We give away sp_Blitz™, a totally free health check tool for Microsoft SQL Server. It looks for all kinds of common reliability and performance problems and gives you a prioritized to-do list.

The number one question I get about it – by far – is, “Why do you give it away for free? Why don’t you charge for it?”

Free Beer vs Free Speech

We need to start by considering the word free. In the software world, there’s two ways to look at it. The Wikipedia article on Gratis versus Libre sums it up well:

Gratis versus libre is the distinction between two meanings of the English adjective ”free”; namely, “for zero price” (gratis) and “with little or no restriction” (libre). The ambiguity of “free” can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright and patents.

I can give you a free beer once, or perhaps many times. However, you may not get the recipe to my beer, and I may decide at any time that I no longer want to give it away.

sp_Blitz™ is Free Beer

We’ve copyrighted and trademarked sp_Blitz™ because we want to maintain ownership of it and protect the work we’ve put into it.

Nightmare scenario: a software tool vendor sees sp_Blitz™ and says, “Wow, this is awesome! We’re going to integrate this into our own tool so that it displays the sp_Blitz™ results, and we’ll say POWERED BY THE BLITZ on it so people will know it’s good. Except we’re going to change sp_Blitz™ a little – we’re going to take out some of the checks, and we’re going to add a few dubious ones, and we’re going to take out all of the references to BrentOzar.com.” Ouch. Not cool.

Gray area scenario: a blogger sees sp_Blitz™, likes it, and decides to put a copy of it on their site for free download for their readers. It starts getting search engine traffic, and next thing you know, people are clicking on that link, downloading their version, and not understanding that it’s really old. Maybe it’s got an ugly bug that causes problems. (Hey, who are we kidding – it’s mostly my code, so it very definitely has bugs.) We have no idea that someone else is hosting an old version, and it’s doing more harm than good.

This might sound far-fetched, but I know another blogger who’s experienced this exact problem. He wrote a web site with a lot of good educational content about SQL Server, and then he sold the web site. The buyer runs ads on the site, making money off it, but can’t be bothered to update the content. As a result, some of the advice on the site is now just plain wrong, and it’s spreading bad knowledge amongst new DBAs who don’t know about the site’s new ownership.

To protect ourselves – and by “ourselves” I mean those of us who work with SQL Server – we copyrighted and trademarked sp_Blitz™. We don’t allow other sites to distribute sp_Blitz™ because we don’t want to worry about a dozen different versions scattered all over the Intertubes. (This also explains the continuous ™ marks all over the place – the lawyers make me use that whenever I mention sp_Blitz™. Never thought I’d memorize the keyboard shortcut for that – on the Mac, it’s alt-2.)

But Why Give Away sp_Blitz™?

I don’t want to get paid to solve easy problems. I don’t want a client to schedule us in advance, get all excited, and then have us find out in the first five minutes that they’ve got auto_shrink turned on and it’s killing their performance. Sure, it feels good to get an easy win, but … that’s not really fair.

Nobody should have to suffer through poor performance just because somebody accidentally turned on a switch they didn’t understand. I want everyone to be able to run sp_Blitz™ and find out if their fly is unzipped without having to call a consultant. Heck, I wish SQL Server Management Studio ran sp_Blitz™ on a server every time it connected, and then showed big flashing red lights for dumb stuff like auto_shrink.

We give it away because we want people to find the easy problems on their own. We want them to look at the results, see our links to our site for friendly, helpful explanations of common problems. We want you to watch our free training videos explaining how to fix those common, easy pain points.

Then, down the road, when you run into a really challenging problem – something that really does require a Microsoft Certified Master or an MVP to solve – then you’ll call us. You’ll already know how we identify problems and give easy solutions, and you’ll trust us with your SQL Servers because you’re already relying on our scripts. You won’t email me today or tomorrow, or maybe not even this year, but this isn’t a short-term bet. I’m very bullish on the community for the long term.

And it works – you’d be surprised how often I hear, “We’re having performance problems, and we’ve fixed the obvious stuff from sp_Blitz™, but now we need something deeper.” Giving easy fixes away for free brings in consulting business. However, if I charged anything for sp_Blitz™ – even just $1 – it wouldn’t get word-of-mouth advertising.

