Voice of the DBA

Tag: AI

  • A Prompt Engineer

    No, Redgate Software isn’t hiring for SQL Prompt. I’m sure quite a few of you depend on SQL Prompt and would like more engineers working on it. Maybe a few of you would find that an interesting piece of software to work on.

    Rather, a Prompt engineer is someone that works with AI, trying to get a system to produce better results. I can’t decide if this sounds like an interesting job that stretches your brain or the equivalent of a mediocre developer that just keeps copying something from Stack Overflow, hitting compile, getting an error, and repeating that cycle.

    I can picture a scientist using their voice to continually correct some AI system by saying “no, that’s not quite right. I want to see more blue” or some other type of guidance. Is this job the equivalent of raising a digital toddler?

    I actually found one of these jobs on Indeed.com. For a company in San Francisco, a hybrid position paying between US$175k-335k to help create steerable AI systems. I’m not entirely sure what this is, but at that pay rate, it is tempting to learn.

    I think AI systems are fascinating, especially for someone that has done some development and can see how difficult it would be to specify an algorithm that can handle some tasks. Like composing some prose result. Or suggesting code based on what you’ve typed. These are some handy features that have been added to some IDEs and services.

    GitHub CoPilot is interesting, and if you haven’t tried it, I think it helps Java/C#/app programmers. Go watch some videos or sign up for a trial. I am not sure about these helping us in database work. There is probably a little more work needed before an AI delivers help for your particular database issue. However, I’ll be testing and working with some tools to see what I think.

    If you are interested in AI and have a lot of patience to train models, and a lot of patience to work on data cleansing and loading, then maybe you can find a new career in AI. It might be a fad, but I don’t think it will ever go away, and I do think there will be a lot of opportunities in this space in the next decade.

    Note: If you find this interesting, I had a discussion recently with a few others in a webinar.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Autonomous Driving Around London

    There’s a video of Bill Gates taking a drive in an autonomous car around London. I’ve been to London dozens of times, ridden and cabs and Ubers, and even driven a few times. It’s a crazy environment, and I struggle to process everything as a human. This is certainly a challenge for a car.

    It’s not a Tesla. In fact, I don’t see many Tesla FSD (full self driving) videos in the UK. I know they don’t have all the updates the US gets, but I struggled to find any actually in London. A few that looked like they were close to London aborted in city driving.

    In any case, this is a neat video, and if you look at all the things happening, as a driver, you can see the complexity of navigating around London. Imagine programming this.

    If the video doesn’t tender, the URL is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruKJCiAOmfg&w=560&h=315

    This is a car from Wayve, and it is impressive. Not the car, but the driving and control are something. It’s something I’d like to experience, since I could imagine this being a very neat thing in witness. Certainly would be better than the Uber I took in Las Vegas a few years ago.

    They’re hiring. Not for me, but maybe for you.

  • The AI T-SQL Tuesday–#160

    tsqltuesdayIt’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again, and this time there is an interesting invitation. Damien Jones reached out and wanted to host, so he gets to pick the topic this month. His invite is on the Microsoft OpenAI partnership.

    T-SQL Tuesday is a great way to keep the community engaged with a monthly topic hosted by someone new each month. I manage the party, and if you want to host, let me know. If you want to find a new topic for your blog, write each month and link to the invite.

    OpenAI

    If you read the invite, OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research company. They’re behind the and DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT services. I’ve only lightly used these, but they have been in the news quite a bit in the last year.

    Microsoft supports the company with investment and provides the cloud services they use. The invite this month is asking what we’d like to see from this partnership. What AI things should Microsoft try to integrate in Azure, O365, SQL Server, etc.

    My Wish List

    What I would love to see from this sort of partnership is more of a personal assistant AI that helps me with typing/coding/work on my laptop/desktop. I’ve seen great strides in autocorrect on my phone, and Google has some nice autocomplete stuff in Gmail and other apps. I see some of this from the laptop, but what I really would like is a better assistant that does stuff for me.

    I’m thinking of these types of things:

    • autocomplete, which I see is VS and Copilot, but more, smarter complete for the code I write. Recognize the types of mistakes I make.
    • In the Command Prompt, when I type “get status”, recognize I’ve erased and corrected this to “git status”.
    • Lately in every place I’ve needed it, I type “Floriday” for some reason. Please just fix this.
    • Help SQL Prompt be smarter, and auto complete the similar types of queries I run.
    • Recognize that I often write certain things over and over, bring up a template of sort, or remind me that it’s time to handle this task.
    • Recognize repeating actions and offer to write some code. I have a few import tasks where I have to download a file, run code to import it, and then run a SQL script. Offer to do that for me. That’s where another human would recognize a repeating task and handle it. In this case, it’s not easy to log in and download a file from a script, but an AI assistant could integrate some semi-manual tasks like that.
    • Handle some recurring search/replace stuff for me, maybe with a quick popup. In Evernote, there is some HTML added to notes that I need to remove constantly. Look for repetitive actions in an app and offer to handle them. It’s not a lot of keystrokes, but it’s also something hard for me to automate, but perhaps easy for an AI.

    These are selfish, quick things I’m thinking of, but beyond what a basic voice assistant can do today. ChatGPT seems to be moving in the direction where it might actually be able to be a better assistant, if integrated into the OS and also customized and adapting to each user.

    I’m sure we all repeat lots of actions, perhaps an AI might help us better handle these things. With notifications, reports of actions, and auditing, it might be something I’d trust.

  • Will ChatGPT Write Our Queries?

    The short answer is no.

    The longer answer is it depends, and perhaps to be more complete, ChatGPT likely will help us produce the simple, tedious queries with much less effort.

    There has been a lot of news about AI and ChatGPT and how well it performs for a computer. That last phrase is important because while it’s impressive, I don’t know that any of us would consider ChatGPT to be in our list of the Top 5 Dream Dinner Guests. The tool isn’t that impressive compared to most people, especially our friends.

    I look at Ayende Rahien’s blog often, and he recently had some thoughts on this topic, experimenting with ChatGPT and coding. Some things worked; some didn’t. In general, to get good code, you still need a subject matter expert, which is also the case with humans. We have plenty of people writing code that aren’t great at their jobs. We do see a lot of bad code, but we also have some great coders that help others to learn or just refactor their code later.

    So is ChatGPT better than a below-average developer? I don’t know. While the tool will get better, one advantage with people is we can complain to them, or send them problem queries, and they’ll learn to paste better code in from the SQL Server Central forums or StackOverflow or somewhere else. Perhaps ChatGPT will learn, but will it learn to improve and refactor code? I’m not sure how easy it will be to teach the system to edit something rather than just produce new code.

    I do think that the assistance features of AI, suggesting ways to complete sentences or lines of code, can be very valuable. They are a great productivity tool that can enhance your ability to get work done. If they learn to work in your style, suggesting the things you’ve done in the past, then these tools will help. As with most tools, they aren’t a replacement for your knowledge, but merely a lever to make you more efficient.

    Steve Jones

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