Meet my latest toy, a 1991 Honda Beat! I introduce it, then take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 02:17 Pro: Are sessions sleeping during transactions harmful, and do they prevent the transaction log from truncating? If so, how can’t I prevent them server-side?
• 03:35 sqlknitter: We have high IO (pageiolatch_sh) causing performance sluggishness. Trying to check index fragmentation, and the query just runs. The GUI freezes. Is this potentially indicative of a highly fragmented index?
• 04:39 We Don’t Do Corruption Checks!: I don’t trust my SAN Admin. How can I be absolutely sure that the production snapshots he gives me are the type that I can offload CHECKDB to?
• 05:21 MyTeaGotCold: What is your preferred query hint for telling the optimizer to predict that a lot of rows will come from this query?
• 06:02 Linux in production: The SQL Server licensing docs have confounded me. Is Enterprise $7,000 per core or is it $7,000 PER YEAR per core?
• 06:54 BillsFan17: I receive files with hundreds of key-value pairs. I want to store them as is in two columns of a table. My boss wants me to pivot the rows to cols and merge the result into a table for easier reporting. But new keys could arrive at any time making merging difficult. Who’s right?
• 08:15 SqlServerGuy: How do you see the SQL Server future? A lot of people are saying it not worth to learn SQL Server anymore and go for cloud data technologies such as AWS or GCP to stay competitive on the job market. Do you think SQL Server 2025 may change that?
• 09:57 SQL_rage: I have a licensed prod server, I want to use one of its db backups to refresh my test/qa server and a dev server monthly. No SA, would I need to license either of the lower instances or would dev edition be adequate?
• 10:59 ConsultingMadness: My friend has a boss that references older blogs that mention updating some config items which I think SSDs/shared storage make obsolete. Do you have a current recommended config resource? (My friend is trying to ensure that they’re following 2025’s best practice and not 2012’s)
• 12:16 Janis: Hi Brent, we were wondering if you’ve ever restored the master database to a different server than the original. Specifically, we’re looking to preserve logins and their passwords during the process. Do you have any insights or best practices for this scenario?
• 13:28 Interested App Developer: Last episode you mentioned a 0 RT/PO solution with queries + results getting dumped into a schemaless db. I was quite gobsmacked. Can you give us any more reflections/details? How did it work with non deterministic things (NEWID(), Update x where y less than now(), window funcs)?