Voice of the DBA

Tag: AI

PowerPoint to HTML with Claude AI

I had an idea for an animated view of a sales tool, and started to build this in PowerPoint. I decided to switch to Claude and ended up with an interactive one-page web app. This post looks at how I approached the process.

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

Editing in PowerPoint

Someone sent me a slide in PPT and asked me for feedback. I wanted to adjust the look, and started to make changes in PPT. I was moving boxes, changing a few colors, and adding something that I thought would have more impact.

I was about to start building some animations to show how I envisioned things working when it occurred to me this would be a better as an interactive, more self-service item.

I opened Claude and this was my prompt. I uploaded an image of my slide.

In 3 minutes, I had a working one-page web app that I could click around in and see changes. I had one more prompt as my gauges weren’t working correctly.

I took another moment to fix the UI as it had 3 of my 5 items on one line and then I had to scroll to see the others. My last prompt fixed this.

After getting a slide asking for feedback from a colleague, and spending 10 minutes futzing in PPT, I switched to Claude and had a working, interactive showcase of what my mind was thinking,thanks to Claude (free Claude).

I sent it back and my colleague loves it. I don’t want to quite show this here, as we may use this in Redgate and someone will need to make it waaaaayyyy prettier than I can or even prettier than I can describe to the LLM.

How Useful is This?

You might say that going from an image or slide to an interactive picture isn’t useful. You might be right, and to be fair, I’ve never had the need to do this.

However, if I think a little wider about the idea of making something interactive or expressive, I have had the need for this type of thing before.

For example, I’ve needed a list of things that I want people to do and check them off. I’ve built this in word, with the little checkboxes, and given it to people. However, they have to remember to save as, or where it is, etc. Here, I could just give a URL to this in docs (or in code) and people could open it and live check boxes as they’re walking through a procedure. I could even have it change colors or notify when everything in a step is done.

Or display a warning if a step is skipped. How useful would that be?

I have also had the need to ask a group of people a question and get their answers or ratings. How easy would it be to have a link I can send, detect the user (I’m sure AI can add this) and then record their vote, letting them override their decision at any time?

What about a page people can use to plan vacation or anything and send me back their decisions? This saves everything in a file.

What would your imagination let you build?

February 3, 2026
More Documentation is Needed

AI is everywhere, and if you spend any amount of time looking for answers on the Internet to your coding challenges, you’ve likely encountered a lot of poor, average, good, bad, amazing, and just-helpful-enough AI content. For awhile, I was avoiding the AI summary from Google as the quality seemed slightly off, but lately it’s gotten good enough that I tend use it to decide which links to click on in the results. The summary helps me better understand the context Google sees in my search query.

I ran across a post on coding documentation and how helpful these docs are in onboarding, code reviews, and more. The teams that worked smoothly together often had good docs that helped them function as a cohesive group. At least to some extent. Over time, teams start to depend on tools and lose some of that cohesiveness since they rely more on tools than docs. I agree with the piece that this is a part of the reason many teams don’t really function as teams over time.

In the age of AI, this becomes more important. These AI agents are smart, but gullible and prone to making inconsistent decisions if you let them. In the piece, there’s a great quote: “When your codebase follows consistent patterns, AI assistants become force multipliers. When it doesn’t, they become chaos amplifiers.” Or as we data people know it, garbage in, garbage out.

The lack of documentation means a lack of guidance for both humans and AI agents. It’s easy to say AI makes crazy decisions when we feed it our code, but humans do the same thing. I can’t even begin to count the number of weird decisions over structure and naming I’ve seen from other humans when I didn’t provide them guidance. It happens even when I give them standards, but at least then we can have a conversation about attention to detail if there are docs.

I saw Brent’s predictions for AI database development in 2026, and part of the challenge in getting AI to be helpful is the lack of docs many of us have on schemas. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been asked if Redgate has tools that can doc a schema and decipher what data is being stored. Microsoft spent a billion+ on Purview, and its results in classification are a mixed bag. It’s a hard problem, and a lot of the problem is us. We don’t make good decisions about what to name columns or tables, we’re inconsistent, and we reuse columns as our requirements change, subtly altering the data being stored. Usually, this is an overloading of two types of similar, but different, data into one column. Sometimes it’s just storing whatever we want in a column (or allowing a user to do so).

