Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Finding Balance: Things Will Come Up

    I have a presentation on finding balance in your career that got quite a few people thinking and commenting on their own experiences. I decided to write a few posts supporting the ideas in the presentation, which my wife and I have used to both drive our careers forward while enjoying our lives.

    Just this week, I had an example.

    This is a series of posts on finding balance in your career.

    It Starts with a Picture

    My daughter told me this happened Monday afternoon. This is one of our horse feeders, and as you can see, the bottom has fallen out.

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    This happens periodically, but it was unexpected. In this case, I’d returned from a week and a half of travel, and I needed to try and get prepped for some additional travel the following week.

    In other words, I had plenty of work to do, lots of commitments in life already in place, and now something new pops into my life.

    This isn’t critical, but it is something I need to get done before I leave again, which left me limited time around work, coaching commitments a few nights a week, trying to get time to exercise to maintain my health, cooking for the family while I’m here, and, of course, getting time to relax.

    I decided I’d have to find time in a couple ways. First, I got up a little early, 30 minutes, the next day and started working. When my daughter texted that she was getting the tractor out, I took a break and went outside to meet her and bring the feeder back to the house.

    I then evaluated what was needed and realized I needed some wood from the hardware store. Fortunately, I had a meeting scheduled that I didn’t need to speak in, so I started to town while listening to the meeting in the car.

    Multi-tasking FTW.

    I had almost completed my trip to town when the meeting ended. I drove back and went back to work, handling a few tasks, editing an article, etc. Once I thought I had gotten most things done for the day, I took a break.

    It took about 75 minutes to cut some wood and re-attach the pieces and parts in the feeder. I’d cut into my day a bit, but fortunately work is flexible and I can work a little longer on Wednesday to make up for the time missed.

    That extra work will cut into my time to relax, but this is an unexpected issue, and I have to trade time somewhere. Making adult choices, I flexed work to get something in my life done sooner, and spread that flex across two days so that I wasn’t overloaded.

    Less time to relax, but that happens some weeks. Especially with horses.

  • Finding the Next Sequence Value: #SQLNewBlogger

    I saw a question asking about the next sequence value and decided to try and answer it myself. I assumed this would be easy, and it was, but I used some AI help to make it very quick to get the value and learn something.

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

    Checking for Sequences

    I know I’ve done some testing lately with sequences for a customer, so I decided to ask Prompt AI to help. I connected to a database and asked this question after clicking ALT+Z.

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    I got this response, which I executed before accepting the code. One thing I like about SQL Prompt is I can execute code and then adjust my prompt (or paste in an error). As you can see, I have 3 sequences in this database. I get a bunch of the meta data, including the current_value.

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    However, is that the next value or the last one? It could be interpreted multiple ways. I could look this up, but I decided to ask again. I accepted the code, then wrote a quick SQL statement to get the next value. If you’ve never done this, you might not know how sequences work, which is a different issue. In my case, a “se” tab, “ne” tab “i” got e this code. I then asked to find this.

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    UPDATE: From this article, the current_value has an issue. For new sequences, it shows the starting value, even if that value hasn’t been used, so the last_used_value is a better choice.

    SQL Prompt AI returned this query, which gets me the current_value, but I know that. I decided to ask for an explanation rather than Google or work my way through MSLearn.

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    The explanation is good. It’s not the current value + 1 it’s the current value + increment, which is a subtlety that some people might miss.

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    Let’s test this. I wrote some code and then executed it. I get 17, which makes sense. The current value (seen above) is 15 and the increment is 2.

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    Problem solved. This short session likely will help me remember this detail for future code (or prompts).

    SQL New Blogger

    This post took me about 8 minutes to setup the code, capture the images, and write this up. I’ve done a lot of these, but I showed how to investigate a question, use AI for help, and then make sure the AI is actually giving me something good.

    You could write these types of posts and show your fluency with both data engineering and AI assistance. Take a minute and start writing some blogs that showcase how your skills and career are growing.

  • The Book of Redgate: No Politics

    In today’s world, this might mean something different, but in 2010, we had this value:

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    In our context, this was about being open and transparent. This is the text from the facing page:

    No gossiping, no intrigue, no pussy-footing around problems and no telling people what you think they want to hear whist privately disagreeing. We will be transparent in our dealings.

    In a small company (2010 must have been 200-ish people), this made a lot of sense and I think overall we minimized politics. I don’t know this will ever be a “no politics” world for Redgate or any other, but we were better about publicly disagreeing.

    I think we’ve lost a little of this over the years, as I see more people talking a bit inconsistently to smaller, private groups than they do to large ones. I try hard not to do this, though I’m sure my open-ness sometimes rubs people the wrong way.

    I’m OK with some conflict. I’m also OK debating and disagreeing about what we do or why/how we do things. I think it’s healthy to do so.

    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.

  • The 2026 Redgate Summit in New York City

    We’re coming back to New York, which is exciting for me. I love NYC.

    The Redgate Summit 2026 – New York City comes back on May 5, 2026. You can register today and I’ll see you back in Manhattan the first week of May. Once again Bob Ward is giving the closing keynote, with me and fellow Redgater’s giving the opening one.

    We’ll have three tracks, but I’ll be hosting a session with one of our customers, so you can hear how and why Redgate Monitor helps them out and what it’s like to work with Redgate. We did this in Chicago, and there were some great questions from the audience.

    We’ve chosen customers who have had good experiences, but feel free to ask them anything about how Redgate Monitor works and how we are as a vendor. I’m certainly proud of how we partner with customers, so come get a first-hand view from a large financial services organization.

    New York City is such an amazing place, and we’ll have a drinks reception after, but there is lots to do. I’ll be bringing my wife and we’ll likely go see a Broadway or comedy show the night before. You should do the same.

    We also have a Redgate track and an AI one, so this is a great chance to see how Redgate views the world and how we’re approaching building software that helps you become more efficient inside your organization.

    Register for the Redgate Summit 2026 – New York City and I’ll see you in May.