Voice of the DBA

"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.

Or maybe they're less annoyed by things that don't work well. Ah, the joys of software.

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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. "We are not using them" was not the answer I expected. Perhaps even more interesting was the rest of the answer. Casey loves programming and wants to enjoy what he does. He writes the code because he wants to do the work. If he didn't, he'd license some game engine or technology, not spend time getting an AI to do the work.

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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, 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.

That being said, most of the solutions for managing database change focus on the database itself and everything inside it. After all, that's where the data is. I understand people wanting to solve that problem, but there are plenty of things that need to be managed for a database server (or instance for MSSQL) outside of the database. We have security, configuration, and in the case of SQL Server, jobs. That might be the number one request is a way to manage jobs across systems.

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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.

Gemini broke into three companies during a security test. Claude escaped a test environment and breached three organizations. OpenAI had breaches of Hugging Face and other sites, so perhaps this is the most powerful model, as it exceeded the "rule of three." In all these cases, the agents weren't doing anything amazing. These were acting the same as most malicious or bored human hackers who might find or guess credentials and take advantage of them. In some sense, this points to the generally poor state of security in the world.

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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. Anthem kept her record, which includes my tax ID. So today, in 2026, I have to log into my Anthem account with her ID to see my plan.

That's likely an older, legacy system, so we might understand that they didn't expect two people to be primary account holders over time, right? Well, we also have a more modern tax software system to deal with. Let's call the software "Chewit" to protect the reputation of the company. When we contracted with an accountant for services, they set up an account for me. However, my wife manages most of the money, so I asked them to add an account for her. Apparently, this "Chewit" business tax service only allows for one person in a household to have an account. This person has to manage the account, so now when my wife logs in with my account, I get a code, and I send it to her. If you think these are isolated, I have 3 or 4 other services that work like this, from well-known, global brands.

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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. On the third hand, lots of them worry about their organizations attempting to get by with more AI and less humans in the future.

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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. They have used 10% of their data, which spans over 100 years.

I have many questions. But first, $40mm? How many tokens is USD$40mm? A quick calculation is trillions of tokens, and while I'm sure there is some payback if lots of their customers use the model for work, there's also a compute cost every time they use the model. Perhaps they can fine-tune and train the model more efficiently over time, but I can't see many individual companies spending this effort on training their own model.

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The first one is hard. The rest are boring.

I hear this statement from someone recently and 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. I might want to make most things routine and automated, but that doesn't always work out.

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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. I grabbed pictures of a number of them, but a few that stood our to me were these:

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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. Whether you work for someone else or run your own business, there will be times you aren't completely in control of the work and wonder how you ended up in this situation. Even if you're self-employed, you have clients that sometimes dictate your day.

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