Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Labor Day 2026: Fun on the Ranch

    It’s Labor Day in the US and I’m not working. Not for Redgate, at least. I’m not even traveling today, which is something that happens all too often on holidays.

    Today I’m going to be working on the ranch, catching up on a few things. I was up in the air last week, trying to replace a pulley. The bolt in this pulley sheared off. Both ends and the nuts were still there, somewhat rusted to the side. The wheel and middle were on the ground.

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    This lasted 15 years, which is good. Bad that this was 30ft in the air at the top of a building. And I was it Scotland when it broke.

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    My daughter secure the door, so she could get hay out. I had to rent a lift last week as this couldn’t wait until Labor Day. We had a spare and I ordered another one as well. I got up in the air and unbolted this and replaced it with a new one.

    While I was up there, I took the opportunity to replace the lifting cable. This had broken near the bottom a few years ago and I added a new section, but it didn’t go up and down smoothly. Since I had the lift, I was up here, undoing the stays for the cable on the left and then running it down 30ft to the bottom of the door.

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    My daughter had noticed part of the upper cable was also worn, so I ended up replacing that since I had the lift. My wife also asked that we tighten down the straps on this end of the building, as they were looser than others. We replaced the roof last year, and if you want to see part of this, I have a video of us pulling this section over the frame.

    It was a long, hard 24 hours of having the lift and being up in the air for 8-9 hours while working on a Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.

    I’m sure I have something else in store for today just as hard. It’s a wild life for a database professional who lives on a ranch.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

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    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.

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    And an MCP server!

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    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.

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    Still no timestamps from the logs, but I’m every hopeful.