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Professional Development

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Professional Development

DBA Job Interview Questions and Answers

What’s Your Favorite SQL Server Interview Question? Here’s Mine.

April 20, 2020

“Out of the stuff on your resume, what are you the proudest of, the most excited about? When I’m interviewing a candidate for one of my clients, I’ll usually start with this question to help understand the resume. See, recruiters seem to actively encourage folks to keyword stuff their resume: to dump in everything and…

My Home Office Studio Hardware: Spring 2020 Edition

April 9, 2020

Home Office, Streaming

When I last blogged about my home office setup in December, I’d just invested in a new massive beast of a desktop: a Mac Pro with a 16 cores, 96GB RAM, and a AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32GB. Now it’s time to put that horsepower to work. In the past, I’ve used GoToWebinar for…

Learn T-SQL Querying by Lopes and Lahoud

Recommended SQL Server Books, 2020 Edition

February 17, 2020

If you’re the kind of person who likes to read books, here are some that I think would expand your horizons. These links are Amazon affiliate links, so I make a few cents when you buy through ’em. It’s your way of tipping me for the book recommendations, so thank you! T-SQL Books: Level 1:…

The 2020 Data Professional Salary Survey Results Are In.

January 6, 2020

We asked what you make, and 1,734 of you in 63 countries answered. Altogether, you made $170,753,936 this year. Damn, y’all are bringing home the bacon! Download the 2020, 2019, 2018, & 2017 results in Excel. A few things to know about it: The data is public domain. The license tab makes it clear that…

My Home Office Studio Hardware: Winter 2019 Edition

December 23, 2019

Home Office, Streaming

I run a lot of online training classes, and some of you who do webcasts from home might be interested to see how all this works. I did pretty well this year, so I upgraded my home office setup to sneak some expenses in on my taxes. Here’s what I’m running at the moment: Desktop:…

Are You Underpaid? Let’s Find Out: The Data Professional Salary Survey is Open.

December 11, 2019

It’s time for our annual salary survey to find out what data professionals make. You fill out the data, we open source the whole thing, and you can analyze the data to spot trends and do a better job of negotiating your own salary: I make my query bucks the hard way Take the Data…

What Should We Change About This Year’s Data Professional Salary Survey?

December 4, 2019

Every year, we run a Data Professional Salary Survey here. Thousands of y’all have answered – here are the past results in Excel – and it helps everybody get a better idea of how overpaid they are. (Did I word that right?) Here are the questions I’m planning to ask this year: What’s your total…

Yep, still the same smile.

DBA Training Plan 23: Congratulations! Now, It’s Your Turn.

September 23, 2019

DBA Training Plan, Professional Development

I bet you think you suck at databases. You’re sitting there on your computer, reading all kinds of blogs, watching presentations online, and you’re thinking, “Everybody knows more about databases than I do.” We all feel that way. There’s even a name for it: Impostor Syndrome. I have it too. For example, about a decade…

Live Class Season Pass

DBA Training Plan 22: Where to Learn More

September 17, 2019

DBA Training Plan, Professional Development

Whew. We’ve worked through a couple dozen posts together in this DBA Training Plan, and you’re still just getting warmed up. First, pick your specialty. Here’s some of the more popular specializations in the SQL Server business: Production administration – managing uptime, building new boxes, troubleshooting clusters, setting up storage, designing virtualization infrastructures Performance tuning…

Brent Reading Book

What Are Your Coworkers Learning Right Now?

September 2, 2019

Professional Development

Not a poll, no fixed list of answers, just totally open comments. What are the developers, sysadmins, and data professionals on your team learning these days? Any particular topics that they’re really excited about? Let me know in the comments. (I think this is the shortest post I’ve ever written, hahaha!)

Home office 2019

Upgraded to a Nicer Green Screen and Microphone

July 11, 2019

Home Office, Streaming

I’m constantly looking for ways to raise my game, so I made some investments this month to take my video class audio & video to the next level. I’m now doing green screen effects on the recordings. I picked up an Elgato retractable green screen that mounts to the wall so that I can pull…

Brent Ozar presenting at SQL Saturday Israel 2019

Tips for Better Presentations

June 4, 2019

Writing and Presenting

Today’s post is for those of you who give presentations to user groups and conferences. Upload your resources before the session starts. When you say “I’ll upload the resources later,” the attendee hears you saying, “I’m winging this, I barely finished this deck 15 minutes ago, and I didn’t even have the time to upload…

Brent Ozar reading

Why That “DBA” Job Posting Sounds So Terrible

June 3, 2019

Professional Development

What follows are just some of the highlights from an actual job posting. I’m not including the job description, just the requirements that an applicant has to have in order to even throw their hat in the ring: Requires Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience. Experience running and maintaining a 24×7 production computing environment Hands-on experience…

Learn T-SQL Querying by Lopes and Lahoud

Book Review: Learn T-SQL Querying by Pedro Lopes and Pam Lahoud

May 8, 2019

Learn T-SQL Querying by Lopes and Lahoud You’ve been writing queries for at least a year or two, and you’re curious about what’s happening under the hood when SQL Server runs a query. You want to know what you can do to improve your queries, tune your indexes, and change SQL Server’s configuration settings so…

The 2019 Data Professional Salary Survey Results

January 6, 2019

How much do database administrators, analysts, architects, developers, and data scientists make? We asked, and 882 of you from 46 countries answered this year. Y’all make a total of $84,114,940 USD per year! Hot diggety. (And at first glance, it looks like on average, y’all got raises this year.) I make my query bucks the…

Thoughts About the 2019 Salary Survey’s New Questions

December 30, 2018

Our annual Data Professional Salary Survey is open now and closes this Sunday. We’re asking a few new questions this year (based on your feedback), and here’s what we’re seeing so far. At how many companies have you held this job? This one came about because folks were curious if job hopping paid off: If…

Joe Sack query bucks

Tell Us What You Make: The 2019 Data Professional Salary Survey

December 11, 2018

It’s time for our annual salary survey to find out what data professionals make. You fill out the data, we open source the whole thing, and you can analyze the data to spot trends and do a better job of negotiating your own salary: We make Stacks of Sacks Take the Data Professional Salary Survey now.…

What Should We Change About the Data Professional Salary Survey for 2019?

October 18, 2018

Every year, we publish an open Data Professional Salary Survey. Last year, 3,113 folks from 73 countries answered, so we’re doing it again this year. Here are the questions we asked last year. If there’s any changes you want to make, leave a comment and we’ll talk through it as a community. I want to make…

Book Review: Microsoft SQL Server Training, Volume 1

May 10, 2018

Last week, I shared a few pictures out of Ron Soukup’s Inside SQL Server 6.5 book. You had a blast with that one, so I figured I’d share some more pictures from another, uh, let’s call it “well-preserved” book about SQL Server. Make sure you see the subtitle of this book before you add it to your…

Book Review: Inside SQL Server 6.5

May 2, 2018

Books Offline 30 years ago, back in 1988, Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, and Sybase got together to start building SQL Server 1.0 for OS/2. I wanted to take a trip down memory lane to celebrate, but I didn’t wanna go back quite that far. I wanted to go back to what would probably be fairly recognizable – say,…

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