For the last Office Hours of the year, I’m coming to you from Tokyo, the last stop on my 3-week tour of China and Japan. This was a big Epic Life Quest task for me, for sure, something I’ve wanted to do for decades. Let’s bring you along and go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento:

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 00:43 VeryLost: Do I need to do something special to get your 6-Month DBA Training Plan? I sign up for it every time that I download the FRK at a new job, but I have never got one of the emails.
• 01:19 MyTeaGotCold: Is it sensible to use query hints to stagger or test a migration to a newer compatibility level? It seems like a good idea but I don’t know anyone else who has had it.
• 02:09 CuriousDBA: For a table with a 2-column PK and a query filtering IN lists on both columns, SQL is doing a CI seek on only the 1st column (reading 50k+ rows) and then a FILTER operation on the 2nd column afterwards. Is SQL capable of determining when UNION would be better for a query instead?
• 04:07 AnonymousDBA: We have a heap table with more than 15 non-clustered indexes. No UPDATEs. Only SELECT and INSERT. It shows up at the top of the list with highest number of indexes fragmented. Will a clustered index reduce the fragmentation problem with the non-clustered indexes on this table?
• 04:51 summer-fondness: Hi Brent, if I had a friend they might have asked, do you think this is the right time to take the risk and learn a db outside the norm, like Iceberg? They might think something like Iceberg has benefits in industries that make Big$ and they might like to stay close to Big$
• 06:19 Tom: Do you have a process or ideas for creating your own hands-on projects when learning new tech like Postgresql beyond what’s in classes? It’s always a catch-22 at work when wanting to take on new projects but you need the hands-on experience before taking on new projects.
• 07:02 midDBA: hi brent i have a non clustered index on a table that has 1 billion reads and 1.3 million writes do you think that is a problem?
• 07:45 Stefan: After 11 years as an underpayed and overworked DBA, I’m leaving the company to do something completly different. I wanna thank you very much for all the things you do for this cummunity, and a big heart to this very lovely und helpful community. I’ll miss ya all.
• 08:22 Dopinder: Trying to convince the developers to not send customer facing emails from SQL Server sp’s. What are your top supporting reasons for this? Any horror stories?
• 08:59 Mark Simon: Hey Brent, Does your training cover how to use query store?
• 10:14 CrookedDBA: Every now and then my CPU elevates and I see queries locking on TempDB 2:1:128. Once it starts the CPU stays elevated until I trigger the plan cache to clear. Can a bad plan flag as a TempDB 2:1:128 wait? SQL Server 2019.
• 11:14 Pro: I’ve come across some tricky behavior: SELECT IIF(0x10 0x1, 1, 0); — 1 SELECT IIF(0x100 0x10, 1, 0); — 0 SELECT IIF(0x1000 0x100, 1, 0); — 1 and so on. The reason for this is clear (I won’t spoil it), but what would be the best way to compare rowversions?