Production Database Administration

It’s Friday. I’m Not Answering These 14 Office Hours Questions.

Sometimes, I don’t care if questions get a lot of upvotes at https://pollgab.com/room/brento – I just don’t wanna answer ’em. They’re not necessarily bad questions, but I’m just not interested in them, or I’ve answered them repeatedly, or I don’t have a good answer. Maybe y’all do, though, so I’ve numbered these. If you want…
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Office Hours Speed Round, Easy Text Answers Edition

Some of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento have easy one-line answers. Let’s knock ’em out: George: Hi Brent, what recently has been the most challenging/surprising/new-to-you performance issue you have encountered? SQL Server 2019’s slowdowns. I spent days working on that. RoJo: Have you used Distributed AG as a way to upgrade major versions of…
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This is the Last Week of Free PowerShell Training.

PowerShell
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You’ve been working hard all month to get through our newest class, Fundamentals of PowerShell for DBAs. This week, it all starts to come together as you put together PowerShell plus SQL Server to automate tasks on a regular basis: March 27, Mon: Objects and Namespaces March 28, Tues: PowerShell and the SQL Server Agent March…
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Free Training Coming Up! March is PowerShell Month.

PowerShell
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You’re a production database administrator responsible for the health, security, and uptime of many database servers. You’ve been pointing and clicking your way through SSMS for years, scripting out T-SQL to files, but… when you need to do the same task repeatedly across several servers, it’s a bit of a pain. You’ve told yourself someday…
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Office Hours, ChatGPT Edition: AI Answers 4 of Your Questions

In a recent Office Hours post, David Reabow suggested letting ChatGPT answer a few of the questions y’all posted at http://pollgab.com/room/brento/. Brilliant! Let’s see how it does. I purposely cherry-picked the questions that I thought ChatGPT would have the easiest time answering. Rollback is single threaded asks: Hi Brent! An update statement has blocked all…
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Most DBAs Say They’re Encrypting Personally Identifiable Data. Most.

Despite the continuous stream of data breaches, ransomware, and GDPR violations, some companies still aren’t encrypting personally identifiable information (PII) inside our databases or backups. I see this all the time when working with clients, but I can’t exactly talk about that or give numbers, so I decided to take a highly unscientific poll on…
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And it looks bad even in shades.

Office Hours, Short Text Answers Edition

Not all of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento require long, thought-out answers. Some are just one-line specials, like these: F’legend: Hi Brent, in reply to a question talking about database restores for 1TB+ you also touched on scrubbing or synthetic data as a way to populate dev environments. Are there any resources/tools you would…
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Your Turn: I’m Not Answering These 13 Office Hours Questions

Normally, after I do a round of Office Hours of going through the questions that got posted at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, I answer the highly upvoted ones and then clear the queue. If y’all didn’t upvote questions, then I don’t answer ’em. However, today I’m trying something different: I’ll post the non-upvoted questions here for y’all to…
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