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PODCAST

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.

technology tech news

All Episodes

02:47

The Improvement Limit

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/10/12

I caught a short post from Gary Bargsley on LinkedIn that had this quote: "Many people do not believe this is true. If there isn't a fire to put out, then you are not doing a good job." He included a repost from Shaik Ashraf with that quote and an image that explains better what things a DBA is doing because they aren't always busy. I would say that by busy we think of a DBA as rushed and always trying to fix something that isn't working well. I've certainly walked into operational positions where

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02:49

Cleaning Up the Cloud

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/10/02

Recently, I got a bill from Azure. That's not an unusual thing for many of you, but for me it was a surprise because it said I was late paying. I've had a number of services running, and I thought at first that I had left something running too long, like a VM. As I checked, most of the things were paused, even the expensive ones like a Synapse workspace. Instead, I found that my free credits were not being applied. Fortunately, I had changed credit cards or I might have been billed for a few months

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03:25

PRs Are Like Trouble Tickets

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/30

I've spent quite a bit of my career as a DBA/sysadmin/Operations person. However, I've had my share of development positions as well. As I work with customers who look to mature their database development to be more like other software development, I've noticed that PRs sometimes don't get handled as smoothly as we might like. In some sense, they are like help desk trouble tickets that never get closed. One of the first things I caution people about is specifying specific reviewers, especially DBAs

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04:19

Chosing an AI Model in Sept 2025

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/28

Some of you out there are positive about AI and looking to use them. Some of you aren't too thrilled with the tools and might avoid using them. I think that not learning to harness the power of an AI is a mistake. This technology is going to change the world in many ways and you need to learn how it can help you. You also should learn where the sharp edges are as there are some very, very sharp edges. Read the rest of Choosing an AI in Sept 2025

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03:21

Don't Forget About Financial Skills

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/25

I get a regular email from Quora, with questions that I might be able to answer or might be of interest to me. There are some database questions, some Tesla ones, and others, but recently I caught an interesting one that asked: why are most people broke? To be fair, there are a lot of questions that appear to be trolling, not people seeking answers, but this one caught my eye. This isn't very data-related, but it is a bit of advice from someone who is getting older. As I look towards retirement in

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03:59

Getting More Time from AI

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/23

As I get older, I find that time is the most valuable commodity I have. It's the one thing that I need more of, but I can't get it. Even if I find more efficient ways of doing things, it seems there's an endless list of things at work and on the ranch that need to be done. It seems to be the same for most of my friends in other jobs, whether in medicine, law, or any other position; they're often overloaded with more work than they can get done in a week. Arguably, it's not all important work, as

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04:36

All the Costs of Downtime

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/21

I studied economics in university, which isn't that close to database work, though I did have to work through linear regression problems by hand. I always enjoyed mathematics, so this wasn't a hardship. Until I purchased a PC that was capable of letting me do graphs and calculations in PASCAL and BASIC. Then I realized that my enjoyment wasn't that efficient or useful, and a computer could help me get things done way more efficiently. Many of us work on systems that process tremendous amounts of

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02:40

Remembering Phil Factor

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/18

One of the most prolific and popular authors at Simple Talk has been Phil Factor. He wrote many pieces on all aspects of database work and has probably written more articles on the Redgate Product Learning site than anyone else. He has entertained, informed, and inspired many database professionals in his many years as an author. Phil, aka Andrew, passed away recently. This was a shock to many of us and a sad day. Tony Davis introduced me to Phil, whom I always thought of as Andrew, many years ago

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03:09

Pushing the Limits of AGs

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/16

Many of you reading this likely have an Availability Group (AG) set up on at least one database in your organization. Maybe not most, but many of you as this has proven to be a technology that many people like for HA/DR, upgrades, and probably other uses. As the technology has evolved from it's SQL Server 2012 debut, it has improved in many ways. This might be one of the few features that has received regular attention from the developers in Redmond across multiple versions. That's not to imply this

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02:52

AI Steals Joy

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/14

Take a moment and think about how much work you do each day. If you write code, how much time do you actually spend writing code around meetings, admin work, and other tasks. If you manage systems and develop scripts, how often do you get to work on a script, change it, upgrade it, or add a new feature? I bet it's a minority of time for most of you. Studies show that many developers spend only an hour or two writing code each day. I would guess it's lower for sysadmins or DBAs who incorporate coding

