As my time in Hong Kong came to an end, I sat inside on a foggy morning and hit your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:32 MyTeaGotCold: Are there any signs of brain drain from SQL Server to Postgres? It seems that every SQL Server guru agrees that Postgres is better, even if SQL Server pays them more. 02:33 Frozt: Do you have a checklist on decommissioning an SQL Server? 03:06 Mike: Hi Brent, you mentioned that you are going to update Recorded Classes in 2024. Is this still true ? If yes, which ones you want to update, and when t ..read more

I’m kinda weird. I get excited when I’m troubleshooting a SQL Server problem, and I keep hitting walls. I’ll give you an example. A client came to me because they were struggling with sporadic performance problems in Azure SQL DB, and nothing seemed to make sense: sp_BlitzFirst @SinceStartup = 1 showed very clearly that their top wait, by a long shot, was blocking. Hundreds of hours of it in a week. sp_BlitzIndex showed the “Aggressive Indexes” warning on a single table, but… only tens of minutes of locking, nowhere near the level the database was seeing overall. sp_BlitzCache @SortOrder = ‘d ..read more

The Monday after next, I’ll be getting together with dozens of smart people who are a lot like you. You’ve attended some of my free online streams, read my blog posts, and you use the First Responder Kit. You enjoy my laid-back, humorous approach to sharing what I’ve learned over the years. You love live classes. You’ve tried watching recordings or stepping through demos yourself, but…you just can’t block out the time, and you can’t stay motivated while you’re watching a recording. You like the fast-paced energy of seeing me live, asking me questions, and seeing me respond to your chats. You h ..read more

I recently went to Shanghai & Hong Kong, and stopped to take your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento while sitting next to the Hong Kong harbor. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:18 Jason G – RN & Accidental DBA: Would you elaborate on DB Owner implications? sp_Blitz help recommends using the SA account, but the articles referenced by Andreas Wolter advocate for using low privileged accounts which are DB specific. Which would you recommend and why? 02:44 MyTeaGotCold: Can you name any good relational databases that aren’t built around SQL? It’s strange that a system ..read more

As a consultant, I sometimes see SQL Servers with high CPU core counts relative to their workload. For example, the situation that inspired this post was seeing half a dozen SQL Servers with ~50 cores each, hundreds of cores total – yet they consistently had just 1-5% CPU usage. Here’s what I said to management: Right now, you’re running SQL Server on 280 cores. SQL Server Enterprise Edition licensing is about $7,000 per core, so you’ve installed $1,960,000 worth of licensing. If an employee or former employee goes to the BSA and reports you, they may get a pretty sizable cash reward. I’m not ..read more

So you’ve got an iPhone or iPad or Vision Pro, and you bought one of my training classes or the Fundamentals or Mastering passes, and you wanna watch the classes while you’re offline. Perhaps you wanna learn on the train ride in to work, or perhaps on the weekends, you like to completely disconnect from the world and retreat into a bunker lined with a Faraday cage. I won’t judge. Go into the app store and get the Teachable online courses app: Log in, and you’ll see your list of courses: Click on a course, click on a lesson, and at the top right of each lesson, there’s a download button: Cli ..read more

A few career and security questions found their way into the queue at https://pollgab.com/room/brento for this episode: Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 02:10 Ethan: What percent of your constant care shops require encryption to connect with SQL server? What are your thoughts on mandatory encryption? 03:24 Miles: Hi Brent, an app that spawns multiple spid’s,multiple txns.While troubleshooting BLOCKING,initially thought to trace one spid and all sql stmts for that spid.But it turned out, multiple spids r getting involved? how to troubleshoot issues when multiple spids & db’s are involv ..read more

You’ve been reading my site for a while, watching videos, keeping up with the best SQL Server techniques. However, you’ve got a lot of other folks on your team who don’t have as much free time as you, or they’re just getting started on their SQL Server performance tuning journey. Forward this post to them, because they need to know about Fundamentals Week, May 6-10. Hey you! You love live classes. You’ve tried watching recordings or stepping through demos yourself, but…you just can’t block out the time, and you can’t stay motivated while you’re watching a recording. You like the fast-paced ene ..read more

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Pinal Dave asked us if AI has helped us with our SQL Server jobs. For me, there’s been one instant, clear win: code reviews. I usually keep a browser tab open with ChatGPT 4, and I paste this in as a starting point: You are an experienced, diligent database developer who specializes in Microsoft SQL Server. Review the below stored procedure and decide whether it has any security or performance risks. Then I paste in the code right below that. Here’s an example output using bad dynamic T-SQL. ChatGPT (and just 3.5, not even 4) cut straight to the point, identif ..read more

Sometimes y’all post questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento that require extended answers. Today, I’m hitting just 3 questions: Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:44 MyTeaGotCold: If storage is no issue, do I need to worry about the size of Query Store? It’s going to hit 10% of the size of my largest database. I have no interest in changing QUERY_CAPTURE_MODE away from ALL or my retention period. 04:12 DB-Ay?: For a high activity table, is it worth updating stats at a higher percentage just for auto-update to resample at a lower rate within an hour? I’m not able to persist the valu ..read more