Office Hours: Answers For Your Database Questions

Y'all post questions and upvote the best ones at pollgab.com/room/brento and I discussed 'em in my home office:
00:00 Start
00:45 Eve: When should you/should you not execute the SSMS recommended Missing Index in the execution plan?
02:42 MyTeaGotCold: Logging sp_WhoIsActive and sp_BlitzFirst to a table has come up on your blog a few times. Do you still bother with it on versions that support Query Store?
04:03 Frozt: Hi Brent, There is a upcoming DB we have that they configured where AG is not in automatic failover because of the dependecies of Reporting Services. Do they have other options to make AG highly available and reporting services as well?
05:25 GrumpyOldDBA: Why does this variable @S get declared, even though IF evaluates as false:
06:24 Luis C.: Hi Brent, Why sometimes when you use Statistics time, the CPU time is greater than the Total Exec Time?
07:12 Mean Gene: Do physical reads ever matter when query tuning or just logical reads?
08:57 bbk0919: Which performs better, a materialized view for a specific query? Or a non-clustered index with included columns for the same query?
09:36 Luis C.: Hi Brent, Is it good or bad to put the same column in more than one index?
10:04 Chris: Hey Brent, in a previous office hours you hinted at a potential Mastering Columnstore class, is this still on the horizon?
10:24 Ignacio: What is your opinion of Azure SQL database watcher?
11:58 Poul J: My friend asked me if it will make sence to delete autogenerated statistic on a regular basis. He is assuming that most of them are created due to adhoc queries, and he would like to save the ressources spend on updating them. I'm not sure what to respond... Any thoughts?
12:40 Jökull: What is your opinion of Microsoft certifications relating to SQL Server? It seems like an opportunity to learn then forget.
13:50 mailbox: Hey Brent, Do you think the avg DBA salary has decreased since 2005? I recall many DBA jobs being minimum $100,000, and now I'm seeing the average come down to like $78,000 in my area. Just curious what your thoughts are on this. Thanks!
14:48 mailbox: Hey Brent, Given the news about Broadcom discontinuing free version of ESXi, what do you think the impact will be to the on-premise, SQL Server DB crowd? I've only ever supported SQL Server instances on vmware VMs or physical server.
15:28 DadJokerDetroit: Recently, the brilliant Steve Sanderson did a great demo about Vector Search. Have you seen more demand for Semantic Search in SQL Server?
15:43 Poul J: Is there a way to get information about how often the statistics of a table have been updated and how much time was spent on the updates?
18:20 chandwich: Hey Brent! When do we get a tour of the office/home/garage?
20:08 MustangKirby: I have hundreds of customer databases on several servers. Company policy says the dbs must be deleted if not being currently used. Other than taking all of them offline and seeing who yells, is there a way to determine the last time a db was accessed?

[@TheRealSmendle]

for the DB and AG question @4:04...I would have just said, use an AG listener and point to that DNS entry.

[@euromicelli5970]

For that “why” question at 6:23: I wager even Microsoft wouldn’t “know”. You would really need to ask the original programmers employed by Sybase back in the mid-1980’s.

[@JeffersonMartinSynfluent]

Ashton-Tate; hadn't thought of them in years... no, decades.

[@kennethrow]

In my testing, it looks like SQL (or Sybase) initializes all of the variables up front, albeit with null values: if 1 = 0 declare @d int = 1 if @d is null select 'it is null' returns "it is null"