Redgate and Rome

Posted on May 11, 2026 by way0utwest

I’m at the UK Redgate office today, meeting with senior leaders in all areas of the business. I was honored to be awarded a spot in our President’s Club. This is where the top performing sales people get to meet with leaders in the company and then head off for a few days of relaxation and excitement.

I’m here today and tomorrow and then off to Rome. We’re heading to tour the city, see the Vatican, and visit some great restaurants. I’m excited for the trip and I’ll have a few photos and thoughts next week, but I’m off this week.

Hopefully it’s a quiet one for you.

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Republish: Other IDEs

Posted on May 11, 2026 by way0utwest

I was very lucky, and honored, this year to be picked as a part of the Redgate President’s Club. This is our sales award club, which primarily goes to reps, but sales engineers and others are picked. I was one of the wild cards, as I helped on a lot of deals last year, so today I’m in Cambridge meeting with product people and execs.

While I’m over there, you get to re-read Other IDEs. Leave a comment and let me know if things have changed since I first wrote that. Are you using another IDE?

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The New Wave of Security Threats

Posted on May 9, 2026 by way0utwest

We’ve had quite a few GDR patches for SQL Server released this year. If I glance at the Build Lists I maintain, I see Sept 2025, Nov 2025, Jan 2026, and Mar 2026 GDR patches. That seems rather frequent as the history of builds for recent versions has often seen them without any GDR, out-of-band patches. Just CU after CU every other month.

That pattern of rare security updates might be changing for lots of software, not just SQL Server. There was an article recently that noted AI tools might start exposing lots of bugs, including security holes, in software that has been around for years. Someone recently used AI found bugs in both PostgreSQL and MariaDB that have been around for years. They are patched, so if you run those platforms, make sure you patch things. The information is out there and someone is looking to take advantage of it.

Anthropic built a new model, Mythos, which has not been released publicly. It’s been given to a few customers who have used it in testing, and it seems that it might be more capable than expected at finding bugs. Hopefully, we will find out how good it is soon and lots of companies can use it to examine software. It’s certainly a danger as hackers and criminals might use it, but I believe that (responsible) information disclosure is better for everyone.

This is also a good reminder that you need to patch your systems. I certainly get wary about updating on day 1, but I do try to patch without too much of a lag. There are no shortage of zero-day attacks, but I also weigh the risk of instability from patches of questionable quality. Many vendors do a great job of patches and upgrades most of the time, but “many” and “most” aren’t “all”, so I prefer to let others test early. Someone has to apply the patches on day 1, but I don’t want it to be me.

Security is getting harder, it’s getting more burdensome, and it’s becoming more important. At the same time, lots of people are building better security with new tools, including AI. Just make sure you apply those patches to take advantage of their work.

Steve Jones

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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

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