That face I’m making in the video thumbnail is priceless. YouTube randomly picks these, and I laughed out loud at this one. Anyhoo, let’s get to answering your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento:

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 00:59 Mohit: Hello Brent, What options does a DBA have in terms of performance tuning when managing third party application databases which have lots of crappy SQL queries and no lock hints? Last but not least, thanks for your service to the community.
• 02:11 MyTeaGotCold: Page fullness is very important, but sp_BlitzIndex never touches sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats and Ola only touches it in LIMITED mode. What am I missing?
• 04:19 Tony Feuz: Lot’s of talk about linked servers and how we should not do that. One of your recent posts you mentioned to move the data to the same server and I want to confirm that cross server queries = bad and cross database queries on the same server = acceptable. Do I have that correct?
• 04:48 Trudging Through A SQL Swamp: I swear that I watched a video of you demonstrating how using NOLOCK could return incorrect data. I have looked everywhere and can not find that video. I did find a very short blog post by you about it, but would like to see the video again. Is it still available?
• 05:35 Crazy Harry: Who is the Itzik Ben-Gan of PostgreSQL?
• 05:49 Paul Hunter: How do you properly setup Index maintenance using Ola Hallengren on an AG? My environment has one active Server and one inactive server for fail over. (You will most likely ask why I used an AG for this, I didn’t. It is just something I have to deal with)
• 06:43 mailbox: What are the advantages & disadvantages to housing your Data Lake in SQL Server? I’ve seen many sites push towards housing data lake on some NOSQL DB.
• 07:56 Juan Pablo Gallardo: Is it correct that performance is greatly impacted by the cluster size of the partition, ie. 8k cluster size is ideal?
• 08:53 MuSQL: Hi Brent, Recently involved in a debate on LI with a .Net dev. who claims that Stored procedures are legacy and that new projects never use them. I feel the pain when migrating between DBRMs but also the benefit of not shuffling data back and forth. Whats your opinion on this?
• 10:00 Dopinder: Does SQL row / page compression make up for the low drive performance in Azure? Has it got you over the finish line?
• 10:54 ScenarioFromRealWorld: How can I let coworkers stop using Activity Monitor. Are there any new articles regarding this? Because I cannot see that AM is getting any better than before
• 12:07 OracleIsDiffrent: After downgrade MSSQL2019 from Ent. licence to Sta.we noticed small perform. issues.Queries who do index seeks and scans are running slower.The execution plans are same, major diff. is execution mode on index operations.On Ent. where running in batch mode now I can see row mode.
• 12:51 Yavuz: Hello Brent. I’ve been a DBA for over a year now and noticed that DBA’s don’t really write too many queries. How did you get good at writing long @$$ sprocs and T-SQL while being on the data administration side? It’s mostly developers and BI folks writing the queries, not the DBA
• 14:39 Bruno: What do you think of transactional replication? Would it be better to use Log Shipping instead? We have a publisher distributing a lot of publications and we experience some performance issues on a regular basis. Thanks Brento and Cheers to the DBA great family.