[Video] Office Hours in Bulgaria
I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento while in front of the National Gallery for Foreign Art in Sofia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12E_6VWKb_4
Announcing Free SQL Server Monitoring.
You already use sp_Blitz and the rest of the free, open source First Responder Kit to give your SQL Servers a health check now and then.
But let's be honest: you don't do it often enough.
Use “We” Not “You”. #tsql2sday
For T-SQL Tuesday this month, Louis Davidson suggested we give our past self some advice.
I'd tell myself, "Use 'we', not 'you'."
[Video] Office Hours in Sofia, Bulgaria
I was honored to speak at the Present to Succeed conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, run by a former SQL Server MCM. Sofia is a beautiful city, and the gorgeous Patriarchal Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky (Wikipedia) was close to my hotel, so I dragged my tripod over there for an Office Hours session.
https://youtu.be/xn2afGkPcmo
T-SQL & Development
Does Bit Column Order Matter in Tables?
At the PGConf.dev, where Postgres developers get together and strategize the work they wanna do for the next version, I attended a session where Matthias van de Meent talked about changing the way Postgres stores columns. As of right now (Postgres 17), columns are aligned in 8-bit intervals, so if you create a table with alternating columns:
[Video] Office Hours: I Don’t Have All the Answers
When I went through the top-voted questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, I didn't have all the answers today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6fqxTPnDd0
T-SQL & Development
The SQL Language is Just a Hurdle You Gotta Overcome.
I'm not talking just about Microsoft SQL Server specifically here, nor T-SQL. Let's zoom out a little and think bigger picture for a second: is the SQL language itself a problem?
Sometimes when I talk to client developers, they gripe about the antiquated language.
[Video] Office Hours: Database Answers from a Hotel Room
I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento before heading out to PGConf.dev in Vancouver.
https://youtu.be/sd6yO-nHDx0
Performance Tuning
Query Exercise Answer: Beating ChatGPT at Finding Good Question Times
For this week's Query Exercise, I asked you to write a better query than ChatGPT wrote. Your goal was to find the best days and times to post questions on Stack Overflow.
I found it interesting that a lot of the initial answers focused on the times when there were the most questions, or which questions were the most highly upvoted. For me, the best time to post a question is when you have the highest likelihood of getting the right answer, quickly.
[Video] Creepy Office Hours in Vancouver
While in a hotel room in Vancouver for PGconf.dev, I strapped on my Apple Vision Pro headset to take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Somehow, the latest Vision OS update gave me a 1980s 3rd Bass haircut.
https://youtu.be/wgsxGBBJiyE
Performance Tuning
Query Exercise: Beat ChatGPT at Finding Good Question Times
What are the best days of the week and times of the day to post a question at StackOverflow.com? It seems like a simple question, but it's surprisingly nuanced. I asked ChatGPT's latest version, 4o, and its answer made me laugh out loud. First off, the T-SQL is terrible: it creates a completely unnecessary temp…
There’s a 6-Month Statute of Limitations on “The Last Person.”
"The last person must have set it up that way."
"The last person wrote that code."
[Video] Office Hours in a Hotel Room
While in Nashville for a creators conference, I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://youtu.be/lDdQqlsyGN8
Production DBA
Two Tweaks for Faster Backups with Ola Hallengren’s Scripts
Ola Hallengren's free maintenance solution is widely used as a replacement for SQL Server maintenance plans. It's a more powerful, flexible tool for backups, corruption checking, and index & statistics updates. If you're using it for backups, there are two quick, easy changes that can dramatically reduce your nightly job runtimes. First, set @NumberOfFiles =…
[Video] Office Hours: 16 Questions
Like Sixteen Candles, but different: I go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Strangely, my video and audio is ever so slightly out of sync in this episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmward6JyOw
T-SQL & Development
Coming in Entity Framework 9: Better Query Parameterization
Hallelujah. With current versions of Entity Framework, when developers add a mix of parameters and specific values to their query like this: [crayon-6a781cf77f06d416810910/] See how part of the filter is hard-coded (".NET Blog") while the other part of the filter is dynamically generated, an ID the user is looking for? That causes Entity Framework to…
Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for May 2024
If you've hard-coded installer file names, there's a big change in this release. There are now just 2 installer scripts: Install-All-Scripts.sql, and a new Install-Azure.sql, which only installs the scripts that are compatible with Azure SQL DB. The old Install-Core scripts are gone because we've deprecated sp_AllNightLog, sp_BlitzInMemoryOLTP, and sp_BlitzQueryStore. Read on for why.
[Video] Office Hours: I Feel Like an Amateur Edition
I started with audio problems, then had video problems halfway in. It's amusing because we also discuss feeling like a SQL amateur!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2HEvFSeR8k
T-SQL & Development
The Future of DBAs: History Rhymes
Eitan Blumin recently wrote a post about the future of the DBA career in which he talked about the rise of jack-of-all-trades IT professionals. It's a good post. You should read it. I did, and over the last 20 years, I'm pretty sure I've read a dozen variations of that post.
There's a saying: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."
[Video] Office Hours: Answers for Your Database Questions
Y'all post questions and upvote the best ones at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and I discuss 'em in my home office before tackling a client's performance issues:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cudm8g0CnVg
