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. 2D AGO

    The North Star for the Year

    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 example (this is completely made up), one North Star might be achieving feature parity across all platforms for SQL Compare. Read the rest of The North Star for the Year

    3 min
  2. You Might Also Like: The Oprah Podcast

    2D AGO · BONUS

    You Might Also Like: The Oprah Podcast

    Introducing Oprah and Iyanla Vanzant on Daily Care for Your Spiritual Hygiene from The Oprah Podcast. Follow the show: The Oprah Podcast Oprah sits down with world-renowned spiritual teacher, bestselling author and “fixer" Iyanla Vanzant for a powerful, soul-shifting conversation about her newest book "Spiritual Hygiene: A Practical Path for Clean Living, for Inner Authority, and for Divine Freedom." In this intimate and deeply personal episode Iyanla explains the transformative concept of spiritual hygiene—the idea that just as we tend to our physical hygiene our mental, emotional and spiritual well-being also require conscious, daily care. Iyanla shares what she’s learned and how she’s healed from her own childhood trauma as well as losing two of her adult daughters, Gemmia in 2003 and Nisa in 2023. Oprah and Iyanla are joined by audience members who bravely ask how they can cleanse their spirits of the pain, heaviness and generational burdens they’ve carried throughout their lives. Together they explore how spiritual hygiene offers clarity, courage and a way forward. This episode is a moving invitation to let go and step into a more grounded, spiritually spacious life. BUY THE BOOK! https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Spiritual-Hygiene/Iyanla-Vanzant/9781668214121 00:00:00 - Welcome Iyanla Vanzant, author of ‘Spiritual Hygiene’  00:03:40 - Meaning of spiritual hygiene  00:04:15 - Iyanla’s backstory 00:11:08 - The power of grief  00:13:30 - Parenting with spiritual hygiene  00:14:00 - Iyanla says she was a horrible mother  00:15:25 - The distinction between wrong and bad  00:17:50 - The meaning of divine freedom 00:19:00 - Everything is energy  00:20:30 - Healing the pain of being a daddy-less daughter 00:30:20 - Create your own spiritual hygiene  00:33:15 - How to be expressive with family  00:37:40 - Reorder your story 00:38:10 - The life you signed up for  00:40:00 - Look at far you’ve come  00:41:40 - The guilt of choosing yourself  00:46:15 - Always choose yourself  00:48:02 - A sacred no and a spiritual yes  00:52:00 - Everything has a purpose Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: https://www.instagram.com/oprahpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/ Listen to the full podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLI https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices DISCLAIMER: Please note, this is an independent podcast episode not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in conjunction with the host podcast feed or any of its media entities. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of the creators and guests. For any concerns, please reach out to team@podroll.fm.

  3. 4D AGO

    Finding Motivation

    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 go. Compare your progress with people who started years before you. Get stuck imagining outcomes instead of creating them. Keep waiting for motivation instead of building discipline. What was interesting to me is I saw people doing similar things when I was younger. Either adults with careers or fellow students. I'd change "sad" to "anger", which I saw a lot in the 80s. Replace the phone with TV, as I saw lots of people start to invest a lot of time in TV with the growth of cable and 24-hour channels in the early 80s. Eating well was less of a thing, but drinking more was a thing. However, many people stagnated, or maybe ruined, themselves in similar ways. Read the rest of Finding Motivation

    3 min

  4. 6D AGO

    The Side Job

    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 DBA wants to be a Reliability Engineer. You have a career and you're working in that area. Read the rest of The Side Job

    2 min

  5. 12/19/2025

    Your Value from a Conference

    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 hall or the hallway track. I ran across a Reddit thread on the value of conferences, and it got me thinking. What is the value that you get from attending a conference (or an event). If your employer pays you might feel that you should bring some value back to them when you return. That's the premise of the thread, and I know there are plenty of people that feel that way. However. Should you value your time and effort any less? Read the rest of Your Value from a Conference

    4 min

  6. 12/17/2025

    The Challenge of AI

    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 collapse. This book was published before Suleyman joined Microsoft. Satya Nadella is more optimistic than his new deputy. In an interview at Microsoft headquarters, while sitting next to his human chief of staff, Nadella said that his Copilot assistants wouldn't replace his human assistant. As his chief of staff sat typing notes of the conversation on her tablet, Nadella acknowledged that AI will cause "hard displacement and changes in labor pools," including for Microsoft. Judson Althoff, Chief Commercial Officer, said that Nadella was pressuring his team to find ways to use AI to increase revenue without adding headcount. Read the rest of The Challenge of AI

    4 min

  7. 12/12/2025

    Refactoring SQL Code

    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 Refactoring SQL Code

    3 min

  8. 12/10/2025

    Investing for AI

    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 you, I think AI can be amazing. Like more of you, I think it can be a really poor partner and it produces output I can't trust. I think one of the major challenges is learning to treat an AI like a colleague whose work quality is erratic. It's not that I can't work with them and use their work, but I need to test, validate, and verify the code they give me does what I need, at some acceptable quality level. Read the rest of Investing for AI

    5 min
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4.9
out of 5
9 Ratings

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