On Black Friday, I took a break from answering support emails to hit your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 00:41 MatthewsSQLServer: How AlwaysON AG failovers cause can be analyzed, is it DB/Cluster/Infrastructure/AD issue. Can you please suggest any videos or blogs that can help?
• 02:19 NotADeveloper: We have a 40 TB DB. There are discussions to move the data to MongoDB from MSSQL because it provides sharding and its caching is better than SQL. There is no partition today. Mongo DB’s sharding and caching VS SQL’s Partitioning scheme, what route is better and why for a VLDB.
• 04:25 Alex Threepwood: Hi Brent, When a client calls (calls? mail?) for an emergency job, do you charge per hour, or to analyze the problem at hand? And do they know your rate then, or do you send a quote before you get out of bed?
• 06:04 ImAfraidOfBI: After restoring a database (to test backups, be it manually or automatically), what do you suggest is done to test and make sure that the DB restore is good? Random selects? DBCC checkdb?
• 07:39 Mobius: What is your opinion of Copilot SQL query optimization?
• 09:43 Eduardo: Are there any gotchas when upgrading from an older version of Ola H’s maint solution to latest version? SQL 2019 Enterprise
• 10:26 Renzi: What is your opinion of constrained core VM’s for Azure SQL VM?
• 11:33 Iceman-OG: Hi Brent, I’m getting back into SQL Server on prem. I see that PolyBase seems to be a cool feature that’s been around, but I never heard of it, seems a like an excellent feature
• 12:36 MyTeaGotCold: What is the DBA equivalent of automated unit testing?
• 13:24 thatkerolearlier: Hey Brent! I am currently studying Intelligence systems for my major such as machine learning, ann, cnn etc. can you give me an idea for my final year project ?
• 14:30 Froid: Is it ever ok to lead a non-clustered index with an inequality search column followed by an equality search column? If so, when?
• 15:41 Kang: For boxed SQL, should we clear SQL wait stats after raising the DB compat level to the latest level?
• 16:17 Piotr: Have you ever had to disable TSQL_SCALAR_UDF_INLINING for a database? If so, why?
• 16:56 Diana: Do you know of any gotcha’s when running cross DB queries where DB1 and DB2 are in different compat levels?
• 17:30 Bill: Does the first responder kit follow the same end of life schedule as Microsoft for SQL Server versions?
• 18:34 Aditya: Are there any troubleshooting benefits to naming TSQL transactions as opposed to not naming them?
• 19:18 RushingSQL: Did anyone let you know that Bob Ward gave a class on Always On Availability Groups at Pass Data Community Summit 2023 and you were listed at the top of his reference slide?
• 20:28 Tom: Hello! I have a question before pruchasiong a prodcut. “SQL Server 2019 Standard – 15 clients” Whats does 15 clients means? I am not sure if this is related with CALS or the amount of database that I can conect it to.
• 21:18 BoboDBA: Hi B. Would partitioning a 300 million records (800gb) table monthly on a datetime column (with an aligned index on the column too) provide better query performance than a nonclustered index on that column? Stakeholder is demanding partitioning but he doesn’t have to maintain it.
• 22:28 thevibrantDBA: long winded question
• 23:20 Sigríður: Does the MemoryGrant property for a query plan include the memory used to read pages from disk into the buffer pool needed to service the query?
• 23:57 Here-I-Am: What’s your opinion on CDC and its use in products like Goldengate for replication?
• 25:12 RenegadeLarsen: Starting to see in Europe that many customers are focusing on security. Do you see the same trend in the US?
• 27:24 Vinícius Lourenço: Hi from Brazil, as a non-database person, what is the basic maintenance tasks I should look/do on my Azure SQL Server DB? A few thousand inserts per month into 2 tables
• 28:05 Slow Cheetah: Query performance is good for a given query when forcing parallelism with trace flag 8649. It’s bad without this query hint.
• 28:50 Ingeborg : Have the Iceland lava flows affected any friends / places you visited?
• 30:34 Chakra: What is your opinion of the KEEP PLAN query hint? Do you ever like to use it?
• 31:01 Håkan A: Hi Brent, We get a .bak file every night we have to import new data from. Do you know any common reasons for running restore database from disk with replace (in single user) getting stuck in (restoring…) very often?
• 31:52 Hera Syndulla: What is the best and worst SQL VM naming conventions you have seen?
• 33:25 Raghav: Do you like any third party software for SQL A.G. backup over native backup?
• 33:54 Q-Ent: Hi Brent, Can you suggest any article related to CPU Mathematics 101?
• 34:54 Richard Wilmuth: What is the best way to import databases from a Google Cloud VM SQL Server to an AZURE SQL Server (not on a VM) ?
• 36:04 BullRed: How did you enjoy the F1 weekend in Vegas?