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It's a weird time in the job market. Companies are hiring, and I see friends and colleagues starting new positions. At the same time, I have had many more friends reach out, saying they are struggling to find employment, and job searches are dragging on for months. I sympathize, and it certainly seems that lots of people are trying to hold onto their existing positions. Whether you're looking for a new position or trying to create security in your existing role, it pays to be aware of the impression you leave in the world. Is it a positive one? Do others want to work with you? Or maybe you find people gravitate towards others. Are they impressed with your output? Satisfied? Left wanting? Read the rest of Making an Impression

I wonder if any of you have ever tried this. When faced with a problem, think of a solution using whatever comes to mind. For most of us in the data space, this is a SQL-based solution, hopefully a set-based on for MSSQL. For Oracle, you might approach things differently. In any case, solve the problem. Then force yourself to imagine that you weren't allowed to implement the first idea for some reason. No funding, no time, whatever the reason, you can't implement it. Maybe it's your team hates your ideas and just won't approve the PR. Read the rest of Choose the Second One

"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.   Read the rest of Today's AI

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. Read the rest of Development Is Fun

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. Read the rest of Smart AI Agents and Data Security

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. Read the rest of You Need a DBA Pipeline

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. Read the rest of Designing for Teams

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. Read the rest of Get Along

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. Read the rest of Finely Tuned Models

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. Read the rest of Make It Routine

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: Read the rest of Your Favorite Quotes

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. Read the rest of I Don't Want To Do XX

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. I'm sure my bank has multiple systems behind the mobile app I use to pay for things, move money, check balances, etc. I would guess there is some DB/2, SQL Server, and some analytics or No/NewSQL stuff in there. Hidden as different applications that make up the "app", but they are still in there from my perspective as a user of the app. No one intentionally designs software like this, but we still see it. They might not even have 5 or 6 platforms in their organization, but almost none of the customers I work with have less than 3. Somehow, somewhere, someone added a PostgreSQL server to an Oracle/SQL Server environment. MongoDB crept in when someone thought it was a better store than DB/2 or MySQL. An article written about how Facebook or Spotify or some other high tech company used Cassanda or Snowflake inspired a developer to add that to their toolbelt and build it into their application. Read the rest of The Cost of Multiple Platforms

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. As an adult, the end of summer doesn't really stand out anymore. Corporate changes are usually at the beginning of the year or in July, so it's the end of June or December that are slower times. September is often the beginning of conference season for me, and I've usually been preparing for travel in September, as I am this year. I'll be in San Diego in a little over a week for VS Live (if you want to join me, use the code Jones). Read the rest of The End of Summer

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 Redgate Monitor and Flyway updates reflect this. New functionality, fixes, and previews. I'm proud of the constant updates we deliver, and I know customers get increased value throughout our partnership. Does our software provide a good ROI? I get asked this question by execs regularly, and I often ask them if they feel they get a good ROI from their staff already. Answers are mixed, especially in the database world where it seems the costs and the value delivered from database dev or ops groups can be nebulous. Databases support application software, and if that software doesn't work well because the database deployment scripts weren't correct, weren't tested, or have performance issues, who is at fault? Read the rest of Measuring Productivity