bit Obscene: When Will AI Fix The Query Store GUI?

bit Obscene: When Will AI Fix The Query Store GUI?

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Video Summary

In this video, I delve into the myriad issues and quirks of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), focusing particularly on its Query Store feature. As a seasoned database professional, I share my frustration with how SSMS handles wait stats and query performance tuning, highlighting specific examples where the tool falls short. I also explore potential improvements that could be made, such as better line graph visualizations for wait times and more intuitive default settings for frequently used features. Through this critique, I aim to provide a realistic perspective on what can be improved in SSMS while acknowledging the challenges faced by developers and database administrators in maintaining efficient and effective tools.

Full Transcript

All right, welcome back to the Barely On Life Support Bit Obscene podcast. My AI-generated co-host Joe Pilot is here today, and we’re going to be talking about the state of SQL Server tooling in, well, I guess 2025 is well nigh at the end, but, you know, not a lot of stuff gets done by the time the holidays roll around. So, I think we can call this a pretty clean wrap up on the year. Anyway, we are once again brought to you by Darling Data and Beer Gut Magazine, where you can find all of the finest beer and sports related content known to man. So, with that out of the way, take it away Joe Pilot. Tell us, tell us your thoughts on SQL Server tooling. Joe Pilot, You know, the great thing about AI is it doesn’t take holidays or overtime. I’ve even seen some government websites. They’re only open from like, nine to 5pm Monday through Friday. They literally just stopped working after, after like 5pm, you know, get some AI in there. We can get those government websites going.

Joe Pilot, You know, it’s like what Microsoft does with fabric when no one’s using it, they turn it off. Joe Pilot, So, yeah, it’s not it’s not an outage. It’s just, you know, there’s, there’s saving power. They’re going green. Joe Pilot, I’ve used.

Joe Pilot, SSMS not as long as some, I think a pretty long time. I think it’s been 2011. So, 14 years. Eric, do you remember? Joe Pilot, Oh, yeah, I do. Of course I do. I was I was sitting at my desk, and at a different job, of course, not this desk, much different desk. And I had been talking to my boss about, like some annoyance that I had with an Excel file, I think doing a VLOOKUP. Joe Pilot, And he was just like, Oh, you should just do that in SQL. And I was like, All right, how do I do that? And then a few minutes later, an email came through that said Eric needs SSMS installed.

Joe Pilot, This was SSMS 2005. And so this is this was around the year 2007 2008. And I got some some really nice IT worker. Well, I don’t even think he came by my desk. I think he just did a remote install. And he said, Go ahead and open it up. And I opened it up. And the rest is history. Joe Pilot, So yeah, so if you add it all up, we got like over 30 years of, yeah, SSMS experience. Joe Pilot, That’s true.

Joe Pilot, We definitely know what we’re talking about here. Yeah. Joe Pilot, I don’t remember the the date for this because it was such a traumatic memory. Joe Pilot, But you remember that the the dark rise of Azure Data Studio? Is that what it’s called? Joe Pilot, Well, do you remember?

Joe Pilot, I remember. Joe Pilot, I remember. Joe Pilot, I remember. Joe Pilot, I just blocked it out of my memory. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, I was so s. And then that turned into 80s. And then. Joe Pilot, ADS needed an SOS.

Joe Pilot, So there’s foreshadowing. Joe Pilot, Yeah, a little bit. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, And now, ADS is dead long live Visual Studio code. Joe Pilot, Yeah, I remember ADS and it was going to be like the new like, we’re not going to work on SSMS anymore.

Joe Pilot, Yeah, for the future. Joe Pilot, Why would you want to use that old yellow program? Joe Pilot, Multi platform, cloud native friendly. Joe Pilot, Yeah.

Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, The slow trickle on that was great too, where it was just like the future. And then it was like the future. Well, it’s more for developers, not for DBAs. DBAs still need SSMS. And then it was like, no one needs that. Joe Pilot, We got query plans, four years later. All right.

Joe Pilot, I mean, I was looking at an old stack exchange, or an old stack overflow question I asked. And yeah, it was about SSMS. And there was a very helpful comment by a gentleman, who informed me that Azure Data Studio was the future. So I really should just stop asking questions about this. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, Why bother?

