Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Prompt Requests

    One of the challenges of AI-assisted coding agents is that they tend to produce A LOT of code. Even in refactoring or migration changes, the AIs can work quickly and generate such a volume of code that the process starts to become overwhelming. For pull requests, for CI/CD build systems, and certainly for human reviewers, they can be overwhelmed. This can become a real problem with OSS projects, where submissions can grow exponentially to the point that maintainers stop looking at pull requests. I suspect the same thing might happen in corporate repositories when lots of developers can refactor or submit huge amounts of code produced by AI agents in a fraction of the time it took a year ago.

    I was listening to an interview with an experienced software developer and OSS project maintainer who said that he preferred getting a “prompt request” that contained a description of a problem and the specification for a solution that he could submit to his own LLM to get the code. Rather than use an AI to review a code in a PR written by a human or AI agent, a great prompt that can communicates the problem and solution is preferred.

    That’s a fascinating idea to me. Specify what you want and let the code owners send it to an AI and get a code response whose quality and focus they can decide to implement, based on their own context provided to an LLM (standards, style, patterns, etc.)

    Of course, for open source projects, perhaps the maintainer doesn’t want to spend time managing AI agents or working through quality, but this does allow them to focus on the idea being suggested rather than attempting to review code, test it, judge the quality, and perhaps request changes from the submitter. They can take your idea and implement it. If it’s a simple fix, even better, as the maintainer might get quick help from an AI, using the style of code they are used to (their own).

    Software engineering is changing a lot in the age of AI, and this seems to be one of the more interesting things I’ve seen suggested. Not YOLO or vibe-coding, but rather a prompt that suggests the idea and turns contributors into a specification written for the robot coder.

    Steve Jones

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

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  • Is Your Time "Free"?

    We do a lot of research at Redgate Software, often contacting customers or Ambassadors and asking questions, getting feedback, and listening to their challenges or criticisms. We take that information and it helps guide us when we build the tools that help you in your job.

    Recently, I watched a call with a customer who uses our famous Toolbelt in their job and has for years. In this case, the call was about the value of Flyway and how that might fit in their organization. The person performed a lot of manual work to deploy code changes, and could see the way in which Flyway helps, but wasn’t interested in saving time.

    They saw their time as free. I assume their employer felt that way as well.

    In my three decades of working in technology, I’ve seen a lot of employees and their management think of their time as free. Management has been happy to have tech workers stay longer at their desk to get things done. How many of you have had to deploy code on nights or weekends?

    Perhaps a better question is how many of you have been happy to work nights or weekends? I’ve seen no shortage of IT people volunteer their efforts to work longer or out of hours to get something done. It’s a point of pride or a badge of honor to spend lots of hours working. I know I’ve felt that way in the past. I’m both proud of working 100 hours a week to support a system (for multiple weeks) and saddened that I did that.

    I did learn that wanting to overwork myself was a poor idea after spending a year with a blanket and pillow in my desk. I worked overnight or late into the night too many times across a year and eventually decided to look for a new job when I realized that neither my employer nor I was valuing my time.

    Many tech people are on salary, which makes it very easy for management to request (or demand) extra hours spent to meet a deadline or minimize the impact on other users who work “normal” hours. This happens to other professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc.), but I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

    Working long hours, especially during stressful situations, can teach you a lot. It’s an opportunity to grow and improve your career, but it has lots of downsides. Burnout, mistakes, unhappiness and other negative factors can impact your life and work over time. You ought to value your time, and your employer ought to as well. I learned this when a coworker told our boss he was working the problem until 5 and then needed to leave for a family event. He could work later or come in early the next day, but not everyone needed to stay all evening tonight, and he wasn’t going to do so.

    Learn to be more efficient, whether that’s in the work you do, or the people you manage. Learning to save time, use tools, share knowledge, and smooth your processes will build a stronger team over time. People will be more focused, more knowledgeable, and able to get more done in less time.

