Office Hours with Brent Ozar Unlimited

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.

Brent Ozar was in Rome attending a teaching conference, staying in an AirBnB with a breathtaking view overlooking Rome and Vatican City. Over his morning coffee, he worked through your top-voted questions from pollgab.com/room/brento. He didn't cover many questions this episode — because some of them deserved really long, thorough answers, and he had a great time digging into each one.

Brent Ozar records this episode from a stunning black pebble beach in Iceland — not black sand, but smooth black pebbles that chime together as waves wash in and out. He works through your top-voted questions covering everything from database consolidation strategies and index maintenance deadlocks to caching, query plans, and whether you can build a great database career without a public online presence. He also weighs in on why conversations about data governance and medallion architecture can feel oddly cult-like.