Blog Posts

Engagement Startup Costs: You Don’t Hire Consultants to Load Dishes

March 20, 2018

“Whaddya mean you won’t do ___?” It’s a question I get every now and then from a prospective client. Most folks see our marketing, see that our consulting services page only has one thing on it, and understand that we’re very specialized. But every now and then, someone contacts us after seeing our pages in their Google results over and over again, and they figure we’re up for anything. They say something along the lines of, “I just need you to look at this one query and fix it.” And sometimes – not often, but usually when the prospect has…

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Databases Eight Years from Today, 2018 Edition #TSQL2sday

March 13, 2018

databases, nostradumbass, predictions

Almost exactly five years ago today, back in March of 2013, I wrote a post called Databases Five Years from Today. In it, I predicted: You’d still be supporting 2005 and 2008 – while the number of 7% of servers are still 2005 and 2008 might seem small, it means that on average, every shop with 14 servers still has one of these boat anchors. (The folks at Quest recently told me the number of 2000 servers is still big too, but their monitoring app just stopped supporting 2000, so that was that.) I give myself a point on that. There’d be…

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The Road to PASS, Week 5: Submitting Your Abstract

March 6, 2018

presenting, sqlpass

In this month’s Road to PASS series, I’m challenging you to submit an abstract for the PASS Summit: Week 1 challenged you to write a few pain points you’ve solved this year Week 2 was about writing the session’s recap slide Week 3 had you writing the abstract’s technical details Week 4 was time to gather feedback from others My Week 4 homework results I posted my abstracts on GroupBy.org, then linked to them on social media: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I got most of the feedback from LinkedIn! I find that interesting because I don’t really think of LinkedIn as a discussion…

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The Road to PASS, Week 4: Gathering Feedback

February 27, 2018

presenting, sqlpass

In this month’s Road to PASS series, I’m challenging you to submit an abstract for the PASS Summit. Week 1 challenged you to write a few pain points you’ve solved this year, week 2’s homework was to write the session’s recap slide, and week 3 had you writing the abstract’s technical details. Now, I need to get feedback on my abstracts – so I posted them on GroupBy: Getting Better Query Plans by Improving SQL’s Estimates How Often Should You Run Backups and CHECKDB? What to Do When SQL Server is Unusually Slow Eagle-eyed readers will notice that I tweaked the…

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The Road to PASS, Week 3: The Abstract’s Technical Details

February 20, 2018

presenting, sqlpass

In this month’s Road to PASS series, I’m challenging you to submit an abstract for the PASS Summit. Week 1 challenged you to write a few pain points you’ve solved this year, and week 2’s homework was to write the session’s recap slide. This week, let’s write the technical part of the abstract. It’s tempting to start with a catchy theme or title, but hold off on that – your abstract needs good bones first, and we can always dress the skeleton in different clothes later. Let’s think about the basics first. Given your recap slide from last week: What did…

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The Road to PASS, Week 2: The Recap Slides

February 13, 2018

presenting, sqlpass

This year, I’m working with you to get you to the PASS Summit stage. Last week, we talked about your first homework: a list of a few pains you’ve relieved over the last year. This week, you need to write the recap slide for each of those pains. Think about the end of the session: when the attendee walks out, what are the most crucial takeaways you want on their mind? What do you want them saying, “Thank God I went to that session, because now I know that ____. When I get back to the office, I can’t wait…

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The Road to Your First PASS Summit Session, Week 1: The Pains

February 6, 2018

presenting, sqlpass

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry, but you picked the wrong room for sleep The PASS Summit is like the World Cup of the SQL Server community, only with less head injuries and more of a chance of you getting up onstage. Every year, people just like you submit sessions, and believe it or not, some of them get accepted. You get free entry to the conference, a seriously cool entry on your resume, and an itchy polyester shirt that fits horribly, but you’re gonna wear it anyway because you’ll be so doggone proud of your achievement. Let’s do this. I…

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Thoughts on Visiting the Porsche Factory

January 30, 2018

cars, porsche

Fantastic sculpture outside the Porsche factory in Stuttgart Erika and I took a short vacation in Germany last week to check off a few items on her bucket list and my Epic Life Quest. I drove a Mercedes E-class on the Autobahn, visited the Porsche Museum, and toured their factory in Stuttgart. The Porsche museum was lovely, and it really crystallized to me that I’m a Porsche guy. I’ve admired so many of their cars through my life. I wouldn’t really bother blogging about that though – it’s a museum, it’s got cars, they’re cool – but the factory tour…

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I’m Proud of Our Guest Instructor Partnerships.

January 23, 2018

business, teaching, training

When I first started kicking around the idea of letting guest instructors run classes at BrentOzar.com, I did a brain dump of how I wanted to do business, and shared it with the guest instructors. It’s working out pretty well, so I’m sharing the more interesting parts here for those of you who like reading the behind-the-scenes type stuff. In here, BOU means Brent Ozar Unlimited, and “you” means the instructor. You exclusively own your material. The speaker owns the intellectual property (IP, aka slides/scripts/materials), and BOU doesn’t get any rights to it. Longer term, if we do the recorded…

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Ernie Ozar, 2003-2018

January 18, 2018

dog, Ernie, personal

Our rescued mini Schnauzer mix, Ernie, passed away last night. She was diagnosed with cancer last year, but she was blessed with a great quality of life right up til the end. Ernestina On car trips, she brought her big bed with her Sunning herself in the afternoons on the couch She was so patient, letting us put her in all kinds of photo poses Wonderful traveler. Just liked to sit and people watch. In what we called her condo – her under-seat airplane bag, en route to the airport She was a surprisingly good driver We got to watch…

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Blog Posts

Hi. I’m Brent.