Investing for AI

Posted on December 10, 2025 by way0utwest

The GenAI boom is growing like crazy. From hype to disasters to successes to investment to the embedding of GenAI tech into lots of products, it seems no one gets away from AI. My wife, kids, friends, they all talk about AI and alternately give me stories of huge successes or epic failures. Even those who just scroll through reels aren’t immune as we see amazing things, but we can’t trust them because of AI. Who knows what image/video/audio was actually recorded and what was generated.

Like many of you, I think AI can be amazing. Like more of you, I think it can be a really poor partner and it produces output I can’t trust. I think one of the major challenges is learning to treat an AI like a colleague whose work quality is erratic. It’s not that I can’t work with them and use their work, but I need to test, validate, and verify the code they give me does what I need, at some acceptable quality level.

Microsoft is a company investing a lot in AI, and it’s changing the company. Some of us might not like the direction as it seems that AI is being pushed for the sake of AI and to generate profits for Microsoft. Or at least revenue as I’m not sure how much profit there will be with all the compute costs of AI. However, it’s certainly affecting every product development team.

I listened to a very interesting interview with Satya Nadella talking AI, globalization, and more, including a data center tour of their new AI site in the ATL. The data center tour with Satya and Scott Guthrie is at the beginning and it’s amazing to see. The network connections in this data center are equivalent to all of Azure a few years ago. That’s impressive, especially seeing they plan to link these new generation data center with petabit networks. For someone that grew up with 300baud modems and then 2.5Mbps Arcnet, I can’t even conceive of these speeds.

As I listened to the interview, I was skeptical of Microsoft’s efforts. The hosts were as well, as they pressed Microsoft to really give them a reason why all this AI investment makes sense. The interview is long (1:27:47), but includes some interesting statements.

Satya says that AI might be the biggest think since the industrial revolution. I could see that, and I’m not sure I disagree. AI tech, with the ability to reduce the requirements to interact with a computer for everyone, is incredible. It can dramatically reduce the UX issues we constantly see with developers building things that don’t always make sense to users. For me, I love that it can handle my misspellings, something many traditionally coded systems cannot handle.

There’s also a great quote that Satya uses from a CMU professor: AI is a guardian angel or a cognitive amplifier. I think it’s both, as AI is a tool and it’s something you can use well or not. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; that’s a famous quote. A hammer is a great tool.

Sometimes.

Sometimes it’s not the tool, and something else is needed. AI can be a great cognitive amplifier, but if you treat all problems as nails, you will let AI create a lot of problems. However, if you use it for the appropriate task, it can really help you. The AI can also see or spot things that we can miss as humans. As the world gets more complex, we deal with more things at once, or the rate of information coming to us increases, we may (will) miss things. An AI can do a better job of catching things, just like another person might catch things you miss.

The last interesting thing is on models vs scaffolding where we look at what models mean and what scaffolding or infrastructure. The example is with Excel (which Satya wish had a database), but it’s an interesting look at how we might get value from AI in getting tasks done, and saving labor with AI technology. It’s worth the listen (or read the transcript).

I found myself seeing how this might not only benefit Microsoft, but perhaps will benefit the world as other companies embrace multiple models and facilitate the ability of more people to use AI tech. I still don’t know if the ROI and costs make sense, but we will as the AI bubble bursts and this becomes a normal part of our lives in some way.

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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Keeping MS Docs Up to Date

Posted on December 10, 2025 by way0utwest

One of the things that I like about the SQL Server docs (MS Learn Docs) is that I can fix things I find wrong. For years we had downloaded Books Online from installs, then we have BOL on a site, but those were mostly updated when a new release came.

Now we have MS Learn, and a regularly changing set of docs. If you haven’t taken advantage of these docs for SQL Server, you should. Bookmark: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/?view=sql-server-ver17&redirectedfrom=MSDN

I help change those. It’s part of my contribution as a Microsoft MVP, but it’s also something that I enjoy because it makes my life easier. This post will look at how I do this.

Note: You need a GitHub account.

A Recent Change

Someone posted a note about multi-column primary keys, noting that the docs said we could use up to 16 columns, but they were able to do 17. I went to this page, Primary and Foreign Key Constraints , where in the first bullet list, there was a 16. This was the week of 24 Nov.

Now, a week later as I write this, it says 32.

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When I saw the 16, I decided to test things. I set up scenarios, I checked against multiple versions, and I verified that 32 was the right number.

Then I clicked this edit button on the page:

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When I did that, I was sent to the GitHub repo for the docs, which is in the MicrosoftDocs org. You can see what I see below. A lot of this is their markdown template, and can be ignored.

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On the right is a pencil edit button. I clicked that.Note this says I’ll get a fork of this repo. That’s what I want.

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When I click the pencil that, I go to the same page, but without any rendering. Note I’m still in the MS repo, but the blue note at the top says my changes will be written to my repo in a new branch.

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When I knew I had seen an error, I scrolled down in the page and found the list. Here we see my 32 highlighted. This said 16 a few weeks ago.

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I can edit this, so I’ll change this to 64. Don’t worry, I can’t affect the live docs. When I do this, I’ll then click “commit changes” in the upper right.

