Voice of the DBA

I remember getting a job at a startup in the Denver Tech Center. This was shortly after SQL Server 7 was released, with a marketing campaign that the platform was auto-tuning and wouldn't require a DBA. My colleague asked me if I wanted to learn Cold Fusion and have a longer career. I declined and stuck with this SQL Server thing, which has seemed to work out pretty well over the years. I was remi...

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There have been a lot of features added to the SQL Server platform over the years. Several of these features let us perform functions that are beyond what a database has traditionally been designed to handle. SQL Server has had the ability to send emails ,  execute Python/R/etc. code , and in SQL Server 2025, we can call REST endpoints . Quite a few of these features (arguably) are more applicatio...

The oldest article we have on the site is  Tame Those Strings! Part 4 - Numeric Conversions , by me. It's dated 2001-04-18, though I think that's a date we picked when we converted all the content from one database to another. The founders agreed sometime during Feb 2001 to jointly run SQL Server Central. Since we each owned the copyright of our articles from another site, we migrated several arti...

I was reading Andy Pavlo's end-of-year review of the database world . He's done this for a number of years, and there are links to previous recaps in the piece. He is an associate computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, working on quite a few database-related projects. In the review, he tends to track the database world from the perspective of business success and money. There ar...

AI is everywhere, and if you spend any amount of time looking for answers on the Internet to your coding challenges, you've likely encountered a lot of poor, average, good, bad, amazing, and just-helpful-enough AI content. For awhile, I was avoiding the AI summary from Google as the quality seemed slightly off, but lately it's gotten good enough that I tend use it to decide which links to click on...

There's concern about the future of AI and how it may affect jobs and employment for the masses. I see plenty of people on both sides of the issue. Some are sure AI technologies won't replace people; some are concerned their jobs will be eliminated, and some are hoping that we will eliminate some jobs and create many more. Sometimes that's the same person. Read the rest of Deep Learning and Crafts...

I've had the fortunate, or maybe unfortunate, experience of being thrown into a few jobs with no training. At a couple of my bartending jobs, I had to start working without any training, calling over someone to help run the ordering machine while I made and served drinks. I managed to slowly learn how things worked throughout that first shift, so I was ready to work on my own the second night. I h...

When I was at the Small Data 2025 conference , one of the speakers was talking about their work with AI technologies. This person uses it a lot in their day job, often to complete tasks that they would have struggled to work on in the past, mostly because of time constraints, but also a lack of resources. Sometimes this person has an idea, but doesn't want to distract themselves or others by havin...

JSON seems to be everywhere these days. Many application developers like it across all sorts of languages, C#, JAVA, Python, and more. They use it for transferring information between systems, and are comfortable serializing hierarchical object data into JSON from text and de-serializing it back into its various elements. For those of us working in relational databases, JSON seems like a blob of i...

I came across a post recently on the Microsoft Fabric blog about the evolution of SSIS 2025 ..I hadn't heard much about SSIS in SQL Server 2025, so I thought this might provide some info on the investments that Microsoft is still making in Integration Services. I've run into a few people in the past year who are still heavily invested in SSIS and run packages daily. SSIS seems to be a technology t...

I ran across a post that discusses what makes you a senior engineer (via Brent Ozar ). The main point of the post is that there is a core skill that separates senior engineers from others, which is reducing ambiguity. When a senior engineer gets an ill-defined (or ill-communicated) request, they can deliver a solid, or even great, result. When someone says "performance is poor," what do you do wit...

Recently, I was discussing AI with a friend, and they asked me to name a great success of using AI to build software. I've tried a few things, and I've worked with customers who are using AI tech. However, most of the things I've seen built with AI are small tasks; they're utilities or quick wins that change a minor part of the software. The items tend to be tactical and focused in a narrow band o...

Security has been a constant concern for many IT professionals over the years. Many of us are trying to implement better security controls, and yet at the same time, we try to avoid anything that slows us down. Security clearly hasn't been a big enough concern, as we've had more than our share of SQL Injection issues. These often come about from poor practices, lack of education, and too many peop...

It's the beginning of the year, and some of you likely have today off. But plenty of you are at work, moving slowly through this Friday at the start of the year—handling busywork, catching up on maintenance you've let slide, or preparing for the tasks you know will start coming Monday. At Redgate, most engineering teams work toward a North Star goal: a high-level direction that guides your various...

I ran across a tweet (are they still tweets?) on X/Twitter that was titled: how to ruin yourself . It had these items, which seem to be coming from a young person. Either a student or in their first job. Stay on your phone all day. Feel sad for no clear reason. Stop eating well and ignore your studies. Sleep super late and wake up in the afternoon. Let sadness take over everything. Always look at...

Most of you reading this are likely technology professionals of some sort. You might be a software developer in C# or a DBA or a manager of those teams. Maybe you're an analyst working with data and reporting. You have made this a career choice and (hopefully) are growing and learning more about your craft. I also expect that you want to continue working in the area you are now, or maybe want to m...

The PASS Data Community Summit 2025 was held in Seattle last month, and it was an interesting event for me. I wrote a wrap-up on my blog , but a few things stood out. The event was a little smaller, with over 50% first-time attendees, but seemed to be a bit more vibrant. Perhaps people coming for the first time added something that I hadn't expected. I was a bit over-committed, so I didn't spend a...

In his book, The Coming Wave , the CEO of Microsoft AI laid out the risks of AI tech bluntly. "These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence. They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor-replacing," he wrote. Suleyman advocated for regulatory oversight and other government interventions...

One of the things I see software developers often talking about is how they refactor code. As they touch a class, method, etc., they may take the time to refactor the code to make it cleaner, perform better, or just add some documentation. It seems that a regular part of a software developer's job is refactoring code in the codebase. That is unless they see a "don't touch this, no idea how it work...

The GenAI boom is growing like crazy. From hype to disasters to successes to investment to the embedding of GenAI tech into lots of products, it seems no one gets away from AI. My wife, kids, friends, they all talk about AI and alternately give me stories of huge successes or epic failures. Even those who just scroll through reels aren't immune as we see amazing things, but we can't trust them bec...

Recently I saw an article on Simple Talk, 15 Practical Tips for Securing SQL Server , and I thought that many of these are fairly simple things. Turn off unused features, disable sa, etc. These are things that a lot of people probably ensure are in their SQL Servers builds. Though, I'm sure a lot of people don't bother. Read the rest of Your Security Checkup

Imagine a perfect world? I have an AI agent that knows my business well. It's getting real time input from sales, from customers, it makes amazing decisions. We get a large order? We need to ramp up production of our widgets. We have an order pipeline of xx widgets and we know over time that yy% will close. Let's place a larger order with a supplier overseas. The next day, we have an election and...

Over the years I've had no shortage of licensing questions for SQL Server. At times it's felt a little crazy. Look at the licensing guide . Choose EE or SE and the number of cores. Then check if you're using VMs. Oh, and consider the cloud, and which cloud you're running a workload on. It's simple right? It can seem confusing, and at times I've wished Microsoft would make it simpler. And perhaps e...

If you graph computer/query cost against the size of data, you can get four quadrants: small data, small compute (most CRUD app queries) small data, big compute (complex BI queries for this quarter, most reporting) big data, small compute (logs, audit data) big data, big compute (complex BI queries across all our data) Read the rest of Don't Let Corner Cases Drive Your Design