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. −2 d

    I Want to Use My Brain

    I had a very interesting conversation recently with a longtime DBA who was worried about using AI in their database work. The Redgate State of the Database Landscape 2026 report showed that the vast majority of you (99%) are getting value from AI, so clearly it's being used. However, this individual was concerned that using AI for tasks would not engage their brain, and they might lose some of their SQL skills. And they want to use their brain at work. Read the rest of I Want to Use My Brain

    3 min

  2. −4 d

    Spending Time in the Office

    I've visited a number of customers in the last few years who require most people to work in the office. Recently, I had the chance to go to Epic Systems, just outside Madison, WI, USA. They are a medical records software provider that was very reminiscent of Microsoft in some ways, and quite different in others. I published a blog with some pictures, so you can see how cool this office is in person. Epic has all their employees coming into the main office every day. They are flexible if you have needs, but the expectation is that employees go in every day. I believe this is also their policy, and culture, in various offices around the world. Read the rest of Spending Time in the Office

    3 min

  3. −6 d

    What is the Cloud?

    Last week we had a training session at Redgate Software on the Cloud. One of the first slides from John Q Martin asked the question, "what is the cloud?" The next slide had the answer: it's just someone else's computer. I mean that's true, but it's not Grant's computer. He's got a creaky, 4 year old HP that I don't want running my workload. Read the rest of What is the Cloud?

    3 min

  4. 18 juni

    Changes, Happiness, and a Few Tears

    Change is inevitable for most of us. The jobs we hold, the places we work, the people we know, even our families grow and change over time. As I get older and live longer, I've learned to accept, appreciate, and flow with changes. I might resist, delay, embrace, or anticipate tomorrow, knowing there is always a positive and negative side to things. This week, one of my colleagues retired. Annabel has been a part of Redgate nearly as long as I have, and we've worked together for many years. If you've ever attended a Redgate event, live or online, she likely had a part to play in the planning, organizing, execution, financing, and every other part of the process. Read the rest of Changes, Happiness, and a Few Tears

    4 min

  5. 16 juni

    Follow Your Hunch

    For a while, I kept seeing that the cost of writing code was approaching zero. So many people felt that with an AI LLM, the costs would go way down to produce software. I'm not sure that's true. In fact, some companies are finding they spend more on AI tokens than salaries. However, the ability to produce more code, experiment with ideas, or generate proof of concepts has gone up. Whether it's worth the cost or not depends on the engineer, but some organizations are finding that they can try more things than they would ever had time to try in the past. The time of engineers was the constraint, and if you can afford the cost, AI LLMs can relieve that time pressure. Read the rest of Follow Your Hunch

    2 min

  6. 14 juni

    The Slow Growing Problems

    Both as a DBA and developer, I've had plenty of immediate, this-is-broken, fix-it-quickly issues. Usually, I, or someone else, wrote some bad code and somehow got it deployed. I mean, I do test things, and I would (probably) never change code after I'd tested it to fix that one little annoying thing, like the formatting. I'd (almost) never do that, and I'm sure you wouldn't either. Yet somehow bugs slip in at times. Those are the acute issues, and they can be hard to fix at times, but often we can reproduce the problem in development and build a fix. Sometimes we even spot the issue quickly and just fix it in production. I'm sure you never do that, but I have had that experience myself a few times. Read the rest of The Slow Growing Problems

    3 min

  7. 7 juni

    Would You Retire Rather Than ...

    Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of C++. I read a few of his books and alternately loved what he'd done and hated having to write C++ code in university and at a few jobs. I found it tedious and hard, though arguably better than C once you had a decent set of classes structured. BTW, I love his website, the basic text view of the world, which is how I have built a few sites on my own. I caught an interview with him and this short response on AI and coding. He had this quote: "Senior developers are already retiring rather than deal with it." He doesn't love the results from AI, which is fine. And it's not what I want to talk about today. Read the rest of Would You Retire Rather Than ...

    3 min

  8. 4 juni

    The Data Model Matters

    I ran across a statement that seems exciting to me as someone that has written a lot of code in their career. It said: "Many of the "modern" software practices of the last decade were early adaptations to this shift, even if we didn't articulate them that way. Immutable infrastructure. Stateless services. Containers. Blue-green deployments. Infrastructure as code. These ideas all share a common premise: never fix a running thing. Replace it." These are a few sentences in this piece on the death and rebirth of programming. That's how a lot of software developers have viewed the world during the last decade and we've seen a lot of software advances in that time. The very successful developers and teams, who often speak at conferences and publish papers have adopted many of these practices. Serverless, containers, lots of tests allowing continuous deployment of new objects into complex environments that scale to levels many of us never thought possible. These are the very high performances talked about in the State of DevOps report every year. Read the rest of The Data Model Matters

    3 min
Visa alla (100)

Om

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

  • Skapad av
    Steve Jones
  • Aktiva år
    2007 - 2026
  • Avsnitt
    100
  • Åldersgräns
    Barnvänligt
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2020 Steve Jones
  • Programmets webbplats
    Voice of the DBA

Du kanske också gillar