Blog Posts

How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me in 2024

December 23, 2025

Every year, I post a retrospective about what it’s been like to start up a company. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the life quest tag. Starting this year, the posts cover calendar years, so this one covers how 2024 went for me. When we left off the Year 12 (2023) post, I had just barely launched SmartPostgres.com with the goal of becoming “the Brent Ozar of Postgres.” I’d been really burned out on Microsoft data products, and I wanted to find an off-ramp to another technology. A pair of mini-pigs sleeping on top of…

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My 2025 Black Friday Sale (Work) Starts… Now

August 29, 2025

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business

Every year, I run a Black Friday sale at BrentOzar.com on SQL Server training and apps. It’s a genuinely big deal for me, almost half of our annual revenue. We brought in $885K last year (up from $847K in 2023, although down from well over $1M during the pandemic.) In addition, this is a release year for Microsoft, which means customers will be looking for training on the new version, SQL Server 2025. To prep for that, I have to think about: What my deals will be for this year – because I need to walk the line between cheap (which…

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More Thoughts on Owning a Rolls-Royce

July 30, 2025

cars, Rolls-Royce

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I’ve been dailying my new-to-me 2017 Rolls-Royce Dawn for a couple months now, and I’ve noticed it really changed the way I feel about cars. People are overly friendly to me. They wave, take pictures, and constantly compliment both the car and me in a way that doesn’t happen with any other car I’ve driven. The compliments have a common theme: “You look happy, and I’m happy for you.” It’s happened so often that I can’t deny the commonality – especially contrasted with my other cars, where the comments are appreciative of cars, the styling, or their cost, but I never…

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Bought a Rolls-Royce Dawn.

May 6, 2025

cars, Rolls-Royce

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I decided to do a little shuffling in the car collection. I sold a few cars, basically consolidating 3 cars into 1: I sold my Porsche Speedster replica because I’d had some great adventures with it for 3 years and I wasn’t driving it as much anymore. Yves’ hair is really long now, and she doesn’t like going out in a convertible that doesn’t have side windows or a wind deflector. We tended to use the 911 Targa instead. For short solo errands in a convertible, I have my Honda Beat, which I adore. I sold my Cadillac Brougham because…

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Starting a Car Project: The Porsche 986 Bergspyder

March 3, 2025

bergspyder, cars

In 1968, Porsche wanted to win hill climb races, so it built a one-off experimental car called the 909 Bergspyder, which translates to mountain spider. I was absolutely smitten with it when I saw it in the Porsche museum in Stuttgart back in 2018: The 909 Bergspyder was one of the lightest Porsche race cars ever produced, weighing in at just 847 pounds (384kg). For comparison, a tiny Smart Fortwo weighs about twice as much! The Bergspyder could do 0-60mph in 2.4 seconds – a feat most cars still can’t pull off today, even electric ones. Here’s a modern Porsche…

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I Bought a 1991 Honda Beat.

January 22, 2025

cars, honda beat, wraps

Kei cars are the smallest cars allowed on expressways in Japan. They’re physically tiny: less than 11.2 feet long, with engines under 660cc (40 cubic inches). Most motorcycles in the US have bigger engines than that! Popular kei car designs include the retro Nissan Figaro, gullwing door Autozam AZ-1, and adorable workhorse Daihatsu Hijet trucks and vans. Kei cars were never sold in the US, but now that they’re over 25 years old, they’re eligible for import. Even better, they’re dirt cheap in Japan because the government has tapered off the kei car tax benefits. You can buy imported kei…

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Wrapped the 911 Targa with Hello Kitty and Kuromi

January 16, 2025

cars, porsche, wraps

Behold! My Sanrio wrapped Porsche 911: And the other side: It’s split down the middle so that both sides transition to different colors front to back: So, how does something like this happen? We’ve had great results with Purple Flare Wraps doing our Speedster replica in metallic pink, Defender in black camo, and the base Gulf blue wrap for our Graffiti Gulf 356. I sent them my goal for the 911: I wanted to give the car a split personality. I wanted one side red, the other side black, with geometric shapes breaking it up like shattering glass. On the…

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Tech Content Creators Will Have a New Job This Year

January 2, 2025

marketing

Yves uses a few Chinese social media platforms to keep up with her friends back home, and I often see stuff on there while she’s doing things. I don’t speak or read any Chinese whatsoever, but between what I’ve just seen visually, and what Yves & I have discussed, one thing is extremely clear to me. Chinese platforms leverage their comments in interesting ways. For example, on Chinese equivalents of YouTube, comments are overlaid atop the video player itself, encouraging even more interactivity. At first this sounds horribly distracting, but in a matter of minutes of seeing it in action, I…

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Thoughts on China and Japan

December 24, 2024

travel

I just got back from vacation. This trip was my 2nd time in China, and my 1st time in Japan. Being in China feels like being in the future, while being in Japan seems like being in the past. That’s not to say that either of them are good or bad necessarily, just way more different than I’d expected. I’d somehow expected Japan to feel futuristic, but it was the exact opposite of that. Just off the top of my head, here are some of the things that felt really odd about Japan. In Japan, there are almost no public…

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I Custom Ordered a New Porsche 911 Targa.

September 4, 2024

cars

Since I was a teenager, I’ve loved the Porsche 911 Targa. It’s an iconic design: I had posters of this thing on my wall all throughout high school and college. The right color was always Guards Red with a black roll bar and black wheels. That right there, so 1980s. 5 years ago, I fulfilled that childhood dream when I bought a new 2019 Targa off the showroom floor. Porsche of Downtown LA had done a really cool job speccing that car: chalk paint and all black accents. A couple years later during the COVID car price boom, nearly-new cars…

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Hi. I’m Brent.