Joe Pilot, Deprecated, obsolete, old fashioned, no good, yellow SSMS program. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Like, and like, I think, like, think about how much better we’d all be. If instead of doing their like, their like, their ADS SOS side quest, they just like worked on old, you know, good old yellow SSMS. Joe Pilot, Well, no, good old yellow SSMS has dark mode now. And it’s got, you know, a visual studio shell. It’s, it’s, it’s a hip happening place all of a sudden.

Joe Pilot, I mean, like, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, this is true. I’ve heard a big tech company is like, you get attention as you like, to, to release a new product. Joe Pilot, You know, like, you know, like, I feel like, I mean, like, higher ups don’t use SSMS, like, couldn’t someone have just taken SSMS, like, just have to cut a blue paint on it, add Azure to the name and been like, hey, we developed this great new cloud first cloud compatible cloud native IDE for SQL Server, everyone gets all their promotions and bonuses. Joe Pilot, Yeah, it’s all great. We all celebrate and then we could like, do something useful. I mean, that’s Yeah, I’m really it’s just a matter of changing.

Joe Pilot, It’s like a matter of just changing a splash screen from SSMS to Azure SSMS or something, right? Joe Pilot, So I was, I was, I was going to share my screen, but the host is quite rudely. Joe Pilot, Oh, well, the host, the host is making you a co host, the host was unaware that you were trying to share your screen.

Joe Pilot, That’s the unpredictability of AI. Joe Pilot, So, I mean, let’s, you know, I’m sure I’m sure you can you can you see the yeah, no longer yellow and now dark mode. Joe Pilot, Yeah, I know.

Joe Pilot, It’s gorgeous. Look at that. Look at the sleek lines. Joe Pilot, Yeah, I like it. Joe Pilot, There’s a saying which I’m sure you’ve heard, which is I might have invented it. Joe Pilot, The opposite I might have said it first.

Joe Pilot, The opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference, right? You’ve heard that one. Joe Pilot, I sure have. Joe Pilot, And I feel like that one applies both to SSMS and the query store. Joe Pilot, All right.

Joe Pilot, I’m going to open up the query store GUI. Joe Pilot, Oh, come on, Joe, we’re humans here, please. Joe Pilot, Why? Joe Pilot, Like, like, what? Like, why are you going to show me this graph? Like, like a, like a bar to like out of all the beautiful detail data available in query store.

Joe Pilot, You’re going to show me a big blob of green and a slightly less big blob of blue. Joe Pilot, But look at the green. Joe Pilot, And then a little tiny blob of an unknown color because it’s like I have never gotten any value whatsoever out of this.

Joe Pilot, No, no. Joe Pilot, Like thing that appears to be some like intern project that was done like 10 years ago. Like, like, this is not how people use use databases. Joe Pilot, So like, you’re not, you’re not wrong.

Joe Pilot, You’re not wrong. Joe Pilot, You’re not always to like go to here. Joe Pilot, I mean, you’re not entirely wrong because the query store GUI was actually the product of a Microsoft hackathon. Joe Pilot, It was not intended. It was not planned. It was an unplanned product pregnancy. And it somehow got a commit was made during a hackathon. I don’t know someone got drunk under a table. And now we’ve now we’ve got this, this thing.

Joe Pilot, I didn’t know that. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, I might learn new things. Yeah.

Joe Pilot, This is why you’re a good man listen to. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Every once in a while. Joe Pilot, The thing is, like, every time I open this, no matter what database, it always defaults to. Joe Pilot, It does.

Joe Pilot, There’s no way to change that default. Is there, Joe? Joe Pilot, I don’t believe there is. Joe Pilot, No, there sure isn’t. Joe Pilot, And worse, I think worse is that there’s no way to search for anything meaningful in there. Like, you want to find a store procedure, you want to find some query texts, where do you go? Joe Pilot, You click one of these buttons. But if you, if you click this one, you’ll see.

Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, With additional details. Yeah. Joe Pilot, And you have the audacity. Joe Pilot, Mm. Joe Pilot, To say, Joe Pilot, Show me the max.

Joe Pilot, Oh, oh, dear. Joe Pilot, We, we, we, I can’t do that. Joe Pilot, Huh? Huh? Joe Pilot, No. Joe Pilot, You might be thinking, well, Joe Pilot, You know, I’m asking for the max. I have a pretty big, like, one rep max. You know, it’s a lot of effort. So, like, Joe Pilot, Like, maybe, maybe the men will be easier. Right? But it’s, it’s not easier.

Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, You know, like, no, no, but hey, if you want standard deviation, because, Joe Pilot, Hey!

