Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The DBA is Dead; Long Live the DBA

    I remember getting a job at a startup in the Denver Tech Center. This was shortly after SQL Server 7 was released, with a marketing campaign that the platform was auto-tuning and wouldn’t require a DBA. My colleague asked me if I wanted to learn Cold Fusion and have a longer career. I declined and stuck with this SQL Server thing, which has seemed to work out pretty well over the years.

    I was reminded of this when I saw a “Death of the DBA Again” post, this time from an Oracle DBA. There are plenty of links in there from Larry Ellison and Oracle about how some version of Oracle won’t require a DBA. I’ve seen questions on Reddit (and elsewhere ) about this topic where people seem to think DBAs can be replaced.

    Or maybe they want them replaced.

    There are no shortage of posts on why this isn’t the case (Grant, Kellyn, Brent, William, Boris). These all look slightly different, but the main thrust is that there is still data management-type work and people are needed to do it. Or maybe to direct the AIs to do it.

    An interesting post from Kendra last year that we will see less DBA jobs because good DBAs can leverage AI to replace a few less-good DBAs. I like her approach, and the key reason why AI agent usage will grow is that they can potentially just make less mistakes than a human.

    If that human making mistakes is you, then you might not have a job.

    I do think that the DBA as a gatekeeper or a single point of managing systems and ensuring backups/security/patches are made is dwindling. However, there are still lots of places for database-related work. High Availability setups are needed; someone has to work with InfoSec and auditors and implement their requirements. That might be especially important as those requirements might not be clear and clean enough for all your systems. While ETL might be a thing of the past with the various “links”, without a doubt, people will link too many tables to analytics systems, leading to overloaded systems, too many resources being used, and costs being too high.

    That might be a reason we will still need some type of DBA. They need to field the complaints from budget holders and work on resolutions to reduce costs.

    The DBA will continue to exist in many organizations, but the job will change, and you need to evolve. There might be other organizations that don’t want a “DBA” as a title, but they will need a data engineer, a full-stack developer spending more of their time on the database stack, an InfoSec person that mostly works on database security, or some other job that absorbs all the data-related chores.

    There is a lot of opportunity still out there, but the bar is being raised, and one end of that bar rests on AI. Improve your skills, show your value, and become someone who delivers results and doesn’t just say “No.”

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • When SQL Server Central Went Down

    This is part of a few memories from the founders of SQL Server Central, celebrating 25 years of operation this month.

    “The site is down.”

    I got a phone call from one of the other founders around 9 am in Denver one day. At the time, I was working at a small startup, in a semi-private office with one other person. Most of the company knew I had a site on the side, and alternately cheered me on or celebrated hiccups, depending on the person.

    I checked, and things were down. I had a side channel to telnet into the server, but couldn’t access things. At this time, the site was hosted on a single server, running IIS and SQL Server, in a friend’s basement. This was in 2002 or 2003, and broadband was a lot different then. No cable internet, and most other solutions were in the kbps range. I had ISDN at my house, but a friend had gotten into a trial from Sprint, giving him 3Mbps over a microwave link.

    My office-mate was listening and watching. I said I was taking an early, and long, lunch. She chuckled and went back to her own tasks. I let my boss know and started driving, stressed out. After all, the site was growing, popular, and downtime could be a killer.

    We’ve had a few outages over the years, but not many. This was one of the more stressful ones as I fought traffic on I-25, trying to get from the Denver Tech Center up to Westminster. I can’t remember the weather, but I was sweating when I got to my friend’s house. This was the before-times, when remote work was a rarity. Luckily, my friend had left me a key to get into his house, where I ran into the basement. Unable to get the server to respond, I rebooted it and crossed my fingers.

    I’m sure a few of you have had the stressed-out feeling of waiting for a database server to restart, hoping that it comes back up cleanly. It did this time, and I don’t remember what went wrong, but things were back up and running with no major issues. I was probably in the basement for less than 30 minutes, and I left, dreading the long drive back to the office. Almost two hours driving for a 30-minute fix.

    I do remember thinking if this was going to be a regular occurrence, I might need a new job. Or a new place to host the server.

    We weren’t in the basement for too long. Revenues were increasing enough that I started to look at co-location facilities. My current employer had investigated quite a few when we set up our systems, and I reached out to a few contacts. I negotiated a half-rack at some point, moving our servers to a real facility. By that time, my employer had failed, and I got an F5 firewall as part of my severance, which fronted SQL Server Central for quite a few years.

    Those were the days, with lots of CLI access to remote systems and a power strip where I could cycle them off and on. Those were skills I had to learn to avoid more drives at inconvenient times.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • Expensive CPUs

    There have been a lot of features added to the SQL Server platform over the years. Several of these features let us perform functions that are beyond what a database has traditionally been designed to handle. SQL Server has had the ability to send emails,  execute Python/R/etc. code, and in SQL Server 2025, we can call REST endpoints.

    Quite a few of these features (arguably) are more application-oriented than database-oriented. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a server perform some of these functions, and there have been some very creative implementations using these features. I recently ran into one of these examples from Amy Abel, where she shows how to use the new REST endpoint feature to call an AI LLM to generate and send emails from your database server. That’s creative, and it’s reminiscent of the numerous examples from various experts over the years who demonstrate how these features can be used to accomplish a task.

