This Office Hours episode comes to you from Virgin Voyages’ newest cruise ship, the Brilliant Lady, sailing through the Western Caribbean. We were originally scheduled to do the Eastern Caribbean, but Tropical Storm Melissa had other ideas, so they reworked our itinerary at the last minute.

Let’s take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento:

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 02:14 Do I want to know all 🙂 ?: Hi Brent, thank you for all the community work! Since you work on two database platforms, it does the Job duties for Database Developers, Development DBAs, and Production DBAs change with the platform or do they stay the same ?
• 03:13 DataBarbieAdministrator: What are your thoughts on pushing semi-structured data types such as JSON into a relational database such as SQL Server? A friend of mine says: It’s not SQL Server’s job—Microsoft isn’t going to revolutionize the engine just for one data type.
• 05:06 sakaLchuluDBA: I have a server handling around 100,000 batch requests per second. The problem is TempDB contention. I have increased the number of TempDB files to 16 but in high workload is not help me Would a memory-optimized TempDB help me solve this issue? How much memory would be required?
• 06:15 Josef: Hey Brent, have you ever used sp_CheckSecurity from Straight Path Solutions? Would you recommend that, or is there another tool you prefer for checking security vulnerabilities?
• 06:51 Nonclustered Cellstore: I’ve just finished Fundamentals of Columnstore, as well as the big reading list at the end. Have you had any further thoughts on what you would put in a Mastering Columnstore class?
• 07:19 Big Blue Couch: Hey Brent, Do large(fortune 500) enterprise companies use SQL Server more than other database engines? Or does company size not correlate with database platform choice?
• 08:26 Major Bludd: How did the AWS outage affect you? Are you being compensated by Amazon? Will this happen again?
• 09:46 MyTeaGotCold: On a busy OLTP system, how can I grab the actual execution plan for a short-running query without setting my whole server on fire? My first idea, sp_HumanEvents, has safeguards to protect from exactly this.
• 10:16 Big Blue Couch: I’ve got a request to evaluate moving our SQL server from Ent edition to Std edition. We have 4 cores and we are cpu bottle necked. The idea is to just increase core count and not budget. We don’t need HA. What are the important considerations to see if this is viable?
• 11:56 Pradeep: Hi Brent, hope you’re doing well. I’m focusing on query performance tuning. How secure is the future of this specialization? Do you see it as a safe and valuable career path long-term?
• 13:35 Whiny App Developer: Have you seen any AI mishaps/been asked for advice on how to prevent them happening in your consulting work? We’ve seen a database user (shared by many apps -rolleyes-) get made read-only by a developer using postgres’ MCP server. Not in prod, but still a time sink!