A Day in the Life of Brent Ozar: July 23, 2018 #SQLCareer

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Steve Jones asked data professionals to cover four days in our lives, so I blogged about a normal non-client-facing day, and then an unproductive day. Today is different: I’m client-facing. We specialize in a 3-day SQL Critical Care: Day 1 – we meet with the client to dig through their SQL Server together while we ask them questions about their database, indexes, queries, designs, RPO/RTO goals, hardware, and more. Day 2 – we split up. The client goes back to doing their thing, and we write the findings for them. (You can see examples of the findings on that page above.)…
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A Very Unproductive Day in the Life of Brent Ozar: July 18, 2018 #SQLCareer

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Yesterday, I blogged what I did in a random work day per Steve Jones’ suggestion. And yesterday, I said I’d blog today as well because it was going to be a different schedule. You shouldn’t read this. It’s useless. It’s useless because as I look back on it, I didn’t accomplish much of anything on Wednesday, July 18th. That’s not rare – there are plenty of days where I feel like I don’t make enough progress. Thing is, Steve wanted us to share the tools we’re using and what problems we’re solving, and this post is pretty well devoid of that information…
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A Day in the Life of Brent Ozar: July 17, 2018 #SQLCareer

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Steve Jones asked data professionals to cover four days in our lives, so here goes the first post: what I did on Tuesday, July 17th, 2018. Nothing special about this day, just the day that Steve prodded me to take part, heh. My days are radically different, so I’m glad he said to do this four times – otherwise I’d feel guilty about just posting this one without more explanation. (I’ll do this again for July 18th because it’ll look totally different, but then hold off for a few days before posting another.) 4:07AM – I wake up without an…
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WordPress 4.9.6 GDPR Compliance Demo Videos

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In Tuesday’s upcoming WordPress 4.9.6, there are a couple of new features to help with GDPR compliance. First, you can create a privacy policy page: Second, you can export a user’s data and erase it: The current schedule is for 4.9.6 to go out this Tuesday, May 15th. If you’d like to take part in the discussion about these features, here are a few useful links: WordPress GDPR compliance roadmap WordPress GDPR issues sorted by status Slack discussion – #gdpr-compliance channel in Make WordPress (weekly chats on Wednesdays at 1500 UTC)
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Brent Ozar Unlimited, early 2016 at Cliff Lede in Napa

How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 6

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It’s time for my annual update on the wild ride. A brief recap of what’s happened so far: April 2011 – we started the company. April 2012 – year one finished, but I didn’t blog about it right away. I wanted to get it into the rear view mirror for perspective before blogging. April 2013 – year two finished, so I blogged about year one. April 2014 – year three finished, so I blogged about year two. April 2015 – year four finished, so I blogged about year three. April 2016 – year five finished, so I blogged about year four. April 2017 – year…
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Engagement Startup Costs: You Don’t Hire Consultants to Load Dishes

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“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

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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

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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

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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’ve 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

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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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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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