Brent Ozar

I make Microsoft SQL Server go faster. I love teaching, travel, cars, and laughing. Las Vegas, US. He/him.

Proposed Sessions for 2026

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

Brent Ozar leads a panel of experienced data professionals reflecting on 20 years of the cloud. With no vendor marketing, they discuss what actually changed, which problems never went away, and what they expect to face in the next 20 years based on real-world experience.

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

Brent Ozar leads a panel discussion about how AI is reshaping data careers. Panelists share how they decide what to delegate to AI, how impacts differ by role, warning signs of over-automation, and how to intentionally cast AI as a sidekick, hero, or villain in your career.

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

Brent Ozar cuts through AI hype with real-world lessons from calling LLMs inside sp_BlitzCache. Learn how to pick models, write effective prompts, pass the right context, handle failures, and use AI safely from your own stored procedures.

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

In this demo-heavy, interactive session, Brent Ozar turns index tuning into a Pokémon-style battle. Using the Stack Overflow Users table, the audience plays index “cards” against real queries to see which designs win, lose, or backfire—and why you can’t have them all.

The Big Red Button: How to Use sp_Kill

In this quick talk, Brent Ozar introduces sp_Kill, a safer alternative to restarting SQL Server during emergencies. Learn when to push the big red button, how to identify runaway sessions, and how to kill the right queries while logging everything for later analysis.

Watch Brent Tune a Query in SQL Server 2025

Ever wonder how somebody else does it? In this all-demo session, watch over Brent Ozar's shoulder while he takes a slow query, analyzes it, and iterates over several improvements. He'll explain his thought process and get feedback from the audience.

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.

T-SQL Tuning with Colin Chapman, Enzo Ferrari, and The Stig

Making your T-SQL fast isn't really all that different from building and driving race cars. Learn lessons from racing icons that you can apply right away in your databases.

Using Perfmon and Profiler

Got a slow application or server, and not sure where to start? Brent will explain how to use the two most popular free tools and how to read their results.