Blog Posts

How to Negotiate Your Consulting Rates

July 29, 2013

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

July 22, 2013

bigdata, hoarding, opinion

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

June 25, 2013

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, consulting, life quest

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

June 21, 2013

community, marketing, microsoft, mvp

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?

June 18, 2013

performance tuning, SQL Server

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

May 16, 2013

gadget, home office, microsoft, review, surface

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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Why sp_Blitz™ is Free

May 6, 2013

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business, community, marketing, sp_Blitz

We give away sp_Blitz™, a totally free health check tool for Microsoft SQL Server. It looks for all kinds of common reliability and performance problems and gives you a prioritized to-do list. The number one question I get about it – by far – is, “Why do you give it away for free? Why don’t you charge for it?” Free Beer vs Free Speech We need to start by considering the word free. In the software world, there’s two ways to look at it. The Wikipedia article on Gratis versus Libre sums it up well: Gratis versus libre is the distinction…

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Followup on the @DBAReactions Experiment

March 25, 2013

blogging, community, dbareactions

Database administrators are lonely. In most companies, there’s only one DBA, and nobody else really understands the job duties. We don’t have anybody else we can talk to about the crazy things we run across. I think this is the biggest reason there’s such a vibrant SQL Server community on Twitter – we’re looking for other people who understand us. This January, Jeremiah turned me on to DevOpsReactions.tumblr.com, and I was hooked. DevOps is a new hybrid job, a cross between developers and system administrators. Like DBAs, they’re an unusual profession with very different challenges than most of their coworkers. I knew…

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Pick a Needle and Move It

March 18, 2013

career

Employees have one job: move needles. Company executives track their most important metrics using dashboard graphs like the example at right from Geckoboard. The VP of Sales, the Chief Financial Officer, the Board of Directors, or anybody else with a fancypants title can all name their top 2-3 key metrics, what the numbers are today, and where they need to be. Your job – no matter what you think your job title is – boils down to these 6 things: 1. Figure out who you need to impress. If you’re just getting started with this technique, odds are your direct…

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Treat Criticism Like Spam Email

March 8, 2013

blogging, career, presenting

When you do something – anything – you’re going to get criticized. I used to lose a lot of sleep about it, but I’ve figured out there’s an easy way to filter criticism: treat it like incoming email. Use a series of filters and scores to determine whether it meets your threshold, and if not, throw it away. All criticism starts at 0 points. Filtering the Critic Is the critic anonymous? -5 points Does the critic know me in real life? +5 points Has the critic given me helpful criticism before? +5 points Has the critic given me unhelpful criticism…

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Blog Posts

Hi. I’m Brent.