When you think ‘beach chair’, this probably isn’t what you think. I’m at a black sand beach on the south coast of Iceland, answering your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

• 00:00 Start
• 02:28 BoBo: Let us rate Brent’s shirts – I will start. “Morally flexible” and “Maybe today, Satan” are my top picks. Which one is the one you got the most comment in public?
• 03:03 Saint Elmo: Which limitation of Basic Availability Groups bothers you the most?
• 03:44 Yusef: Our third party web app vendor can’t tell us what SQL permissions they need to create and run their reports. They are used to running everything as SA. What are some alternative ways to figure out the required permissions?
• 04:36 Oleksii: Why can’t we create an indexed view in Microsoft SQL if it uses an outer join?What exactly, on a technical level, prevents this on the server?
• 05:47 JRL: What advice would you give someone who was creating an online training course on a technical topic? I saw you have a post about this, but it is about 9 years old and your thinking may have expanded or changed.
• 07:14 Jacob: What are your experiences with Linux SQL High Availability? Mine self-destructed recently because someone had set a permanent location constraint that caused pacemaker to fail over twice in short succession the next time it was failed over for updates.
• 07:35 Bandhu: What is your opinion of the new AI features in SQL Server 2025? Is this a checkbox feature?
• 08:47 Bandhu: What’s your opinion of the new vector data type in Azure SQL DB? Any performance gotcha’s?
• 10:07 Dopinder: Our IT admins are required to run windows update on all azure vm’s. This sometimes results in SQL Cumulative update being installed by IT instead of the DBA. What are your thoughts on this patching process? 11:17 GVibes: I have a 3 TB table on Standard Edition. It should have been compressed. Can you think of any way to fix that without partitioning it? My maintenance window is 10 hours per week.