Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • The Book of Redgate:A Prehistory

    I’ve covered the values in a number of previous posts on the Book of Redgate. Those values came from our founders, Simon Galbraith and Neil Davidson. I am lucky enough, and honored to have known these gentlemen for many years and had the chance to sit and chat with them throughout my time at Redgate. Simon and I still get together periodically even today after 25 years.

    In the Book of Redgate, there’s a section about prehistory. In it, there’s this picture and text. Neil and Simon have known each other since they were sixteen, starting a business together after they spent time at university.

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    Neil stepped away from the company many years ago, for a variety of reasons, and he remained on the board for many years. Simon continued as CEO for a long time and stepped down right after the pandemic. He remains on the board today.

    The thing that caught my eye is that they worked together from their 20s until their 40s. I still remember their joint 40th birthday party at the old Redgate office. How many people have you worked with for 20 years?

    How many of you have worked for an organization for 20 years?

    I guess I’ve worked for SQL Server Central for 25 years, but only some of those were me working for myself. I’ve been with Redgate almost 20 years as a contractor and employee, but I haven’t spent 20 years with anyone outside of my family and Andy Warren.

    He and I still talk most weeks, even though we’re not in business together anymore.

    Redgate has remained a strong brand and presence in my life and that of many others. Part of that is the longevity of so many employees. We’ve had some ups and downs, but relatively few turnover over the years. More recently, especially in sales, but there are a lot of people who have worked there for more than 10 years.

    That’s still amazing to me.

    I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.

  • You Need a DBA Pipeline

    I work regularly with a number of customers on improving their database change processes. This has been the goal of Redgate’s Database Change Management over the years, helping database systems work more like application software with DevOps principles. The idea is to move quicker and respond better to demands, while providing safety and governance. A database is a stateful machine, which is a challenge to evolve and maintain, but with good data modeling, testing, code analysis, and automation, your database change process can coexist with your application software.

    That being said, most of the solutions for managing database change focus on the database itself and everything inside it. After all, that’s where the data is. I understand people wanting to solve that problem, but there are plenty of things that need to be managed for a database server (or an instance for MSSQL) outside of the database. We have security, configuration, and, in the case of SQL Server, jobs. That might be the number one request is a way to manage jobs across systems.

    Regardless of any tooling you might use, the important thing that you need is a way to easily manage and deploy the scripts you generate. These might be adding users or logins, perhaps rotating certificates, or something else. Clicking through SSMS or manually running things might seem like it’s quick, but that’s a governed way to manage tasks. You might update a Jira ticket when you’re done, but do you always capture the code you ran in the ticket? The results?

    For many tasks, this might not seem like it matters. If we make a mistake, we correct it, and no one needs to know. However, this doesn’t help you work more efficiently, nor does it help your team work closer together. If there are records of the code and results in a pipeline, then you have a trail of who, what, when, and how. The ticket should tell you why.

    This helps hold you accountable. It ensures you test more carefully. It gives teammates a place to go grab a script that worked and re-run it, perhaps changing the name of something in the script; this allows the reuse of work. This ensures that the work is routine.

    Many of us have made a career out of doing work manually, and we’ve gotten good at it. However, the future will require us to work in a team, one that may include an AI, and learning to build patterns of work that flow easily across humans and agents will be a skill that lets us both be productive and provide value to our employers.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • Keeping Track of my ConEmu CLIs

    I use ConEmu for my terminal interface. I’m still on Windows 10 at home, and for consistency’s sake, I run this on my Win11 laptop and the home machine. I love it, and it keeps my windows together, so that I can run multiple command prompts.

    However.

    Sometimes I find myself in this situation. I have a bunch of prompts open, and I’m not sure what is what. I know the current one is one of my Flyway projects, but what about the other 4?

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    I was flipping through them recently and thought there has to be a better way. As you can see, some have a folder, but some don’t. What I really want is some organization.

    I learned I can right click the header and get a menu. Notice the “rename” in here.

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    I can type a new name then for the tab. I did this for my last (right-most) tab below:

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    Now I can see where all my tabs are focused. I’ve had a tendency to pop a new tab for a new task, as I sometimes have different things going on as I multi-task, or really, as I wait for someone to respond so I can complete the task in a window.

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    I wish I had an auto-mapping of some sort that might rename these for certain things, but this works well for now. I usually only have 4-5 open, and if I change the task, it’s easy to rename a tab. I tend to do that when I realize I’m looking for something and the name is wrong.

    If you use the Windows 11 terminal, it can run multiple prompt and you can rename them as well, but if you’re still on W10 or lower, think about ConEmu. I’ve loved it for the last 5-6 years and it’s worked well. Plus I can have it slide down from the top if I want.

  • Designing for Teams

    Some years ago, I had to register for my medical benefits with Redgate. My employer had contracted with Anthem for health insurance, and I went to register myself. I found that not only could I not register myself, but there was already an account there with my tax number, and it was under my wife’s account. Many years ago, she had health insurance with Anthem through another employer. Anthem kept her record, which includes my tax ID. So today, in 2026, I have to log into my Anthem account with her ID to see my plan.

    That’s likely an older, legacy system, so we might understand that they didn’t expect two people to be primary account holders over time, right? Well, we also have a more modern tax software system to deal with. Let’s call the software “Chewit” to protect the reputation of the company. When we contracted with an accountant for services, they set up an account for me. However, my wife manages most of the money, so I asked them to add an account for her. Apparently, this “Chewit” business tax service only allows for one person in a household to have an account. This person has to manage the account, so now when my wife logs in with my account, I get a code, and I send it to her. If you think these are isolated, I have 3 or 4 other services that work like this, from well-known, global brands.

    The quality of data modeling and software development is depressing some days.

    A lot of what I see from customers at Redgate, often from people who want to use Flyway to smooth our their database change management, is that they have built similar solutions that often depend on A person (or A server or AN account) to work. Someone hasn’t modeled things well for teams. Even when we try to smooth out a flow, often I see the users don’t account for the complexities of teams working together. I think some of this is because a demo or a model often shows a happy path, and we all tend to think in that mindset of a simple flow. Managing parallel actions is hard, just like parallel programming is a thing many people struggle to do well. Well, they struggle to make the code work without race conditions.

    I see the same thing in T-SQL. So many people think in terms of singletons, working with a row of data. They don’t think in sets, or as Jeff Moden put it recently, about how to work with the entire column at once. Thinking that way is harder and requires a new mindset, but that’s why we get paid well. Or should be paid well. We solve the hard problems.

    The world is more connected, more complex, and more likely to require teamwork. Whether that’s between partners/spouses in a household or different groups of people in an organization. We should be designing and modeling for teams, not individuals, in everything from data storage and security to user settings and customizations.

    Steve Jones

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

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