Getting Fired
When should a DBA get fired? Steve Jones thinks it should be rare and gives you two cases.
2025-10-06 (first published: 2014-03-27)
706 reads
Editorials
Lessons from the Postmark-MCP Backdoor
The Koi Security team recently uncovered the first known, malicious MCP server in the wild: a package called postmark-mcp, downloaded over 1,500 times per week, that silently BCCs every outgoing email to an attacker-controlled domain. So, what happened? High-level, a lot: The attacker cloned the legitimate Postmark MCP repository, made one small but nefarious change […]
2025-10-04
200 reads
2025-10-03
93 reads
PRs Are Like Trouble Tickets
Adopting a modern development approach brings with it the need to manage PRs, which Steve thinks can be like trouble tickets.
2025-10-01
121 reads
2025-09-29
177 reads
Building AI Governance and Policies- First Steps
AI has moved from experimental to operational in record time for many organizations. In industries like fintech, healthcare, and retail where sensitive PII (personally identifiable information) and relational databases are the backbone of daily operations, this innovation speed to adopt AI brings enormous opportunity, but also significant risks
2025-09-27
98 reads
Don't Forget About Financial Skills
A bit of advice from Steve to ensure you do not neglect the management of your finances for the long term.
2025-09-26
108 reads
Getting More Time from AI
Today Steve wonders what you might do with extra time if the AI can give it to you.
2025-09-24
93 reads
All the Costs of Downtime
Downtime causes a lot of problems, not all of which are financial for an organization.
2025-09-22
122 reads
Planning for tomorrow, today - database migrations
I have been speaking to people about database migrations to the cloud a lot over the last few weeks. One thing that has jumped out at me is that we seem to focus on the process of moving data being the migration rather than one step in a larger process. Many people neglect the discovery […]
2025-09-20
141 reads
Blogs
Prime Day Recommendations
By Steve Jones
It’s Prime Day. A few of my recommendations, since I want to do some...
Fabric for Operational Reporting & SQL Endpoint Trap
With Fabric Mirroring, Microsoft is promoting a nice and appealing story for operational reporting...
Crawl, Walk, Run with Agentic Development of Power BI Assets
If you’ve been watching AI roll through the data community and thinking, “this seems...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
Concurrency and Baseline Control: Level 5 of the Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Concurrency and Baseline Control: Level...
Spending Time in the Office
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Spending Time in the Office
Question of the Day
Multiple Values Inserted
I have this code on SQL Server 2022. What happens when it runs all at once?
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.Commission GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Commission (id INT NOT NULL IDENTITY(1,1) CONSTRAINT CommissionPK PRIMARY KEY , salesperson VARCHAR(20) , commission VARCHAR(20) ) GO INSERT dbo.Commission ( salesperson, commission) VALUES ( 'Brian', 12 ), ( 'Brian', 'None' ) GOSee possible answers