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!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2lZMHOfbsw
For the last couple of months, I've been trying to get my on-location Office Hours episodes filmed with an Insta360 so you can pan the camera around to see the sights. Folks, I've finally pulled it off! If you watch the video on YouTube (rather than here on the blog), you can move the camera around with your clicker:
Steve Jones recently posted an update about SQL Saturday's status, and it includes some news we need to talk about:
However, this year the number may stagnate or even decline slightly. Running events has become challenging for many communities. Organizers are busy, space is hard to find, and costs are rising.... The biggest challenge in running events is finding space at a reasonable cost. Many Microsoft offices are closing, which were strong supporters of events in the past.
The release of SQL Server 2025 keeps inching closer. Release Candidate 0 is out now, and here are the release notes. If you're planning on replacing your SQL Server 2016 instances (which go out of support next July) with 2025, now would be a good time to start doing functionality testing. As a reminder, here's my post on how to go live on a new SQL Server version.
Software vendors have a wide variety of clients: Some clients don't have any IT staff at all, and just outsource everything. The client wants to hand an installation manual to their contractor and say, "Build whatever the software vendor wants." Some clients have a full time sysadmin or two, and those sysadmins don't really know…
On the last day of my Caribbean cruise, as we pull into port in Miami, let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://youtu.be/2tkrh7--2jU
Here's a homework challenge:
When you ask data people how they feel about AI, you get pretty rabid, extreme reactions. People either love it or hate it. Set that aside for a second, and let's zoom out and think about a bigger picture question.
What's it like to work with someone you know, versus a stranger?
The first few questions from this week's crop at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are very much about what-problem-are-you-trying-to-solve, but they get more complex from there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWDUgd_8ZNo
99.9% of you are never gonna need this.
But let's say you need to run queries with leading (not trailing) wildcards, like this search for all the different national versions of the Encabulator, each of which has different prefixes depending on which government it's being sold to:
Wanna hear about my worst job interviews? I drove up to 8,000 feet where it's 30 degrees colder than Las Vegas to bring you these answers to your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. The audio's a little odd on here because it was really windy, and I had to use noise reduction in post-production.
Last week, I asked if your database administrators could read all of the data in all databases. The results (which may be different from this post, because I'm writing the post ahead of time and the poll is still open):
Yes: 61%
When I'm tuning queries, the normal answer is to make the query perform better - either via changing the T-SQL, adding hints, or adding indexes so that the data's better prepared for the query.
However, sometimes when I'm looking at the output of sp_BlitzCache, I scroll across to the Average Rows column and double-check that the query's actually returning a reasonable number of rows out in the wild.
You've got a good job, and some spare time. You're thinking about giving back to the community by blogging, presenting, live streaming, or working on Github projects - and you'd like to make your next job search easier. Let's talk about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ3TuMM4cEQ
It's a simple question: can your database administrators read all of the data in all databases? Yes Yes, but we trust them not to - as in, we've got written policies in place, and they know they're not supposed to go poking around in the payroll tables or the human resources database Yes, if they…
Your company doesn't want to send you off to conferences or training classes in other cities.
You've looked around locally, but the local options seem to be irrelevant to your needs. It's generic stuff like how to pass certification classes, or boot camps to get your first DBA job.
I've been pretty vocal here on the blog and on social media about the reliability problems with Microsoft Fabric. Today, I've got good news: Microsoft released a new Fabric status page and a known issues page, something that really does take guts given the current reliability situation. The status page still appears to be manually updated, not automated, but at least it acknowledges outages like how SQL endpoints are currently returning incorrect query results:
Let's hang out, listen to the peaceful waterfall, and go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. This is kinda the calm before the storm: in another week, I'll be on the road again for a while, hopefully bringing you some fresh Office Hours locations from the Caribbean and Alaska!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdBa7FKQMWI
In this quarter's update of our SQL ConstantCare® population report, showing how quickly (or slowly) folks adopt new versions of SQL Server, the data is very similar to last quarter. SQL Server 2019 still rules the market:
SQL Server 2022: 24%, up from 21% last quarter
SQL Server 2019: 45%, was 44%
SQL Server 2017: 11%, was 12%
SQL Server 2016: 12%, was 15%
SQL Server 2014: 5%, was 4%
SQL Server 2012 & prior: 1%, same
Azure SQL DB and Managed Instances: 2%, same
I'mma wax philosophical for a second: I love the open source nature of the First Responder Kit because it lets anybody, anywhere, diagnose database problems faster. If you're a full time employee somewhere today, you owe it to yourself to use the FRK scripts because if you ever switch from one company to another, your…
