In retrospect, I should have put on sunscreen – even for just a 20-minute Office Hours session on the beach! Dang, that sun is powerful. Let’s go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. This is a 360-degree video, so if you watch it on YouTube, you’ll be able to pan the camera around and take a little virtual vacation with me.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 00:45 AGony: I’ve taken all of the standard advice – I’ve read every page of documentation, built a lab, bought a monitoring tool, and even contributed to open source – but I still suck at debugging AG outages. Who/Where do I go to for learning more? I need a guru.
• 03:00 BlakeDBE: In an OLTP database we DBEs have a standard to create indexes for all Foreign Keys to support joins on the FK for performance. The DBAs quarterly request to drop unused (in the last 90 days) indexes which sometimes scoops up the indexes supporting FKs. Which side would you be on?
• 04:19 CXPhoenix: Did Query Store really fix anything in practice, or did it just give us one more DMV to ignore?
• 06:12 MyTeaGotCold: I’ve run out of good jokes about what DBA stands for. Please give me some.
• 06:38 zlobnyfar: Very important Thank you Brent for keeping DBA’s life a little bit easier!
• 06:52 Otto Optimizer: You talk a lot about why people shouldn’t store XML and JSON in the database. So why do developers love doing it if it usually makes queries slower and indexes useless?
• 08:14 CycleToWork: Why does SQL Server need to do a Compute Scalar operation when returning a computed PERSISTED computed column from a table? If SQL Server does the Compute Scalar operation regardless of column being persisted or not, why bother persisting it and spending storage space doing so?
• 08:50 CloudyWithAChanceOfDTU: Was the DTU model the worst thing Microsoft has ever done to SQL Server, or am I missing something?
• 11:07 JohnSteak: Our company is migrating from SQL Server to Postgres to cut costs. I’m concerned about performance degradation with our complex, ORM-generated queries. What are the key performance differences to anticipate, especially with execution plans and query optimization?
• 13:05 Otto Optimizer: Do query hints make you a bad DBA, or are they just practical tools Microsoft secretly expects us to use?
• 14:23 IWriteSQLInPortuguese: You mentioned some time ago that you would be doing a Mastering ColumnStore (I’m one of the future customers ) any plans on this or you scraped the idea?
• 15:44 Licensing Larry: Given SQL Server’s licensing costs, why would anyone choose Enterprise Edition instead of just building around Standard’s limitations?