Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

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 hand. Yet this was less than a minute for a computer system to take this image and transform it into something fun.

Christian Buckley wrote an interesting post about AI challenging our identity, which sums up nicely one of the struggles many of us have with AI. Many of us identify with our work. We spend most of our lives for decades toiling away at a craft that we (hopefully) enjoy and in which we have success. We build skills, and we’re proud of our accomplishments.

Some of us are more proud of our scars.

Either is OK, but AI challenges that. AI can do work in seconds that we used to take minutes, often tens of minutes. Sometimes hours. It can remember things that we spend time googling or looking up in SQL Server Central forums. Our ability to search and navigate docs for an obscure setting, like that strange exit code you found in your CI/CD pipeline. We’re proud of where we’ve been and what we’ve done.

I wrote recently about experts wanting to still solve problems themselves, without AI assistance. Some people don’t embrace AI because they think it devalues their knowledge. Others are afraid of the technology and potentially making mistakes with code an AI wrote that they don’t understand. They see this as a risk (and they should).

However, choosing not to use the technology at all, or not trying to learn how and when to use it, is a mistake. We need to embrace the tools in our world, learning to take advantage of them.

And more importantly, show our current and future employers we can do so.

AI does challenge us. It challenges the way we used to work and some of the skills we used to rely on. We have to learn to flow with this challenge and make it a part of our future career.

Steve Jones

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August 24, 2026
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 Token

I’m not going to bore you with the setup and configuration of the Redgate Monitor instance. That procedure might change by release, so I’ll assume you’ve got the MCP server enabled.

To access the MCP server, you need to give your AI agent a token. This authorizes the MCP server to connect to Redgate Monitor and read data. These are read only tokens, and designed for the MCP and the tools that are available.

In the configuration, there is an Access Tokens area. Click here.

Click Create Token on the next screen. This is in the upper right.

On the next screen, give your token a name, description, and set an expiration date. The default is one year.

Make sure you select the MCP type. I messed this up the first time.

Below this, pick the servers the MCP token can access. I’ve selected just the Production serer group, but you can set this as needed. I’d make sure the name and/or description lets you know what can be accessed.

You will get a review screen, to verify what you’ve done. Accept that and you’ll get a dialog with the token value. Make sure you save this securely somewhere.

Once you’ve created this, it’s in a list, and you can click the “view details, which shows you what the token can access, as you can see below. You cannot get the token itself anymore.

Configuring VS Code

I’m going to show this working in VS Code. I opened the Command Palette and selected the MCP: Open User Configuration, as shown.

Inside the config, I pasted this inside the “servers” key. This should be a sub element, and this goes alongside any other MCP servers.:
```
"redgate-monitor": {
  
 "type": "http",
  
 "url": "https://<your-monitor-host>/mcp",

 "headers": {
  
 "Authorization": "Bearer ${input:redgate-mcp-token}"

 }

 }
```
Then inside the “inputs” key, add this:
```
{

 "id": "redgate-mcp-token",

 "type": "promptString",

 "description": "Redgate Monitor MCP token",

 "password": true

 }
```
The save this. When you start the MCP server, it will ask you for your token. Paste the value in and then you should connect. You do this from the MCP: List Servers item in the command palette. This should give you output like this, with a connection message and tools discovered:

If I open a chat, and add the MCP as a tool, I can ask questions. Here’s a question I asked and the initial responses from the LLM.

Once this is done, I’ll get a list of the alerts. I did approve some PoSh commands where the LLM stored results from Redgate monitor and then tried to process those after writing them to a temp file.

\

This is the raw LLM trying to use tools and fumbling around. With a few skills and guidance, this will run smoother, quicker, and more efficiently in your environment.

Summary

The Redgate Monitor MCP server is a great way to start using AI to analyze all the data in your database estate that Redgate Monitor collects. There were 7 tools when I started, but within a few weeks there were 11. By the time you read this, there are likely going to be even more.

Give Redgate Monitor a try and learn how to use MCP servers to link your LLM to Redgate Monitor and start analyzing systems in a more natural manner.

Redgate Monitor is a world-class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.
August 24, 2026
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 improve it’s capabilities, and much faster than a human can. The AI/ML advances of the last few years mean that we don’t have to program robots to be precise and exact. The fact that a robot can balance and run and stay inside the lanes is incredible. I suspect these robots, both humanoid and other form factors will start to become more commonplace in our world.

Which is scary.

Not for us tech people, though certainly AI advances are worrisome. More, I worry about other jobs. Think about the industrial robots of the last 30 years that have been used in places like car manufacturing. They are bespoke, designed to do certain jobs, and in a certain way. They are programmed with fairly tight tolerances to perform a specific task, often at a quicker and more reliable (and repeatable) way than a human can. There were plenty of false starts here, but today many robots are used alongside humans to assemble cars. You can see them working here, doing tasks that would be slower and harder for humans, even with mechanical aids.

