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Voice of the DBA

Welcome to the Voice of the DBA, thoughts from Steve Jones on databases, SQL Server, and life.

Dec 8, 2025

Recently I saw an article on Simple Talk, 15 Practical Tips for Securing SQL Server, and I thought that many of these are fairly simple things. Turn off unused features, disable sa, etc. These are things that a lot of people probably ensure are in their SQL Servers builds.

Though, I'm sure a lot of people don't...


Dec 5, 2025

Imagine a perfect world? I have an AI agent that knows my business well. It's getting real time input from sales, from customers, it makes amazing decisions. We get a large order? We need to ramp up production of our widgets. We have an order pipeline of xx widgets and we know over time that yy% will close. Let's place...


Dec 3, 2025

Over the years I've had no shortage of licensing questions for SQL Server. At times it's felt a little crazy. Look at the licensing guide. Choose EE or SE and the number of cores. Then check if you're using VMs. Oh, and consider the cloud, and which cloud you're running a workload on.

It's simple right?

It can seem...


Dec 1, 2025

If you graph computer/query cost against the size of data, you can get four quadrants:

  1. small data, small compute (most CRUD app queries)
  2. small data, big compute (complex BI queries for this quarter, most reporting)
  3. big data, small compute (logs, audit data)
  4. big data, big compute (complex BI queries across all...


Nov 28, 2025

A few weeks ago, I was at the Small Data SF 2025 Conference in San Francisco. I attended the inaugural event last year and decided to go back again. It's a great chance to hear people thinking about data and its impact on the world in a different way, recognizing that building lager and larger systems isn't always...