Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

A Spread of Vacation
I’m off on vacation today.

Which is a little weird as I just got back from a week long vacation in May, cruising with my family. Usually my trips for personal stuff get a little more spread out, but I’m slowly learning to relax and try to take advantage of the benefits and balance out my life better.

I travel a good bit for work, taking 13 trips for work, 2 as a coach, and 1 vacation in the first half of 2026. It was a busy time, and for the first time in a quite a few years, my wife didn’t come on any of the work trips. That made it a hard six months for both of us.

It’s not one’s fault, but we decided to do better, both to enjoy our lives more, but also to ensure we’re recharging and refreshing. Our changes for H2 are to take these trips together:
- Jul 3-6 vacation
- Jul 17-20 Day of Data Baton Rouge + 2 nights in New Orleans
- Aug 10-18 – Cambridge for a week for me and then 5 days at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh
- Oct 10-19 – Cruise in Europe
- July TBD – Camping for a long weekend
- Sept TBD – a long weekend in the mountains of Colorado
It’s a nice set of things to look forward to, which will break up my work periods with something coming every month to look forward to. With Thanksgiving and Christmas, this feels like a relatively relaxed H2 for me, which is great.

I’m learning to relax and work a little less, enjoying life more. Many of you do this better than I do already, so thanks for all the comments, ideas about trips, and sharing about things you enjoy outside of work.

This also might be the first time I get to Q4 without any extra vacation that I have to start burning without plans.
July 3, 2026
Cognitive Coverage

Satya Nadella talked about cognitive coverage in the age of AI, about being able to understand and manage AI agents to get work done as a software developer. The interview from Hard Fork Live covers the future of work and comfort in this new age. This reminds me of a book that the CEO of Redgate recommended, Reshuffle. I love the book, but it’s slow reading as I constantly stop and think.

Work is changing; it’s becoming unbundled and re-bundled in different ways, and many of us will have to learn to work in new ways. Not all of us, but many of us. Some might see their day-to-day efforts change little; some will not recognize their job a year from now. As with anything, lots of us will be in the middle with some changes, some status quo. That’s certainly where I am with AI assistance.
The short version of what Satya says is that there is new glue work coming to software engineers. To me, this is where we re-bundle the work that needs to be done: there is work completed by us, results from AI LLMs, and the glue that puts that stuff together. The glue is managing, organizing, deciding, and probably a few other xxx’ings in there. It’s also about understanding what’s happening across all the work you are responsible for completing.

That understanding is the cognitive coverage. I like that term as it implies that I need to know the sum total of what’s happening from my team, both humans and AI agents. I can grok the way the river of work is flowing.

And it’s flowing. It’s not stopping. It might be getting wider. I can lightly influence it, but if I don’t keep an eye on things, it might go in directions I don’t expect and even overflow its banks.

The hosts noted that most people want to know their jobs won’t change or how they will change. That’s one of the big things with AI that’s disruptive and scary. With a machine able to learn and adjust in ways that are more flexible than ever in the past, we have to be adaptable as well. We have to learn to work with this flexible, non-deterministic, eerily human-like technology. It’s a scary and unnerving thing for many of us.

AI is definitely changing the world. It’s not magic; it’s not going to automatically get rid of all, or maybe not many, humans, but it is going to change the demands placed upon them. Getting a grasp of your cognitive coverage of what AI does is going to be important.

Steve Jones

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

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

July 1, 2026
AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness

I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a backspace key relatively quickly on most keyboards. That and a space bar.

AI helps me deal with my issues in a way that I really like. This post looks at a small thing that I appreciate, and it’s why I wish I had a small local model running for more software.

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

Searching for Posts

Today I was searching for some posts. I typed in something and found nothing.

Clearly, I mistyped something, but before I fixed this, I alt-tab’d over to Claude and tried a similar query. It worked much, much better.

Not perfect, as the search (corrected) on my site shows more posts.

In this case, what I really wish was that this search box (and lots of other software), were running a small model, not an LLM, but a SLM, that would interpret my poor typing and do what I want. Or ask me and remember what dumb mistakes I make all the time.

