Product has been added to your cart.

SQL Server

2 Features of SQL Server You Should Avoid

Last Updated December 16, 2012

Crystal meth helps you lose weight and feel better about yourself. It’s true. Wikipedia says so. Sure, the side effects of methamphetamine are more than just anorexia and euphoria, but if you’re looking to be an upbeat, skinny person, meth gets the job done. SQL Server has a couple of similar features that might make…

More Free SQL Server DBA Training Videos Online

Last Updated March 10, 2021

The SQLBits conference in Great Britain videotapes their sessions and makes them available for public viewing. This weekend, they announced that last fall’s sessions are online now – and it’s all free! Here’s my Performance Tuning for Race Car Drivers presentation. (Yes, I do insult Americans within the first 30 seconds, but I don’t think…

Book Week: The Economics of Writing a Book

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Book Reviews, SQL Server

This week I’m focusing on books and the book business. Today I’ll be covering the money thing for authors, and tomorrow I’ll be reviewing a book I like for both the content and the business. Enjoy! Now that I’m holding a physical copy of our book in my hand, the pain of the experience has…

Typical BBS Menu

You may ask yourself, How did I get here?

Last Updated June 7, 2020

Paul Randal (Blog – @PaulRandal) tagged me in a post about the three events that brought him here. I had to think about this one for a while, and I even talked it over with Erika. Discovering BBSes Typical BBS Menu Long before the public got access to the Internet, I was logging onto Bulletin…

How to Use the #SQLHelp Hash Tag on Twitter or Slack

Last Updated February 19, 2020

You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers. No, not Radio Shack – Twitter and the SQLcommunity Slack. Right now, no matter when you’re reading this, there are people on Twitter who can answer quick questions for you. Thanks to an excellent idea by Aaron Nelson (@SQLVariant), it’s even easier now. In this post, I’ll show how…

Christian Bolton on SQL Server memory

Last Updated March 10, 2021

At #SQLBits, I was quite excited to attend this session because of the presenter. Christian Bolton of COEO (Twitter) was the head author on our upcoming book SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting, and he’s one of the only 8 Microsoft Certified Masters on SQL Server that work outside of Microsoft. Physical vs Virtual Memory…

SQL Server 2008 R2: Into the Clouds

Last Updated September 14, 2022

R2’s new Data-Tier Application (DAC) capabilities give the DBA to manage databases as if they were more like virtual servers. Today I’m going to talk about what that means short-term and long-term. Short-Term: Nothing To See Here, Move Along I don’t think most DBAs will see a .dacpack file in the wild for years: It’s…

Top 10 Interview Questions for Windows Administrators

Last Updated January 9, 2014

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

When you’re hiring a Windows desktop administrator, here’s the best questions to ask. Includes questions like, “What’s a Windows profile? When would you delete one, and what gets deleted?”

These are also good for environments where the sysadmins have to wear multiple hats, and they also touch servers.

We Finished the Chicago-Mac Race (Last)

Last Updated July 23, 2018

The good news: in the official press release announcing the winners of the Chicago-Mac sailing race, the Hannah Frances was included along with the winners. Hannah Frances Skipper Mike Cook Receiving the Pickle Boat Trophy The bad news was the way we got mentioned: “While 33 boats chose to retire, most citing reasons related to…

The Chicago-Mac Sailboat Race

Last Updated July 23, 2018

The Race Course Since 1898, sailors have gathered at the Chicago Yacht Club each summer to race their sailboats up Lake Michigan to the Mackinac (pronounced mackinaw) Island. The 333 mile course from Navy Pier to the lighthouse makes it the longest annual freshwater sailing race in the world. The sailboats race around the clock…

Finding old, unanswered StackOverflow questions

Last Updated January 30, 2016

So you wanna start answering questions on StackOverflow, but you’re frustrated because it seems like people are fillin’ out answers even faster than you can type? Find yourself up at 3am hitting Refresh just hoping a new question comes in? Necromancer Badge Shirt Here’s a new trick: Import the StackOverflow database into SQL Server Run…

How to Import the StackOverflow XML into SQL Server

Last Updated June 8, 2013

UPDATE 2013: This code is no longer available. The size of the StackOverflow export has grown beyond what you can import with this method. Want to play around with the StackOverflow database export? Here’s how to import the XML files into SQL Server, and some notes about the tables and data schema. Script to Import…

SAN Multipathing Part 2: What Multipathing Does

Last Updated February 13, 2017

SQL Server, Storage

Storage Area Networks (SANs) can do multipathing, but what does that really mean? I explain the differences between failover and performance load balancing, and talk about why active/active multipathing isn’t what it seems.

SAN Multipathing Part 1: What are Paths?

Last Updated February 13, 2017

SQL Server, Storage

In the beginning, God made drives directly attached to our computers. Over time, man decided to get jiggy with it and use Storage Area Networks. Learn why pathing is so important to these two systems.

The Cost of Log Shipping SQL Server to Amazon S3

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Log Shipping, SQL Server

Want to know how much it’ll cost to back up your database transaction logs to Amazon S3? I’ll show you with a snippet of T-SQL. Note the parameters at the top for retention periods. The defaults assume one full backup weekly. DBAs would normally want to do full backups more often, but when you’re paying…

Getting the most recent record

Last Updated April 10, 2015

Sounds simple, right? Just grab the max. But what if you want to use a single T-SQL operation to fetch the most recent record and some of its attributes? StorminSpank asked: @BrentO SQL Question. 4 columns, ID, Date, Info1, Info2. ID has multiple entries. Want Latest Date for Distinct ID, but also info1 and 2.…

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…