Working Better Under Pressure

Posted on April 17, 2026 by way0utwest

One of my colleagues wrote a great post about DBAs and developers, about how a DBA’s pushback on bad code isn’t to be difficult, it’s because they can see the future. I never thought of myself as a modern-day Nostradamus, predicting the future of system performance. Apparently I had another title besides DBA.

Working under pressure and with short deadlines often leads to short cuts. I’ve made them. I’ve implemented quick hot fixes. I’ve forgotten to port changes back to development databases. I’ve increased our tech debt load, just to solve a more immediate problem.

The challenge is cleaning things up later, when we have more deadlines and things to fix. It seems that we never have enough time to do the job the way we would like, and there’s certainly no time to go back later and fix things. Most management won’t make this a priority until things get so bad that we have to rewrite a lot of code (which we should never do).

DevOps, pipelines, automations, and yes, AI, helping can reduce some of the tech debt we create if we use those tools appropriately. Which is a big IF. Often we have more immediate pressures that prevent us from finding time to invest in our systems or in ourselves.

Getting a handle on bad code, checking it early, and doing so every time with automation can help prevent some of these issues, even when we are in a hurry. That’s why it pays to adapt our work and learn from others. Listen to that DBA that keeps your systems alive. Listen to the DevOps engineers that want you to automate things. Certainly, make them prove their suggestions work, but adopt those patterns. Learn to work with them, rather than against them.

They can see 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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A New Word: Soufrise

Posted on April 17, 2026 by way0utwest

soufrise – . The maddening thrill of an ambiguous flirtation, which quivers in tension halfway between platonic and romantic – maybe, but no, but maybe – leaving you guessing what’s going on inside their chest, forced to assume that at any given moment their attraction is both alive and dead at the same time.

I don’t think in terms of romance here, having been married for nearly 28 years, but I do think about this in terms of my career.

When I’ve been approached about opportunities or jobs, or someone expresses interest (or I do), it feels a little like soufrise. It’s both a real opportunity or they really want to hire me, like a romanace. Or maybe it’s just a conversation that’s exploratory without any real intention of moving forward (platonic).

This is a hard place to be, where you might want things to go one way or the other, and the other party might feel differently.

To me, this is where communication matters, though I certainly understand not necessarily wanting to answer the question about whether this is a romantic or platonic relationship.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

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Who is Irresponsible?

Posted on April 15, 2026 by way0utwest

There was a post on X recently from a founder in the EU about an engineer using Claude and ChatGPT to build a feature. I am not sure how true these posts are or if they are designed to just create engagement, but it’s still an interesting topic. The part that makes me think is that (supposedly) the engineer was fired because their “data” (code) was sent to American servers. The code was then deleted and the feature will be built without AI.

First, read some of the responses before you form an opinion. There are some funny ones in there. There are a few I think are overblown and silly, and I skim past them. Someone is always more upset than I am, and more than I think they rationally should be, so I tend to let their outrage flow by me.

There are two interesting things here. First, the debate about sending data to America. There certainly is some cause for concern here if data is being sent to a place outside of the EU where GDPR rules might apply. There possibly could be some legal issue here, though I doubt some of the responses about all code being compromised are an issue here. I don’t think code is PII, though if it were re-used or appears in AI output, perhaps investors could sue this company.

The second thing here is whether someone should be fired for doing this. There might be a policy and some training about not doing this, and in that case, perhaps the person should be fired. However, I find this kind of thing happening too often, and it’s the type of thing that has happened before AI where people used outside sources (SQL Server Central, Stack Overflow, etc.) to post code in a question and get an answer. And then often use that code without changing or testing it.

Is this rational? Some people might say yes, some no, many unsure. In the past, before AI, what would you think? To me, sometimes there have been solutions engineers have found but couldn’t use code written by someone else. There are real IP/copyright concerns here. You could rebuild the solution, rewriting the code, which in some sense is what Google did with Java APIs and successfully defended that effort. If another human or an AI gives you code, can you rewrite that code, keeping the same idea for the solution?

I think that in most cases this is acceptable. I use AI for a lot of things and I throw away a lot of AI output, but it often gets me started down a path, whether in writing, coding, or something else.

Who was more irresponsible here, the founder or the engineer? I think the former.

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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JSON_OBJECTAGG is an Aggregate: #SQLNewBlogger

Posted on April 15, 2026 by way0utwest

I wrote an article recently on the JSON_OBJECTAGG function, but neglected to include an example of why it can behave weirdly. This post looks at something you might not realize unless you remember this is an aggregate function.

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

A Strange Result

I have some data, which I show below. Some teams, cities, and years.

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If I ask for this data in a JSON_OBJECTAGG query, I get one document back. Which is fine. You can see this below

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However, if I were to add the year separately as a column, I get an error without a GROUP BY. This shows me this is an aggregate, which I read and knew, but wasn’t thinking about in my testing:

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If I add a GROUP BY, then I see these results. Notice that I get documents for each section of the GROUP BY with just that data. Each of these documents is 1 team, except for the 1960 year, where three teams started.

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If you are using this to assemble simple JSON documents with a WHERE clause, you might not realize this is an aggregate and behaves that way.

Make sure you test your code in a few ways and treat this function as an aggregate.

SQL New Blogger

This post took a little longer to write (20 minutes). I took the code from my previous article, but I restructured a few things once I realized how this works as an aggregate. It’s a simple look at the function, but it also points out something I learned, which isn’t necessarily obvious. Talking about that shows you have some knowledge besides just copy/pasting code to create JSON documents.

You could do this as well, and leverage the idea of building off one post to show something in another.

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