Office Hours: 45 Minutes of Fun and Answers

Post your questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me cover. Here’s this episode’s questions:

00:00 Start
00:30 Jr Wannabe DBA: Hi Brent, recently you talked about linters; do you recommend any for T-SQL? I tried a few randomly from Google search, they are useless.
04:55 Rajiv: What is the best way to read JSON in sql?
06:07 not Kevin Mitnick: (I ask all my colleagues do your courses) What percentage of your clients use TDE vs Always Encrypted vs Nothing? Except your survey, there seems to be no public data on usage. I have seen hacks that demonstrate how to crack TDE. Always Encrypted seems the right way to go.
06:56 ProochingMan: Is your Office Hours podcast still available anywhere? I used to enjoy listening to you, Kendra, and others discuss SQL Server – including older episodes. I haven’t been able to stream/download it with me podcast aggregator for a while, and I am not finding them on your site.
07:46 Benji: What is your opinion of using Azure SMB File Shares to host SQL Server data files?
09:02 Don’t Be Afraid: Hi Brent, maybe a loaded question that you will rip into me for. But how bad is spilling to tempdb for sorts? Not having any issues, just looking to understand! Thank you!
11:36 Eduardo: Is the cost / complexity of SQL DAG vs AG ever worth it? Do you get to work on DAG with your clients?
16:10 marcus-the-german: Hi Brent, I have a table A with a nvarchar(255) column. It’s filled with data. If I query the data type I see a max_length of 510 bytes in the sys.columns table for this column in my table A. What’s the big deal about it?
16:45 Dollop: What’s a good book to learn query tuning ?
18:02 carpediem: Hello, do you have some book or link recommendations for implementing Hit-Highlighting with fulltext search?
19:08 Vishnu: What is your opinion of agreeing to automatically send SQL mini dumps to Microsoft?
20:26 Piotr: Is it ok to patch SQL Cumulative Updates and Windows Updates at the same time or should they be done separately?
21:41 reporting_developer_dba: Can modifying indexes and using date as a first column will be advantages so we can use between to pull data in range vs reading pages by ID’s?
22:20 Benji: What is your opinion of third party HADR solutions for SQL Server such as SIOS DataKeeper?
24:23 Mariángel: Have you ever seen Windows filter drivers cause data corruption in SQL Server? What are your tips for preventing data corruption from filter drivers?
25:07 Boris: It is easy / hard working in both SQL Server and PostgreSQL?
27:10 TJ: Hi Brent, how would you go about troubleshooting a query that runs forever and you can’t get its actual execution plan?
29:35 TY: Hi, do you think that performance in SQL Server can be faster for one-time executions: If the engine takes time to write logs, executions plans or any other fancy stuff – is there a way to turn OFF
31:35 Wren: Really hard question to google… If you have an AG-enabled server with multiple dbs on it in a WFC, do all of the dbs *have to* be in the AG to failover for patching, etc? Is there any reason to *not* put a db into an AG on an AG-enabled server?
33:20 accidental_dba: what happens if run 2 instance on a 256gb RAM sever with standard edition. Does each instance get its own 128gb under 1 license and divide the cores between those
34:08 SQLrage: I took your advice and tested this and found that updating all statistics with full scan alone on all tables referenced in a proc did not cause the plan to be regenerated.
36:18 hammered_by_manager_to_work_on_sata_drives: if 2 similar procedures or queries run from 2 different databases, will SQL server keep plans per database or as global?
37:30 Vishnu: What is your opinion of SQL ledger tables? Is this another service broker from M$ft?
39:15 Sasan: Hi Brent, In your mastering class you say that it does not really matter for an equality search which leading key is indexed first. While I have found this to be true in terms of the number of reads, it could produce plans with different estimates. Any thoughts?
39:45 Red Dog: What are your memories / experiences of SQL Data Services from 2008?
40:30 AK: Hi Brent, When is the next sale for your courses besides the black friday one? Just fyi I did google it but I did not find the answer.
42:02 Magnús: We see forward fetches from a sproc that makes heavy use of tempdb. it inserts into and update a local temp temp table before finally returning the reporting results. Is there a forward fetches threshold at which we should be concerned about performance (thousands, millions)?
42:54 Programmer: What’s a reasonable progression for deploying a production database for a new project (assume negligible budget to start) as it grows for a team that shies away from managed/closed services but doesn’t have expertise in managing databases?
44:07 Gabriele: if my friend had a work proposal for working some days (5-10) a month on a 24/7 on call ready schedule, what suggestion will you give him?