Voice of the DBA

Tag: AI

Using Prompt AI for a Travel Data Analysis
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt could help me with some analysis. I was pleasantly surprised by how this went. This post looks at my experience using this to help me write a few queries.

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

New York City

This year was a big one for me and New York City. By my count, I went there five times. I wanted to see if that was right.

I started by loading up a bunch of travel data I keep into a database. I do this to keep an eye on where/when I’m going places, so that I have a few of how busy I’ll be. In this case, I loaded data into a table. Here’s a short sample of data.

I started by asking Prompt AI to write me a query. Here’s the prompt:

Simple enough. I could have written what it gave me, so I asked for more. Since I’m not tracking trips, but where I am on days, I needed something better. My prompt is what I might express to someone else, non-continuous trips.

I got a 4 back from more complex code, which is looking for entries with the city being NYC or a variant. It then adds a LAG(), which is what I was thinking before I decided to let Prompt do this. Notice above I was already asking for dates.

I got my dates, but still 4 trips. I know I flew to the NYC area more times. In looking at the dates, I realized that one of the trips, Mar 31-Apr 2, was only to Jersey City. So I had asked for that above.

You can see more more complex code, which adds in New Jersey. The results were interesting. This has 6 trips, because on one another trip, I went to New Jersey for a day. I had forgotten that one.

Checking Countries

I wanted to do some country analysis. I knew there was a bunch of country data from 2025 in there, so I wrote a simple query. That gets me some data, but it’s a bit of a mess. I really want to know when I visited countries.

I used PromptAI with a simple request.

I got some results back, which were good, but included the USA. I then asked to remove this and you see the result.

This was a good query, overall, so I clicked the “Optimize SQL” button. I got these items added as comments.

There isn’t a lot to do here, but I created the index. The “optimize” had also added a FORCESEEK, which I didn’t realize at first, so I removed it.

Eventually I added back the USA, partially as this improves performance, but also, with the results, I got a good look at travel patterns. In this case, I can see when I’m in the USA and when I’m not. I liked that I had asked for the trip duration, but the GenAI also added days traveling on the trips, which was fascinating.

The final query is here:
```
;WITH TravelCTE
AS (SELECT Country,
            TravelDate,
            DaySpentTraveling,
            ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Country ORDER BY TravelDate) AS RowNum
     FROM dbo.Travel WITH (INDEX = IX_Travel_YearCountry) -- Use existing index to improve performance
     WHERE TravelDate >= '20250101' -- Using efficient date literal format
)
SELECT t.Country,
        t.TripStartDate,
        t.TripEndDate,
        t.TripDuration,
        t.TotalDaysSpentTraveling
FROM
(
     SELECT Country,
            MIN(TravelDate) AS TripStartDate,
            MAX(TravelDate) AS TripEndDate,
            DATEDIFF(DAY, MIN(TravelDate), MAX(TravelDate)) + 1 AS TripDuration,
            SUM(DaySpentTraveling) AS TotalDaysSpentTraveling,
            DATEADD(DAY, -RowNum, TravelDate) AS GroupingKey
     FROM TravelCTE
     GROUP BY Country,
              DATEADD(DAY, -RowNum, TravelDate)
) AS t
ORDER BY t.TripStartDate;
```
Summary

This was an interesting experiment in having an AI help me do some data analysis. I could have written these queries, but it would definitely have taken me as long as it took to ask the AI and write this post to do so. I’d be messing with data, double checking myself, and trying to decide what I wanted.

I also found it interesting to have the AI write the code and I could think more about the data being returned. I found a few data anomalies that I corrected along the way.

Prompt AI is proving useful, though when I was going back and forth a lot, I got this message.

There are limits to how much and how often you can query.

Video Walkthough

I’ve tried to duplicate this in video below.
December 31, 2025
The Challenge of AI

In his book, The Coming Wave, the CEO of Microsoft AI laid out the risks of AI tech bluntly. “These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence. They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor-replacing,” he wrote. Suleyman advocated for regulatory oversight and other government interventions, such as new taxes on autonomous systems and a universal basic income to prevent a socioeconomic collapse. This book was published before Suleyman joined Microsoft.

