Shows / Voice of the DBA
Episodes
- Voice of the DBA
The #MS_DatabaseConnector## Role: #SQLNewBlogger
I had seen these roles in various instances, but never dug into the new Fixed Server roles added to SQL Server. They are supposed to help ensure the principle…
- Voice of the DBA
Planning for Change
Update: My apologies to Randolph for the incorrect pronouns. They should be correct now. Over the last year, I’ve been asked numerous times when…
- Voice of the DBA
Great Things
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” – Vincent van Gogh, Dutch Post-Impressionist Painter. I ran across this quote…
- Voice of the DBA
Cleaning Up Azure MS Defender Billing
I have a few Azure subscriptions, which are fairly small and not used that often. Mainly I do some SQL Server or Azure SQL experimentation. Sometimes I might…
- Voice of the DBA
PostgreSQL 19 Is Late
“All software contains bugs.” That’s a quote from Robert Haas’s “Postgres 19 is late” post. He goes on to say that…
- Voice of the DBA
A Heavy Heart
Hugo, I have many memories of moments we spent together, discussing data, career, life, and family. Three stand out, though not more or less important than any…
- Voice of the DBA
Car Update October 2026
This month I want to look at a few of the things I’ve seen posted about cars during the last month. These are a few headlines, as well as some questions I’ve…
- Voice of the DBA
AI Is Improving Security
I was updating the SQL Server build lists the other day. I typically get a notification from Microsoft when new builds are released. This is something that…
- Voice of the DBA
Experimenting with CHOOSE: #SQLNewBlogger
I was looking over the CHOOSE() function while editing an article at SQL Server Central. I realized there isn’t a documentation note on how many parameters can…
- Voice of the DBA
A Fun Prize at the PASS Data Community Summit
I had a briefing for the 2026 PASS Data Community Summit, which is just a couple of weeks away. Amongst a bunch of admin type stuff, there was a slide with a…
- Voice of the DBA
Making an Impression
It’s a weird time in the job market. Companies are hiring, and I see friends and colleagues starting new positions. At the same time, I have had many…
- Voice of the DBA
Monday Monitor Tips: Query Recommendations
We keep adding stuff to Redgate Monitor, and it’s easy to miss some of the improvements. Here’s one that’s been around quite awhile, but while discussing the…
- Voice of the DBA
Choose the Second One
I wonder if any of you have ever tried this. When faced with a problem, think of a solution using whatever comes to mind. For most of us in the data space…
- Voice of the DBA
Advice I Like: Time and Focus
“You don’t need more time because you already have all the time that you will ever get; you need more focus.” – from Excellent Advice for Living Boy, I…
- Voice of the DBA
Power BI Fun With Travels
I’m back from a great vacation. I had the chance to visit two new countries (for me and my wife) and many new cities as we cruised around the Adriatic. We also…
- Voice of the DBA
T-SQL Tuesday #203: Risk and Reward
This is timely, as I’m currently on a boat in the Adriatic taking a break with my wife. I think I’m in Croatia (or off the coast) today, but who knows. Any who…
- Voice of the DBA
Republish: Data Decisions or Instinct?
I’m off today on a cruise ship in Rome for 10 days with my wife. I’ll be out of touch, and hopefully my colleagues can handle the load while I’m gone. You get…
- Voice of the DBA
Smart AI Agents and Data Security
I don’t know if Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google have really spent a lot of time and effort on security around their models. I know they talk about it…
- Voice of the DBA
Au Revoir for now
No, I’m not quitting or retiring. Just going on vacation, but I leave tonight for Brussels and this is my last day at work for a couple of weeks. My wife will…
- Voice of the DBA
Today’s AI
“This is the worst version of the car you’ll own.” That was a quote from the delivery manager when my wife and I picked up our Lucid Gravity…
- Voice of the DBA
The SUM of Nothing: #SQLNewBlogger
I caught this interesting item over on Pinal Dave’s blog: Eleven Interview Questions that Look Too Easy. I decided to give you a few thoughts from me on the…
- Voice of the DBA
Architecting Zero Downtime Deployments–Day of Data Boston
Here are the resources for my talk at Day of Data Boston. Slides – ArchitectingZeroDowntime.pptx Slides also at…
- Voice of the DBA
Development Is Fun
I was listening to The Pragmatic Engineer interview Casey Muratori about high-performance code, which I found really interesting. I’m actually…
- Voice of the DBA
The Book of Redgate:A Prehistory
I’ve covered the values in a number of previous posts on the Book of Redgate. Those values came from our founders, Simon Galbraith and Neil Davidson. I am…
- Voice of the DBA
You Need a DBA Pipeline
I work regularly with a number of customers on improving their database change processes. This has been the goal of Redgate’s Database Change Management…
- Voice of the DBA
Keeping Track of my ConEmu CLIs
I use ConEmu for my terminal interface. I’m still on Windows 10 at home, and for consistency’s sake, I run this on my Win11 laptop and the home machine. I love…
- Voice of the DBA
Designing for Teams
Some years ago, I had to register for my medical benefits with Redgate. My employer had contracted with Anthem for health insurance, and I went to register…
- Voice of the DBA
Flyway Tips: Object History
It’s a small change, but a handy one. Flyway Desktop (FWD) now includes the object history for different schema changes, so as you are evaluating how your…
- Voice of the DBA
Absolute and Relative References
This week I caught a short tale of Reitse trying to migrate a Power BI report from one Tenant to another in Fabric. It’s something that I would consider…
- Voice of the DBA
Get Along
I enjoy listening to Get Along by Kenny Chesney periodically, often smiling to myself. I was reminded of this song recently while talking about careers and the…
- Voice of the DBA
Car Update September 2026
