[Video] Office Hours at Iceland’s Most Famous Waterfall

Iceland has some pretty famous waterfalls, from Þórufoss and Skógafoss in Game of Thrones, to Háifoss in Stranger Things, to Dettifoss in Prometheus, and more. However, probably the most-photographed one is Seljalandsfoss, partially because of its easy access from the Ring Road, and partially because of, uh, Justin Bieber’s video for I’ll Show You. That video is also a pretty good intro to the greatest hits of Iceland’s south coast.

Anyhoo, this episode finds me standing in front of Seljalandsfoss, taking your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 02:01 Justin Case: Will AI-generated query tuning make junior DBAs obsolete in five years, or are we all overestimating it like we did with every other “DBA killer” tool?
• 03:16 Jan de Graaf: We have an AG with 1 sync secondary. 1TB db. We would like to move to 3 new servers and thus an AG with 2 sync secondaries. Our company (of course) prefers low downtime (at most minutes). Can you give a starting advise? Perhaps a reference to a good guide?
• 05:15 The Impostor: If you still Google basic syntax sometimes, are you underqualified? How do I explain myself during an interview?
• 07:42 DBAInAction: Hi Brent, any thoughts on using MCP servers for DBA tasks? Do you see a benefit in building custom ones, or are there any MCP servers from Microsoft already out there for this purpose? Or is the whole idea just overkill? Appreciate any insights!
• 08:56 Pete Not Peter: If Query Store forces a plan and performance improves, should I still investigate the root cause?
• 10:08 Developer: A DBA is refusing to shrink a 2TB database because doing so is “asking for corruption”. Is this true? I want to clean up and shrink this database before moving it to Azure MI so that I’m not over-paying.
• 11:42 Peacekeeper: Any advice on performance testing changes to queries that use table-valued parameters? The execution plans only give cardinality, so I never know what a realistic test case looks like.