For the last couple of months, I’ve been trying to get my on-location Office Hours episodes filmed with an Insta360 so you can pan the camera around to see the sights. Folks, I’ve finally pulled it off! If you watch the video on YouTube (rather than here on the blog), you can move the camera around with your clicker:

We covered your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento, including:

• 00:00 Start
• 02:28 I adjusted my chest today: On a new 2022 instance, do you default to varchar or nvarchar for strings? I remember that varchar got unicode support in 2019.
• 03:59 Index_It_All: Hey Brent. I work in a small organization. The first 2-3 years were hell as I was the First DBA. Things are really slow now.I am in Most of the Courses you have going.Sp_Blitz helps me stay ahead.My manager wants things to brag about my job. What will you advice for my relevance.
• 06:14 SQL Saturday Junkie: What location has been your favorite SQL/Data Saturday event to speak at world-wide and in the US? How much work is it to plan for a full day pre-con? Thanks!
• 12:21 Mike: Hey Brent! Where do you think is a better place to post technical articles – mssqltips.com, sqlservercentral.com, red-gate.com, linkedin, or something else ? p.s. take into account “peer reviewed”, “speed of posting”, “number of views / popularity of the website”
• 15:45 Hany: Hi Brent, in the year 2025 where SQL 2025 should be released anytime soon, and with no specific problem trying to solve, just a migration project from one cloud vendor to another, is it advisable to stay on SQL 2019 or should we upgrade to SQL 2022 with the migration?
• 17:05 chris: How can one benchmark disk performance on a SQL Server PAAS offering? I’d like to ensure we’re getting the disk performance we’re paying for; however, I understand Crystal DiskMark is only meant to run locally from an OS.
• 19:53 i_use_uppercase_for_SELECT: What’s a common problem you see that even though you see it often it’s hard to find the root case?

From now on, knock on wood, I should be able to do these 360 videos as I travel around the world. I’ve got upcoming visits to LA, Boston, and another Caribbean cruise, so I’ll take your eyeballs on vacation along with me.