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
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Changes, Happiness, and a Few Tears
Voice of the DBA
Change is inevitable for most of us. The jobs we hold, the places we work, the people we know, even our families grow and change over time. As I get older and live longer, I've learned to accept, appreciate, and flow with changes. I might resist, delay, embrace, or anticipate tomorrow, knowing there is always a positive and negative side to things. This week, one of my colleagues retired. Annabel has been a part of nearly as long as I have, and we've worked together for many years. If you've ever attended a , live or online, she likely had a part to play in the planning, organizing,...
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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_outlineYou 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 piece on how an AI agent deleted a production database. 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 PocketOS and the API vendor that allowed the AI agent to make the same type of mistake we've seen humans make. A mistake of not double checking, not verifying, not following the rules of getting a second set of eyes, even a second set of virtual eyes, on the code that could drop resources.
Read the rest of Limit the Blast Radius