Blog

Lusting after the new Apple Macbook

Last Updated May 9, 2010

Oh yeah, I gotta have me one of these.

Here’s the deal: as of about a year ago, Apple started moving their entire lineup over to Intel processors instead of Motorola ones, which means Apple computers can run Windows. During the boot process, the user can pick which operating system they’d like to run – Apple OSX or Windows. That’s great for those of us who still have to use Microsoft programs at work, like me. I make my living working with Microsoft SQL Server, and I can’t imagine trying to administer a database without the new SQL Server Management Studio. It doesn’t run run on Macs, doesn’t run on Linux, etc – ya gotta run Windows.

So now, I could either boot into Windows, or I could use Parallels, a slick piece of VMware-like software that lets you run Windows inside a Mac.

This was all good, but until last week, the only Intel-based Mac laptop was $2k – a little too pricey for me. Now there’s the new $1100 MacBook, and that’s a heck of a cheap price point. They make a black model for $1500, but I’d rather have the white one, actually.

The only question now: how can I get work to pay for it? Heh….alright, who in the company needs a new (used) Dell D810 laptop?

End ofa long, hard day

Last Updated February 11, 2017

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

End ofa long, hard day, originally uploaded by BrentOzar.

I spent the second half of the day building and installing a couple of pizza boxes from IBM. We’re cleaning up our network test lab, mounting flat panels on the walls for easier builds, and just generally making it a nicer place to spend time.

BarCamp coming to South Beach

Last Updated May 12, 2006

Brent Ozar

Yeah, it’s been a while since my last blog post, sorry about that. Life is a blast here, having a ton of fun with things at work, but I’m going to try to catch up on the blog over the weekend.

First things first: BarCamp South Beach! Woohoo! I can’t believe it. My first kinda-Valley-ish experience. I’m excited about it. I haven’t been involved in the geek meatspace since I stopped going to HoustonWireless last year, although I still keep in touch with a few of those guys.

But anyway, back to BarCamp. If you’re in the Miami area, you should check out the planned BarCamp experience and consider signing up. It’s demo-centric, meaning you’re expected to share as well as learn. I’m going to be frantically brainstorming about what I could show off. I doubt the attendees would be much interested in the finer points of database systems that cost $25k per CPU, but I might see if I can put together some demos of how we use Microsoft SQL Server on handheld computers. At the very least, I can help out by bringing projectors or servers from work.

Technorati tags: BarCamp, BarCampSouthBeach, BarCampSoBe

Reverse-engineering databases

Last Updated April 26, 2006

Brent Ozar

I’m a big fan of the relatively inexpensive Case Studio as an alternative to the big database design tools. Case Studio does a very competent job at reverse engineering databases, modeling, UML, etc.

The reverse engineering just got a whole lot better with the recent InferRI add-in that can infer relationships between tables even when no relationship is defined in the database. It looks at what fields are the primary keys in each table, and then looks for similarly named fields in other tables. This makes reverse-engineering databases a lot easier for database administrators who don’t like to force the database to enforce relationships, or who take over databases that have never been managed by a DBA before. This thing just saved me a couple hours of work.

The only drawback is that the field names have to be identical. If the Customer table has a primary key of CustomerID, and the Orders table has a field called PurchasingCustomerID, CaseStudio won’t infer the join between the two tables.

Pretty damn good for a first version of the add-in, though.

SQL performance tuning for VPN users

Last Updated September 5, 2009

Brent Ozar

The latest newsletter from the excellent SQL-Server-Performance.com had a tip about doing performance tuning on high-powered machines. If you need to test large queries running inside the server room (meaning, the app or web server runs a big query against the db server), you may not get the speed results you’re expecting if you try to run that same query on your desktop. SQL-Server-Performance attributes this to low resources on the desktop, but there can also be another reason: network bandwidth and latency.

Last week, I was doing performance tuning on a SQL Server that supports users across the United States. One of the applications exhibited very high Duration numbers in the profiles that I ran, and I couldn’t figure out why. Even when I tuned the tables by adding appropriate indexes, the load on the server didn’t improve the way I’d expected. Finally, I found out that this particular application was running on machines in another state – not application servers inside our data centers like we’d typically do. The query results were being piped over their slow VPN connection down to their workstations, and so the Duration statistics were artificially high. Sure, it looked like the queries were taking forever, but in reality, it was just a slow network connection, and there was nothing I could do on the database side to speed that up.

The morale of that first story: never performance tune by looking at a single statistic alone, like Duration, Reads, Writes, or CPU. Use all of them together to gauge what queries are really having an impact.

Technorati tags: PerformanceTuning, SQLServer

Raising the dead…servers

Last Updated April 19, 2006

Brent Ozar

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

Raising the dead…servers, originally uploaded by BrentOzar.

I’ve blogged about more of the downsides than the upsides of my new Cingular 8125, and it’s time for some opposing views.

Stuck in the datacenter working on a dead server, this thing proves its worth. I’m able to take full advantage of some spare time while waiting for stuff to work. I’ve caught up on my emails. I’ve caught up on my voicemail, thanks to our slick VoIP phones that send our voicemails to email. I’m even blogging! Hooah!

Now I just need a pair of Bluetooth headphones so I can whistle while I work.

