Voice of the DBA
A series of episodes that look at databases and the world from a data professional's viewpoint. Written and recorded by Steve Jones, editor of SQLServerCentral and The Voice of the DBA.
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Today's AI
10/04/2026
Today's AI
"This is the worst version of the car you'll own." That was a quote from the delivery manager when my wife and I picked up our Lucid Gravity. He said that since the car is very software-oriented and gets regular over-the-air updates, the car keeps improving. The car I bought is the worst version because it keeps getting better. His experience over the last few years with the company has shown that the changes made in software result in customers growing more fond of their vehicles. Or maybe they're less annoyed by things that don't work well. Ah, the joys of software. Read the rest of
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Development Is Fun
10/01/2026
Development Is Fun
I was listening to about high-performance code, which I found really interesting. I'm actually considering going through his and (re)learning some assembly. I never thought I'd even consider doing that. I learned Assembly in high school and university, and I didn't enjoy it. Casey is a game programmer, and there was a question in the interview about how he uses AI tools in his work. " was not the answer I expected. Perhaps even more interesting was the rest of the answer. Casey loves programming and wants to enjoy what he does. He writes the code because he wants to do the work. If he didn't, he'd license some game engine or technology, not spend time getting an AI to do the work. Read the rest of
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You Need a DBA Pipeline
09/29/2026
You Need a DBA Pipeline
I work regularly with a number of customers on improving their database change processes. This has been the goal of over the years, helping database systems work more like application software with DevOps principles. The idea is to move quicker, respond better to demands, while providing safety and governance. A database is a stateful machine, which is a challenge to evolve and maintain, but with good data modeling, testing, code analysis, and automation, your database change process can coexist with your application software. That being said, most of the solutions for managing database change focus on the database itself and everything inside it. After all, that's where the data is. I understand people wanting to solve that problem, but there are plenty of things that need to be managed for a database server (or instance for MSSQL) outside of the database. We have security, configuration, and in the case of SQL Server, jobs. That might be the number one request is a way to manage jobs across systems. Read the rest of
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Smart AI Agents and Data Security
09/29/2026
Smart AI Agents and Data Security
I don't know if Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google have really spent a lot of time and effort on security around their models. I know they talk about it (, , ), but in practice, I'm not sure the researchers and testers are being as careful as the marketing and management of those companies want you to think. during a security test. and breached three organizations. , so perhaps this is the most powerful model, as it exceeded the "rule of three." In all these cases, the agents weren't doing anything amazing. These were acting the same as most malicious or bored human hackers who might find or guess credentials and take advantage of them. In some sense, this points to the generally poor state of security in the world. Read the rest of
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Designing for Teams
09/27/2026
Designing for Teams
Some years ago, I had to register for my medical benefits with Redgate. My employer had contracted with Anthem for health insurance, and I went to register myself. I found that not only could I not register myself, but there was already an account there with my tax number, and it was under my wife's account. Many years ago, she had health insurance with Anthem through another employer. Anthem kept her record, which includes my tax ID. So today, in 2026, I have to log into my Anthem account with her ID to see my plan. That's likely an older, legacy system, so we might understand that they didn't expect two people to be primary account holders over time, right? Well, we also have a more modern tax software system to deal with. Let's call the software "Chewit" to protect the reputation of the company. When we contracted with an accountant for services, they set up an account for me. However, my wife manages most of the money, so I asked them to add an account for her. Apparently, this "Chewit" business tax service only allows for one person in a household to have an account. This person has to manage the account, so now when my wife logs in with my account, I get a code, and I send it to her. If you think these are isolated, I have 3 or 4 other services that work like this, from well-known, global brands. Read the rest of
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Get Along
09/24/2026
Get Along
