>we got rid of our old database greybeards and replaced them with "DevOps" people that knew nothing about performance etc
Seems a lot of those DevOps people just see Azures recommendations for adding indexes and either just allow auto applying them or just adding them without actually reviewing it understanding what use loads require them and why. This also lands a bit on developers/product that don't critically think about and communicate what queries are common and should have some forethought on what indexes should be beneficial and created. (Yes followup monitoring of actual index usage and possible missing indexes is still needed.) Too many times I've seen dozens of indexes on tables in the cloud where one could cover all of them. Yes, there still might be worthwhile reasons to keep some narrower/smaller indexes but again DBA and critical query analysis seems to be a forgotten and neglected skill. No one owns monitoring and analysing db queries and it only comes up after a fire has already broken out.
Seems a lot of those DevOps people just see Azures recommendations for adding indexes and either just allow auto applying them or just adding them without actually reviewing it understanding what use loads require them and why. This also lands a bit on developers/product that don't critically think about and communicate what queries are common and should have some forethought on what indexes should be beneficial and created. (Yes followup monitoring of actual index usage and possible missing indexes is still needed.) Too many times I've seen dozens of indexes on tables in the cloud where one could cover all of them. Yes, there still might be worthwhile reasons to keep some narrower/smaller indexes but again DBA and critical query analysis seems to be a forgotten and neglected skill. No one owns monitoring and analysing db queries and it only comes up after a fire has already broken out.