This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by my friend and brother from another mother, Pinal Dave.

My job title is Chief Data Engineer for Enterprise Data & Analytics and Enterprise Data & AI. So, “Has AI Helped you with your SQL Server Job?” In a word, yes. I can hear some of you thinking, …

“How Has AI Helped, Andy?”

That’s a great question! I’m glad you asked!

Part of my job is managing, in part or wholly, the brands of a handful of business endeavors (the two mentioned above, plus Data Driven Media, the Data Driven Podcast, Data Integration Lifecycle Management Suite, and others under development). All of these businesses are related to SQL Server.

Managing brands involves blogging, writing, developing courses, and presenting. I’ve used Large Language Models (LLMs) to help develop outlines and craft better email responses.

Have I experienced wild success each and every time? Goodness, no! Sometimes the LLMs to which I subscribe – and I subscribe to a handful – produce output that I do not find useful. But more often than not, LLMs contribute ideas to the final output. Do I ever use the output of LLMs without editing? That has happened precisely once (last month).

For Coding?

I’m impressed with the capabilities Microsoft is adding via Copilot with Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL), as demonstrated in this SQLBits 2024 keynote video clip.

My experience for coding help has been unfruitful. I had a wakeup call when I used an LLM to convert contents of a cmd file to PowerShell. The resulting output PowerShell executed without failing, but it did not accomplish the intended purpose.

Reminder: Not failing != succeeding.

In March, Cognition Labs released Devin, an AI for coding. Will AI get better at software development? Yes. Yes it will. Does development include Transact-SQL? I believe there’s enough correlation between the outcomes to consider crafting T-SQL a development task, but that’s just my opinion. I call myself a database developer. I am not a DBA (I can provide references).

I’ve experimented with LLMs and SQL with mixed results.

So, answering the original question: Has AI Helped me with my SQL Server Job?
Yep. The help has been mostly related to business-y tasks, not so much with developer-y tasks.

ChatGPT generated the feature image for this post. That was helpful.

Peace.
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