Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

IT Unionization

I’ve been reading an interesting book that looks at some of the ways that we can better build software in enterprises. One of the side notes in the book is that the tech companies have the funding and the ability to disrupt many other types of businesses, not just technology. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others have delved into other types of industries, potentially pushing others out.

We see Amazon becoming as much a shipping and logistics company as they are a retailer. There was a unionization vote, which passed in 2022. Recently, another one failed. Amazon continues to fight these efforts, trying to prevent workers from collectively negotiating the terms of their employment.

I’ve wondered in the past if tech workers would ever unionize. In general, we are paid well and have lots of options for work. There has often been no shortage of opportunities for talented workers, though this year is proving tough for our industry. There are lots of people out of work and struggling to find new jobs. While I’m sure some would prefer a union that might better protect them from layoffs, many tech workers are against the idea.

There is a growing number of tech workers looking to unionize. Inside Google, there is a union for some workers, but not all. That’s unusual, as often all workers in a category are part of a union at a company. To gain employment, you need to join the union.

I don’t know if I’d want to join a union. I’ve had lots of success and haven’t seen the need, but I do know that I’ve also seen lots of other tech workers pressured and pushed to work long hours, to skip vacations, and other practices that are good for the employer, but not so good for the employee. I’ve seen many people not know how to negotiate with employers, and perhaps a union would benefit most people.

Would you want to be part of a data professionals’ union? It might give some security and more benefits for many, though not quite as much pay as you might otherwise receive. Maybe more than you get now, as it depends on where you sit in the salary scale at your company. Let me know what you think about unions today.

Steve Jones

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

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

June 4, 2025
Getting References for GenAI Results

I wrote an editorial on the view of GenAI tech from execs and someone commented that they wanted references for results. Most of us might take a result from a co-worker and use it without asking for any proof of where it comes from. If we trust our co-workers, this can work well. If we don’t, then we might want to know where they learned this and how they know it works.

For GenAI, we might want some references to help us learn more or check something. Or, more likely, learn how to modify something that isn’t perfect.

In this sense, GenAI can be better as this gives us the references we need to learn how the answer was generated.

This post looks at how I got references in a few cases using Claude, Perplexity, and Copilot.

This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems.

Asking a Question

I decided to ask a question that I was asked by someone and I used Copilot to find the answer. Here is my prompt:

I need to schedule a Powershell script to access a SQL Server and want to use a managed service account to run the script. How can I do this in powershell

Let’s look at how the various tools I’ve used respond.

Claude

Claude.ai is from Anthropic and it’s a tool I’ve enjoyed using. When I pasted in the prompt, I saw this response:

I got to the bottom and no references, but when I asked for them (see my prompt in the image), I got a few to look at.

That’s one of the tricks with AI. You can ask it to explain itself.

Perplexity

My second test was perplexity, which I started to use a bit after Grant mentioned it.

Right at the top, I get some references that I can click. When I get to the bottom, I have a list of possible future prompts, which aren’t references, but they get me thinking about things I might need to consider.

That worked well and I liked having the references, though I’d prefer them at the end.

Copilot

I decided to try Copilot inside of VS Code, which is where I’d likely use it. I entered the prompt as a comment in a blank .ps1 file. After my first line, it suggested a few more comments to give context. I accepted a few and then added the last #include references line.

I didn’t get references and the generation stopped at the #End of script line.

I then added the comment below asking for URL references.

Each of the items above appeared as a line in italics, like other suggestions. I hit Tab to accept and I’d get another reference. When I saw the last one repeat, I stopped the responses.

Summary

I’m not evaluating the code here, just trying to see if I could get some idea of where the code came from. In this case, I don’t deal with MSAs a lot, so it’s good that I can get some URLs to check docs or get more options other than the code I found.

If I asked this question on Stack Overflow, I might get the same code (or similar), but getting URLs or references isn’t always easy there. Some people provide them, some don’t, and some might just close my question and say I should have searched better.

I think the GenAI does a good job here of giving me a starting point, and a place to go, which is helpful.

June 2, 2025
Helping Students with a Data Professional Career

At a recent event, I had a student ask about how to get started as a data professional. What types of things should they do? What platform should they work on or learn? Where should they focus time? What tools are available?

Those are all good questions and many of you likely have your own advice. I’ll give a few things to think about today, which are good for anyone that might want to get into the data field. I think this is still one of the better technical careers. I’ve suggested this to my kids, though only one of them went into a technical area. One is a therapist for autistic children and one helps run the ranch while pursuing a graduate degree in literature.

If I were to give someone advice on how to get started in a tech field, I’d likely start with these items: first, download the free SQL Server developer or Express editions. Most of us run Windows and this is a good place to start. Get SSMS, and learn to connect to your server. If you have struggles, ask a question in our forums.

From there, I’d suggest working through a book on SQL. Or look at our Stairway series on T-SQL (basic, beyond basics, advanced). Learn to work with data and query it. Learn to download and get datasets into a database, as well as how to query, update, and analyze the data. Those are key skills. If you want to manage systems, try setting up an Availability Group, ensure you have backups and can restore systems, and maybe explore replication and CDC.

If you want to develop applications, then start building something. Ask a GenAI for help, but produce a working system that lets you analyze some data. Pick sports data, or music data, or something else, and produce an application or report that conducts an analysis of the data. Work with something that’s interesting to you.

While you’re doing this, blog. Write about what you learn. Build a growing resume that showcases your skills. Chat with others online, build a network of people, and always have an up-to-date resume that you can send out to find a job. Your resume/CV and your blog are invaluable.

That’s my advice. Anything else you suggest?

Steve Jones

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

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

June 2, 2025
Copilot Outside of SSMS Seems to Work

I read Brent’s first look at SSMS and Copilot in there. He didn’t have a great opinion of the tool, especially comparing it to Gemini or Claude. I haven’t tested this yet, mostly because I’ve got other stuff going on, but I decided to take his prompt and the code and drop it into the dedicated Copilot App on my Windows 11 laptop.

This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems.

I have a button that starts Copilot, so I pressed it and put in this prompt:

This was copied from Brent’s post, and then his code copied and dropped in.

I was curious to see if this worked.

My Results

I thought my results were better. The first part of the response is shown below. Copilot sees the scalar function as a problem and rewrites things. I don’t love that this is just the query and not the CREATE OR ALTER PROC part, but still.

Below this, it notes that I should test indexes and gives me the ones it would recommend. Then it goes into the fact that order by desc can be problematic. It also has a TOP 1 recommendation for the first query.

The rest of the response is OK, and gets into some general things that might help me go past the recommendations.

The prompting matters, as if I click on the “what are more perf opt techniques” I get a lot of generic stuff.

Is AI going to make you a better DBA or developer? Maybe. It will give you things to think about, but you need to test them. You might even ask a GenAI tool for help on that. I did and got this:

And below, some more steps.

Not bad, and likely what a lot of people do, though perhaps not with #5, in which HammerDB is suggested to run this proc.

Learn to use GenAI tools, learn where they help (And save time) and where they can’t be trusted. That’s likely an ongoing battle for most of us, but these tools can help us be more productive.

May 30, 2025