[Video] Office Hours in North Bay, Canada

Every year, Aaron Bertrand runs a curling tournament up in scenic North Bay where he grew up. I joined in this year, and before the tournament, sat on the shores of Lake Napissing to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 01:25 MyTeaGotCold: Kendra Little’s recent article on the decline of SQL Server scared me and it matches much of what I’ve been thinking privately. I’m in my late 20s and heavily specialised into SQL Server. Should I be worried?
• 04:03 sqlknitter: I have a chunky 17TB database, largest table 2TB (1TB IDX). CheckDB takes days to run (5 days in, 27% complete per sp_whoisactive), with a weekly reboot. How can I tell which tables have actually been checked, before I make the decision to refactor the job to use checktable?
• 06:11 Smart Python: What metrics can I use to determine if my manual failover AG can safely be promoted to automatic failover?
• 07:31 Always Query With TABLOCKX: I have an app that churns temp tables outside tempdb so often that schema locks are my biggest problem. I can ask devs to not create temp tables this way if I back the reason with stats—but how do I gather stats on something blocked for minutes yet only used for seconds?
• 08:45 SaintBear: What’s your opinion of the SQL upgrade assessment functionality in SSMS21?
• 09:08 Mike: Hi Brent! You mentioned you go to bed and get up very early. How and why you started doing this, were there any specific reasons or benefits for you ?
• 09:52 Dick_Bowen: I restored a sql 2008 db to sql 2022 and the size doubled. What would cause this to happen?
• 10:40 Venkat: What is your opinion of Uber’s new QueryGPT for converting natural language to SQL queries?
• 11:32 Vinneet: Is throwing more hardware at DB performance problems more likely in PostgreSQL than In SQL Server? What are your thoughts?
• 12:29 SilentKnight: What’s your take on standards other than “good to have”. What effort would you expend to enforce standards on an environment that is very inconsistent. e.g. DB locations, physical file names, table names. PROD: 30 srv 300 DBs of similar design (table structures, SPROCs, views)