Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

Keeping MS Docs Up to Date

One of the things that I like about the SQL Server docs (MS Learn Docs) is that I can fix things I find wrong. For years we had downloaded Books Online from installs, then we have BOL on a site, but those were mostly updated when a new release came.

Now we have MS Learn, and a regularly changing set of docs. If you haven’t taken advantage of these docs for SQL Server, you should. Bookmark: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/?view=sql-server-ver17&redirectedfrom=MSDN

I help change those. It’s part of my contribution as a Microsoft MVP, but it’s also something that I enjoy because it makes my life easier. This post will look at how I do this.

Note: You need a GitHub account.

A Recent Change

Someone posted a note about multi-column primary keys, noting that the docs said we could use up to 16 columns, but they were able to do 17. I went to this page, Primary and Foreign Key Constraints , where in the first bullet list, there was a 16. This was the week of 24 Nov.

Now, a week later as I write this, it says 32.

When I saw the 16, I decided to test things. I set up scenarios, I checked against multiple versions, and I verified that 32 was the right number.

Then I clicked this edit button on the page:

When I did that, I was sent to the GitHub repo for the docs, which is in the MicrosoftDocs org. You can see what I see below. A lot of this is their markdown template, and can be ignored.

On the right is a pencil edit button. I clicked that.Note this says I’ll get a fork of this repo. That’s what I want.

When I click the pencil that, I go to the same page, but without any rendering. Note I’m still in the MS repo, but the blue note at the top says my changes will be written to my repo in a new branch.

When I knew I had seen an error, I scrolled down in the page and found the list. Here we see my 32 highlighted. This said 16 a few weeks ago.

I can edit this, so I’ll change this to 64. Don’t worry, I can’t affect the live docs. When I do this, I’ll then click “commit changes” in the upper right.

After clicking this, I get a commit dialog. Copilot tries to guess what I’ve done and it’s a good start. I typically edit the description a bit.

Once this is done, and I click Propose changes, I get a pull request page. In this case, notice in the top image, I see this is going from my repo, from a specific branch, to the MS repo for comparison. I’m asking them to pull my changes.

Below this, I see the file(s) changed. In this case, one change.

I typically just click “Create pull request” for my changes and then the MS automation takes over. A form appears that shows the PR created and the status (if it can be merged). Since these are quick, usually there’s not problem with a clean merge.

I get an email from the automation thanking me for the contriution, letting me know an author has been notified.

If there are comments, I’ll get emails on those. When this happens, sometimes they let me know there is something else needed or I should amend my PR. Sometimes they tell me they’re closing the PR and incorporating the change into something else. I’ve had my change get someone thinking and they might take my idea and add something else in their own internal PR.

If someone approves my PR, they’ll add a tag from their side, and the change is merged and a rebuild happens. Here’s the email I get.

Then my change is live pretty quickly.

I probably submit 5-10 a year, almost one a month. I don’t find a lot of issues, though I do sometimes take the time to add a new example that might serve me, or others. I should do more of those.

If you want to submit your own corrections, feel free. If you don’t, and want me to do it, send me a note and I’ll submit the PR.

December 10, 2025
A Note and a Message: T-SQL Tuesday #193

This month Mike Walsh hosts T-SQL Tuesday. It’s been quite some time since he hosted (back at #4), but he answered my call for hosts and I appreciate that. He has a really good end of year invitation that asks us to look to the past and the future.

I’m trying to keep T-SQL Tuesday alive, but I’ve been struggling for hosts. I need more of you to host, and more people to blog.

Blogging is incredible for your career. Take some time to get started, and if you do nothing but respond to these monthly blog parties, you’ll look better than most other candidates for jobs.

If you want to host, ping me on X or at sjones at sqlservercentral dot ***.

A Message to Steve in 2015

The world seems to be changing quite quickly in in our lives. You bought a new Pebble watch this year, database automation is becoming a bigger part of your job, and there’s lots of data analysis you can do.

Power Bi is a tool from Microsoft that is going to grow in popularity and it’s a place you ought to invest. New places to store data, new features in SQL Server, new platforms for building analytics will appear, but Power BI is a place you should spend more time in and improve your DAX skills.

Learning to build better visualizations, especially for your volleyball coaching (which is going to continue for some time), is an investment that will really pay off in the future.

A Word from the Future in 2035

Steve,

we spent a lot of time early in our career working with networks, helping manage accounts, users, security, privileges, and more. That knowledge and experience helped us understand SQL Server and other database platforms as well from the security standpoint.

Starting in 2026, you need to revisit some of those skills, ensure you better understand how authorization and authentication works in the context of AI and agents. AI technology is changing the world, and it’s going to be heavily used by agents, but security and ensuring there are limits placed on them is going to define who has more success with AI and who has more trouble.

