Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

The Book of Redgate: Taking Breaks

We work hard at Redgate, though with a good work-life balance. One interesting observation for me (as an American) is how well most of the company in the UK works normal hours and rarely works outside of those.

However, sometimes we do find people, especially engineers, heads down and very focused. With our engineers in the office a day or two a week, they might end up coding in a group and trying to solve a challenging issue.

We used to have engineers working more than 8 hours regularly, often late, when they were in the office. I came across this page in the Book of Redgate.

The text below is: Working too hard? Why not relax with a gentle game of ping-pong.

Our offices have always had some game tables. I don’t think we have ping pong in the new office, but we have a pool table near the coffee machines and I’ll see people taking a few minutes to play a game at different times. We also (I think) still have a foosball table.

We have a piano upstairs, and some guitars in the foyer. I usually take a few minutes between meetings and strum some songs. Here’s the view I have most days when I’m in the office, a few minutes at a time.

We’re not afraid of resistant to working hard. We just try to take breaks and find balance.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.

June 12, 2026
Funny Money: #SQLNewBlogger
While wandering around the documentation looking for some Question of the Day topics, I learned something new about the money data type. This post discusses what I learned.

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

The Money Type

Did you know that you can add a currency symbol to the money data type for assignment? I didn’t. This isn’t in the documentation, but it’s something I need to submit as a PR.

In any case, I can assign money like this:
```
DECLARE @YenAmount MONEY;
SET @YenAmount = ¥1500; 

SELECT @YenAmount AS RawValue; 
```
Note that this isn’t really assigning Yen values. It’s just a number, but since the money type supports certain literals, this works. If I select the amount, I get just a number.

If I change the symbol, it still works because SQL Server doesn’t really interpret the amount and symbol or the variable name. That being said, this is bad code.

The money and smallmoney data type page lists the symbols you can use, but none of them are stored. Where this page fails is that it doesn’t help you get the values back out as the currency.

Format helps here. I can use this with some culture to determine what I want to get out. For example, I get Yen with this:
```
 FORMAT(@YenAmount, 'c', 'ja-JP')
```
You can see the results here:

I can also get Pounds.

SQL New Blogger

This post took me about 5 minutes to assemble as I’d already had the code, but it’s an example of a quick thing based on other work I was doing.

You can showcase this and help others see that you are learning and growing.
June 10, 2026
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.

June 9, 2026
Monday Monitor Tips: AI Alert Analysis
We keep adding new AI capabilities to Redgate Monitor, where it makes sense. Check out this new feature we’ve added for alerts. This is a great addition to help a busy Ops staff cope with a large database estate.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.

Alert Index Analysis

One of the new things we’ve added in Redgate Monitor is an AI analysis of your alerts. This isn’t for every alert. Right now, we have three where this works in preview:
- Long-running query
- blocking process
- Deadlock
This is documented on its own page.

You can see this if you go to the Alerts page and look for a blocking process alert. Here’s a URL, but this repeats regularly, so just find the alert. You should see something like this:

If you click on the alert, then you’ll see the details, as shown here. However, to the right is an “AI Analyze Alert” button.

If you click that, a blade slides out from the right, and it has some analysis in it. This has a summary at the top. For my session, this had ended, so the summary is nice in that it gives me an overview with the time of the blocking and the statement. There is also a root cause analysis below this. This is something that would help me quickly answer questions from my boss.

Further down there is a diagnostic review, which helps you navigate Redgate Monitor to verify things. You should use the AI to help you and still verify what it says. This is a good explanation, but worth double checking. There are also recommended actions below this.

It’s a good way to approach a series of alerts, especially in a busy environment where you might have lots of these alerts across different systems.

Summary

AI is a great tool in places, and this is one of those measured approaches from Redgate to use AI where it’s helpful and useful, and does some work for you. Looking across a bunch of similar data and getting patterns, getting some quick insight into timings, that’s useful. This might be especially great when someone calls you with a question and you need a summary.

As always, you should verify the diagnosis and recommendations before you do something, but this does give you a quick place to start fixing chronic issues in your system. I look forward to AI analysis coming to other alerts.

Redgate Monitor is a world-class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.
June 8, 2026