On a nice sunny Saturday, I took the 911 around the Las Vegas canyons, and stopped to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento:

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 00:56 TheWorstDBA: I have a large table with 50 billion rows. It has a partition implemented on it, with a columnstore index. SP_BlitzIndex suggest I add a NC Index to improve performance, but when I do it slows down my queries. How can I make my queries more performant? Workload mostly reads
• 02:44 Jack: Hi Brent, how do you come up with ideas for blog posts and demo? I liked the recent post about Index Rebuilds with ADR & RCSI.
• 04:13 Golden : Hi Brent! Forget SQL Server. Why not try your hand at gold? Buy it when it’s cheap, sell it when it’s valuable.
• 04:31 JohnSteak: We have a transactional application that sends the read statements to a RDS Read Replica. This replica does not autoscale. Do you see any performance advantage when using this architecture, or have any advice on how to measure the performance gain?
• 05:42 Q-Ent: Hi Brent, does it make any sense to use in memory tables instead of traditional row store tables when the data pages in row store are all cached in RAM? Are there any performance differences for different query types (SELECT . INSERT , UPDATE) ?
• 07:24 chris: Have you ever had to deal with the fallout of a split brain event? With all of our DR environments I should prepare for such an emergency. Are there any tools or techniques you’ve found helpful to bring the data back together in to one database?
• 08:15 Novocaine: Are the numbers from DBCC CHECKDB … ESTIMATEONLY reliable? My VLDB’s production DBA is telling us that we can’t run CHECKDB because we can’t afford the tempdb hit, even on SAN replicas.
• 09:28 MyTeaGotCold: I’m dropping lots of big tables from a VLDB, compressing what is left, and then making it read only. Any tips for shrinking the database afterwards? The data is so cold that I expect post-shrink fragmentation to matter.
• 10:34 April 13, 2011: Can I prove that my SAN makes me do random rather than sequential reads? My SAN admin read too much Jonathan Kehayias and is blaming fragmentation for my ills.
• 12:08 geopolitically_confused_dba: The recent rise in tensions between the US and Denmark has sparked a discussion of what would happen if US pulled the plug on cloud services for us. Could something like this happen, or am I paranoid? Can I prepare for such “doomsday” scenario in any way?