**Last UpdatedSeptember 11, 2025

In between clients, I hopped onto my Twitch channel to take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. If you’d like to get notified whenever I do one of those live streams, you can follow my channel for free and you’ll get email notifications automatically. I do ’em whenever I have time, usually about once a week when I’m at home.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Start
• 02:26 DemandingBrentsAttention: Are you aware of any solutions to run SSMS or manage on-prem SQL servers from a Linux/*nix OS? There does not seem to be anything viable, but I’m not sure what I’m missing.
• 05:24 DataBeardAdministrator: I’ve been tasked with building my first data warehouse. With goals like adding temporal fields and updating reports to use date ranges rather than filtering by active = 1. Any tips on getting started with data collection and ETL? Any personal favorite tools or books you like?
• 06:56 Wrapped the Tenga with Hello Kitty and Kuromi: Do you ever see Distributed Availability Groups at all? Not even work on, just see.
• 07:39 Karen from IT: Should DBAs even care about normalization anymore when storage is cheap and SSDs are fast?
• 09:00 I’mTrying: Our company is pushing us to AWS, including all databases (currently MSSQL and Oracle). Obviously, I’m still learning, but is Amazon RDS for SQL Server a good idea? Are there any apparent gotchas I need to do further research on?
• 10:05 Online transaction procrastinator: I want to move my 4-node AG to super fast local storage. This means losing the ability to offload corruption checks with SAN snapshots. Is there any other good way to offload them? Failing over to a corrupt database is my worst nightmare.
• 11:49 MyTeaGotCold: Any advice for dealing with Tableau in particular? My users swear to me that they have no control over the queries it generates, so the only way I’ve found to get good performance is to throw clustered columnstore in wildly inappropriate places.
• 12:46 JuniorDBA: We take care of multiple customers database servers, Standalone, FCI, Always on AG. Whenever we inherit servers within the company or the customer comes to our company and they migrate here, what kind of checklist should we go through before official accepting the handover?
• 13:29 Petert: What is your favorite event to go to these days?
• 14:48 Partitioning Pete: Is table partitioning actually worth it in real-world workloads, or is it just a resume-driven feature nobody really needs anymore?
• 16:21 My Coffee Got COLD: Why do the run dates in SQL Agent – Job Activity Monitor show in DD/MM/YYYY format? As far as I know all language settings are US-English. Running SSMS Ver 15.0.1824
• 17:46 SQLbuddy: I have multiple SQL Server instances on one cluster. SSAS, SSRS are also working on it. Is there an easy way to have it working in disaster recovery (in case of one of nodes will fail). Only move these services to separate machine/vm and buy new licenses?
• 18:40 SQLbuddy: My company has 25TB DataWarehouse (already migrated from async 2016 to sync 2022). All of their jobs (related with Tabular, SSRS etc. only exists on primary node. What is the easiest way to have it replicated in case of failover (and working with minimal impact on business)?
• 20:25 SQLClueless: We’re working on a problem where USERSTORE_TOKENPERM balloons out of control, even on SQL 2019. I’ve read your post about this and periodically free this memory using an agent job. Have you heard of any new solutions to this issue? Sometimes the job alone doesn’t keep up.
• 21:14 Chakra: What is the future of SQL DBAs, required to switch to PostgreSQL, NoSQL DBAs, along with AI/ML Vector DBs?
• 22:10 Dopinder: In SQL 2019, Is there a good way using first responder kit or other tool to see which queries are consuming the most tempdb?
• 23:10 IWriteSQLInPortuguese: You reference of not using “You Should NoT Linked-Server”. But when inner joins are required, I still need the data. I’ve solved most with data replication, but with some big tables replication is not “possible”. What other solution recomended? TableFunctions? StoredProcedures?
• 24:54 ParameterSneezing: If OPTION (RECOMPILE) solves parameter sniffing, why not just sprinkle it everywhere and be done with it?

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