"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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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: …

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I had to run out of town, as noted in my other post. So you get to read An Azure Outage. Are things better? The cloud more reliable? You happy?

My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer trips, I can be on the road a lot. As it is, I’ve flown across the Atlantic six times this year, and now I’m coming back from a 7th. I wasn’t planning on this trip. However, life doesn’t always go as planned and we have to roll with the changes.

Every job is a job on some days. I've said this to my kids and others I've mentored over the years. I've probably written that here, and I truly believe it. When you work at a job, some days are bad days. There are always days you don't want to do the work. There are also likely some days that you dread starting.

I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of company I’d want to build if I founded another company. It’s a great place, and one of the things I appreciate is that we value outcomes. One of our values is: The text on the next page continues the sentence: What you achieve is more important than how long it takes.

I ran into an interesting post that noted the modern data platform can have a bunch of different systems underlying it. The example might be that your "software" could use PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Clickhouse, and something NewSQL (Spanner, CockroachDB, etc,). Some of you might think that's not reality, but keep in mind that for a lot of your organizations, the "software" is what the customer uses.

Next week I’m at VS Live in San Diego (register and join me) and one of my talks is on the Data API Builder. I want to show how this gives you REST, GRAPHQL, and MCP access. As a part of the talk, I also wanted to show this working across platforms, so I’m showing this in PostgreSQL as well.

It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again and this is a great prompt to start writing. I might have written about this before, but it’s a story that sticks with me. It’s a memorable one, and it was quite the outage, one that lasted for weeks. Thanks to Marlon for this invite on unforgettable outages.. T-SQL Tuesday is the monthly blog party, and if you want to participate, feel free to write on a blog, Linked In, or anywhere else and link your post to the invite.

It’s Labor Day in the US and I’m not working. Not for Redgate, at least. I’m not even traveling today, which is something that happens all too often on holidays. Today I’m going to be working on the ranch, catching up on a few things. I was up in the air last week, trying to replace a pulley. The bolt in this pulley sheared off.

Growing up, this was the last week of summer for me every year. When I was a child in Virginia Beach, school started the day after Labor Day every year, which is next Monday in the US. This was our last chance to sleep in, enjoy the ocean, and stay out late without commitments. Starting next week we'd be back in school, up early, with homework to do every night.

“A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea” - from Excellent Advice for Living Whenever we read about the success of someone or something, we often get the impression that someone had a great idea and executed on it. Especially in computing, it can seem like it’s the trajectory of many of the companies we know well.

I've dealt with a lot of customers with who lately are concerned with the ROI of their teams. Certainly they want a good ROI if they purchase software from Redgate, as do we. Our goal has been to be partners with customers and continue to add value to the products they've purchased on a regular basis. We release every week or two, and our…

I was updating my session for the Data API Builder (DAB) recently, mostly to work with the MCP server capabilities. As I was trying to get this working, I realized that the MCP capabilities were newer than my DAB version. I had v1.4 Wow, that’s old. The Overview page for the SQL Server MCP site says v1.7 is needed and 2.0+ has bug fixes.

Most data professionals I know go out of their way to take care of the data entrusted to them. Most people ensure backups are running, lots (hopefully most) test their restores. A few will ensure a good rotation their data offsite. Some of you might have formal rotation schemes, and some might just keep a rolling list of xx backups available.

Redgate had some Claude training recently, which I went through as my knowledge has been gained in bits and pieces and is fragmented. I wasn’t sure I’d get a lot out of it, but I was surprised by a few things I learned. One of these was scheduling a task to give me a daily report. This post looks at that process for me.

Data is the lifeblood of much of the world today. Not necessarily big data, and certainly not perfect data, and definitely not just digital data. Organizations, individuals, governments, really everyone out there are making decisions based on data. You might think it's going to rain, so you cut the grass today, or maybe defer adding fertilizer. Your organization sees demand for a product increase, so it orders more and produces more.