How Helpful is a GenAI Copilot

Posted on May 7, 2025 by way0utwest

I’m sure many of you have tried a GenAI LLM to do something. Maybe write some code, maybe get some sort of recommendation or suggestion, maybe to rewrite something or summarize text. I’m sure you have had some feelings about whether the tool made you more or less productive.

There was a trial conducted by the Australia Department of the Treasury on Microsoft’s 365 Copilot, asking for volunteers to participate and use the tool in their daily work. They used it and then completed a survey, which are summarized in this piece. Only 218 people went through the trial, and the results are interesting.

The headline says that the staff rated the GenAI less useful than expected. Those last two words are interesting because your expectations shape a lot of how you view anything in the world. If you expect little and get a little more, you might be happy. If you expect a lot and don’t get it, you might be very disappointed.

The sub-headline and the first sentence note that there still is an ROI from the tool. It isn’t as helpful and isn’t as widely applicable as people expected, but they chalk some of this up to product limitations and some to limited use by people. It was useful in summarizing things and drafting content, which are what they call basic administrative tasks. That’s interesting and likely where GenAI tools can help quite a bit.

Maybe the most interesting thing to me is that if Copilot saves 13 minutes a week for mid-level workers, it pays for itself. I don’t know how much time it would have to save me, but an hour or two a week might make me use it more. It certainly would be use a small monthly cost. So far, I haven’t committed to regular work with the tools, and I think I still spend more time learning and typing with GenAI tools than I’d like. I’m not sure if I am saving time over just doing the task myself. Some of that is because I have habits that allow me to work quickly and to use a Copilot, my pace slows.

This also brings up something I wonder about with these GenAI services. With the cost of compute services, there might not be a lot of margin for vendors to raise prices if people are only lightly more productive. I can see lots of companies starting to use these tools, realizing there isn’t as much value as they expected from increased productivity, and then dropping the cost from their budget. That might be some of what we saw in this years State of the Database Landscape, with less people using AI for database management tasks. I suspect some of the hype has died down and people aren’t finding the tools as useful as they expected.

I do think GenAI is helpful, but just helpful. It can’t do the work, and it can’t be trusted more than a junior worker. At least not yet. Maybe that will change, but I haven’t seen it to date.

Steve Jones

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

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

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SQL Saturday New York City 2025 is Back!

Posted on May 6, 2025 by way0utwest

After missing last year, SQL Saturday New York City is back in 2025. I’m excited to go to the event and honored to speak there. I love visiting New York and I’m looking forward to the trip, as is Mrs Way0utwest, who is coming along for a little vacation. Hopefully we’ll find a fun show to see Saturday night.

There is a precon this year from Andreas Wolter, longtime SQL Server Program Manager  at Microsoft. It’s on practical performance tuning and troubleshooting, and you can register and attend on Friday.

Saturday has a great schedule the includes a wide variety of topics. Data virtualization, Power BI, development in a 24/7 environment, Cost optimization, and of course, a lot of Fabric. I’ll be talking about the Data API Builder, which is a cool piece of tech to quickly get those CRUD apps going.

Pass the word, and come into the city on May 11 for a fun event. Register today and I’ll see you later this week.

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Create a Linked Server: #SQLNewBlogger

Posted on May 5, 2025 by way0utwest

I had a customer recently that was asking about Linked Servers and some development advice. I was going to show them a few things and realized I hadn’t created a linked server in my demo environment, so I did it and decided to create a quick post on this.

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

The Scenario

I have a few demo instances of SQL Server in my local environment: Aristotle and Aristotle\SQL2022. In this case I was connected to the named instance, and decided to create a connection to Aristotle. As you can see, I don’t have any linked servers in the named instance.

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To create a linked server, I can use this simple code:

EXEC master.dbo.sp_addlinkedserver   
     @server = N'Aristotle',   
     @srvproduct=N'SQL Server';  
GO

This creates the linked server (as you can see below), with a number of defaults. In this case, the security is made with whatever login queries the linked server.

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You can see the security properties here:

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This might be OK in your enviroment, or it might not be. Perhaps you need to ensure everyone querying the remote server uses the same login. In which case, the sp_addlinkedserver procedure doesn’t do this. You would need to use sp_addlinkedsrvlogin to do that. That’s for another post.

NOTE: Be sure you understand what a linked server does, how to use it, and the downsides. There are many and this can slow down your application or overload servers

I can test this connection by right clicking the Linked Server in SSMS:

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This works, as expected.

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I can also run a query through the linked server, using 4-part naming with the linked server, then the database, schema, and table. This also works:

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That’s it to get started. I recommend you be careful when using linked servers as this creates a bit of a tight coupling and makes development harder. I might recommend you get away from querying database server to database server when possible and let an application do this work if it’s possible.

SQL New Blogger

Linked Servers aren’t that common, but they aren’t rare. This is a skill that SQL Server people should have and understand a bit about. This post is very basic, but it provides a jumping off point where I could write a number of other posts related to linked servers and perhaps guide an interviewer along a path of asking me about them. I certainly showcase some knowledge here if someone asks me if I’ve ever created one.

This post took me about 10 minutes to test and write, and you could probably do this in your environment. You don’t even need to servers, as you could create a loopback linked server.

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Rising Pay for Certifications

Posted on May 5, 2025 by way0utwest

Certifications can pay off, at least in some areas. There’s a piece that talks about pay rising for some tech professionals when they have some credentials. Networking, architecture, and project management are mentioned in the report, as are database and data management.

I haven’t seen the source report, and I’m not sure which certifications are getting higher pay rises, but I’d guess that newer data technologies, things related to cloud databases, and even anything related to AI is likely to get you a raise.

Note, that I would guess that if you want a raise, you likely need to change employers, as those companies who have skills gaps in their teams are likely to overpay in the short term. There are certainly pockets of change in many organizations that are looking to move faster and adopt new technologies and might need training for existing staff as well as hiring new people to handle the workload.

There are two interesting quotes in the article related to AI. The first is that companies are learning that the quality of their data impacts their use of AI, and I suspect they might want more people managing data, checking quality, cataloging it, and more to ensure they can use it to train a GenAI LLM.

The other quote was that “…technologies like AI are forcing organizations to move with lightning speed to fill specific gaps in their job architectures — and too often, they are stumbling.” I read this as AI gives people code they don’t understand, so there is a need to hire someone experienced enough to review AI code. That’s good for experienced people as it creates opportunities, but I wonder if these are short term or this will be a lasting trend.

This is a tough time in technology, in May 2025 as many companies are being cautious about hiring tech professionals. This might be the time to get a few certifications as companies start to put more weight on them along with experience. The cert doesn’t prove you can do the job, but with experience, it might give hiring managers a little more confidence you are a good choice.

Steve Jones

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

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

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