I flew into Wales a couple days early to get used to the time zones, and showed up at the conference center where SQLBits would be located. Let’s go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento on a very chilly morning:

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 01:02 Jersey: Has Microsoft fixed any of the bugs in the MERGE command? And is it worth using in its current state?
• 01:44 chris: Hi Brent, after you’ve addressed a performance emergency are there cases where you recommend table structure changes as a better long-term resolution? If so, what are some examples of anti-patterns you’ve come across where table structure should be addressed?
• 03:21 39 Flat: What makes you say that the queries from monitoring tools are optimized? Whenever I catch them on sp_WhoIsActive, they are far worse than what is in the FRK.
• 04:33 Failed To Fail: What do you think about Erik’s monitoring tool ?
• 06:02 Used-to-be-DBA: Hey Brent, Where do you see the Enterprise IT industry in 20 years? Will we be back on-prem with everyone having their own private clouds? Or will we own less and everything will be a service?
• 07:12 Storage Bottlenecked: My user databases are too big for my limited hardware to CHECKDB, but they are all in AGs with 4 nodes. Is automatic page repair enough to keep me safe?
• 08:01 JoyOfSqlCoding: Hi Brent, as of today, what SQL version is more stable for production? 2022 or 2025?
• 09:00 rookieDba: Hyperthreading on SQL Server with a high core count. Yay or nay? The best is of course to test on a production-like traffic, but that’s a giant pain in the rear
• 09:34 TeaEarlGrayHot: I have had mixed results with SQL Loops. Most i’ve seen eventually run out of memory, have large spills and subsequently high CPU. I have also seen loops written for fast ordered deletes that never have problems. What is the difference in loops that spill vs loops that do not?
• 12:29 Craig W: How to integrity check a 15 TB database that has a small (6 hours) window of non-critical use?
• 12:58 Ricardo: Hi Brent. Do you feel one day you will have ‘passive income’ or are you constantly creating / updating your courses?
• 14:11 Anonymous: Out of curiosity, is there a reason you didn’t expand your career to performance tuning other components like SSAS (now Power BI)? Is it because they never had much observability baked in?
• 14:57 Arramasta: I’m not understanding remote DAC correctly,I have a job that failed to kick off due to “Could not connect because the maximum number of ‘1’ dedicated administrator connections already exists.”. If the setting in sys.config is 0, why am I still seeing this in my error log ?
• 16:08 flyboy91901: SQL Server 2022 Std vs Enterprise. What is the decision process for one or the other? Also, the behavior is WAY different between the 2. App behaves on Std, on Enterprise the SP throws an Arithmetic error. Changed the Compat to 130 and it works. Exec Plans so different.
• 17:03 Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition: Hola Muchacho, Have you had any issues with installing or running SQL Server 2025 on Windows server 2025 even though being local admin? I’m thinking permission or similar, I’ve had issues with GUIs not starting, but I can accomplish the same thing with powershell without issues.
• 17:32 Sean: In a recent OH, you said you and Claude were “Learning Together” about new functionality. One of my vendor libraries broke with an update, documentation is sparse, and it seems forums are out of vogue. Can you share your experience breaking new grounds with AI?
• 19:05 Cam: Hi Brent. Loved your post about making an AI agent of yourself. I have gone wild and created a panel of experts. So far it’s you, Erik Darling, Jon Skeet, and even Paul White dropped by. It’s wildly entertaining to work with you all. Thank you so much for this awesome idea!
• 20:20 Used-to-be-DBA: Hey Brent, I just got back from Fabcon and realized that many of the great conversations that I had with presenters post session might have been for nothing. I forgot to introduce myself! How do you handle meeting new people at conferences? exchange business cards?