October 11, 2025 at 12:34 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Technological Dinosaurs or Social Dinosaurs?
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
October 11, 2025 at 8:23 am
I have thought for a number of years there is no good reason why an IT project should fail. We as IT Pros have enough skills to get almost anything working. Projects still fail, but more for lack of leadership than lack of skills.
I have also noticed the lack of care around performance and maintenance. This has been going on for over a decade, and is at least partly driven by the low relative cost of masking performance issues by throwing kit at the problem. Very few IT projects need to scale to the extent that designing and coding for performance becomes important.
Just about the only thing that is a concern is security, but the number of successful hacks shows that security barely registers in the design process.
Fabric is king. It has helped make most IT development projects easy. The skill levels needed to deliver a fabric-based project are significantly lower than needed even with VS ten years ago. Some projects get delivered faster than the old hand-cranked methods, but Fabric-based delivery speeds have become accepted as normal. I think mostly this is a good thing, but relevant managers need to be aware of the collateral effects in performance, security, etc. Mostly the ability to deliver trumps all other concerns.
Ultimately we have to accept the world we see is the world we have to live with. For most of us, saying that things could be done in a better way will get us labelled as dinosaurs or just simply cancelled. We just have to hope that the few people who get lauded as visionaries and produce the next Best Thing will give us all something that even old-timers can see is a real improvement.
Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.
When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara
October 11, 2025 at 8:25 am
Can we please, please stop talking about relational data stores?
The relational model is about the logical organization of data. One of the central aims of the model is to ensure that the user or developer doesn't need to know anything about how the data is organized physically at the storage level and shouldn't need to know if the data is on a disk, in memory, on premise or in the cloud.
Referring to relational data stores leads to many developers profoundly misunderstanding the role of relational databases.
October 11, 2025 at 9:01 am
Great write up Grant. You may be a dinosaur but that would make me one too. The idea of OLTP being a solved problem is exactly how i feel relational DBs are treated now. They are a necessary evil that should “just work” all the time, no matter what garbage or lack of care goes into them. They have been replaced in the minds of mgmt by sexier, shinier things. This is the attitude i see from so many teams now. The DBs should work, always work, always give consistent results, and never need feed or caring. It is like a beating heart in our chest that we continually feed cheese fries and butter then get mad when it skips a beat or stops….just work heart!
October 11, 2025 at 11:33 am
This reminds me of a situation that Phil Factor would have enjoyed crafting a story around.
412-977-3526 call/text
October 11, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Grant, this is the first time I've replied to a post but your theme and take on it strikes a chord. I'm a few years older than you but I started late in working with technology (relational databases). Does anyone remember Microsoft Works? That was my start - self-taught - in the mid 90s. I was introduced to Microsoft Access while working on a Computer Science degree in the early 2000s and moved from there to SQL server (I still have a couple of Access applications I put together for personal use in the mid-2000s that have moved from laptop to laptop as I've had to upgrade - just completed the most recent, replacing a 10 year old Windows 7/MS Office Professional 2010 machine with Windows 11/ MS Office 2024 and MS Access 2024. Can't get Access with Office anymore :-(.) I had a Networking instructor that was bewailing the black box that setup and configuration of Novell had become and spent quite a bit of class time showing us what was going on in that black box (long forgotten as Networks were never my strong suit or passion) but the concept is pretty similar. I'm struggling with LLM/AI as I like to feel that I have/need more control of what's going on in the background. I see the value in it as a tool but see an overreliance on acceptance of what gets produced/proposed without adequate testing and review. A global Insurance company based in my area just announced the layoff of 400 employees in their accounting department - replacing them with AI. I know I'm rambling but basically, I agree, the technology still matters and if the next generation(s) of IT workers forget or aren't taught that, the quality of software will suffer.
