My tripod is probably never gonna recover from the salt water, but the water was so nice that I couldn’t resist. This is a 360 video, so you can grab the screen and move it around to see Magens Bay in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands, as I go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 01:22 NotCloseEnoughToRetirementToStopLearning: Hi Brent-In a recent office hours you talked about aggressive stats maint. causing plan sensitivity\cache issues. My shop is aggressive on stats. Can you talk about how to investigate if we have this problem to a point we should adjust are current practice?
• 02:36 kladze: I’m trying to learn XE, most written material out there is how to setup a basic session and then query it. But since there is a huge amount of objects you can capture, i find it almost impossible to find the once i need. How can i properly learn about XE and the objects i need?
• 03:37 Sujan N: What is your take on certifications? Eg: DP-300. Does it actually help you step up? What advice would you give to an 8-month old dba on leveling up? Thanks for all the help!
• 04:50 Mark Richey: With opensource DB solutions like Postgress being the back end of very publicly facing and hugely scaled solutions like ChatGPT along with the like of ahem yourself using and teaching them, can you foresee the big licence products slowly becoming a thing of the past?
• 05:23 racheld933: Regarding upgrades from 2008r2 or 2012 to 2025, is there ever a situation where you’d want to upgrade to a lower version like 2019 or 2022 before 2025? Or is a direct upgrade always the way to go? I’ve upgraded Postgres in AWS RDS where I was forced to do version hops.
• 07:51 ArchipelagoDBA: You do recommend do update statistics maybe weekly. I get your reasoning behind that but isn’t it there then a risk that you will run into stale statistics like values outside of the histogram?
• 08:35 Sov: Any thoughts on managing databases as code in git and building/deploying DACPAC’s to manage the production schema? My org is working to adopt this model
• 09:29 dbApe: Sometimes my SQL server gets stuck on UpdateQPStats, where app is unavailable, AutoUpdateStats and AutoUpdateStatsAsync are set to True, Is this my cue to turn it off?
• 10:33 Andrew: Hi, I’ve stumbled into a DBA job and taken on around 30 database servers which were somewhat managed by several different people across the business prior to this. What would be your recommendation to get some consistency across them now that one person is managing them?