Why open source will triumph: one big community

Last Updated May 9, 2010

Brent Ozar

For the past few days, I’ve complained a couple of times about the lack of testing on my new Cingular 8125. My troubles continue with the MMS integration. The device has a great digital camera, and it has great email support, but do the two work together? Not so much.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:
1. Take a picture. (I took this particular one yesterday afternoon while walking Ernie down the boardwalk, and I’m only now getting the damn thing into my blog because this process is such a pain in the ass.)
2. Click Send at the bottom of the screen.
3. You get options for each of your email accounts – but not Goodlink, and I can almost understand that because it’s a third-party email client. However, Cingular touts its support, so Cingular should really support it. Bottom line, you can’t send camera phone attachments with Goodlink. But I digress – back to this particular bug. Choose MMS, a picture message.
4. The MMS window pops up, and the first thing is the “To” address.
5. Start typing a person’s name, an email address, or a phone number.

ACTUAL BEHAVIOR:
Nothing happens.

EXPECTED BEHAVIOR:
When I start typing an email address or a phone number, it should pick from my list of contacts and complete the address for me. Or at the very least, it should pop up a clumsy additional window and let me pick an address from my address book. No such luck. It’s as if my address book on the device didn’t even exist. Come on, man, this device fits in the palm of my hand – why are all of the parts so damned independent?

This brings me to testing. The bug reporting format I used above was copy/pasted from the Flock wiki entry on submitting Flock bugs. If I have a problem with the browser, I can simply submit a bug report like I did this morning. I caught a minor grammatical error and submitted a bug for it. I can then watch the Flock crew react to it, hopefully fix it, and publish the fixed code. I can download the fixed browser and see my contribution in action. The very fact that they’re open to my opinion gets me even more excited about using their product.

Now, contrast that with my Cingular 8125. I shudder to think at what would happen if I tried to report a bug to Cingular. I know they have to deal with a lot more users, and they have to insulate their developers better from their end users, but there should still be an open forum at some point where I can go to find problems other people are having with this device and its firmware. Oh, sure, there are forums alright, but they’re independent third-party phone forums that have sprung up out of desperation because they can’t get what they want from the big companies. But that doesn’t make me more excited about Cingular – it makes me more excited about the forums. Cingular has a chance to build their brand here, build a community of involved users, and they’re missing the boat.

Flock, on the other hand, Gets It. They understand that by building a community of involved users, they encourage their product to grow and spread wings.

SQL Server training for developers: primary keys & indexes

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Indexing, SQL Server

I had to do some developer training last week and I wrote up a paper on the basics of primary keys and indexes. Sure, there’s tons of similar stuff around the net, but this is MINE, baby.

Our Table: Phone Numbers

For our evil training purposes, let’s say we work for the phone company, and we need a database table with phone numbers. We need to track:

Phone number (required)
Billing contact last name (required)
Billing contact first name (required)
Business name (optional)
Business category (restaurant, dog groomer, auto dealer, etc)
Address 1
Address 2
City
State
Zip
Service start date

(Sometimes a person or a business will have multiple phone numbers, but for the sake of this training, let’s keep it a simple flat table.)

We will never have two records in here with the same phone number. We have to tell our database about that by making the phone number our primary key. When we make the phone number the primary key, we’re telling SQL Server that there can be no duplicate phone numbers.

That means every time a record is inserted or updated in this table, SQL Server has to check to make sure nobody exists with that same phone number.

As of the year 2000, there were about 360,000 people in Miami. Throw in businesses, and let’s say our table has 500,000 records in it.

That means by default, every time we insert one eensy little record, SQL Server has to read half a million records just to make sure nobody else has the same phone number!

Every 1 write = 500,000 reads.

Well, that won’t work, will it? So let’s organize our table in the order of phone number. That way, when SQL Server inserts or updates records, it can quickly jump to the exact area of that phone number and determine whether or not there’s any existing duplicates.

This is called setting up a primary CLUSTERED key. It’s called clustered because – well, I have no idea why it’s called clustered, but the bottom line is that if you could look at the actual hard drive the data was stored on, it would be stored in order of phone number.

This is different from a primary NONCLUSTERED key – nonclustered means it has nothing to do with the way the data is stored on the physical hard drive.

So to recap:

Primary Clustered Key means 1 write = a few reads
Primary Nonclustered Key means 1 write = 500,000 reads

Sounds like a black and white decision, right? It usually is. There are ways to make primary nonclustered keys fast, but it needs to be a very careful decision not taken lightly, because there are a heck of a lot of ways to make them dead slow.

But let’s get back to our phone number table. Now we have the table organized by phone number, and if we want to find people by phone number, it’ll be very fast. While our computer systems will usually need to grab people’s data by phone number, our customers and end users often need to get numbers by other ways. That’s where indexes come in.

The White Pages: A Lookup Index

Our customers constantly need to find people’s phone numbers by their name. They don’t know the phone number, but they know the last name and first name. We would create an index called the White Pages:

Billing contact last name
Billing contact first name
Phone number

That index would save people a ton of time. Think about how you use the white pages:

You scan through pages looking at just the letters at the top until you get close
When you get close, you open up the full book and jump to the right letters
You can quickly find the right single one record

Now think about how you would do it without the White Pages. Think if you only had a book with 500,000 records in it, organized by phone number. You would have to scan through all 500,000 records and check the last name and first name fields.

