Office Hours with Brent Ozar Unlimited

Brent Ozar is recovering from a 16-hour time zone jump back in Las Vegas, and he's set up in the home bar to work through your top-voted questions from pollgab.com/room/brento. This week's session ranges from practical database performance topics like indexing and query plan analysis to broader career questions about skill-building when your employer isn't keeping pace with the market. Brent also shares personal stories about his first DBA job loss and weighs in on AI tooling, cloud data warehousing, and independent consultant retirement planning.

Brent Ozar is visiting Zhengzhou, China — Eve's hometown — and finds himself reflecting on AI and the future while watching locals do their morning exercises. He then turns to the top-voted questions submitted by listeners at pollgab.com/room/brento, covering topics ranging from large-scale integrity checks and tempdb bottlenecks to career advice for laid-off DBAs and how to leverage AI as a development DBA. It's a wide-ranging session that blends philosophical musing with practical, hands-on database guidance.

Brent Ozar is joining you from the dining room, which also happens to house a 1992 Honda Beat. He explains the story behind that unusual arrangement before diving into your top-voted questions sourced from pollgab.com/room/brento. Topics range from writing advanced database content to indexing strategies, in-memory features, consolidating vendor databases, and the future of AI-assisted querying.

Brent Ozar takes his show on the road, driving through the scorching desert of Lake Mead National Recreation Area about half an hour outside of Las Vegas. With the temperature well into the triple digits, Brent fields a wide-ranging set of questions covering query plan headaches, monitoring tool reliability, data warehousing strategies, and the realities of working under a difficult manager. It's database wisdom from one of the hottest spots in the American Southwest.

Brent Ozar is in Las Vegas, working through viewers' top-voted questions submitted at pollgab.com/room/brento. This episode covers HADR_SYNC_COMMIT waits behind Always On availability group outages, whether to index valid_to or valid_from in temporal tables, enabling RCSI without introducing concurrency bugs, comparing SQL Server with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle, whether SQL Server 2025 is safe to adopt yet, finding the queries eating your TempDB space, and choosing between a filtered index and a filtered statistic. Submit and vote on questions at pollgab.com/room/brento, and learn more at BrentOzar.com.