The PASS Summit goes on tour this year, with a September stop in Dallas. This is the first event in the series, and I’m excited to go back to New York City for the event. You can register here and come see some amazing speakers on Sep 15-16, 2025.
The lineup is small and short, but it’s a one pre-con day with two half-day sessions and then a one full day of hour long sessions. The pre-cons include Fabric, leadership, performance tuning and more. All from industry experts. The regular sessions are across four tracks with a variety of things you can learn during the 5 time slots throughout the day.
There is also a Redgate Summit in Dallas on Wednesday. That’s got Redgate specific content, but if you’re interested (or a customer), stay an extra day for that as well.
If you’re near Dallas, or can convince your boss to send you, register today and join us on tour. The larger main event is still in Seattle, and if you prefer that, come for a full week in November.
The PASS Summit goes on tour this year, with an August stop in New York City. This is the first event in the series, and I’m excited to go back to New York City for the event. You can register here and come see some amazing speakers on Aug 18-19, 2025.
The lineup is small and short, but it’s a one pre-con day with two half-day sessions and then a one full day of hour long sessions. The pre-cons include security, analysis, performance tuning and more. All from industry experts. The regular sessions are across four tracks with a variety of things you can learn during the 5 time slots throughout the day.
There is also a Redgate Summit in New York on Wednesday. That’s got Redgate specific content, but if you’re interested (or a customer), stay an extra day for that as well.
If you’re near New York City, or can convince your boss to send you, register today and join us on tour. The larger main event is still in Seattle, and if you prefer that, come for a full week in November.
It’s been an amazing week here, as well as a long week. I’m tired, as are many others. The blogging table is a little bare this am, but I do understand. Louis Davidson invited me to the Simple Talk breakfast and it was a struggle to get up, pack, and make it to the event. I was a little late, but I got there in time to catch Louis’ remarks.
I love that we have the previous year’s speaker introduce the next one. Ben tells us that he started growing his career here at the Summit, as have many others. Ben tries to help others grow and expand their careers, and I hope a few people get inspired to start blogging, speaking, and more. Most of us you see on stage started just like those of you in the audience.
This is live-ish blogging, so apologies for typos. I’ve tried to italicize my thoughts.
Privilege
We are privileged to be here. Our companies invested in us, or we can afford it. We get the time to come. We get to interact with others in our industry, get some swag, enjoy the
Ben thanks the DEIB committee, which does a lot of small things. The code of conduct, the non-alcoholic bar, gender neutral bathrooms and more. These items might not affect you, but they make the event better for others.
There is also a New Stars track for new people who have never spoken. You can submit to this, which is a separate process from the main submissions. Ben runs New Stars of Data (with William Durkin) and he can help. He’s more than willing to help.
He also thanks a lot of people in the community that helped him. I feel the same way, in that we work hard, but success comes with help from others.
You might think others are doing much better than you. There certainly are those people, but there are also many more doing less well than you.
Appreciate what you have and acknowledge your privilege. You don’t need to apologize for it, but don’t pretend it doesn’t exist.
Generating Innovation
Ginger comes out, asking about the media we used to watch. Gilligan’s Island for her, on a TV. Today, kids watch YouTube, Tiktok, etc., and on their phones. They watch things like this.
Cable TV is going away, and a survey of younger people showed most thought this was going to happen.
Today everyone talks about AI and that we might lose our jobs. Ginger thinks this is hype.
But it is an important tool. Learn, innovate, be better.
Netflix is the first example. They worked by mail, competing with Blockbuster. They took a chance on streaming, which I remember. Wondering if we could actually get enough bandwidth. Today Netflix dominated over others.
First is not the most successful. Lots of tech was first, but hasn’t survived. Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 were first and everywhere, but they didn’t survive. Excel took over. They had a button to emulate Lotus, so that users could move. Excel innovated and won.
You need to innovate and change to survive. Ben is the example. He was (is?) a VB6 developer. However, if he stuck there, he might not be on stage, in the community, owning a company, and more. He changed and innovated.
That can be each of us. Ginger reminds us that other people help us grow, learn, get inspired, and do more. People are the reason companies innovate.
Innovation requires curiosity, brave, and willing to fail. You have to take risks. If you start something new, you won’t be great, but you can learn and finds ways to innovate.
