Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About Databases and Careers

Some career-related questions popped into the queue at pollgab.com/room/brento along with the usual database questions. Here's what we covered:
00:00 Start
02:10 Ethan: What percent of your constant care shops require encryption to connect with SQL server? What are your thoughts on mandatory encryption?
03:24 Miles: Hi Brent, an app that spawns multiple spid's,multiple txns.While troubleshooting BLOCKING,initially thought to trace one spid and all sql stmts for that spid.But it turned out, multiple spids r getting involved? how to troubleshoot issues when multiple spids & db's are involved?
05:13 Miles: Hi Brent, Does MSDTC txns gets translated to serializable isolation level? but when I check the additionalinfo column output in sp_whoisactive, it shows ReadCommited. Other thing, even when I am using RCSI, it shows isolation level as ReadCommitted? am i missing anything?
05:58 Ignacio: Do you have a recommended formula for required number of DBAs to number of SQL Server VMs managed?
06:45 Karthik: What's your opinion of ChatGpt ability to analyze a pasted query execution plan?
07:53 DBA_JR: Hello Brent, why does SQL Server allocate space in tempdb for running a query? And when does this allocation occur? Upon enabling Read Committed Snapshot Isolation (RCSI), why does the tempdb size continue to increase? My database contains 3TB of data.
08:54 Ben Grimm: What are your thoughts on making the domain user for the SQL account a local admin on the VM?
09:09 Pedro Gonzalez: Hi Brent, I'm one of the junior DBA admins in a mid size company, and I want to be like you. Where do I start? I like to read documentation, so they can hire me for that.
10:58 MyTeaGotCold: I find temp tables so valuable to performance tuning that my go-to solution for tuning functions is to convert them to stored procedures. Is this a common problem?
12:17 Steve E: Hi Brent, You often say 5 Non clustered indexes per table is a good rule of thumb, does this advice change when working with very wide data warehouse tables which have more than five columns users often search on?
13:10 Ignacio: Does sp_Blitz check for instant file initialization enablement?
14:10 Sean C: Hi Brent, do you have any experience and/or resources you could point my friend to regarding unit testing for SQLServer procs, etc? My friend has some idea of what unit tests are, but is having trouble visualizing how this is accomplished in TSQL; he's pretty dumb.
15:16 Atherol: Why does the four day work week work well for the U.K. but not the U.S.A.?
16:01 Ethan: Will strict TLS 1.3 encryption in SSMS20 cause users to think twice about upgrading from SSMS19?
16:30 Karthik: How do you keep your mind from racing at bedtime?
17:55 Ignacio: How does Aurora PostgreSQL failover speed compare with Azure SQL DB / M.I. / V.M. failover speeds?

[@ericferguson6824]

Favorite comment of the day; the less you work, the less you get done. Very nice, Brent.

[@ntobergta]

Funny, I’m watching Brent and getting “lit” too! Cheers!

[@BrentOzarUnlimited]

Cheers!

[@mortezasafaee6981]

Thanks brent❤

[@jwfcp]

To address blocking, you gotta sniff out that sweet, sweet wait type. Will it take you onto an adventure to disks, memory, cpus /maxdop, indexing/maint? A little bit of each? Anything is possible.

[@joshash5944]

Generating efficient query plans is too important a job to be handed to an "optimizer" - Old Jungle Saying