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04:05

The Security of Old Tech

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/11

There has been a lot of news about air traffic problems in the US in 2025. I haven't had any delays due to this, though I've gotten a few messages in my travels that I might want to reschedule. There was an article that some of the technology still used in various facilities is old and needs upgrading. Old as in Windows 95 and floppy disks. That's old, but obviously it still works. Even with the various accounts of problems, almost every day thousands of flights are managed successfully by the

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02:50

Password Guidance

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/09

I remember working at a large organization with a team of other IT Operations staffers. We rotated this one job every month amongst a few people, each taking turns, where we'd lose a day to update all the privileged passwords for our servers. This was before Managed Service Accounts and the cloud, when we were required to change these every 30 days and then store the new ones in an encrypted store. What struck me when I got stuck with this wasn't the requirement to change every 30 days; that seemed

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03:38

Requiring Technical Debt Payments

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/07

I was working with a customer recently that is trying to improve their processes. This was a large company, over 100,000 employees, though most of them aren't in the technology area. However, across many divisions and groups, there are a lot of developers and operations personnel who have tended to work in silos, managing their own applications and systems in disparate ways. In other words, doing software development the way most companies do it. Read the rest of Requiring Technical Debt

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03:15

Guidelines and Requirements

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/04

I saw a post from Brent that Microsoft had changed the default memory guidance. At first glance I read this as they'd changed the default values, which would be interesting. However, this is a guideline, set to 75%. I also saw a few thoughts from Randolph West on LinkedIn, and quite a few comments. The comments were interesting in a few ways. It is easy to look at 75% and say that won't work for this server that's on my mind right now because I keep getting woken up. That might be true. However, the

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03:07

Concerns over AI Chat Privacy

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/09/02

One of the major concerns for using GenAI tools is who is reading the data you submit as a prompt, and will this data be used in future training of the model? In other words, could someone using a future model access the data I put in a GenAI chat? It's a valid concern, and not just because of the vendors. There is a lawsuit over the use of data by OpenAI, and a court has ordered all chats to be retained, including deleted ones. Since this is a lawsuit, there is always a chance that some of the data

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03:11

Data Sovereignty in the Cloud

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/08/28

I remember the court case years ago when the US government wanted to access data in Azure that was physically stored in Ireland. I wrote lightly about this and linked to the article back in 2020. This has typically been more of a concern for the EU (and other countries) than the US, but I'm sure there are organizations in the US that use the cloud and don't want their data accessed by other countries' governments. Recently, a Microsoft executive was asked about this in the French Senate. The

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03:26

Ghostworkers

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/08/26

Ghostworking is pretending to be busy at work. According to this article, it's on the rise with a number of people looking for other remote opportunities at other organizations. Some employees might be just wasting time at the office, though I suspect there is a minority that are actually working at another (second) job. Maybe they are growing a side hustle or maybe they've even accepted another job, and they're spending part of there day on those tasks. This might be part of the reason that many

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03:14

Your Favorite Improvement

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/08/21

SQL Server 2025 is out in preview form. CTP 2.0 is available for you to test, and there are quite a few changes that have been added to the platform. Some of these are already in the cloud, but this is your chance to test them in your environment. This is version 17.x, though I don't know we've really had 17 versions to work with. In any case, there have been a lot of versions in my career. I've connected to and worked on all of these: 4.2, 6.0, 6.5, 7.0, 2000, 2005, 2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2014, 2016,

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03:45

Can You Ask for a Raise?

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/08/19

I mean, you can ask for a raise. It's always an option, but is now the time to ask for a raise in this economic climate, where businesses can be unsettled and there are a lot of tech workers looking for jobs. I even saw a piece that noted many computer science graduates are struggling to get hired at the top tech firms. While that's not where most people work, it seems that often other CIOs/CTOs look to the big tech firms for guidance, and they may choose to hire fewer new staffers as well. This is

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03:24

The Next Great Thing

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/08/17

At SQL Bits, I was chatting with Brent about a few things, including AI, which we think is changing the world. I've got my set of AI experiments going, and I do believe we will fundamentally alter work and how we use computers in the future. Not sure if it's for the better or worse, but things are changing and will change more. Read the rest of The Next Great Thing

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