Voice of the DBA

Oh, how I wish I could make you learn. How I wish I could coach, guide, inspire, or even bribe you to learn more about your job, or things related to your job, or even things in life. I wish all of you would improve your skills, but more, I wish you would want to improve your skills. I find lots of people who do want to get better, but far too often, people aren't trying to improve because they wa...

I saw this article and thought, surely there's nothing I could use in here:  10 Best AI Prompts for Everyday Tasks . Quite often, when these articles appear, they are very high-level and contrived examples of things that I rarely find myself doing. So I clicked the link. Read the rest of A Quick Second Opinion

Tomorrow is the United States 250th Independence Day celebration. I've been hearing about this on the radio for weeks, and it's struck me that I've been alive and lucky enough to experience both the 200th (1976) and the 250th (2026) milestones. I'm not sure either is more amazing than any other 4th of July, but the round numbers stand out. Read the rest of Independence Day .

Satya Nadella talked about cognitive coverage in the age of AI, about being able to understand and manage AI agents to get work done as a software developer. The interview from Hard Fork Live  covers the future of work and comfort in this new age. This reminds me of a book that the CEO of Redgate recommended, Reshuffle . I love the book, but it's slow reading as I constantly stop and think. Work i...

Is it worth continuing to run SQL Server when PostgreSQL licensing is zero? Rebecca Lewis has a  well written post on why that looks at some of the pros and cons of paying for SQL Server instead of moving to PostgreSQL. She starts with some of the things PostgreSQL does well, of which I think the Extensibility is really cool. SQL Server has some of this in CLR and the non-SQL language support, but...

I had a very interesting conversation recently with a longtime DBA who was worried about using AI in their database work. The Redgate State of the Database Landscape 2026 report showed that the vast majority of you (99%) are getting value from AI, so clearly it's being used. However, this individual was concerned that using AI for tasks would not engage their brain, and they might lose some of the...

I've visited a number of customers in the last few years who require most people to work in the office. Recently, I had the chance to go to Epic Systems, just outside Madison, WI, USA. They are a medical records software provider that was very reminiscent of Microsoft in some ways, and quite different in others. I published a blog with some pictures, so you can see how cool this office is in perso...

Last week we had a training session at Redgate Software on the Cloud. One of the first slides from John Q Martin asked the question, "what is the cloud?" The next slide had the answer: it's just someone else's computer. I mean that's true, but it's not Grant's computer. He's got a creaky, 4 year old HP that I don't want running my workload. Read the rest of What is the Cloud?

Change is inevitable for most of us. The jobs we hold, the places we work, the people we know, even our families grow and change over time. As I get older and live longer, I've learned to accept, appreciate, and flow with changes. I might resist, delay, embrace, or anticipate tomorrow, knowing there is always a positive and negative side to things. This week, one of my colleagues retired. Annabel...

For a while, I kept seeing that the cost of writing code was approaching zero . So many people felt that with an AI LLM, the costs would go way down to produce software. I'm not sure that's true. In fact, some companies are finding they spend more on AI tokens than salaries . However, the ability to produce more code, experiment with ideas, or generate proof of concepts has gone up. Whether it's w...

Both as a DBA and developer, I've had plenty of immediate, this-is-broken, fix-it-quickly issues. Usually, I, or someone else, wrote some bad code and somehow got it deployed. I mean, I do test things, and I would (probably) never change code after I'd tested it to fix that one little annoying thing, like the formatting. I'd (almost) never do that, and I'm sure you wouldn't either. Yet somehow bug...

Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of C++. I read a few of his books and alternately loved what he'd done and hated having to write C++ code in university and at a few jobs. I found it tedious and hard, though arguably better than C once you had a decent set of classes structured. BTW, I love his website, the basic text view of the world, which is how I have built a few sites on my own. I caught an...

