This is from 2010, but I loved that people felt this way about Redgate Software. A lot of these words are things that we aim to express to each other and to customers.
Ingeniously Simple was a tagline that our founders aimed for with our first products. I still remember this and challenge developers to work towards this. However, I love these words being things that stand out: calm, dependable, Gold-Standard, Excellent, Trustworthy, even Love.
I have been proud to be a part of Redgate, and I want to ensure that customers not only get value from us for the money they spend, but that they want to, and like to, do business with us.
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.
Redgate has a research arm, called the Foundry, that has been experimenting with AIs and DBA tasks. This post shows how GenAI tech can be helpful to DBAs in finding blocking and removing the offending client.
One of the experiments the Foundry is running is with something we’ve called Runbooks. Here’s the main screen, where I have a welcome and a chat window. This is like what I see in Claude.ai.
I have connected this to two instances in the settings, and given the tool permissions to run queries, but not execute commands. The first server is the Local 2022 Default and the second is the 2910-41433.
A Blocking Problem
I’m going to set up a blocking session with this code. Notice it opens a transaction and then performs an update.
In a second session, I’ll run this code. Notice this select is blocked and I have no results. The bottom shows this as “executing”.
Now I’ll go to the Runbooks and enter a question. In this case, I ask it what is wrong with my 2022 server, as if someone called me and said there was an issue. Imagine the “Select” query owner wondering why things aren’t returning right away.
The Redgate Runbook responds by saying it needs to run something. The first time, it asks me to approve this, which I did. Then it runs it and shows executed.
Below this I get some results of what’s returned. This isn’t different than SP_who2, but if you’ve used that tool, you often get a lot of system stuff. I Could use sp_whoisactive, but again, more results than I want without knowing anything. Here the Runbook as limited results to what I care about.
What’s more, the Runbook then tells me something about what it analyzes. This isn’t perfect, but it’s been better than what a lot of help desk/first line support people have told me.
If I know who 56 is, certainly I can ask them to close their tran. This isn’t perfect, but I can ask the Runbook to do this, as I do at the bottom of the image above.
It again asks me to run something, and when it does, I see the executed note.
If I go back to SSMS, I see the query completed.
I typically might not kill the session without more research. I could have asked for what this is, which I’ll do now for the 57 (blocked) session. What was running here? (since 56 was killed)
Again, I approve this and get results.
To me, that’s pretty cool. Using AI to help me get things done as a lever, rather than a replacement is useful. I could have set the AI checking while I finished another task, or used Slack/Teams to check with others as a troubleshoot. I could certainly let the AI run, but I want approvals. I could copy/paste the code to a tool to run it, but the AI let’s this run separately, while I could be multi-tasking with a phone call to the user, or to the help desk, or anything else. More importantly, if I had this AI working from a mobile phone (jump box, etc.) I could be doing minimal typing and have the tech working for me.
This isn’t a product, and unlikely to be one in its own right, but this is the type of thinking we do at Redgate. Harness AI, in a safe way, that’s useful.
Today I’m in San Francisco at Small Data SF 2025. I went to the conference last year and thought it was a great event. Watching people talk about data and how we might look at managing smaller systems, at dealing with the challenges of exploding volumes by querying, storing, and handling less data was fascinating. The event had me me really thinking about ways in which we can build better performing (and cheaper) systems.
To be clear, small data isn’t very little data. Often this is still 100s of GB, perhaps low TBs, but it’s getting away from the idea of thinking we’ll be working on PB-sized big data systems, or that we even need to.
Last year there were lots of talks on data analysis, querying, and even AI, but using smaller sets of data in practical ways that provide value to organizations and individuals by judiciously choosing data sets. Either recent or representative data.
This helped me think of new ways for subsetting, which is something I’ve been pushing at Redgate for our TDM product.
I’m looking forward to the talks. This is a quick trip. I skipped the workshops yesterday since they weren’t that great last year (too many product/company pitches from Silicon Valley) and flew out last night after coaching kids in their first practice. At the conference today listening to talks and doing networking get together after before flying back early tomorrow.
A quick trip, but I’m sure I’ll lots to write about (and think about) in the future.
foilsick – adj. feeling ashamed after revealing a little too much of yourself to someone – allowing them too clear a view of your pettiness, your anger, your cowardice, your childlike vulnerability – wishing you could somewhat take back the moment, bolting the door after a storm had already blown it off its hinges.
What a visual. The door blown off its hinges from a storm, and you desperately trying to set it back into the opening.
Blurting out something in an emotional moment is likely something many people have done. I would guess parents as much as teenagers feel foilsick after an argument or a moment of passion in which they say something they didn’t mean.
In the modern world, we might do that with messages or emails as well. I find myself trying to avoid putting myself into the place where I might feel foilsick and I often take a moment to draft something in Joplin (my notetaking app) before I put it into Slack or email. I can’t accidentally send it and then feel some regret over what I said.
I think the avoidance of ever feeling foilsick often leads many of us to not say something we feel, or admit a challenge, precisely so that we aren’t vulnerable and regret our words. As I grow older, I realize that being vulnerable isn’t going to create a foilsick feeling in many cases. It’s going to bring me closer to someone else, or help them help me.
Voice of the DBA 