SpaceX and musk shown. Why do some companies succeed in new ways? I think this is a great example, as this company changed the way rockets and space exploration works.
Who remembers and awful job. Ginger’s gave her headaches every Sunday, in anticipation of going back to work Monday. She didn’t plan this, but found herself in the situation.
We need to prepare for the future, be ready in advance. Explore your world, look at what’s important, what are others doing?
I hear this a lot from people, but the devil is in the details, and I know that lots of people question what to do. I both agree with Ginger’s advice, and I don’t. A few years ago we were told we needed R. Lots of people, including me, spent time on R as it was added to SQL Server, ML was a big deal, and we saw others learning this.
Today R isn’t something I see widely used. Python has taken over more, Databricks and Spark and other tech is being used more often, but will that continue? I don’t know.
Ginger worked at a company she thought was good, but started to see people leaving because they weren’t valued and didn’t work on interesting things. Money wasn’t the reason, and I agree. I think back to Drive, which talks about Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Monday matters, but those things bring more satisfaction (if the money is good enough).
Ginger overworked herself at a job. She got sick, but thought she’d have done a good job. She asked why she was asked to do all the work in December.
“did you get it done?”
“She said yes, and the response was, “I guess I picked the right person for the job.”
The boss felt he’d done a good job, but Ginger didn’t feel that way. She felt like she’d been abused and taken advantage of in the situation. She wasn’t valued. The same feeling of her friends.
She left and that company failed. That company didn’t value employees. That could be us? Do we value our situations, our friends, our knowledge?
I think that’s a decent analogy, because there are companies (that I know) and people who do continue to survive and do well even though they aren’t liked, or good, or anything. Sometimes they take advantage of the market (companies) or their situation/power (people) and others don’t like them but feel trapped. Or they constantly find new people that don’t know how toxic or unsatisfying it is around those people.
I don’t know if those are exceptions, or if they’re the minority or even majority. I do know that those aren’t places I want to work, or people I want to spend time around. I also know there are lots of other opportunities.
Ginger mentions pay, and that more pay doesn’t necessarily ensure you’ll enjoy the situation. I’ve learned that the hard way as well. I have often found that more pay isn’t better. I can get better pay and a better situation, but I can also accept slightly less pay and enjoy the situation more. Have I done this? Yes. I made $75k at one point and took a $68k job. It was totally work it.
The Mississippi Miracle. After being ranked #50 in a 4th grade reading assessment (9-10yr olds), the US state found a new way to teach kids to read. They trained teachers, made an investment that was small, and they improved dramatically.
I think this is a great example. A little investment in your career is what I ask. Not a part-time job investment, but a 1, 2, 4 hour a week investment. It can make a difference. I was talking to someone about blogging last night. I said you could write 1 small post a week. In a year, that’s 50 posts. That’s a lot of stuff to showcase about your career, a lot of practice to learn better communication skills, and a lot to learn about what you know or do. If you want a better year in a year or two, start now.
Netflix had a recession, they laid off 30% of the company. They realized they had good people and had to let those people do work. They trusted them (autonomy), they asked them to work on things that helped the company (purpose), and gave them opportunities to showcase their knowledge and improve (mastery).
If you haven’t read about things the Netflix engineers do, or seen talks from them, they have done amazing things. They innovate in tech. Their engineering blog is amazing, even though I don’t know most of the tech behind what they do. I’m frequently lost, but I also recognize these are very smart people getting things done.
I’m not saying Netflix is amazing culturally, but they are impressive.
Ginger notes she looked for opportunities and tried to find ways to get into a new department. They kept promising things, but never moved her, so she quit.
Glassdoor, mentioning this is a good resource. One review, best thing is the food trucks outside because everything inside is garbage.
Take Glassdoor with a grain of salt. There are always people who just gripe or are unhappy. My view is toss away 5% of the top and bottom reviews.
It can be helpful in determining if you can trust the company and management.
Training provides opportunity. If your employer provides them, great. If not, you need to do your own training. You want to create your own safety net for the future.
I believe in this. In places resistant to investing, I usually do some, show what I’ve done and then ask for matching. That has worked in multiple situations.
Ginger notes that she talked to someone who got upgraded on a flight. They talked to a manager/owner next to them. The owner noted their employees were in the back and that’s a bad message.