The database works the same way, except it’s even worse! If a developer wrote a SQL query looking for the phone number, it would look like this:

SELECT PhoneNumber FROM Directory WHERE LastName = ‘Smith’ AND FirstName = ‘John’

That doesn’t say select the top one – it says select ALL of them. When you, as a human being, go through that list of 500,000 phone numbers, you would stop when you thought you found the right John Smith. The database server can’t do that – if it finds John Smith at row #15, it doesn’t matter, because there might be a few John Smiths. Whenever you do a table scan and you don’t specify how many records you need, it absolutely, positively has to scan all 500,000 records no matter what.

If the database has an index by last name and first name, though, the database server can quickly jump to Smith, John and start reading. The instant it hits Smith, Johnathan, it knows it can stop, because there’s no more John Smiths.

Covering Fields: Helping Indexes Work For You

But that’s not always enough. Sometimes we have more than one John Smith, and the customer needs to know which John Smith to call. After all, if your name was John Smith, and the phone book didn’t include your address, you’d get pretty tired of answering the phone and saying, “No, you want the John Smith on Red Road. He’s 305-838-3333.”

So we would add the Address 1 field in there too.

Billing contact last name
Billing contact first name
Address 1
Phone number

Do we absolutely need the address in our index for every query? No, but we include it for convenience because when we DO need it, we need it bad. And if we DON’T need it, it doesn’t really hurt us much.

This is called a covering index because it covers other fields that are useful.

Adding the address field to our index does make it larger. A phone book without addresses would be a little thinner, and we could pack more on a page. We probably don’t want to include the Address 2 field, because the Address 1 field is enough to get what we need. The database administrator has to make judgement calls as to which fields to use on a covering index, and which ones to skip.

When building covering indexes, the covering fields go at the end of the index. Obviously, this index would suck:

Billing contact last name
Address 1
Billing contact first name
Phone number

We don’t want all of the Smiths ordered by their address, and then a jumbled mess of first names. That wouldn’t be as fast and easy to use. That’s why the covering fields go at the end, and the names go first – because we use those.

Selectivity: Why the Last Name Goes First

If you wanted to search for Brent Ozar in the phone book, you look in the O’s for Ozar first, and then you’ll find Ozar, Brent. This is more efficient than organizing the phone book by first name then last name because there are more unique last names than first names. There are probably more Brents in Miami than Ozars.

This is called selectivity. The last name field is more selective than the first name field because it has more unique values.

For lookup tables – meaning, when users need to look up a specific record – when you’ve narrowed down the list of fields that you’re going to use in an index, generally you put the most selective field first.

Indexes should almost never be set up with a non-selective field first, like Gender. Imagine a phone book organized by Gender, Last Name, First Name: it would only be useful when you wanted a complete list of all women in Miami. Not that that’s a bad thing – but no matter how much of a suave guy you think you are, you don’t really need ALL of the women in Miami. This is why non-selective indexes aren’t all that useful on lookup tables.

This rule is really important for lookup tables, but what if you aren’t trying to look up a single specific record? What if you’re interested in a range of records? Well, let’s look at…

The Yellow Pages: Another Index

When we need to find a dog groomer, we don’t want to go shuffling through the white pages looking for anything that sounds like a dog groomer. We want a list of organized by business category:

Business Category
Business Name
Address 1
Phone Number

Then we’ll look at the list of businesses, see which name sounds the coolest and which address is closest to ours, and we’ll call a few of them. We’ll work with several of the records.

Here, we’re searching for a range of records, not just a single one.

Notice that we didn’t put the most selective field first in the index. The field “Business Name” is more selective than “Business Category”. But we put Business Category first because we need to work with a range of records.

When you’re building indexes, you not only need to know what fields are important, but you have to know how the user is fetching records. If they need several records in a row next to each other, then it may be more helpful to arrange the records like that by carefully choosing the order of the fields in the index.

When in doubt, experiment. Create two or more indexes with the same fields, but in different orders. Then check your query execution plan to see which index gets used.

One Phone Book per City: Partitioned Tables

When we’re dealing with a lot of data, sometimes we partition the same data into multiple tables. The phone company separates its customer list into cities, for example, so that there are separate tables for Miami and for Fort Lauderdale.

When customers want to look up a phone number, they grab the Miami phone book. They don’t want to look in the Fort Lauderdale phone book for someone who lives in Miami.

But how do they know which book to use?

They look at the front of the book, where it says “Miami, Florida”. This is a constraint: this book is constrained to Miami numbers only.

Constraints Define Partitions

Constraints help us because it means we don’t have to put fields like State in our index. When our users are looking at a single entry in the phone book, they don’t have to wonder which State the entry is for. The book is constrained to State = ‘FL’.

Databases need constraints too. We might create a table called OrderHistory_FL, and put a State field in it. However, our poor little database doesn’t know that only FL orders are stored in this table, because the table name doesn’t mean anything. We have to specifically create a constraint on the state field.

When the database server builds query execution plans, it looks at the constraints on each table and uses that knowledge to help build a better execution plan. If it knows that it will only find states of ‘FL’ in a particular table, then it knows it doesn’t have to do any work when the query says WHERE STATE = ‘FL’. The database already knows that all records in that table match the constraint – just like if I tell you to find me all of the John Smiths in Miami, you don’t have to call each of the John Smiths in the phone book and ask them if they’re actually in Miami.

