Voice of the DBA

Tag: AI

A Daily Report from Claude

Redgate had some Claude training recently, which I went through as my knowledge has been gained in bits and pieces and is fragmented. I wasn’t sure I’d get a lot out of it, but I was surprised by a few things I learned.

One of these was scheduling a task to give me a daily report. This post looks at that process for me. I’ll walk through what happened, and then a summary below of what I think of this.

This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems.

Getting Started with Skills

One of the first demos shown was to build a daily snapshot of what things need to be looked at and handled. The default in Claude is the /morning command. I ran this, looking to customize it, and Claude decided to create a new skill for me, based on this, which it named “morning-plus”.

I had previously added the Microsoft 365 Connector, so the skill could read my email. That’s good, as this is a read-only view for me, and it’s local to my machine. I’m sure there is some security risk, but this is managed and limited by Redgate, so I’m assuming this is good enough for my work.

The next thing was to alter the view. I had a weird graph of lines that seemed to try and show the height of a graph implying the length of a meeting or a business of the day, but that’s not helpful. I decided to ask for a calendar list.

This gave me a nice look at my day, which is shown below:

Another thing I wanted to do is keep an ongoing TODO list as I have various things that aren’t in my calendar. A bunch of these things are repeating or ongoing, but having a list helps me stay organized. I might need a way to order them, but for now I asked Claude to add this. It guided me to using a folder to store this, which is what I wanted.

I also decided to keep the report here, as this helps me stay organized. I can keep the todo.md open in VSCode or elsewhere and edit as needed (or ask Claude). I like to do some editing myself, rather than waste tokens. If I have to type in a prompt, but not just edit the doc.

In the past I’d have tried to figure out how to schedule things. Here I just asked Claude. It did the work for me.

Once done, I have an item entered in my Scheduled area. This is a Claude thing, so Claude needs to run, which is fine. My desktop is running all the time.

I clicked the item and selected Run Now from the menu that popped up. This ran and went through all the tasks and produced a report. It took a few minutes, maybe 5? It’s slow, but not a lot of stuff going on when this will run for me, so it’s not a big deal. The report:

Not bad, but I also want to get anything from overnight that is important. I tend to look at Slack for mentions/links, so I added the Slack connector, which Redgate has authorized. This will let the agent scan for things that mention me and I can get a summary rather than searching through all folders.

I added a prompt to help here, which is great.

That didn’t work, and Claude explained why.

One note, each time I altered the skill, I had to approve the changes after Claude decided what to do. It’s a good idea, but the list of stuff it lists in a stream of text is too much to read, so I’m not sure how well this secures things.

I also have to re-approve a changed skill to access my e:xxx folder on each run. I guess it’s good, but in a practical sense, I’m going to just approve this.

The last thing I added was a Windows Scheduled task to run Edge and load this page. This was easy to do, and it will bring up a browser on my desktop that I can see when I log in. Now I can skip some of the checks I might do early in the am, knowing that I’ll get a view of my day when I get to my desk.

Summary

One of the interesting things the trainer noted was that when you start using a new tool, productivity can go down until you get the hang of it. This applies to many tools, but certainly Claude and AI chat/agents. It takes some time to see benefits, which is something I’ve noticed myself. Part of this is learning to use the tool, and part is deciding how you want to use the tool.

In my case, I was skeptical this was actually a useful thing. My days can be chaotic and crazy. However, I’m willing to give it a try. I am starting to have more and more things that I need to keep an eye on, and things that span more than a day. I use calendar reminders constantly, but there are a lot of moving parts here. Keeping a todo list is a start, though I likely need to add some dates or priorities. I’ll play with this over time.

The lack of Slack integration is annoying, but if I can keep other things organized, this will be helpful.

Is this helpful and worth it? I don’t know. This is an experiment on my part, which I’ll run for 3-4 weeks to see if this is helpful in tracking lots of disparate work. I certainly forget some things and then end up working late, or miss deadlines.

Is this worth the cost? Running a report costs $0.82 in its current iteration. Is it worth $1 to organize my day and prevent missed items? Perhaps. I’m not sure, but this is an experiment.

A small AI thing, but at $200 a year, this might be a nice productivity helper for me, partially to ensure work is done, and partially to reduce stress from the chaos of my life.

August 31, 2026
Collecting Data is Hard

Data is the lifeblood of much of the world today. Not necessarily big data, and certainly not perfect data, and definitely not just digital data. Organizations, individuals, governments, really everyone out there are making decisions based on data. You might think it’s going to rain, so you cut the grass today, or maybe defer adding fertilizer. Your organization sees demand for a product increase, so it orders more and produces more. Government is always using data to make decisions about resource allocation. We might not think governments make great decisions, but they do use data and data matters.

Recently I was reading a science fiction book (I, Starship) about the future, where a person’s brain (Henry) becomes uploaded to manage a starship. This ship will travel light years away for 80 years and they need the human crew asleep in hibernation to survive the journey. The interesting thing, to me, was a part in the book where there is a discussion of why Henry was uploaded and why AIs aren’t advanced enough to run the starship. There’s this quote: “The first generations (of LLMs) performed well, but as time went on, we entered a situation where more and more of the data available to train them on was itself machine-generated. So, instead of mimicking high-quality human output, the outputs got more garbled.”

I worry about this as the current models are sucking up so much data to learn, but so little of the new data is being generated by humans. We already see plenty of AI-slop on the Internet, with fewer and fewer articles, blogs, etc. being human generated. I’m sad because people don’t share as much of their own thoughts, knowledge, etc. This is especially true in light of the AI companies taking individuals’ work for training without compensation. Indeed, I worry that many places will go the route of Stack Overflow, where they essentially fail.