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After clicking this, I get a commit dialog. Copilot tries to guess what I’ve done and it’s a good start. I typically edit the description a bit.

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Once this is done, and I click Propose changes,  I get a pull request page. In this case, notice in the top image, I see this is going from my repo, from a specific branch, to the MS repo for comparison. I’m asking them to pull my changes.

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Below this, I see the file(s) changed. In this case, one change.

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I typically just click “Create pull request” for my changes and then the MS automation takes over. A form appears that shows the PR created and the status (if it can be merged). Since these are quick, usually there’s not problem with a clean merge.

I get an email from the automation thanking me for the contriution, letting me know an author has been notified.

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If there are comments, I’ll get emails on those. When this happens, sometimes they let me know there is something else needed or I should amend my PR. Sometimes they tell me they’re closing the PR and incorporating the change into something else. I’ve had my change get someone thinking and they might take my idea and add something else in their own internal PR.

If someone approves my PR, they’ll add a tag from their side, and the change is merged and a rebuild happens. Here’s the email I get.

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Then my change is live pretty quickly.

I probably submit 5-10 a year, almost one a month. I don’t find a lot of issues, though I do sometimes take the time to add a new example that might serve me, or others. I should do more of those.

If you want to submit your own corrections, feel free. If you don’t, and want me to do it, send me a note and I’ll submit the PR.

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A Note and a Message: T-SQL Tuesday #193

Posted on December 9, 2025 by way0utwest

This month Mike Walsh hosts T-SQL Tuesday. It’s been quite some time since he hosted (back at #4), but he answered my call for hosts and I appreciate that. He has a really good end of year invitation that asks us to look to the past and the future.

I’m trying to keep T-SQL Tuesday alive, but I’ve been struggling for hosts. I need more of you to host, and more people to blog.

Blogging is incredible for your career. Take some time to get started, and if you do nothing but respond to these monthly blog parties, you’ll look better than most other candidates for jobs.

If you want to host, ping me on X or at sjones at sqlservercentral dot ***.

A Message to Steve in 2015

The world seems to be changing quite quickly in in our lives. You bought a new Pebble watch this year, database automation is becoming a bigger part of your job, and there’s lots of data analysis you can do.

Power Bi is a tool from Microsoft that is going to grow in popularity and it’s a place you ought to invest. New places to store data, new features in SQL Server, new platforms for building analytics will appear, but Power BI is a place you should spend more time in and improve your DAX skills.

Learning to build better visualizations, especially for your volleyball coaching (which is going to continue for some time), is an investment that will really pay off in the future.

A Word from the Future in 2035

Steve,

we spent a lot of time early in our career working with networks, helping manage accounts, users, security, privileges, and more. That knowledge and experience helped us understand SQL Server and other database platforms as well from the security standpoint.

Starting in 2026, you need to revisit some of those skills, ensure you better understand how authorization and authentication works in the context of AI and agents. AI technology is changing the world, and it’s going to be heavily used by agents, but security and ensuring there are limits placed on them is going to define who has more success with AI and who has more trouble.

Take the time to ensure that as you engage with MCP servers, task agents with work, and evolve the way you use AI that you include governance in your efforts to protect yourself from runaway agents that might go beyond what you expect, or spend more money than you want them to spend.

Enjoy the next decade, it’s going to be amazing.

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Your Security Checkup

Posted on December 8, 2025 by way0utwest

Recently I saw an article on Simple Talk, 15 Practical Tips for Securing SQL Server, and I thought that many of these are fairly simple things. Turn off unused features, disable sa, etc. These are things that a lot of people probably ensure are in their SQL Servers builds.

Though, I’m sure a lot of people don’t bother.

Often, I’ve found that different people might be responsible for setting up servers, or they might have rights to change things on existing servers. Over time, what we thought of as a standard often isn’t standard on all instances. Exceptions creep in, perhaps because developers change things when they don’t know better or aren’t thinking of security. Vendor software might have some  unexpected requirements for similar reasons that deviate from our standard. We also might change our own standards over time and forget to revisit existing servers.

I wonder how many of you have a security audit procedure in place to re-examine your existing servers. It’s something that ought to be done periodically, like storage management. It isn’t needed every day or week, but a few times a year you might want to ensure things are set appropriately and ready for the next few months.

I’ve been surprised at the number of people that really like the Redgate Monitor Configuration page to keep track of their servers and the deviations their own standard config. It’s also been interesting how many people upgrade to the Enterprise Edition to get the Security features. Tracking these over time can be a pain DBAs want an easy way to do this. In fact, there are so many feature requests for enhancements to security tracking that the devs on RGMEE are very busy.

It’s getting to be the end of the year, and that’s a slower time for many of us. Unless your business is related to the holidays, a lot of people take vacation, we have code freezes, and there’s a little more time for housekeeping. This might be a good time to conduct a little security audit and ensure that your servers aren’t open for attack or making it easy for malicious actors, or naïve but well-intentioned coworkers, to get into systems.

DBATools is a great way to do some changing or enforcing of standards across lots of servers. Even if you can’t change all the settings, you might ensure you have documentation on why that one instance has an sa account enabled. You might also ensure that your security people have signed off on any exceptions.

If nothing else, a good security checkup should include checking your versions and getting up to date on patches.

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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