Sometimes, y'all post questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and they don't get a lot of upvotes, and reading through 'em, I bet it's because other people don't quite understand what you're asking. I think there might actually be a good question at the heart of it, but ... I'm just not sure what it is, and it needs to be rephrased.
You're over the hump! Just two weeks left to go.
All month long, I'm giving away our newest class, Fundamentals of PowerShell for DBAs. Here's what you'll be learning this week:
Not all of the questions y'all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento require long-winded responses.
Brandon: Do you seen a rise in json queries to address impedance mismatch between data/objects? I struggled with EF to produce a query that was neither simple nor complicated against a properly designed db (according to 2 experts). Dropped EF; used json query in stored proc; it was magic.
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.
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 other sessions. What should I do? Killing it, restarting SQL server service, waiting, etc. What's your opinion? Thanks!
I think I've found a bug in SQL Server setup's MAXDOP calculation, and I need you to take a second look. Setup is recommending MAXDOP 8:
Which is odd, because this is running on an AWS i3.16xlarge with 2 sockets, 2 NUMA nodes, 32 logical processors per node, 64 logical processors altogether. In this screenshot, I've laid Task Manager alongside setup so you can see what I mean:
Some of the questions y'all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are pretty straightforward. Let's get 'er done. LetTheDbaHandleIt: My friend needs to track who has accessed what data. This is easy at OS and app level, but how can my friend verify that those who have direct DB access are not snooping on data inappropriately? e.g. payroll or…
Over the past month (plus or minus a couple days), Erik Darling churned out dozens of posts to show how he uses different SQL Server Community Tools that are free and open source to troubleshoot SQL Server issues. You should read all of them. I did. (I also shamelessly copy/pasted this intro, plus the below, directly from his blog.)
Some of the questions y'all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are open-and-shut cases. I was going to do a one-word-answers edition, but I think this is even better: gifs.
GI Joe DBA: Thoughts about IT professionals Unionizing? IT professionals are in demand. Because of our demand, should we use this leverage to unionize, raise the bar, force better health benefits, retirement benefits, etc for ALL.. US Citizens? Ever discuss this with colleagues?
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 Twitter. I figure if DBAs are sitting around on social media, they're probably done with all the important parts of their job. The 147 votes came in:
When your SQL Server's top wait stat is ASYNC_NETWORK_IO, that indicates SQL Server is waiting on the app to ask for the next part of the result set.
This is a real pain in the rear to troubleshoot because often these waits happen for really short duration each time - think milliseconds, not seconds. It's an issue of death by a thousand cuts.
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 suggest for these approaches?
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 see if there's something you want to answer in the comments. I'll number 'em so y'all can refer to 'em easier in the comments.
Got questions for me? Post 'em at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you'd like to see me cover. I filter out the ones that are too short for video answers, and here's the latest batch:
Corrupted: Should DBCC CheckDB be run on secondary replicas in AG as well ? Is it recommended to attach corrupted database to Prod server, to check how your integrity check job will react ?
Last week, I was reading a brand new article from a Microsoft employee about how you should directly query sys.dm_exec_requests in order to find out what's running on your system.
I lost my mind.
Got questions for me? Post 'em at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you'd like to see me cover. I filter out the ones that are too short for video answers, and here's the latest batch: Thomas Franz: When I have a very large table with no statistics (or not on a specific column in the…
Not all of the questions you post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are hard. Some of 'em can be answered in one line:
Q: accidentalDBA: Hi Brent, My friend is moving from two physical servers (production + failover) to VMs on the same host and SAN. His manager wants to keep log shipping as a DR solution. I advised against this as most disasters would affect both VMs equally. Am I missing something?
Not all of the questions y'all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are hard - some of 'em can be answered in just a line or two:
Q: Hany: Hello Brent, Who's "Brent Ozar" in the Azure world?
Some questions that come in at https://pollgab.com/room/brento have such straightforward answers that I don't need to cover them on video. It's time for a rapid-fire speed round:
Q: Uncle Buck: Is there a good way to tell if a given include column for a NC index is being used at all?
The newest Cumulative Update for SQL Server 2019 has this gem in the release notes:
This is a massive problem if:
