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Question of the Day

The Long Name

The Voice of the DBA

Eight Minutes

When I was at the Small Data 2025 conference, one of the speakers was talking about their work with AI technologies. This person uses it a lot in their day job, often to complete tasks that they would have struggled to work on in the past, mostly because of time constraints, but also a lack of resources. Sometimes this person has an idea, but doesn't want to distract themselves or others by having them work on a side project.

During a recent ride in a Waymo (self-driving car), this person had their laptop out and running Claude Code. They gave it a prompt, asking it to build a small app for some data analysis. During the 8-minute ride, the agent had spit out the code, a Readme, and committed this to a git repo. Later, the speaker tried it and found it solved most of his requirements, and then did some other work on the project, as well as having Claude write more to get something that was beyond a minimally viable app.

He then gave us this William Gibson quote: "The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed." I've thought about this quote a lot during the last few decades, especially as mobile phones and apps have become prominent. In Colorado, the bandwidth and connectivity have lagged behind other places. When I get frustrated with the mobile network, I want someone to put a copy of that quote above every developer's desk at Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc. so they realize the way things work in Silicon Valley isn't how they work elsewhere.

I've been feeling that way about AI tech lately. It's the future, and it's not well distributed. There are some successes out there, among lots of failures, but I suspect that some of this is that we're all working with unevenly distributed models, knowledge, and problems. Some of us are learning to use things better than others.

So I'm wondering, what do you think you could do in 8 minutes with a coding agent? Take a Waymo if you want, but you might be more comfortable with Claude Code (or another agent) at your desk. Take a problem you've been working on and give it to the AI agent. See what happens. Maybe even tackle a side project you can't seem to find time on which to work and see what happens.

As I started this, I actually kicked off Claude Code and asked it to load some data from messy files into a database. Across a couple of days (I started late one afternoon), I estimate I spent 10 minutes approving actions, but for less than $5, I had a lot of data loaded (88 files) and the code to do it committed in a repo. With very little effort from me.

Think about what you could do in a few minutes with an agent. You might get something useful, with little effort or cost. It probably would not be a production-ready app, but it would be something to test an idea, or maybe some code that might inspire others to tackle some of their own backlog.

What do you want an agent to help you build?

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Featured Contents

T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: Fuzzy String Search I

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from SQLServerCentral

Comparing strings has always been hard when we don't have great data quality. If we need exact matches, SQL Server works great. However, we often expect users to enter values without typos and know what values they want to find. Or at least know part of the string. However, matching with wildcards or partial strings […]

SQL Server Privilege Escalation via Replication Jobs

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

Learn how attackers can exploit SQL Server replication cleanup jobs to escalate privileges from db_owner to sysadmin

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Catching Up On SQLOrlando

Andy Warren from SQLAndy

Somehow two years have elapsed since my last update; hopefully it won’t be that long before the next one. My last post was about SQLSaturday Orlando 2023. Since then,...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Using Prompt AI for a Travel Data Analysis

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from The Voice of the DBA

I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt could help me with some analysis. I was pleasantly surprised by how this went. This...

Architecting Power BI Solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from SQLServerCentral

Business Intelligence (BI) tools like Power BI are used by a wide range of professionals, creating diverse and complex scenarios, and finding the right solution can be daunting, especially when multiple approaches exist for a single use case. The author distills his 17 years of experience on various data platform technologies in this book to walk you through various Power BI usage scenarios.

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	The Long Name
I run this code to create a table: When I check the length, I get these results: A table name is limited to 128 characters. How does this work?
Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

Which Result II

I have this code in SQL Server 2022:

CREATE SCHEMA etl;
GO
CREATE TABLE etl.product
(
    ProductID INT,
    ProductName VARCHAR(100)
);
GO
INSERT etl.product
VALUES
(2, 'Bee AI Wearable');
GO
CREATE TABLE dbo.product
(
    ProductID INT,
    ProductName VARCHAR(100)
);
GO
INSERT dbo.product
VALUES
(1, 'Spiral College-ruled Notebook');
GO
CREATE OR ALTER PROCEDURE etl.GettheProduct
AS
BEGIN
    exec('SELECT ProductName FROM product;')
END;
GO

When I execute this code as a user whose default schema is dbo and has rights to the tables and proc, what is returned?

Answer: Spiral College-ruled Notebook

Explanation: The name resolution and ownership chaining for dynamic SQL is different. In this case, the executor (not the proc owner) gets their context used and dbo.Product is queried. No ref again, but let me know if you find one.

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

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Editorials

An SSIS Upgrade - Comments posted to this topic are about the item An SSIS Upgrade

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Article Discussions by Author

Semantic Search in SQL Server 2025 - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Semantic Search in SQL Server 2025

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Fixing the Error - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Fixing the Error

T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: Encoding Functions - Comments posted to this topic are about the item T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: Encoding Functions

Which Table I - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Which Table I

Using Python notebooks to save money in Fabric: The Fabric Modern Data Platform - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Using Python notebooks to save money in Fabric: The Fabric Modern Data Platform

SQL Server 2022 - Administration

High Availability setup - has anyone seen this method? - Hi all, I recently moved to a new employer who have their HA setup in a way I've never seen and I'd just like to get opinions on it; I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just different (but it does appear to have caused issues). The way that I'm used to is that two […]

Certificates expired - Can't restore after creating new certificate - The previous DBA created a certificate which expired 12/31/2025. I came in hoping to have an easy day for New Year's Eve and found all of the backups were failing. After doing the research, I found the certificate had expired. 1. I created a new certificate since I couldn't update the expiry date. 2. I […]

SQL Server 2022 - Development

advice on diving into devops for managing BI projects - hi , i know this is a sql server forum but i think my brain is aligned more with members of this forum than any other. we have a large netsuite migration in which multiple erps are involved. The technologies on which those erp's run vary from db2 to all flavors of sql server based […]

Simplifying WHERE Condition with LIKE test on multiple columns - Good Evening, Is there a simpler way to rearrange the following WHERE condition: [Column_1] LIKE 'Beta08%' OR [Column_1] LIKE 'Beta11%' OR [Column_1] LIKE 'Beta16%' OR [Column_1] LIKE 'Beta17%' OR [Column_1] LIKE 'Beta15%' OR [Column_1] IN ('Beta192') OR [Column_2] LIKE 'Beta08%' OR [Column_2] LIKE 'Beta11%' OR [Column_2] LIKE 'Beta16%' OR [Column_2] LIKE 'Beta17%' OR [Column_2] LIKE […]

Switch partition: NULL boundary id - I have table: t1 in schema1 with 19 billion records. I have another table with same name: t1 in schema2. My goal is to move data from schema1 to schema2 and leave the empty table in schema 1. To achieve this, I'm using switch partitions. There are 30 boundary ids for the table schema1.t1 but […]

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