Quibbles with the Cingular 8125

Last Updated April 15, 2006

Brent Ozar

After working with my new Cingular 8125 for a few days, I can say it’s a keeper. As soon as my memory card gets here, I’ll probably even stop carrying my laptop home during the week. I haven’t even started putting 3rd party applications on it yet, but I can say that it’s going to be my primary electronic device outside of the office.

Every single good feature, though, has the oddest drawbacks that point to insufficient testing.

Good: the keyboard buttons are huge and make typing a breeze. Bad: there are so many buttons scattered all over the damn thing that it’s almost impossible to hold without accidentally triggering the camera, voice dialing, comm manager, etc. It’s great for short-term typing, say one paragraph or less, but anything longer than that is risking disaster. It’s just too easy to accidentally start another application right in the middle of typing a paragraph, and then depending on what keys you’re in the middle of pressing, you might trigger disaster. I’ve started phone calls to people, deleted files, taken pictures, etc, all while trying to just type a letter.

Furthermore, with so many multi-purpose buttons liberally slathered all over the phone, why take up onscreen space with visual buttons that have the same purpose? There’s a dedicated hardware button for the Comm Manager – why take up an entire line of the “Today” screen to show one tiny icon for it as well? And don’t get me started about the location of the Power button: when the phone is holstered, the power button is precisely positioned to hit the seat belt socket in a car. Every time I get into the car, I turn the phone on without knowing it, and then as I buckle the seat belt, it places a call. I’m to the point now where I just take the phone off before I get in the car.

Good: two soft keys make it easy to get around in most screens, and HTC even duplicated them above the keyboard for use when the unit is in landscape mode. Bad: these two buttons are so close to the keys that they’re almost impossible to avoid. When composing email, the soft key right above the E will instantly send the email without asking if you’re sure. I looked like an idiot when I sent out three partially completed emails in a row to a group of execs. Not good. If this setup was tested, it was tested by somebody with needles for fingers.

Good: the 8125 comes with a stereo earbud headset with microphone, and it makes a killer wireless walkman. I love walking the dog while listening to Jimmy Buffett’s Radio Margaritaville over the internet, all live. Bad: the earbuds are huge. We’re talking mammoth. I don’t have small ears by any means, but I can’t keep these earbuds in my ears. They pop out at the slightest provocation because they’re apparently designed to fit in Ernie’s ears. There’s no way anybody tested these before deploying them.

Good: the camera takes great pictures for a PDA/phone. The picture you see here was taken outside at dusk with minimal lighting. The camera is very light-sensitive for a simple PDA, and a $300 PDA at that. Bad: despite buttons scattered all over the surface of this device, it’s impossible to change most of the camera settings without getting out the stylus.

Good: underground firmware available on the web enables Microsoft Direct Push email with Exchange. Companies using Exchange Server 2003 with SP2 can enable push email out to PDA’s and phones without paying for GoodLink or Blackberry Enterprise Server setups. It works pretty well out of the box with no configuration. Bad: while the push email does work, it isn’t anywhere near the speed of GoodLink or Blackberry devices. I routinely got emails on my PDA several minutes after they arrived in my inbox – not acceptable for “instant” email. Thankfully, our company uses GoodLink as well, and one of the network guys hooked me up with a GoodLink account. Presto, the emails arrived on my 8125 even before they hit my laptop. That’s what I call push email!

Good: wifi reception is better than I expected. Bad: the phone doesn’t intelligently switch over to WiFi for browsing when available. I’ve even had to manually shut off the GPRS connection just to force all communications to go over the available WiFi connection just to get the fast speed. Totally worth it, though – this device makes for a completely workable web browser from the couch during TV commercials.

Good: the device works pretty well as a phone, and the big screen means the onscreen buttons are large enough to actually work for one-handed dialing. Bad: it doesn’t come with support for A2DP, the new stereo Bluetooth profile for headsets like the droolworthy Jabra BT620. It doesn’t even come with some of the more basic features I expect in an intelligent phone, like the ability to set custom ringtones based on the caller. Come on, man, don’t let my shiny new PocketPC phone get outsmarted by a $50 Nokia.

All of the annoyances I’ve mentioned are minor. The best review comes from everybody who sees this thing in action. They all seem to say the same word: “Whoa.” The screen is big and bright, the keyboard buttons are better than a Treo’s, and it runs Windows Mobile 5. At $300 from Cingular, it’s a heck of a deal. I don’t buy new gadgets as often as I used to, and I’m completely confident in buying this thing right now. It’s the best PocketPC phone on the market today, and it’ll be a long time before anything better hits the stores at this price point.

My first blog entry from a Cingular 8125

Last Updated September 5, 2009

Brent Ozar

Take two.

It’s hard to write a glowing review of a piece of consumer electronics when the damn thing crashes every half hour or so.

As I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted by a frozen screen, my new Cingular 8125 has everything from WiFi to Bluetooth to a full-blown keyboard.

Make that a half-baked keyboard. The keyboard, like the rest of this rebadged HTC Wizard, has a few annoyances that mar an otherwise amazing experience.

Take the keyboard backlighting, for example. At first, I was amazed that the keyboard lighting worked so well. After a few minutes, though, I got aggravated by how quickly the backlight turned off. The keyboard doubles up every letter key with punctuation or numbers. The only punctuation mark with its own key is the period. To use a question mark, I have to find it on the keyboard, then hit the modifier key and the key. If I don’t find it in time, the backlight cuts off, and I have to hit some random key to turn it back on, then backspace, and start looking again for my punctuation mark. Typing becomes a sort of masochistic race against the clock.