October 11, 2025 at 4:43 pm
Great article Grant. I, too, feel like a dinosaur - realizing that I've been married longer (35 years) than many of my coworkers have been alive. The programmers don't understand databases at all, and complained that they can't get data from that SQL server without an API. Turns out that's because none of them know SQL or anything about databases. Lucky they had me on the team, eh? 🙂
Many of our customers are pushing to have AI set up to access their databases and give them answers to their questions about the data. And they think this can be done efficiently by reading the OLTP databases. Then they compensate for poor performance by upping the power of the AI engine. If they were willing to build (and maintain) an OLAP database from their data, they would be saving money in the long run, and get better results much faster. <sigh>
October 11, 2025 at 5:28 pm
I find there are a lot of people in management nowadays who have learned statistics in their MBA and are proficient in R.
R dataframes implement the relational model and they don't seem to have much trouble using the relational operations in R. There still seems to be a lot of fear of SQL even though it does largely the same thing.
R dataframes are a much simpler way of programming than using ORMs or APIs. Python also implements dataframes but I find them a bit incoherent in comparison with the R implementation.
If dataframes (and their attendant relational operations) can be brought into C#, Java and JavaScript then I think we will be on to something really significant.
October 12, 2025 at 7:51 pm
The dinosaurs didn't die out. They grew feathers and took to the air.
October 12, 2025 at 9:37 pm
Great article, Grant. I appreciate your rambling. I'm also one who is very concerned to not become a technological dinosaur. That has happened to me in the past. My previous employer was open to sending us to either training or conferences, which was great for keeping up with technology as it moved ahead. Nevertheless, when I was laid off from that job, I discovered that I had holes in my skillset that I hadn't picked up at any of those trainings or conferences. I did learn them on my own, while unemployed, but I was surprised at my own missing skills.
In my current position it is worse, because my current employer doesn't allow anyone who is an individual contributor in a technical field to ever go to a training or conference. Management can, but the rest of us can't. Add to that the fact that our CISO has banned all AI, which is the hottest technology that everyone should gain experience at, but everyone not in management at a serious disadvantage. I'm doing what I can to compensate, by paying GitHub for GitHub Copilot, but it isn't cheap for an individual and paying for that service restricts me, given my budget, for paying for any other service.
So, yeah, I am very concerned about falling further behind.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
October 13, 2025 at 1:19 am
Sorry I haven't been here to respond to you all. I've been traveling quite a bit (typing this in Hong Kong of all places).
What you all say resonates. @EdVassie, yeah, it's unusual that so many projects still fail, but at least part of that must stem from the fact that anyone can find their way into computing, and not everyone finds the path easy (speaking as the film school drop-out who stumbled his way through a computing career). @will, I'm not sure why relataional data store is a problem, but I get it. Tools & tooling should help us avoid the need for a lot of knowledge of SQL. Maybe it does and that's a piece of the puzzle. Not sure. @Kimberlin, yeah, I see it across the board in PostgreSQL as well as SQL Server. @robert. Yep. @RaDavis, please, do respond more. I think you're right. AI/LLM is just a tool. We're in a hype-cycle/bubble at the moment. We'll see some more horror stories and then the bubble will pop. I'm hoping this is a canals bubble though and not a tulip bubble. @LadyRuna nice, Michele and I are at 37 years married this year, which is insane on the face of it. But you're pretty thoroughly ensconced in analytics, so you can't have too much of that dinosaur feeling just yet. @will very interesting take. I may need to spend some more time there... assuming I can find or make time. And true, the dinosaurs are with us, but in a radically different form. @rod, yeah, I've been mostly blessed in my career. Even if I didn't have employers sending me to a lot of training, I still had them support me in learning stuff. Even some of my worst managers saw the need for improvement. I argue we're always responsible for our own learning, but, you should get some help from your employer.
Great feedback all. Thank you. As I say, this is all still very much in flux in my brain. I'm still trying to see the shape of where things are going and I'm not sure I understand it, at all. Feels like we're building a new layer of tech debt on the data collection side of things that we just don't need to build. But, I could be way off. Let's face it, lots of people are running down this path as fast as they can. I'm not going to sit here and say they're utterly wrong. I'm just not sure they're utterly right.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
October 14, 2025 at 4:11 pm
+1 That is something C. J. Date emphasized with relational database theory in the 1980s. And easy to see with columnar stores. The relational design is the same, just a difference physical storage underneath your logical relational design. Good comment!
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