Voice of the DBA

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  • Admin Rights for Everyone

    I was chatting with someone that works at a smaller organization Still a few hundred employees, but the technical teams (dev and ops) were less than 20 in total. They mentioned that everyone had admin rights to the systems as they worked as a team and sometimes developers provided production support. I haven’t encountered that in quite some time. Is it still a thing to give a lot of people administrator writes across many systems? I know…


  • Using the SIGN() Function: #SQLNewBlogger

    I was trolling the docs and noticed the SIGN() function. I have never written this in production code, but it is an interesting function. This post looks at where I might use this and when the need arises. Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. How It Works The SIGN() function works by taking an argument and evaluating if the value is positive,…


  • 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, different technology that somehow seems magic, extremely intelligent, and at times as dumb as a box of rocks. It can do things that I could never do, or would never do, for myself. Heck, I’m not sure I could or would pay someone to do this by…


  • 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 connected. I’ll cover how I did this in Claude and Visual Studio Code in this post, and try to warn you about a few places I made mistakes. This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts. Creating A…


  • 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 devolves into the inspiration for lots humorous comments as it crashes into a wall. There are some funny comments, but some pedantic ones that note the robot can’t beat a human record because it’s not a human. That’s correct, but … The comments miss the point. The robot will…


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