Republish: Data Decisions or Instinct?

I’m off today on a cruise ship in Rome for 10 days with my wife. I’ll be out of touch, and hopefully my colleagues can handle the load while I’m gone. You get to re-read Data Decisions or Instinct?, which is something I’ve been questioning a it lately. I’ll write about it, but as you read this, think. And then check out the first comment from 2014. I’m reading that book now.

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Smart AI Agents and Data Security

I don't know if Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google have really spent a lot of time and effort on security around their models. I know they talk about it (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google), but in practice, I'm not sure the researchers and testers are being as careful as the marketing and management of those companies want you to think.

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Au Revoir for now

No, I’m not quitting or retiring. Just going on vacation, but I leave tonight for Brussels and this is my last day at work for a couple of weeks. My wife will try to catch my daughter between classes tomorrow before we fly to Rome for a 10 day cruise. We’ll also stop back in Brussels for a day with the kid to see how she’s loving European life.

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Today’s AI

"This is the worst version of the car you'll own." That was a quote from the delivery manager when my wife and I picked up our Lucid Gravity. He said that since the car is very software-oriented and gets regular over-the-air updates, the car keeps improving. The car I bought is the worst version because it keeps getting better. His experience over the last few years with the company has shown that the changes made in software result in customers growing more fond of their vehicles.Today's editorial: Today's AI…

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The SUM of Nothing: #SQLNewBlogger

I caught this interesting item over on Pinal Dave’s blog: Eleven Interview Questions that Look Too Easy. I decided to give you a few thoughts from me on the SUM one. Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. The Sum of Nothing I am guessing more people working with SQL know that if you have a NULL in your data and try to sum the column, you get the NULL ignore.

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Architecting Zero Downtime Deployments–Day of Data Boston

Here are the resources for my talk at Day of Data Boston. Slides – ArchitectingZeroDowntime.pptx Slides also at: Code: Some interesting questions. I’ll write more, but a couple of quick answers as I breakfast at Logan. How do I handle expanding a column? Making it larger? This is platform and change dependent. For example, if you are expanding a varchar() column from 10 to 20, this is usually a metadata operation in MSSQL.

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Development Is Fun

I was listening to The Pragmatic Engineer interview Casey Muratori about high-performance code, which I found really interesting. I'm actually considering going through his Performance Aware Programming series and (re)learning some assembly. I never thought I'd even consider doing that. I learned Assembly in high school and university, and I didn't enjoy it. Casey is a game programmer, and there was a question in the interview about how he uses AI tools in his work.

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The Book of Redgate:A Prehistory

I’ve covered the values in a number of previous posts on the Book of Redgate. Those values came from our founders, Simon Galbraith and Neil Davidson. I am lucky enough, and honored to have known these gentlemen for many years and had the chance to sit and chat with them throughout my time at Redgate. Simon and I still get together periodically even today after 25 years.

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You Need a DBA Pipeline

I work regularly with a number of customers on improving their database change processes. This has been the goal of Redgate's Database Change Management over the years, helping database systems work more like application software with DevOps principles. The idea is to move quicker and respond better to demands, while providing safety and governance. A database is a stateful machine, which is a challenge to evolve and maintain, but with good data modeling, testing, code analysis, and automation, your database change process can coexist with your application software.

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Keeping Track of my ConEmu CLIs

I use ConEmu for my terminal interface. I’m still on Windows 10 at home, and for consistency’s sake, I run this on my Win11 laptop and the home machine. I love it, and it keeps my windows together, so that I can run multiple command prompts. However. Sometimes I find myself in this situation. I have a bunch of prompts open, and I’m not sure what is what.

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Designing for Teams

Some years ago, I had to register for my medical benefits with Redgate. My employer had contracted with Anthem for health insurance, and I went to register myself. I found that not only could I not register myself, but there was already an account there with my tax number, and it was under my wife's account. Many years ago, she had health insurance with Anthem through another employer.

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Flyway Tips: Object History

It’s a small change, but a handy one. Flyway Desktop (FWD) now includes the object history for different schema changes, so as you are evaluating how your changes might fit in with others, or you are trying to determine where something broke, you can see a list of historical changes. This post looks at checking history quickly in FWD. I’ve been working with Flyway and Flyway Desktop and helping customers improve their database development.