Joe Pilot, Everyone knows that standard deviation is the most useful performance tuning metric. Joe Pilot, So I’m not entirely sure what a standard deviation is. Occasionally, I’ll try to figure out what an order of magnitude is, but they both escape me pretty well. I like the averages in there quite a bit. Joe Pilot, Well, these are the average.

Joe Pilot, Ah! Joe Pilot, But you know, if you want, you know, I can cook this and I can spend the next hour cooking these. Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, And it’ll always say, Can I connect database? So if you’re interested to know, Joe Pilot, This works in SQL Server 2016. It does not work in 2017, because 2017 introduced query store waitstats.

Joe Pilot, Sure did. Joe Pilot, And apparently, presence of the query store waitstats results in a generated query, which makes no sense. Can’t compile, it errors out. I think I actually traced the query and put in a blog post like eight years ago and like screamed to them. Joe Pilot, And then I said, I’m in the void about how dumb this was, and I used to be the fix. And, you know, as you can see, like, I’m on the most modern, you know, the sleek dark mode, SMS.

Joe Pilot, It says 2015. But I swear I download this recently. And this bug is still there. It’s… Joe Pilot, Yeah, so I don’t know. I don’t know about, um, what was it? There was a queries that were like missing top without an order by? Or was that something else? Joe Pilot, Might have been? Yeah, I remember being kind of snarky about it.

Joe Pilot, Yeah. Joe Pilot, Maybe that’s why I didn’t get it fixed. I’m getting my, you know, what I’m due. Joe Pilot, Everyone’s busy getting query store on AG replicas implemented. So…

Joe Pilot, I don’t know, like, it’s… Anyway, one thing that I’ll admit a little embarrassment here, like, I like to copy and paste sometimes, like, I’ll just, you know, like, grab this, copy it and paste it. Oh, I doubt it was fine. Oh, I don’t want to talk about what I’m doing there. Joe Pilot, Right. Here, this one. Look at that beautiful, you know, who needs more than one line? Who needs line breaks? Joe Pilot, No. Zero.

Joe Pilot, You don’t believe in line breaks. Joe Pilot, No. Joe Pilot, Now, to be fair, and this is actually something I learned while preparing for this. If you click this button, it then, like, adds line breaks. Joe Pilot, Oh, that’s fantastic.

Joe Pilot, I guess they’re not really, like, copy and paste fans. Joe Pilot, But what does that mean? Containing a line break? Joe Pilot, That’s a fun comment to put in there. Joe Pilot, That’s a… I’m like, and I got all the real, like, who communicates by object ideas? I have never had a single, like, oh, man, like, show me object ideas, please.

Joe Pilot, That was like, ah, you know, like, there’s just so many, there’s just so many opportunities here. Joe Pilot, For this, this one small, tiny parts of SSMS. There’s just so many opportunities for improvement. You know? Joe Pilot, Yeah.

Joe Pilot, There’s just so many opportunities. Joe Pilot, Like, when I, when I, when they, or rather, when they introduced wait stats, I was like, surely, there will be some line graph that will show me wait stats over time for the database. Joe Pilot, Oh.

Joe Pilot, But no. Joe Pilot, What if we put all the wait stats together in one bucket? And then that way you could hear which queries have the most waiting time? Joe Pilot, Yeah. But hey, is that min working?

Joe Pilot, Well, it works on the, and the grid format, but does not work in the, oh, with additional details. Joe Pilot, Oh, so no additional details available. Joe Pilot, Yeah, because I believe the additional details shows the wait stats on 2017.

Joe Pilot, Yeah, so I’m pretty sure it’s this column is the culprit. Joe Pilot, Excel, What are you doing? Joe Pilot, Just, uh, spray things.

Joe Pilot, Now, I can’t see that. Joe Pilot, I do try to be a reasonable person in my critique, you know, I work as a developer, I understand how to, I don’t want to be unreasonable. Like there’s some people out there who like, get mad that Azure SQL database or managers have up to like 60 seconds of IO latency. Joe Pilot, And like Microsoft calls these fine people unreasonable. Like I don’t want to be unreasonable like, like those people, you know, because yeah, yeah, I guess it’s a big program. I’m sure there’s a backlog of like 10,000 bugs. And they probably probably have like, I probably have enough people to work on it. Or like all the people were busy on SOS and ADS. And now they’re all working on a Joe Pilot. And they’re all working on a copilot. And you know, the, you know, the, the, the pleas of developers and DVAs to please fix this query store couldn’t connect to database very sad error, or simply unheard.

