I took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento and answered ’em from my balcony at Disney’s Aulani Resort in Hawaii. I’m not really a Disney guy – we were there for a friend’s birthday celebration – but I tell ya what, that’s my new favorite resort in the world. The water park, food, beach, and nearby activities were great, and it has the awesome Disney service. Top notch. Anyhoo, back to tech:

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 01:31 CuriousDBA: Do you still recommend formatting SQL Server Data, Log, and TempDB drives with 64K allocation blocks, or has latest storage advancements made performance benign between 64K and the 4K default?
• 02:51 MyTeaGotCold: My developers are scared of seeing old data so they never query my synchronous replicas. Since I can’t 100% guarantee sync replication, how can I help them to offload queries?
• 04:53 Ceiling DBA is Watching You Tabulate: What’s the lowest RTO/RPO that you have seen for whoops queries? How was it satisfied?
• 06:44 Tenga Dating Simulator: Have you ever heard of Microsoft giving out Standard Edition for free to companies that buy massive amounts of Enterprise Edition? I think my DBA has been tricked.
• 07:58 chandwich: I’ve been vocal about my desire to be a DBA at my company. I’ve developed scripts (SQL & PS) to automate discovery/troubleshooting/deployments. I’ve taken all of your classes. I changed roles to work with two MS MVPs, but I just can’t wedge my way in. What am I doing wrong?
• 09:44 RoJo: Inherited (I did not do this) main table has 20 indexes. Is the solution to segment into tables with their own indexes or any other approach?. Not sure if splitting helps or just kicks the can down the road. The indexes are on a Person table for ID type fields to search.
• 10:58 Dan Dan the DB Man: I noticed that SQL Server allows you the ability to register a DLL as an assembly and then use it in a stored proc or function. Do you recommend taking advantage of this feature or do you avoid it?
• 11:51 Dopinder: What is your opinion of Optional Parameter Plan Optimization (OPPO) in SQL Server 2025 for addressing parameter sniffing?