Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

Another AI Faux Pax

I was experimenting with a local model (article) and as a part of this, I pulled down a web interface for my model in a container. I ran it and had it in the background. I’ve randomly been asking questions as I need to look up things. I’m mostly curious how well it works.

This week I asked about CDC and got and interesting response.

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

Updating a CDC Schema

I asked this question of my local mistral model: How do I alter a table in SQL SErver that is being tracked by CDC to add a new column?

That might not be the best way to phrase things, but I was on a call with a customer who was going to enable CDC and wanted to discuss how to manage this with schema changes. I’m not a CDC expert, so I was checking some documentation while chatting and decided to put this query in.

I got these results,

I thought I’d missed something, as I had never heard of sp_cdc_refresh_schema. Sure enough, I didn’t see it on MS Docs.

If I were trying to do this (pretend I’m a copy/paste DBA), I would see this:

So, the next step is to call the AI on this. It finds that it hallucinated and give me other ideas.

It gets worse. Now I create a proc and insert into the system tables, which isn’t recommended.

This won’t work either, but I can see people trying this.

First, if you get advice from the Internet, please always, always use a sandbox to test (what I also recommended to the customer), and second, treat any AI response like it came from a teenager.

January 20, 2025
Monday Monitor Tips: Using the PowerShell API
Redgate Monitor has grown tremendously from its early days and I find many customers using this to monitor lots of servers, like thousands. In those cases, some of tasks you might do to manage your Redgate Monitor server can be cumbersome in the GUI.

This post shows you how to get started with PowerShell to administer your Redgate Monitor Instance.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts

The Purpose of the PowerShell API

Redgate Monitor (RGM) has lots of configuration options that you can set. In any size estate, this can be overwhelming when you need to change settings for some servers, but not others. For example, suspending some monitoring for servers being patched or upgraded. While this can be done easily in the web interface, for more than 1 or 2 servers, you might want a programmatic way to do this.

The PowerShell API is designed to help you change your configuration in a programmatic way rather than clicking through the GUI. If you look at the main documentation screen below, it says the same thing.

Getting the PowerShell Module

To get the various PoSh modules you need, you need to go to your configuration screen and click the download under the PoSh API section. You can see this below, and it’s also in the docs.

While this downloads, you also need an authorization token from your install. This is also on the configuration screen and described in these docs. The PowerShell API section has the Authorization Tokens section. Click that and in this screen you can genernate a new one. Save this, as you can’t see it after generation.

From here, test making a basic connection to your server with a script like this one below. One of our solutions specialists wrote it, and it imports the module, sets the URL and token, and then tries a connection. If that works, you are connected. You can run the Get-RedgateMonitorMonitoredObject as well. This gets a list of all objects being monitored.

Where to go from there is up to you. What types of things do you find yourself changing in Redgate Monitor? If there are a series of stops, then think about automating them. We have a set of example scripts that might give you some examples. There are things you might do from a list of servers like:
- add to a group (or move)
- suspect monitoring
- annotate them with an event
- set a tag
- copy settings from one server to another
With PowerShell, there are so many ways to program a script to do the thing you used to do manually. Give it a try with Redgate Monitor today.

https://youtu.be/eTlg1auKRUA

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.
January 20, 2025
Setting up a Local LLM
I wanted to experiment a bit with an LLM and training it, so I decided to try a few things. I looked at a few tutorials (see the references below) and then finally got this working. This post distills down what I got to work.

Getting Started

I like containers, and rather than install something on my machine, I decided to get docker images for ollama. I ran this to get started:
```
docker pull ollama/ollama
```
I ran the Docker container with this command:
```
docker run -d -v ollama:/root/.ollama -p 11434:11434 --name ollama ollama/ollama
```
From there, I pulled a few models into the container with these commands:
```
docker exec -it ollama ollama pull mistral
```
I then ran this to start the model and interact with it.
```
docker exec -it ollama ollama run mistral
```
Here are a first few things I typed in to test the model.

From here, I exited and then ran this to start the model in detached mode.
```
docker exec -d ollama ollama run mistral
```
From there, more experiments, but that’s in another article.

References

Here are some places and tutorials I looked at:
January 20, 2025
Advice I Like: Apologies

How to apologize: quickly, specifically, sincerely. Don’t ruin an apology with an excuse – from Excellent Advice for Living

This is great advice. I remember myself often saying “I’m sorry, but …”, which takes away from the I’m sorry. In fact, I wasn’t really sorry.

I’ve learned to just apologize. No excuses, no qualifications, just apologize for what you (or often, I), did. Leave it at that.

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.

January 17, 2025