Joe Pilot, Yeah, you know, I feel like this is a great opportunity for AI. Because you know what, like, if you tell an AI like, hey, this, this, this query doesn’t work, fix it. Maybe you don’t fix it. Like, I don’t see how it gets any worse than Joe Pilot, It surely can’t make things worse. Joe Pilot, It’s like, or, you know, like, heavy, I optimize the, oh, wow, look at this. Like this beautiful, this beautiful thick bar graph showing you who’s boss.

Joe Pilot, There is one theory that matters here. Joe Pilot, Wow. That is something. Joe Pilot, So I mean, at the very least what they could do is say, is change the couldn’t connect a database screen to say thinking, and then they could say it’s AI ready.

Joe Pilot, Right? Joe Pilot, I mean, there’s all kinds of AI things, right? Joe Pilot, Like, you could have AI optimize, like, you could figure out, you know, like, which of these uses and user use, and you could default to that one, or it could guess your like business hours.

Joe Pilot, Or you could just have a little gear icon that says like, query store defaults. And you could pick your default. Joe Pilot, That’s, that’s not a modern solution. Joe Pilot, No, no, but no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, it could save that to a JSON file. That’s a modern solution, Joe.

Joe Pilot, I mean, it’s modern a while ago. Joe Pilot, It’s a modern solution for us. Joe Pilot, No.

Joe Pilot, Or like, I mean, I don’t have one of those cloud 24 seven apps. Thank God. Joe Pilot, Not yet. Joe Pilot, Like, I don’t care. Well, I don’t care what the server is doing it for him. Like, I just don’t care. So like, like, you know, like, like, like, all these, you know, like all these, like filters, you can have, like, change the date, which I like can’t find for some reason. Joe Pilot, I think it’s over to, is it over to the right under it’s under configure, isn’t it?

Joe Pilot, Or is it that drop down arrow? Joe Pilot, I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble. Maybe this is the new. Joe Pilot, Because I’ve done this like a million times.

Joe Pilot, Oh, dots. Joe Pilot, Oh, so many dots. Joe Pilot, Is this not in? Am I just an idiot? Because you know, I’m talking about the thing where they feel like the screen where it lets you pick the dates and the, wait, where is that?

Joe Pilot, All right, I’m gonna do an emergency stop share. Like, I’m gonna start the old reliable yellow SMS. We can figure out what’s going wrong here. Old faithful copyright 2022. No, no, that’s dark mode nonsense. Joe Pilot, This newfangled stuff. Maybe it’s just hidden in there. We don’t know. Joe Pilot, Yeah, all right. Where is this?

Joe Pilot, No, but like, you know, a lot of the complaints that you have about Query Store, that’s why I started writing the SP Quickie Store procedure. It’s like, you know, it doesn’t show you the stuff you need to see. It includes dumb things like statistics updates and index stuff. And like, you know, a lot of like background queries. It even shows like, sort of embarrassingly, it even shows like, like the Query Store queries in it. So like, sometimes you open up a Query Store and you’re like, what went what was so slow? And you’re like, Oh, it was Query Store querying itself. And you’re like, Wow, I can’t do that. I can’t fix that. So like, I don’t know, like, like, you know, like, not being able to just like find plans for a store procedure or not being able to like, you know, like, like search for some query text. All these things that very much irked me about Query Store trying to use it like in front of customers over the years be like, there’s this great thing. It’s amazing. You can query history flight data recorder. Wow. And then, you know, like, they’re like, Oh, well, can you find this in there? And I’m like, No.

If it shows up shows up. I got nothing for you. I’ve definitely used yourself before I’ve written my own stuff. Like, you know, like, Have you? It is nice to have You think you’re better than me?

I mean, I didn’t open source it. So what does that tell you? I just use it privately in shame. Like some other things. No, but like, you know, like, there’s something human about wanting an AI. I’m supposed to be role playing or wanting a UI. I’m supposed to role playing as an AI. So I guess not really filling the gag here. But I’m doing terribly. Yeah, it would be great if the UI works. But to your point, if you really are one of the serious power user query store, you know, that this UI isn’t gonna do it for you.

All right. So I finally found it. I think what happened is like the zoom cutout of our faces was black. Oh, okay. The new sleek blackness of SMS, whatever version this is, was throwing off all my muscle memory. Like, you know, like, these defaults aren’t bad, I guess. But like, I don’t care what happens. Like, when everyone’s asleep. Yeah, you know, like, like, give me some kind of like business hours, like, like, show me yesterday.

