Blog Posts

Why I’m Taking a Break from Teaching In-Person Classes

October 24, 2017

Let’s get one thing out of the way right away: I love teaching. I love seeing that “Ah-ha!” moment in a student’s eyes when they suddenly understand a concept. I also believe that in-person events are the best way to see that moment. It’s magical. As this post goes live, I’m welcoming a bunch of folks to Catalyst Ranch for my performance tuning class, and I’m totally excited to show them all kinds of cool stuff. However, in-person classes have a few drawbacks. Things can go horribly awry in-person. There was that time all the meals were delayed due to…

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My No-Free-Private-Answers Philosophy

October 17, 2017

community, DBA.StackExchange.com, Stack Overflow

When clients and class students email us a question, we answer. It’s not always right away, but since everybody in the team has access to our shared public email address, somebody’s going to be available sooner or later to give a good answer. But when people I don’t know email me with a technical support question, I respond with a GMail canned response: Thank you for thinking of us! We’re busy tending to sick SQL Servers, so for questions, here are a few ways to get an answer: Free, at StackExchange 24/7 – post your question at https://DBA.StackExchange.com, and if…

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Epic Life Quest Task: Setting the Summit Pre-Con Attendance Record

October 10, 2017

conference, life quest, pass, training

When Erik and I got a PASS Summit pre-con this year, I asked Alison and Leeza a question out of morbid curiosity: what was the pre-con attendance record? They reported that 7 pre-cons since 2012 have gone over 200 attendees, and the record was 269. I figured that would be really hard to beat, especially given that word on the street is that Summit attendance is down overall due to the Halloween scheduling. To make matters worse, I keep hearing “thought leaders” say that database work is dead, and the magic cloud is going to solve everything. Would there be…

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How to Understand Where a Software Vendor Employee is Coming From

October 3, 2017

microsoft

I’ve had a lot of conversations with software vendor employees over the years, and I’ve noticed a few things. Understanding these will help you parse what you’re hearing. They’re working on vNext, not vFiveYearsAgo. They’re already hard at work building things that you’re going to use – not this year, and probably not even next year, but a couple of years from now. They’re hearing about groundwork that’s getting laid for powerful future technologies. This makes them really excited for the future, and very dismissive of today’s problems. (An awesome exception: product managers who want to get the word out…

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How to Automatically Tweet Your Stack Overflow Answers with Zapier

September 26, 2017

stackoverflow

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In our company Slack chat, we have a bot that alerts us whenever there’s a new SQL Server question at DBA.StackExchange.com. One day, a question came in, Erik got to thinking, and I went a-Googling: The Eureka moment First, get your user ID # for the site you want to use (Stack Overflow, DBA.StackExchange.com, etc.) It’s in the URL for your user profile page – click on your user icon at the top of any Stack page, and it’ll take you to your profile. For example: My Stack profile page: https://stackoverflow.com/users/26837/brent-ozar – which means my Stack user ID is 26837, but…

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Using Slack for Conference Session Q&A

September 19, 2017

conference, pass, slack, sqlpass, training

Next month at the PASS Summit in Seattle, Erik Darling and I are teaching a one-day pre-conference class on performance tuning. We sold ~300 seats, which is awesome – but that comes with some challenges, one of which is handling Q&A. As classes get over 100 people, folks can be hesitant to raise their hands, and they rarely want to walk up to a microphone to address the entire room. I’ve tried using Twitter for this in the past, but it can be hard to get people to: “Does anyone have any questions?” Fit the question in 140 characters (less…

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Tools We Use for Remote Work

September 12, 2017

business

A reader emailed in to ask: We are in the process of trying to move to working remotely more often. I know that your team for the most part are all pretty remote and also work remotely with a lot of your customers. Just wondering if you could give me a list of what technologies you use for conferencing, team meetings, etc. Also maybe some pros and cons and\or issues you have run into. Here’s my favorite apps: Slack for chat – we used to use Stride (formerly Hipchat), and it was alright, but Slack gained more traction WebEx for…

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How I Manage Email and Tasks, 2017 Edition

September 5, 2017

productivity

In a recent SQLServerRadio.com podcast episode, @Guy_Glantser and @MatanYungman talked about how they organize their work. I wrote about how I managed emails and tasks in 2015, and a lot of that is still true. My work environment I have two older monitors: an old 32″ QHD primary, and a 24″ 1080p secondary with Slack and Google Analytics: Desktop circa fall 2017 In our company Slack #general room, we get notifications for stuff like new blog posts, relevant DBA.StackExchange.com questions, and new PasteThePlan entries. We have a separate #development room for stuff like First Responder Kit Github issue changes, check-ins,…

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Dream Car Track Garage: 4 Cars, $100k

August 29, 2017

cars

In my dream car garage series, I’ve assumed that the garage is at home – but what if it’s at the Autobahn Country Club? Yes, that’s an actual thing. In the outskirts of Chicago, you can get a country club membership at a place where the focus is on the golf carts rather than the golf. Oh, and the golf carts are race cars. And you can buy property and build your dream garage. So what would I put in mine, you ask? 2013 Ariel Atom SRA ($40k) I CAN’T HEAR THE ENGINE OVER THAT COLOR Jeremy Clarkson made the Ariel…

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Designing This Year’s PASS Summit Session

August 22, 2017

conference, pass, presenting, sqlpass

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I’m honored to say that I’ll be presenting a session at the PASS Summit this year. The Summit is kinda like the Super Bowl of American SQL Server conferences: the competition to present is intense, and that makes you wanna bring your absolute best game. I try to bring something really different every year. I try to push myself into new presenting styles, bring some kind of new trick to show off. Past stunts have included: 2017 – Last Season’s Performance Tuning Techniques (24HOP) – Erik and I wore fashion costumes for the online delivery emphasizing how quickly your skills…

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Blog Posts

Hi. I’m Brent.