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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

02:34

The North Star for the Year

Voice of the DBA ·

2026/01/02

It's the beginning of the year, and some of you likely have today off. But plenty of you are at work, moving slowly through this Friday at the start of the year—handling busywork, catching up on maintenance you've let slide, or preparing for the tasks you know will start coming Monday. At Redgate, most engineering teams work toward a North Star goal: a high-level direction that guides your various tasks. Perhaps it's growing a customer base or achieving an overarching product specification. For

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02:57

Finding Motivation

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/12/31

I ran across a tweet (are they still tweets?) on X/Twitter that was titled: how to ruin yourself. It had these items, which seem to be coming from a young person. Either a student or in their first job. Stay on your phone all day. Feel sad for no clear reason. Stop eating well and ignore your studies. Sleep super late and wake up in the afternoon. Let sadness take over everything. Always look at others' lives and feel yours isn't enough. Keep blaming yourself for the past but never try to let it

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02:18

The Side Job

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/12/29

Most of you reading this are likely technology professionals of some sort. You might be a software developer in C# or a DBA or a manager of those teams. Maybe you're an analyst working with data and reporting. You have made this a career choice and (hopefully) are growing and learning more about your craft. I also expect that you want to continue working in the area you are now, or maybe want to move into a related area. Maybe a report writer wants to move into more warehousing/lake housing. Maybe a

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03:30

Your Value from a Conference

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/12/19

The PASS Data Community Summit 2025 was held in Seattle last month, and it was an interesting event for me. I wrote a wrap-up on my blog, but a few things stood out. The event was a little smaller, with over 50% first-time attendees, but seemed to be a bit more vibrant. Perhaps people coming for the first time added something that I hadn't expected. I was a bit over-committed, so I didn't spend a lot of time in the public spaces, but things felt a little different the few times I was in the expo

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03:51

The Challenge of AI

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/12/17

In his book, The Coming Wave, the CEO of Microsoft AI laid out the risks of AI tech bluntly. "These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence. They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor-replacing," he wrote. Suleyman advocated for regulatory oversight and other government interventions, such as new taxes on autonomous systems and a universal basic income to prevent a socioeconomic

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02:53

Refactoring SQL Code

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/12/12

One of the things I see software developers often talking about is how they refactor code. As they touch a class, method, etc., they may take the time to refactor the code to make it cleaner, perform better, or just add some documentation. It seems that a regular part of a software developer's job is refactoring code in the codebase. That is unless they see a "don't touch this, no idea how it works" comment. There are plenty of those, and often everyone leaves that code alone. Read the rest of

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04:59

Investing for AI

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/12/10

The GenAI boom is growing like crazy. From hype to disasters to successes to investment to the embedding of GenAI tech into lots of products, it seems no one gets away from AI. My wife, kids, friends, they all talk about AI and alternately give me stories of huge successes or epic failures. Even those who just scroll through reels aren't immune as we see amazing things, but we can't trust them because of AI. Who knows what image/video/audio was actually recorded and what was generated. Like many of

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03:03

Your Security Checkup

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/12/08

Recently I saw an article on Simple Talk, 15 Practical Tips for Securing SQL Server, and I thought that many of these are fairly simple things. Turn off unused features, disable sa, etc. These are things that a lot of people probably ensure are in their SQL Servers builds. Though, I'm sure a lot of people don't bother. Read the rest of Your Security Checkup

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03:31

How Important Are Real Time Decisions?

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/12/05

Imagine a perfect world? I have an AI agent that knows my business well. It's getting real time input from sales, from customers, it makes amazing decisions. We get a large order? We need to ramp up production of our widgets. We have an order pipeline of xx widgets and we know over time that yy% will close. Let's place a larger order with a supplier overseas. The next day, we have an election and tariffs are announced on imported parts. We react immediately, cancel the order, start the process to