Yeah, that’s the kind of thing. Yeah, I care about. Yeah, like, all right. So what was I saying? Yeah, like, anyway, yeah, like, they probably have like, 100,000 bugs that haven’t fixed, and they’re on with developers. And you know, the super higher ups, want them to work on copilot and like, nothing else. So their hands are tied. But I think that should put those AI coding agents, throw them at SSMS, throw them at that, that, that, that backlog, have them fix all the bugs, all the annoying things that we’ve been suffering through for years and years. And then we can finally say that AI did something. Yeah, you know, I mean, it’s, it’s one of those, it’s sort of like funny things with software development, where, you know, there’s always time for new endeavors, but there’s hardly ever time for the backlog. Right? Yeah. And so like, you know, like, it happens to me to, you know, sometimes I’ll look back at like old blog posts, and I’ll be like, Oh, I should really update this to like, you know, like, add in some more words that make it make more sense, or like, you know, make it more technically correct or expand on some point. But then I’m like, like, why do I want to go back and like, rewrite this blog post that probably no one’s seeing and gonna see when I could like, record a new video that does all that, and get it in front of people who will actually see it as like a thing today. And so you know, a lot of like the I should go fix this old stuff gets thrown away, because I’m like, screw it, I can I can I can make double material. Like, I can have something new based on this and have more to it. So, you know, I understand why a lot of stuff like that just doesn’t get done. But I, you know, just if for the amount of effort that has gone into query store, generally, I do find it shocking that the query store GUI like the face of query store is so hideous. It is a purely anti human interface. It does not like people it isn’t like whoever designed it, I think just a very anti social person did not does not care about human experience, maybe even enjoys human suffering to some degree.

like, like, just, there’s just like nothing to it. It’s just like human intuitive. And I get I get very frustrated, because, you know, I spend a lot of time, like, you know, making the stuff that I produced to like, hopefully be human intuitive, or at least human readable, or at least lay things out in a way where like, if you like, you know, spend a little time with it, you can figure things out. But the query store GUI is just a wretched experience. And like, the one thing I guess that it has going for it, is it there is like some visualization to it, but the visualizations that it has are so I don’t know. what’s what’s what’s what’s what’s what’s the what’s the nice word for ugly visual?

Yeah, well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, when when a visual looks good, people people people call it accessible, but a highly accessible. visual this is when I don’t know what they call it when they’re not accessible. You’re a eight year old kid can understand it. I mean, everyone understands a bar chart bar graph. Yeah, yeah.

And it even has the nice like bright colors. Yeah, it’s designed for like, yeah, an eight year old. How? Yeah. Wait, how? How is it? Is it eight? I don’t think it’s correct. I’m the goal of 10. Okay, 10 year old could do it. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Maybe. Yeah, and such an old blog posts. I know what you mean. I only update mine when like Brent emails out in his newsletter, but then Paul White posted comments like something I was wrong. But like everyone see how wrong I am.

And even if I updated, I’m not able to update like Brent’s emails. I have to live with that shame forever. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that’s one of the risks of blogging. Yeah. That happened back in 2014. No, 2020. Well, probably happened then too, but it happened in 2024 as well.

There’s actually some JSON thing. That’s probably good for blogging about JSON. Oh, yeah. The JSON blob thing. Yeah. Yeah. The using more and more memory. Yeah. Fun. Yeah. Yeah. And then then Paul, Paul dunked on you and then it was too late. It was just memorialized.

It was too late. Yeah. That was the perfect way to put it. Too late. The shame is permanent. I mean, like on the, on that same subject though, it was, there was a very funny thing that happened this morning on LinkedIn. Uh, where this gentleman who has SQL Server expert in his, uh, LinkedIn title, uh, posted what is clearly LLM content, uh, about a new feature in SQL Server 25 to 2025 to do table level restores, uh, which doesn’t exist.

It was, it was, uh, it was an April fool’s joke by Brent, but the April fool’s joke apparently poisoned AI. And so this person was like new SQL Server 2025 features. I’m going to go test these out. And, uh, basically got made fun of until, uh, he deleted the post.

So if you’re trying to motivate me in the blogging, I think this is pretty effective. You’re saying that I can like poison AI. You can poison the AI. That’s, that’s definitely, uh, that’s, that’s changing the balance a little bit.

