Office Hours with Brent Ozar is a weekly Q&A where Microsoft data platform expert Brent Ozar answers your top-voted questions about SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and database performance tuning. Each episode works through real questions from DBAs and developers around the world: performance, high availability, backups, indexing, and more. Submit and vote at pollgab.com/room/brento, and learn more at BrentOzar.com.
Database Questions from the Norwegian Encore's Final Alaskan Voyage
This is the third Office Hours in a row recorded from the same cruise ship. Brent Ozar is aboard the Norwegian Encore on the last Alaskan cruise of the 2026 season, answering questions submitted at pollgab.com/room/brento. Topics include spotting warning signs before production disasters strike, backup file deduplication, the most interesting and challenging industries Brent has consulted in, and how DBAs might generate passive income as AI continues to evolve.
6 Oct 2026
Database Questions from the Last Alaskan Cruise of the Season
Brent Ozar is aboard what he describes as the very last Alaskan cruise of the season — a trip he chose on purpose. In this episode, he answers your top-voted questions from pollgab.com/room/brento, covering topics ranging from columnar database decisions and tempdb workarounds to AI tools for data professionals and whether BI platforms will survive the age of AI. He also shares thoughts on aft cabins, SQL Server sprawl from decades past, and what Alaska looks like in the depths of winter.
29 Sept 2026
AI, Shoemakers, and the End of the World at Cabo San Lucas
This is a Very Special Episode™ of Office Hours with Brent Ozar, recorded off the shore of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico — a place Brent calls the End of the World. Instead of answering questions from the audience, Brent responds to questions he imagines listeners would ask after reading Thorsten Ball's post, "What I believe about the future of software development." Topics range from whether hand-tuned indexing becomes a luxury craft to whether probabilistic AI output can ever be trusted with trans...
22 Sept 2026
Database Questions from a Cruise Ship off Long Beach
Brent Ozar is setting sail from Long Beach for a week-long retreat to think about the future of the industry, but first he stopped to answer your top-voted questions from pollgab.com/room/brento. Topics range from migrating a 25 TB database to a fresh instance seeded with two years of data, to CDC falling behind under heavy transaction load, to what comes next for reporting now that SSRS isn't shipping in the next SQL Server release. Brent also weighs in on cloud database pricing comparisons,...
15 Sept 2026
Database Questions Before the Mexico Cruise
Brent Ozar is wrapping up his Mastering Index Tuning course and preparing for a Mexico cruise, so he's squeezing in a full Office Hours session from his Las Vegas home office. This episode covers your top-voted questions from pollgab.com/room/brento, ranging from statistics maintenance on massive tables and columnstore join estimation to TempDB latch waits, automation strategy, Availability Groups, and the realities of consulting on someone else's turf. Brent also fields a question about sp_B...
8 Sept 2026
Database Questions from the Cool Peaks of Mount Charleston
Brent Ozar is spending the weekend at Mount Charleston, enjoying the cool mountain temperatures just outside Las Vegas. In this episode, he works through your top-voted questions submitted at pollgab.com/room/brento, covering topics like fill factor tuning, index maintenance at scale, included columns, and more. It's a packed Q&A session straight from the mountains.
1 Sept 2026
Database Questions from the Las Vegas Home Office
Brent Ozar broadcasts from his Las Vegas home office this week, working through the community's top-voted database questions. Topics range from parameter sniffing and recompile concerns, to deadlock resolution strategies, shrinking databases, and read-committed snapshot isolation. Brent closes out the session by sharing the stoic morning habit he relies on to start his day.
18 Aug 2026
Database Questions from the Home Bar in Vegas
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 ware...
13 Aug 2026
Database Questions from Zhengzhou, China
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...
6 Aug 2026
Database Deep Cuts from the Honda Beat Dining Room
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.
28 Jul 2026
Database Questions from the Mojave Desert
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.
21 Jul 2026
Database Questions from Las Vegas
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...
14 Jul 2026
Database Questions Overlooking Rome, Italy
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.
7 Jul 2026
Database Questions from a Black Pebble Beach in Iceland
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 ...
30 Jun 2026
Database Questions at Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon, Iceland
Jökulsárlón is one of Brent Ozar's most beloved places on earth, where the great Vatnajökull glacier slowly melts into the sea. Chunks break free into the lagoon, pinned by incoming tides before floating out and washing ashore on the black sand as Diamond Beach — sparkling like gems in the Icelandic sun. It's a fittingly dramatic backdrop for a packed session of database questions.
26 Jun 2026
Database Questions at Seljalandsfoss, Iceland
Iceland's Seljalandsfoss is one of the most-photographed waterfalls in the world, thanks to its easy access from the Ring Road and a certain Justin Bieber music video. Brent Ozar makes his way to this iconic spot on the south coast to answer your top-voted database questions. From AI-powered query tuning to high-availability migrations and beyond, this episode covers a lot of ground — much like the Ring Road itself.
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