Posts by Brent Ozar

Chad Miller put out a new SQL Server PowerPack for Quest’s free PowerShell tool, PowerGUI, which got me to thinking – I wonder if there’s been more PowerShell adoption lately? [poll id=”2″] And because the results can get skewed by job description: [poll id=”3″] Thanks for taking the time to answer!  Your feedback is a…

I’ve been really lucky so far: I hardly ever get sick. Steak Tartare Every now and then, I engage in risky eating behavior and I come down with food poisoning. I should know better, but I just can’t help myself when I get the chance to try steak tartare, sushi, deep fried goat cheese or…

Every year, Quest Software convenes a Customer Advisory Board at the home office in Aliso Viejo, California.  We bring some of our highly experienced customers out for a couple of days to talk about what’s happening with technology, and good times are had by all. At the welcome reception, I was struck by how many…

Today at the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Microsoft announced a free web-based version of Microsoft Office 2010.  Much like Google Docs, Office users will be able to collaborate on the same document at the same time from anywhere, even without Office installed.  Users will be able to edit documents from IE, Firefox, Safari,…

Donabelle Santos (Twitter – Blog) celebrated her birthday today, and her coworkers at Black Ninja Software set her up.  They pinged me to ask if I’d call her to surprise her on her birthday, and one thing led to another.  Next thing you know, she was getting an urgent support call from Ted Striker.  Ted…

Wanna be the best at what you do? Start paying attention to more than just “what you do.” What Ken Block Does Ken Block is a rally car driver, which means he slides cars around dangerous obstacles at high speed with great precision.  Thing is, though, lots of people can do that.  Standing out in…

In the aftermath of the InformationFlash plagiarism incident, several questions have come up from the site’s webmaster and from other bloggers. Is it okay if the plagiarizer isn’t making money? No.  Authors work really, really hard to create their original content.  Seeing someone else pass it off as their own, whether there’s a charge or…

If your copyrighted blog content shows up in whole on another site without proper attribution like InformationFlash.com is doing, here’s a few steps you can take. IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), so YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). Send the Webmaster a Cease & Desist Letter Get a sample cease & desist letter and tailor…

I’ve been joking a lot on Twitter about the passing of the King of Pop.  Somewhere between the Jesus Juice and the Elephant Man, he’d lost a lot of credibility in his fading years.  Earlier in both of our lives, though, things were different. This Had Me Written All Over It In middle school when…

Yesterday, Kevin Kline ran across the WeFollow list of top twitterers for the SQL tag and remarked: How to Climb a Mountain I hear that same question privately every now and then, and it’s not that hard.  I’ve got the simple answers to get yourself to the top of the popularity list! Set Up Searches…

Opinion poll time!  I got asked a few questions, and I’m curious about what the rest of you think: Question 1: How do you feel about Run Book Automation for databases? Have you used it?  Would you want to?  Why or why not?  If you’ve never done it and never would, please respond too –…

I took the StackOverflow database dump, brought it into SQL Server, and did some slicing and dicing by tags and users.  I wanted to find the answers to questions like: What are the most active tags? Who is submitting the most answers? Who is getting the most answers accepted? What tag answers get the highest…