I really wanted to film Office Hours on the Great Wall of China, but the instant I got out there, I realized it was a lost cause. That place was SO overwhelming – tons of people, frigid winds, heights, totally overwhelming in every way. So, instead you get a nice peaceful park in downtown Zhengzhou, Yves’ hometown, and it’s one of those nice 360 degree videos where you can turn the camera around to see the goings-on. Let’s go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento:

Here’s what we discussed:

• 00:00 Start
• 01:37 CornFieldDBA: Hi Brent. We are considering installing SQL Server 2022 along side SQL Server 2019. According to Microsoft this is supported. Have you ran two versions of SQL Server on the same host? Anything to be worried about?
• 03:10 AG Avoider: I’ve heard you mention synchronous SAN replication across DCs, such as what Pure Storage offers. Is this different from multi-subnet failover clustering?
• 05:15 newbie dev dba: hi brent, my boss wants us to encrypt some columns in some of our transaction tables. My colleague brought up using the Column Master Key (CMK) method for this. Have you had any experience with it, or seen any of your clients use it? Just curious to hear your thoughts
• 05:45 SQLHCDBA: Do you have a documentation on how to configure SSRS on Always on Availability group SQL database and the best practices?
• 07:51 Elwood Blues: Which is worse : installing Cumulative updates as soon as they are released or installing them months later? Which is safer for Azure SQL VM?
• 08:44 Land of the Lost: What’s your opinion of SQL Server 2025’s mirroring to Fabric OneLake feature?
• 10:12 Wade Wilson : Will you be attending Microsoft SQLCon in Atlanta next year?
• 13:07 MyTeaGotCold: Do you know of any monitoring tools that still get regular updates? Spotlight and Sentry look dead. I’m not sure about Idera.
• 15:36 Elwood Blues: Our commercial SQL monitoring software caused corruption in our database. Have you seen or run into this?
• 16:53 BrentIsTheMan: Hi Brent, With the new ADR functionality for tempdb in SQL Server 2025 I wonder if the version store for tempdb will clear out if I have long running transactions in other DBs? If you don’t wanna answer this because I can test myself I wonder what is your favorite tequila drink?
• 17:39 Captain Hurry-Up-and-Commit: My queries sometimes slow down to due to large Version Store crawling, but I’ve noticed that enforcing clustered index scan on simpleton SELECTs during these times I get better query performance than with preferred covering index seek. What trivial knowledge am I missing?
• 20:55 flyboy91901: We have multiple databases that now have to integrate with each other. The issue with many of these databases at customer sites has different collation which is problematic. What is your approach to changing collation for every aspect of the DB, table/columns, functions, views?