Building the BrentOzar.com 2020 Black Friday Sale

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Seven years ago, I ran the first Black Friday sale at BrentOzar.com just for fun. I always like shopping for stuff like TVs around this time of year, even if I don’t actually buy anything – it’s just a fun diversion for looking. However, it caught on with consumers in a big way, so over the years, it became a really big deal for the business. In 2018, we crossed the half-million dollar mark, and then things got better in 2019 as well. Every year, leading up to the sale, I put a lot of thought into two things: What…
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Reminding Myself What Life Was Like During COVID19: Day 237

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It’s been about eight months since California first went into lockdown. Every now and then, I blog little reminders to myself about what life is like so that I’ll be able to read back in the future and remember how things were going. You can read the past ones under the covid19 tag. I’m doing a mental checkpoint because 3 significant things happened recently. 1. San Diego is heading into lockdown again. This week, we got word that the number of cases here has gone up to the threshold of the purple tier again, California’s highest risk rate, so we’re going…
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We’re Planning to Move to Iceland for a While.

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@brentozar #iceland #travel #glacier #ocean ♬ Landslide (Live on PBS in Boston 2004) – Fleetwood Mac Erika and I first visited Iceland for SQL Saturday 2019, and returned again in 2020. We had such a good time and loved the place so much that we started making plans to go for longer and longer periods of time. In mid-2020, we realized that the coronavirus situation was going to get a lot worse before it got better. I decided not to do any in-person client engagements or conferences until we could both be vaccinated, and that wasn’t going to come around…
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Reminding Myself What Life Was Like During COVID19: Day 194

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Update 2020/10/02 – a few days after I wrote this, President Trump and the First Lady tested positive. Just making a note here because obviously that’s gonna be a pivoting moment. It’s been a little over six months since California first went into lockdown. Every now and then, I blog little reminders to myself about what life is like so that I’ll be able to read back in the future and remember how things were going. You can read the past ones under the covid19 tag. The last one was about two months ago. Almost all of my clients are…
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Upgraded Helmut, My Porsche 911 Targa

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It’s been a year since I bought Helmut, my 2019 Porsche 911 Targa, so I gave him some electronic birthday presents. I bought him off the dealer lot, so I didn’t have the chance to customize it during the purchase process. He had the Bose stereo, and it would be fine for most folks – especially given that the acoustics in an open-top car like a Targa aren’t great anyway, However, I’m really picky about my audio, and I like to play it loud without distortion. (No, not with other people around – just on the open road.) However, I…
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Reminding Myself What Life Was Like During COVID19: Day 138

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It’s been a couple of months since my first update on what life is like, and I wanted to make a few notes for myself about what changed, and what hasn’t. View this post on Instagram Social distancing is a lot easier down here. A post shared by Brent Ozar (@brento) on Jul 9, 2020 at 6:05am PDT We took a couple of quick vacations. I was scheduled for jury duty starting June 29th, and the county didn’t cancel that until 3 days before. Suddenly facing 2 open weeks on my calendar, we hopped in the car and drove up…
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Reminding Myself What Life was Like During COVID19

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This blog post isn’t for you, dear reader: it’s for me. We succeeded in erasing our wine collection I was thinking today that at some point in the future, I’m going to look back and ask myself, “Self, what was life like during the first wave of COVID19?” I figured I’d take some time and whip out a few notes to myself so I can remember. I usually schedule my blog posts in advance, but not this one – just doing a quick brain dump on Saturday, June 13th, and publishing it immediately. We’re about 90 days into the quarantines.…
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San Diego home office

How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 8

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It’s time for my annual update on the wild ride. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 8 of the company: May 2018 to April 2019. Erika and I moved to San Diego. San Diego home office We’d lived in Chicago for years, but I was tired of the winters. Ever since my first trip to California, I’d felt like I belonged there. It took years to make the financial numbers and personal timeline make sense, but we finally pulled it off in August 2018. I loved…
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Brent Ozar in Iceland

Why I Haven’t Come Home Early From Vacation (Updated)

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Hello from Iceland! For March 2020, Erika and I scheduled a month-long road trip to slowly drive around Iceland’s Ring Road. If you wanna follow along, I’m posting stuff on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Several folks have asked me, “Brent, with all the coronavirus stuff going on, why don’t you fly home?” I’ve scribbled out short answers a few times, but I figured I should probably post the full version for posterity here. I’m writing this on Monday, March 16th, and of course the situation is super-fluid, but I’m mostly interested in being able to go back and see what my thought process…
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His name is Helmut.

Epic Life Quest: Level 13 Completed.

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Childhood dream achieved When I made the decision to stop having consulting employees, a big part of that was being able to be flat out gone for longer periods of time. In a tiny 4-5 person business, it’s challenging (but by no means impossible) for 2 of the team members (Erika & I) to simply disappear for a month at a time. We could have done it by adapting how the company worked, I know, but that’s a matter for that other blog post – this is about my Epic Life Quest, and here, the company change manifested itself in…
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Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in California with my wife Erika. I'm on an epic life quest to have fun and make a difference.

I co-founded Brent Ozar Unlimited to help make your SQL Server go faster. I also maintain sp_Blitz® and the open source First Responder Kit repo.

profile for Brent Ozar on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites
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