Hi. I'm writing this from a cottage in Iceland, in the midst of a 9-month digital nomad stint.
I'm teaching classes and doing client work for 1-2 weeks, then Erika and I take off and hit the road for 2-3 weeks at a time, driving around the country, seeing the sights, and sharing 'em on my Instagram feed.
This month, to mark the 20th anniversary of BrentOzar.com, I’m stepping back and looking at the big picture rather than blogging about database problems & solutions like I usually do.
It wouldn't be a good navel-gazing series without a couple thousands words looking inward at myself.
Erika and I moved to Iceland for a while. For those of you who don't follow my personal blog, here's why we moved, and how we got here with a teleworker visa. You can spy on our adventures via my Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. We're working half the time while we live here, and sightseeing the…
Thirteen years ago, I met Gareth Swanepoel (@GarethSwan) for the first time, interviewed him for his first real sysadmin job, and ... turned him down.
Thankfully, my manager overruled me and hired him anyway.
You work with data, and you're thinking about getting a Microsoft certification. Which one should you get? If you need the certification to get a job... Then get the certification you see mentioned the most often in the descriptions of the job you're looking for. This is just a little tricky because certifications shown on…
Here's the last video in my vacation series with the answers to your most-upvoted professional development questions. Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unUfDYNCtNo
Last week, I posted a call for questions about SQL Server careers and professional development, and y'all asked a lot of good ones. Here's the next video with the questions you upvoted the most, and I'll post the last round of 'em next week.
https://youtu.be/9jfl3wTk0i4
I posted a call for questions about SQL Server careers and professional development, and y'all asked a lot of good ones. Here were the questions you upvoted the most, and I'll post another round of 'em next week.
The audio on this isn't up to my usual home-studio quality, of course!
This week, I published two blog posts:
How Bad Statistics Cause Bad SQL Server Query Performance
How Scalar User-Defined Functions Slow Down Queries
I was thinking back about the presentations I've been the most proud of over the years. I've written and performed a *lot* of stuff over time, but here are some of the free public presentations I'm the most proud of, and the stories of how they came to be.
#4: Watch Brent Tune Queries (2014)
This show was inspired by the Discovery Network. I love watching people just do their job. Deadliest Catch. Dirty Jobs. Maine Cabin Masters.
You've stumbled upon this blog, and you're having a pretty good time. Now you're wondering, "Where else can I network with database folks, get to know them, and talk shop?" You're not getting out due to the quarantines, so your local user group isn't fulfilling your networking cravings. You wanna know what else is going on. I've got a ton of good news.
In my recent post about how I use OBS for training classes & webcasts, I mentioned that to keep things lively, you wanna have a variety of scenes that you can switch between to keep the viewer engaged. Imagine a TV show or sporting event that only used one camera angle and screen layout for 30-60 minutes on end: you'd be bored out of your gourd, and you'd tune out.
I've written a lot about the hardware & gear I use for streaming, and now let's talk about the software side. There are a few thousand words in here. Don't think that you have to tackle all of this just to get started streaming, dear reader. I've been working on my streaming setup for months…
For the next year or two, we're going to be learning and sharing online rather than in-person. I wanna look and sound as good as my budget (and my face) will allow, so in this post, I'm going to lay out a starter ($220), good ($1,500), and great ($3,000) online video/audio setups and show you what each level looks & sounds like.
"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 the kitchen sink, every task they've ever performed. Recruiters see the resume as a place to play Keyword Bingo.
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.
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:
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.
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:…
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."
