Blog Posts

Stop Ignoring These Signs That Your Job Sucks

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I work with a lot of developers, sysadmins, DBAs, and IT managers. I’m a consultant, so companies don’t bring me in when times are good. They bring me in when the room is covered with poop, and they can’t unplug the fan because it’s mission-critical. Sometimes I just want to pull specific employees aside and say, “You are way, way, way too good to be working in this brown hole.” Unfortunately, I can’t do that, so instead here’s the signs I see. If you recognize ’em, find a new room to work in. You haven’t learned anything new at work…
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Ernie’s Morning Routine

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Step 1 – stand at the patio door. Step 2: when someone comes to open it for you, head out. Step 3: bask for about five minutes, until you can’t handle the heat anymore. Step 4: retreat into the house somewhere to cool down. Repeat for hours.        
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The Blogger Isn’t The Devil

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This morning, Ted Kreuger wrote a post called Microsoft Isn’t the Devil. He writes: “What does kill me is the people that insist on the public bashing of a product, like SQL Server.  I’m not referring to the daily Oracle DBA that has to install SQL Server.  I’m referring to the people that have based their career, income, and livelihood to supplying services to customers based on the product.  Truly speaking, I’d like to see those people move on.  Work on something you think is perfect in your own little world.  My only hope is that really does happen and…
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Charging People to Find Free Stuff? Are You Crazy?

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Last week I launched a video course called The Best Free SQL Server Downloads. It costs $29, and I gave out coupon codes to drop it to $19 for the launch. I expected to get a few questions: How Can You Charge People for a List of Free Stuff? If you’ve ever watched TV late at night, you’ve probably stumbled across one of Matthew Lesko’s informercials. He wears a suit covered in question marks, and he sells information about how to get free money from the government. Matthew LeskoPhoto by 88Slide.com I have never bought one of Lesko’s books. The cynic in…
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How to Negotiate Your Consulting Rates

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It’s really hard to find good DBAs these days, so some of my friends have started doing part-time consulting after hours and on weekends. They often ask me how to set their rate, and there’s a lot of interesting questions around that. Cooperation Options Working Together – You and the client staff must both be online together, sharing screens, and talking through a problem. This is what clients usually want by default. Solo – You get access to the client’s systems via VPN, and you can do the work on your own without having the client involved. Examples of this…
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Big Data is Hoarding 2.0

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It’s time for an intervention. Here’s 3 signs you might be a data hoarder – see if you recognize your databases in Wikipedia’s list of compulsive hoarding symptoms: 1. You tend to hold onto items that most people would consider not useful: Old catalogues and newspapers Freebies picked up, like cached copies of Internet data You say, “Drives are cheap, so it doesn’t really cost much to keep this around” Things that “might” be used one day 2. There’s so much clutter that servers and drives can no longer be used for their intended purpose, and some of your data is inaccessible.…
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How the Company-Startup Thing is Working Out for Me

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A little over two years ago, I partnered up with Jeremiah Peschka, Kendra Little, and Tim Ford to turn my blog, BrentOzar.com, from a blog into a consulting company. I didn’t want to live-blog the business-building process. As life unfolds in front of you, it’s a noisy, jumbled mess with everything happening at once. Plus, like Salman Rushdie wrote in Midnight’s Children, “Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.” To give myself better perspective and a bigger picture, I decided I’d wait at least a year before blogging about anything that happened. It’s going well,…
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Interesting Stats About My Community Work This Year

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My Microsoft MVP status is up for renewal again, so it’s time for a little navel-gazing at the community work I’ve done over the last twelve months. Here’s the data I found most surprising this time around. YouTube Channel Stats This one just completely boggles my mind – you have watched OVER 23,000 HOURS of our videos this year, and that’s just since September 1st: YouTube Channel Stats 3 people are watching a Brent Ozar Unlimited video, around the clock! We must find these three people and show them a different web site or something. Maybe Taylor Smith’s goat duets.…
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How Fast Should the Developer’s SQL Server Be?

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Slow and cheap, right? Managers and DBAs usually want the development server to be just slow enough to get the job done, and no faster. The dev server doesn’t have production load on it – you’re just working by yourself. If you can’t make your code fast when you’re the only person working in the server, then it’ll never scale in production with hundreds or thousands of simultaneous users. Wrong – the development server should be faster than production. Ideally, the whole database should fit in memory, and we should be using solid state drives. Amazon’s running a huge >30%…
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Why I’m Tolerating the Surface Pro

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When the iPad came out, reviewers pointed out that the iPad itself simply disappeared when you used it. The iPad became a featureless black frame, and what you were really using was an app. Fire up a text editor, a game, a browser, whatever, the iPad hardware was just a simple glass window into the app itself. If you used an app that was clean, polished, and functional, then you saw the iPad as clean, polished, and functional. Luckily for Apple, developers came out with a lot of clean, polished, and functional apps within the first year, so the iPad…
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Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in Iceland with my wife Erika. 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.

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