There’s a secret theme to the questions I hand-picked from the queue at https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Normally I just take the top-voted ones, but today, see if you can spot the thing they all have in common:

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 01:51 Tivan: Hi Brent, I’m facing a deadlock in MS SQL Server with “ORDER BY DESC” on a primary key (clustered index) during a read, conflicting with an insert on the same table. Is this related to descending scans? I couldn’t find a clear explanation. Could you share some thoughts? Thanks!
• 03:19 ddev: Sometimes it happens that in a blocked process report I can see a frame that I know cannot be in a stacktrace (I know it is not called from that procedure). What does it mean ? It is bug I can fix ?
• 04:38 Asking2much: Occasionally when tempdb is heavily hammered, sp_blitzwho gets an error of Lock request time out period exceeded (1second) due to tempdb.sys.sysschobjs.clst index being blocked. Would you be ok with setting the max lock_timeout value to 15 seconds? No issue with blocking liveplan
• 07:14 Gary Numan: When tasked with fixing overall SQL VM performance with cloud hardware, what are your pros and cons of increasing server memory vs upgrading disk SKU? Which do you see more of?
• 08:23 Vahid: Hi Brent I’ve been learning SQL DBA for about a year, mainly through tutorials. I feel I lack hands-on experience. How proficient should I be in T-SQL for this role? What’s the best learning path to improve my admin skills and problem-solving? Any advice is appreciated!
• 09:24 Call Me Ishmael: Over a decade ago, when I “cornered” you at a SQL Saturday in Washington, DC, in-between sessions, I asked you about SCHEMAs, which at that time you were adamantly against, albeit humbly, belying your rock-star status. Are you still against the use of schemas?
• 10:58 Jersey DBA: My company has a 3-node HA cluster. The third node is read-only for reporting. Why do we still sometimes see latency and blocking on that node with queries using the “with nolock” hint.
• 13:30 KyleDevDBA: Hi Brent, What would you recommend when one DBA thinks another DBA isn’t pulling their weight? Is there a certain thing you look at to either prove or disprove this?
• 15:58 CuriousDBA: Hello Brent. I see that you can use sp_blitz output to a table locally. Is there a way to store all that information centrally by running sp_blitz command against a list of all servers so that I can create a report for all critical issues across all my servers?
• 17:56 Tim: If sql server becomes overwhelmed with locking / blocking issues, is there a way to give the server a break and allow it to catch up ?
• 18:50 RacerX: What’s your opinion of NVME ultra disk when you are stuck with low memory (128gb) for multi TB database in Azure SQL VM?
• 19:36 Milind: Hi Brent, Will there be any difference in join where column with regular index versus filtered index (where table has size and good number of rows)?