Funny Money: #SQLNewBlogger

Posted on June 10, 2026 by way0utwest

While wandering around the documentation looking for some Question of the Day topics, I learned something new about the money data type. This post discusses what I learned.

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

The Money Type

Did you know that you can add a currency symbol to the money data type for assignment? I didn’t. This isn’t in the documentation, but it’s something I need to submit as a PR.

In any case, I can assign money like this:

DECLARE @YenAmount MONEY;
SET @YenAmount = ¥1500; 

SELECT @YenAmount AS RawValue;

Note that this isn’t really assigning Yen values. It’s just a number, but since the money type supports certain literals, this works. If I select the amount, I get just a number.

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If I change the symbol, it still works because SQL Server doesn’t really interpret the amount and symbol or the variable name. That being said, this is bad code.

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The money and smallmoney data type page lists the symbols you can use, but none of them are stored. Where this page fails is that it doesn’t help you get the values back out as the currency.

Format helps here. I can use this with some culture to determine what I want to get out. For example, I get Yen with this: 

 FORMAT(@YenAmount, 'c', 'ja-JP')

You can see the results here:

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I can also get Pounds.

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SQL New Blogger

This post took me about 5 minutes to assemble as I’d already had the code, but it’s an example of a quick thing based on other work I was doing.

You can showcase this and help others see that you are learning and growing.

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Un-Migrating From the Cloud: T-SQL Tuesday #199

Posted on June 9, 2026 by way0utwest

This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted once before, and agreed to help me out this month by tackling another topic. We’ve shared a few beers in the EU, though not in some time, so I hopefully will get the chance to buy him a pint and thank him for this month’s invite.

He was inspired by another friend, Alexander Avidsson, who wrote about skills and the cloud, but with an interesting take. This month’s invite is about moving back on-premises from the cloud, which is something I’ve had a few customers do, or start doing. Nothing is quick when migrating systems, either to or from the cloud.

Here’s my take.

How Easy Is It To Un-Migrate?

I decided on a fun title here, since so many people talk about migrating to the cloud. Is going back on-premises an un-migration? Or a re-migration? Just a migration? I won’t worry about the semantics.

I work with a lot of different customers at Redgate Software. Whether they are discussing development topics (Prompt/Toolbelt), deployment issues (Flyway), production stuff (Monitor) or compliance (all of the above + TDM), I find that most of them are still rooted in an on-premises mindset. Even when they’ve migrated to the cloud, it’s often lift-and-shift, with VMs running in AWS/Azure/GCP. In that sense, they still tend to manage things in an on-premises way.

They’re more comfortable with those skills and more confused by cloud auth systems, still. In 2026.

I think that’s still the norm and it’s easy to think that most people work in the cloud all the time. Some do, and I think most people have some familiarity with one of the major cloud systems, but I would expect that lots of people would love to come back on-premises.

Is it easy? No. It’s another migration, and while you might find it easy to re-provision hardware (whether purchased or rented from another provider like Rackspace) there are still major data movement challenges in the db world. How do I sync systems? Can I get log backups? What type of quiescing and cutover is there?

The tech stuff, matching versions, etc. is likely easy. After all, most of us don’t use the latest and greatest functions from SQL Server, so moving back to on-premises likely just works. If you are in the IaaS world, this is simple, other than the latency of copying data down (and explaining the egress charges).

I actually think customers might gain some efficiencies from moving systems with known workloads and costs back on-premises. Especially those that create lots of tickets for DBAs or developers. Any time spent moving back will come back in the skills that so many have with on-premises systems.

The one downside I think might cause some issues is HA. It’s easy in the cloud, and hard on-premises. Those are skills that some people likely need to brush up on if they don’t have a significant HA footprint with VMs.

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Would You Retire Rather Than …

Posted on June 8, 2026 by way0utwest

Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of C++. I read a few of his books and alternately loved what he’d done with the language 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.

The idea that senior developers, presumably like Mr. Stroustrup, would rather retire than work on codebases that are being changed by AI is interesting. I suspect that in some problem domains, you might hate AI code and not want to deal with it, but would you retire? Is that the answer?

I have known some IT people who retired because they didn’t like their jobs. My wife left tech because it was too stressful, but it wasn’t an easy decision. She’s questioned it a few times, but she had a passion for something else and wanted a new job. I think that in both cases, someone moved towards something rather than away from something. They had another thing they wanted to do in their lives.

I wonder how many of you would really retire or leave your job because you don’t like the work. Most people I know who don’t like the work are looking for something else to do until they retire. I would be sad to hear about someone who is hanging on to a bad job until they retire, especially if retirement isn’t coming soon (like the next 2-3 years). I would also hate to think that some people see AI as making their job so un-enjoyable that they decide to retire earlier than they expected.

I do have a good friend who was close to retiring in his early 60s. He decided it was too soon and took another job after his previous employer was sold and closed their local office. He’s spent a little over a year working remotely and he doesn’t like it. He’s going to retire this year because he doesn’t like the job and doesn’t want to look for a new one. He is close enough to retiring that he’s looking to the future doing less and finding a way to enjoy life without work.

AI might force some people out of the industry, but I think it’s more likely that there are other factors, like a poor work environment, bad management, or some other factor. However, if you disagree, let me know. If you would stop working because you don’t want to deal with data or technology, let me know. As always, if you don’t want to post publicly, message me and I’ll post something anonymously for you.

Steve Jones

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Monday Monitor Tips: AI Alert Analysis

Posted on June 8, 2026 by way0utwest

We keep adding new AI capabilities to Redgate Monitor, where it makes sense. Check out this new feature we’ve added for alerts. This is a great addition to help a busy Ops staff cope with a large database estate.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.

Alert Index Analysis

One of the new things we’ve added in Redgate Monitor is an AI analysis of your alerts. This isn’t for every alert. Right now, we have three where this works in preview:

  • Long-running query
  • blocking process
  • Deadlock

This is documented on its own page.

You can see this if you go to the Alerts page and look for a blocking process alert. Here’s a URL, but this repeats regularly, so just find the alert. You should see something like this:

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If you click on the alert, then you’ll see the details, as shown here. However, to the right is an “AI Analyze Alert” button.

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If you click that, a blade slides out from the right, and it has some analysis in it. This has a summary at the top. For my session, this had ended, so the summary is nice in that it gives me an overview with the time of the blocking and the statement. There is also a root cause analysis below this. This is something that would help me quickly answer questions from my boss.

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Further down there is a diagnostic review, which helps you navigate Redgate Monitor to verify things. You should use the AI to help you and still verify what it says. This is a good explanation, but worth double checking. There are also recommended actions below this.

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It’s a good way to approach a series of alerts, especially in a busy environment where you might have lots of these alerts across different systems.

Summary

AI is a great tool in places, and this is one of those measured approaches from Redgate to use AI where it’s helpful and useful, and does some work for you. Looking across a bunch of similar data and getting patterns, getting some quick insight into timings, that’s useful. This might be especially great when someone calls you with a question and you need a summary.

As always, you should verify the diagnosis and recommendations before you do something, but this does give you a quick place to start fixing chronic issues in your system. I look forward to AI analysis coming to other alerts.

Redgate Monitor is a world-class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

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