But who cares, right? I’m lounging on the couch blogging from my phone! I’m even listening to Jimmy Buffett’s Radio Margaritaville streaming audio out of this thing’s stereo speakers WHILE I TYPE! It’s a freaking multitasking phone! This little machine is way more fun than a $300 phone has a right to be. And the camera quality is spectacular. Just look at at the picture attached to this blog entry!

Oh, wait. That’s right. I can’t get the thing to email a decently sized picture because it keeps timing out trying to send an mms message. Another annoyance.

Every feature I’ve tried so far has a similar drawback. Thankfully, it looks like everything has a workaround so far. It crashes unexpectedly, so I’ve already learned to pen my blog entries in Word instead of the web browser, saving them every few minutes as I go. Like any good relationship, it’s all about compromise. You never get exactly what you want. You have to put up with a little flakiness in order to get the good stuff. So far, the Cingular 8125’s a good balance between the two.

Teaching people programming

Last Updated April 8, 2006

Brent Ozar

My new job’s going extremely well, having the time of my life. I’m working with a group of very competent programmers who’ve produced a whole lot of code, but without the luxury of having their own database administrator. As a result, the database is in truly horrendous shape. As an example, I spent about an hour tuning indexes for a nightly job that’s been taking 4-6 hours to run. After tuning, it takes 1-3 minutes. MINUTES.

Does that make the programmers incompetent? Of course not. They’re very good at what they do, but they’re not database administrators. They know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to scale enterprise apps.

Another guy in the company (not you, Carlos, if you’re reading this – it’s another guy) asked me how I became a database administrator. I explained that I got started programming, and eventually took on enough database administration duties to do it full time. It’s a good fit for me because I’m much better with databases than I am with programming – debugging sucks – and I really enjoy it.

The guy then asked, “So if I was going to start becoming a database administrator, what would I do?”

I was kinda caught off guard. I don’t have a good answer for that. I mean, I have plenty of good answers, but only for people who are already doing network administration or programming. If you can do either of those halfway well, then you can be a database administrator. But to start with DBA work, with no prior programming or network administration? I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. It struck me as a get-rich-quick scheme, and further conversations with him have proven that to be his motive.

Today, I read Peter Norvig’s excellent Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, and it does a fantastic job of explaining my feelings on this subject. Don’t expect to jump into anything – programming, network administration, database administration, etc – and be an expert in 24 hours, regardless of the book titles down at Barnes & Noble.

My new humble abode

Last Updated March 29, 2006

Brent Ozar

Change of plans. Southern Wine & Spirits, where I’ve been consulting since October, decided at the last minute that they wanted to bring me on permanently to work directly for them. They’re a fantastic group of people, and they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Pictured here is my new cube. It may not even be my permanent cube – there’s a slightly quieter cube available right outside Don’s office, and I’ll probably swipe that one instead.

Squint closely at the picture and you might be able to make out my Dell Latitude D810, Dell flat panel, Cisco VoIP desk phone, and Cisco 802.11b cordless handset. Muhahaha, new toys….

I’ll probably be slacking off on the blog entries this week and next while I get up to speed in my new duties. It’s the same company, but a completely different set of duties.

Job hunters – your web site is your brochure.

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

Last week I wrote a series of postings for employers, and this week I’ll touch base on things candidates should know.

Candidates: you are a product, and your web site is your brochure.
Managers: read the brochure just as you would a new product.

These days, we buy everything online. We read the product’s web site, get excited by the marketing, and we’re sold on it even before we walk into the store. Heck, we might not even walk into the store – we might just pick up the phone or buy it online.

Candidates: your personal web presence is your second chance to build a powerful, persuasive brand.

Managers: before you do a phone screening with a candidate, Google their name and see what comes up.

I’ve hired people strictly based off their web site. If their web site is engaging, funny, knowledgeable and powerful, then they’re going to represent my company well too.

Candidates: always keep a clean name online – not just when you’re looking for a job.
Managers: check not just their personal site, but their online history through time.

Search for a candidate’s name online, and sometimes their personal postings on message boards show up. For example, a database administrator candidate may show up in SQL forums asking questions about how replication works.

Here’s where the fun starts: compare the datestamps on their online messages with their resume history. Are they posting Java questions at a time when they said they were working as a DBA? Are they posting in-depth questions, or questions that you would have expected them to already know by that point in their career?

I’ve been doing this kind of candidate research since 2000-2001, and while I’m still in the tiny minority, it won’t last long.

Candidates: put your web site in the body of your resume, not at the top.

Recruiters chop off all of the personal contact info at the top and bottom of resumes. I’m guessing they don’t want the company calling the candidate directly, only going through the recruiter. Whatever.

The problem is that they keep chopping off the candidate’s web site, which is a big piece of the candidate’s resume.

The secret is to put it in the “Experience” or “Qualifications” section of the resume, like “Posts SQL Tips at BrentOzar.com.” That way, recruiters won’t be as likely to lop that part off.

If your resume is in a Word doc, make sure the web site is a hyperlink, so it jumps right out in blue text. When a manager sees that link, it’s almost impossible not to click it. It’s like candy for a baby.

