Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

Car Update: August 2026
It’s been some time since I provided a car update, so I decided to showcase a few things I’ve learned about my cars since the last one. In this post:
- A Second EV: Lucid Gravity
- Efficiency and Tires on the Tesla Model Y
- Serendipity with a Suburban
This is part of a series of thoughts on cars, just for fun. These are my thoughts and opinions based on my experiences.

Our Second EV: Lucid Gravity

We bought a Lucid Gravity after driving it one day. We’d driven a few other EVs and then stopped by the Lucid dealer because we had an hour and it was close. We weren’t expecting to be impressed by the car, but we were. In fact, we immediately stopped thinking of the other cars.

After a few hours of debating it, we bought one in the airport while waiting for a flight. It’s amazing to see how much easier it is to buy from Tesla and Lucid than other deals.

It’s the nicest car I’ve ever owned, and it’s an EV with great acceleration and handling. It’s also got a squashed steering wheel, which I am surprised I like. It’s easy to control and has a nice space to rest my wrists.

There are some weird things with software, and I have already learned how to “reset” the car. It took me a few minutes to get it right, which is weird. I have to press the brake and then press two buttons on the steering wheel. This didn’t fix the issue I was having with switching profiles, but it was an interesting experience to reboot the car.

One of the things I love is the cooled and massaging seats. I might get tired of this over time, but I have a bunch of different settings and there are a few I’ve enjoyed on our drives.

If you think about a Lucid, use my referral link. We’ll both get some credit.
Efficiency and Tires on the Tesla Model Y

In about 4 years of driving the Tesla Model Y, covering almost 60k miles, I had a long term efficiency of around 250Wh/mi. That’s just a bit below the rating for the car. I think I did very well, driving mostly at 45mph and lower in chill mode.

A friend sold me the spare 18” wheels from his Model 3 when he got rid of his car. I put them on mine, mostly because he had better tread than my summer tires. I didn’t think much of this until I checked the efficiency one day.

I was in the 205Wh/mi range with the smaller tires. Now, the software doesn’t have a setting for 18” tires on the MYLR, so I left it at the 19” stock tires, so possibly there is a calculation error, but I got > 10% efficiency improvement from changing wheels and tires. Smaller, lighter tires, but still. That’s crazy.

As we looked for new cars, I was aiming for the smallest tires I could get, both for replacement cost and efficiency.

Serendipity with a Suburban

In 2006, I bought a 2001 Chevy Suburban for $6500. The car had 101,000 miles on it and we were slightly nervous, but with a family of 5, we wanted a car that would carry all of us skiing and on trips. The AC died the next year, but that car has served the family driving all over CO, WY, and NM for many years. Each of my kids had driven it, one even banged into a concrete barrier in the snow.

I felt this was the best car investment we’d made over the years. I sold it in 2026 with 250,000 miles on it. We’ve basically done regular maintenance (oil, brakes, tires) and replaced minor parts across the roughly 150,000 miles we’ve owned it. The car was old, had rust on it, and in the hot CO summers, it was a car my wife used carrying the dogs from client to client.

She wanted something better.

I had been periodically looking for a good deal when I stumbled on a 2010 Suburban with 203,000 miles on it, It was a 3 owner car, no accidents, lots of records of service.

It was listed $6500 (I paid $6200).

I made my wife cut short work one Sat and we drove down to a dealer, getting there just before they closed. A bit of a test drive and we bought it that night. So far, about 8k miles in, it’s performed as well as the old one.

And it has AC.

Still feels like a good deal and a good choice. 20 years later, same price.
August 7, 2026
TRY_PARSE Limitations: #SQLNewBlogger
I got a notification from a question I’d posted at SQL Server Central: Getting the Average. A user had posted their repro didn’t work, with no real comment. As a SQLNewBlogger FYI, that type of post shows poor communication and a lack of communication. I see that a lot and it’s a challenge in the modern world.

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

A Quick Setup

This was what the user posted:
```
declare @t table
(
    id int identity
  , i int
);

insert @t
select null;

insert @t
select 11;

select avg(try_parse(i as int))
from @t
group by id;
```
This does return an error, as you can see below.

Why?

Well, the TRY_PARSE() docs give part of an explanation. I highlighted this in Yellow, but the relevant text says “only for converting strings”.

Shouldn’t an int convert to a string? No, the precedence rules have int higher than char types. We convert lower to higher, not higher to lower.

SQLNewBlogger

I noticed something, thought for a second why this wouldn’t work, and then checked the docs. I decided to write this up and it was a 5-10 minute post for me. Easy to do and showcasing knowledge.

