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...
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Half of All Engineers
Voice of the DBA
The AI LLM boom seems to show no sign of slowing down. Each time I think we've reached some level of crazy use or predictions, things take another turn. I still find myself pinging back and forth between this will be amazingly good and horrifyingly bad. Sometimes on the same day. Read the rest of
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Local Agents
Voice of the DBA
Recently I saw , saying that someone could build a general purpose coding agent in 131 lines of Python code. That's a neat idea, though I'm not sure that this is better than just using Claude Code, especially as the agent still uses the online version of the Claude model from Anthropic to generate code or perform other tasks. There's a video in the article showing how this code can be used to perform some quick tasks on a computer. However, the code isn't specific to Anthropic. It can be used with any LLM, and I started doing just that, with a copy of the code from the article, but...
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Every Database Has Problems
Voice of the DBA
Every database platform has some strengths and weaknesses. Some more than others. I caught from , and it made my day. I was having a tough one when this site got me to smile and chuckle out loud a few times. I especially like the MySQL and SQL Lite links (again NSFW). Every platform that you might choose to use to back an application can work in many situations. Certainly scale and load are factors to consider, but for the major relational database platforms, most will work fine for many applications. Some might work better than others, but there are always tradeoffs. There are pros and cons....
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The New OS Wars
Voice of the DBA
In the last year I've seen a lot of statements about data and sovereignty between countries. While there have been concerns in the past, there seems to be more worry around the world with AI services primarily being run by, and hosted by, US companies. Plenty of my customers at have concerns over our ability to see data when we run AI models, though we don't store the data. Once the session ends, Recently I saw a piece about , specifically the Windows OS from Microsoft. They are looking to move to their own version of Linux, as well as a number of open source software packages. This quote...
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Working Better Under Pressure
Voice of the DBA
One of my colleagues wrote , about how a DBA's pushback on bad code isn't to be difficult, it's because they can see the future. I never thought of myself as a modern-day , predicting the future of system performance. Apparently I had another title besides DBA. Working under pressure and with short deadlines often leads to short cuts. I've made them. I've implemented quick hot fixes. I've forgotten to port changes back to development databases. I've increased our tech debt load, just to solve a more immediate problem. Read the rest of
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Who is Irresponsible?
Voice of the DBA
There was about an engineer using Claude and ChatGPT to build a feature. I am not sure how true these posts are or if they are designed to just create engagement, but it's still an interesting topic. The part that makes me think is that (supposedly) the engineer was fired because their "data" (code) was sent to American servers. The code was then deleted and the feature will be built without AI. First, read some of the responses before you form an opinion. There are some funny ones in there. There are a few I think are overblown and silly, and I skim past them. Someone is always more upset...
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Poor Names
Voice of the DBA
It's always interesting to me when I give product feedback to engineers at Redgate on their demos. Quite often they've built a feature that uses AdventureWorks or Pagila (PostgreSQL) or some other well known schema to evaluate how their particular thing works with a database. I try to remind them that many databases aren't well modeled and designed with consistent naming. I ran across that isn't showcasing databases, but it does show some poor naming in data being stored in a PDF. The developer who had to automate a process had to map these fields to database fields, which also might not be...
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Acting with Confidence
Voice of the DBA
Recently, I saw a graph about making decisions that showed the impact of both reversibility and consequences. and how one might approach decisions. If things are easily reversible or have a low consequence, we tend to make a decision and move on. Or we are willing to make a decision. One of the examples of such a decision was choosing what to wear out to dinner. It's easy to change, and (in general) of little consequence. Choosing to send a large amount of money to someone through Venmo (or some other mechanism), can be hard to reverse and have substantial consequences. This made me think of...
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Barely Reviewed Code
Voice of the DBA
Years ago I was giving a talk on software development and asked the audience how long it takes to review a PR that has 10 lines changed. Answers were in the minutes to tens of minutes range. I then asked how long it takes to review a PR that has 1,000 lines changed. Some people said hours, but a few people said seconds. I've often taken the latter, pessimistic view. Not because I don't think engineers want to do a good job, but because I know human behavior. Most humans will get bored, lose focus, and end up skimming through a large amount of code. Many (most?) people don't want to spend all...
info_outlineThe AI LLM boom seems to show no sign of slowing down. Each time I think we've reached some level of crazy use or predictions, things take another turn. I still find myself pinging back and forth between this will be amazingly good and horrifyingly bad.
Sometimes on the same day.
Read the rest of Half of All Engineers