I’m worried about that here at SQL Server Central, as I see less questions being asked by humans and less discussion about the nuances of database challenges.

However, there are AIs out there also polluting the world. This was a piece from last year that more AIs are taking surveys and polls. Reddit is seeing questions being asked, and I’m sure there are AIs answering them. How long before the amount of AI generated traffic dwarfs human generated traffic? I mean new data, not consumption. I expect plenty of humans are going the way of the people in WALL-E and just consuming data. They’ll continue to watch untold numbers of reels, shorts, Tik-Toks, etc.

Are we going to see less “real” data and more generated data? I already have seen no shortage of issues from customers trying to use synthetic data for testing. It doesn’t match the real world well, but if they stop getting real data from customers and more from other bots, maybe it won’t matter. Of course, I’m not sure how well their systems will perform in the real world.

GIGO is a real issue, and I expect a lot of companies will learn this as the volume of AI-generated data increases.

Steve Jones

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

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

August 28, 2026
A Challenge of Our Knowledge

AI is here to stay. It will evolve, it will get better at some things, and we might decide that it’s not good for certain tasks. It’s a weird, new, different technology that somehow seems magic, extremely intelligent, and at times as dumb as a box of rocks. It can do things that I could never do, or would never do, for myself. Heck, I’m not sure I could or would pay someone to do this by hand. Yet this was less than a minute for a computer system to take this image and transform it into something fun.

Christian Buckley wrote an interesting post about AI challenging our identity, which sums up nicely one of the struggles many of us have with AI. Many of us identify with our work. We spend most of our lives for decades toiling away at a craft that we (hopefully) enjoy and in which we have success. We build skills, and we’re proud of our accomplishments.

Some of us are more proud of our scars.

Either is OK, but AI challenges that. AI can do work in seconds that we used to take minutes, often tens of minutes. Sometimes hours. It can remember things that we spend time googling or looking up in SQL Server Central forums. Our ability to search and navigate docs for an obscure setting, like that strange exit code you found in your CI/CD pipeline. We’re proud of where we’ve been and what we’ve done.

I wrote recently about experts wanting to still solve problems themselves, without AI assistance. Some people don’t embrace AI because they think it devalues their knowledge. Others are afraid of the technology and potentially making mistakes with code an AI wrote that they don’t understand. They see this as a risk (and they should).

However, choosing not to use the technology at all, or not trying to learn how and when to use it, is a mistake. We need to embrace the tools in our world, learning to take advantage of them.

And more importantly, show our current and future employers we can do so.

AI does challenge us. It challenges the way we used to work and some of the skills we used to rely on. We have to learn to flow with this challenge and make it a part of our future career.

Steve Jones

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

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

August 24, 2026
Monday Monitor Tips: Configuring Access to the MCP Server
I have been experimenting with MCP servers in a few ways, including the Redgate Monitor MCP Server. It took me a few tries, and some help from engineers to get connected. I’ll cover how I did this in Claude and Visual Studio Code in this post, and try to warn you about a few places I made mistakes.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.

Creating A Token

I’m not going to bore you with the setup and configuration of the Redgate Monitor instance. That procedure might change by release, so I’ll assume you’ve got the MCP server enabled.

To access the MCP server, you need to give your AI agent a token. This authorizes the MCP server to connect to Redgate Monitor and read data. These are read only tokens, and designed for the MCP and the tools that are available.

In the configuration, there is an Access Tokens area. Click here.

Click Create Token on the next screen. This is in the upper right.

On the next screen, give your token a name, description, and set an expiration date. The default is one year.

Make sure you select the MCP type. I messed this up the first time.

Below this, pick the servers the MCP token can access. I’ve selected just the Production serer group, but you can set this as needed. I’d make sure the name and/or description lets you know what can be accessed.

You will get a review screen, to verify what you’ve done. Accept that and you’ll get a dialog with the token value. Make sure you save this securely somewhere.

Once you’ve created this, it’s in a list, and you can click the “view details, which shows you what the token can access, as you can see below. You cannot get the token itself anymore.

Configuring VS Code

I’m going to show this working in VS Code. I opened the Command Palette and selected the MCP: Open User Configuration, as shown.

Inside the config, I pasted this inside the “servers” key. This should be a sub element, and this goes alongside any other MCP servers.:
```
"redgate-monitor": {
  
 "type": "http",
  
 "url": "https://<your-monitor-host>/mcp",

 "headers": {
  
 "Authorization": "Bearer ${input:redgate-mcp-token}"

 }

 }
```
Then inside the “inputs” key, add this:
```
{

 "id": "redgate-mcp-token",

 "type": "promptString",

 "description": "Redgate Monitor MCP token",

 "password": true

 }
```
The save this. When you start the MCP server, it will ask you for your token. Paste the value in and then you should connect. You do this from the MCP: List Servers item in the command palette. This should give you output like this, with a connection message and tools discovered:

If I open a chat, and add the MCP as a tool, I can ask questions. Here’s a question I asked and the initial responses from the LLM.

Once this is done, I’ll get a list of the alerts. I did approve some PoSh commands where the LLM stored results from Redgate monitor and then tried to process those after writing them to a temp file.

\

This is the raw LLM trying to use tools and fumbling around. With a few skills and guidance, this will run smoother, quicker, and more efficiently in your environment.

Summary

The Redgate Monitor MCP server is a great way to start using AI to analyze all the data in your database estate that Redgate Monitor collects. There were 7 tools when I started, but within a few weeks there were 11. By the time you read this, there are likely going to be even more.

Give Redgate Monitor a try and learn how to use MCP servers to link your LLM to Redgate Monitor and start analyzing systems in a more natural manner.

Redgate Monitor is a world-class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.
August 24, 2026