The Power of Data and Privacy
Voice of the DBA
I tend to be fairly careful with data, especially data on this site. When we started the site, we were worried about potential issues and worked hard to ensure we kept our systems safe and limited the attack surface area for personal information. We also declined the various offers we had to sell our list of subscribers to marketing firms. We know that some places add value for marketing, but some abuse the trust of their users and our approach was always to be careful. When we sold the site to Redgate, we emphasized the need for this trust, and to date, Redgate has been a great steward of...
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The DBA is Dead; Long Live the DBA
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 reminded of this when I saw a "" post, this time from an Oracle DBA. There are plenty of links in there from Larry Ellison and Oracle about how some version of Oracle won't require a DBA. I've seen (and...
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When SQL Server Central Went Down
Voice of the DBA
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Expensive CPUs
Voice of the DBA
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 , , and in SQL Server 2025, we can . Quite a few of these features (arguably) are more application-oriented than database-oriented. There's nothing inherently wrong with having a server perform some of these functions, and there have been some very creative implementations using these features. I recently ran into , where she shows how to use the...
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25 Years of SQL Server Central
Voice of the DBA
The oldest article we have on the site is , 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 articles to build up our content library. This was back when , , and I all had full-time jobs and managed the site during breaks, nights, and weekends. That was 25 years ago. Twenty. Five. Years. Read the rest of
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There Are a Lot of Databases
Voice of the DBA
I was reading Andy Pavlo's . He's done this for a number of years, and there are links to previous recaps in the piece. He is 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 are certainly parts of it that discuss technical changes, but my overall impression is more about the business and usage success than it is about the way database systems work. The main thing that struck me after reading the review was how many database systems there are in the...
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More Documentation is Needed
Voice of the DBA
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 in the results. The summary helps me better understand the context Google sees in my search query. I ran across and how helpful these docs are in onboarding, code reviews, and more. The teams that...
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Deep Learning and Craftsmanship Matter
Voice of the DBA
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
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Learning From Breakage
Voice of the DBA
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 had a similar experience at a tech job, starting as the lead DBA/IT Manager in a crisis, having to try and solve problems after ask others how things were supposed to work. I ended up fixing a bit of...
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Eight Minutes
Voice of the DBA
When I was at the , 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 having them work on a side project. During a recent ride in a (self-driving car), this person had their laptop out and running Claude Code. They gave it a prompt, asking it to build a small app for some data analysis. During the...
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