Use this page to scan recent stories from Brentozar, see the themes that keep appearing, and jump into complete story briefs.
I teach Microsoft SQL Server performance tuning in a 4-class rotation. The winter rotation is getting ready to start: Fundamentals Week – November 2-6 Mastering Index Tuning – November 30-Dec 4 Mastering Query Tuning – January 11-15, 2027 Mastering Server Tuning – February 8-12, 2027 You have to take ’em in order, so I
Sometimes my value as a blogger is to make complex topics simple, or to deliver industry news to you, or to entertain you. Sometimes, it’s just to keep you posted on things that are happening in the industry. So with that in mind, at Microsoft FabCon Barcelona this week, there was a partner day for […]
On Wednesday, registration opens for the next round of my live training classes, and you can get access to all my live classes & recordings for just $995. So, what’s been changing with databases & classes lately? This year, I rebuilt the classes with a new focus: Fundamentals is about good defaults for new & […]
![[Video] Office Hours Off the Coast of Long Beach](/api/proxy/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.brentozar.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2026%2F09%2Fvideo-office-hours-off-the-coast-of-long-beach-1790068424.png%3Fomgimg)
A couple times a year, I go away for a week to think about what’s working well, what I need to change, where our industry is going, and how I need to react. I usually do it on a cruise because the crappy internet makes it easier to disconnect and reflect, hahaha, and that’s where […]
Next month on Saturday, October 17, I’ll be speaking at the free Day of Data Orlando. Registration is open now. The event is 8AM-4PM at the Seminole State College Sanford/Lake Mary Campus at 100 Weldon Boulevard, Partnership Building, Sanford, FL 32773. You can see the whole lineup here, with 5 tracks of 5 1-hour sessi
I hope you never have to look for another job. However, if you do, I wanna give you as much reinforcement as I can. If you’re the kind of person who attends my live classes, pays attention, asks questions, and does the lab homework, you deserve to be able to brag about that. You deserve […]
I teach Microsoft SQL Server performance tuning in a 4-class rotation. The winter rotation is getting ready to start: Fundamentals Week – November 2-6 Mastering Index Tuning – November 30-Dec 4 Mastering Query Tuning – January 11-15, 2027 Mastering Server Tuning – February 8-12, 2027 You have to take ’em in order, so I
NOLOCK is bad and you probably shouldn’t use it, but every time I mention that publicly, the pushback just keeps coming. I don’t know why people so firmly believe that their situation couldn’t possibly be affected by bad/random data from NOLOCK. Today’s misconception comes from a LinkedIn commenter telling me it’s safe
By popular demand, SQL Server 2025 added JSON indexes. You can eat the cake of being able to store practically schema-less JSON blobs as part of each row, and have it too by querying specific values quickly. (The common phrase is to “have your cake and eat it too”, but did you ever think about […]
When you run monitoring queries like sp_BlitzWho and sp_WhoIsActive, you wanna see the program names that are running the queries. It’s super useful when you’ve got multiple apps running on the same servers, or when you’ve got apps scattered across end user computers. If you don’t set the program names, you’ll either e
![[Video] Office Hours: Stoicism in the Home Office](/api/proxy/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.brentozar.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2026%2F09%2Fvideo-office-hours-stoicism-in-the-home-office-1788037017.png%3Fomgimg)
I’m back in the home office this week, covering your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and we finish up the session with a discussion of the stoic habit I use to start my mornings. Here’s what we discussed: 00:00 Start 01:42 Spicy Ninja Attack: If parameter sniffing fears justify skipping daily
You’re looking at page split numbers in a monitoring tool or Perfmon, and you’ve heard that page splits are bad, so you’re lowering fill factor, expecting your page splits to go down. You’re monitoring the wrong number. To prove it, let’s check the page splits counter, add 10,000 pages to a table, and then check […]
Open the app view when you want faster scanning, saved stories, and source-focused reading in one place.