On an overcast morning in scenic Camden, Maine, I stood on the docks and took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 00:54 Alma Fahlstrøm: Does index fragmentation matter with column store indexes on SQL 2019 / NVME San storage?
• 01:22 Miss Minutes: What is your recommended way to find the slowest queries with plan warnings?
• 01:58 Renzi: What is your opinion of using Azure managed disks vs Azure storage account for use with Azure SQL VM?
• 02:24 Beta Ray Bill: What are your thoughts on enabling Locking Pages in Memory for Azure SQL VM?
• 03:05 Cheech: What is your opinion of sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint for invoking REST endpoints from SQL Server? Have you seen any good use cases?
• 03:53 Franz: Does MSSQL Server have anything comparable to PostgreSQL plugins?
• 04:43 Izzy G.: Why does SSMS default identity int seed values to 1 instead of the smallest negative value for int / big int? Should this be changed to not waste half the potential range for a column?
• 05:30 Alma Fahlstrøm: What is your opinion of vector databases?
• 05:45 Miss Minutes: For performance reasons, is it ever wise/permissible to have a unique non-clustered index instead of a primary key?
• 07:21 Shawn Carter: What is your favorite VM size (sku) for running azure SQL VM with good balance of price to performance?
• 07:42 Eric Wright: What is your opinion of using third party SQL backup software to support restoring individual tables in case of oopsies?
• 08:41 azuredata: Large company looking to standardize Azure SQL DB deployments. What are the pros/cons of keeping everything under a single RG the DBAs own/manage versus letting devs provision their own databases in their own RG? Is it bad to have one massive RG for SQL DBs if it is locked down?
• 10:00 WTF_SQLServer!?!: Azure SQL Database’s tempdb size is governed by the CPU count of the instance. My Data Science team is constantly running out of tempdb space. I’ve increased CPU a few times and now it’s getting expensive. Do you have suggestions for reducing tempdb usage?
• 11:22 Mike Hanewinckel: How can you efficiently delete records from very large tables? I have tables that I store log data that needs to be purged occasionally. Truncate is not an option because I want to keep the most recent. I have read that deleting in batches is an option.
• 12:25 Baylan Skoll: Is PostgreSQL DBA and consulting as lucrative as MSSQL DBA and consulting?
• 13:21 shouldISpecialize: Brent, I’d like to hear your take on generalist vs specialist discussion. I’m an app dev, curious about databases and performance tuning (I’ve taken your courses) and I have a hard time choosing a niche. Any advice is more than welcome. Thanks