    However, these are examples. They work amazingly well with one user running a limited workload. This reminds me of many of the examples I’ve seen using the AI vector enhancement in SQL Server 2025 to create embeddings from string data using an LLM. That is interesting, but most of the examples show a trigger being used to update the encodings. Imagine users updating data and those triggers firing. Imagine a real workload and how often your users might update string data you want to use in an AI application, especially a RAG application. Think about how complex or long-running triggers in your applications now that can overload your system.

    CPUs in database servers are expensive. The hardware isn’t more expensive, but the software is pricey. Standard Edition is limited to 24 or 32 cores (depending on version), and while Enterprise isn’t limited to any number of cores, the cost of each core is $$$$. Is it worth having those $$$$ cores sending emails or calling external services? Or would you be better offloading those calls to another server, like an app server, where the cost of the core is the hardware and a little .NET code running separately?

    Many of us already struggle with the database server as a bottleneck for our application and workload. Scaling up our database systems is expensive and cumbersome. We struggle to get approval for larger VMs, and if we scale up in the cloud, it gets very expensive very fast. I’m not surprised that database vendors are happy to add these features as it increases the licensing cost for applications using them.

    I know the majority of the cost of building applications is labor and software developers’ time. However, that’s changing with LLMs that can produce code cheaply. I keep seeing that the cost of writing code is approaching zero.

    That’s not going to be true if you use LLMs trained on the example code that increases your database licensing cost. Then the cost might be higher than you expect.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • 25 Years of SQL Server Central

    The oldest article we have on the site is Tame Those Strings! Part 4 – Numeric Conversions, by me. It’s dated 2001-04-18, though I think that’s a date we picked when we converted all the content from one database to another. The founders agreed sometime during Feb 2001 to jointly run SQL Server Central. Since we each owned the copyright of our articles from another site, we migrated several articles to build up our content library. This was back when Andy, Brian, and I all had full-time jobs and managed the site during breaks, nights, and weekends.

    That was 25 years ago.

    Twenty. Five. Years.

    It’s incredible to think that almost half my life has been spent working with this community. That joint effort morphed into a full-time job for me sometime in late 2003 or 2004. I took a pay cut to run the site, though as we grew from one to two to five to six newsletters a week, we started to make enough money to make up the difference. I was a horrible salesman, but fortunately, we had a great site that kept growing week after week, and we didn’t need to rely on my salesmanship. The site grew from dozens of users when we started to thousands in a few months to tens of thousands in a year. Eventually, we reached a million registered users, which was quite a milestone for us.

    Apart from the site, we published books and gave out copies at our annual party during the PASS Summit. That party was one of the highlights of my year. We also used to publish a magazine in partnership with the PASS organization. That was a stressful time, with me trying to manage an every-other-month schedule for the magazine, which had to be laid out, printed, and shipped to subscribers. While that was going on I had to keep a couple of yearly book projects going and still get daily articles published.

    I started writing these editorials because I was a little bored with the job. I never imagined how popular these pieces would become and how many people would read them. I suppose I should have as I was the one who negotiated and paid for our emailing software. We used to pay for Lyris Listmanager, which cost a few thousand dollars when we started. As we grew, we needed to send more emails overnight. One year I received a quote from Lyris for a few hundred thousand dollars to add the additional sending capacity. When I called the sales rep, he told me the only small companies sending more emails than us were the porn people. Needless to say, Andy took that as a challenge, not wanting to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for email software.  we designed a system using an SMTP component that would let us send a lot more emails. At our peak, we were sending over 8 million emails a week.

    I had to learn a lot about running this site, from SMTP tricks and the how CAN-SPAM act applies to negotiating advertising contracts with customers. I had to manage hosting locations in the early 2000s. We first rented a VM, but they were too small after about six months. We moved to the house of a friend of mine, where he had 3Mbps broadband connection (this was 2002). At the time, I only had an ISDN connection, which wouldn’t cut it. We migrated through a few different co-location facilities in the Denver area that I had worked with as a corporate employee. Those moves entailed me physically moving servers into cages (or partial cages) in cold rooms, re-configuring our switch and firewall, and ensuring everything connected to the Internet. I even had an account at Dell as we regularly upgraded hardware.

    When we sold the site to Redgate, some of those hassles went away, and I could focus on just being the editor of the site. I no longer had hosting responsibilities or even coding ones. Things were good and bad with that change . Good as I had developers to whom I could send bugs, but bad in that they had other, higher priorities. In the last few years, I’ve struggled to get things enhanced or fixed on the site, though I’ve been promised that is changing this year.

    Despite all the changes over the years, I’m still thrilled to be the editor of SQL Server Central and glad that Redgate continues to run and support the community. Most of my time is spent doing other work with Redgate, but managing this site continues to be a significant portion of my work week.

    And I still enjoy it.

    I want to thank everyone who has read an article, asked or answered a question, syndicated their blog, tried the Question of the Day, written an article, or just left a comment on a piece. This has been an amazing community where many of you learned to be a better data professional. Lots of you asked, debated, and shared your knowledge with others in an extremely neighborly way. It’s been a joy to see this community grow into one where we appreciate, value, and love each other. I’ve made many friends here, met many of you in person, and seen you get a value from this community that cannot be measured. The success of this community is because of all of you.

    I’m blessed to have joined you here for 25 years, and I look forward to many more.

    Steve Jones

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

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