Bad News, DBAs, We Are All Developers Now

I sometimes joke that I’m a Junior Developer and a Principal Database Administrator, which is why I have a Staff level title. I’m not sure it’s a joke anymore, though.

I’m still an OLTP database specialist, but increasingly I’m also a programmer who commits code in multiple languages. I own pull requests that I ship in a release process, following all the same rules and patterns as other developers. My PRs feature unit tests, integration tests, feature flags, the whole shebang.

Tech roles, including DBA roles, are changing rapidly due to AI coding advances. Don’t use AI to write production SQL code without incredibly heavy review and revisions, but do use it to accelerate shipping your improvements to SQL code.

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How to Stop SSDT / Database Projects / SQLPackage from Modifying Database Options

SQL Server’s free state-based version control tooling was introduced under the ‘Data Dude’ brand, then became known as ‘SQL Server Data Tools’ (SSDT). Its extension for the (now dying) Azure Data Studio IDE is called ‘SQL Database Projects’. If you need to find documentation, you often need to know to search for specific component names like SQLPackage.exe, which is a command line utility used to deploy SSDT Projects AKA SQL Database Projects.

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Automated Deployments and the Art of the Database with Database Michael J Swart

In this episode, Michael J Swart joins the Dear SQL DBA Podcast to talk about databases, automation, and how he’s come to illustrate some of the coolest blog posts ever to be written about data.

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Database DevOps Core Concepts: Migration Scripts

Database migration scripts are a popular and effective way to check database code into version control.

In this post I describe the most common features of popular migration script runners for database code deployment, along with the top gotchas that folks hit when versioning their database code with migrations.

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Why Not Call Database DevOps Simply DevOps?

Sometimes people are annoyed by the term ‘Database DevOps’. Why not call it simply ‘DevOps’? After all, Database DevOps follows the same core principles.

The answer is simple: implementing DevOps is tricky by itself, but most teams are set up to fail when it comes to implementing DevOps for databases. This makes it worth defining as a specialization.

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Adding a Netlify Contact Form to a Hugo Static Site

I redid my static site’s contact form with a free option from my host, Netlify.

Here’s why I changed my static site host and how I got a Netlify contact form to work with a blog built on Hugo and the Mainroad theme.

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Gotchas with Deferred Name Resolution in SQL Server: Stored Procedures, Synonyms, Views, and Functions

Have you ever tried to create an object in SQL Server, but it failed due to a missing table, column, or other dependency? If so, you’ve hit a case where SQL Server doesn’t offer ‘deferred name resolution’.

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