Videos

On a beautiful sunny afternoon in the mountains, I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Audio is a little rough on this one because I used a new wireless microphone and forgot to put the wind shield on it. If you’d like to watch the spatial video version on an Apple Vision Pro or…

Not all of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento require long-winded answers. Let’s conquer 22 questions in 15 minutes! Here’s what we discussed: 00:00 Start 01:05 JoseDBA: We just started monitoring our AlwaysOn with Datadog. Any recommendations of what to monitor that is valuable and not filling ourselves with meaningless alerts? Thanks! 01:43 Boutaga: Hey…

To answer today’s questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento, I strapped on my Apple Vision Pro and recorded my persona as if we were on a FaceTime or Zoom call together. It’s delightfully creepy, as if I’m AI Brent from the Future. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:44 Rushabh Shah: I have a question regarding the DBCCSHRINKFILE…

Today’s Office Hours comes from a very different office! I climbed into the hot tub to review your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Don’t worry, the webcast is completely safe for work. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:32 MooneyFlyer: Hey Brent, what are your thoughts on functions like PIVOT and window functions (last_value, first_value, etc).…

Post your database questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me discuss on the stream. If you’d like to be alerted when I live stream these, follow me on Twitch. Here’s what we discussed today: 00:00 Start 00:38 Steve E: Hi Brent, Have you ever come across any environment using Application…

On a chilly January day, I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Yes, it actually gets cold in Vegas! It’s sub-freezing overnight before the sun comes out each day. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 02:53 MyTeaGotCold: Is BCP dead for both exporting and importing? When exporting, people seem to prefer not using SQL.…

Today’s Office Hours has a different topic. Eugene Meidinger dropped by to answer your business intelligence questions. Follow Eugene on YouTube and TikTok Subscribe to his 5-link weekly newsletter Check out Eugene’s new Power BI classes Read Eugene’s blog posts 00:00 Start 01:35 Tim: Can Power BI fully replace SSRS? We are looking to migrate…

I answer your top-voted Azure SQL DB and SQL Server questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento and lose my temper about what you’re doing. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:40 Mattia: Has bulk logged recovery model ever got you across the finish line? If so, could you share a story? 01:41 ForEachDBA: My manager wants to reduce…

Forgive the hoarse voice – I’m recovering from something COVID-ish. I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento and did my best: Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 03:03 DBANoob: We have EF code that creates randomly generated temp table names every time it runs, while the rest of the logic remains the same, giving…

The last Office Hours of 2023 featured some oddball questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Not bad, just … odd. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 03:04 TheMooneyFlyer: Hey Brent, how do you work on optimizing sp that performs insert/update/delete? Does putting the exec within a begin tran / rollback is a good option? 06:06 MyTeaGotCold: If a…

Most of the https://pollgab.com/room/brento questions from this episode had really short and sweet answers. Let’s take a break for the holidays and knock ’em out: Here’s what we covered this episode: 00:00 Start 03:29 TheyBlameMe: Have you ever made it across the finish line for a customer by changing the way their application connects to…

For this month’s First Responder Kit releases, I worked through most of the pull requests live on my Twitch channel. If you wanna get a glimpse of what it’s like being an open source maintainer, this is a good behind-the-scenes look: And part 2, with more PRs:

This one is a 3-part episode: I take 21 questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento and then later, work on First Responder Kit pull requests. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:08 MooneyFlyer: Hey Brent, apart from installing and playing around with it, what is the best way to get started with Postgres for someone familiar with SQL…

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed after a nap. How does that even happen?!? To take the edge off, I poured myself a gin & tonic and went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 05:41 LongRunningBackups: You say to use SAN snapshot backups on larger…

You know how this works: you posta the questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and I giva the answers: Here’s what you asked in this episode: 00:00 Start 03:18 DBA in VA: I recently discovered the “force order” query hint. I’m usually inclined to let the optimizer do its thing, but I have seen some of our code…

Y’all were on fire in this one! You posted great questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and I worked through ’em: Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 04:06 DislikeEntityFramework: In AWS RDS, we inherited a 9TB table with uniqueidentifier as clustered PK, another column is an identity int but not needed. How can we quickly fix this? Drop…

In between client calls, I stop to review y’all’s top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Here’s what we covered today: 00:00 Start 02:44 mailbox: Do DBA’s still need to be the only ones with permission and responsibility to roll-out code changes in production? Are there are shops in which this is a developer task that doesn’t involve…

On Black Friday, I took a break from answering support emails to hit your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.   Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:41 MatthewsSQLServer: How AlwaysON AG failovers cause can be analyzed, is it DB/Cluster/Infrastructure/AD issue. Can you please suggest any videos or blogs that can help? 02:19 NotADeveloper: We have a…

In this episode, a lot of the questions triggered mentions of our Black Friday Sale, on now! Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:41 Pete: 1 NUMA, 2 NUMA, 3 NUMA, 4 NUMA, or More? 176 cores, 1.5 TB RAM, currently all in a single NUMA configuration. I’m just a jr DBA so researching if…