Would You Retire Rather Than ...
Voice of the DBA
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 interview with him and . He had this quote: "Senior developers are already retiring rather than deal with it." He doesn't love the results from AI, which is fine. And it's not what I want to talk about today. Read the...
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The Data Model Matters
Voice of the DBA
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 premise: never fix a running thing. Replace it." These are a few sentences in this piece on . That's how a lot of software developers have viewed the world during the last decade and we've seen a lot of...
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Over of Under Provisioned
Voice of the DBA
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 the one from last year. When you move, do you size your system for the peak? 80% of the peak? Perhaps there is another goal for which you design. Do you worry about ever being under-provisioned and...
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The New Software Team
Voice of the DBA
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. In 2026, that hasn't changed, but what has changed is the makeup of the team. No longer do I need a bunch of humans. In today's world, with extremely powerful AI LLMs, we can have a team of AI agents...
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Limit the Blast Radius
Voice of the DBA
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 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 design that had a hole in it. An API call to change infrastructure that could change both staging and production. Not something an AI set up, but humans did. A hole from both and the API vendor that allowed the AI agent to make the same type of mistake we've...
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What Can AI Really Do?
Voice of the DBA
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 , including my . 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 developer you didn't think was production-ready? Or deployed code like that? Certainly, AI could exacerbate the situation, but it can also spark ideas, ease (and speed) development in small ways, and tackle the backlog of things your org needs. Especially small tools. Read the rest of
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There's Too Much to Learn
Voice of the DBA
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 Server 6.5 during our development, and I wanted to learn more about it. I purchased and read the entire thing, getting prepared to finish development and then manage a new platform in production. I had...
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The Dangers of Dependencies
Voice of the DBA
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 for well-written SQL code, but we often lose that battle with developers. Read the rest of
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Who is Using CAGs?
Voice of the DBA
While talking to a customer a few weeks ago, they mentioned that they used (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's rare we get to update/patch/set something across an environment of any size and ensure every system is the same. Still, setting a CAG as a default makes some sense for enterprises. This ensures that in an HA situation I have...
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A Tool is Better than a Script
Voice of the DBA
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 my career. Often I struggled to find tools that actually worked in the way I wanted them to and built them myself with Unix shell utilities, VB Script, PowerShell, or some combination of those or other...
info_outlineWhen is the last time you interviewed for a new position? It could have been at a new company, or maybe you had an interview was for a different position inside your existing company. Perhaps you needed to talk to a manager internally for a new project. I've tried to treat all my one-on-one meetings or reviews as interviews since I'm usually trying to impress someone enough to get a raise or promotion.
Preparing for something you do rarely is hard. Most of us have interviews very infrequently, and we often aren't prepared to impress others. If your partner or a close friend is also a business person, perhaps they can help you get ready, but I've found that most people struggle to help others prepare as they don't know how themselves.
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