[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About SQL Server

Let’s pick up right where we left off yesterday. I’ve got more time and champagne, so let’s keep going through your top-voted questions from PollGab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Introductions
• 00:39 Wilma: Poor code & tuning issues. Evidence = Database Performance Analyzer & sp_blitz. App is the customer’s idea. The dev has got golden balls (but writes poor queries), server, network and SQL always to blame. Any suggestions on how to present my findings with out losing a customer?
• 03:15 Doug: What are the common gotcha’s associated with running SQL in a VM environment?
• 04:36 Richard: Is it ever OK to use a non-unique date/time column (CreationDate in this case) for a new clustered index on a pre-existing HEAP table?
• 05:10 Kyle: Does the 5 x 5 rule for new Non-Clustered indexes apply to both OLTP and OLAP tables?
• 06:17 Dwight: What are the ways to find all queries targeting a given table?
• 07:54 Bruce: Hello Brent, when should you play a good cop vs bad cop towards the dev executing performance destabilizing queries on the production sql server?
• 11:11 BiggieDB: Hi Brent and all the party people! I am working on tuning up code and see the developer put, on every join, forceseek hint. I know we are bossing the optimizer around there, but is there ever a good case to use this technique?
• 12:14 Bruce: Hello Brent, what are the hidden costs of PostgreSQL?
• 13:40 Dwight: Hello Brent, what is the Microsoft true-up process like for SQL server? 14:30 SwedeDBA: Hi Brent, I have a friend that is searching for unused indexes on a DB in an availability group with readable secondaries. He wonders if the result from SP_BlitzIndex shows all index usage on the readable secondaries so he can securely drop the unused indexes? Thanx man!
• 15:00 Bill: Hello Brent, have you ever considered working for Microsoft?
• 21:00 Wally: Hi Brent, is there a good way to find root cause for when page life expectancy drops significantly? Is this a worthy tracking metric?
• 21:59 Shawn: What are your favorite non technical books?
• 25:34 Wrap-up, discussion of Dead by Daylight