SWAG Saves the Day

Posted on April 30, 2026 by way0utwest

PASS Summit East is in one week.

I was on the road last week in the UK and then Houston for the Houston AI-lytics event. I had been a little under the weather all week, and when I arrived in Houston, I decided to stay in the hotel and rest. Plus the 6:00 arrival was midnight for my body.

I walked next door and got some takeout and then grabbed a beer from the hotel store to relax and get to sleep early. Unfortunately, the bottle needed an opened. Fortunately, I was prepared.

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This little opener is a piece of swag I got from Redgate years ago and I’ve kept it in my bag for just such occasions. No walking back to the desk, no disappointment, just a handy item that let me relax and get to sleep by 8.

I don’t know what swag Redgate or others will have next week at the PASS Summit East 2026 in Chicago, but if you don’t go, you won’t know. Register for the event, book a flight, come join me.

Sure, you might get some just-in-time training from a precon that lets you learn about PostgreSQL from Grant and Pat or how to secure your estate from Andreas. Did you know Andreas did this job for Microsoft for years, architecting security features?

There are lots of sessions where you might get inspired by a demo or get a question answered about your environment. Those are great, but who knows what SWAG you’ll find. You might get a handy tool you didn’t expect that saves your day, or night.

Send yourself. Send a colleague.

Send someone today to learn a few things, connect with others, and collect some swag. Register for the PASS Summit East and join me in Chicago next week.

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Half of All Engineers

Posted on April 29, 2026 by way0utwest

The AI LLM boom seems to show no sign of slowing down. Each time I think we’ve reached some level of crazy use or predictions, things take another turn. I still find myself pinging back and forth between this will be amazingly good and horrifyingly bad.

Sometimes on the same day.

Today, I’m a little more down on AI. I was listening to Steve Yegge on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, and they were discussing the curve of AI usage at companies. He points out that he’s mad that Amazon let 16,000 engineers go and might let more go. He worries that companies might let 50% of their engineers go. Not necessarily because the top 50% will be more productive with AI than 100% of engineers without it. Rather the concern is that companies will get rid of half their salaries to pay for the AI tokens for the other half.

Steve Yegge is an accomplished software engineer that has worked at Amazon and Google. Steve wrote Gastown and has been someone who not only is successful at producing code but also thinks a lot about how we produce more software.

How coordinated and powerful are the new models? Can they really do a lot of software work that we do today? Steve thinks so, but to be fair, he’s got a lot of experience and can architect and design software well, which means he can also guide AI LLMs and agents to write more code. He also thinks the latest models, like Opus 4.6, are way more capable that most people believe.

I also caught this post on X about a paper predicting that AI might cause economic collapse as less knowledge workers are used in various tasks. This might happen faster than we can absorb those workers who are laid off in the name of AI back into the economy in other positions. It’s a scary thought.

The positive side of this, at least from me, is that so many organizations move slower, and so many people aren’t extremely competent software engineers, so we’ll get a lot of bad software written by non-technical people that doesn’t scale. We’ll have more database (and application) performance issues, and that will slow the use of YOLO, vibe coding.

Plus plenty of companies just aren’t implementing or looking to pay for lots of tokens. They’ll just move slower and the world will change, but not anywhere near the pace that Steve or others think it will. We’ll see, but let me know what you think.

For a more positive spin, I’ve been reading Reshuffle, which is a little less depressing about the future.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

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Upgrading SQL Server Containers on the Laptop

Posted on April 29, 2026 by way0utwest

I don’t have SQL Server installed on my laptop. In an effort to keep things clean and smooth in case I need to rebuild things, I’ve gone with containers. I can easily copy a folder with all my docker compose files and data to another machine and be up and running.

One other benefit is upgrades. This post looks at the process of upgrading/patching SQL Server on my laptop.

Getting the Latest Version

A normal process for me in the past (and on my desktop) is to download a patch, run the installer, and then have SQL Server upgraded. Sometimes there’s a reboot involved as well. With a container, things are a little different. Here is the process:

  • Edit the docker-compose.yml
  • Restart the container

That’s it.

Once the image downloads and the container restarts, I have a new version. If I want to go back and test the previous CU/patch, I change my docker-compose file back. Most of the time, the database version hasn’t changed with a CU or GDR, so I can upgrade and downgrade easily.

Here’s how this works in practice.

There were a number of SQL Server patches released recently, including a few for SQL Server 2022. When I looked at my docker-compose file, I saw this:

image

The latest version of SQL 2022 is CU24+the Apr 2026 GDR (I’ve been remiss here in patching this machine). If I want to patch this, I update line 5. I know that there is a page on the MS Artifact Repository that lists the tags for each CU. It’s an easy Google search away.

I change from this:

image: mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2022-CU18-ubuntu-22.04

to this:

image: mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2022-CU24-GDR1-ubuntu-22.04

Now, when I restart my container, I’ll see the new image downloading. Since images are built in layers, this isn’t the complete SQL Server image, but rather the changes from other images, so the download size and time are shorter.

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As soon as this finishes, the container starts and SQL Server is patched.

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Now I need to check the other SQL compose files I have for 2019 and 2025 and update those version.

Video Walkthrough

Below is a video showing me doing this process.

 

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Spring Connections and Learning at PASS On Tour

Posted on April 27, 2026 by way0utwest

It’s just a few weeks until the spring PASS On Tour Chicago 2026. This is a smaller version of the PASS Summit that will be coming to Seattle in November and has been running for 26 years each fall. Myself and many other data professionals have found immeasurable value from the time we’ve spent with others at these events.

Connect. Share. Learn.

That’s the motto that PASS adopted many years ago, and I love it. We get to network with each other, talk about our experiences, challenges, and struggles, and hopefully find a way past them. We are stronger as a team, and the synergies that come from people working together allow us to accomplish more than we ever would alone.

The PASS Summit has been an event at which this has happened, and I’ve been very lucky to attend most of them. I’ve learned lots of tips and tricks in sessions, but much more by talking with others before or after the presentations. I’ve been inspired by others and warned about walking down paths where people have struggled. All of the knowledge shared with me has helped grow my career across the last 26 years.

In 2025 there were 3 tour events, and I was able to attend all of them. They were small, but I still had ample opportunities to connect with others, learn from them, share with them, and get out to a few dinners with friends who didn’t plan on coming to Seattle, but they made one of the regional events.

This year there is just one tour stop in the US. May 7-8 in Chicago, and I get to go again. There’s a fantastic lineup of speakers, some great pre-cons, all at a relatively cheap price compared to many other data events. Chicago is easy to get to and it’s not too expensive to spend a few days in one of America’s classic cities.

I hope you’ll join me in Chicago. It’s short notice, but there are still chances to join, and I’ve got a discount code if you ping me 😉

Steve Jones

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