It’s tempting to look at the download numbers (approaching 20k) and think, “If I just charged $5 per download, I’d have $100k, and I could buy that Porsche 911 I’ve always wanted.” Not so – by charging for it, I instantly change the game. People expect support for paid software. People rarely offer to contribute code for paid software. People complain about paid software. I don’t like complaints.

Besides, if I give it away for free, it doesn’t take a lot of consulting engagements to pay off $100k. I see sp_Blitz™ as kinda like a sponsored charity: companies pay me to improve sp_Blitz™ for the public. The more I improve it, the more companies pay me, and the more I can improve it again. It’s a wonderful cycle, and that’s also why I copyrighted and trademarked it: I have to protect that cycle. As long as I can nourish and grow sp_Blitz™ for the public, it’ll continue to pay for itself.

Could sp_Blitz™ Be Open Sourced?

To make that cycle work, companies have to contact me for consulting work once they’ve exhausted sp_Blitz™’s answers. To encourage that, sp_Blitz™ includes more-details links that point back to educational pages on BrentOzar.com. DBAs see those links, read the content, and say to themselves, “When we’re in trouble, I’m going to call these people first.”

To maximize my chances of making that work, I want to maintain control of the more-info links in sp_Blitz™. I prefer that they to point back to BrentOzar.com, not Books Online. We looked at putting it into Github so anybody could check in improvements, but then they could fork the repository and make their own version without giving us any credit. In a perfect world, I’d let anybody contribute to the project quickly and easily (while still protecting our rights). I’m not sure how to get there from here, but I keep looking to see if I can find a way.

Database administrators are lonely. In most companies, there’s only one DBA, and nobody else really understands the job duties. We don’t have anybody else we can talk to about the crazy things we run across. I think this is the biggest reason there’s such a vibrant SQL Server community on Twitter - we’re looking for other people who understand us.

This January, Jeremiah turned me on to DevOpsReactions.tumblr.com, and I was hooked. DevOps is a new hybrid job, a cross between developers and system administrators. Like DBAs, they’re an unusual profession with very different challenges than most of their coworkers.

I knew what I had to do.

I started DBAReactions.Tumblr.com and set up logins for Jeremiah, Jes, and Kendra to contribute. The images & captions came fast and furious, and almost immediately we’d written a couple of weeks’ worth. I figured it was a fun experiment just to see if other people would enjoy seeing our take on common DBA problems.  I kinda soft-launched it just by retweeting a few of @DBAReactions’ tweets, and people came in droves:

The bump in early February is from our blog post announcement and it hitting Reddit.

I wasn’t expecting that many people to find it funny – after all, I think we’ve got kind of a wacko sense of humor. The site’s already got a strong following on both Twitter and Tumblr.

The real shocker was the number of pageviews. When people visit the site, they VISIT THE SITE, going through 5-10 pages of gifs at a time. On any given weekday, it gets 5-8,000 views:

I shared those numbers with a couple of my friends who work in marketing, and their first words were, “Wow! How are you going to make money on that?” Hey, not everything is about money – sometimes it’s just about having fun, and this is a hell of a lot of fun. When I sit down to write these on weekend mornings, I look up at the clock and realize two hours just disappeared. It’s a great way to blow off steam and share the strange life of database work.

I’ve set some restrictions on what I write. I try to keep it database-independent so that a DBA on any platform will get a laugh out of it. While I take a lot of pot shots at SAN admins, VMware admins, and developers, I try to keep it in good fun. Tumblr restricts images to around 1MB max, so that cuts the gif potentials somewhat. Maybe the toughest restriction: I try not to use gifs with obscenities. Sure, the f-bomb is funny in the right circumstances, but I want people to be able to forward the site around via email without worry. Other DBAs have sent in their own suggestions, too. Feel free to email yours to Help@BrentOzar.com and we’ll add ‘em to the queue.

Employees have one job: move needles.

Company executives track their most important metrics using dashboard graphs like the example at right from Geckoboard.  The VP of Sales, the Chief Financial Officer, the Board of Directors, or anybody else with a fancypants title can all name their top 2-3 key metrics, what the numbers are today, and where they need to be.