Satya Nadella is more optimistic than his new deputy. In an interview at Microsoft headquarters, while sitting next to his human chief of staff, Nadella said that his Copilot assistants wouldn’t replace his human assistant. As his chief of staff sat typing notes of the conversation on her tablet, Nadella acknowledged that AI will cause “hard displacement and changes in labor pools,” including for Microsoft. Judson Althoff, Chief Commercial Officer, said that Nadella was pressuring his team to find ways to use AI to increase revenue without adding headcount.

In 2025, Microsoft has reduced quite a bit of its workforce. Over 9,000 earlier this year, though perhaps there will be some hiring in the future, according to Nadella. Nadella contends that AI could end up delivering more societal benefits than the Industrial Revolution did. “When you create abundance,” Nadella said, “then the question is what one does with that abundance to create more surplus.”

As I discuss AI with different people, I get wildly different opinions. The pace of GenAI model growth across the last two years has led quite a few people to believe that the technology will approach mimicking the average human’s intelligence in just a few years. That’s a scary thought, and it certainly could lead a lot of executives to place a bet on fewer human employees and more digital ones.

However, many more people believe that the GenAI models still need a lot of guidance, and they are best suited for partnerships with humans. That’s good, in a sense. If a smart or talented human can use an AI partner and get a lot done, that means we still need some humans.

Some.

That use of AI by a few talented people might also lead us to a reduction in labor for a lot of organizations. Maybe fewer humans get more done with AI, and it’s possible organizations want to make that trade. It’s easy to think we’ll find things for more humans to do, but computers are incredible levers, and this worries me.

A little.

What I also think is that there is so much work we’d like to get done, but we can’t, at least in the technology space. We don’t have enough people to do the work, so GenAI agents or partners working with humans might let us catch up on the backlogs we have.

Of course, I don’t know that all that backlogged software we went is something we need, if it’s good for the world, and if it will end up putting even more people in the real world out of work.

Lots of challenges ahead. Let me know what you think.

Steve Jones

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

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

December 17, 2025
Vibe Coding a Login Tracking System
A customer was asking about tracking logins and logouts in Redgate Monitor. We don’t do this natively, as this really needs an XEvent session. I decided to see if an AI could help me get a solution setup that might let me build a custom metric to track this.

I could do this myself, but it’s some looking syntax and capabilities, futzing with different code items, and trying to think about options. The goal here is can an AI help and save time. Not do the work for me, but assist.

So maybe not Vibe coding per se, but felt like I did little.

Video Walkthrough at the bottom.

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

Note: This isn’t something I necessarily worry about. The rate might tell me if I’m under attack, but I’d hope applications would detect this first (and be able to block things)

The Problem

The customer just asked if they could track logins and logouts. I mentioned the Server Properties (shown below), to see what they’d done. They hadn’t used this, but also, it’s not very flexible or reportable as it puts info in the error log.

Tracking this info really requires an XE (Extended Events) session. That’s a lightweight way to capture this information. If I want to capture some info about the client logging in, or failing to log in, that’s the way.

A separate request was could we also get logouts. The only way to do this is with an XE session and the sqlserver.logout event.

With that in mind, let’s see how my assistant can help.

Using Claude

I opened Claude and asked this: “in sql server can I track login counts and logout counts from t-sql?” and actually spelled everything correctly. No savings here.

The base answer I got started like this, giving me a few options.

The ending asked me if I’d like to get the Extended Event option. It had provided only the login trigger option. I need an assistant, so I said yes.

That first answer was maybe 20-30 sec, but I started reading things, so this felt like a discussion with another DBA. Once this started, I let it go and it started to write out and work on code on the right, and then fill in the results on the left. This was a few minutes, so I flipped over to answer a few emails while I saw this on another monitor.

The results started with a table to store data and then an XE session. The whole page looks like this, which is a lot.

Here’s the full left side. Notice that it asks me for a next step. I’ve met a lot of junior DBAs, or even Senior-DBAs-with-1-year-of-experience-10-times that didn’t do this.

The actual code doesn’t matter yet, since I realized this isn’t getting failed logins. I asked another question and got a response. A polite Claude complements me and then rewrites code. This took another few minutes, and it was neat to see it rewriting its code on the right, adding in a new field in the table and adjusting the session.

