An anonymous interview with a database professional who did everything the company asked. There is no lesson at the end of this one. I looked for one. AI TrainingI write about databases. I write about things that are broken and can be fixed, because fixing things is the work I know how to do and it is the work that makes me feel useful.This one cannot be fixed. I am publishing it anyway.They completed the AI development plan their employer assigned them, paid for, and tracked in a system with a progress bar. Eleven days later they were on a…
Author: drweb
An architecture scenarioImagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales owns sales transactions, Finance owns budgets, and Shared Data owns common tables such as Customer, Product, and Date. Executive Analytics needs selected data from all three, but it does not want to copy everything into another lakehouse and maintain another set of pipelines. Instead, it creates shortcuts to the authoritative tables and presents them together in its own lakehouse.This is where the beauty of Fabric OneLake shortcuts becomes obvious. To a report developer or analyst, the Executive Analytics lakehouse can look like one complete collection of tables.…
Security on your SQL Server is important. That doesn’t need any explaining. But where do you start when evaluating the security of your SQL Server? If you are like me, and probably for many DBAs, that’s the hardest part. You know security matters, but without a structured baseline, it’s easy to overlook configuration issues that could expose your environment to unnecessary risk. Starting with a proven checklist gives you a clear way to identify gaps before they become problems. And how do you even implement the principle of least privilege on the instance and database level?And how do you even…
TL;DR — Key Takeaways A rapidly spreading Shai-Hulud supply-chain attack has compromised more than 1,280 npm packages with a combined 2+ billion monthly installs, after attackers hijacked the GitHub account of a key maintainer and published malicious updates with legitimate signatures. The malware silently executes during npm install, stealing GitHub, npm, AWS, Kubernetes, Vault, Slack, Stripe, SSH, VPN, and other secrets before spreading worm-like to additional maintainers and packages. Researchers warn the campaign is expanding by 50 to 100 newly infected packages every few minutes, impacting software tied to organizations including Deliveroo, OneReach, ServiceTitan, Picsart, and Qlik. Researchers at Aikido…
Much of the MySQL interview prep you’ll find online is based on outdated versions that reached end-of-life years ago. If your answer to a connection question still mentions mysql_pconnect(), or you write string comparisons without quotes, an experienced interviewer will immediately know you haven’t worked with a modern MySQL server. This is the third installment in our MySQL interview series, and every question and example has been verified on a currently supported MySQL release. If you haven’t read the previous parts yet, they’re a great place to start before continuing. All examples in this article were tested on a MySQL…
TL;DR — Key Takeaways AWS has introduced Kiro Crew, an open source workspace that lets developers assign asynchronous coding tasks to autonomous AI agents. The workspace can coordinate multiple agents, preserve context across sessions and display each agent’s activity, tool calls and results in real time. Kiro Crew can observe developer workflows and recommend reusable AI skills based on recurring tasks. Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week added an open source workspace for its Kiro artificial intelligence (AI) coding tool that enables application developers to asynchronously assign tasks to an AI agent that is capable of autonomously performing tasks, such…
Sandbox testing works well when your team controls both sides of the integration. You define the service, you define the mock, you know exactly what the sandbox should return. That setup holds up fine for internal microservices and first-party APIs.It starts to break down when you don’t own the dependency. Payment processors, identity providers, SMS gateways, banking APIs, shipping integrations—these are services your system depends on but can’t fully replicate. Their providers give you a sandbox environment, but that sandbox is a simulation they maintain, not a mirror of what production actually does. The gap between the two is where…
Everyone writes about AI generating queries. Nobody writes about the strange jobs it is actually doing inside real database teams. These are nine of them, and I helped build every one.I want to say something before the technical part, because it is the reason I wrote this at all.The most satisfying work of my career has not been tuning a query. It has been walking into a room where a team is quietly terrified of their own database, and walking out three days later with them arguing confidently about it. That shift is the whole job. It is also the…
Docker Captain Aug 5, 2026 Governance Is a Developer Experience Problem Learn why AI governance is about more than security. Discover how trust, clear boundaries, and developer experience enable AI adoption at scale. Read now
I got a notification from a question I’d posted at SQL Server Central: Getting the Average. A user had posted their repro didn’t work, with no real comment. As a SQLNewBlogger FYI, that type of post shows poor communication and a lack of communication. I see that a lot and it’s a challenge in the modern world. Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.A Quick SetupThis was what the user posted:declare @t table ( id int identity , i int ); insert @t select null; insert…