Yes and no. Costs are a factor, and sometimes people get benefits because they travel a lot. I get upgraded and don’t apologize. I’ve had bosses that were in first while I was in coach because they had status and I didn’t. Or they spent money on an upgrade. I’ve also had bosses that use the same policy as employees. We do that at Redgate.
Don’t get too black and white with specifics, look for trends. Fair and equal doesn’t always mean the same for everyone.
What’s important to you? Talk to people to find out. Learn what matters to you. If you don’t like your situation, find a better situation and quit.
It costs 150% of a person’s salary to replace them. Is that crazy? Think about all the time, all the effort, the work not being done, the training time. Ginger thinks this isn’t necessarily a bad number.
Lat year a company gook their employees out to dinner at an expensive dinner at PASS. They then told the people because the food is expensive, they’d order family style and share. Made the employees think that management didn’t value them.
I’d agree here. Don’t cheap out if you make the decision to spend money.
Example of an employee that lives in S Dakota. The employee sends this person to a conference in Florida in December as a perk. He asks, chooses a time and place that suits him, and is happy. He’s still at the company.
Good employees get more opportunities and more perks. It’s fair because they often provide more value to the company. Keep that in mind when you ask for something and it gets declined. Some managers are just jerks, but I often question myself and sometimes realize that I might not deserve something.
Prompt Engineering
Everyone needs to learn how to do this. Take a course, and it doesn’t take 6 hours. Do these things:
be specific about how much text in the answer (give me 5 things)
pick the persona you want to answer the questions (act as a travel agent)
ask for clarification from the previous question (give me more)
ask AI how to ask AI a question (how could I have asked this better)
You can learn more by doing this. With generative AI, which generates responses, but also generates hallucinations. Because of this, ask for links and check them.
Ginger showed her Dad how to follow this method with AI and he was surprised by his success.
Go out and do good prompt engineering. This is a tool, and Ginger is more productive. It doesn’t do all her work, but it does help her. ZeroGPT is useful to find AI. Remind your kids about this.
I use this and others. I don’t take AI stuff at SSC.
Use tools, but remember we work with people and want to maintain our network. Remember the two rules:
The Golden Rule – treat others as you want to be treated.
Wheaton’s Law – Don’t be a jerk
Most of us can imagine someone in our careers that didn’t obey Wheaton’s Law.
I think about both of these often.
Ginger reminds us that don’t just live in AI, remember to talk and work with people.
Spend time with people who do what you want to do, learn from them, get inspired, and innovate for yourselves.
I missed blogging yesterday as I was on stage/backstage for quite a bit of the keynote. Live updates, so keep refreshing.
Today I’m blogging and noting the interesting things I see. Today is the Redgate keynote, and disclosure, I work for Redgate, so take this with a grain of salt.
The opening this morning is from my good friend, Annabel Bradford. Annabel and I have been at events all over the world for over a decade, both Redgate hosted and third-party events, including many PASS Summits.
She’s welcoming everyone, sharing some memories from her previous 14 events, and giving a little housekeeping. It’s good to have a few reminders as there is so much happening. The
Annabel also reminds us to give feedback. Fill our evals and surveys, take pictures and post notes, and even email the Summit team if you want to see changes. As someone that has been on the back side of these events, we review and debate lots of feedback.
The Redgate Keynote: Simplifying Complexity: making the database work in the real world
The first speaker is Kellyn Gorman. She’s been a friend for around 15 years, formerly living in Denver. She’s come to SQL Saturdays and I’ve spoken at Oracle events, so we’ve crossed paths regularly.
The data world is scary, with so many data breaches. Lots of headlines.
And this is more painful because of multi-platforms. Lots of challenges above security, we have other issues, including just running systems
One of the possible solutions here is synthetic data, which shouldn’t be a security risk for data breaches. However, synth is hard, and Kellyn is leading to a new area where Redgate is spending some time.
It takes a village to get things running smoothly. She notes that AI and ML are here to help us, to be our assistants. She likes ML as a subset of AI. This will help us get more done in many ways, but one is with synth data.
Graham McMillan, CTO of Redgate
Graham is our new CTO, I met him this past summer. We had dinner in NYC a few months back, and I’ve gotten to see how he thinks as there is a weekly CTO report that he post.
