Voice of the DBA

Tag: administration

  • The SQL Server 2016 Plan

    SQL Server 2016 went out of support this week, on Jul 14, 2026. This is the end of the Extended support, according to the Support Lifecycle page. Microsoft posted an article on next steps for SQL Server 2016, which looks like the AI read of an article at the top. There’s a lot of header info, so scroll down. I’m sure none of you want to listen to 10 minutes of an AI voice reading an article.

    I know some of you still run SQL Server 2016. In fact, I still run into some companies on older versions, and the last (ever) update from Brent also showed 6% on 2014 and older. There are probably still plenty, albeit a minority, of systems on older versions. I know when I worked in a non-regulated industry, we weren’t in a hurry to upgrade as many of our applications ran fine on older versions. Especially with VMs these days, I could see people sticking with 2016 for a while if it’s running well. Just be sure your server is well protected by firewalls.

    The blog gives 3 upgrade paths: Azure (IaaS or PaaS), SQL Server 2025, or Extended Security Updates. That latter one goes until 2029 if you want to pay for it. This is certainly a marketing post more than a technical one. Moving to Azure PaaS isn’t necessarily easy or quick. IaaS doesn’t help you here, so I’m sure whoever wrote this post (or whatever AI) isn’t thinking this through. An Azure VM isn’t going to get me any support.

    SQL Server 2025 is likely the easiest if you want to upgrade, as you could continue to use an older compatibility level in your database on SQL Server 2025. It will cost something, but it does give you 9-ish years of support and updates. I’d certainly prefer this over paying for ESU. It might not be a seamless upgrade, but I’d give it a quick go and see if my application worked on a restored 2016-on-2025 database. That’s an easy test and helps me make a decision.

    I suspect some in regulated industries need support for their compliance goals, and they might pay for ESU if their staff is busy and they need to mitigate an audit finding. I think this option is there, and it’s expensive, as a carrot/stick combo for organizations to upgrade. I can’t be upset about this, as I think there should be a plan in organizations to keep their software up to date. Either deliberately plan to remain on an older version and accept the risk, or ensure you have plans (and time) in place to regularly upgrade systems.

    If you’re on SQL Server 2016, what are your plans? Upgrading soon? Sticking with the platform? And if you’re on 2017 or 2019, you ought to be thinking forward and be ready to handle the end of support for those versions.

    Steve Jones

  • The Slow Growing Problems

    Both as a DBA and developer, I’ve had plenty of immediate, this-is-broken, fix-it-quickly issues. Usually, I, or someone else, wrote some bad code and somehow got it deployed. I mean, I do test things, and I would (probably) never change code after I’d tested it to fix that one little annoying thing, like the formatting. I’d (almost) never do that, and I’m sure you wouldn’t either.

    Yet somehow bugs slip in at times.

    Those are the acute issues, and they can be hard to fix at times, but often we can reproduce the problem in development and build a fix. Sometimes we even spot the issue quickly and just fix it in production. I’m sure you never do that, but I have had that experience myself a few times.

    However, in the database world, we can have other, slow-growing problems. I saw this post from Jacob Sebastian about production issues that don’t trigger alarms. There are just slowdowns that trickle across multiple systems and cause issues for clients. These aren’t things you instrument for, as a slowdown isn’t necessarily an issue. These things can resolve themselves, or they can develop into a major issue.

    I think about this like vehicle traffic. A minor fender bender on a highway might not be a problem, but it can become one. Cars don’t get out of traffic quickly enough, or traffic police don’t arrive soon and move the cars. Traffic starts to back up, which slows down the response, including that important tow truck that might keep things moving. Suddenly, it’s not a few people inconvenienced by an accident, but thousands.

    There are likely signals in your environment that would let you know about a potential issue coming soon. These are subtle and not always indicative of a problem individually, but taken together, they indicate a production issue is going to occur. To me, this is a place AI can eagerly be taught to look for these signals and then happily keep looking for them every day.

    The future of monitoring is the active examination of correlated data that precede an issue, hopefully giving humans, or other AIs, enough time to respond and prevent customers from experiencing a slowdown.

