Blog Posts

Vacation in Mexico

January 6, 2015

Public Service Announcement: your company gives you vacation time for a reason. Tulum beach at sunset Watching Christmas Dinner Tulum ruins Dinnertime at Chimiko’s Siesta on the beach Ernie flying home Remember who you really work for. Schedule your 2015 vacations now.

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Blog Posts I Couldn’t Write in 2014

December 30, 2014

blogging, writing

Every year, I finish up by emptying out my list of blog post ideas. It’s a freeing feeling, letting go of these ideas that I just couldn’t find a way to flesh out, and lets me feel better about new ideas in 2015. Here’s the ideas I just couldn’t hit Publish on in 2014: Database Administrator Warning Labels – you know those big cigarette warning labels in black and white print? Wouldn’t it be cool if Books Online carried similar warnings on certain pages? WARNING: TRIGGERS MAY CAUSE LONG, PAINFUL TROUBLESHOOTING. How to Publish Scripts – whenever you put a…

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From Blog to Business: Rethinking My Attitude About Community

December 23, 2014

Over 13 years ago, I started BrentOzar.com as a personal blog. Since then, I slowly turned it into a SQL Server focused blog, then an evangelism platform when I worked for Quest Software (now Dell), and finally into a consulting company when Jeremiah, Kendra, and I started the company. Today, it’s a seven-figure company with full time employees, vendors, lawyers, accountants, contracts, intellectual property, and tens of thousands of subscribers. Wowza. Part of the fun of being a company rather than just a blog: we can do stuff like this. I don’t have a big head – totally the opposite.…

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How to Do a Successful Lightning Talk

December 16, 2014

lightningtalks, presenting

Ten-minute presentations aren’t easier than 60-75 minute sessions. They’re much, much harder. Start by writing the first sentence and the last sentence. If you only have ten minutes, you don’t get the luxury of an agenda slide or a recap slide – you get a single sentence for each. Ideally, the first sentence describes a pain or a frustration with not understanding a concept. Here’s examples I’ve used: Database administrators often wonder what the term CXPACKET means. Are you stumped about SQL Server licensing under virtualization? Why are we supposed to make sure Page Life Expectancy is over 300? These sentences can seem cryptic…

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How to End Every User Group and Conference Presentation

December 9, 2014

marketing, presenting

“To learn more, go here.” Say this while pointing at the screen, which is displaying a short link to a page on your blog. That page has your list of resources – not just things you’ve written, but things you find interesting about the topic. Why? Because you just got done presenting about a topic you love, and you’ve gotten the audience excited about it too. They already picked your session because they needed help with something, and you’ve shown a few ways to get started. Now they see you as an expert, and they want to keep the learning going.…

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Why I’m Not Learning Analytics

December 2, 2014

analytics, career

Business analytics is a hot career right now. Here’s why I’m smiling and nodding as it goes whizzing past: Analytics projects start as short term experiments. This sounds awesome at first for consultants because you can parachute in, jump on the data, and give the business actionable information. You can use whatever tools you want right now – and boy, do you have choices. There’s an analytics gold rush, which means many competing tools. To make money during a gold rush, you don’t mine gold – you sell mining supplies. Companies see the rush to analytics, so they’re slinging all kinds of tools out there…

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Survey Says: the PASS Summit 2014 Session Ratings & Comments

November 25, 2014

After conference attendee feedback comes in, I like to blog about it to talk about what worked and what didn’t. Here’s the abstract PASS selected this year: Developers – Who Needs a DBA? You store data in SQL Server, but you don’t have enough work to keep a full-time DBA busy. In just one hour, you’ll learn the basics of performance troubleshooting and index tuning. Brent Ozar, recovering developer, will teach you the basic care and feeding of a Microsoft SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2012, or 2014 instance and give you scripts to keep you out of trouble. I keep…

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My Favorite WordPress Tools: 2014 Edition

November 11, 2014

blogging, marketing, wordpress

I keep my How to Start a Blog post updated, but here’s some of the more advanced tools I’ve been using lately. These aren’t really install-and-go – they require a weekend of work to set up and configure in total, but the payoff is worth it. MailChimp email subscriptions – free for up to 2,000 subscribers, and really reasonable above that. MailChimp makes it easy for people to keep up with you by watching your RSS feed for updates, then sending those updates as nicely formatted emails to your mailing list. Plus, when you want to promote something else like an…

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How to Have a Great Time at Conferences Like #SQLPASS

November 4, 2014

conference, presenting, sqlpass

One of the things I love about conferences is that I’m suddenly surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people who do exactly the same thing I do for a living. We work in kind of a loner field – data professionals often have to work alone in an organization, with nobody else to understand what we do. It’s incredibly therapeutic to suddenly be able to talk to someone else who gets it. We can vent together about how tough our work is (and how rewarding it is when we get it right.) Before you know it, you’ve made lifelong friends…

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Why I’ll Miss SQLBits XIV (Updated: I’m Going!)

October 29, 2014

presenting, sqlbits

UPDATE 30 Oct – Good news! The SQLbits organizers reversed course on this decision and let presenters opt out of the pre-con recordings. I’ve submitted sessions (including pre-cons) and I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll get accepted. Hope to see everybody in London! Here’s the original post: I’ve glowed about how much I love SQLbits, but I’m going to have to miss the 2015 version. Session submission is going on right now, and the speaker contract includes a tricky line: “If I am selected to present a Training day, then I understand that SQLBits may record the session. Distribution of…

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Blog Posts

Hi. I’m Brent.