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Production Database Administration

What Does Setting the SQL Server Compatibility Level Do?

Last Updated April 19, 2023

Configuration Settings, Videos

If you right-click on a database in SQL Server Management Studio, you get an option to set Compatibility Level at the database level: When you upgrade SQL Server or you want to improve performance, which option should you choose? Should you always go with the newest compatibility level? If you have an old application, can…

Office Hours Speed Round, Easy Text Answers Edition

Last Updated April 18, 2023

Production Database Administration

Some of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento have easy one-line answers. Let’s knock ’em out: George: Hi Brent, what recently has been the most challenging/surprising/new-to-you performance issue you have encountered? SQL Server 2019’s slowdowns. I spent days working on that. RoJo: Have you used Distributed AG as a way to upgrade major versions of…

This is the Last Week of Free PowerShell Training.

Last Updated February 4, 2023

You’ve been working hard all month to get through our newest class, Fundamentals of PowerShell for DBAs. This week, it all starts to come together as you put together PowerShell plus SQL Server to automate tasks on a regular basis: March 27, Mon: Objects and Namespaces March 28, Tues: PowerShell and the SQL Server Agent March…

Brent Reading Book

Office Hours: Questions That Didn’t Make the Cut

Last Updated March 23, 2023

Production Database Administration

Sometimes, y’all post questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and they don’t get a lot of upvotes, and reading through ’em, I bet it’s because other people don’t quite understand what you’re asking. I think there might actually be a good question at the heart of it, but … I’m just not sure what it is, and it needs…

It’s Monday. Do You Know Where Your PowerShell Training Is?

Last Updated March 21, 2023

You’re over the hump! Just two weeks left to go. All month long, I’m giving away our newest class, Fundamentals of PowerShell for DBAs. Here’s what you’ll be learning this week: March 20, Mon: Parameters and Error Handling and Demos March 21, Tues: The SQL Server Module and Demos March 22, Weds: The SQLSERVER:\ Drive…

Brent Ozar

Office Hours: Short Text Answers Edition

Last Updated February 19, 2023

Production Database Administration

Not all of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento require long-winded responses. Brandon: Do you seen a rise in json queries to address impedance mismatch between data/objects? I struggled with EF to produce a query that was neither simple nor complicated against a properly designed db (according to 2 experts). Dropped EF; used json query…

Free Training Coming Up! March is PowerShell Month.

Last Updated March 21, 2023

You’re a production database administrator responsible for the health, security, and uptime of many database servers. You’ve been pointing and clicking your way through SSMS for years, scripting out T-SQL to files, but… when you need to do the same task repeatedly across several servers, it’s a bit of a pain. You’ve told yourself someday…

Office Hours, ChatGPT Edition: AI Answers 4 of Your Questions

Last Updated January 31, 2023

Production Database Administration

In a recent Office Hours post, David Reabow suggested letting ChatGPT answer a few of the questions y’all posted at http://pollgab.com/room/brento/. Brilliant! Let’s see how it does. I purposely cherry-picked the questions that I thought ChatGPT would have the easiest time answering. Rollback is single threaded asks: Hi Brent! An update statement has blocked all…

Is There a Bug in SQL Server’s MAXDOP Calculation? (Update: Yes!)

Last Updated November 3, 2022

Configuration Settings

I think I’ve found a bug in SQL Server setup’s MAXDOP calculation, and I need you to take a second look. Setup is recommending MAXDOP 8: Which is odd, because this is running on an AWS i3.16xlarge with 2 sockets, 2 NUMA nodes, 32 logical processors per node, 64 logical processors altogether. In this screenshot, I’ve laid…

Learn the Fundamentals of TempDB for Free This Week.

Last Updated September 18, 2022

Every weekday during the month of October, one of the modules from my Fundamentals classes will be absolutely free to watch. But you gotta watch it that day – you snooze, you lose. For this week’s TempDB class, you don’t have hands-on labs, but if you want to follow along with the demos, I’ll be using…

Office Hours: One-Word Answers Edition

Last Updated October 13, 2022

Production Database Administration

Some of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are pretty straightforward. Let’s get ‘er done. LetTheDbaHandleIt: My friend needs to track who has accessed what data. This is easy at OS and app level, but how can my friend verify that those who have direct DB access are not snooping on data inappropriately? e.g. payroll or…

Erik Darling’s Month of Free Tools Training

Last Updated October 3, 2022

Production Database Administration

Over the past month (plus or minus a couple days), Erik Darling churned out dozens of posts to show how he uses different SQL Server Community Tools that are free and open source to troubleshoot SQL Server issues. You should read all of them. I did. (I also shamelessly copy/pasted this intro, plus the below,…

Office Hours: Gif Reactions Edition

Last Updated September 17, 2022

Production Database Administration

Some of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are open-and-shut cases. I was going to do a one-word-answers edition, but I think this is even better: gifs. GI Joe DBA: Thoughts about IT professionals Unionizing? IT professionals are in demand. Because of our demand, should we use this leverage to unionize, raise the bar, force…

Most DBAs Say They’re Encrypting Personally Identifiable Data. Most.

Last Updated September 11, 2022

Production Database Administration

Despite the continuous stream of data breaches, ransomware, and GDPR violations, some companies still aren’t encrypting personally identifiable information (PII) inside our databases or backups. I see this all the time when working with clients, but I can’t exactly talk about that or give numbers, so I decided to take a highly unscientific poll on…

Community Tools Month: Using sp_WhoIsActive to Catch ASYNC_NETWORK_IO

Last Updated September 11, 2022

When your SQL Server’s top wait stat is ASYNC_NETWORK_IO, that indicates SQL Server is waiting on the app to ask for the next part of the result set. This is a real pain in the rear to troubleshoot because often these waits happen for really short duration each time – think milliseconds, not seconds. It’s…

And it looks bad even in shades.

Office Hours, Short Text Answers Edition

Last Updated September 5, 2022

Production Database Administration

Not all of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento require long, thought-out answers. Some are just one-line specials, like these: F’legend: Hi Brent, in reply to a question talking about database restores for 1TB+ you also touched on scrubbing or synthetic data as a way to populate dev environments. Are there any resources/tools you would…

Your Turn: I’m Not Answering These 13 Office Hours Questions

Last Updated August 18, 2022

Production Database Administration

Normally, after I do a round of Office Hours of going through the questions that got posted at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, I answer the highly upvoted ones and then clear the queue. If y’all didn’t upvote questions, then I don’t answer ’em. However, today I’m trying something different: I’ll post the non-upvoted questions here for y’all to…

Office Hours Speed Round, Text Edition

Last Updated August 10, 2022

Production Database Administration

Got questions for me? Post ’em at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me cover. I filter out the ones that are too short for video answers, and here’s the latest batch: Corrupted: Should DBCC CheckDB be run on secondary replicas in AG as well ? Is it recommended to attach corrupted…

Brent Reading Book

Let’s Make September Our Free Community Tools Awareness Month.

Last Updated July 22, 2022

Production Database Administration

Last week, I was reading a brand new article from a Microsoft employee about how you should directly query sys.dm_exec_requests in order to find out what’s running on your system. “Step 1: get a stone that looks round.” I lost my mind. There was a lot of yelling at the monitor. In the year 2022,…

Office Hours Speed Round: Text Edition

Last Updated July 29, 2022

Production Database Administration

Got questions for me? Post ’em at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me cover. I filter out the ones that are too short for video answers, and here’s the latest batch: Thomas Franz: When I have a very large table with no statistics (or not on a specific column in the…