I’m back in the US at my home studio in San Diego, so I did a live Office Hours session. Post your questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me cover.

Here’s what we covered today:

• 00:00 Introductions
• 00:41 WTF_SQLServer!?!: I have a some dbs that take nearly 6 hours each to finish recovery after patching. I’ve checked VLF counts and they are reasonable. The dbs are in SIMPLE recovery and logs are showing huge recovery times but millisecond times for analysis, redo and undo.
• 02:04 Marcus: Is SQL Server the only relational DB that can have parameter sniffing issues?
• 02:54 GrumpyDBAsFriend: A friend’s manager wants him to replace a SQL 2012 Enterprise server (24 cores) with a 2019 Standard server (12 cores). This is a heavily-used box with about 40 databases running multiple critical applications… should he just find a new job now?
• 04:38 Ferhat Karatas: I use Ola hallengren’s index maintenance script every night. But I figure out that sql server unresponsive during script execution.
• 06:00 Roland G: Hi Brent, is it ever a “good thing” to create one of clippy’s suggested indexes when the query already runs sub-second but consumes 200,000 logical reads.
• 07:16 Miguel: Hi Brent, what are the top issues you see surrounding Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator?
• 08:38 Oscar G: Hi Brent, is ‘grumpy’ a justified stereotype for DBAs?
• 10:53 Louis: To combat effects of param sniffing, is it acceptable strategy to proactively / automatically run a common query once to put it’s plan first into cache before outliers have a chance to be put into cache?
• 11:55 Hoss Cartwright: Hi Brent, how can you detect when developers are hinting maxdop 0 in their queries?
• 13:42 Beta Ray Bill: Hi Brent, I sometimes see articles where the author has the data file and transaction log file for a given DB on separate drives.
• 15:05 Sultan: Hi Brent, what are the top gotcha’s / hurdles for a long time pessimistic locking SQL developer moving to “A whole new world” of optimistic locking (RCSI) in Azure SQL?
• 16:02 TurnerBurn: Hi Brent. My friend is pulling his hair out (he’s quite bald already) over a deadlocking issue. sp_BlitzLock shows lots of deadlocks of 2 queries, but both are crazy-fast when executed so poor performance does not seem to be an issue.
• 17:40 Egemen: Hi Brent, does Query Store work well with cross database queries?
• 18:51 gserdijn: A database server of a customer has 8 processors and SQL Server Standard Edition. So 4 processors are not being used due to licensing issues.
• 20:30 Sir Logs-A-Lot: Hi Brent, Will you consider writing a SQL anti-patterns book? It would be a New York Times best seller. 🙂
• 21:53 Süleyman: Hi Brent, what are the top features of PostgreSQL and Oracle that you would love to see incorporated in a future version of SQL Server?
• 23:40 FrankieG: In a recent server survey I found the option to use “legacy cardinality” was on.
• 25:10 1440×1080: Hi Brent ! Is there a way to recreate a query text based on its execution plan ?
• 25:53 SqlPadawan: Hi Brent. A career-related question: in your experience, what has helped you to decide when it’s time to move on to another place or to your own thing?
• 27:31 Jason Stapley: Is the future of the DBA role Data engineer or Data Lead or Data Steward or other? I’m seeing a trend toward Data engineer. Nice seeing you at SQL Bits 2022 UK!!
• 29:20 BehindTheScenesDBA: When/if you manage more DBAs under you, how do you keep the synergy/interaction among the DBAs as healthy as possible? Sometimes I see some members act like I am better than the others.
• 30:46 Ned G: Other than “Do it out of hours and use nolock”, How would you suggest my friend queries a couple of error log tables (~5m rows) for Message like %SomeError%?
• 32:24 GI Joe DBA: Management wants their first DWH in Azure. The data will be sourced from a few 100GB Azure SQL DBs. A non-dba name-dropped CDC, is it worth a look or is SSIS\DataFactory the common data feed sol?
• 34:20 i’ll_talk_about_bruno: What is your favorite deprecated feature in SQL Server
• 36:06 sqlsucks: Hello Brent, how was your SQLBits experience in London?
• 39:45 dman: Say one node of your two-node sql cluster is suddenly dead (non-recoverable hardware failure) and you have a 24 hour old vm snapshot for that server.
• 41:46 I want to be on a beach in Cabo: I have a legacy source system that used BIGINT’s for a PK. We switched to a new system that uses varchar as the new PK datatype. It’s still a bigint though. No joins to the source systems. Should I convert the new values to bigint
• 43:09 gabriele: my friend’s dev team is developing the old apps in .net core with codefirst, this means the database structure is binded by the program and therefore my friend can not suggest query changes because the queries are made by .net
• 45:23 Sir Logs-A-Alot: Brent, Nice fanboy shirt… Where do you purchase your funny shirts?
• 46:07 Boutaga: Hi Brent, love your show from the beach. I see in the XML of the compiled plan of a very slow query a parameter data type varchar(20) compiled with a value C followed by 19 white space