I enjoy listening to by Kenny Chesney periodically, often smiling to myself. I was reminded of this song recently while talking about careers and the AI impact during . On one hand, most of the people I surveyed or chatted with were using AI to accomplish some tasks. However, very few are using it in a way that would eliminate their positions or do the majority of their work. On the third hand, lots of them worry about their organizations attempting to get by with more AI and less humans in the future. Read the rest of
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Finely Tuned Models
09/22/2026
Finely Tuned Models
I have no idea if this is true, but says that used information they've collected for decades to fine tune and train a model. They started with one of the qwen models and then spent $40 million to add their knowledge to the model. The post says this model is comparable to the Gpt5.5 and Sonnet 5 models. They have used 10% of their data, which spans over 100 years. I have many questions. But first, $40mm? How many tokens is USD$40mm? A quick calculation is trillions of tokens, and while I'm sure there is some payback if lots of their customers use the model for work, there's also a compute cost every time they use the model. Perhaps they can fine-tune and train the model more efficiently over time, but I can't see many individual companies spending this effort on training their own model. Read the rest of
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Make It Routine
09/20/2026
Make It Routine
The first one is hard. The rest are boring. I hear this statement from someone recently and sounds like something a technical person would do with a task. It's often been a goal of mine, or maybe a direction to aim, that I want to make things easier with some script or automation. Sometimes I think it's more aspirational than actual. I might want to make most things routine and automated, but that doesn't always work out. Read the rest of
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Your Favorite Quotes
09/17/2026
Your Favorite Quotes
I love seeing thoughtful, pithy, witty quotes. A good saying can often spur me in some way. Maybe I'll stop and think about what the words mean. Perhaps I'll get inspired. Sometimes the quotes improve my day by making me smile. In any case, I was visiting a few months ago and they have a screensaver in one of the meeting rooms that displayed a number of quotes, along with some lovely backgrounds. I grabbed pictures of a number of them, but a few that stood our to me were these: Read the rest of
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I Don't Want To Do XX
09/10/2026
I Don't Want To Do XX
Every job is a job on some days. I've said this to my kids and others I've mentored over the years. I've probably written that here, and I truly believe it. When you work at a job, some days are bad days. There are always days you don't want to do the work. There are also likely some days that you dread starting. Whether you work for someone else or run your own business, there will be times you aren't completely in control of the work and wonder how you ended up in this situation. Even if you're self-employed, you have clients that sometimes dictate your day. Read the rest of
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The Cost of Multiple Platforms
09/08/2026
The Cost of Multiple Platforms
I ran into an interesting post that noted . The example might be that your "software" could use PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Clickhouse, and something NewSQL (Spanner, CockroachDB, etc,). Some of you might think that's not reality, but keep in mind that for a lot of your organizations, the "software" is what the customer uses. I'm sure my bank has multiple systems behind the mobile app I use to pay for things, move money, check balances, etc. I would guess there is some DB/2, SQL Server, and some analytics or No/NewSQL stuff in there. Hidden as different applications that make up the "app", but they are still in there from my perspective as a user of the app. No one intentionally designs software like this, but we still see it. They might not even have 5 or 6 platforms in their organization, but almost none of the customers I work with have less than 3. Somehow, somewhere, someone added a PostgreSQL server to an Oracle/SQL Server environment. MongoDB crept in when someone thought it was a better store than DB/2 or MySQL. An article written about how Facebook or Spotify or some other high tech company used Cassanda or Snowflake inspired a developer to add that to their toolbelt and build it into their application. Read the rest of
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The End of Summer
09/03/2026
The End of Summer
Growing up, this was the last week of summer for me every year. When I was a child in Virginia Beach, school started the day after Labor Day every year, which is next Monday in the US. This was our last chance to sleep in, enjoy the ocean, and stay out late without commitments. Starting next week we'd be back in school, up early, with homework to do every night. As an adult, the end of summer doesn't really stand out anymore. Corporate changes are usually at the beginning of the year or in July, so it's the end of June or December that are slower times. September is often the beginning of conference season for me, and I've usually been preparing for travel in September, as I am this year. I'll be in San Diego in a little over a week for ). Read the rest of
