SQLBits 2020

300-Level Guide to Career Internals: Planning Your Career

Isn't it awkward when someone asks you, "So, where do you see yourself 5 years from now?" Brent Ozar will share how he analyzed the data job market to build his career path.

You're overwhelmed with choices: so many things you could learn, so many ways you could specialize in your career. Which one should you choose? What are the safe bets, and what are the risky bets? Should you be a contractor? A consultant? A freelancer? Specialize in the cloud, and if so, what products? There's no guide for data professionals here, and it's kinda scary.

I'm Brent Ozar, and about ten years ago, I sat down with a pen and paper to analyze the ways that I could make a living with data. I devoured a lot of business books, thought about the kinds of things companies pay money for, and laid out a simple grid to help decide what kind of career I wanted to build for myself.

Today, in 2020, you're facing the same problems. In one session, I'll explain what companies pay for, what individuals pay for, and how you could build different careers with that knowledge. I won't tell you what's right for you - I just want to give you a map of different choices, like a guidance counselor would. I'll finish the session by explaining the choice I made, and why - and if that resonates with you, you can attend the 400-Level session to get the roadmap I used to build my own career.

Brent Ozar's other proposed sessions for 2026

20 Years of the Cloud: What Changed, What Didn’t, and What’s Next - 2026

AI in Your Career: Sidekick, Hero, or Villain? - 2026

Calling AI from T-SQL: Real-Life Lessons from sp_BlitzCache - 2026

Pokémon Battle, Choose Your Index: You Can’t Have Them All - 2026

The Big Red Button: How to Use sp_Kill - 2026

Watch Brent Tune a Query in SQL Server 2025 - 2026

Brent Ozar's previous sessions

300-Level Guide to Career Internals: Planning Your Career

A roadmap of options for your career.

Fragmentation Explained in 20 Minutes

What do index rebuilds and defrags really do?

Fundamentals of Stored Procedures

How to write stored procedures that have a high likelihood of performing well and are easy to troubleshoot.

300-Level Guide to Career Internals: Planning Your Career

Isn't it awkward when someone asks you, "So, where do you see yourself 5 years from now?" Brent Ozar will share how he analyzed the data job market to build his career path.

500-Level Guide to Career Internals: Building a Brand

If you want to work for yourself, you need to be able to sell yourself. I know, I hate it too - it feels gross when I write it that way. I'm Brent Ozar. You recognize my name, that's why you wanna learn this from me.

Deadlocks: Lets Do One, Understand It, and Fix It

You keep getting warnings and emails about deadlocks, but let's be honest: you're not really sure how they happen or what to do about it. Brent Ozar will show one, use sp_BlitzLock to analyze it, then fix it.

"But It Worked in Development!" 3 Hard Performance Problems

You've been performance tuning queries and indexes for a few years, but lately, you've been running into problems you can't explain. Could it be RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE, THREADPOOL, or lock escalation?

Easy Performance Tuning: an Intro to Wait Statistics

You're a DBA who's struggled with Perfmon metrics and Profiler. You're facing a sea of confusing numbers, and you don't know where to focus first. Microsoft Certified Master Brent Ozar will give you a friendly introduction to wait statistics.

How to Pick SQL Server Hardware

You don't buy a lot of servers, but you're about to deploy SQL Server, and you only get one chance to make it right. Brent Ozar will boil down everything you need to know into just a few simple decisions including SQL Edition, sockets, and RAM.

How the SQL Server Engine Thinks

How does SQL Server build results? We'll role play: Brent Ozar will be an end user sending in queries, and you'll be SQL Server. This session is for people who are comfortable writing queries, but not with indexes, statistics, and sargability.

Watch Brent Tune Queries

Ever wonder how someone else does it? There’s no right way or wrong way, but in this session you can peer over Brent’s shoulder (virtually) while he takes a few Stack Overflow queries and tries various techniques to make them faster.

Virtualization and SAN Basics for DBAs

These two technologies can make a very big – and very bad – difference in how your SQL Server performs. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get the real, honest lowdown from a virtualization administrator, a SAN administrator, and a DBA? Wouldn’t it be even better if one person had done all three, and could give you the pros and cons of each point of view? That person is Brent Ozar, a Microsoft Certified Master who’s been there and done that.

SQL Server Storage - 1,000GB Level

PANIC IN THE DATACENTER! Your databases are approaching - or surpassed - the Terrible Terabyte mark. You're pouring money into the SAN, but your data isn't pouring back out as fast as you want. You're terrified to DBCCs or index maintenance because everything takes forever, and you don't have big maintenance windows.