It helps me remember, might teach someone something, and gives an interviewer something to ask me. Add to your blog with short posts like this (or drop on LinkedIn).
August 5, 2026
Monday Monitor Tips: The MCP Server
I have been experimenting with MCP servers in a few ways, and pressing on our Redgate Monitor team to add one to their system. They did, started adding tools, and are continuing to work. I’m excited.

Here’s a quick look at the MCP server for Redgate Monitor (preview in July 2026).

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

Getting Started

I’m not going to bore you with the setup and configuration. You do need to be on a 14.23 or later as the version. Your account rep can get you setup instructions, which are still be worked on and finalized. This is really a work in progress as of this writing (Jul 30) and I’ve found a few things that didn’t quite make sense, so be patient. This is editing the Monitor Webserver config file and enabling this.

Once that’s done, it’s a little tricky with an AI agent system. This is the high level, and I’ll do some more detailed notes about getting this in VSCode and Claude, where I work. The basic steps are:
- Enable in Redgate Monitor
- Create an MCP Access token
- Add the MCP config to your Agent setup
It’s not quite as simple as it sounded to me, but it wasn’t that hard. It’s mostly working through some of the steps and ensuring you get your JSON correct.

Accessing the MCP Server

I connected with Claude for the demo in the Video Walkthrough below, but I’ll give you a quick look here. I set my token for the prod/staging/dev systems. When I look at the test instance of Redgate Monitor, I see this: lots of servers and alerts.

Once the MCP server is added, I start Claude and run a /mcp. I see my server get connected.

There are a number of tools, which have grown since I started testing. I don’t have a complete list and anything I put here will be out of date in a week, so I won’t bother. In any case, I’ll ask for the production servers. I can see the various base monitors being queried. This is slower than almost any customer, since we have more BMs than most people here. Most have 1-2 at most.

Note: I did get asked for permission a few times before the tools were accessed. Since all MCP stuff is read-only now, I just granted permission for all sessions.

Here are the results. Note the summary at the bottom.

I next asked this: which servers are in critical status and why. The Claude LLM interprets this and starts querying the Redgate Monitor server, using the token for security, and the tools, which are really the API of things that can be run.

The results I got were what you see below. The LLM had to run a bunch of queries to get results and the read in those results and interpret them. In this case, there were a lot of different queries of tools to look for data. This probably took a minute or two, but it feels long while watching the screen.

I next asked about queries on an instance. I don’t know these servers that well, but I know there are workloads on some to simulate what clients see. I decided to ask about one of the 2019 instances in production. In this case, I got asked for permission for a new tool (I hadn’t run the top queries tool) and then the agent went to work. You can see the tool usage and results. In this case, the system was down when I ran this, and it let me know this was from before the outage.

At the bottom, there are some observations, which can be useful. I’ve got cursors running, XEvents, etc. Helpful to look at this for a system I don’t spend a lot of time examining.

Ultimately the MCP server is a way for you to use tools you use already, but allow them to query the data in Redgate Monitor.

I’m excited to see where this can go, and how it can help customers interpret all the data collected by Redgate Monitor and more easily summarize it. This will be useful to some, though others of you might not like MCP access and instead stick with the internal AI tools.

It’s up to you, but we are giving you the choice to work as you wish.

Summary

The Redgate Monitor MCP server is in preview as of July 2026. I tried to give you a short sense of how you can use this to query Redgate Monitor and keep an eye on your systems. There are lots of ways to work, and I’ll try to give some guidance on specific things over time, but for now this gives you a sense of how MCP works.

I’ll do future posts that cover the config and help you get testing in your own environment.

Redgate Monitor continues to grow and advance and MCP capabilities are a great way to start using AI to help manage a large database estate, with your own AI resources.

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.

Video Walkthrough

Watch me use the MCP server live.
August 3, 2026
A New Word: Mauerbauertraurigkeit

mauerbauertraurigkeit – n. inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends whose company you generally enjoy, like a poker player who keeps folding a promising hand in order to avoid the pain of losing, or temp down the urge to go all-in.

This one is close to home. It’s especially easy to push away people away early in a relationship when you don’t trust that things will continue to grow and improve. It’s quite easy to get nervous and suspect that the person will hurt you in the future.

I’ve done this in both dating relationships and friendships, when I felt that I was spending too much time, investing too much, and not seeing that reciprocated. Who knows where things might have gone if I’d have been more mature and communicated openly rather than worrying.

I’ve seen this in jobs as well. I’ve left a few jobs, mostly because I didn’t trust others in charge, and was worried they might let me go. I’ve seen good employees do this in the past, sometimes justified, sometimes prematurely.

In any case, mauerbauertraurigkeit is something that I think is prevalent when there is a lack of trust and transparency between people.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

July 31, 2026