The Road to PASS, Week 2: The Recap Slides

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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Hi. I’m Brent.

That's me, Brent.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. 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.

My current car collection includes a 1986 Ferrari 328 GTS, a 1964 Porsche 356, a 1971 VW Type 3 Squareback, and more.

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