For the rest of December, I’m out vacationing in China and Japan. For this episode, I’m coming to you from the People’s Park in Zhengzhou, China, which is kinda like the Chicago of China. It’s in the middle of the US, bigger than people think (13 million people), and has beautiful parks.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 01:50 Uno: What’s the easiest way to setup a secondary server for failover? My friend runs a app on a single virtual server. We take nightly backups, but would like a better option to avoid losing an entire day’s worth of data. Any suggestions?
• 03:55 GoingAnonymousThisTime :D: I’ve setup an XE using sp_HumanEvents in order to track queries over 5s in a db. After a few minutes, I see high LATCH_UP on tempdb GAM and queries pile ups, blocking the entire server. Everything goes back to normal as soon as I stop the XE session. Any idea why this could happen?
• 05:22 Josef: What are some good books for beginners learning SQL? Is ‘SQL in a Nutshell’ by Kevin Kline a good choice? Any other recommendations?
• 06:09 Juan Pablo Gallardo: With the current hardware capabilities, SSD’s,huge RAM availability, do you think SQL would be replaced by solutions that do not require relational dbs, like Cosmos db? Why would you need a relational database datamodel if you can store all in one big table?
• 06:53 MyTeaGotCold: Has the lack of columnstore on Postgres bothered you?
• 07:21 Dogpool: What is your opinion of the new MSSQL extension for VSCode? Is the query plan display as good as SSMS?
• 08:17 Josef: Should data, logs, tempdb, and backups be placed on separate partitions when installing SQL on a local machine with local storage?
• 09:20 Mary Puppins: Found a SQL VM query that is suffering from parameter sniffing but can’t refactor it because it’s embedded in C#. Any tips?
• 10:05 Josef: Do you have any plans to visit India in the future? Just curious since I saw you’re visiting China and Japan this December!
• 11:07 Ricardo: Hi Brent, On a new customers prod server I can see everything coming from the VB sql-generator has isolation level ReadUncomitted. Can this slow performance?
• 12:22 Vishnu: What are your pros / cons of having your SQL Data warehouse VM and SQL OLTP VM on a single VM vs two separate VMs? Which do you see more of?
• 13:21 Ricardo: How should I handle my manager who insists on changing production data himself to fix immediate application issues. When all my advice and coaching is ignored.
• 20:02 KyleDevDBA: How do you go about trying new skills/concepts that you are learning? When trying to learn something, I often get stuck at the “I have a hammer, where can I find a meaningful nail to hit” stage.