Brent Ozar – Page 4 – Sharing what I learn about community and consulting.

Thoughts on Visiting the Porsche Factory

January 30, 2018

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

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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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Epic Life Quest: Level 10 Achieved.

January 9, 2018

life quest

Life’s little moments of success can pass us by so easily. If we don’t track the things we’re proud of, we lose track of how far we’ve come. Steve Kamb’s Epic Quest of Awesome inspired me to build my own Epic Life Quest. I keep track of achievements, and after five significant ones, I level up. In the last level, I focused a lot on passive income: building training that I could sell, and then getting that educational material out to as many people as possible. That paid off in this level because the passive income gave me more time to focus on other…

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Dream Car Seasonal Garage: 3 Cars, $50K

January 2, 2018

cars

We’re up in Michigan, dogsitting for Dad & Caryl while they’re down in Mexico on vacation. Dad & Caryl’s house started as a 1-bedroom schoolhouse, gradually expanded over the years. I absolutely love their garage setup: 2 main cars, plus a side entry workshop garage, plus space to park another few cars. So I got to thinking – what’d be in my collection if I lived here? And I do mean here, a place where there’s a foot or two of snow on the ground here during the winter. Also, with this area’s history of car manufacturers and suppliers, it’s also…

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Free WordPress Plugins I Recommend for 2018

December 26, 2017

blogging, wordpress

I recently helped Hugo Kornelis set up a new WordPress blog at SQLServerFast.com, and I realized it’s been a while since I listed the plugins I recommend. Here you go: Crayon Syntax Highlighter – show your T-SQL code in all its glory. Has an SSMS 2012 theme, and you can set the default language to T-SQL. Editorial Calendar – I’m a huge believer in scheduling your posts ahead of time. This plugin gives you a drag & drop calendar so you can reorder posts when your priorities change. EU Cookie Law – because the European Union saves your life by telling…

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2018 Data Professional Salary Survey: Early Results Thoughts

December 19, 2017

career, salary

The 2018 Data Professional Salary Survey is open, and you can analyze the results as they’re coming in. As of this writing, we’ve just crossed 1,000 results (last year we ended up with around 3,000). Based on your feedback, I made a few tweaks to the questions and answers. I’m going to focus on a quick check of how those tweaks are doing. We split “DBA” into a few jobs. Last year, 52% of the responders identified as DBAs, so this year we broke that up into 3 titles. Responses so far: DBA (Development Focus – tunes queries, indexes, does…

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My 2018 Learning Goals #tsql2sday

December 12, 2017

career, learning, t-sql tuesday

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Mal asked us to blog about our 2018 learning goals. Her homework assignment included these 3 questions: What do I plan to learn? I like being at the cutting edge, learning things today that people are going to pay a lot for 5-10 years from now. I like to skate to where the puck is going. If a technology is already popular, then it’s too late for me to start learning it. In the early to mid 2000s, that meant learning virtualization, which paid off really well as that grew wildly in popularity. Then around…

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GroupBy’s One Year Anniversary and What’s Next for 2018

December 5, 2017

community, groupby

Last year, I unveiled GroupBy.org, a new free community event where anybody could submit a session on any topic, and the attendees would vote to see what sessions made the cut. I had a lot of questions when we started. Would people submit sessions? What kinds of sessions would readers vote for? Would they prefer attending live, or getting the recordings? When the event first took off and got a lot of abstracts and attendees, I purposely took my hands off the wheel and started letting the audience decide where things went. I stopped doing marketing, stopped pushing for abstracts,…

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Some Large Businesses Like to Work with Other Large Businesses.

November 28, 2017

business, paperwork, setting the tone

Our human resources team Small businesses usually like working with other small businesses. Similarly, large businesses working with other large businesses. During the sales process, small businesses tell me things like, “All the decision-makers are on this call” and “Let’s move forward with this right now. What do we need to do to start tomorrow?” Large businesses are more likely to say, “Please fill out this 26-page PDF to be eligible for a bidding process that will start in three months.” I’ve long believed in this as a kinda-sorta unwritten rule, but I got an email (and a bunch of…

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Hi. I’m Brent Ozar.