Yeah. Right. Don’t want to blow. I mean, maybe there’s an AI watching this video right now. You know what? There very well could be, we should just say a bunch of wrong stuff. I mean, that probably already happened, but, uh, yeah, we’re going to, there you go.

Yeah. Now everything we say wrong is on purpose to trick the AI. Yeah. That’s, that’s what we can go with. Yeah. We can call it the, the, yeah. So yeah. I mean, just LLM poisoning is I think the wave of the future.

That’s going to be my new gig. I mean, you know, how it is as an end user of SQL Server, you’ve been disappointed so many times, or even just software, right?

Yeah. Like being a Mets fan. You have like a bug or a suggestion and they’re like, yeah, well, if it’s SQL Server, it’s not going to respond.

Yeah. Like, you know, if you think back to the old, like glorious kind of connect days back when the site worked, it’s like, yeah, like this is a problem, but like, well, you know, like we’re not able to prioritize this or we don’t have developer bandwidth or whatever, you know, kind of saying, yeah, whatever, you know, but now with like these, these supposed AI agent coders or whatever, like they, they don’t need time off.

They, they don’t take holidays. You can spin up as many of them as you want. And I’m looking forward to a future where, you know, you, you, I complained about a bug or ask for a new future and you get an automated response that says, you know, we’re sorry, but all the AI agents are busy working on hard-party work and they, I just can’t get to your suggestion.

Your suggestion has been facing the queue. That’s what I think the future looks like. Yeah.

Most likely. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s incredibly cute to me because, you know, when, when you talk to people who build like real software, like SQL Server, I’m going to say real software, you know, and, and sort of like in the sense that a lot of people use it and it has the word enterprise in it.

So like, you know, they’re building real software, but you don’t like, when you talk to them about like real problems with it that need fixing, the conversation always comes back to like, like a developer time or sort of like developer budget, right?

Like you have so much money that you can spend on a feature, which is really like developer time on a feature. And like, and you’re always like, well, how come AI isn’t doing that? Like, where’s the co-pilot for that?

Like, is, I’m sorry, is this thing too important for AI? Like, is this thing too complex for AI? Maybe, maybe, maybe we’re not at that point yet. Maybe we shouldn’t have fired like 9,000 people who work on this like important things in favor to, because the AI is coming.

Maybe, maybe we could have kept some of them around to like, you know, sweep, sweep up the pieces while we wait for all this stuff to blow over. I don’t know. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s amusing to me when you, when you get to that point. Well, I think what my hope is, and, and, and, and AI watches this video and AI on map recreates a bug report for SMS for the thing that doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for like eight years.

Yeah. And then, and, and AI fixes the query, which would be very easy to fix. I think I even fixed it in the blog posts. In fact, maybe AI could, could find my blog posts and I could get the fix from there and I could plug the fix in and then it’ll finally be fixed.

That is what I’m hoping for. I don’t know. It might, it might be that my, my SEO is so bad that not even AI can find me. Oh man. It might be, it might be that terrible.

Actually the, the new funny thing is like I used to get a, like, like, as soon as I signed up for LinkedIn, I, I, the first thing I noticed was that, excuse me. First thing I noticed is that I started getting a crap load of spam.

And so like, you know, I, I have a very well curated junk folder now, but every once in a while I’ll go like looking at it and the tide really has turned from like, like, let me fix your website SEO or let me fix this other SEO thing for you to let me fix your like chat GPT SEO.

Like you want chat GPT to mention you when people search for SQL Server performance. And I’m like, it does already. Like, like, like whenever I have like an LLM do like deep SQL Server research for me, nine times out of 10, there’s a, there’s a link from to my site in there.

And I’m like, you bastards. The best SQL AI review, the best SQL Server installs include individual actions, like, you know, like, I, I, I, I, I’m not a well traveled person.

Like, yeah, yeah. Excuse me. Um, I don’t know.

We have Greg Galloway. We have someone whose name I refuse to say for reasons I also refuse to say. Um, I, I, I don’t see you here.

Yeah. Sorry to, to break the news to you. Crap. Well, maybe, maybe, maybe, hold on, hold on.

It says AI responses may include mistakes. So obviously it was a mistake that your name wasn’t included. Well, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe if you asked for, uh, the best SQL Server performance consultant in the world outside of New Zealand, it would, it would show up.

But maybe. Yeah, maybe we can, we can hope. Right.

