Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

The End of Summer

Growing up, this was the last week of summer for me every year. When I was a child in Virginia Beach, school started the day after Labor Day every year, which is next Monday in the US. This was our last chance to sleep in, enjoy the ocean, and stay out late without commitments. Starting next week we’d be back in school, up early, with homework to do every night.

As an adult, the end of summer doesn’t really stand out anymore. Corporate changes are usually at the beginning of the year or in July, so it’s the end of June or December that are slower times. September is often the beginning of conference season for me, and I’ve usually been preparing for travel in September, as I am this year. I’ll be in San Diego in a little over a week for VS Live (if you want to join me, use the code Jones).

I hope that most people have busy times and slow times at work. If you’re constantly busy and fighting fires, life is not good. That leads to stress, unhealthy living, and burnout. It’s not sustainable over time, at least not if you want to keep producing high quality work. I’ve lived in those situations and they’re neither enjoyable, nor the times when I’ve been at my most effective.

When work is slower, I naturally slow down a little and appreciate that I can take more time to write, answer emails and messages with more detail, and think more carefully about situations. I also use the time to get ahead administrative tasks that I sometimes put off. For me, this is producing and scheduling things I’ll need later. This is often a time when I’ll write questions or editorials for the future.

These are often the pieces I’m more pleased or proud of. I have time to work through details and spend more time reviewing my work. These are often the best questions I write.

As a developer, this was the time I might refactor code I’m not pleased with, or tackle some niggling piece of work that I know is needed, but never has priority. As a DBA, this is when I refactor scripts and alerts, do more maintenance, maybe add some automation for tasks that I’ve just been doing manually because I don’t have time to do anything else. If I were still a dev or DBA, this is when I’d be experimenting and practicing using AI as a lever to make myself more effective.

When you have slower times, what tasks do you tackle? Documentation? Improvements? What else might not get done when the pace is a little more hectic? Let me know today.

Steve Jones

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

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

September 4, 2026
Advice I Like: Lots of Ideas

“A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea” – from Excellent Advice for Living

Whenever we read about the success of someone or something, we often get the impression that someone had a great idea and executed on it. Especially in computing, it can seem like it’s the trajectory of many of the companies we know well.

The reality is that a lot of companies have various bad ideas and then discover one working well. They pivot into the one good idea. Microsoft started writing programming languages and then pivoted to providing DOS. Netflix went from DVD rentals to streaming.

The reality is that often we have lots of ideas and it can be hard to decide what a good idea is. That’s why we brainstorm, why we game, debate, and discuss options. We don’t have any hindsight when we are trying to move in a new direction, so we need to come up with various ideas to find a great one. Artists do this, musicians do this, plenty of creative people do this.

I used to want to try and wait to have a great idea before discussing it with others. Andy Warren taught me to just throw things out there and then examine them with others.

I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.

To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.

September 4, 2026
Updating the Data API Builder
I was updating my session for the Data API Builder (DAB) recently, mostly to work with the MCP server capabilities. As I was trying to get this working, I realized that the MCP capabilities were newer than my DAB version. I had v1.4

Wow, that’s old. The Overview page for the SQL Server MCP site says v1.7 is needed and 2.0+ has bug fixes. I need an update.

I had this in my slide deck, but the dotnet tool is used to update the DAB. The command is
```
dotnet tool update –-global Microsoft.DataApiBuilder
```
This showed a download and then in a few minutes it was done. I could see I had an updated version.

And an MCP server!

A Further Update

I checked a few weeks later and couldn’t remember the command, but I decided to try the install command. That worked as well, and I got an even newer, 2.0.12, version.

Still no timestamps from the logs, but I’m every hopeful.
September 2, 2026
A Daily Report from Claude

Redgate had some Claude training recently, which I went through as my knowledge has been gained in bits and pieces and is fragmented. I wasn’t sure I’d get a lot out of it, but I was surprised by a few things I learned.