I’d like to think that the growth of AI will result in a little more attention being paid to documenting our data stores. I’d hope this results in at least using the extended properties or COMMENT capabilities of the different platforms. I think having better ER diagrams might be a second step, though certainly with some AI assistance to help keep things in sync as we evolve our schemas.

Documentation is tedious work, and it’s not something humans are good at, or want to, update over time. However, if an AI agent were around to do the work and then let a human check the results, I suspect we might do a better job of keeping things up to date. To me, that’s another place where the AI revolution might benefit us all.

Steve Jones

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

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

January 28, 2026
Deep Learning and Craftsmanship Matter

There’s concern about the future of AI and how it may affect jobs and employment for the masses. I see plenty of people on both sides of the issue. Some are sure AI technologies won’t replace people; some are concerned their jobs will be eliminated, and some are hoping that we will eliminate some jobs and create many more.

Sometimes that’s the same person.

A GenAI can replicate a human, or maybe more accurately, mimic one. That might work well enough for some people to trust the technology more than humans. Or maybe it works well enough, enough of the time, and lots of us are OK with well-enough. After all, I think a lot of us already work with “well-enough” or “good-enough” code on a daily basis.

However, the GenAI is based on what other humans have already done. It’s “trained” on lots of existing ideas, decisions, codebases, etc. It can recall and use those quicker, and often as well as many humans. It might be a light craftsman, but it can’t be a great one.

Humans will be able to deeply understand problems and create better craftsmanship for many systems. Across time, an AI can learn from these craftsman and repeat their work in other systems, but an AI will often struggle to understand the entire context of whether we would apply that solution or a slightly different one this time.

That’s the human advantage. Deep learning and craftsmanship will differentiate us from the AIs because we can contextualize things better than an AI. Or really, we can internalize the context better than another human can express it to the AI. That will be the difficult part of working with AI LLMs, agents, and whatever comes next: explaining what is really needed in a new situation.

Communication is hard. Because many humans aren’t good at communicating, they won’t be able to use an AI to replace other humans. They’ll struggle with the results, and they will need to hire a craftsman to help. However, that also implies that more of us need to become craftsmen, not only for the advantage it gives us over AI, but because those skills will help us better judge AI output, as well as express what we want to see the AI do.

There will be lots of work in the future, even with AI, but I also believe that the jobs that are desired, that will pay better, will go to those who learn to use AI tech and who can judge when the quality of the work is appropriate for the situation.

Steve Jones

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

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

January 26, 2026
Using AI for Git Hooks
Recently I had someone internally ask about whether SQL Source Control supports Git Hooks. Since it was after UK work hours, I decided to run a quick test. One problem, I haven’t setup a Git hook in a few years.

Could AI help me? See what I did.

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

Asking for Help

Claude is my go-to AI. I don’t have a good reason why I don’t lean on Copilot or ChatGPT or anything else, but I’ve become more comfortable with how Claude works and responds to me. When I have something that doesn’t have any PII or other sensitive requests, I tend to start with the free Claude site.

Here was my prompt: what is an example of a git precommit hook

Simple, easy, no punctuation or big setup. I just needed something. I got some code:

and an explanation. Here’s the’s the text of the explanation (italics from me):

This hook:
1. Prevents commits with console.log statements
2. Catches trailing whitespace
3. Runs your linter
To set it up, save this as .git/hooks/pre-commit and make it executable with chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-commit.

If the hook exits with a non-zero status (like exit 1), the commit is aborted. You can bypass hooks temporarily with git commit --no-verify if needed.

Many teams use tools like Husky to manage hooks in a project, making them easier to share across the team since .git/hooks isn’t version-controlled by default.