Your job – no matter what you think your job title is – boils down to these 6 things:

1. Figure out who you need to impress.  If you’re just getting started with this technique, odds are your direct manager doesn’t actually have any needles set up yet.  You might have to leapfrog several people to pull this off.  I’ve just grabbed people after a status meeting and said, “Hey, I’m sure you’re busy. Can I walk with you to your next meeting and ask you an easy question? Great, thanks.”

2. Find out what their needles measure.  While you’re walking with them, ask, “What are the 2-3 key metrics that mean the most to your department?”  Memorize them, repeat them back to confirm that you understood their names, and then thank them profusely for their time.  Don’t ask how the number is calculated unless you’ve got a really long walk with them – you want to show that you value their time, and you’ll do the research yourself.

3. Find out how to move one of the needles.  Do some Googling to understand how the metrics are calculated.  Write out the full definition, and if possible, try calculating the value yourself.  Does the company have any dashboard or reporting systems that show the needle?  How often are they updated?  How have they been trending lately?

4. Move one of the needles.  This one step has whole books written about it, and I won’t explain that here.  Make the magic happen.  Don’t think “this needle isn’t my job” – it may not be written in your job description, but if you move the right needles, you get raises and bonuses.

5. Prove that you moved it.  Document what you did to move the needle and the effect it had.  For example, at one point, my boss’s boss was starting to freak out about the number of rack spaces left in the datacenter.  If he couldn’t get that needle under control, we faced a very large expenditure to add datacenter space, and that would have moved a whole bunch of needles in the wrong direction.  I undertook a SQL Server consolidation project to cut the number of servers we had in the datacenter, and every time I pulled a server out, I took a picture of our team joyously removing it.

6. Share the proof with the person from #1.  It ain’t bragging if you can prove it.  When my consolidation project finished, I wrote a PowerPoint presentation to the executive showing how I’d personally increased the number of available rack spaces by X%.  That presentation got forwarded around to other executives and departments, and I was lauded as part of the solution rather than part of the problem.  My manager thanked me for being able to translate business needs into IT tasks and delivering value.  Blah blah blah, right?

Remember – every day, you’re already making one needle worse: salary costs.  While you’re patting yourself on the back for meaningless busywork, other people are tracking the year-to-date salary needles.  Every day, that needle raises.  Make sure you’re changing enough other needles to justify that metric, or else you’ll find someone fixing the salary needle problem.

If you find yourself learning things just out of curiosity or to do an even better job of what you’re already tasked with, then that’s a good sign that you’re too comfortable as an employee.  Us IT people are really susceptible to the “ooo-look-a-shiny-new-incremental-improvement” syndrome.  We focus on polishing our skills just a little bit more, sharpening our knives, and making ourselves 10% more efficient.

In many shops, your boss (and your boss’s boss) don’t need you to be any more efficient.  They don’t measure your efficiency, and you’re not really going to influence the IT human resources cost needle.  If you can suddenly manage 10% more servers with your snappy script, they’re not going to lay off 10% of the staff, and they’re not going to magically create 10% more servers just because you’re more capable.  They’re going to give you more servers when they need to, whether you’re ready or not, and they’re not going to reward you based on your effectiveness with those servers.  (This is why I get so frustrated with the “drop everything and learn PowerShell” guys – they’re not usually moving business needles unless they work in 1,000-server shops.)

The needles I see IT executives staring at most often are IT hardware, licensing, and hosting costs.  If your management has been making noises about the cloud, it’s because they’re finally hearing an interesting solution that might move business needles.  Sure, you might not think it’s the RIGHT solution, but the ball’s in your court.  I bet you’ve got better ideas on how to consolidate servers, virtualize old ones, switch to cheaper licenses for expensive products, and other ways to easily save money.

You think they won’t listen to you, but you’re wrong.  They will, but you have to use the same techniques outside vendors use in order to get your point across.  Build a PowerPoint deck talking about how your idea can save the company money.  Get a meeting with people who can pull the trigger.  Act like a vendor, but instead of handing over a check to some stranger in a suit, you want them to hand authority to you – and maybe even a bonus afterward.

It’s time for you to pick a needle and move it.