Steve Jones

Denver

Editor-in-Chief at SQL Server Central

Steve Jones -Editor, SQL Server Central and Advocate, Redgate Software. Data Platform MVP, husband, father, volleyball coach, and lover of Hawaiian shirts.

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Articles

A DevOps Workshop Tomorrow in Atlanta

4 days ago | voiceofthedba.com | Steve Jones

Tomorrow is the Redgate DevOps Day in Atlanta. You can still sign up, so do that if you can make it. Here’s the rough outlineVision Session – w/ Advocate Steve JonesRedgate Flyway hands-on Session6 ways to Elevate Database MonitoringWhiteboarding SessionTest Data Manager Demo SessionNetworking/Happy Hour Lunch is provided and I’m looking forward to this. I’m traveling from Baton Rouge today to Atlanta (probably right now), coming from a customer visit. Register and come see me in Atlanta tomorrow
Editorial Republish: Evergreen SQL Server

5 days ago | voiceofthedba.com | Steve Jones

Editorial Republish: Evergreen SQL Server I’ve been traveling a bit lately, but this week is a little crazy, two trips to two places, and so I’m more out of touch. You get a re-run of Evergreen SQL Server, which is a fun one to re-read. The idea of upgraded database software is something that is more common these days than in 2019.
T-SQL Tuesday #186-Agent Jobs

6 days ago | voiceofthedba.com | Steve Jones

It’s that time of the month again, when the T-SQL Tuesday blog party takes place. I manage this site, and am looking for hosts all the time. This month I managed to convince Andy Levy to host, and I’m grateful for his participation. His invitation is asking about SQL Agent jobs and how they are managed. It’s focused, but he gives a lot of choices for how to examine this subsystem in SQL Server.
Deleting a Database

1 week ago | voiceofthedba.com | Steve Jones

Who among us has deleted a production database? I’d hope it’s very few of you that have done this in your career. I’m sure a few of you have deleted (or truncated or updated all rows for) a table in production. I’ve done that a few times, but fortunately, I’ve been able to recover the data quickly. I had this happen in SQL 6.5 and was grateful I could start a single-table restore before my phone rang.
SQL Server Engineering in Austin

1 week ago | voiceofthedba.com | Steve Jones

I was lucky enough to attend SQL Saturday Austin 2025 a little over a week ago in conjunction with some work at the Redgate office. The opening keynote at the event was given by Conor Cunningham, who is an architect at Microsoft and runs the engineering team in Austin for the Data Platform. His talk was very interesting and engaging. This was about half the room below. I’ll describe the talk, which was great, but I’m probably mis-stating something.
Database DevOps Recommendations

1 week ago | voiceofthedba.com | Steve Jones

The DORA organization is constantly researching how to better produce software at any organization. This is similar to work done by Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute many years ago. Both groups are trying to determine what things help engineers work better and produce high-quality software. On the DORA site, there is a database change management page, where they recommend approaches to managing database schemas.
A New Word: Lookaback

1 week ago | voiceofthedba.com | Steve Jones

lookaback– n. the chock of meeting back up with someone and learning that your mental image of them had fallen wildly out of date – having grown up or gotten old, fallen apart, or pulled themselves together – which shakes your faith in the accuracy of the social puppet show that runs continuously inside your head. Most of the time I’ve run into someone after time away, they are similar to what I expect.
A New Word: Lookaback – SQLServerCentral

1 week ago | sqlservercentral.com | Steve Jones

lookaback– n. the chock of meeting back up with someone and learning that your mental image of them had fallen wildly out of date – having grown up or gotten old, fallen apart, or pulled themselves together – which shakes your faith in the accuracy of the social puppet show that runs continuously inside your head. Most of the time I’ve run into someone after time away, they are similar to what I expect.
Speaking at the NYC Lunch and Learn-May 23

1 week ago | voiceofthedba.com | Steve Jones

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be in New York City for the Redgate DevOps Devour Hour Lunch and Learn. This is at the Industrious office at 730 3rd Avenue, which is a neat location near the tip of Manhattan. This is a half day event, from 12-430, with a short happy hour afterwards. I’ll be there, along with Kendra Little and Erik Darling, talking a variety of different topics.
How Helpful is a GenAI Copilot

1 week ago | voiceofthedba.com | Steve Jones

I’m sure many of you have tried a GenAI LLM to do something. Maybe write some code, maybe get some sort of recommendation or suggestion, maybe to rewrite something or summarize text. I’m sure you have had some feelings about whether the tool made you more or less productive. There was a trial conducted by the Australia Department of the Treasury on Microsoft’s 365 Copilot, asking for volunteers to participate and use the tool in their daily work.