The Era of The Shared SQL Server Database is Finally Ending

For more than 20 years, many small and medium SaaS companies have built products with complicated business logic and a flexible user experience on the .NET stack using an architecture with a shared SQL Server database. This approach has kept the production environment relatively simple.

These companies have new incentives to move away from this architecture because agentic development lands new business rules on the shared database fast enough to painfully cut velocity and add significant risk to deployments.

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Your AI Doesn't Need to Dig Around in Production Databases. It Needs Better Briefings.

I increasingly hear or read the advice to solve problems by querying MCP servers on production databases.

Meanwhile, I’m reading output from an AI agent that tried to use an MCP server of some sort. And the output is full of things that are obviously wrong/false/dangerous.

It’s expensive and dangerous to trust an AI Agent to query production freely, even with read-only access. You have MUCH safer options which will give you better results, both for human employees and AI Agents.

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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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