He used to run an SaaS operation with 5,000 SQL Server databases. They were upgraded semi-rarely, and the environment felt brittle. He has been in the situation many of us have, trying to get things done, testing our systems, upgrading, and feeling the pressure from the business. He believes in investing in people, process, and tooling.
He introduces an IDC, an analyst from Europe. Archana Venkatraman. I find analysts interesting in that they do hear from lots of different organizations and people, but they can still be led astray by a few loud voices.
A few stats from what IDC sees from executives
digital tech spend expanding 7x faster than the economy in 2024
CEO expect 49% of rev to come from digital products
8-10 expect more than 25% of new apps to be cloud native
Excellence comes from speed, quality, efficiency. We know that, but we also know that lots of organizations aren’t doing well in these areas.
Lots of tech debt, especially after the pandemic where companies pivoted quickly.
Graham doesn’t like tech debt as a term as those were the decisions we made. I think that’s a bit short sighted, as we sometimes make conscious decisions we know are wrong, but that need to be made to get quickly.
3.5 hours on average to deploy to databases. That’s crazy.
I also believe it.
Why, lots of silo’d development, especially between DBAs/developers. The DBA world is often working in less-automated ways, often from historical habits.
Speed is a bottleneck, which lowers our productivity. Less time is spent on value activities, and more on firefighting, That’s something I see often, and something many DBAs don’t appreciate.
The Messy Middle
Made some changes to address low hanging fruit, but then get stuck. This is the messy middle from IDC. The image shows this in two ways, with infrastructure shown, as well as operational challenges.
Costs is a big one that is pointed out, especially the lack of awareness and controlling costs. This is a big deal in the cloud. Visibility is another.
Graham says we’re here as we make a decision, but we don’t follow through. That is truly a leadership and culture failure, not a tech worker failure. Archana repeats this, culture is a problem.
How can we do that? That’s the trick. Redgate has some ideas, and we’ll see how that might be done.
Arneh Eskandari and Danny de Haan, come on. Arneh is a solutions engineer I’ve worked with for well over a decade. He and I have debated, argued, informed, and presented often in the past about DevOps and how to get better at working with databases. We often agree and I enjoy our talks. These days, we are trying to build better engineers to demo and support customers.
He’s her with Danny, who helps run the databases for the largest pension company in the Netherlands. Their approach to making changes is evolved. Five years ago, they worked very manually. Each team had to request all their own changes, knowing what they needed.
They have moved to building a platform to make things easier. Some are bespoke, built in-house, but there are also third party products. That’s likely the reality for a strong org, build some things, buy some things. Things can be done in a portal, or through an API, to request resources (servers, services, cloud, local, etc.).
This makes things better in these ways.
easy (portal or API/code)
independence (self-services)
efficient, few people involved (self-service again)
compliant by design (regulatory risk)
secure by design (certain things allowed or disallowed)
Thoughtful automation – Arneh uses this term, which is what we should do. Don’t automate everything, and don’t just automate it for what the customer wants (or what the tech wants). Do it in a way that is compliant and secure by design, and give some choice, meaning API-first with a portal on top of this.
They have a baseline. They have an expected set of things that need to take place for infrastructure and code, meaning some limits/guidelines/restrictions. They flag things that deviate from the baseline. That’s an approach that I like, since there are reasons to sometimes go away from a standard.
However.
Most of the time the deviations are simple mistakes. We’re too far along in tech to allow simple mistakes to slip through often, which is likely in the era of constantly changing staffs. Use automation to flag these, but have a way to create exceptions if needed.
More Industry Insights
Graham and Kellyn come back.
“Devops is essential. If you’re not automating, you’re not doing a good job.” – Kellyn.
Graham notes we run the State of Database Landscape survey. We’re run this quite a few years, and this year (the 2025 report from 2024 research), we had 2500+ responses. Report coming in Jan, but a few early results.
What do we want. What’s efficient? Kellyn says update. She’s prefer a db with no users, but that’s not possible (laughs).
She wants to patch or upgrade the database platform, but Kellyn doesn’t want to do changes for deployments. She does like tuning.
74% using more than one platform, along with organizations trying to incorporate lots of new technology. 26% using more than 4 platforms. Audience survey, but I couldn’t see how many responded.
18% (almost 1 in 5) making daily changes. There is also a 50% increase in short term changes between 2022 and 2024. These are bug fixes, security fixes, or enhancements. I see pressure to do this, but I also worry about this. Short term can be rash changes if not thought through.