This shows some bash, which I don’t think runs natively in Windows. That makes sense as a lot of coders are likely using Linux/MacOS for complex stuff and the default training for Claude likely assumes that. I asked about Windows and got two options: Node.js and Husky. Since I don’t like to install things, I went with Node. Here’s the next question I asked.

I didn’t want to lint or worry about whitespace, since I’m depending on SQL Source Control to create the files, so I asked a different question: can you create a pre-commit hook using node (for Windows) that checks for a commit message between 1 and 50 characters?

The response is good. I didn’t want this, and reading this, I realize Claude is right. I wasn’t quite thinking through the process here. I also didn’t want the code for a commit-msg hook, so I ignored the code.

I could see that I was getting generic hooks, mostly for other code, so I rephrased a prompt: I want a sample pre-commit hook for .sql files to test something, what is a good example

The response was a practical hook for SQL files. The code had a couple of messages printing our errors when I failed things, and the code here isn’t important, but here was the explanation. The bottom of the code is shown, and then the list of things that are checked.

At the top there is a comment about the hook, and since I’d done this a few years ago, I thought I know what to do, but I asked. I mean, why not ask the AI for more help? I liked that it noted not only do I need to add this to my .git folder, but I need to track this if I want to share it. That’s important. I do want other team member, or in this case, me on another machine, to have this hook.

Testing the Hook

I then went to SQL Source Control and made a change. In this case, I added a file that I knew would fail the check. Here’s my code:
```
ALTER PROCEDURE dbo.GetAllCustomers

AS

SELECT * FROM dbo.customer
```
I could see this code change in the SQL Source Control GUI, but no error. I thought this might be staged, and I somewhat assumed the hook would fire on staging, so I asked.

My new prompt: when does this hook fire?

The response let me know that I had to commit this to get the hook to fire. It runs on the commit command, as before the commit succeeds. That’s good to know. Thanks, Claude, for helping me learn something.

In checking from the CLI, I realized that SQL Source Control at this point hasn’t staged the file. It also hasn’t written the file, so there’s nothing to stage. One of the downsides (one fo the few) of SQL Source Control is very limited git configuration. The write, stage, and commit happen at once.

I tested this and sure enough, I got a failure when I tried to commit. The hook fired and saw my SELECT *, and my lack of a semi-colon.

I tested this further by fixing these elements individually, and I could correct the SELECT *, but I couldn’t fix the semi-colon. I realized with testing that when SQL Source Control writes the file, it always includes a “GO” at the end. So my hook doesn’t work.

Asking for Modification

I decided to see if Claude would fix this, as I wasn’t sure what to change myself. I’m not a Node nor RegEx person, and I’d be googling a bunch to figure this out (or find someone else’s code). Instead I tried this: can you adjust this hook to ignore the missing semi-colon if the file ends with a GO, or check for a semi-colon before the GO

The response was interesting. The explanation said this:

Now it handles both cases:
- File ends with GO: Checks that the line before GO has a semicolon
- File doesn’t end with GO: Checks that the last line has a semicolon
The relevant code is here:

I can read this and it makes some sense, but I would have struggled a bit to get this done in a reasonable time. Instead, it was seconds for Claude to produce this.

When I re-tested, this passed the SQL Source Control GUI and I had a working git hook looking for a couple of simple silly mistakes I might code.

Summary

This is an area that I have a little experience, but not a lot. I’m a junior dev when it comes to Git, and Claude is definitely more skilled. However, I have to know what to ask to get a result and I thought the answers and explanations were good in helping me setup this test in a few minutes rather than the better part of an hour (or longer) if I were searching and trying to assemble code.

This is one of those areas where AI was very useful to me. It built a fairly trivial coding item I needed, it helped explain things when I had questions, and it was helpful in adjusting code quickly when I realized I needed something else.

Imagine asking a colleague this, realizing you’d asked the wrong thing, and then asking them again for new code. How slow, and annoying, would this be for both of you? AI is a game changer here, for things that are too simple to work with a colleague on, yet complex enough that you’d waste a decent chunk of time googling.

That time savings went into me testing the code and testing SQL Source Control. I verified that SQL Source Control can work with git hooks in minutes.
January 26, 2026