Software is hard. While I love our Lucid Gravity, I realize that they are behind Tesla with software. A few of the weird UX and software engineering decisions…
- Voice of the DBA
Finely Tuned Models
I have no idea if this is true, but this post on X says that Thomson Reuters used information they’ve collected for decades to fine tune and train a…
- Voice of the DBA
Local Models Using GPUs with Ollama
Can you use your GPUs when running a local model under Ollama? You can, and it really depends on how you run Ollama and what your hardware is. Ollama supports…
- Voice of the DBA
Creating a Local Model Chatbot on Windows
After my session at VSLive last week, I had a few questions from the audience. I’m adding some of these into blogs, and this was one: How do I run the docker…
- Voice of the DBA
Make It Routine
The first one is hard. The rest are boring. I hear this statement from someone recently, and it sounds like something a technical person would do with a task…
- Voice of the DBA
Your Favorite Quotes
I love seeing thoughtful, pithy, witty quotes. A good saying can often spur me in some way. Maybe I’ll stop and think about what the words mean. Perhaps…
- Voice of the DBA
A New Word: Dorgone
dorgone– adj. wondering if you could slip away from an event or group conversation without anyone noticing your absence. I’m not often concerned about…
- Voice of the DBA
Using the Data API Builder–VS Live San Diego Resources
Thanks for attending my sessions. Resources below: Slides: Using Data API Builder GitHub repo:  https://github.com/way0utwest/DAB-Experiments
- Voice of the DBA
Running a Local LLM On Your Laptop Resources
Thanks to everyone that attended my sessions at VS Live San Diego yesterday. It was a fun session and I’m glad a few people came up to ask questions. Slides…
- Voice of the DBA
Editorial Republish: Evaluating a DBA (or AI)
How do you evaluate a DBA? Can you pick someone that will do a good job? History says that most of us don’t do a great job in picking candidates to offer a…
- Voice of the DBA
Differences Between xp_readerrolog and sp_readerrorlog: #SQLNewBlogger
I was creating a question on sp_readerrorlog and realized that this procedure is different from the one it wraps: xp_readerrorlog. This post digs into a few…
- Voice of the DBA
Editorial Republish: An Azure Outage
I had to run out of town, as noted in my other post. So you get to read An Azure Outage. Are things better? The cloud more reliable? You happy?
- Voice of the DBA
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer trips, I can be on the road a lot. As it is, I’ve flown across the…
- Voice of the DBA
I Don’t Want To Do XX
Every job is a job on some days. I’ve said this to my kids and others I’ve mentored over the years. I’ve probably written that here, and I…
- Voice of the DBA
The Book of Redgate: Hours
I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of company I’d want to build if I founded another company. It’s a great place, and one of…
- Voice of the DBA
The Cost of Multiple Platforms
I ran into an interesting post that noted the modern data platform can have a bunch of different systems underlying it. The example might be that your…
- Voice of the DBA
PostgreSQL Support in the Data API Builder
Next week I’m at VS Live in San Diego (register and join me) and one of my talks is on the Data API Builder. I want to show how this gives you REST, GRAPHQL…
- Voice of the DBA
T-SQL Tuesday #202: 100 Hours
It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again and this is a great prompt to start writing. I might have written about this before, but it’s a story that sticks with me…
- Voice of the DBA
Labor Day 2026: Fun on the Ranch
It’s Labor Day in the US and I’m not working. Not for Redgate, at least. I’m not even traveling today, which is something that happens all too often on…
- Voice of the DBA
The End of Summer
Growing up, this was the last week of summer for me every year. When I was a child in Virginia Beach, school started the day after Labor Day every year, which…
- Voice of the DBA
Advice I Like: Lots of Ideas
“A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea” – from Excellent Advice for Living Whenever we read about the success of someone or something…
- Voice of the DBA
Measuring Productivity
I’ve dealt with a lot of customers with who lately are concerned with the ROI of their teams. Certainly they want a good ROI if they purchase software…
- Voice of the DBA
Updating the Data API Builder
I was updating my session for the Data API Builder (DAB) recently, mostly to work with the MCP server capabilities. As I was trying to get this working, I…
- Voice of the DBA
A Challenge of Our Knowledge
AI is here to stay. It will evolve, it will get better at some things, and we might decide that it’s not good for certain tasks. It’s a weird, new…
- Voice of the DBA
Monday Monitor Tips: Configuring Access to the MCP Server
I have been experimenting with MCP servers in a few ways, including the Redgate Monitor MCP Server. It took me a few tries, and some help from engineers to get…
- Voice of the DBA
The New World Of AI Robots
It’s been a good time for robots. While on vacation last week I caught this video of a robot running. It’s impressive for a bit, and then it…
- Voice of the DBA
An Eventual Consistency Scam
Recently I sold a car. It was an interesting process as I hadn’t sold a car to someone I didn’t know in a long time. I listed the car in a few…
- Voice of the DBA
The Book of Redgate: Evidence
We aren’t the only company that does this, but Redgate Software does try to be data driven. Across my 18 years, I’ve had plenty of people use evidence from…
- Voice of the DBA
Never is Not the Policy
Years ago I worked with a few developers and DBAs that were temp-table happy. As in they defaulted to using temp tables everywhere. This was in SQL Server 6.5…
- Voice of the DBA
Accessing the Data API Builder MCP Server from VS Code
I recently started playing with the MCP Server for SQL Server, which is a part of the Data API Builder (DAB). I’m not sure why there wasn’t a separate piece of…