Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • I Can’t Make You Learn

    Oh, how I wish I could make you learn. How I wish I could coach, guide, inspire, or even bribe you to learn more about your job, or things related to your job, or even things in life. I wish all of you would improve your skills, but more, I wish you would want to improve your skills. I find lots of people who do want to get better at things, but far too often, people aren’t trying to improve because they want to coast along at their jobs. Or really, anywhere.

    I get it. You’re stressed and busy at work, though hopefully not too often. You have challenges at home, kids to raise, parents getting older, financial stresses, concerns about politics or sports or exercise or diet or just about anything in the world. We all have things that take mental energy in our lives. How/why/when should I add another thing to the list?

    My view in the past has been that I invest in my knowledge and my skills because that helps me in the future. Whether that’s learning to write better T-SQL, or it’s learning a new thing about T-SQL, or it’s learning how to find information about the new thing in T-SQL. Or it’s something completely different. In the past, I’ve spent time learning to write better with a blog, knowing this might lead to a future job, but also to experiment and decide how much I liked writing. I’ve learned to organize presentations better, partially because I wanted to impress people at a user group, but also because I knew this skill would help me argue for a raise or communicate well in a job interview.

    I thought about this recently as a fan switch went out at the ranch. That’s not related to work, but I like to learn everywhere in my life. We have a whole house fan that cools the house at night. Someone else installed it years ago, but the switch stopped working. My wife wanted to call someone right away, as none of us are a) electricians, or b) have worked on a hard-wired fan. However, I thought this couldn’t be difficult. It’s worth a small experiment. I ordered a part that was vaguely familiar to the broken switch, not having much confidence that it would work.

    My son and I found the breaker (which was an adventure) and disabled it. We disassembled the switch, matched up wires, and replaced the switch. We turned on the breaker and were excited that the fan worked. We of course, had another adventure putting it back together, as the first time things didn’t work when we enabled the breaker, but we solved the issue. A couple of hours in total and $40 for a switch when it would have been easy to call someone and (likely) spend $150 or more.

    I always ask questions when work is being done. Whether that’s a tradesperson doing building or repair work, or a fellow tech professional writing code, or a fellow marketer authoring content. I want to learn to be self-sufficient and more capable. Even if there are things I’d really never do and happily pay someone to do them, I want to know how they are done.

    At the very least, I want to be able to judge future quality. That’s a skill I need with electricians and AI technology.

    Steve Jones

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  • Un-Migrating From the Cloud: T-SQL Tuesday #199

    This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted once before, and agreed to help me out this month by tackling another topic. We’ve shared a few beers in the EU, though not in some time, so I hopefully will get the chance to buy him a pint and thank him for this month’s invite.

    He was inspired by another friend, Alexander Avidsson, who wrote about skills and the cloud, but with an interesting take. This month’s invite is about moving back on-premises from the cloud, which is something I’ve had a few customers do, or start doing. Nothing is quick when migrating systems, either to or from the cloud.

    Here’s my take.

    How Easy Is It To Un-Migrate?

    I decided on a fun title here, since so many people talk about migrating to the cloud. Is going back on-premises an un-migration? Or a re-migration? Just a migration? I won’t worry about the semantics.

    I work with a lot of different customers at Redgate Software. Whether they are discussing development topics (Prompt/Toolbelt), deployment issues (Flyway), production stuff (Monitor) or compliance (all of the above + TDM), I find that most of them are still rooted in an on-premises mindset. Even when they’ve migrated to the cloud, it’s often lift-and-shift, with VMs running in AWS/Azure/GCP. In that sense, they still tend to manage things in an on-premises way.

    They’re more comfortable with those skills and more confused by cloud auth systems, still. In 2026.

    I think that’s still the norm and it’s easy to think that most people work in the cloud all the time. Some do, and I think most people have some familiarity with one of the major cloud systems, but I would expect that lots of people would love to come back on-premises.

    Is it easy? No. It’s another migration, and while you might find it easy to re-provision hardware (whether purchased or rented from another provider like Rackspace) there are still major data movement challenges in the db world. How do I sync systems? Can I get log backups? What type of quiescing and cutover is there?

    The tech stuff, matching versions, etc. is likely easy. After all, most of us don’t use the latest and greatest functions from SQL Server, so moving back to on-premises likely just works. If you are in the IaaS world, this is simple, other than the latency of copying data down (and explaining the egress charges).

    I actually think customers might gain some efficiencies from moving systems with known workloads and costs back on-premises. Especially those that create lots of tickets for DBAs or developers. Any time spent moving back will come back in the skills that so many have with on-premises systems.

    The one downside I think might cause some issues is HA. It’s easy in the cloud, and hard on-premises. Those are skills that some people likely need to brush up on if they don’t have a significant HA footprint with VMs.