I watched a bit, but got distracted with a Slack message. One nice thing is I can move on to another task while my assistant keeps working.

At the bottom, I liked the summary of how it works.

My Slack message was from an AE, asking a question about the server property stuff (from the customer). I could have typed a bunch, but when I looked back, Claude was finished, so I asked it.

I copy/pasted this to the AE, as it’s a good summary for the customer. This assistant is making my job easier.

Testing the Solution

I didn’t just send this. Instead I decided to test this on a few local systems. I keep a DBA database on each instance, so I ran the code in there to create the table and session. As a precaution, since this isn’t my code, I ran each item separately.

The table worked here. I had another window for the session, which I looked over, but didn’t extensively check. I’m not an XE expert, and I’d likely fumble this code worse than an AI at first, so I checked the events and actions. I decided to just run this since it looked good.

When it came to the procedure, I got an error. I copied and pasted this into Claude. It recognized an issue and fixed it. This took a few minutes, but this is faster than I could have corrected my own amateurly written query against XE.

Now I had a procedure. One thing I edited in both the session and proc is that I removed the hard coded c:\SQLData path. I wanted this captured with my other instance stuff in the \logs folder, so I left just the name of the XE session.

Adding Archival

One of the things that Redgate Monitor does really well is manage older data. I’ve seen so many people, including myself, set up something like this and then a year later realize they’ve captured GB of data.

I asked Claude to just fix this for me.

I grabbed the second command for my Agent Job and changed 180 to 90.

SQL Agent Job

Claude again asked me above about jobs, but jobs are simple and easy, and I wanted to think about it for a minute. I right clicked and created a new job. I thought about the name and description I wanted. Then I made two steps, pasting in two exec proc commands for the procs my assistant had written.

The last thing was some testing. I ran my job to be sure it was working. It completed, which was good.

I made a few logins and logouts, including a few failed logins. Then I queried my table. I didn’t remember the name, but my assistant tends to pick plain/boring names. So I used SQL Prompt to find it with a ssf <tab> l and got this:

When I got a query and checked, I see logs of my logins and logouts.

Redgate Monitor Custom Metric

My AE and customer wanted to see this in Redgate Monitor, so I decided to ask Claude. It was happy to help.

I could repeat that for the other items (failed logins and logouts). I didn’t, but this gets me ready to add this to Redgate Monitor.

Summary

This shows how an AI assistant can help me set up some auditing for security purposes. There is nothing complex here, and I’ve set up a bunch of this myself in the past. I even have a blog on this.

However, the code is cumbersome and slow to write for me. Or most humans unless you end up working with XE every day. Even if you use SSMS and the GUI to generate the script, it can be slow. I know I’d certainly have to look things up. In less than 15 minutes, I had a fairly well working solution, with archiving (deleting) old data and I didn’t need to focus tightly the entire time or type a lot. I did some other work, and I could focus on just testing.

Claude was a great AI assistant to this problem, which is similar to a lot of DBA-type work I’ve done in the past.

These were the tools I used:
- Claude
- SQL Prompt
- Redgate Monitor
And, of course, Management Studio 22.

Addendum

I tried Google Gemini and ChatGPT. A quick summary of those, which didn’t work as well. At least not to me.

Note that I use the free versions for all of these tools right now.

Gemini

The first prompt got me just a table and trigger, with a followup if I wanted more. I asked about XE and got a basic session, not as easy to read as Claude and embedded inside the response. It also had fewer actions.

I got to the same place, but it was more prompts and I had to keep guiding it along, like micro, or at least mini, managing another DBA. On the plus side, this was faster.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT suggested a trigger, but noted this wasn’t great. It did suggest extended events, and a complete solution. I could have just entered “yes”, but I didn’t. I’m still working on muscle memory at times.

I got each part of the solution separate, but this has me scrolling through explanation and code. Again, I prefer the Claude side-by-side approach, but this works. And it’s fast.

This also kept leading me along the process, which I liked. It certainly likes the checkboxes and Xs in its results.

Both tools helped me with custom metrics.

Video Walkthrough

Here is a a retry, and then showing the first solution. I think Claude learned a bit the second time.
December 17, 2025
Investing for AI

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.

December 10, 2025