    Invest in things that save time. It’s the one resource we can’t get more of, no matter how much we push on people.

    Steve Jones

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

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  • Doing the Little Things

    I wrote a blog about sitting at LHR recently and watching planes take off. That’s been a fun thing for me to do when I’m stuck at the airport. I can see a plane roll down the runway every 35-45s during busy times. This time I was sitting by a window in the hotel, working and watching.

    There was a moment when I realized no planes were taking off. I looked and saw a vehicle rolling down the runway, and then realized there were two, one from each direction. It was an runway FOD inspection, looking for anything that might damage a plane.

    It’s a little thing that has to be done regularly at an airport.

    How many of you do little things in your job? Do you clean up old logs/backups/ETL source files? Do you double-check security for old/expired accounts, unused databases, forgotten audits/traces, etc.? Maybe do you check the status of patches across your database estate? Is there something else you should do semi-regularly?

    I’ve seen many people (including myself) lose track of things over time because there are so many. My phone (or pager) has rung so many times because a system ran out of disk space due to old files that accumulated over time. Those log files might not be be large, but after years the size can add up. And they’ll fill up a disk at night, not during working hours.

    This is where AI might help. I’ve written many little scripts that helped me clean things, but they were often brittle and focused on a specific task. Generalizing them would take too much effort, and might not even be possible. After all, sometimes I’m not even sure what the general case would be when building the utility.

    AI coding agents can help us in this space. Ask an AI for a script to remove old backup files, leaving the last few. Perhaps you want to look for unused accounts. You can ask an AI to setup an audit to scan for login times (script one) and then process the results to get the last login time for each account (script two). The action might be to disable accounts that haven’t logged in for six months (script three). Set these scripts to run ad hoc or on a schedule as needed. Just be sure you have a calendar entry to remind you to check the results.

    Each of these scripts isn’t that complex, but across many systems, perhaps with slightly different requirements and situations, you might not have time to adjust each script or even build them. However, if you can think about a small utility, an AI can help you build it. Just be sure you also ask the AI to set up tests to ensure the script works as intended. This is especially important since you’ll likely be asking the AI to refactor or change the code and want to prevent regression bugs.

    Doing the little things at work can eat up a lot of time, but building small utilities can help you can ensure that your systems run smoothly. And ensure you still get home in time for dinner.

    Steve Jones

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

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  • Everything is the right question away

    When I was young and needed to learn about something, I had to go to a library or a bookstore to get information. I often started by looking through an encyclopedia. I had to wander between entries to learn more about the topic I was researching. A few lucky friends had their own copy of an encyclopedia, which was nice since we could research at home. At some point these collections of information were moved to CD/DVDs, which made them more portable and more accessible to a larger group of people than in the past.

    In the 90s we had the innovation of search engines, which allows us to more quickly move through information. There was more information available on the Internet than was ever published in encyclopedias. Over the years, these search engines improved their ability to rank and recommend information that is relevant to your query. However, you still need some idea of what you are trying to learn about. You have to direct the searches, although the Google auto-complete felt very predictive at times.

    However, I heard a quote recently that is the title of this piece: everything is the right question away.

    That might seem like something a search engine or even an encyclopedia would help with, but consider the fact that with an AI LLM you don’t have to specify much at all to get started. You can even ask it the question of how do I do/learn/find something and get a result that seems better than any computer system in the past. It might be better than what you get from most humans as well.

    Of course, you might not get the answer you want or need, though you can continue to ask the LLM and refine what you need. What’s even better is that once you get a good answer, you can shortcut the route to that knowledge by asking the LLM to provide you with a better prompt to get you to the place you end up in faster.

    Asking the right question to get an answer is an age-old human problem. Philosophers and religious figures have debated and hinted at this for centuries. You still need to build strong communication skills to ask a clear question and some expertise to judge the results. AI LLMs, however, make this a much easier and quicker process than at any time previously in human history.

    Steve Jones

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

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