[Video] Office Hours: Open Q&A for Microsoft Databases

Today I’m back in the home office, finishing up teaching Mastering Index Tuning and getting ready to head out on a Mexico cruise. Let’s go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 00:30 Need For Speed Round: What do you recommend for statistics maintenance on TB-scale tables with billions of rows? We’ve gone 5 years with neither scheduled nor automatic statistics updates and it hurts. WITH SAMPLE 1 PERCENT is many millions of rows.
• 03:43 CantSayWithoutThemKnowing: Hi Brent, long time listener/supporter. Are you seeing a battle starting between experienced DBAs vs a AI developer DBA who think they know better? I go to battle sometimes and use the same AI tools but leverage my experience to and prove them wrong. #NeverLostACase #TrainTheLLM
• 05:30 I_like_SQL_Server: Hi Brent, I can see there are some new classes with 2026 in the name. How are they different from your recorded classes? Will they be included in the forever bundle for fundamentals and mastering you offered some time ago? Keep on being awesome!
• 06:50 MyTeaGotCold: Particularly with regards to temp tables, have you ever saved the day with OPTION(KEEP PLAN) or OPTION(KEEPFIXED PLAN)?
• 07:42 Ricky Bobby: How do you decide what to automate first in a SQL Server environment, and how do you determine when the automation is worth the effort?
• 09:16 EdgeCase: Hi, We see short PAGELATCH waits on TempDB system objects (eg sysallocunits) during heavy workloads (many sessions using many table variables and temp tables). We are looking at testing with “IsTempDBMetadataMemoryOptimized” and wondered if you had any experience of using this?
• 10:22 retired dba: I have been on both sides of the table when it comes to consulting and found that workers at a client site are often resentful and sometimes ambivalent towards consultants (they felt slighted by mgmt). Have you ever experienced this and how best did you handle the situation?
• 14:15 Thomas Franz: When I select the ID column of a large table (COLUMNSTORE) into a #tmp and join both tables again later, SQL Server often estimates, that just ~30% of the rows in the #tmp will match (I could have added random ids). Is there a way to indicate, that it will be a 100% match?
• 17:09 chris: I understand AGs are complicated to setup and require a team of people to support them; however, at what point are simpler methods inadequate for a company’s HA/DR needs?
• 18:59 Margaret: I’ve created a job to use sp_BlitzWho to collect data for using to troubleshooting. The XML for the query plan (or live query plan) exceeded 132 levels, so the job failed. I made a small modification to the code to circumvent that – where do I post it for you?