Security and AI Fail
Voice of the DBA
The AI boom is still growing like crazy. Many organizations are trying to learn how they can use AI to improve operations and become more efficient, at a reasonable cost. Plenty of companies are spending crazy amounts of AI tokens, sometimes blowing their yearly budgets in months and not necessarily receiving substantial value back. Some companies are trying to train AIs to understand their operations and perhaps reduce their other costs, primarily labor. Still others are tip-toeing in the waters of AI LLM use and conducting smaller experiments, with limited access to AI technology. Meta has...
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Forward Deployed Engineers
Voice of the DBA
I recently recorded a session with and a Redgate Flyway Solution Engineer. It was a fun session using GitHub and AI, and better managing the code in an automated fashion to bring some determinism to AI coding. I'm hoping it will be released soon, and you can see a vision of how you can better wrangle your AI agents and reduce risk and increase reliability. When we started our discussion, Ken noted that he is an AI forward deployed engineer for GitHub. His job is to work with teams in how to use agentic coding. When we were first prepping, I had never heard the Forward Deployed Engineer title,...
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I Can't Make You Learn
Voice of the DBA
Oh, how I wish I could make you learn. How I wish I could coach, guide, inspire, or even bribe you to learn more about your job, or things related to your job, or even things in life. I wish all of you would improve your skills, but more, I wish you would want to improve your skills. I find lots of people who do want to get better, but far too often, people aren't trying to improve because they want to coast along at their jobs. I get it. You're stressed and busy at work, though hopefully not too often. You have challenges at home, kids to raise, parents getting older, financial stresses,...
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A Quick Second Opinion
Voice of the DBA
I saw this article and thought, surely there's nothing I could use in here: . Quite often, when these articles appear, they are very high-level and contrived examples of things that I rarely find myself doing. So I clicked the link. Read the rest of
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Independence Day 2026
Voice of the DBA
Tomorrow is the celebration. I've been hearing about this on the radio for weeks, and it's struck me that I've been alive and lucky enough to experience both the 200th (1976) and the 250th (2026) milestones. I'm not sure either is more amazing than any other 4th of July, but the round numbers stand out. Read the rest of .
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Cognitive Coverage
Voice of the DBA
Satya Nadella talked about cognitive coverage in the age of AI, about being able to understand and manage AI agents to get work done as a software developer. covers the future of work and comfort in this new age. This reminds me of a book that recommended, . I love the book, but it's slow reading as I constantly stop and think. Work is changing; it's becoming unbundled and re-bundled in different ways, and many of us will have to learn to work in new ways. Not all of us, but many of us. Some might see their day-to-day efforts change little; some will not recognize their job a year from...
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SQL Server Still Wins
Voice of the DBA
Is it worth continuing to run SQL Server when PostgreSQL licensing is zero? Rebecca Lewis has a that looks at some of the pros and cons of paying for SQL Server instead of moving to PostgreSQL. She starts with some of the things PostgreSQL does well, of which I think the Extensibility is really cool. SQL Server has some of this in CLR and the non-SQL language support, but those seem kludgy and complex to me. They aren't really integrated into the SQL Server platform. They're good, but I do wish vendors or the community could add some extensions in a way PostgreSQL does. Of course, I also...
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I Want to Use My Brain
Voice of the DBA
I had a very interesting conversation recently with a longtime DBA who was worried about using AI in their database work. The Redgate State of the Database Landscape 2026 report showed that the vast majority of you (99%) are getting value from AI, so clearly it's being used. However, this individual was concerned that using AI for tasks would not engage their brain, and they might lose some of their SQL skills. And they want to use their brain at work. Read the rest of
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Spending Time in the Office
Voice of the DBA
I've visited a number of customers in the last few years who require most people to work in the office. Recently, I had the chance to go to Epic Systems, just outside Madison, WI, USA. They are a medical records software provider that was very reminiscent of Microsoft in some ways, and quite different in others. I published a blog with some pictures, so you can see how cool this office is in person. Epic has all their employees coming into the main office every day. They are flexible if you have needs, but the expectation is that employees go in every day. I believe this is also their policy,...
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What is the Cloud?
Voice of the DBA
Last week we had a training session at Redgate Software on the Cloud. One of the first slides from asked the question, "what is the cloud?" The next slide had the answer: it's just someone else's computer. I mean that's true, but it's not Grant's computer. He's got a creaky, 4 year old HP that I don't want running my workload. Read the rest of
info_outlineIt likely isn't a surprise to many of you that executives like AI. A survey shows that 74% of executives surveyed have greater confidence in AI-generated insights than advice from colleagues or friends. At the board level, even more (85%) favor AI-driven advice.
That's amazing to me, and while I might think this is a bit too much trust being placed in these GenAI LLMs, perhaps it's also partially because they work with too many people who aren't great at their jobs. Plenty of people skim through data or focus on certain things and might miss the details. While an AI can read and summarize a lot, it might not have the context we expect. I tend to be a bit skeptical of AI summaries, often because they don't necessarily weigh the different parts of an article the same way that I do.
Read the rest of The AI View From Above