Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • A Flex Holiday

    I’m taking a holiday today, enjoying New Orleans with my wife after a fun Saturday at Day of Data Baton Rouge. It’s always a great event and one I look forward to attending.

    Today’s holiday is a shift of a holiday from June. I find that I often get busy on scheduled holidays with travel or work, and I don’t get to enjoy them on the scheduled day. I don’t get too worried, since I know I’ll use the day at some point.

    That day is today, and I’m glad that my company is flexible and understanding. Just as I try to be understanding when they ask me to work. I had to record a few things on Juneteenth, and since I couldn’t take the day off because of scheduling, I just worked the rest of the time.

    I’m happy to trade a random Friday at home in Colorado for a day in New Orleans today.

  • Day of Data Baton Rouge Slides and Code

    Thanks to everyone for attending my talk today at Day of data Baton Rouge 2026 (formerly SQL Saturday Baton Rouge).

    The slides are here: Building an API with DAB – Baton Rouge

    The repo for the code and demos is here: DAB-Experiments

    Use the Getting Started folder for the setup and demos as batch files. This is for SQL Server with a user set as JoeUser. Change this in the .env file if you want to alter this. I use Northwind, with a few additions in the .sql files.

    Apologies, it’s not completely organized as I am still working on the flow and structure. feel free to reach out with questions.

  • Moving on from Tesla

    We decided to sell our Tesla Model Y. It’s been almost 5 years, and it’s (still) an amazing car. My wife, however, wants something more luxurious. As cool of a car as it is, and how well it performs, it’s not luxurious inside. The ride can be stiff, the seats are good, not great, and we’re ready for something else.

    We’ve been testing a few different SUVs, as we don’t want anything smaller than the Model Y. We ended up choosing a Lucid Gravity, which feels like an advanced version of a Tesla in many ways. It doesn’t self-drive, but it’s a very, very nice car inside and drives like a computer.

    A luxury computer that is very comfortable.

    What’s amazing is I listed the Tesla and had 6 people ping me that day for the car. I showed it to one and he liked it, so we’re in the process of getting paperwork done. I haven’t sold a car in a long time that had a loan, and I’m surprised at the weird challenges that this entails.

    It’s been 4.8 years with the Model Y and it’s still an amazing car. No real problems with it, it’s performed well, and the battery health is still at 88%. What’s even more amazing is that moving to 18” wheels netted me better performance than I ever had, with my last, around town 200 miles showing 205Wh/mi. Kind of amazing.

    2026-07_0364

  • The Book of Redgate: Products

    We are product focused at Redgate Software. Here is another of our values that focused on this:

    2026-04_0231

    The text on the next page is:

    Shipping something amazing is better than creating something average and to budget and on time. We cannot market, sell, manage or account our way to success.

    We have tried to do that. I’ve used many of our products before coming to work for Redgate. My former partners at SQL Server Central used them extensively as well. Since I have been an employee, I’ve worked with a lot of customers who constantly find value in our products.

    I think we’ve succeeded, and I think that us trying to build useful software is what has helped. My fellow advocates and I constantly try to bring the voice of the customer to Redgate so that our engineers better understand your challenges. This helps them build things that are useful.

    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.