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Day: January 7, 2026

Thoughts on AI-Driven Database Development in 2026

Published 2026-01-07 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar shares some thoughts:

In the PollGab question queue for Office Hours, MyRobotOverlordAsks asked a question that merited a full blog post answer:

My company announced during some AI training that within the next 12 months we won’t be writing any of our own code. Instead, we’ll be babysitting agents. What’s your opinion on this from a DB dev / DBA POV? MSSQL Dev tends to lag, so I’d personally be surprised.

If this sounds completely alien to you, check out this blog post by developer Armin Ronacher. In it, he discusses how 2025 was the year when he reluctantly shifted his development process to the point where now he spends most of his time doing exactly what MyRobotOverlordAsks’ company is proposing: rather than writing the code directly, he now asks AI tools to build and debug things for him, and he spends his time tweaking what they produce. (Update 2025/01/07: for another example, check out Eugene Meidinger’s post on his uses of AI.)

Brent is generally bullish on the idea. I agree that a lot of companies will move in this direction, but am not at all bullish that it’ll work well. I think this is mostly the latest iteration of Stack Overflow-driven development, except with less copy and paste of bad code and more generation of bad code.

If you want the really spicy version of this take, you’ll have to talk to me in person.

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Randomly Moving the Mouse Cursor in R

Published 2026-01-07 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun has been so busy, his screensaver never comes on, even when he’s out at lunch:\

New R Package called LazyMouse with single function for randomly moving mouse cursor in your favorite R IDE.

For every R developer, R data scientists and all those everyday R users, that also need a break and do not want the computer to go into sleep mode.

Read on to see how it works. And jokes aside, there have been times in which I’ve wanted something like this to keep the screen from locking up or drives going to sleep when running heavy work overnight on a device I can physically control (i.e., not a workstation I’m leaving on at the office).

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An Overview of Fabric Security Insights

Published 2026-01-07 by Kevin Feasel

Yael Biss lays out some changes:

We want to update on a strategic evolution in how you can access and utilize security insights within Microsoft Fabric! The powerful reports you’ve relied on in the Microsoft Purview Hub are officially transitioning and being significantly enhanced within the new Admin Report in the Govern tab of the OneLake Catalog, as was announced at Ignite in November and explained in the Govern in OneLake Catalog for Fabric admins (Preview) blog post.

This isn’t just a relocation; it’s a consolidation and elevation of your most critical governance data. This move is a direct response to your feedback and a key step in providing a more unified, intuitive, and action-oriented governance experience right where your data lives.

There’s a bit too much marketing hype in the blog post for me not to roll my eyes a bit, but the security insights themselves are useful.

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Creating a Variable Library in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-07 by Kevin Feasel

Laura Graham-Brown opens a library:

This post to help you get started creating a variable library. When multiple dataflows, notebooks and pipelines are using the same details to perform tasks it helps if those values are stored in one place. When you move to use deployment pipelines and those values change from your development workspace to your test workspace to your prod, it helps if that is easy. The solution in Microsoft Fabric is a Variable Library to store those common values.

Click through for step-by-step instructions on the process.

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