One of these was scheduling a task to give me a daily report. This post looks at that process for me. I’ll walk through what happened, and then a summary below of what I think of this.

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

Getting Started with Skills

One of the first demos shown was to build a daily snapshot of what things need to be looked at and handled. The default in Claude is the /morning command. I ran this, looking to customize it, and Claude decided to create a new skill for me, based on this, which it named “morning-plus”.

I had previously added the Microsoft 365 Connector, so the skill could read my email. That’s good, as this is a read-only view for me, and it’s local to my machine. I’m sure there is some security risk, but this is managed and limited by Redgate, so I’m assuming this is good enough for my work.

The next thing was to alter the view. I had a weird graph of lines that seemed to try and show the height of a graph implying the length of a meeting or a business of the day, but that’s not helpful. I decided to ask for a calendar list.

This gave me a nice look at my day, which is shown below:

Another thing I wanted to do is keep an ongoing TODO list as I have various things that aren’t in my calendar. A bunch of these things are repeating or ongoing, but having a list helps me stay organized. I might need a way to order them, but for now I asked Claude to add this. It guided me to using a folder to store this, which is what I wanted.

I also decided to keep the report here, as this helps me stay organized. I can keep the todo.md open in VSCode or elsewhere and edit as needed (or ask Claude). I like to do some editing myself, rather than waste tokens. If I have to type in a prompt, but not just edit the doc.

In the past I’d have tried to figure out how to schedule things. Here I just asked Claude. It did the work for me.

Once done, I have an item entered in my Scheduled area. This is a Claude thing, so Claude needs to run, which is fine. My desktop is running all the time.

I clicked the item and selected Run Now from the menu that popped up. This ran and went through all the tasks and produced a report. It took a few minutes, maybe 5? It’s slow, but not a lot of stuff going on when this will run for me, so it’s not a big deal. The report:

Not bad, but I also want to get anything from overnight that is important. I tend to look at Slack for mentions/links, so I added the Slack connector, which Redgate has authorized. This will let the agent scan for things that mention me and I can get a summary rather than searching through all folders.

I added a prompt to help here, which is great.

That didn’t work, and Claude explained why.

One note, each time I altered the skill, I had to approve the changes after Claude decided what to do. It’s a good idea, but the list of stuff it lists in a stream of text is too much to read, so I’m not sure how well this secures things.

I also have to re-approve a changed skill to access my e:xxx folder on each run. I guess it’s good, but in a practical sense, I’m going to just approve this.

The last thing I added was a Windows Scheduled task to run Edge and load this page. This was easy to do, and it will bring up a browser on my desktop that I can see when I log in. Now I can skip some of the checks I might do early in the am, knowing that I’ll get a view of my day when I get to my desk.

Summary

One of the interesting things the trainer noted was that when you start using a new tool, productivity can go down until you get the hang of it. This applies to many tools, but certainly Claude and AI chat/agents. It takes some time to see benefits, which is something I’ve noticed myself. Part of this is learning to use the tool, and part is deciding how you want to use the tool.

In my case, I was skeptical this was actually a useful thing. My days can be chaotic and crazy. However, I’m willing to give it a try. I am starting to have more and more things that I need to keep an eye on, and things that span more than a day. I use calendar reminders constantly, but there are a lot of moving parts here. Keeping a todo list is a start, though I likely need to add some dates or priorities. I’ll play with this over time.

The lack of Slack integration is annoying, but if I can keep other things organized, this will be helpful.

Is this helpful and worth it? I don’t know. This is an experiment on my part, which I’ll run for 3-4 weeks to see if this is helpful in tracking lots of disparate work. I certainly forget some things and then end up working late, or miss deadlines.

Is this worth the cost? Running a report costs $0.82 in its current iteration. Is it worth $1 to organize my day and prevent missed items? Perhaps. I’m not sure, but this is an experiment.

A small AI thing, but at $200 a year, this might be a nice productivity helper for me, partially to ensure work is done, and partially to reduce stress from the chaos of my life.

August 31, 2026