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Measuring Productivity
09/01/2026
Measuring Productivity
I've dealt with a lot of customers with who lately are concerned with the ROI of their teams. Certainly they want a good ROI if they purchase as do we. Our goal has been to be partners with customers and continue to add value to the products they've purchased on a regular basis. We release every week or two, and our and updates reflect this. New functionality, fixes, and previews. I'm proud of the constant updates we deliver, and I know customers get increased value throughout our partnership. Does our software provide a good ROI? I get asked this question by execs regularly, and I often ask them if they feel they get a good ROI from their staff already. Answers are mixed, especially in the database world where it seems the costs and the value delivered from database dev or ops groups can be nebulous. Databases support application software, and if that software doesn't work well because the database deployment scripts weren't correct, weren't tested, or have performance issues, who is at fault? Read the rest of
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Preserving Data
08/30/2026
Preserving Data
Most data professionals I know go out of their way to take care of the data entrusted to them. Most people ensure backups are running, lots (hopefully most) test their restores. A few will ensure a good rotation their data offsite. Some of you might have formal rotation schemes, and some might just keep a rolling list of xx backups available. Likely a few of you don't worry about anything other than the last full backup, which is a risker approach than I'd take. Read the rest of
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Collecting Data is Hard
08/27/2026
Collecting Data is Hard
Data is the lifeblood of much of the world today. Not necessarily big data, and certainly not perfect data, but organizations, individuals, governments, really everyone is making decisions based on data. You might think it's going to rain, so you cut the grass today, or maybe defer adding fertilizer. Your organization sees demand for a product, so it orders more and produces more. Government is always using data to make decisions. We might not think they make great decisions, but data matters. Recently I was reading a science fiction book () about the future, where a person's brain (Henry) becomes uploaded to manage a starship. This ship will travel light years away for 80 years and they need the human crew asleep in hibernation to survive the journey. The interesting thing, to me, was a part in the book where there is a discussion of why Henry was uploaded and why AIs aren't advanced enough to run the starship. There's this quote: "The first generations performed well, but as time went on, we entered a situation where more and more of the data available to train them on was itself machine-generated. So, instead of mimicking high-quality human output, the outputs got more garbled." Read the rest of
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Admin Rights for Everyone
08/25/2026
Admin Rights for Everyone
I was chatting with someone that works at a smaller organization Still a few hundred employees, but the technical teams (dev and ops) were less than 20 in total. They mentioned that everyone had admin rights to the systems as they worked as a team and sometimes developers provided production support. I haven't encountered that in quite some time. Is it still a thing to give a lot of people administrator writes across many systems? I know for many organizations there is concern about developers being able to change things in production, but if you aren't a public company or a regulated one, then , , , or other restrictions don't apply. In those cases, if you have a tight team that functions together, would you be worried about this? Read the rest of
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A Challenge of Our Knowledge
08/23/2026
A Challenge of Our Knowledge
AI is here to stay. It will evolve, it will get better at some things, and we might decide that it's not good for certain tasks. It's a weird, new, different technology that somehow seems magic, extremely intelligent, and at times as dumb as a box of rocks. It can do things that I could never do, or would never do, for myself. Heck, I'm not sure I could or would pay someone to do . Yet this was less than a minute for a computer system to take and transform it into something fun. Christian Buckley wrote an , which sums up nicely one of the struggles many of us have with AI. Many of us identify with our work. We spend most of our lives for decades toiling away at a craft that we (hopefully) enjoy and in which we have success. We build skills, and we're proud of our accomplishments. Some of us are more proud of our scars. Read the rest of
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An Eventual Consistency Scam