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02:27

SQL Server Licensing is Simple

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/12/03

Over the years I've had no shortage of licensing questions for SQL Server. At times it's felt a little crazy. Look at the licensing guide. Choose EE or SE and the number of cores. Then check if you're using VMs. Oh, and consider the cloud, and which cloud you're running a workload on. It's simple right? It can seem confusing, and at times I've wished Microsoft would make it simpler. And perhaps even give us some add-ons, like adding some additional hardware capabilities (cough more RAM *cough) in

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03:59

Don't Let Corner Cases Drive Your Design

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/12/01

If you graph computer/query cost against the size of data, you can get four quadrants: small data, small compute (most CRUD app queries) small data, big compute (complex BI queries for this quarter, most reporting) big data, small compute (logs, audit data) big data, big compute (complex BI queries across all our data) Read the rest of Don't Let Corner Cases Drive Your Design

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02:39

What's Your Theme Music?

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/11/28

A few weeks ago, I was at the Small Data SF 2025 Conference in San Francisco. I attended the inaugural event last year and decided to go back again. It's a great chance to hear people thinking about data and its impact on the world in a different way, recognizing that building lager and larger systems isn't always possible. Or a good idea. We might find that smaller systems fit well, especially smaller datasets, which can both serve our purposes and create agility. The manifesto of the conference

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02:23

Done is Better than Good

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/11/26

Mary Spender is a musician in the UK who I follow and hope to see live one day. She works hard producing content about music, that business, and, of course, songs. Recently she had a little essay on Instagram where talked about creative time and focus. In it she referenced Elizabeth Gilbert saying "done is better than good." My initial reaction was "that's right." Read the rest of Done is Better than Good

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03:15

Is Data Modeling Common?

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/11/24

Recently, I had a few questions on database modeling. One was posted in the SQL Server Central forums, and a customer asked about ERD tooling on the same day. This came shortly after Redgate acquired Vertabelo (now Redgate Data Modeler). This stood out to me as very rarely in the last few years have I found people consulting and updating a diagram while performing database development. When I started as a developer and needed to update a database, I had to first update a diagram that was stored in

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02:51

An Unexciting Exciting Release

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/11/21

SQL Server 2025 was released this week. The announcement came at Ignite and the PASS Data Community Summit with keynotes on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively. While there are some things to look forward to in the release (What's New) and some highlights from T-SQL Tuesday this week, it seems that this release wasn't a very exciting one. On one hand, I blame all the Microsoft Fabric focus, which seems to distract from the core product that powers the databases at many organizations. The SQL

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04:18

Don't Create Workslop

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/11/17

I remember a time before email. Some of my first jobs were mostly based on paper being moved from person to person. I'm sure some of you remember these envelopes being used to communicate between individuals in an organization. I used those to send and get memorandums from others before we implemented email. Fortunately, our email implementation (cc:Mail) came soon after I started working in corporations. Initially, people treated email much like paper mail inside organizations. However, over time,

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03:09

Being Mindful of Design Time

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/11/14

Over the last few years, I've worked a lot with various customers on finding better ways to build database software, often using the principles of DevOps to drive the change. A lot of managers and leads want to see a smoother process to help their teams become more efficient. DBAs often want less overhead and friction in the process, while developers just want to deliver code. In many cases, however, what lots of management wants is speed, and they're looking for ways to increase their current speed

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02:54

Internal Staff Growth

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/11/12

Imagine that you are about to tackle a new project that will take more than a year. This might be a new system, perhaps a cloud migration, or maybe it's rewriting something that doesn't work well. You don't have enough employees to undertake the project without overloading everyone. Your team needs to grow. Would you rather hire a more senior person from outside the organization or pick a junior person that's already inside your company and teach them what they need to know? Think about this as if

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03:33

Do You Really Need HA?

Voice of the DBA ·

2025/11/10

I ran across a thought-provoking post from Chrissy LeMaire asking if we should reconsider SQL Server HA. The post actually asks if you've considered not using it. The default from Chrissy, for most installations, is to use standalone SQL Servers. This isn't to say she's against HA solutions (FCIs or AGs), but that they often cause problems and might not be needed. It's an interesting position to consider. For a long time, I avoided SQL Server clusters as they were hard to setup with a lot of

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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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314 results

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