Include it in the signature of your personal emails, too, so when you’re corresponding with a recruiter, they’ll be just as tempted.

Don’t look dumbfounded or bashful when someone says they pulled up your website. Be excited and proud. “What did you think? What was your favorite part?” If you’re not excited, the interviewers will believe they stumbled across something secret, and you’ll look like an idiot.

Candidates: add some marketing fluff to your resume.
Managers: assume the resume might have some marketing fluff.

Show your personality and your knowledge in the site. Include pages about your interests to show that you’re a real human being. Don’t be dry and boring in an attempt to be inoffensive.

Marketers will tell you that you need to build a personal connection with your sales contacts. The more things you have in common with your sales prospects, the more they’ll bond with you. Your own web site should identify as many things as possible that you hold a genuine interest in. My site, for example, covers my travels, turtles, server monitoring, and other wacko things that I love doing.

Managers – caveat emptor. Not everything on the candidate’s site may be the full truth. I’ve seen candidates post blog items like books they’ve read recently, only to find out they didn’t actually read the book. (Very common with business books and trendy tomes.) I’ve also seen candidates post SQL how-to articles and code snippets, only to find out they completely copy/pasted the content. If something looks impressive, copy/paste a particularly unique snippet into Google. See how many other sites have that exact same content, and that’ll help track down plaigarism.

Hiring the Best DBAs: From a DBA Perspective

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

A few more collected notes from my recent interviews:

Sell Them On Your Company Right Away

In your company’s reception area, have a few pieces of relatively up-to-date reading material about your industry, or even better, about your company in specific. The company I ended up choosing, had a great marketing booklet describing the relationships between various branches of the company and their clients. That one brochure actually put me in a great frame of mind before walking into the interview, because it gave me a good, positive outlook on the company and how they treat their customers. Marketing material works just as well on prospective employees as it does on prospective customers.

What’s Your Motivation?

During the interview process, ask each candidate what motivates them. It’s a trick question: not only does it tell you about the employee, it tells you what they’re probably not getting in their current position. (I didn’t realize it was a trick question until long after I was done answering – and isn’t that the best gauge of a trick question?)

Do You Help Others?

Ask candidates if they contribute to any open-source projects. It’s a long shot – even in this relatively open-source-friendly age, us contributors are definitely in the very, very small minority – but if the candidate answers yes, you might have found a really big winner. Ask them to talk about what projects they contribute to, why they do it, and what they’ve learned while working on open source projects. There’s no right answer here, but just knowing that a candidate is that fired up about technology tells you something.

Who You Gonna Call?

Ask candidates, “When you face a very tough technical problem, are there any forums or discussion groups that you like to use?” Make exact notes of the sites they quote, and then go to those sites looking for their posts. I know, it sounds slimy, but this will tell you what kinds of questions they ask and what kinds of answers they give to others.

Get A People Person’s Opinion

If your company has salespeople, consider asking one of the people-savviest salespeople to interview the best candidates after they’ve already passed the technical part of the interview. In my humble experience, salespeople tend to be better judges of people than us technical people. The salespeople I’ve worked with could “read” a person in a matter of minutes and catch interesting things about a candidate’s personality that I’d never notice. Salespeople make a living out of judging people’s interest in a product, and they can do a great job of judging a candidates interest in your company.

Move Fast When You Find The Right Candidate

Agile companies, companies that make quick and accurate decisions, will grab the best employees. Slow, lumbering companies with tons of red tape will get the leftovers. Why? Because agile companies quickly decide whether or not they’ve got Mr. or Mrs. Right, and make that candidate an offer without waiting to go through all of the candidates in a metro area. I interviewed with a downtown Miami company who declared I was a great candidate, said they wanted me, but said they wanted to interview a few other people first. I liked their management style, liked their employees quite a bit, and enjoyed spending time with them. I even envisioned my shorter commute with glee. However, they took their sweet time and made me an offer almost a month later – at which time, I’d already taken an offer. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Slow, lumbering companies, on the other hand, will only get the employees that the agile companies passed over.

Show candidates their work areas, and get their reactions

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

When hiring a new IT worker, take a few minutes to give them a tour of the group’s work environment. You don’t have to go so far as to point out, “Here’s the cube where you’d be sitting,” but try to give them a general idea of what the typical work area looks like. At some shops, all of the programmers get their own offices, and at some shops all of the programmers are packed in two to a cube. Showing the general work area sets basic expectations for the candidate.

This is not for the candidate’s sake. Forget the candidate for a moment.

Ask the candidate, “How does this work environment compare to your current company?” Then ask, “And how does this compare to the other companies you’ve interviewed with?”

This is your chance, Imaginary Employer Corporation, to find out how your office looks at a very first glance to a prospective employee – and to a prospective customer! Watch the candidate’s reaction carefully, and read between the lines. Examine what they say, and link it to their current employer’s size, sales, and industry.

I know the dot-com days are long gone. Nobody installs foozball tables or free soda machines anymore, and nobody gives programmers corner offices with a view of Biscayne Bay. But as an employer, how often do you get the chance to tour your competitors’ offices? Because when it comes right down to it, everyone else is competing for the same talent you want. I had one interview where I was mentally calculating how much I’d have to spend in order to make my office livable, and another interview where I was mentally calculating how much of a salary cut I would be willing to take in order to work in a particularly posh environment.

