There’s Too Much to Learn

Posted on May 8, 2026 by way0utwest

I remember getting started on SQL Server and trying to upskill myself in the mid-1990s. At that time, my employer was running a SQL Server 4.2 instance for a third-party application, but we wanted to rewrite our internal bespoke sales app to run on SQL Server. We were upgrading from Foxpro to Visual Foxpro and looking to move from shared dbf files to a SQL Server. There was a new release of SQL Server 6.5 during our development, and I wanted to learn more about it. I purchased Inside SQL Server 6.5 and read the entire thing, getting prepared to finish development and then manage a new platform in production.

I had updated copies of that book as SQL Server released new versions until SQL Server 2005. When that came out, there weren’t one, but rather 4 books to cover the Inside SQL Server details (Programming, Query Tuning, T-SQL, and The Storage Engine). A similar thing happened with the SQL Server Bible, which grew in size to over 1400 pages for the 2012 version. It was a backache in a book if you put it in with your laptop.

Since then, the growth of the Microsoft Data Platform, which includes SQL Server, has been incredible with lots of changes not only to the box/on-premises product many of us install, but to the related systems in Azure. The SQL variants, Fabric, Power BI, Azure Data Factor, and more. It feels like there is way too much to learn  I know I can’t keep up, and I expect most people feel the same way.

Coping with the load and the accompanying imposter syndrome is hard. It’s hard on your psyche and it’s hard when others in your organization, especially your boss, expect you to understand how to work with T-SQL, even when they might refer to SQL Server in one request and SQL Database in Fabric in another. They might even expect that you know “everything database-related”, including how to troubleshoot their Azure PostgreSQL Flex server performance issue.

AI can help, as can some strong Google skills and an eye that spots the information you need. Whether to do actual work or help guide an AI LLM along a path. I would argue that improving your ability to differentiate what’s better from what’s worse is becoming even more important in the age of vibe coding. Even if you aren’t a YOLO, let-Claude-Code-do-it’s-thing, others are and they’ll call you when they don’t get the results they want.

Or when their system performs poorly against your database system. Who knows how many implicit conversion issues or RBAR pieces of code an LLM will write. There’s a lot of that sample code out on the Internet, and much of that code goes into training these models.

I don’t have a magic solution for keeping up, other than build the habit of learning. Practice new techniques, play with code, conduct experiments in the things that plague your environment, or that you see others working with. I don’t mess with Hyperscale much as I don’t see it with customers, but I do see other technologies, like System-versioned tables. So I spend time there, learning what works well and what doesn’t. Those are the skills that help me keep up with the knowledge I need to work with LLMs and humans.

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: the Kinder Surprise

Posted on May 8, 2026 by way0utwest

the kinder surprise – . the point in your early adolescence when you realize that your parents are muddling through their lives the same as you; that many respectable adults are not less lost than you and your friends, no less petty and obsessive and insecure, which makes you wonder if there are no real adults, because such a thing never actually existed, except in bedtime stories.

I am not an adolescent, but I realized this early in my career, while working with some other technologists that I expected to know a lot more than I did and be more aware of things they should do to either advance their careers or improve their skills.

Over the last ten years, more and more I find that most people aren’t really strong, self-confident adults in all aspects of their lives. They might be at home, or at work, or on a sports field, or while playing an instrument, but in some of those areas they are insecure.

Or lost, or obsessive, or anything else.

I’ve tried hard to be honest with my kids as they were growing up, letting them know I’m fallible and unsure sometimes. At the same time, I try to help them develop confidence and show when I have that.

And explain that confidence isn’t’ arrogance. Being confident doesn’t mean I’m sure I’m right about something, but rather I know the pros/cons and what this means in my life. What effects my decisions have and I choose to make them, knowing there is both an upside and downside.

Few people have figured out most of their life. Many might have figured out little and aren’t really that much different from a teenager.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

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The Dangers of Dependencies

Posted on May 6, 2026 by way0utwest

Many of us working with databases know the problems of a single point of failure. We build HA/DR technologies into a lot of systems precisely because many of us know if the database goes down, a lot of stuff goes down. Broken software is easier to fix and rollback, but a broken database can be a much bigger problem.

We also know an overloaded server doesn’t handle a workload well, hence our quest for well-written SQL code, but we often lose that battle with developers.

In any case, as we move to a world where AI technology is used by many organizations, who often have a contract with a vendor to provide services, there is a potential issue. Imagine that you’ve setup workflows, maybe agentic loads and you depend on a company, say Anthropic, to provide those services. What if your organization gets banned?

That happened to a company (reported on Reddit). A user got a note from Anthropic, but his entire organization got banned. That’s quite a dependency where a user in your company could cause an issue. In some sense, that’s like someone in your company sending an email that gets your organization’s email blacklisted or has Google/Microsoft/etc. cutting off access. Imagine the disruption there?

Some of these companies providing AI services aren’t that large, and aren’t suited for the enterprise. Some of you are using vendors that might be contracting with these AI firms. Imagine your monitoring, DevOps, etc. service suddenly not working because they lost access to their AI services?

I’d like to assume this doesn’t happen with the very large cloud vendors, but who knows. I’d like to think that not only enterprises, but even smaller companies don’t lose access because of the actions of one person. Or if they do, there’s any way way to get a response from customer service. However, I also know that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have made it harder to get an answer from a real person.

I didn’t talk about this recently when presenting on local AI models, but I think the future might be companies having more control over their AI tech, running them the same way we run servers in the cloud, in IaaS, with more effort required, but more controllable by the organization.

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 Cloud Dependency Failure from Amazon

Posted on May 6, 2026 by way0utwest

I went to sleep while reading a Kindle book on my phone. I know because my hand dropped and the phone knocked me in the forehead. I set it on the nightstand and went to sleep again.

I woke up and was planning on reading for a few minutes before starting my Monday. When I opened the Kindle app, it asked me to log in. When I did, Amazon said my account was locked and I needed to check an email. I did, and found one from Amazon.co.uk questioning a purchase I made and asking for me to very an order number and the last 2 digits of a card to charge.

I wasn’t sure what to do, but since my wife was complaining about her Audible account, I knew I needed to do something.

I didn’t like the email for multiple security reasons, including not giving me a way to verify the email online. Checking Amazon’s help page said I should have a link in the email to a form. Even when I called the Amazon help line, they said I should have a link when I logged in to do so. I didn’t on either the .com or .co.uk sites, but Amazon Customer Service eventually unlocked my account.

I wrote about Dependencies in today’s editorial, inspired by this story and the Reddit story linked in there about losing access to Claude. That’s scrary, especially in this new automated world where AI agents might be examining activity and undertake this type of action to prevent other issues. It’s an overreaching type of judgment that starts to expose the dangers of a highly interconnected world.

I get Amazon might want to ensure my purchase was legitimate and perhaps prevent future orders, but also locking my content away (books, movies, audio, etc.) because of a shopping issue seems extreme.

It’s certainly my issue, and I’m not sure how I untangle things for the future, but it does make me think about limiting dependencies a bit more in the future. Or at least understanding the dangers of too much on one service.

Whether that’s the books I read or the services my company gets from any one vendor.

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