Voice of the DBA

I wrote recently about some work with Redgate Clone, and one of the things I did was start up a blank container instance of SQL Server from the image named empty-sql-current. This image contains SQL Server 2019. Clearly, “current” was a poor choice.

I see this often in various places, where someone will reference “current”, “new”, “latest”, or some other term that denotes the most recent changes. If everyone reading the reference is doing so with knowledge of the past and at a time close to publication, this works fine. However, a year later, does this make sense? At the same time, I do like consistent names that might be used in scripts. If I always want developers pulling the latest item, I might use latest. However, if versions are important, than “latest” or “current” might not be the best choice. Much of the time, I tend to try and get a version or some other specific indicator in a name.

It’s like seeing the words “the fastest SQL Server ever” (or pick your technology) in a release announcement. At that time, it might be the fastest SQL Server release, but when the next version is released (hopefully) that won’t be true.

As I’ve matured, I aim to build things that last for the future, thinking beyond what the world looks like right now. This includes architecture decisions and more, but it also includes naming. Reference specific versions, times, etc., with the idea that I want to convey some information with the name. I even name my containers with the port I use because it makes it really easy to see which database container is running on 1433 and which is 41433.

The other consideration for naming, for me, is to include data in the name that I will use for searching or sorting. Perhaps means using good date practices, like 2025-05-01 and 2025-10-03 to ensure my files sort correctly. That might be very important for things like backup files. Maybe it’s using something like “Customer_Copy_Delete_After_Year_Close” for a copy of data that might be relevant through our current financial cycle.

I often do like using names that come to mind first, as this can help me find things, but I also have learned to be more explicit when using names as a way to convey information. With modern computing and support for large names, it sometimes pays to be descriptive.

The only thing I try to avoid is spaces. For the most part, file explorers and web servers handle spaces, but sometimes things break, so I’ve learned to avoid spaces where possible.

Steve Jones

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