08/20/2026
An Eventual Consistency Scam
Recently I sold a car. It was an interesting process as I hadn't sold a car to someone I didn't know in a long time. I listed the car in a few places and was surprised by the interest. It was an EV (I guess it still is), and with the rising price of fuel in the US, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. I arranged a couple of showings, but I had quite a few people offer to buy the car after only seeing a few pictures, asking if I'd take a check. Some of you might be wary at this point, and I was. However, my wife had gotten similar offers from a few people when she was selling a horse. She never did, but we talked about where the scam is if someone sends a check and says they'll wait for the funds to clear. Read the rest of
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Never is Not the Policy
08/18/2026
Never is Not the Policy
Years ago I worked with a few developers and DBAs that were temp-table happy. As in they defaulted to using temp tables everywhere. This was in SQL Server 6.5, and tempdb was an issue with contention, sizing, and performance. I rewrote so many queries to remove temp tables for our clients that I banned them. I told other developers they could never use temp tables in their SQL code. They, of course, would try to submit code with temp tables in our VCS (Visual SourceSafe at the time), but an early, pre-automated CI/CD would notify me and I'd have the developer rewrite their code. There were situations that didn't perform well with a single query, and we did allow some temp tables. The point wasn't the ban them entirely, but stop them from being a crutch for developers or a first choice. I wanted them to think about the problem first and try to solve it with SQL. If performance was an issue, then we'd look at a temp table. Read the rest of
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A Worse Computer; A Better Car
08/13/2026
A Worse Computer; A Better Car
A few weeks ago, my wife and I purchased for our second EV. We've owned a Tesla for almost five years, and it has been an amazing car. However, we decided that we spend a lot of time driving, and we wanted something a little more luxurious. The Tesla has a bit of a stiff ride, and it's not quite as lush a car as some others EVs that have come out since we bought our Model Y. After trying a few different brands, we were excited by the Lucid and decided to get one. Like the Tesla Model Y, this is really a computer on wheels. A lot of software and screens drive the vehicle, though it's not quite as minimalist as a Tesla vehicle. There are physical buttons and controls in various places, and more than one screen. Some things work better, and I like that. Read the rest of
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Building Great Software
08/11/2026
Building Great Software
Most of us will work on software for our organization, and we might not want to or care about the end result being great. We do want it to work, and we want clients to find it useful. If we have external customers using our systems, maybe we want it to be great. In most of my experience, people are often proud of their work, sometimes ashamed, but not many people spend a lot of time making their corporate applications great. Often because we don't have (or aren't allowed) the time to do so. Read the rest of
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Imagine the Physical World
08/09/2026
Imagine the Physical World
Brent Ozar has , where he tries to explain what work is done by SQL Server during certain operations, such as and . These show how the engine might need to read or update various pages as it tries to perform operations. Both experienced and novice SQL Server people might think that these are interesting, but not that useful. I think they're great. Read the rest of
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The Quiet Part
08/06/2026
The Quiet Part
Apparently, Meta did what a lot of employees suspect their management will do: use AI to lay off people. In this case, there is that Meta used it's AI-integrated HR platform to make decisions about who to let go in a layoff. The rumor is that the AI used productivity metrics to choose who was the target of the layoff. As with a lot of AI failures, this appears to be another case of poor communication guiding the AI, or the AI not actually taking individual situations into account. A number of the people terminated were on maternity/paternity leave, which is a protected activity. Others may have been on other medical leave, though for privacy reasons, the article doesn't have firm data to prove this. The lawsuit will likely bring more of this out, but this appears to be a case not just of AI making decisions, but of poor behavior from management. Plaintiffs were discouraged from taking leave off, which is something sh****y humans have said to people for decades. We need you; your baby or family isn't important, so don't use your leave. It's one aspect of working in the US that is way worse than overseas, where there are more employee protections. Read the rest of
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Are You Working More Hours?
08/04/2026
Are You Working More Hours?
