Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Whiling away an afternoon, thinking

    I come to Heathrow often. Today is likely somewhere close to 60 trips to this airport in my lifetime. After over 19 years of working with Redgate (plus a trip in college), this is the airport I’ve visited most outside of Denver (my home).

    This is the view outside my hotel window. You can see an A320 (or a Boeing 737) taking off. This is a good sized plane I fly all over the US. It is about 35 meters (100ft) wide and carries 150-180 people.

    As it took off beside the A380 pulling into the terminal, it looked like a toy plane. Those things are massive.

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    I’ve stayed here a few times after landing to try and get some work done, and to check in early to take a nap. I landed at 10am after flying all night, and I could use some rest. Rather than heading into London and getting stuck sitting in a restaurant waiting to check in, I booked a room here. Already had a nap and ready to work.

    Thinking Time

    This is good thinking time, which is sometimes rare to get. Years ago on one of our multi-times-a-week SQL Server Central calls, Andy told me that he needed time to think about his work as a DBA and manager of others. Time to just consider how things are going, why things are going well or not, and which direction to go.

    Time just thinking about a topic.

    It has stuck with me all these years that time to just think is important, and it helps me clarify how I view things.

    It’s often how I get editorials written. Turning vague ideas into something concrete. I’ll look at a note I’ve made or re-read something and think about it. When inspiration strikes, I’ll start writing.

    Today I was thinking, watching planes take off when I realized I hadn’t seen a plane in awhile. Normally they take off around every 45s at LHR. Then I saw this little vehicle doing down the runway, something I’ve never seem.

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    I watched for a few minutes and realized there was another one coming the other way. They met in the middle and circled a few times before leaving the runway.

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    I’m sure this is some FOD (Foreign Object Detection) process looking for pieces that might have fallen off planes (yikes) or vehicles, or somewhere. A pilot friend said that this is something that is done in the military, sometimes by grunts walking the runway looking for something that might get pulled into a jet engine.

    In any case, it was something new and unusual and inspired me.

    I don’t know that everyone needs thinking time, but if you manage or lead or are trying to develop strategy, I do believe you need some quiet thinking time when you’re not really getting anything done, but just thinking about work.

    Glad that I took the time today and grateful to have the opportunity.

    Now back to writing about AI and other things impacting the data professional.


  • Balancing Life with a Career–Slides

    I had a great time at SQL Saturday Atlanta 2026 this past weekend. I had some good comments and a few questions. I’ll write a bit more on this, but I’ve uploaded the slides (apologies for the delay).

    Balancing Life with a Career

  • Advice I Like: Knots

    Learn how to tie a bowline knot. Practice in the dark. With one hand. For the rest of your life, you’ll use this knot more times than you would ever believe.” – from Excellent Advice for Living

    I like this advice, not because I use this know a lot, but because there are things you should be able to do in the physical world, and some self-reliance and ability is handy.

    For the record I do use bowlines regularly around the ranch, but we use some horseman’s slipknots (manger tie) and square knots more.

    In my life, there are small skills like this that get used over and over. We still live in the physical world, and not only are physical skills useful, but there is a lot of satisfaction from being able to accomplish something yourself.

    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.

  • The DIY Cost of Masking Test Data For Smaller Organizations

    One of the things I’ve tried hard to do in database development situations if ensure I could easily refresh dev and test environments on demand. In a small startup, we wanted to be sure our weekly releases worked well, so if we found bugs in QA, we immediately filed a report with developers and once they viewed a repro, we refreshed QA with a fresh copy from production.

    Not the best approach, but for a small database in the early 2000s when we were less concerned about data breaches, this worked well.

    At the time I remember discussing this challenge with Andy during one of our SQL Server Central catchups. He had a similar issue, though for him, they needed to clean the data. Their system included a bunch of email notifications and they couldn’t take the chance of sending out test emails. They also were in a regulated industry and clients who were concerned about developers getting names and addresses from production.

    Cleaning up names and addresses seems like a simple task, but there were endless variations and a new set of edge cases appearing constantly. It was a regular task for Andy to maintain and adjust his scripts to ensure data was masked well. This also resulted in no shortage of calls from others when things didn’t run smoothly.

    A Time Sink

    For smaller organizations (50-200 people), it wasn’t, and likely still isn’t, an option to purchase some of the more established tools in this area. They are too expensive and require a lot of resources (time and hardware) to get working.

    At the same time, the DIY approach is essentially a commitment to a software development project, one that never ends and distracts people from their regular jobs. If you have staff on salary, this can seem like a good approach, but it’s often a waste of their efforts.

    Even in the age of AI, I can see how this would be something that eats up sizable amounts of resources. While AI makes coding easier, directing that coding isn’t easy. And since models only keep limited context, I can see someone spending just as much time directing a model with prompts and correcting its mistakes as they might spend writing the code. I might be wrong, but since this isn’t always an easily defined task, I bet I’d spend a decent amount of time, even with Claude Code, constantly reshaping masking scripts.

    Not to mention, I’d still be hoarding the knowledge in my head about how to direct the AI.

    A Better Approach

    I work for Redgate Software, and certainly I’m a bit biased here. We sell a solution in this area, but I’ve also helped shape (a little) how we approach this space based on the challenges I see from customers, and the needs they have to get a system working quickly. Not to mention an affordable solution that reduces the risk of accidental data loss or regulatory fines.

    We’ve developed Test Data Manager to work within the constraints of small to medium sized organizations, both with functionality and price. It has a lot of what I want in a solution, though not everything. I still push on the product and engineering teams to add more features as well as reduce complexity wherever possible.

    I want this to be ingeniously simple to use.

    I’ve had the opportunity to work with a few customers that have become audit ready in hours by using the smart defaults and adding a bit of their knowledge about the system. The time to value keeps getting lower and I’m impressed by how the team responds to customers requests and demands.  Like many of our products, we’re releasing regularly and adding features constantly.

    The approach of having a tool that codifies what you want, is easily version controllable, and gets updated regularly is what most people want from software. We try to be good partners, and we’re working to ensure that customers not only get the value for the price they pay, but that value continues to increase throughout the year as we mature the software.

    We’re releasing in a DevOps manner, to ensure you can do so for your organization.

    If you’d like to see how Test Data Manager can can keep you in control of your databases, reduce your risk of data loss, and help ensure compliance, give us a try .

    We also have a webinar (

    Compliance Without Compromise: Test Data Management That Finally Fits) coming up on Mar 18 that you might check out for a quick look at some of the benefits of TDM.