Voice of the DBA

Steve Jones

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.

  1. 2h ago

    Security and AI Fail

    The AI boom is still growing like crazy. Many organizations are trying to learn how they can use AI to improve operations and become more efficient, at a reasonable cost. Plenty of companies are spending crazy amounts of AI tokens, sometimes blowing their yearly budgets in months and not necessarily receiving substantial value back. Some companies are trying to train AIs to understand their operations and perhaps reduce their other costs, primarily labor. Still others are tip-toeing in the waters of AI LLM use and conducting smaller experiments, with limited access to AI technology. Meta has been a company on the forefront of trying to train AI based on the work employees already perform. There has been plenty of concern that their efforts are designed to lower headcount and replace humans with AI agents. That might or might not work, though I don't expect a lot of organizations to do this. It's likely harder than any of the hype suggests, and most organizations have much more complex types of operations than Meta. Read the rest of Security and AI Fail

  2. 2h ago ·  Bonus

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  3. 2d ago

    Forward Deployed Engineers

    I recently recorded a session with Ken Muse and a Redgate Flyway Solution Engineer. It was a fun session using GitHub and AI, and better managing the code in an automated fashion to bring some determinism to AI coding. I'm hoping it will be released soon, and you can see a vision of how you can better wrangle your AI agents and reduce risk and increase reliability. When we started our discussion, Ken noted that he is an AI forward deployed engineer for GitHub. His job is to work with teams in how to use agentic coding. When we were first prepping, I had never heard the Forward Deployed Engineer title, which is apparently getting popular. It was in an issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Deep Dives last year, and I must have missed that issue. Apparently, this is a role that works part of the time with customer teams and part of the time with product or engineering teams. In other words, a software engineer with a new title who gets paid more than a software engineer. Read the rest of Forward Deployed Engineers

  4. 5d ago

    I Can't Make You Learn

    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, concerns about politics or sports or exercise or diet or just about anything in the world. We all have things that take mental energy in our lives. How/why/when should I add another thing to the list? Read the rest of I Can't Make You Learn

  5. Jul 7

    A Quick Second Opinion

    I saw this article and thought, surely there's nothing I could use in here: 10 Best AI Prompts for Everyday Tasks. 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 A Quick Second Opinion

  6. Jul 2

    Independence Day 2026

    Tomorrow is the United States 250th Independence Day 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 Independence Day.

  7. Jun 30

    Cognitive Coverage

    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. The interview from Hard Fork Live covers the future of work and comfort in this new age. This reminds me of a book that the CEO of Redgate recommended, Reshuffle. 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 now. As with anything, lots of us will be in the middle with some changes, some status quo. That's certainly where I am with AI assistance. Read the rest of Cognitive Coverage

  8. Jun 28

    SQL Server Still Wins

    Is it worth continuing to run SQL Server when PostgreSQL licensing is zero? Rebecca Lewis has a well written post on why 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 worry about stability, so maybe this is a wish that isn't really a great idea. Read the rest of SQL Server Still Wins

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4.9
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Steve Jones
  • Years Active
    2007 - 2026
  • Episodes
    101
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2020 Steve Jones
  • Show Website
    Voice of the DBA

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