Thanks for joining me today – I know you reporters are all really busy, and I appreciate you taking the time to attend this press conference.

I’d like to start off by formally announcing my candidacy for Database Administrator General. There’s a lot of great candidates out there, but I think it’s time for me to step up and do my part to help our country.

I’ll take questions now. Don, go ahead.

“Don Gonya, NPR. Traditionally your party has viewed life issues as a litmus test. Where do you weigh in?”

I believe in a developer’s right to choose. I know that’s going to be controversial, and that’s why I’ve decided to run as an independent. But the thing is, I believe that developers should have the right to abort their own queries under certain circumstances. I’ve written a stored procedure so they can kill their own queries even without SA rights. I want to empower them to control their own lives, even in production, because we all make mistakes.

And Don, I’m going to speak frankly here – I also believe in the death penalty because not all queries have a right to live. (Shouting, crosstalk, not transcribed) Hold on, hold on, let me finish. We’ve had a series of incidents where queries – especially those from inside the executive branch, if I’m honest – have caused serious issues in production. I will authorize the help desk to use deadly force when necessary on these queries.

Next question – Bob, you’re up.

“Bob Woodward, Washington Post. What’s your stance on education?”

First, I believe we can take a few easy steps to better educate our team without raising the budget. My education plan includes weekly lunch and learns taught by different team members: the DBA teaching the developers about query tuning, the architects teaching the rest of the team about new database options, and project managers teaching – well, I’m not sure what they’re going to teach yet.

But education isn’t just about them: it’s about us. I believe that database administrators need to keep learning and growing as well, so I’m going to allocate spending for every DBA to attend one week of either a conference, or a training class. It’s going to involve budget increases, and there’s just no way around that.

Next question, Maggie.

“Maggie Haberman, New York Times. So you’re just going to increase spending?”

Absolutely not. I have a series of budget cuts that will result in a much smarter and leaner balance sheet. First, we’re going to aggressively replace a lot of our older VMware hosts with newer ones running less – but faster – cores and much more memory. Our Enterprise Agreement true-ups with Microsoft are just around the corner, and we simply can’t afford to spend our children into poverty by continuing to run these old, slow, 10-core CPUs that cost $70,000 apiece to license. Under my new plan, our true-up costs will plummet dramatically.

I’m also going to embrace migration. I’m going to start the conversation with a bipartisan project with our development teams, moving our full text search into ElasticSearch, and migrating our session state out of In-Memory OLTP into whatever open source platform the developers embrace. I believe in open borders because it makes us all more successful.

Next question – wait, dude, what are you even –

“Anthony Bourdain, CNN. Describe your foreign policy approach.”

Seriously, you’re a travel show host. I mean I love your work, but that doesn’t get you a press pass into a political news conference.

But since you asked, my first act as Database Administrator General will be to go to Techorama in Ede, Netherlands in October. I’m doing a pre-con:

Developer’s Guide to SQL Server Performance

You’re stuck with a database server that’s not going fast enough. You’ve got a hunch that the biggest bottleneck is inside the database server somewhere, but where? In this one-day class, you’ll learn how identify which queries are killing your server, what parts of the database server are holding you back, how to tackle indexing improvements, and how to identify query anti-patterns.

You’ll learn:

• How wait stats tell you where to focus your tuning
• How the plan cache shows you which queries are the worst
• How to make fast improvements by picking the right indexes
• How to identify and fix the most common query anti-patterns

Registration is open now. Alright, that’s a wrap, folks. See you on the campaign trail. Anthony, what’s the nearest place for fresh stroopwafels?