I’m back in Vegas, at least for the moment, so let’s hang out in my home office and talk through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. There’s a lot of good questions this week!

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 02:26 Eric M: I’ve recently become very disenchanted with the commercial SQL Server monitoring tool I use. I’ve been taking a serious look at https://dbadash.com/ and It looks great thus far. Do you have any experience/thoughts with or about it? DISCLAIMER I am in no way affiliated with it!
• 04:16 Boris: I’m a DWH admin and developer. My company wants to give edit access to Risk department to change SQL code that processes DWH data. What should I tell them?
• 06:00 It’s 2025: Have you found any monitoring tools that gracefully work with PSOP?
• 06:47 MyTeaGotCold: What correct predictions are you most proud of?
• 09:41 Mikkel: A former team member chose to save raw image data in a table. When we remove the table column. Should we shrink the database or leave the database file sizes as they are? You always say that shrinking is bad.
• 12:16 Erika: My business isn’t sophisticated enough for AGs. How can I achieve high availability in the cloud? Database mirroring isn’t an option.
• 13:38 Q-Ent: Hi Brent, i reached a point where i cannot get additional value and growth if i do minor, repetitive tasks. I have to keep up with these tasks to have my job. Do you follow any work routine like email check cut off time or disconnect from social media to keep up with deep work?
• 17:08 Running out of resourced: We have a historical log table which contains the date time of the transaction, user name, and a nvarchar(max) column containing a json object. Table has 250 million rows and size is 500gb. What are recommended practices for reducing storage and increasing query performance?
• 18:49 Juan Pablo Gallardo: Is there a specific function to run to make sure is ok to reboot the sql server?
• 20:07 Milos: Have you ever encountered SQL Server being rolled out and used as primarily an enterprise ready XML document DB? Any considerations or precautions for such a use case – which is using Sql Server akin to a MongoDB, just for XML instead of json?
• 21:26 Brent Ozar Jr: What similarities and differences are there between being a developer / administrator for an online transaction processing (OLTP) DB vs an online analytical processing (OLAP) DB? What must you do differently for an OLAP DB vs an OLAP DB, and is there any overlap of skills?
• 23:30 Just James: ChatGPT5 has read too many of your videos; it seems a bit sassy to me. I wrote a query and asked it if it could be improved. It came back with “No window + DISTINCT gymnastics:” I was using count over partition by. Should I give up my torrid love affair with over partition by?
• 25:03 Artem: Implementing business logic inside/outside database. When it is appropriate to implement business logic inside the database. And when it is not. Considering CPU, network latency, long-running data processing. Any articles on the subject. Patterns, anti-patterns, pros, cons, etc.
• 26:57 KnowEnoughDBAtoBeDangerous: I’ll be moving our SQL databases over to Aurora PostgreSQL. Now that you’ve started Smart Postgres, have you had any clients make the switch?
• 28:25 Brent Ozar Jr: What are some tips for learning how to become a better Data Engineer on the SQL side of things?
• 29:57 Winston : When you awaken in early morning what’s your routine? Do naps help?
• 31:28 Aubrey Plaza: For a good decade, when we needed to create a test environment we were use to take a copy of the vanilla version of our database. Now someone mentioned words like “version control” and “Liquibase” and we need to rush to it immediately. In what scenario this makes sense to you?
• 33:30 Brent Ozar Jr: What other security considerations do developers and DBAs have to make for SQL databases other than prevent SQL injection attacks?