Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Who is Using CAGs?

    While talking to a customer a few weeks ago, they mentioned that they used Contained Availability Groups (CAG) everywhere. They also said they were amazing and wondered why everyone wasn’t using them in other environments. Of course, I questioned the “everywhere”, which turned out to be more of a default for new systems than a standard across all systems. That’s likely true of most things since it’s rare we get to update/patch/set something across an environment of any size and ensure every system is the same.

    Still, setting a CAG as a default makes some sense for enterprises. This ensures that in an HA situation I have my logins, jobs, etc. already on a secondary node. That’s been one of the challenges of using lightly linked systems that only sync up database level information. Log shipping, Replication, Availability Groups can all work to keep a secondary ready to take over, but they all miss information that is stored in master or msdb.

    That’s the stuff we have to sync manually. It can be done, but it’s work. We’ve had numerous articles at SQL Server Central on syncing logins and other objects outside of your database.

    Today I wonder how many of you are using CAGs in your environment? As the default for new systems? Moving all ones to this setup?

    Or do you even know about them? They are relatively new, since SQL Server 2022, and I have to admit I’ve heard relatively little about them in the community or from customers. Many people use Availability Groups, but not many seem to use Contained Availability Groups.

    Maybe another question is would you want to use them? There are a few things you have to consider and they can be slightly tricky, but they do some reduce some of the work when you have failovers. Of course, like any other technology, you need to test that your failovers work and you understand  the ins and outs of how they work, just in case that switch isn’t as smooth as you expect.

    It should be, but sometimes things break. If they do, you want to ensure you, or someone on your staff, knows how to fix them.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • A Tool is Better than a Script

    While working with a customer recently, I heard this sentence: a tool is better than a script. The reference was that this customer preferred a known, tested, approved tool for most of their staff rather than a script built, lightly tested, and perhaps changeable by anyone in their organization.

    I was surprised, because in many ways, I’ve depended way more on scripts, more often, than “tools” in my career. Often I struggled to find tools that actually worked in the way I wanted them to and built them myself with Unix shell utilities, VB Script, PowerShell, or some combination of those or other technologies.

    I asked them if they wouldn’t prefer to customize things and let one of their senior people write their tools. They said that it wasn’t necessarily a problem for a few people, but too many people might edit and change the script, even the senior people, and then others couldn’t depend on them. They weren’t sure if they were reliable if a known script wasn’t being run. Even among their senior people, someone would edit a script then they thought something wasn’t quite right, or there was a new requirement and then the script would return unpredictable results.

    I felt they didn’t completely trust their staff, but I also understand. I’ve changed my own “tools” and broken them or gotten back incorrect results. Depending on what the script did, and how busy I was, I might not even notice the problems. That might cause me problems if I expect data or actions to occur one way and they work differently.

    Scripts can be changed by anyone.  The results might not be what’s expected on a team. I get that. At some point in my career, I put all our DBA “scripts” or “tools” into a version control system and we had a path to the trunk (main) branch of them that was read-only, so that we knew what was being executed. If we wanted to change the script, we had to open an branch in the repo, make our edits, and then have another DBA approve the change before it would be merged into the main, and subsequently pulled into the folder in our path. This didn’t prevent changes, but it did give us some versions and history of changes.

    There’s a balance between flexibility and customization that is challenging to tread amongst team members. Sometimes a known, reliable execution is better than one that changes too quickly. We’ve been asked at Redgate Software to ensure people using Redgate Monitor can audit what actions are taken in the tool. Sometimes a team member changes a setting, such as an alert threshold, and other team members aren’t aware. That can impact their ability to diagnose problems when they assume the tool works one way, but it’s actually working another way.

    Tools we decide to use, whether purchased or OSS, won’t always do what we need. There is a requirement to build our own, but we also need some expectation and assumption of how they work. Especially in a team. I don’t want to have to re-read the code every time I run a tool; I should know how it works.

    At the same time, I can’t have every tool change each time someone wants something new. I love sp_whoisactive, but I depend on it working a certain way and wouldn’t want Grant to change how it reports data unless I know about the change.

    Working in a team requires teamwork, which means that whatever type of tools we buy/download/build, we need to ensure we all are aware of how they work.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • Half of All Engineers

    The AI LLM boom seems to show no sign of slowing down. Each time I think we’ve reached some level of crazy use or predictions, things take another turn. I still find myself pinging back and forth between this will be amazingly good and horrifyingly bad.

    Sometimes on the same day.

    Today, I’m a little more down on AI. I was listening to Steve Yegge on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, and they were discussing the curve of AI usage at companies. He points out that he’s mad that Amazon let 16,000 engineers go and might let more go. He worries that companies might let 50% of their engineers go. Not necessarily because the top 50% will be more productive with AI than 100% of engineers without it. Rather the concern is that companies will get rid of half their salaries to pay for the AI tokens for the other half.

    Steve Yegge is an accomplished software engineer that has worked at Amazon and Google. Steve wrote Gastown and has been someone who not only is successful at producing code but also thinks a lot about how we produce more software.

    How coordinated and powerful are the new models? Can they really do a lot of software work that we do today? Steve thinks so, but to be fair, he’s got a lot of experience and can architect and design software well, which means he can also guide AI LLMs and agents to write more code. He also thinks the latest models, like Opus 4.6, are way more capable that most people believe.

    I also caught this post on X about a paper predicting that AI might cause economic collapse as less knowledge workers are used in various tasks. This might happen faster than we can absorb those workers who are laid off in the name of AI back into the economy in other positions. It’s a scary thought.

    The positive side of this, at least from me, is that so many organizations move slower, and so many people aren’t extremely competent software engineers, so we’ll get a lot of bad software written by non-technical people that doesn’t scale. We’ll have more database (and application) performance issues, and that will slow the use of YOLO, vibe coding.

    Plus plenty of companies just aren’t implementing or looking to pay for lots of tokens. They’ll just move slower and the world will change, but not anywhere near the pace that Steve or others think it will. We’ll see, but let me know what you think.

    For a more positive spin, I’ve been reading Reshuffle, which is a little less depressing about the future.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • Spring Connections and Learning at PASS On Tour

    It’s just a few weeks until the spring PASS On Tour Chicago 2026. This is a smaller version of the PASS Summit that will be coming to Seattle in November and has been running for 26 years each fall. Myself and many other data professionals have found immeasurable value from the time we’ve spent with others at these events.

    Connect. Share. Learn.

    That’s the motto that PASS adopted many years ago, and I love it. We get to network with each other, talk about our experiences, challenges, and struggles, and hopefully find a way past them. We are stronger as a team, and the synergies that come from people working together allow us to accomplish more than we ever would alone.

    The PASS Summit has been an event at which this has happened, and I’ve been very lucky to attend most of them. I’ve learned lots of tips and tricks in sessions, but much more by talking with others before or after the presentations. I’ve been inspired by others and warned about walking down paths where people have struggled. All of the knowledge shared with me has helped grow my career across the last 26 years.

    In 2025 there were 3 tour events, and I was able to attend all of them. They were small, but I still had ample opportunities to connect with others, learn from them, share with them, and get out to a few dinners with friends who didn’t plan on coming to Seattle, but they made one of the regional events.

    This year there is just one tour stop in the US. May 7-8 in Chicago, and I get to go again. There’s a fantastic lineup of speakers, some great pre-cons, all at a relatively cheap price compared to many other data events. Chicago is easy to get to and it’s not too expensive to spend a few days in one of America’s classic cities.

    I hope you’ll join me in Chicago. It’s short notice, but there are still chances to join, and I’ve got a discount code if you ping me 😉

    Steve Jones