Blog Posts

Wow, People Didn’t Buy Live Mastering Classes.

business
14 Comments
My annual Black Friday sale over at BrentOzar.com just finished. Every year, I try different experiments with it – changing bundles, adding lifetime memberships, adding buy-now-pay-later, etc. One of this year’s experiments was to add live classes back into the mix. When I launched them in October, I explained that the time had come to update the material for SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL DB, and as long as I had to record them myself to update the material, I might as well teach the classes live. I didn’t offer a Live Class Season Pass as I have in…
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Bought a Defender 130 Outbound.

cars, defender
1 Comment
I loved my 83 Cadillac, but I quickly ran into problems with it. I wanted to have a comfy car for 3-4 hour road trips to nearby places like LA and Palm Springs. I pretty quickly figured out that’s a bad idea in a 40-year-old Caddy, especially one with the HT4100 engine that doesn’t fare well in the desert. If I somehow had a giant warehouse garage, I’d have kept it, but I couldn’t justify keeping a car that I could only use in the fall/winter, and only around town. When thinking about a road-trip replacement, I kept coming back…
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Bought a 1983 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham.

cadillac, cars
4 Comments
I love huge American land yachts, and I think this car is a wonderful time capsule from the 1980s: That’s the epitome of 1980s American luxury: metallic light brown, long lines of chrome, padded vinyl roof, whitewall tires. It’s a weird combination of very clean, simple lines – but wildly over-jeweled. It’s like movie starlet wearing a simple dress, but … jewelry on her wrists, fingers, ankles, ears, and neck. When you open the doors, the kitsch luxury continues with acres of thickly padded brown leather: It’s just a nice, chill, quiet, 1970s place to be. It’s like your favorite…
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How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 11: Massive Changes

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, Stack Overflow
24 Comments
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 Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. This post covers year 11 of the company: May 2021 to April 2022. Normally I do a blog post that weaves a few things together into a story, but this year, let’s just dump the rollercoaster into a bullet point list: June: Stack Overflow got acquired, and Erika and I had a financial windfall thanks to Jeff & Joel’s very generous stock option grants. We almost built a house…
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Bought a 1964 Porsche 356 Coupe

cars
6 Comments
I’m madly in love with Sabine, my Porsche 356 Speedster replica built from a VW Beetle. I love the simplicity of the air-cooled engine experience, the looks, the ride, everything. The only drawback has been constantly saying to admirers, “Yes, but it’s a replica.” So I’ve had my eye out for a genuine 356 coupe for a while, something that I could drive in the winter when the open-air Speedster makes less sense. (The Speedster technically has a heater and a top, but you don’t wanna use either one.) This mysterious 1964 356 coupe popped up on BringATrailer, and right…
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Bought a Modified VW Squareback

cars, vw
6 Comments
This adorable little 1971 Volkswagen Type 3 has such an excellent story. About 20 years ago, it was abandoned at a hotel in Vegas. A towing company carted it away and notified the Californian owner, but the owner didn’t want to bother with it. It was broken down, had a flat tire, dents and dings all over. It sold at auction for $75. Most $75 cars are destined for scrap or being sold as parts, but this one got lucky. Its next two decades were spent under the ownership of VW fanatics who saw its potential. A Porsche 914 2.0L…
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Built a Home Theater

house
4 Comments
As I got older, I watched more online streaming, and I went to theaters less and less. I can’t remember the last time I went to a theater in-person. COVID certainly didn’t help. When I was shopping for houses in Vegas, I wanted space to build a home theater. I didn’t want anything fancy like stadium seating, red curtains, or signs. I just wanted a dark room with comfy seating, good audio, and a giant screen. The house I ended up with had five or six bedrooms, depending on how you read the floor plan – way, way more than…
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Using Stable Diffusion to Generate Presentation Art for Free

ai, Stable Diffusion
2 Comments
This is a brand spankin’ new topic for me here at this blog. Whenever I start teaching something, there’s a struggle to figure out what I’m gonna share first. Should I cover how to install Stable Diffusion? Which toolkit I use? What hardware I use? How I pick a sampler? How to make bigger images in a certain aspect ratio? I can’t cover everything in one post, and even just laying out a table of contents is an impressive amount of work. So here’s the deal, dear reader: when inspiration strikes me, I’m going to share things about Stable Diffusion…
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Bought Another Blue 2013 Jag XKR-S.

cars, jaguar, jaguar xkr-s
8 Comments
About two years ago, I got a 2013 Jaguar XKR-S hardtop, and I love it. It’s comfortable, fast, loud, useful, and pretty. It’s the definition of what a grand tourer should be: a combination of luxury and performance that make it easy to drive long distances at speed. I do way more road trips than track days, although that might change now that I’m in Vegas. But originally, when I first fell in love with the XKR-S, I wanted the convertible version. So I kept my eye out on the market – mostly out of curiosity – watching prices and…
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Doug DeMuro Reviewed My 944 Turbo.

944, cars, porsche
4 Comments
After I bought my 1988 Porsche 944 Turbo off Cars & Bids, I contacted Doug to see if he wanted to review it. The video just went live: Doug remarks a lot in there about the car’s amazing condition and originality, and that’s certainly one of the big things that sold me on it. He sums it up with, “This is an exceptional car. It drives well, it’s fun, it’s exciting, and the Turbo version is pretty fast, and I just think there’s a lot to love here.” I agree!
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Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. 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.

My current car collection includes a 1986 Ferrari 328 GTS, a 1964 Porsche 356, a 1971 VW Type 3 Squareback, and more.

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