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SQL Server

How to Pick Blog & Presentation Topics

Last Updated March 23, 2015

Stumped about what to write about? Not sure what to talk about to your local user group? I bet you’re focusing on the presentations you would ATTEND, instead of the presentations you would GIVE. When I start to think about presentations and blogs, I tend to think about things that I would personally find interesting. …

Index Fragmentation Findings: Part 2, Size Matters

Last Updated July 13, 2017

Index Maintenance, SQL Server

Last week, I blogged about the basics of SQL Server index fragmentation: why it happens, how to fix it, and how often people are fixing it. I left you with a cliffhanger: it seemed that the frequency of defrag jobs didn’t appear to affect fragmentation levels: Databases with no index defragmentation were an average of…

Index Fragmentation Findings: Part 1, The Basics

Last Updated July 13, 2017

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

Index Maintenance, SQL Server

We asked the community for index fragmentation information for data mining purposes, and the results are in – and interesting. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll talk about some of the results we found in the field. What Is SQL Server Fragmentation? SQL Server stores data in pages. To make things easy, think of…

Amazon Web Services Explained

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS), SQL Server

Amazon Web Services When I talk to database administrators, I hear a lot of questions like: What is Amazon S3? What is Mechanical Turk? How do these things matter to a real business? I’ve got a story I like to tell around how to use these services, but for a couple of years I’ve held…

Meet my coauthors on Pro SQL Server Internals and Troubleshooting

Last Updated March 10, 2021

Meet my partners in crime, the people who are going to coauthor the book on SQL Server internals: Christian Bolton – he’s the Director and Database Architect at COEO and SQL Server MVP. He’s ChristianBolton on Twitter. Justin Langford – another SQL guru at COEO, a Principal Consultant, formerly a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Christian…

It was a dark and stormy night…

Last Updated March 10, 2021

and I was hunched over my trusty, battered Macbook Pro, sipping whiskey by the backlit keys when the email came in. I got worried as soon I saw the sender, because Big Jimmy May is what they call a “Performance Consultant”. Before I even opened the email, I called my bookie to make sure my…

GTD for my coworkers

Last Updated July 7, 2019

Dear Coworker, Hi. I work differently than other people you may have worked with. I wanna take a minute to bring you up to speed on how I do it, and what this might mean for you. I use the Getting Things Done methodology from David Allen, and here’s how I work. When You Email…

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SQLIO Tutorial: How to Test Disk Performance

Last Updated February 13, 2017

SQL Server, Storage

Storage is a black box, right? The SAN admins ask how much storage space you need, you tell them, and then they give it to you. They don’t tell you how fast (or slow) it is, they don’t know whether it meets your needs, and they probably don’t know where the bottlenecks are. It’s time…

Steel Cage Blogmatch: How to Configure a SAN

Last Updated February 13, 2017

SQL Server, Storage

Jason Massie and Brent Ozar work with SQL Server for a living and write blogs for fun, but that’s where the similarities end. Jason’s a fan of shared storage SANs: putting SQL Server data and logs on the same set of physical hard drives. Brent’s a cheerleader for dedicated configurations where the arrays are separated…

SQL Server 2008’s new Central Management Server

Last Updated March 4, 2018

Got more than one DBA? Want to make your life easier? You might want to configure a Central Management Server. This is useful for fast-changing shops where there’s a lot of servers added and removed. At my last company, we had a hard enough time telling everybody when we’d finished adding a new server, or…

SQL Server on a SAN: Dedicated or Shared Drives?

Last Updated January 17, 2019

SQL Server, Storage

A reader wrote in and asked: We’re running SQL Server with blades and a NetApp SAN. We have a few hundred databases from 100mb to 200gb. All data, logs, tempdb, etc. are located in the same 30-disk pool. Apparently this was setup using NetApp’s guidelines. NetApp recommendations are to put everything in one aggregate, or…

Recommended Books for SQL Server DBAs and Developers

Last Updated February 14, 2017

Book Reviews, SQL Server

Here’s my favorite SQL Server books for 2016-2014: T-SQL Fundamentals – (updated for SQL 2016) – don’t be fooled by this “fundamentals” title, because everybody who writes T-SQL queries needs this book. It’s the manual we should have been given when we started, and everyone’s going to learn something about concurrency, performance, and updates here. T-SQL Querying…

Transparent Data Encryption in SQL Server 2008

Last Updated March 10, 2021

I played around with TDE a couple of weeks ago, and I was surprised by how difficult it is to implement. I’d expected to be able to check a box, put in a password, and click OK, but it’s nowhere near that easy. Restoring encrypted databases from one server to another can also give DBAs…

SQL Server Partitioning: Not the Best Practices for Everything

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Partitioning, SQL Server

When SQL 2005 was in beta, I clapped my hands and jumped for joy the first time I played with partitioning. I’ve done a lot of data warehouse work, and partitioning lets the DBA break down massive tables into smaller, easy-to-manage chunks. We can put heavily accessed parts of the table onto fast storage, and…

SQL Server 2005 Setup Checklist Part 2: After The Install

Last Updated June 27, 2017

I’ve covered what needs to happen before you install SQL Server – now, let’s talk about what to do immediately after the setup finishes. Install not just the service packs, but also the cumulative updates. Starting with SQL Server 2005’s Service Pack 2, Microsoft releases hotfixes in cumulative packs. These updates do more than just…

SQL Server 2005/2008/2012/2014 Setup Checklist

Last Updated May 16, 2018

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

Ever wonder if you’re missing a step when you set up your SQL Server? Get a checklist to install and configure your SQL Server the right way! We’ve built an easy-to-follow SQL Server Setup Guide for systems administrators, DBAs, and developers that helps you prevent the most common issues we see out in the field. The guide…

What’s the Largest Database You’ve Worked With?

Last Updated January 26, 2018

Professional Development, SQL Server

When hiring a production DBA, I start by asking them, “In terms of file size, what’s the largest database you’ve worked with?” In a perfect world, we’d only hire very experienced candidates, people who’ve worked with larger databases than we’re dealing with. In reality, though, we can’t always afford those candidates – if they’re even…

SQL Server Backup Best Practices

Last Updated September 18, 2017

Backup and Recovery, SQL Server

I’ve been backing up SQL Servers for almost a decade now, and it’s time to share the lessons I’ve learned. All of this is my own opinion – your mileage may vary – but I’ll try to explain the reasoning behind the choices I make. I won’t address log shipping or snapshots this time around.…

SQL Server Perfmon (Performance Monitor) Best Practices

Last Updated March 17, 2026

Monitoring, SQL Server

Database administrators need to know each SQL Server’s weakest link so we know where to focus their hardware budgets and time. On any given server, we need to know what the slowest component is, and where it’ll pay off to invest hours and dollars. This is performance tuning, and the first place to start is…

Goodbye MovableType, hello WordPress

Last Updated March 8, 2021

The more sober among you will notice a small change in the look & feel of this here site. I’ve been toying around with WordPress on some of my other sites for a while, and it’s time I took the plunge and changed over BrentOzar.com. For the next couple of weeks, this site will be…