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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

03:07

Poor Name Choice

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/11/07

I wrote recently about some work with Redgate Clone, and one of the things I did was start up a blank container instance of SQL Server from the image named empty-sql-current. This image contains SQL Server 2019. Clearly, "current" was a poor choice. I see this often in various places, where someone will reference "current", "new", "latest", or some other term that denotes the most recent changes. If everyone reading the reference is doing so with knowledge of the past and at a time close to

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04:07

Data > Hype

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/11/04

There is a ton of hype now about using GenAI for various tasks, especially for technical workers. There are lots of executives who would like to use AI to reduce their cost of labor, whether that's getting more out of their existing staff or perhaps even reducing staff. Salesforce famously noted they weren't hiring software engineers in 2025. I'm not sure they let engineers go, but it seems they did let support people go. For many technical people, we know the hype of a GenAI agent writing code is

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02:45

Practice Until You Don't Get It Wrong

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/11/02

I wrote recently about a bad first day for an intern. He/she was fired, without cause in my opinion, when a production database was damaged while following a document for developer setup. The situation felt like a mistake, and one that wasn't necessarily the fault of the individual. To me, this was extremely poor handling of the situation from a CTO. In the discussion for the piece, someone pointed out that it might not just be a new employee who makes a mistake that causes downtime. Certainly, an

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03:10

The Selfish Case for Learning AI

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/10/30

I ran across this article on a survey about AI usage recently. The headline is this: 55% of businesses admit wrong decisions in making employees redundant when bringing AI into the workforce. That sounds a little ominous for those making these decisions, and a lot of you might be saying, "I could have told you that. Using AI to replace people is a bad decision." On the surface, I agree. I dislike the idea that companies will opt for a semi-competent AI bot or agent to replace people, thereby further

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03:40

Reducing Cloud Cost

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/10/28

Cloud costs are high and growing. Some orgs think they're out of control and are trying to limit spend. Some orgs are looking to leave the cloud. A lot of IT spend over the years has been seen as a cost center, with many executives trying to limit the growth or spend, even while they aim for digital transformations of their businesses. Throughout my career, it's been interesting seeing the tension of groups trying to take advantage of technology and the finance departments trying to manage costs

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03:03

DevOps is DevOps

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/10/26

DevOps can mean a lot of things, but I find in practice that this results in a team using Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment/Delivery using automation to check and evaluate your software in some way. This should result in quicker delivery of updates and changes to customers, better agility, and higher quality of code. That last one only comes if you use testing and try to ensure your code is well-written. It's easy to just use DevOps to throw out more poorly written code that doesn't

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02:45

Can/Can't Do/Don't

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/10/23

The other day, I asked my daughter if she wanted me to make her some eggs. She responded with a "Yes!" in text and came to sit up at the counter while I cooked for us both. We chatted a bit, and at one point she said, "Thanks for cooking, but it's not that I can't cook." I laughed a bit and responded with "this isn't a can/can't situation, it's a do/don't or will/won't one." I know my girl can cook; I made sure all my kids learned how to cook. It's that they often choose not to, hunting for

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03:33

Be Wary of Data

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/10/21

I fly a lot, as you might have guessed if you read my blog regularly. In 2025, I've been on 56 United planes as I write this, with about 10 left to go before the end of the year. One of the things United does is sometimes send out a quick "survey" after a flight, checking to see if everything went smoothly. I don't always fill these out, but recently I decided to give some feedback as I had a great experience. I really wanted to just complement the onboard crew, but the survey was quite a few pages

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03:07

The Journey to PostgreSQL (or anything)

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/10/16

Most of you reading this work in technology, and I assume that you've had to learn something new on the job. Technology is constantly evolving, even on our existing platforms. On top of that, we are regularly given tasks that are outside of our current skill sets. Maybe not far outside, but to meet the changing demands of our jobs, we need to learn new things. I ran across an interesting post (on a new site) from Brent Ozar. I think that guy writes as much as me, but he wrote this one: Why I Started

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03:08

We Should Demand Better

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/10/14

I ran across an interesting open letter. Most of these are from individuals, often complaining or lamenting on the way something in the world works, or maybe doesn't work. This latest letter was from the Chief InfoSec Officer at JPMorganChase, a large worldwide bank. This open letter was written to the software suppliers looking to do business with JPMorganChase, especially those in the SaaS area (Software as a Service). The letter opens by noting that SaaS is enabling cyber attackers and asks for

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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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295 results

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