Recently, I noticed my son was coming home later and going to work earlier. He typically works a 9/80 schedule as a software engineer, but at times he might work extra hours on a deadline. His company tries hard to keep employees working a set schedule without overtime. Unless there is a need, after all, this is software. However, when they are on a deadline, management warns people, and they try to manage overtime to reasonable levels to avoid burning out employees. I asked him if he was extra busy or if AI was encouraging extra hours. He told me this was a short-term project with a few more hours, but mostly the team was decompressing a bit after work. I completely understood that as I've spent my share of time with co-workers at theend ofday, sometimes sharing a drink or meal nearby, sometimes just chatting in the office or the parking lot. Read the rest of
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Finding Bad Queries
08/02/2026
Finding Bad Queries
was in July, hosted by Brent Ozar, and it was a great topic: In the age of AI, when lots of people will get queries written by others (people or AIs), how can you easily and quickly review code? Review is already a challenge in the software world, and I am sure it's going to be even more challenging as people let machines author more database code. Lots of you might hope that an AI agent will write better code than your average developer, but I don't know if I'd count on that. There is a ton of poor query examples on the Internet and that's where AI models are trained. You need some sort of feedback loop, good testing, and strong guidance if you want better query code. I think it's as likely as not that AIs will produce poor queries just like humans. Just faster. Read the rest of
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Fixing P1 Queries
07/30/2026
Fixing P1 Queries
When we look at the performance of software, we use to indicate the latency of an issue. A P95 problem is one that exceeds the time that 95% of the other queries take. In other words, this is the 5% slowest things happening, which can include database slowdowns that impact your application. For many years in software development, we have tended to work on the P95 or P90 issues, the slowest items. This is primarily because those can make a big difference to the system's performance. If I fix the slowest things, then the system feels faster. Certainly, I know lots of DBAs and developers will apply this logic to database queries. They focus on the slowest queries and tune them to improve the system. If most things are quicker, especially the things most users notice, then the system feels faster. Read the rest of
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Building Your Own Software
07/28/2026
Building Your Own Software
Lots of AI usage has been spent inside companies on building new software. Sometimes people are trying to rebuild existing software. I've seen more than a few articles say that , or , or some other SaaS isn't going to survive because people can vibe code their own replacement. I know a few people trying to do this, with very mixed success. I saw , where he noted that most products wouldn't exist if everyone were an entrepreneur. This is because the great products exist precisely because an entrepreneur had a great idea and followed it through. They made mistakes, they learned, and they spent a lot of time getting the product right. The coding was likely a part of this, but the mistakes, the changes of direction, the decisions on what to add or take away, those are time-consuming things not shortcut by AI. The coding isn't the big delay in lots of products. to the post notes this: there are many decisions that go into a product. Many people don't think about all those decisions. Read the rest of
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Make It Routine
07/26/2026
Make It Routine
The first one is hard. The rest are boring. I heard this statement from someone recently, and it sounds like something a technical person would do. It's been a goal of mine, or maybe a direction to aim for, though I sometimes think that goal is more aspirational than actual. It can be hard to do that for every task. The first time I tackle something, it should be hard. It's new work. It's a new process/code/thought/action/etc. It's unfamiliar, and I spend more time on it than I want. After that, I'd hope I could repeat the thing again in much less time. That's the goal, and that's what we aim for in a lot of DevOps work. Make the things we think are hard, less hard. Make them boring by codifying things, using automation, and have the computer replicate the task. Read the rest of
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Another Model, More Data Loss
07/23/2026
Another Model, More Data Loss
This past week I saw an article on eWeek that the newest OpenAI GPT-5.6 (Sol) model has deleted local files and live data. Files I'm less worried about, but data concerns me. There are lots of file backups, and certainly version control should be enabled for any developer tasks on which an AI works. However, data is harder, since it can change quickly, especially in live environments. There are different reports, some of which seem like more human error issues than the model's, but we should account for human error when we use models. In one report, a model had access to a live production database and cleared tables for integration tests. Database testing is hard, as I've learned over the years. Many developers don't think about how testing works with live data and how it is different from mocks and stubs. It is different, and if you use a lot of testing frameworks on live databases, you run the risk of there being issues. You could have data loss, and almost certainly will have some level of downtime disruption. Read the rest of
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What is CPU Usage?
07/21/2026
What is CPU Usage?
I had a request from a customer recently who asked if we could give them a report of their database server instances and include CPU usage. This request was filtered through an account executive, so something was lost in translation, but I was confused and asked for clarification, as asking for CPU usage is kind of like asking how fast you were traveling in your car. There needs to be more context. If someone asked you for a report of CPU usage for a database, what would you expect? How would you report this? I'm sure the person asking might make a difference. A fellow DBA, your DBA manager, or maybe an executive could all view this differently. I want to know how things are performing, if there is a trend, or maybe if we are getting value for the hardware we've provisioned, depending on my role. Read the rest of
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