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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JSON Has a Cost
Voice of the DBA
JSON seems to be everywhere these days. Many application developers like it across all sorts of languages, C#, JAVA, Python, and more. They use it for transferring information between systems, and are comfortable serializing hierarchical object data into JSON from text and de-serializing it back into its various elements. For those of us working in relational databases, JSON seems like a blob of information that isn't easily queried, indexed, or stored. We prefer working with a relational set of data, which brings us into conflict with software developers. We'd like them to convert their...
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An SSIS Upgrade
Voice of the DBA
I came across a post recently on the Microsoft Fabric blog about ..I hadn't heard much about SSIS in SQL Server 2025, so I thought this might provide some info on the investments that Microsoft is still making in Integration Services. I've run into a few people in the past year who are still heavily invested in SSIS and run packages daily. SSIS seems to be a technology that isn't even close to dying for many organizations. The blog starts well, delving into the security investments with the change to the SqlClient and TLS 1.3, as well as supporting Strict Encryption. I don't know many people...
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Where Your Value Separates You from Others
Voice of the DBA
I ran across a post that discusses (via ). The main point of the post is that there is a core skill that separates senior engineers from others, which is reducing ambiguity. When a senior engineer gets an ill-defined (or ill-communicated) request, they can deliver a solid, or even great, result. When someone says "performance is poor," what do you do with that? Can you build a plan to identify the issues and solve them? Or do you expect the customer to explain what is slow and why it's slow? What metrics do they have showing things are slow? A senior engineer can ask questions to find the...
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Your AI Successes
Voice of the DBA
Recently, I was discussing AI with a friend, and they asked me to name a great success of using AI to build software. I've tried a few things, and I've worked with customers who are using AI tech. However, most of the things I've seen built with AI are small tasks; they're utilities or quick wins that change a minor part of the software. The items tend to be tactical and focused in a narrow band of fixes, and they might save a programmer time, but I'm not seeing large-scale team improvements in productivity. Yet. Read the rest of
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Minimally Viable Security
Voice of the DBA
Security has been a constant concern for many IT professionals over the years. Many of us are trying to implement better security controls, and yet at the same time, we try to avoid anything that slows us down. Security clearly hasn't been a big enough concern, as we've had more than our share of SQL Injection issues. These often come about from poor practices, lack of education, and too many people not learning to adopt better habits across time. We've also had no shortage of , , and more over the years. While security (or cybersecurity) is listed as , they are quick to avoid slowing down any...
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The North Star for the Year
Voice of the DBA
It's the beginning of the year, and some of you likely have today off. But plenty of you are at work, moving slowly through this Friday at the start of the year—handling busywork, catching up on maintenance you've let slide, or preparing for the tasks you know will start coming Monday. At Redgate, most engineering teams work toward a North Star goal: a high-level direction that guides your various tasks. Perhaps it's growing a customer base or achieving an overarching product specification. For example (this is completely made up), one North Star might be achieving feature parity across all...
info_outlineI ran across a thought-provoking post from Chrissy LeMaire asking if we should reconsider SQL Server HA. The post actually asks if you've considered not using it. The default from Chrissy, for most installations, is to use standalone SQL Servers. This isn't to say she's against HA solutions (FCIs or AGs), but that they often cause problems and might not be needed.
It's an interesting position to consider. For a long time, I avoided SQL Server clusters as they were hard to setup with a lot of complexity, hardware requirements, etc., and didn't really provide enough benefits over using log shipping with a second server for me. These days I have clients with mostly AGs, and they seem to run fine. That being said, Chrissy notes that after she left a job, a network outages caused a bunch of downtime. I could see there being downtime, as the old database mirroring (and the it-will-never-die replication) needed a working network. If you have network issues, you better know how to manage your HA technology's issues.
Read the rest of Do You Really Need HA?