[video] Office Hours: Microsoft Database Q&a

Let’s go through a LOT of your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento on a VERY early Saturday morning.

• 00:00 Start
• 01:52 DBAInAction: Hi Brent Microsoft just announced Automatic Index Compaction for Azure SQL and Fabric. do you see this finally killing off the traditional ‘index maintenance’ debate? Also, any gut feeling on whether this will eventually be backported to box versions of SQL Server? Thank you!
• 04:19 VladDBA: Hey Brent, meant to DM you but figured this fits office hours: I’m on 2-month garden leave and weighing whether to hunt for another job or launch my own consulting business. If you were in my shoes, what would you do?
• 06:28 Jacob H: What is everyone using for stress testing SQL Server in 2025? Looks like Microsoft has deprecated all it’s tools. (Distributed Replay and it’s replacement Replay Markup Language Utility)
• 09:01 EagerBeaver: hi Brent, when populating table from data from another table via INSERT INTO SELECT is there a way to OUTPUT columns that are not being inserted? I need to store mapping between old and new PK and the only way I found was to use MERGE which you don’t recommend. Thanks
• 10:30 Thomas Franz: Auto Create statistics is enabled on my DWH (billions of rows in partitioned Columnstore tables). When someone executes a query that uses on uncommon column first time in WHERE / JOIN it takes forever to create an execution plan. Is there a way to autocreate the stats async too?
• 11:56 Zale: Ola Brent, have you encountered any significant performance issues in SQL Server caused by the use of cursors?
• 12:37 SteveE: Hi Brent, Do you know of any resources for creating good AI prompts for query tuning? The people who appear to get the most out of AI appear to be good at writing prompts
• 14:57 MyTeaGotCold: Has SAN multipathing improved over the last decade? I remember when we had to be very careful with vendors not having true multipathing.
• 18:43 Jason Not JSON: Should we start designing schemas differently now that AI tools prefer semi-structured data like JSON?
• 21:11 Felipe: Hi Brent, Nowadays, do you think it’s still worth becoming or remaining a DBA specialist? Maybe this is just my impression, but I’ve been working as a DBA for over a decade (mostly with Oracle) and I’m starting to think about changing my career to another role.
• 23:48 .Net Dev: I’m on Azure SQL DB at compat level 140. I’ve heard you say that being “out of support” is a valid reason to upgrade. Since SQL 2017 is hitting EOL, does that logic apply to compat levels in Azure? Or is it fine to stay on 140 indefinitely if I have no performance issues?
• 24:36 Andrew G: I am SaaS support. I work with VMs and SQL server. Why do t-logs, if not properly maintained, affect memory / cause timeouts? Is this something to do with TempDB? If you could let me know if you have a course that covers, this currently working through fundamentals! TY !
• 27:59 Dopinder: We have many old sp’s that reference no longer existent columns but fortunately these sp’s are no longer used. Is there a good way to force a recompile for all sp’s so that we can identify these crusty / old sp’s that error on recompile so we can delete? SQL 2019
• 29:16 Matteo: Hi Brent, I just finished the ‘Faster, cheaper, cloud databases’ module. How much do you think the recent price increases for physical RAM and SSDs will impact the way we evaluate the cost-effectiveness of cloud VMs?
• 32:21 YouTubeFreeLoader: As a query tuner, how do you address or identify performance issues that might be a data issue in a system you aren’t familiar with. For example, a query suddenly performing worse but the root cause is a data issue like a job isn’t running that should be but you don’t know it.
• 34:50 How Did I Even Get Here: Just an update. I recently asked for ideas on choosing a pet project (don’t worry, during work hours). I set up a CMS to deploy/run sp_Blitz and its friends across 12 servers from my CMS and collect data in a table on the CMS. It’s AMAZING! Is this still rare, and if so, why?
• 38:19 Josef: How do you index for a WHERE condition with LIKE ‘%’ + @SearchText + ‘%’?
• 40:06 chris: Howdy, Brent! When working with a client to resolve a problem they’ve brought to you, how much time would you say you spend on documentation after you’ve landed on a solution?
• 43:35 DickBowen: Is using DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS to extract the histogram information into a temporary table for a lookup of RANGE_HI_KEY values a good idea?