Blog Posts

Free WordPress Plugins I Recommend for 2018

December 26, 2017

I recently helped Hugo Kornelis set up a new WordPress blog at SQLServerFast.com, and I realized it’s been a while since I listed the plugins I recommend. Here you go: Crayon Syntax Highlighter – show your T-SQL code in all its glory. Has an SSMS 2012 theme, and you can set the default language to T-SQL. Editorial Calendar – I’m a huge believer in scheduling your posts ahead of time. This plugin gives you a drag & drop calendar so you can reorder posts when your priorities change. EU Cookie Law – because the European Union saves your life by telling…

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2018 Data Professional Salary Survey: Early Results Thoughts

December 19, 2017

career, salary

The 2018 Data Professional Salary Survey is open, and you can analyze the results as they’re coming in. As of this writing, we’ve just crossed 1,000 results (last year we ended up with around 3,000). Based on your feedback, I made a few tweaks to the questions and answers. I’m going to focus on a quick check of how those tweaks are doing. We split “DBA” into a few jobs. Last year, 52% of the responders identified as DBAs, so this year we broke that up into 3 titles. Responses so far: DBA (Development Focus – tunes queries, indexes, does…

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My 2018 Learning Goals #tsql2sday

December 12, 2017

career, learning, t-sql tuesday

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Mal asked us to blog about our 2018 learning goals. Her homework assignment included these 3 questions: What do I plan to learn? I like being at the cutting edge, learning things today that people are going to pay a lot for 5-10 years from now. I like to skate to where the puck is going. If a technology is already popular, then it’s too late for me to start learning it. In the early to mid 2000s, that meant learning virtualization, which paid off really well as that grew wildly in popularity. Then around…

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GroupBy’s One Year Anniversary and What’s Next for 2018

December 5, 2017

community, groupby

Last year, I unveiled GroupBy.org, a new free community event where anybody could submit a session on any topic, and the attendees would vote to see what sessions made the cut. I had a lot of questions when we started. Would people submit sessions? What kinds of sessions would readers vote for? Would they prefer attending live, or getting the recordings? When the event first took off and got a lot of abstracts and attendees, I purposely took my hands off the wheel and started letting the audience decide where things went. I stopped doing marketing, stopped pushing for abstracts,…

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Some Large Businesses Like to Work with Other Large Businesses.

November 28, 2017

business, paperwork, setting the tone

Our human resources team Small businesses usually like working with other small businesses. Similarly, large businesses working with other large businesses. During the sales process, small businesses tell me things like, “All the decision-makers are on this call” and “Let’s move forward with this right now. What do we need to do to start tomorrow?” Large businesses are more likely to say, “Please fill out this 26-page PDF to be eligible for a bidding process that will start in three months.” I’ve long believed in this as a kinda-sorta unwritten rule, but I got an email (and a bunch of…

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What Specialists and Generalists Get Paid For

November 21, 2017

career, generalists, specialists

Generalists say things like, “Yeah, I’ve done something kinda like that before, and I’m sure I can figure it out again.” Generalists get paid to learn new things fast and adapt. Specialists say things like, “Yeah, I did that exact same task last week, and I know it forwards and backwards.” Specialists get paid for things they already know very well. Generalists are generally useful. Armed with a good set of generalists, companies can generally tackle most IT problems that come their way. As a company’s tech stack changes, the generalists can learn new skills and stay productive. Therefore, generalists get…

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My #PASSsummit 2017 Session Evaluation Ratings & Comments

November 16, 2017

conference, presenting

After big conferences, I like to share my session evaluations to talk about what worked and what didn’t. Let’s see how we did this year. PASS’s evaluation form this year had 6 questions with a 5-point ranking (I love that): PASS Summit 2017 evaluation form So how’d we do? Pre-Con: Expert Performance Tuning for SQL Server 2016 & 2017 This was an all-day session I co-presented with Erik Darling. 362 attendees, 152 surveys filled out – great completion rate, thanks attendees! Rate the value of the session content. 4.37 out of 5 How useful and relevant is the session content…

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#PASSsummit Session Q&A Experiment with Pinal Dave

November 14, 2017

presenting

When I’m speaking at a conference and the room assignments are published ahead of time, I look at the convention center’s room layouts to figure out how many seats it holds. I want a rough idea of how easy (or hard) the Q&A will be to manage. At this year’s Summit, Erik & I had room 6B for our pre-con, and I had the exact same room for my general session on Friday. From the capacity list pages, you can’t tell how the rooms will be set up (there’s so many ways to set up a room with chairs/tables/rows), but…

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Building the BrentOzar.com 2017 Black Friday Sale

November 7, 2017

black friday, business, life quest

In 2013, just for fun and with almost no forethought, I announced the company’s first Black Friday sale. I figured that I love shopping for Black Friday deals online, and maybe other SQL Server people would get a kick out of it too. The first year was mostly for fun, but it turned out people loved it. I put more and more thought into it in over time, like starting the sale earlier (because a lot of corporate folks wanted the ability to get in on it, but getting pricing approved at midnight on Black Friday wasn’t gonna happen.) Gradually,…

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How I Use GTD, RTM, Retreats, and the Epic Life Quest, 2017 Edition

October 31, 2017

epiclifequest, gtd, productivity

Guy Glantser read my 2009 post on how I use GTD’s 50,000 foot goals, and commented: Hi Brent, It’s been 8 years since you wrote this post, and it’s still very inspirational today. Thank you for that! I wonder if you are still using the same methods today. If not, how have you evolved the GTD process over the years? I would love to read a followup post, or at least a short update. Thanks! Great question! Here’s how I use GTD, RTM, retreats, and the Epic Life Quest to manage my life. The book Getting Things Done tells you…

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Blog Posts

Hi. I’m Brent.