A headless Claude Code run that answers a disaster alert with a measured root cause in under five minutes, can only read, and says what it couldn't check. Ten rules, with the config, and a real failover. I am a lazy DBA, and I want to automate repetitive tasks so that I can focus more on building what is more valuable. The most repetitive thing I do is the first half hour of an incident. An alert fires, and before any thinking happens I get the laptop out, connect the VPN, RD

Eleven rules from putting production SQL Server data behind an AI assistant, read-only, with the receipts. In September we put an AI assistant in front of our production databases. Support staff ask it questions in chat ("what is the customer type of this account?", "did this message get delivered?") and it answers from live data in seconds. Nobody who asks holds a database login. The assistant doesn't hold one either, not in the way you'd expect . This post is the design, th

A monitoring probe kept firing “SQL Connection Error — Disaster” and clearing itself sixty seconds later. The engine never went down. It was never CPU-starved. It simply had no worker left to hand the next login. This is how I proved that from the DMVs, why max worker threads was the right lever in this one specific case, and the single check that tells you whether it is the right lever for you — because most of the time it isn’t. “Raise max worker threads” is the kind of adv

nitsql — a multi-dialect SQL static analyzer: 52 rules across SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL and SQLite. Finds SQL injection, non-SARGable predicates, missing indexes, connection leaks and error-handling gaps — in .sql files and in SQL embedded in Python, Node.js and C#. Runs as a CLI, a CI gate, a pre-commit hook, or a Claude Code skill. Open source, MIT. We maintain quite few SQL Server database repositories — thousands of stored procedures, functions and views, most

I used to open a chat window and ask my AI assistant to health-check the database fleet whenever I remembered to. It worked great — but "whenever I remembered" is a lousy schedule. So I taught the same health check to run itself: every production database server now grades its own health once a week and drops a color-coded report card into our team channel. No one logs in. No one runs anything. Here's the story — and a real (anonymized) report at the end so you can see exactl

Every production database investigation I've ever done started the same way: cold. An alert fires — "DB Call Failures," a blocking spike, a node that just failed over — and the clock starts. I open RPDs, dozen SSMS tabs, remember which server is the primary this week, paste in the same wait-stats query I've pasted a thousand times, and start piecing together what happened. The knowledge of how to investigate lived in my head and a folder of .sql snippets. None of it was avail

In my last post I traced a wave of EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) crashes on our SQL Server 2022 fleet to an EDR heap-hook incompatibility on Windows Server 2025, and walked through the cross-server comparison that pinned it down. That conclusion held up — for that crash signature. What it didn’t do was stop the bleeding. A few nodes kept crashing after the EDR remediation. Same exception code, but when I actually read the dumps frame by frame, it was a different fau

[UPDATED] In March 2026, our production messaging-database cluster started crashing again. Same exception code as the incident we resolved last year (0xc0000005, Access Violation), but a different stack signature, different servers, different cloud, and ultimately a completely different root cause. This time the bug wasn't in SQL Server. It wasn't in the storage drivers. It wasn't in our queries. It was in something we'd never have suspected without comparing the crashing ser

On public speaking, the age of AI, and why I finally stopped making excuses. There's a photo of me on a conference room screen. Batik shirt, arms crossed, smiling — probably more confident than I actually felt in that moment. "AI-Enhanced CI/CD Workflow for SQL Server, Renz Bagasbas, Senior Database Administrator." I stared at that slide for a few seconds before I walked up. Took a breath. And then I spoke. That probably sounds like nothing. For a lot of people, it is nothing

[UPDATED] There's a principle that stuck with me recently. The core idea was simple: stop describing what you want to build — start building it. If you can explain what you want clearly enough, AI can build it. But the catch is that "clearly enough" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Without structure, AI coding tools produce confident-looking output that quietly falls apart. They ignore your conventions, invent patterns you didn't ask for, and generate code th