    I’d certainly welcome this in both traffic motorways and database systems.

    Steve Jones

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

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  • Limit the Blast Radius

    You still need DBAs (that know how to back up systems and test restores). If you think you don’t, or if you manager does, then perhaps they ought to read this piece on how an AI agent deleted a production database. This wasn’t the case of an agent just running around with sysadmin access to all resources, or a lack of tests that allowed bad code to flow through a CI/CD process.

    This was a system design that had a hole in it. An API call to change infrastructure that could change both staging and production. Not something an AI set up, but humans did. A hole from both PocketOS and the API vendor that allowed the AI agent to make the same type of mistake we’ve seen humans make. A mistake of not double checking, not verifying, not following the rules of getting a second set of eyes, even a second set of virtual eyes, on the code that could drop resources.

    Reading this, I can imagine this is how some of the AWS and Azure outages occurred over the last decade. Not the 2025/2026 AI inspired ones, but the 2010-2015 human mistakes that didn’t expect a change to have such a far reaching blast radius,

    You still need guardrails, for both humans and AIs. Don’t get slack and assume either truly knows what they are doing and deserves rights everywhere. Don’t assume that your guardrails were setup correctly. AI agents make great helpers. Use some read only ones to examine your setup and look for holes. If/When we get the next Claude Mythos model (or the equivalents from Google/OpenAI/etc.) have it look for precisely the types of holes that come from bad code that looks to reset, redeploy, or re-anything in your environment.

    We separate out roles for different people to limit the blast radius of the mistakes we inevitably make. AIs aren’t necessarily smarter or better than humans. Just faster. We need separate roles, separate rights, and governance for AI agents, precisely because they can make decisions faster than humans.

    There’s tremendous potential, but and tremendous danger in allowing anyone, or anything, too many rights in any organizations. RBAC, audits, and all the other things we implement to try and reduce the number of silly mistakes are still needed. At some point we’re going to see amazing social engineered emails, messages, XSS, and other items that are designed to fool the AIs just like humans have been fooled in the past.

    We need to ensure we set good guardrails and limits when that starts to happen. Or we’re going to lose control much quicker than expected.

    PS If you want a fun and slightly scary read on how AI could go sideways, I enjoyed The Final System recently, which made me not want to deploy any sort of AI agent beyond tightly scoped ones with very, very limited rights.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • Who is Using CAGs?

    While talking to a customer a few weeks ago, they mentioned that they used Contained Availability Groups (CAG) everywhere. They also said they were amazing and wondered why everyone wasn’t using them in other environments. Of course, I questioned the “everywhere”, which turned out to be more of a default for new systems than a standard across all systems. That’s likely true of most things since it’s rare we get to update/patch/set something across an environment of any size and ensure every system is the same.

    Still, setting a CAG as a default makes some sense for enterprises. This ensures that in an HA situation I have my logins, jobs, etc. already on a secondary node. That’s been one of the challenges of using lightly linked systems that only sync up database level information. Log shipping, Replication, Availability Groups can all work to keep a secondary ready to take over, but they all miss information that is stored in master or msdb.

    That’s the stuff we have to sync manually. It can be done, but it’s work. We’ve had numerous articles at SQL Server Central on syncing logins and other objects outside of your database.

    Today I wonder how many of you are using CAGs in your environment? As the default for new systems? Moving all ones to this setup?

    Or do you even know about them? They are relatively new, since SQL Server 2022, and I have to admit I’ve heard relatively little about them in the community or from customers. Many people use Availability Groups, but not many seem to use Contained Availability Groups.

    Maybe another question is would you want to use them? There are a few things you have to consider and they can be slightly tricky, but they do some reduce some of the work when you have failovers. Of course, like any other technology, you need to test that your failovers work and you understand  the ins and outs of how they work, just in case that switch isn’t as smooth as you expect.

    It should be, but sometimes things break. If they do, you want to ensure you, or someone on your staff, knows how to fix them.

    Steve Jones

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

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