Office Hours: Short Text Answers Edition

Not all of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento require long-winded responses.

Brandon: Do you seen a rise in json queries to address impedance mismatch between data/objects? I struggled with EF to produce a query that was neither simple nor complicated against a properly designed db (according to 2 experts). Dropped EF; used json query in stored proc; it was magic.

No.

Rufus: What are the best ways to determine if two large query plans have the same shape?

Put them side by side in SSMS and zoom out.

Stan Redman: What is your opinion of the SQL force encryption setting?

I don’t do security or compliance work, so I have no opinion.

Dance Monkey: Do you think there would be much interest for someone to host a PostgreSQL office hours on Youtube/Twitch?

Yes.

Eduardo: What is highest number of DBs you could safely put in an always on availability group?

Read this.

Marian: Hi Brent! Would you recommend any SQL Server Certification that would be easily recognizable? I know Microsoft retired those on SQL Server, and focus on Azure.

No.

Hondo: What is the top batch requests per second (sustained) that you have seen in the field? What were the specs for the underlying hardware to support that kind of load?

At the moment, 150K sustained, 4 socket, 64 core box with 256GB RAM. Small data set, just lots of tiny well-tuned queries that can’t effectively be cached client side.

Rooster: How do you determine the the optimal Virtual Memory page file size for bare metal Windows Server 2019 running SQL Server 2019 Enterprise?

Read this.

Sigríður: Is there anything we can do to to influence the stat sampler so that a given index key (customer in this case) is included as one of the histogram 200 steps? We know who the top 200 most important customers are by $$$$.

Yes, filtered statistics. They’re just like filtered indexes – put a where clause on ’em.

Tim: Greetings Brent. Are you winging it? Or do you sneak a peek at pollgab before starting the stream, so that you’re prepared? If you are winging it, how long did it take until you were confident in your knowledge and no longer had to prepare?

This one takes a little longer to answer, but I’m putting it in this batch because it’s fun.

Before starting the show, I look at the PollGab queue to remove anything that might be offensive or isn’t a good fit for my show (like if someone asks a MySQL question.) In the process of looking at ’em, I at least see what’s coming. I don’t ever go Google for stuff – either I know the answer, or I’m going to tell people what I’d Google, but that’s it.

How long did it take? Well, Office Hours is a really good simulation of what it’s like to be a consultant. Client staff constantly throw questions at you, and you have to be really comfortable either saying you know the answer, or saying you don’t, but you know where you would look. You can’t feel guilty about saying you don’t know. So I’ve been really comfortable with what I do know for a long time – but it’s just that the scope of that surface area slowly and steadily grew over time.

I still make mistakes! In a recent show, I said I didn’t think unique constraints also created a unique index under the hood. One of the viewers pointed out the mistake. Strangely, I get excited about that because it means I still have stuff to learn!