The mission of Redgate is to help here. We display this.
The
Redgate bought db-engines, which Kellyn has used for years. She shows growth across some top platforms, which is similar to what we showed last year. We’ve highlighted this at a few events this year.
Flyway supports databricks, Clickhouse and cassandra. MongoDb as well. N
Not just a breadth though, but we are adding depth. Lots of changes in Flyway, as well as Redgate Monitor, which now runs on Linux/Timescale (PostgreSQL) if you want.
We’re into the product listing.
TDM mentioned, which was announced last year, and they note we’re improved subsetting performance. I am happy to see this (I knew this as I’ve been helping the team lightly), because I think this is crucial for success.
Cloud Movement
Kellyn is showing the the all in the cloud numbers have gone down in 2024 from 2023. Why? There is an increase in all on-premises environments. This matches Kellyn’s experience as she has worked on a lot of VLDBs, which can’t work in the cloud. She’s seen some of the large systems struggle to work in the cloud and they’ve come back.
That’s not most of us, but it is some of us. I never thought VLDBs made sense for the cloud if they were heavy on compute and IO. If it’s just size and they can tolerate latency, great.
Initial investment in cloud movement is low, but if you don’t manage this, cost increases can get out of control. Another reason some orgs might be moving back.
Cloud marketplaces are the place for Redgate. We’ve added Flyway, Monitor and TDM in the cloud.
Biggest challenge from the audience? Data integration issues. The report, skillset requirements and training. However, this is an audience whose companies invested in them for the most part, so I think skills are less an issue here. They have more tactical challenges.
Back to products, with James Hemson. He helps run TDM and I talk with him weekly. The first item to look at is security. That has limited 21% of organizations to adopting other platforms. I guess that makes sense, though I don’t know new platforms are needed. Maybe.
However, that’s a business decision. We don’t want security to be the driving force unless the new db platform is insecure. In that case, don’t use it.
That brings us to Redgate Monitor Enterprise. We launched this earlier this year as a new tier. One of the things added in Ent version was compliance checking, where we look at configuration against a baseline. We also added some security information on access to servers and databases. James shows some of this.
I won’t, but you can see this online for permissions and compliance in our demo system. A nice quote: you can see you’re compliant all the time, not just at audit time.
People believe in AI. It improves productivity (at least a belief in our survey). Hmmm, not sure I think this, but I’m skeptical.
AI can help you in some ways. Redgate has been working to add AI to Monitor. Example, lots of alerts. Too many. If we lowered a threshold, we can remove a lot of noise. We can get alerts when things are very or unusually high, not just higher.
ML is being used to tailor alerts to limit them to when they’re important or needed, not just every alert. This is a great use, since many of us don’t need to keep tuning alerts. We need to respond to them.
I wasn’t aware of what Monitor was doing here, but I like it.
We have a lack of collaboration. Bringing Dev and Ops together, a la DevOps, should have solved this.
A bit of a stretch to me, but I was aware of this. We wanted to ensure we can get test data to devs easier, without a lot of Ops effort. We are adding beta synth data into TDM as of today.
I’ve seen this, and it’s got possibilities, but I’m still unsure of how effective this will be. You judge, but there are some interesting ideas with ML looking at your data and generating synth data that looks like your data, but it’s not real. Great idea, but we’ll see how well it works for lots of different data structures.
There are both rules-based and AI-based versions of this that can be used in different ways. It was an interesting idea when I saw it a few months ago, but I’ll leave it there. You test it and let me know if it works for you.
Monitor, automate, protect, the three areas where Redgate works. Depending on your job and your challenges, you might use one of these.
Was this keynote that showed how to simplify complexity in the real world? I think there were some good things here, though there are certainly some product focuses here on Redgate solutions, but the high level concepts are things that help us make the world better.
Not simple for all the people doing the work, especially in Operations, but for the users, life should be simple. Watch the replay
Final announcements, not just 1 Summit next November, but 4. Three more in other cities (NY, Chicago, Amsterdam), which will be smaller and shorter (1-2 days). I’ve known about these, but wonder if you like this.
Come to the Redgate booth and win an Aardvark, which represents the first product from Redgate. If you get the golden one, you get $250 as well.
Voice of the DBA 