[Video] Office Hours: Interview Horror Stories Edition

Wanna hear about my worst job interviews? I drove up to 8,000 feet where it’s 30 degrees colder than Las Vegas to bring you these answers to your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. The audio’s a little odd on here because it was really windy, and I had to use noise reduction in post-production.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 01:56 neil: Our system admin team tried to quick format production SQL drive “because it says it doesnt lose data.” SQL admin stopped them. Would Windows admins be the team that would have to manage storage snapshot backups? Therefore I think I shouldn’t use it unless I had better sys admins
• 03:03 myClusteredIndexSucks: Your 5 and 5 rule is great, but when the clustered index key is useless, do you ever create a non clustered index with a useful key and all or most of the columns to reduce key lookups?
• 04:46 Mohit: Hi Brent, Have you ever gotten rejected in any of your interviews? What’s your favourite interview story? Last but not least, thanks for giving so much to the community.
• 13:14 AG Avoider: Has the cloud made Failover Clustering any cheaper or more popular? Multi-attach EBS costs so little that I would predict it, but I haven’t seen any evidence.
• 14:19 Kiwi_SQL: Hi Brent, Love your work since I started working with SQL Server. Who are the other consultants in the SQL Server world you follow and why?
• 15:13 gserdijn: Hello Brent, is there a way to notify your followers a bit earlier when you are about to host Office Hours?
• 16:06 Kulstad: Every Monday morning, I run sp_BlitzIndex @Mode=3, as well as Pinal Dave’s check index script. Pinal’s script usually returns many more index suggestions than sp_BlitzIndex. Is there really that much of a difference between what sp_BlitzIndex checks and what he checks?
• 16:58 jrl: My impression is that your income went to the next level once you started to focus on delivering training, especially scalable forms of training. What would your plan B have been if training hadn’t grown your income to the level that you wanted?
• 18:12 MyFriendAlwaysHasProblems: My friend has 2 SQL Servers in AOAG, 2 DBs (of several) in a replica set. CheckDB on the primary node DBs returns errors, but running several times comes up with different errors each time. Remove from AOAG (& set node Offline in WSFC) & no CheckDB errors. Ever see this?
• 18:57 Neil: is it safe to bring an old version of msdb to a new server on sql 2022/2025? we have 1000’s of jobs we need to migrate
• 19:41 TeaEarlGrayHot: Is there a less intrusive way to get page fullness than sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats in detailed mode? I have an app that suffers from low page density, detailed is too intrusive, sampled can be inaccurate and I have problems getting a picture of which indexes need attention