Your office may not be your pride and joy, but it’ll be a part of the job negotiations. If you acknowledge that, and take it into account as part of your offer package, you can make a better offer that the candidate will be more likely to accept.

When hiring a DBA, test their skills

Last Updated February 12, 2017

Brent Ozar

Professional Development

During my recent job search, I noted a few things about the hiring process for DBA’s, and I figured I’d make a few blog entries out of them. This first one covers technical skill testing – finding out whether a candidate has the experience they claim.

DBAs can be tough people to screen because the skill set is so narrow, because your current in-house programmers don’t have the skills to test a DBA’s technical knowledge, and because with just a little studying, a lot of people can wing it through an interview. If you don’t have a DBA (due to the current one leaving or due to this being your first DBA) you will find it really hard to know for sure that a prospective DBA actually knows their stuff, or if they’re just bluffing.

I’ve interviewed with managers who came to the interview armed with a few generic SQL interview questions they found on Google. These managers need to realize that if they found these questions in ten minutes, the candidates have probably found them as well, and the candidates can parrot out the exact answers.

On the opposite side of the difficulty spectrum, I also interviewed with managers who brought out the toughest technical SQL challenges they’d encountered in the past year. One of the questions involved linked queries against a Sybase server – minutes after I’d specifically said I had zero experience with Sybase. Another question involved heavy, heavy, heavy use of temporary tables by way of select-into, and the developer asked me whether I’d implement multiple TempDB files. TempDB was the heaviest used database in the entire server, to the point where the company implemented clustered database servers thinking they’d get faster TempDB’s. The developer asked how I’d solve it, and I tried to delicately say that I’ve never encountered queries written quite that poorly, and that I’d need to research solutions, but that the real solution is to stop doing select-into with temp tables. She was stunned that I didn’t have an answer off the top of my head, and started asking me about Microsoft’s best practices when implementing multiple TempDB files spread across a cluster. I was just as stunned that she expected me to memorize that scenario, something no DBA should ever have to encounter.

Only one of the companies (out of about half a dozen that I actually interviewed with) gave me a technical test in the form of a Brainbench. As a candidate, I abhor Brainbench tests because they’re so abstract. However, I haven’t seen anything better to test SQL aptitude, it’s better than nothing, and it’s way better than asking ridiculously hard or ridiculously easy SQL questions.

It’s still important to interview a DBA to make sure they get along with the managers and developers, but don’t expect these people to judge a DBA’s technical skills. After all, if they had the technical skills, they’d probably be a DBA – not a manager or a programmer. DBA life is pretty darned good.

It’s official: Apples run Windows

Last Updated May 9, 2010

Brent Ozar

It’s official: Apples run Windows.

Apple’s newest machines use Intel processors, just like regular PC’s from Dell and HP. That meant in theory, we could have Apples that run both Apple software and Windows software. In reality, it took some time and about $13k of bounty money to make the whole thing actually happen. After the instructions are posted, individuals should be able to install Windows on top of Apple machines.

This is exciting for me because I have to use Windows stuff for work, but I’ve always wanted to play around with Mac OSX, and I really like the industrial design of Apple hardware.

It’s still not ready for mass consumption, because it’ll probably take a while for things like device drivers to work. What good is running Windows on an Apple, for example, if you can’t connect to the network? Geeks will hack away to get that stuff into place, and then a lot of us – myself included – will be plunking down $$$ for Apples. In fact, it’s great timing for me personally, because I probably won’t get a laptop in my new job, but I want a laptop for home. Macbook Pro, here I come…

Blogging, privacy, and my new job

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Brent Ozar

Blogging

Yesterday, one of my soon-to-be-former coworkers, Kiran, tipped me off to an NPR story on blogging and privacy. Steve Inskeep spoke with a grad student who writes a few Myspace blogs with his personal journal, political ramblings, and – whee – a blog about blogs. The student observed that he doesn’t know anyone who’s been denied employment based on the contents of their blog, but he knew people who had removed blog content with that fear in mind. Kiran said that before he met me, he didn’t know anybody so open about their lives as to maintain a blog.

It’s more than that, though: I don’t just maintain some random MySpace blog under an online name. I run my blog under BrentOzar.com, my real name, for all to see. I believe that a blog written under a real name gives some credibility, some weight, some authority. It’s less of a blog and more of a personal brand, a personal marketing site. It’s also a historical archive that lends some credence to who I am, and what I’ve been doing for the last several years. It shows that I’m not faking it.

I couldn’t go apply for a job right now with a faked resume saying I graduated from the University of Houston. Well, I could, but good HR folks could Google my name, find my site, read it, and discover that I never finished. Even if I doctored up my site right now to say that I finished, really savvy surfers could dig up an archived version of my site, step back through time to see the different copies, and read how I’d marketed myself differently over the years. Bam, busted.

Whenever a resume crosses my desk, I Google the bejeezus out of that person. I try to find every question they’ve asked on newsgroups, every reference to them and their employer, and their personal hobbies. I know I’m the rarity rather than the norm because my coworkers, managers and HR people are always dumbfounded by the amount of information I come across. You don’t have to write a blog to get busted – all you have to do is post a single question to a newsgroup or forum that shows your email address. “Ah, yeah, this guy posts questions regularly in the MS Access newsgroups, even up to last month. Why’s he still posting Access questions this basic if he’s applying for a SQL Server DBA job, saying he has years of experience?” Bam, busted.