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Absolute and Relative References

This week I caught a short tale of Reitse trying to migrate a Power BI report from one Tenant to another in Fabric. It's something that I would consider a common practice, whether it's from a dev tenant to a prod one, or from a consultant to a client workspace. Moving things around is what we do in the digital world, whether that's schema structure, a report, a data export, or something else.

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Redgate Ambassadors, Events, And Community Activities

See which events we're attending, arrange sponsorship for your event or user group, and find out about the Ambassadors Program

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Get Along

I enjoy listening to Get Along by Kenny Chesney periodically, often smiling to myself. I was reminded of this song recently while talking about careers and the AI impact during VSLive San Diego. On one hand, most of the people I surveyed or chatted with were using AI to accomplish some tasks. However, very few are using it in a way that would eliminate their positions or do the majority of their work.

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Car Update September 2026

Software is hard. While I love our Lucid Gravity, I realize that they are behind Tesla with software. A few of the weird UX and software engineering decisions they’ve made. This is part of a series of thoughts on cars, just for fun. These are my thoughts and opinions based on my experiences. Confirmations When I got the car, the phone-as-key wasn’t working.

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Finely Tuned Models

I have no idea if this is true, but this post on X says that Thomson Reuters used information they've collected for decades to fine tune and train a model. They started with one of the qwen models and then spent $40 million to add their knowledge to the model. The post says this model is comparable to the Gpt5.5 and Sonnet 5 models.

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Local Models Using GPUs with Ollama

Can you use your GPUs when running a local model under Ollama? You can, and it really depends on how you run Ollama and what your hardware is. Ollama supports NVidia and AMD GPUs with some exceptions. You can read about their hardware support here. There are drivers required from the vendors, and configuration, but it can help with performance.

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Creating a Local Model Chatbot on Windows

After my session at VSLive last week, I had a few questions from the audience. I’m adding some of these into blogs, and this was one: How do I run the docker compose to get a local chatbot? I didn’t include the dockerfile in a a repo, mostly because it’s simple, but just to make it easy, it’s in this zip: …

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Make It Routine

The first one is hard. The rest are boring. I hear this statement from someone recently, and it sounds like something a technical person would do with a task. It's often been a goal of mine, or maybe a direction to aim, that I want to make things easier with some script or automation. Sometimes I think it's more aspirational than actual.

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Microsoft: Windows Server 2025 changes causing app crashes

Microsoft warned customers last week that they may experience application crashes on some Windows Server 2025 due to recent memory management changes.

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Your Favorite Quotes

I love seeing thoughtful, pithy, witty quotes. A good saying can often spur me in some way. Maybe I'll stop and think about what the words mean. Perhaps I'll get inspired. Sometimes the quotes improve my day by making me smile. In any case, I was visiting Epic Systems a few months ago and they have a screensaver in one of the meeting rooms that displayed a number of quotes, along with some lovely backgrounds.

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A New Word: Dorgone

dorgone– adj. wondering if you could slip away from an event or group conversation without anyone noticing your absence. I’m not often concerned about announcing my arrival or departure at many events. I do try to greet people as I see them or say goodbye, but there are many who try to ensure they let everyone know. They make it a point to walk around and see everyone.

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Using the Data API Builder–VS Live San Diego Resources

Thanks for attending my sessions. Resources below: Slides: Using Data API Builder GitHub repo:

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Running a Local LLM On Your Laptop Resources

Thanks to everyone that attended my sessions at VS Live San Diego yesterday. It was a fun session and I’m glad a few people came up to ask questions. Slides are here: Running a Local LLM Other resources: SQL Server 2025 Quick Start - Jeff Foster – Fine Tuning a Small Language Model with Python Setting up Ollama - Local GUI (Note, change to OpenWebUI container) - I’ll write a bit more and I’ll answer some questions here next week.

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Editorial Republish: Evaluating a DBA (or AI)

How do you evaluate a DBA? Can you pick someone that will do a good job? History says that most of us don’t do a great job in picking candidates to offer a job. I wrote Evaluating a DBA in 2021 and it’s being republished as I’m at VS Live today. Does it still make sense? Have we learned anything? Let me know, and by the way, this applies to “hiring” (using) an AI.

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Differences Between xp_readerrolog and sp_readerrorlog: #SQLNewBlogger

I was creating a question on sp_readerrorlog and realized that this procedure is different from the one it wraps: xp_readerrorlog. This post digs into a few differences. Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. The New System Stored Procedure For most of my SQL Server career, it’s been a habit to use xp_readerrorlog to query the log.

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