My Asian vacation continues in Kyoto, the City of a Thousand Temples. They’re not playing around – the town is chock full of gorgeous historic temples, and it was tough to pick a scene for today’s Office Hours. Let’s go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento:

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 01:35 SQL_Linux: Brent! I have a server that has many tables using nvarchar(MAX) columns. Most of the nvarchar(MAX) cols contain a max datalength of 80 or less. Will i see performance boost by changing size of nvarchar cols to 100? E.G. will this prevent data being written to off-row pages?
• 02:58 Josef: Using sp_DatabaseRestore, is there a way to restore all databases from a backup location at once, instead of handling them one by one?
• 03:34 Vineet: Have you considered changing office hours YouTube into a paid membership channel?
• 04:41 Vishnu: We have developers that continue to run SSMS directly on the production SQL server despite being asked not to. Do you see any downsides to uninstalling SSMS from that VM?
• 05:30 Bandhu: What’s your opinion of the new features in SQL 2025? Anything to get excited about?
• 06:46 JRL: What advice do you give to clients who ask about running graph queries? For example, do you suggest the use of recursive SQL, specialized graph search features, or a specialized graph database?
• 08:29 Rondel: What’s your opinion of Azure SQL DB’s ability to auto create / drop indexes? Does it make mistakes similar to SQL VM suggested indexes?
• 09:32 Rennie: What’s the best time series database?
• 10:00 Double Dragon: What’s your opinion of the pending TikTok divestiture / US ban?
• 10:37 chris: I queried dm_db_index_physical_stats on the readable replica of a CloudSQL SQL Server instance. It took over an half an hour to run at which time the primary started performing poorly. Since the replica is in asynchronous mode is it possible the query could impact the primary?
• 11:30 JRL: I recently attended AWS re:Invent and was disappointed that a majority of the talks seemed superficial and marketing-driven, in contrast to my experiences with the SQL community. Which tech conferences have you found rewarding in terms of technical depth and networking?