If an AI were powering the search, it would guess I mean “Monday” not “moday” and just run the appropriate search, get me all the results, and help me smooth out my day. Instead, I burned a few seconds looking at this, getting my brain to decode what search thing I’d mis-typed, and broke my concentration. I was thinking of a subject and had to change context to figuring out a search typo.

Not a big interruption, but an interruption nevertheless.

I typo things all the time. Git constantly asks me if “git stauts” is really “git status”, but it doesn’t just run that. I should re-enable autocorrect, but who has the time. Maybe I’ll ask Copilot to do that.

In any case, the sloppy mistakes, the implied context, these are things humans deal with well. We can overlook typos and even understand things that don’t look like words. I bet many of you know what this says.

“According to a researche [sic] at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only importent [sic] thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place.” – science alert

For most of my life, computers required being more exact, which was a struggle for many people. Search, led by Google, has helped, but it isn’t as good as an LLM, nor does this help in many pieces of software.

To me, this is one place a local LLM, watching what you type and doing a much better job than phone autocorrect, in all the place I type. That’s what Copilot should do. Fix my typing in software, in the CLI, and other places. Learn what I do and help me.

Right now, Copilot is not something I like, but I see AI potential for the future if they try to make it work well, and not just stuff it in there.

FYI, #@$#$#@$ Copilot didn’t do the work for me.

July 1, 2026
SQL Server Still Wins

Is it worth continuing to run SQL Server when PostgreSQL licensing is zero? Rebecca Lewis has a well written post on why that looks at some of the pros and cons of paying for SQL Server instead of moving to PostgreSQL. She starts with some of the things PostgreSQL does well, of which I think the Extensibility is really cool. SQL Server has some of this in CLR and the non-SQL language support, but those seem kludgy and complex to me. They aren’t really integrated into the SQL Server platform.

They’re good, but I do wish vendors or the community could add some extensions in a way PostgreSQL does. Of course, I also worry about stability, so maybe this is a wish that isn’t really a great idea.

The pros list for SQL Server is quite a good list, at least for existing users. Tooling isn’t close, both for DBAs and developers, and inside the platform. At Redgate, we support both SQL Server and PostgreSQL with Redgate Monitor, and there is so much more information that we can gather from SQL Server on what’s happening. It’s truly amazing when I compare them. We constantly are looking to add to our PostgreSQL monitoring solution and ensure admins see as close a view in PostgreSQL as SQL Server, but the reality is so much information is available.

On the dev tool side, while SSMS can be slow, it’s still way better than any other database development tools I’ve seen.

The innovation argument for SQL Server over PostgreSQL isn’t a great one, as PostgreSQL continues to evolve, but I’m glad Microsoft continues to work on the engine. I wasn’t enamored with SQL Server 2022, but I do like 2025 and look forward to what comes in 2028 (my guess). What I really wish, however, is that Microsoft marketed SQL Server more, with a little less Fabric in the way.

That being said, I am continually grateful for the SQL Server marketing team’s support of SQL Saturday/Day of Data events.

It is interesting to think that the Microsoft-stack gravity is Rebecca’s third argument. It certainly makes a lot of work convenient if you use Microsoft tools, and I completely agree that ripping this out is a major reason why people stick with SQL Server. Across the last 5-6 years, I’ve had many customers tell me they’re moving to PostgreSQL and abandoning SQL Server. They constantly ask Redgate for more PostgreSQL tools (and we’ve built some), but the reality is that a year, or two, or three later, they still have those ambitious plans. They haven’t moved.

It’s really, really hard to change database platforms.

That might not seem like a pro, but it is a reason why SQL Server still wins in many organizations. It’s comfortable, effective, performs well under a variety of situations, and quite frankly, there are millions of people who are more comfortable with it than many other platforms.

I like other platforms, but I love SQL Server. It’s been good for my career and I look forward to spending the next 10-15 years continuing to help others get the most out of their installations.

Steve Jones

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

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

June 29, 2026