I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento while in front of the National Gallery for Foreign Art in Sofia.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 03:12 MyTeaGotCold: If all of my columns are nvarchar, is there a performance benefit to always wrapping strings in N”? My tests have been inconclusive.
• 03:50 SadButTrue: Hey Brent, most of our Azure SQL DBs have top wait stats related to parallelism (CX***) and performance is not great. As we cannot modify the cost threshold for parallelism in Azure SQL, what other techniques can we use to reduce the waits associated with parallelism?
• 05:00 Dom: Hi Brent, I noticed something strange on a SQL Express 2012. I’m looking at the “Visible online” CPU and was expecting to see 4 (as Express limits to 4 cpu or 1 socket) but it shows 8 visible online cpu… Am I missing something or is my SQL Express really using 8 CPU ? Thanks !
• 05:36 dba jr: hi Brent, in my company users can design any query they want. for example they can choose multi column for order by or in where clause . i mean queries in APP are not fix. but they tell me queries are slow. tables have million rows. how can I handle this.
• 07:10 DBA in VA: SQL 2019: What causes a query not to use the execution plan I’ve forced in the query store? Isn’t that the whole idea of the forced plan??
• 08:00 Ruby Sunday: Is creating a NC index that mirrors the clustered index to avoid blocking considered a bad practice?
• 09:30 TheyBlameMe: Hi Brent. What’s you opinion of this MS recommendation to “prevent lock escalation” for long running batch operations? BEGIN TRAN; SELECT * FROM mytable (UPDLOCK, HOLDLOCK) WHERE 1 = 0; WAITFOR DELAY ‘1:00:00’; COMMIT TRAN;
• 10:40 DanishDBA: Hi Brent, my friend needs to create an index on a highly used table on a SQL Server 2019 SE (FCI). On a copy of the db on the same server he knows that it can take up to 4 minutes. The goal is to minimize the impact, as a service window is not allowed. What is the best approach?
• 11:48 JustWondering: Been suspicious that something “outside” of SS is the problem but don’t know how to prove it. Changed from using JTDS JDBC driver to MS JDBC driver and saw 40+% improvement in runtimes. How could I find what the MS driver is doing different vs JTDS? QryPlans seem the same. Thx.