL Server 2014’s new cardinality estimator, I noticed something fun: the new CE can give you different index recommendations than the old one. I’m using the public Stack Overflow database export, and I’m running this Jon Skeet comparison query from Data.StackExchange.com. (Note that it has something a little tricky at the…
Read More13 Questions to Ask Before You Touch a Database Server
I’ve touched a lot of SQL Servers over the years. After my share of trips to HR for inappropriate touching, here’s the questions I ask first these days: Is this in production now? If this goes down, what apps go down with it? When those apps go down, is there potential for loss of life…
Read MoreWant us to run training classes at your office?
You’re working with SQL Server, and you really want to learn how to make it faster and more reliable, but your boss just won’t let you go off to our upcoming training classes. Good news – we’ll bring the training to you. Just download our training catalog PDF and choose from modules on how to diagnose…
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An Update to SQL Server Management Studio is Available
That’s the message you get in your tray if you open SSMS 2016 today: SSMS Update Available Then click Tools, Check for Updates, and you get: Check for Updates What’s awesome is that I didn’t even install SQL Server Management Studio from the new standalone installer – this is my full CTP2.1 installation of SQL Server,…
Read MoreShould You Put Things in the master Database?
Growing up as a young boy, my elementary teachers always warned me about the perils of putting stuff in master. But what’s the real deal? Why is this such a bad idea? System databases are often located on space-limited drives. The default installation parameters for SQL Server throw master, model, and msdb all on the…
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How to Configure Always On AG Backups with Ola Hallengren’s Scripts
With SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, you can offload backups to a replica rather than running them on the primary. Here’s how to do it: 1. Install Ola Hallengren’s utility scripts on all of the replicas. During the install, it creates a laundry list of SQL Agent jobs, but doesn’t set up schedules for any of them.…
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New SQL Server Management Studio 2015/June – with Check for Updates!
This morning, Microsoft announced a new standalone SQL Server Management Studio download: This is our first effort to release SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) in a mechanism outside of the SQL Engine releases. Our goal is to update this frequently with new features, fixes and support for the newest SQL Server features in SQL Server…
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How Do You Manage DBAs? Part 1: Measuring Backups
When the DBA reports to you, ask yourself two questions: “What would I fire the DBA for?” “How can I prove that they’re not doing that?” There’s a lot of possible answers to #1, many of which involve cocaine and the office copier, but let’s focus on one I hear a lot: an inability to restore…
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New Updates for sp_Blitz®, sp_BlitzCache™
We’ve just updated our First Responder Kit to include new versions of these tools: sp_Blitz® v41 – June 18, 2015: Added check 162 for CMEMTHREAD waits on servers with >= 8 logical processors per NUMA node. Added check 159 for NUMA nodes reporting dangerously low memory in sys.dm_os_nodes. Added check 161 for a high number of cached…
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