While recovering from a nasty cold, I took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 03:13 Haruki Tanaka: Hi Brent, The stored procedure has 12 parameters, and users pass various combinations of values to it. I rewrote it using dynamic T-SQL, but I’m unsure how to design an effective index. A columnstore index seems inappropriate. I saw your mastering index tuning class.
• 04:20 Josef: Hi Brent, I’ve only worked with on-prem SQL Server. Is managing SQL in the cloud (like Azure/AWS) a big leap, or can on-prem experience carry over well? Also, what’s a good way to learn and get hands-on with cloud-based SQL?
• 05:07 Josef: Hi Brent, I’m exploring Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) for SQL Server Failover Clustering. How does it perform for high-availability setups, and are there key challenges or best practices you’d recommend for using S2D with SQL FCI? Appreciate any insights!
• 06:23 TokTik: Who is the Brent Ozar of Oracle when it comes to performance tuning and training materials? Do you know if a specific person or persons come to mind?
• 06:52 iH8Toast: Hi Brent! Does Mastering Server Tuning require all of the Fundamentals and Mastering classes to grasp, or is it practical to start with Server Tuning and then jump into specific other classes based on the challenges I’m facing? Trying to budget for myself ? Much love!
• 07:26 MyTeaGotCold: Did you ever find a way to stop optimistic isolation levels from massively slowing down columnstore? You last blogged about it in 2021. I think I’m seeing it on my readable AGs.
• 08:16 Josef: Brent, when I create a DB via SSMS UI, Service Broker is disabled. But when I run CREATE DATABASE via script, it’s enabled — even though model has it disabled. No AGs or replication. Any idea why? Is SQL Server doing this, or something else?
• 08:43 Josef: Hey Brent, I’ve got a trigger on a master table that tries to insert into another table using a JOIN to a details table. But the details table gets populated after the master insert (in same proc), so the join fails. Any better pattern for this?
• 10:06 RoJo: I’m finding it hard to sync from AZ-ManagedInstance to onPrem. No AG. What can you recommend to keep a copy offsite? Daily backup is too much data egres. We use this for backoffice mega queries and reports/stats. Would also be good for async copy.
• 11:21 Snap City: I’ve failed to convince my team to stop doing index rebuilds. Will long-running rebuilds kill tempdb if I enable snapshot isolation?
• 12:36 Sheffield: SQL Server gurus mock the cloud’s slow IO, but the Postgres megaminds never mock Aurora. Why?
• 13:02 DBAMatt: Our manager wants to “find problems before users do”. To accomplish this, he wants us to use Dynatrace dashboards. It’s a nice tool and all but I’ve been doing this for years with SQL Agent alerts and jobs. Should I tell him to relax on Dynatrace or is he onto something?
• 14:21 AG Avoider: I want to use FCI as my HA solution. All of my disks are on AWS EBS. Do I need to do anything smart to use them as for FCI or does it just work?
• 14:59 Josef: Hi Brent! Do filtered indexes make sense in real-world use? Are there cases where you’d recommend using or avoiding them (e.g., WHERE IsActive = 1)? Curious if they help enough with performance to justify the overhead. Thanks!
• 16:02 Harold B: My table has huge data, properly indexed. Query is simple “Select col1, col2, … Col6 from table where date is in a range”. Max date range is 90 days. this query returns over 25Lac records, and takes over 5 min to return the result. how can we have faster response.
• 17:43 MyGrandmaUsesMSAccess: What is the benefit of creating a Clustered Index on a
• #temp table compared to just using Nonclustered Indexes
• 18:36 World Peace: What is OPTION (KEEPFIXED PLAN) exactly and why would you use it? I was thinking this should not be used.
• 19:56 chris: Do you have any more training coming from third parties? I really enjoyed Drew’s content on PowerShell and Azure networking.
• 21:25 Bandhu: What’s your opinion of the new ABORT_QUERY_EXECUTION query hint? Are you for or against abortion?
• 22:02 Dopinder: How close is AI to being able to migrate a C# / TSQL codebase to another database platform such as PostgreSQL?
• 23:23 Miss Belinda Chandra: Any new TSQL features that get you excited in SQL Server 2025?
• 24:44 Inna Shapiro: Hi Brent,our organization is encouraging all developers to integrate AI into their workflow.However, as a DWH/BI team, we’re struggling to find AI tools that are truly relevant to our domain—most available solutions seem geared toward application development.Could you recommend?