The risk of living a somewhat online life is that if you lie about your life, you can get busted.

The reward is that if you consistently tell the truth, people can verify your history online. It’s almost like a reference check. My future employers can step back through time, look at each company I worked for, see my blog entries, and see what I was doing over the years. Until recently, that wasn’t something I promoted, but Kiran had been so impressed by my blog that he suggested I put a link right on my resume. That worked extremely well and it opened a lot of doors I hadn’t expected.

Enough doors, in fact, that I just gave notice at Kanbay/Adjoined after only five months. My last day will be Friday the 24th.

I cringe as I write this because I know I’m going to have to explain this five-month gig thing later. Years from now, hopefully very very many years from now, if I look for another job, I’ll have to explain why I only stayed five months at a company. I am so not a job-hopper – my last job was six years, and before that two at two years, but both were working with the same guy – I basically followed Wayne West to another company.

A non-blogger would give a BS excuse like “I was only a contract employee” or “The new position was a better match” or “I couldn’t stand the Kanbay merger” or something. Here, I find myself under my own spotlight, and I gotta be honest. I’m a permanent employee, I’m going into a similar position, and I think the Kanbay merger is a great move for Adjoined. At the end of the day, I just wasn’t personally fulfilled – this wasn’t the right match for me.

I’m extremely excited about the new company, and I’ll write more about it later. I don’t know their policy on blogging yet or if I have to sign an NDA about the company name, so I’ll keep my big virtual mouth shut until I get those policies cleaned up. After all, blogging is permanent, and you don’t want to screw that stuff up.

Segway is doomed

Last Updated May 9, 2010

Brent Ozar

I get a kick out of seeing quarter-million-dollar cars put in completely mundane positions. I’m not talking about things like Wrecked Exotics, a site that features expensive car accidents, but more like day-to-day tasks like a Rolls Royce at a parking meter.

Sitting at a traffic light today, watching a man load his dry cleaning into the hood of his Ferrari (remember, their engines are generally in the back of the car), I realized that I’m probably in the prime market area for Segways. There’s a ton of money around here, the money is spent on crazy items, everything is almost (but not quite) within walking distance, the city’s laid out for walkers, and the climate is great outside most of the time.

But I’ve never seen a person riding a Segway in South Beach. Not once. Well, there were a couple of women riding Segways and handing out music CD’s for Yahoo, but that doesn’t count because it was their job. I’m talking about people who actually spent their own money on a Segway and actually use it to go places.

I think if Segway can’t succeed here – or even get a single buyer – then they’ve gotta be doomed. People buy the most ridiculously expensive stuff here and flaunt it. I just got back from walking the dog, and I saw half a dozen Hummer H1’s and H2’s all blinged out with huge rims, lots of chrome, big stereos, etc all coming back from the clubs. So where are the Segways?

Software that makes my job easier

Last Updated March 10, 2006

Brent Ozar

The Kanbay-Adjoined merger just got finalized, and the IT staff is asking us to prep our laptops for replacements. I figured I’d make a list of the programs I typically install when I first get a new machine. I’m not including the Microsoft stuff (Office, SQL Server, Visual SourceSafe, etc) that every SQL Server DBA needs, but just the other stuff that I can’t imagine working without. In no particular order:

Flock – awesome web browser based on Firefox, but integrates additional functionality like blog editing, mapping, Flickr uploading, and more.

Total Commander – Explorer shell replacement that resembles the old Norton Commander. Integrated FTP, favorite directories, directory comparison.

UltraEdit – powerful text editor with the ability to do search & replace in files.

Gaim – one client for all instant messaging programs. Better than running half a dozen.

GizmoProject – voice-over-IP. My phone calls come in wherever I’m logged in, and can simultaneously ring on both my computer and my cell phone. Cheaper than Vonage, plus more features.

Acronis TrueImage – backup program that can actually do backups while you’re using Windows. It also builds a separate recovery partition on your hard drive, backs up there, and offers a boot menu to do an emergency restore. Perfect for laptops who need to back up and recover on the road.

Royal TS – open source Remote Desktop client that saves passwords, lets me easily manage lots of connections inside a single window, and resize on the fly.

Case Studio – affordable data modeling tool with almost all of the features of the big boys, like Embarcadero and Erwin. Great support for SQL Server 2005. Very responsive support staff.

Float’s Mobile Agent – Bluetooth utility for Sony Ericsson phones. Syncs my contacts with Outlook, pops up caller ID info on the laptop when my phone rings, lets me send & receive SMS’s on the laptop without hassling with the phone’s keyboard. I’m really looking forward to picking up a Cingular 8125, but I’m a little bummed out that I’ll lose some of the slick SMS integration of FMA.

Attensa – RSS newsreader for Outlook that can sync with their online service. My RSS articles are synced between home and work, and I can access ’em on the road via the web as well. I haven’t started using it for podcasting yet, but when I get the new laptop, that’s definitely my next step. I’m using iTunes right now, but the drawback is that I can only sync at one place, either home OR work, but not both. When I leave work at the end of the day, I want to have the latest podcasts on my iPod for listening on the drive home. With iTunes, that’s not an option unless I use my laptop for my primary iTunes source, and with the size of my music collection, that’s a no-go.