Follow Your Hunch
Voice of the DBA
For a while, I kept seeing that . 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 . However, the ability to produce more code, experiment with ideas, or generate proof of concepts has gone up. Whether it's worth the cost or not depends on the engineer, but some organizations are finding that they can try more things than they would ever had time to try in the past. The time of engineers was the constraint, and if you can afford the cost, AI LLMs can relieve that time pressure. Read the...
info_outline
The Slow Growing Problems
Voice of the DBA
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 bugs slip in at times. Those are the acute issues, and they can be hard to fix at times, but often we can reproduce the problem in development and build a fix. Sometimes we even spot the issue quickly...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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
info_outlineI thought this story about a programmer and a GenAI to be rather humorous. The individual was a game programmer and used the Cursor AI assistant to help them generate some code for a game. After a few hundred lines of code, the AI delivered this: "I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly."
That response makes me actually smile to myself and chuckle out loud. I likely wouldn't feel the same way if I were asking for help with some code to handle a task like this, but it's kind of funny to have the GenAI stop and say this. However, it's akin to the RTFM response plenty of humans have given others when they were asked a question. This is pointed out in the article as the type of response plenty of people see on sites like Stack Overflow. Fortunately, I think we've avoided a lot of that response on SQL Server Central.
Read the rest of Learn to Code