About Me

I make Microsoft SQL Server go faster and share what I learn along the way.

I build tools and communities
that get people talking.

I’m on an epic life quest
to make a difference
and enjoy the ride.

I work to make databases easy and fun.

When I got started with SQL Server, I was so frustrated with the dry, boring training material. Databases are hard enough to learn as it is without struggling to pay attention through droning technical details. I want to make your job suck less, so I build stuff like:

SQL Server First Responder Kit

It shouldn’t be so hard to find out if your SQL Server is set up correctly or not, so I built sp_Blitz to check your SQL Server’s health instantly, and open sourced it on Github.

PasteThePlan.com

I wanted an easier way to share execution plans online to get help, so we built Paste the Plan with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3.

SQLServerUpdates.com

What’s the latest service pack and cumulative update for Microsoft SQL Server? Many folks are surprised to hear that it’s not in Windows Update.

I’m a consultant with great stories.

I manage Brent Ozar Unlimited, a boutique firm that makes Microsoft SQL Server faster and more reliable. I want to build the kind of company you’d love to work with. I write my technical stuff over there, and I write my small business advice and career stuff over here.

I have lots of real-world experience and out-of-this-world battle scars. Every scar has a fun story, though, so now when you want to do something in SQL Server, I can make you laugh while explaining how to avoid injuries like mine.

I’d worked my way up in the hotel industry to the General Manager position so that I was running my own hotels. However, no matter how high up you go in hospitality, sooner or later, you’re working weekends and holidays.

Tired of emergencies that consisted of changing sheets and making omelettes, I left the hospitality business and became a budget analyst and network administrator for a hotel management company.

I loved information technology, but much to my dismay, I discovered that just like hospitality, it involved…working weekends and holidays.

I joined a hotel accounting software vendor as a developer, and I started with Topspeed Clarion. I know, you probably don’t recognize that as a programming language, but it was what the company used. In retrospect, it was kinda like an ORM in that it abstracted the database away from the application, and your app could switch back ends relatively easily.*

* – not at all easily.

I was the guy standing closest to the Microsoft SQL Server (7.0), and I loved to learn, so I got tasked with making that work. I got my MCSE certification by passing SQL Server exams, too.

I bought BrentOzar.com and set it up as a personal blog.

Prior to that, my blog lived at WickedLife.com (yep, I’ve been blogging for a long, long time), but in a rare moment of prescience, I realized that if I was going to gradually build up an online reputation, I wanted it to reflect me – not an adjective and noun that might not apply to me in a few years. (And besides, my life was never really wicked to begin with.)

After cycling through Clarion, Java, and C# in a few years, I decided I wasn’t cut out to be a developer. I love learning – but I hate learning new languages.

I figured it was time to specialize. I noticed that the SQL language hadn’t really changed in decades, and that databases were centric to a lot of company questions, and that database administrators made a lot of money. I chose to focus on Microsoft SQL Server.

I joined Southern Wine & Spirits, a multi-billion-dollar distribution company based in South Florida, as their first and only full time DBA.

I loved it. No, really, LOVED it, with all capital letters. I had a great team of coworkers, a fantastic manager, and I found the business really interesting. I spent many a weekend night doing server maintenance in the data center, and I didn’t even mind the fact that I was working weekends.

Over the next couple of years, I also took on the VMware administrator and SAN administrator roles as well so that I could be a better DBA.

I could have stayed at Southern Wine forever, but family ties pulled me out of South Florida, and I had to move on to something else.

I knew the marketing team at Quest Software (now Dell Software) from our work together on SQL Server white papers and presenting on webcasts. I mentioned to them that I was looking for a new gig, and I ended up joining them as a SQL Server expert and evangelist.

I traveled the US and Europe training database administrators and developers at the world’s biggest conferences. Just when I thought things couldn’t get better than Southern Wine, they did!

Along with my good friends Jeremiah Peschka, Kendra Little, and Tim Ford, I started Brent Ozar Unlimited, a boutique consulting firm focused on solving the toughest SQL Server pains.

I never wanted the company to have my name on it – I’m not the kind of guy who wants to take credit for stuff – but our branding company recommended it. Like Charles Schwab or Donna Karan or Steve Madden, they suggested we should just roll with what was already bringing the business in. (For the record, I’m a minority partner in the company.)

We bootstrapped the company and worked out of our houses. The first year or two was pretty lean. You can read the story of the company so far.

Brent Ozar Unlimited 2015 Company Retreat

After four years of sprinting to make our consulting startup dreams a reality, Jeremiah, Kendra, and I had a great discussion about what to do next. We’d achieved product/market fit and profitability, and now it was time to scale. We all agreed on the vision, but it was time to take some money off the table and get paid for the years of hard startup work.

The company bought out Jeremiah and Kendra’s shares, and I became the sole owner of Brent Ozar Unlimited.

This really didn’t change anything in terms of how we treated employees and customers – we kept right on executing the same vision that Jeremiah, Kendra, and I started with. (It sounds really cliched, but it’s true.)

But starting here, there was only one guy to blame if things went wrong – me, hahaha.

Speaking at Techorama Netherlands

Today, I spend most of my time teaching database administrators and developers at conferences around the world and in my online classes.

If you’d like my help, contact me.

I love teaching database administrators and developers about SQL Server.

I love the incredible rush of seeing someone “get it” – especially when “it” is a really complex concept that they’ve struggled with for years. This drives me to seek out the toughest concepts that stump people in the real world, and come up with new ways of distilling it down to its simplest parts.

Watch Brent Tune Queries

Query tuning is more art than science because there’s so many different ways you can arrive at so many different conclusions. There’s rarely just one right answer.

So how do you teach art? By doing it, and showing the audience your creative thinking process. This session changes so much based on the audience, too, as different attendees ask questions about techniques they’d like to try.

PASS Summit 2017: “But It Worked in Development!”

My favorite part of teaching is the ah-ha moment when the light bulb goes on, but a close second favorite is the ha-ha moment when someone laughs out loud in the middle of learning. People need a good mix of the ah-has and ha-has in order to stay focused and keep absorbing. This session has a lot of the ha-has.