  • Would You Retire Rather Than …

    Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of C++. I read a few of his books and alternately loved what he’d done with the language and hated having to write C++ code in university and at a few jobs. I found it tedious and hard, though arguably better than C once you had a decent set of classes structured. BTW, I love his website, the basic text view of the world, which is how I have built a few sites on my own.

    I caught an interview with him and this short response on AI and coding. He had this quote: “Senior developers are already retiring rather than deal with it.” He doesn’t love the results from AI, which is fine. And it’s not what I want to talk about today.

    The idea that senior developers, presumably like Mr. Stroustrup, would rather retire than work on codebases that are being changed by AI is interesting. I suspect that in some problem domains, you might hate AI code and not want to deal with it, but would you retire? Is that the answer?

    I have known some IT people who retired because they didn’t like their jobs. My wife left tech because it was too stressful, but it wasn’t an easy decision. She’s questioned it a few times, but she had a passion for something else and wanted a new job. I think that in both cases, someone moved towards something rather than away from something. They had another thing they wanted to do in their lives.

    I wonder how many of you would really retire or leave your job because you don’t like the work. Most people I know who don’t like the work are looking for something else to do until they retire. I would be sad to hear about someone who is hanging on to a bad job until they retire, especially if retirement isn’t coming soon (like the next 2-3 years). I would also hate to think that some people see AI as making their job so un-enjoyable that they decide to retire earlier than they expected.

    I do have a good friend who was close to retiring in his early 60s. He decided it was too soon and took another job after his previous employer was sold and closed their local office. He’s spent a little over a year working remotely and he doesn’t like it. He’s going to retire this year because he doesn’t like the job and doesn’t want to look for a new one. He is close enough to retiring that he’s looking to the future doing less and finding a way to enjoy life without work.

    AI might force some people out of the industry, but I think it’s more likely that there are other factors, like a poor work environment, bad management, or some other factor. However, if you disagree, let me know. If you would stop working because you don’t want to deal with data or technology, let me know. As always, if you don’t want to post publicly, message me and I’ll post something anonymously for you.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • There’s Too Much to Learn

    I remember getting started on SQL Server and trying to upskill myself in the mid-1990s. At that time, my employer was running a SQL Server 4.2 instance for a third-party application, but we wanted to rewrite our internal bespoke sales app to run on SQL Server. We were upgrading from Foxpro to Visual Foxpro and looking to move from shared dbf files to a SQL Server. There was a new release of SQL Server 6.5 during our development, and I wanted to learn more about it. I purchased Inside SQL Server 6.5 and read the entire thing, getting prepared to finish development and then manage a new platform in production.

    I had updated copies of that book as SQL Server released new versions until SQL Server 2005. When that came out, there weren’t one, but rather 4 books to cover the Inside SQL Server details (Programming, Query Tuning, T-SQL, and The Storage Engine). A similar thing happened with the SQL Server Bible, which grew in size to over 1400 pages for the 2012 version. It was a backache in a book if you put it in with your laptop.

    Since then, the growth of the Microsoft Data Platform, which includes SQL Server, has been incredible with lots of changes not only to the box/on-premises product many of us install, but to the related systems in Azure. The SQL variants, Fabric, Power BI, Azure Data Factor, and more. It feels like there is way too much to learn  I know I can’t keep up, and I expect most people feel the same way.

    Coping with the load and the accompanying imposter syndrome is hard. It’s hard on your psyche and it’s hard when others in your organization, especially your boss, expect you to understand how to work with T-SQL, even when they might refer to SQL Server in one request and SQL Database in Fabric in another. They might even expect that you know “everything database-related”, including how to troubleshoot their Azure PostgreSQL Flex server performance issue.

    AI can help, as can some strong Google skills and an eye that spots the information you need. Whether to do actual work or help guide an AI LLM along a path. I would argue that improving your ability to differentiate what’s better from what’s worse is becoming even more important in the age of vibe coding. Even if you aren’t a YOLO, let-Claude-Code-do-it’s-thing, others are and they’ll call you when they don’t get the results they want.

    Or when their system performs poorly against your database system. Who knows how many implicit conversion issues or RBAR pieces of code an LLM will write. There’s a lot of that sample code out on the Internet, and much of that code goes into training these models.

    I don’t have a magic solution for keeping up, other than build the habit of learning. Practice new techniques, play with code, conduct experiments in the things that plague your environment, or that you see others working with. I don’t mess with Hyperscale much as I don’t see it with customers, but I do see other technologies, like System-versioned tables. So I spend time there, learning what works well and what doesn’t. Those are the skills that help me keep up with the knowledge I need to work with LLMs and humans.

    Steve Jones

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

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