There is talk of humanoid robots being used in place of some humans, reducing the slow and complex setup . This also lets the robots work in the same places and spaces, moving the same way, as humans do. This might reduce some of the labor costs in the future. That might not seem like a big change overall, as lots of manufacturing uses automation in some way today, but think past this.

You can purchase a humanoid robot for under $5000. That might not be very capable now, but as LLMs get more capable and perhaps specialized models for different purposes like image recognition, this is an issue. Imagine you own an oil change business. You pay 5 people to do most of the work on cars. Those people likely cost you $2000-2500 a month each. That’s the cost of 2 robots, without the hassles of hiring, termination, breaks, etc. An AI LLM can already identify items from a camera image. Is it a far stretch to think that a robot could identify the oil drain plug and the oil filter on a car by moving around it? How hard would it be for a robot to grab a human ratchet, pick the right socket after a database lookup, and remove the plug. They could tell when the oil finished draining and then replace the plug, tightening it to the correct torque. And being a robot, they might do this without forgetting to position the drain or replace the plug.

In my mind, a $5k robot quickly becomes capable of a lot of human jobs. There might still be the need for some humans, but we might easily replace 50%+ of them in a lot of common jobs. Stocking shelves, acting as cashiers, who knows what else these AI driven systems might accomplish. That’s truly a scary world, where human labor in many cases might be devalued.

In the software world, it seems the people having the most success have the best judgment. People who are above average software engineers get above average results from LLMs, and I suspect this will be the case for a long time. Very average, or worse, engineers get worse results and I think are the source of many of the stories of AI coding failures.

I don’t know what a lot of manual labor jobs will do when management starts to experiment with robots, but I know that in our world you can compete and succeed against AI coding agents by learning to work with them, apply your judgment and use them as tools that make you more effective.

Steve Jones

August 22, 2026
An Eventual Consistency Scam

Recently I sold a car. It was an interesting process as I hadn’t sold a car to someone I didn’t know in a long time. I listed the car in a few places and was surprised by the interest. It was an EV (I guess it still is), and with the rising price of fuel in the US, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I arranged a couple of showings, but I had quite a few people offer to buy the car after only seeing a few pictures, asking if I’d take a check.

Some of you might be wary at this point, and I was. However, my wife had gotten similar offers from a few people when she was selling a horse. She never did, but we talked about where the scam is if someone sends a check and says they’ll wait for the funds to clear. This piece decodes where it is.

I was curious, so I agreed to take checks from three people. Two of them sent the checks in registered letters, with proof of delivery. This is a USD$20 cost right now. One sent a FedEx letter. That probably cost a similar amount. In all cases, the people said they were sending enough for the car to be shipped, on top of my asking price. I also told them I’d need the check to clear, and they agreed.

The first one I received, I drove by the bank while in town and deposited the check. I discussed the check clearing with the bank. I was told by the teller that I’d be able to get $400 that day and the rest the next day. I asked about when the check actually clears and the funds were moved, since all three checks were drawn on non-Colorado banks. The teller realized I wanted validation and said it would be 7-10 days and gave me a customer service number to call to check when funds were actually moved

I haven’t used checks very much the last few years. While I know technology has improved, what has mostly happened is that the banks operate on a system of trust that appears to move faster even though many of the underlying systems are older and still slow. When you deposit a check, the bank doesn’t validate anything. That might seem strange, but it doesn’t. It sends the bank routing number, the account number, and amount through a process that reconciles the money with another bank.

Think of this as data in two different databases, which it really is. The update in bank 1 isn’t sent to bank 2 for a period of time. The update from bank 2, which debits their account and credits bank 1, takes longer. In this case, the time is in days.

That’s serious eventual consistency.

What happened with person 1 was that they asked for confirmation of the deposit, and then texted me 2 days later saying that they’d need a deposit for the shipping company. I repeated that I’d need the funds to clear. They wanted to argue about needing to move fast, but I ignored them. After a few days, they said they were sick and could I front them money for a few bills and they’d drive to get the car. I didn’t agree and eventually they gave up communicating with me. A week after the deposit, I got a “funds failed to clear” message from my bank. No charge to me, but the “money” that appeared to be in my balance disappeared.

Person 2 texted me the image of their FedEx note, and when I said I would wait a week for the check to clear, they asked me to tear up the check and send them a picture. I declined. Person 3 sent a check blindly, saying they were trusting me. I ignored future texts, but they persistently kept checking for 12 days. In all cases, these are checks on real banks, but fake names and accounts.

Checks are insecure. And just like plenty of data replication systems that try to synchronize data between two databases, there can be issues if you do not have a two-phase commit.

I wrote this so many of you would be aware of a scam that is out there. Watch out and warn your less tech-savvy friends. However, also be careful when you work with data that lives in two places. There is a lot of overhead to ensuring the data is correct in all the systems, and there are good reasons for this. Sometimes eventual consistency isn’t good enough.

Steve Jones

Note: A few people are concerned about the check images linked. Those are fake people and fake accounts.

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

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

August 21, 2026