Today’s Office Hours comes from a very different office! I climbed into the hot tub to review your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Don’t worry, the webcast is completely safe for work.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 00:32 MooneyFlyer: Hey Brent, what are your thoughts on functions like PIVOT and window functions (last_value, first_value, etc). I haven’t heard much from you on these.
• 01:14 icklemouse: Hi BrentO-Biwan. I know this ain’t your area (cowers for roasting) but when out and about do you see Policy Based Mgt in use? I know it’s dull-grey and clunky as anything but can be useful. Was wondering if lack of usage stops MS making it slightly more smooth and colourful.
• 02:22 DWinOK: Love this Office Hours thing. So, two years out and 11 CUs from the release of SQL 2022. I’ve not heard anything about the next version. Did I miss something?
• 02:57 HoldMyBeer: When you change the database page verify options do you need to rebuild heaps and CI?. Whats the best way to tell if a table has pages that dont have a checksum calculated.
• 03:57 StraightBanana: What is your keyboard typing speed? Have you ever work on that skill to improve efficiency? I like to use monkeytype.com to practice
• 04:33 Paul O: What are you pros / cons of storing XML in SQL Server as varbinary(max) data type vs other data types?
• 05:12 MyTeaGotCold: Has experience shown that it is important to set the Trace Flags that Query Store cares about? Everyone links me to the Erin Stellato article about 7745 and 7752, but the article is nothing but speculation. I’m aware that 7752 is enabled by default in 2019+.
• 05:55 Jonas: I love how passionate and knowledgeable you are as an expert in your field. What tips or advice would you give someone trying to figure out their ‘speciality’?
• 06:23 Dimitra M: What bad things can happen if SQL Server VM max server memory setting is left unconfigured?
• 07:07 Tom: Hi Brent, a table has NC indexes on each column (30+, can’t use columnstore). Sorted queries result in a clustered scan, the sort spills to tempdb, and takes seconds. Adding an index query hint does not and takes ms. Is this type of situation covered in Mastering Query Tuning?