[Video] Office Hours: Hotel Balcony Edition, Part 1

Post your questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me cover. In today’s episode, I sit down on a quiet hotel balcony and talk through a bunch of interesting questions:

Here’s what we covered today:

• 00:00 Introductions
• 00:25 Kebros: Hi Brent.My manager wants me to summarize sql health into a number 1-100 for all 50 production Servers.This is idiotic but just for Banter, what health metric (Eg I/O) will you advise me to use and average out (even if it doesn’t paint a whole picture) so I can feed my family.
• 02:08 SwissDBA: Hi Brent, I inherited a database of 2 TB with 355 data files. How would you check (and prove to the business) if the database has too many data files? Even the biggest file is just 55 GB big and I believe the DB could be faster with much less data files.
• 04:32 Britney: What are the common strategies you see used for recovering from “Oops” queries?
• 05:40 LifeExtinguisher: Can rcsi improve backup speed? Considering backup reads the whole db and saves in bak file, and reads are routed to tempdb for older values, not needing shared lock on resource that already is booked by some other exclusive lock
• 06:33 Sussudio: What tools / techniques do you recommend for generating large sudo realistic synthetic data loads for performance testing in the lower SQL environments?
• 08:27 Dilara: When are SQL Server questions better suited for stackoverflow.com vs dba.stackexchange.com? Which forum has less snark?
• 09:25 Lieutenant Dan: What are the top 4 SQL conferences ranked in order?
• 11:33 Fyodor: What is your opinion / experience with using client side profilers like C# MiniProfiler to monitor SQL query performance?
• 13:14 Does Basically Anything: Hi Brent! Regarding sp_databaserestore. I was wondering if you knew of anyone who wrote something open source that utilizes it for automating testing restores from multiple servers, multiple databases. Any clickholes I could venture down before I start building something myself?
• 14:28 happydba: do you have a video of the baby sea turtles yet?!? 😀
• 15:14 Haydar: What are your preferred scripts / tools for monitoring Always On latency?