Voice of the DBA

As a part of a recent Data Exposed that I was on, there was an ADS update which mentioned Copilot being added. Since I’ve been experimented, I decided to give this a try.

This is part of a series of experiments with the ChatGPT and other AI systems. Lots of Copilot lately.

Installation

One of the easy things about VSCode and ADS is that you can install things from the marketplace very easily. You search and it appears, as shown here. Click Install to add it.

Once you do this, it’s enabled. I have access to the Copilot with my GitHub account, so I assume this picked this up.

Using Copilot in ADS

There’s a blog about what this tech is and a few workflows. However, I decided to try something first. I picked a table in this connection and started typing. Copilot added a suggestion.

It’s not a good one. That’s a table, not a function.

Yeah, some AI isn’t reading my schema and sending it back to GitHub. Boo, this isnt’ helpful. I can only guess that seeing “StringSplit” had the AI guessing this was related to string_split(). Something a new dev might think.

OK, let’s pick a table and see if intellisense works better. I’m guessing it doesn’t. Here’s a suggestion based on what I typed.

Not a bad guess. I have some schema in here, and there is an OrderHeader related to a Customer table. However…

There is no orderdetail. This clearly isn’t intellisense. It’s an AI taking guesses.

Trying Comments as Prompts

Let me try a few things from the blog. I’ll enter a comment.

I don’t like that. While I think this is valid for MySQL or PostgreSQL, it isn’t for SQL Server. Setting aside why LIMIT isn’t in T-SQL, why doesn’t copilot recognize this is T-SQL? Let me help it.

Better, but I don’t want to add “in T-SQL” to everything.

Another experiment. I tried a couple of prompts, but realized that asking for “orders” doesn’t mean that the AI knows I mean orderheader. Context around what or where an order is stored is something humans might include in natural language. However, I got this:

Which doesn’t work. I’d left the “in t-sql” from the previous prompt, so I’m not annoyed there, but this isn’t looking at schema. I also find the Oracle help not helpful.

However, this was interesting. I wanted a shipdate (this is a column) in 2023. The first suggestion was = Jan 1, but when I deleted that and hit enter again, I got this.

Not bad. I tried a longer prompt, with a few comments. All of the code was suggested a line at a time, and when I hit Enter, I got the next line.

The blog does note that adding the table create at the top of the query helps. Let’s try that.

I’ll add creates for customer and orderheader. I then try a simple prompt and get this.

Note, I tried “write a query”, but that didn’t work. I used “fetch” from the blog and that got me something. Though, not sure why this term is needed.

I also changed my prompt trying to get all matching orders and got this instead.

I also tried changing this to get matching orders. No idea why the customer name is limited in here.

What about aggregates? I know some people have trouble with these.

Not bad.

Conclusion

Adding Copilot to ADS is easy, but using it isn’t. The code it produces can have lots of mistakes, and not even work. It can make some strange assumptions, like junior devs might do.

Adding context makes things better, but for many of these simple queries, I have to describe things enough that I might as well write the query. Especially with SQL Prompt, I’d use SSMS instead.

However, learning to use prompts is a skill and it’s one to work on. Hopefully the AI will improve over time and I’ll start to see more useful suggestions, especially with different types of code.

So far, I’m impressed very little with this tool.