You know, if you take advantage of that, uh, the AI SEO, maybe by the time someone watches this video, the results will be different. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe that’d be nice. Maybe you don’t pay for, pay enough for chat GPT for them to give you a real in-depth answer.

You probably, you’re probably using like, Oh, I’m using some like free Google or whatever. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Well, I’ll, I’ll, I’m, I’m doing my best not to be offended by this. Okay. I’m crying inside. Hey, if you want to end the video, we can. No, it’s all right. Oh, I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna pinch my inner thigh real hard. So the emotion sort of tapers off.

Well, for the record, I think the AI is wrong. It is yet another example of untrustworthy. Yeah.

You know, there’s a lot of that. Uh, I don’t, I don’t know. Have you, have you been able to use AI for anything meaningful? And like your. No. Yeah. I mean, like I’m kind of an AI. Uh, I guess like, like I, I, I can’t really get over the, Oh, well, you know, here’s a lot of here’s some, here’s an answer to have, like might be wrong.

Like. It makes you think you can only use it for like. Things where it’s okay to be wrong or things that are easy to verify if they’re correct. Like, I don’t know.

Like if you asked for like a pound drone, that’s like 15 characters long, I guess, yeah, for that. And then it like, like spits out a word easily verify if it’s correct. Right.

Maybe like that’s a good use. Or if you’re doing some like proof of concept code that will never reach production though, as we all know, if the code works, you can. Ship it.

Say what you want about never reaching production and temptation will rear its ugly green head. And now you’ve got AI code in production. Yeah.

I think. I’m definitely the wrong person to ask, but I have, I have a very negative outlook on AI personally. Yeah. Uh, you know, the, the, a lot of the things that I’ve tried to use it for were things that theoretically it should be good for, but the, it just gives you such junk back.

Like, uh, you know, like I, I, I’ve, I’ve tried to use it to like, um, outline in detail training content, but it’s just such a dead end for that because like the, the topics that I would want to cover are not just like, you know, uh, the like DBA one-on-one stuff that you, that it’s capable of, um, you know, generating, uh, a lot of problems with things being factually and technically incorrect.

Uh, whenever I try to like, you know, get into it a little bit there and, uh, yeah, it’s just, you know, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been very disappointed. By, by the, the things that it’s produced. I know that AI is very good at maybe that’s, I, I don’t know, maybe it’s sort of like the, like the coin toss thing where it’s very good at showing me what I don’t want.

So I can at least like, like, oh no, I need to do the opposite of this. This is fine. Right. Uh, but yeah, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve not, I’ve not had a lot of, uh, success getting it to, um, to produce things that are, um, up to, up to the par that I would like them to be.

I actually did have an interaction recently. Uh, you know how if you enable service broker, it has to make a super annoying lock, which is like very difficult to get.

Yeah. I guess. I don’t know. It’s like, uh, it’s like an exclusive database lock or something where like nothing else can be connecting. Yeah. It’s like turning on RCSI. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I wanted to turn off service broker and I, I wondered, I wonder, I wonder if it needs the same super annoying lock. I suspected it did. I, uh, Google that Google’s AI summary shows up at the top and it says, no, you know, you can like while enabling service broker needs a lot, you can say, well, without taking lock.

And I thought that doesn’t sound right. I’m going to try it. And do you want to guess if it takes a super annoying lock?

I’m going to guess it did take a super annoying lock. It did take a super annoying lock. Well, I mean, you know, the power of AI at our service, you know, uh, you know, typically with SQL Server, uh, you expect the worst.

You don’t hope for anything. There’s no hope for the best. Expect the worst. You just expect the worst possible outcome. And then sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised when it does not reach that critical mass.

Like other. I think it’s better than these videos where our viewers can and should expect the best. Correct.

Right. Especially from your camera. Yes. Yeah. Yes. All right. I’m, I’m, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a, a stop recording. Okay. All right. Well, since Joe is ready to stop recording, Joe is tapping out on me. Uh, we’re going to wrap this one up.

Uh, I guess we got off the subject of SQL Server tooling a little bit, but, uh, I think we covered enough of that to at least live up to the name of the, the, the title of the episode.

So we’re going to get going here. Thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed yourselves. I hope you learned something. Once again, thank you to our fabulous sponsor, darling data and a beer gut magazine. And, uh, we will see you in the next thrilling episode where, uh, Joe will show us more of his screen.

I hope. All right. Thank you for watching.

Going Further

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