I ran across a statement that seems exciting to me as someone that has written a lot of code in their career. It said: "Many of the "modern" software practices of the last decade were early adaptations to this shift, even if we didn't articulate them that way. Immutable infrastructure. Stateless services. Containers. Blue-green deployments. Infrastructure as code. These ideas all share a common pr...

Lots of people move to the cloud; it's common. In fact, it's very common to hear customers who are being asked to migrate their workloads to a cloud vendor for a variety of reasons. You might not agree, but often there is some reason to move to the cloud. Sometimes it's even moving from one cloud to another, just because one of the big three (AWS, Azure, GCP) seems more attractive this year than t...

One of the things I used to emphasize in talks about DevOps is that no modern software of any significance is built by one person. Everything takes a team, so the foundation of version control becomes extremely important. We need a way to coordinate work across multiple individuals and communicate what changes are being made. This requires a strong foundation, and that starts with version control....

You still need DBAs (that know how to back up systems and test restores). If you think you don't, or if you manager does, then perhaps they ought to read this piece on how an AI agent deleted a production database . This wasn't the case of an agent just running around with sysadmin access to all resources, or a lack of tests that allowed bad code to flow through a CI/CD process. This was a system...

I wonder how many of you have tried vibe coding something with an AI tool. If you haven't, I certainly recommend it. I've been a bit amazed with a few of my AI Experiments , including my loading of a lot of inconsistently formatted data into a database for USD$5 . To be clear, there's plenty of vibe coding that might not be production-ready, but have you ever been handed code from a human develope...

I remember getting started on SQL Server and trying to upskill myself in the mid-1990s. At that time, my employer was running a SQL Server 4.2 instance for a third-party application, but we wanted to rewrite our internal bespoke sales app to run on SQL Server. We were upgrading from Foxpro to Visual Foxpro and looking to move from shared dbf files to a SQL Server. There was a new release of SQL Se...

Many of us working with databases know the problems of a single point of failure. We build HA/DR technologies into a lot of systems precisely because many of us know if the database goes down, a lot of stuff goes down. Broken software is easier to fix and rollback, but a broken database can be a much bigger problems. We also know an overloaded server doesn't handle a workload well, hence our quest...

While talking to a customer a few weeks ago, they mentioned that they used Contained Availability Groups (CAG) everywhere. They also said they were amazing and wondered why everyone wasn't using them in other environments. Of course, I questioned the "everywhere", which turned out to be more of a default for new systems than a standard across all systems. That's likely true of most things since it...

While working with a customer recently, I heard this sentence: a tool is better than a script. The reference was that this customer preferred a known, tested, approved tool for most of their staff rather than a script built, lightly tested, and perhaps changeable by anyone in their organization. I was surprised, because in many ways, I've depended way more on scripts, more often, than "tools" in m...

The AI LLM boom seems to show no sign of slowing down. Each time I think we've reached some level of crazy use or predictions, things take another turn. I still find myself pinging back and forth between this will be amazingly good and horrifyingly bad. Sometimes on the same day. Read the rest of Half of All Engineers

Recently I saw an interesting article , saying that someone could build a general purpose coding agent in 131 lines of Python code. That's a neat idea, though I'm not sure that this is better than just using Claude Code, especially as the agent still uses the online version of  the Claude model from Anthropic to generate code or perform other tasks. There's a video in the article showing how this...

Every database platform has some strengths and weaknesses. Some more than others. I caught this site (NSFW) from Erik Darling , and it made my day. I was having a tough one when this site got me to smile and chuckle out loud a few times. I especially like the MySQL and SQL Lite links (again NSFW). Every platform that you might choose to use to back an application can work in many situations. Certa...

In the last year I've seen a lot of statements about data and sovereignty between countries. While there have been concerns in the past, there seems to be more worry around the world with AI services primarily being run by, and hosted by, US companies. Plenty of my customers at Redgate Software have concerns over our ability to see data when we run AI models, though we don't store the data. Once t...