Refactoring SQL Code
Voice of the DBA
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 works" comment. There are plenty of those, and often everyone leaves that code alone. Read the rest of
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Investing for AI
Voice of the DBA
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 because of AI. Who knows what image/video/audio was actually recorded and what was generated. Like many of you, I think AI can be amazing. Like more of you, I think it can be a really poor partner and it...
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Your Security Checkup
Voice of the DBA
Recently I saw an article on Simple Talk, , 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
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How Important Are Real Time Decisions?
Voice of the DBA
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 tariffs are announced on imported parts. We react immediately, cancel the order, start the process to expand a local factory. We place ads to hire workers and order equipment. Things are looking good...
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SQL Server Licensing is Simple
Voice of the DBA
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 . 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 even give us some add-ons, like adding some additional hardware capabilities (cough more RAM *cough) in SE. Read the rest of
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Don't Let Corner Cases Drive Your Design
Voice of the DBA
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
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What's Your Theme Music?
Voice of the DBA
A few weeks ago, I was at the in San Francisco. I attended the inaugural event last year and decided to go back again. It's a great chance to hear people thinking about data and its impact on the world in a different way, recognizing that building lager and larger systems isn't always possible. Or a good idea. We might find that smaller systems fit well, especially smaller datasets, which can both serve our purposes and create agility. The of the conference says that "We champion the power of Small Data and smart AI, believing that less is truly more." There's a bit more, but that's the...
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Done is Better than Good
Voice of the DBA
Mary Spender is a musician in the UK who I follow and hope to see live one day. She works hard producing content about music, that business, and, of course, songs. Recently she had where talked about creative time and focus. In it she referenced Elizabeth Gilbert saying "done is better than good." My initial reaction was "that's right." Read the rest of
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Is Data Modeling Common?
Voice of the DBA
Recently, I had a few questions on database modeling. One was posted in the , and a customer asked about ERD tooling on the same day. This came shortly after Redgate acquired Vertabelo (now ). This stood out to me as very rarely in the last few years have I found people consulting and updating a diagram while performing database development. When I started as a developer and needed to update a database, I had to first update a diagram that was stored in ErWin. We had a dedicated computer (back when we went to an office every day) where the software was run and any developer could us this to...
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An Unexciting Exciting Release
Voice of the DBA
SQL Server 2025 was released this week. The announcement came at Ignite and the PASS Data Community Summit with keynotes on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively. While there are some things to look forward to in the release (What's New) and some highlights from T-SQL Tuesday this week, it seems that this release wasn't a very exciting one. On one hand, I blame all the Microsoft Fabric focus, which seems to distract from the core product that powers the databases at many organizations. The has had relatively few posts this year, highlighting a few things. The gets more posts, which is...
info_outlineI often deal with customers who are looking to improve the way they build and manage database software. These could be small companies or large enterprises, with teams of developers trying to enhance their application software to solve new business problems. Often those enhancements require new data, with the related schema changes in a database. Even if there isn't any new data, often we need to query data in new ways, combing, filtering, aggregating, and otherwise transforming data into extra information that a business can use.
Solving many of these problems is iterative by nature. We try one thing, then another. Often a developer might experiment with a data model or query, trying to match a requirement they've been given. Once they produce a solution, we may find problems in testing, or far too regularly, in production. These could be data-related issues, where the developer hasn't considered values in their solution (zeros, blank or long strings, extreme dates, etc.). These could be logical errors, where the developer just made a mistake. There could also be a problem with the requirement, where the customer provided an incomplete or incorrect specification to the developer.
Read the rest of The Cost of Rework