Take the time to ensure that as you engage with MCP servers, task agents with work, and evolve the way you use AI that you include governance in your efforts to protect yourself from runaway agents that might go beyond what you expect, or spend more money than you want them to spend.

Enjoy the next decade, it’s going to be amazing.

December 9, 2025
Flyway Tips: Automation Assistance in Flyway Desktop

I was chatting with the product managers at Flyway and one asked me whether I’d seen the new tab for Automation in Flyway Desktop. I hadn’t and decided to take a quick look at how this works and what’s useful. This post looks at the new feature.

Tl;Dr this is a good way to start learning how to move to a more DevOps, automated way of deploying changes.

I’ve been working with Flyway and Flyway Desktop for work more and more as we transition from older SSMS plugins to the standalone tool. This series looks at some tips I’ve gotten along the way.

Working with Flyway Desktop

For a lot of customers, it’s not too hard to setup a project and start to capture code in a Git repo. However, adding in automation gets challenging for many, especially as the docs are hard to understand if you don’t already have some knowledge. I find that CI/CD is a bit of a chicken and egg challenge as we try to learn to get better, but knowing what to learn and do requires knowledge.

Which we don’t have.

In any case, I’ve taken an existing Flyway project where I am capturing some code. You can see the project below, with objects on the right. The database and the repo have the same object code and are in sync.

Let’s add a few new objects to this database in SSMS. You can see below I’m adding a new table and altering a proc. I’m also refactoring slightly to not keep the old style join convention in my proc as I add a new join.

Once I do this, in Flyway Desktop (FWD), I see my changes. I’ll save these to the repo and then generate a migration script. I won’t show that as it’s not important.

Once I’ve done this, I know I want to deploy code. If I go to Migrations, I can see I have these two scripts ready to go to QA, and I can deploy them with FWD manually. However, I don’t want to do that.

I want some automation. How does FWD make that easy? Let’s see.

The Automation Tab

There’s a new tab on the left, which is the Automation tab. I’ve expanded the left menu out and you can see it, but it’s a lightning bolt, which I might never have noticed (hence this post).

If I click this, I get a little explanation at the top, a few links, and then some CLI based code. This last part is the important part of what I need to move to CI/CD.

If you look at the code closely, you’ll see some placeholders in angle brackets for the environments I need. The code looks like this:

Above this, there are two drop downs where I can select my build and target environments. Build is the CI portion, and it’s a good idea to have a place to build code separate from QA. This lets me validate things, and more importantly, run some code analysis checks, summarize changes, and detect drift.

I’ve expanded the Build drop down below and you can see I have my environments listed, and I can also manage them from here. There is also an Environments tab on the left menu just above Automate Deployments that looks like a database icon.

Once I select an environment, the code changes to reflect this. That makes things easier to automate as I can take these commands and drop them into a task in my CI/CD tool.Note in the image below that I’ve selected NWInt and the code shows target2. The code needs the ID (or PK) of the environment, but the display name I entered is shown in the drop down. Trust me, these match.

I’ll also select a target and then open up a CLI to run the first item on line 5. I did have to auth, but this runs successfully. No doc checks, no experimenting, the command ran.

I’ve never saved any snapshots and so the drift doesn’t work right away, but I’ll get the dryrun script. When I run this, I get a summary from the CLI.

Then I can see the report (see above output for the path at the end. When this opens, on the Dry Run tab, I see my scripts.

Note, I did use the drop downs in FWD to select the environments I need for this.

Very cool.

Summary

One of the challenges with using Flyway is that there are a lot of settings, options, and more that one must learn to take advantage of the solution. Our docs continue to improve, but even for someone that has been using Flyway for a few years, I have to constantly check out things work. Plus, the teams are adding features on a regular basis, so it can get confusing to learn the new things.

This automation tab is really helpful to shortcut some of the things I need for the various environments in my project. I’m going to start using some of this in a new project, and so should you.

Flyway can do much more, and for smoother automation, check out Flyway Enterprise.

Flyway is an incredible way of deploying changes from one database to another, and now includes both migration-based and state-based deployments. You get the flexibility you need to control database changes in your environment. If you’ve never used it, give it a try today. It works for SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL and nearly 50 other platforms.

Video Walkthrough

December 8, 2025
The Book of Redgate: What Our Staff Says

This image is from 2010, and it goes along with my last post of what our Customers Say about us. However, this is what our employees said about the company.

At this point we would have been around a 200 person company, mostly in the UK. It’s a great list of words, and if I were looking for a new employer, this type of work cloud might get me interested in applying.

Redgate has often felt like an extended family, where we care about each other, we’re bonded, and we’re working together to get through life. We disagree and bicker at times, but we love each other.

We’re now closer to a 600 person company, and I don’t know that all of us, or even most of us, feel the same ways, but I’d like to think most people still think this is a great place to work.

I do.

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.

December 5, 2025