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From Tool to Transformation: The Growing Role of AI in Database Operations

Tushita Gupta
Head of Product Design
Redgate Software

Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are becoming essential in data-driven businesses. With increasing pressures on time and resources, as well as growing complexity, AI offers critical support. It's not about AI replacing jobs, but rather about companies missing growth opportunities if they don't take advantage of AI tools. Businesses that fail to leverage AI may find themselves at a disadvantage compared to those that do.

But when do we make the shift to AI, and how?

We surveyed IT professionals on their attitudes and practices regarding using Generative AI with databases. We asked how they are layering the technology in with their systems, where it's working the best for them, and what their concerns are. Our 2024 survey on the State of the Database Landscape engaged 3,849 global IT professionals from all kinds of businesses, from large to small, and across 15 industry sectors.

You're Not Late Yet

We found that 20% of our respondents are already using AI in the context of database management, and 35% are planning to. We believe that many of the 32% who say they don't currently have plans to use AI will change their tune in the next few years.

Image
Redgate1

AI is not a panacea. It is a tool like any other, and it requires active and wise technological leadership to keep it aligned with business objectives. As Jeff Foster, our director of technology and innovation, says, "You need decent code reviews, human oversight and process-based guardrails to help prevent the buildup of technical debt."

How It's Used

Generative AI may be just a tool, but it is a unique one, as reflected in how people are using it in database development. More than any other task, our survey respondents are using AI for testing and development tasks that involve database schema (65%). AI is also used for generating and optimizing queries and code, and for generating sample data. These are areas where AI has unique and powerful benefits.

We believe it's critical to understand that, at the phase of AI adoption in the database business, the tool is best used to support IT professionals in the day-to-day performance of their jobs. As we can see in how Generative AI is currently being used, its greatest impact today comes from streamlining and automating tasks. Using it for generating business insights is far down on the most popular uses.

Image
Redgate2

We believe AI will ultimately be integrated into business decisions and that its use for "insights" will increase. However, that should not happen before we use the technology to make IT pros' jobs easier. Focusing on IT worker productivity will serve to get the group trained up on AI's capabilities, while providing them a time-saving benefit in their day to day.

We think it's appropriate and promising that the #1 task that organizations are looking at AI to streamline is query optimization. That's exactly the kind of work that benefits from human judgment combined with the pattern-matching skills of AI.

Image
Redgate3

Generative AI will have a significant impact in many aspects of our jobs, as well as in the fundamental products and services that companies sell. But business will always be competitive, and at all levels of employment, from entry-level coder to CEO, it will remain necessary to apply human creativity to find ways to use — not be used by — technology. The more work we do to provide our IT professionals with exposure to these tools today, the more successful they will be in the future.

Tushita Gupta is Head of Product Design at Redgate Software

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

From Tool to Transformation: The Growing Role of AI in Database Operations

Tushita Gupta
Head of Product Design
Redgate Software

Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are becoming essential in data-driven businesses. With increasing pressures on time and resources, as well as growing complexity, AI offers critical support. It's not about AI replacing jobs, but rather about companies missing growth opportunities if they don't take advantage of AI tools. Businesses that fail to leverage AI may find themselves at a disadvantage compared to those that do.

But when do we make the shift to AI, and how?

We surveyed IT professionals on their attitudes and practices regarding using Generative AI with databases. We asked how they are layering the technology in with their systems, where it's working the best for them, and what their concerns are. Our 2024 survey on the State of the Database Landscape engaged 3,849 global IT professionals from all kinds of businesses, from large to small, and across 15 industry sectors.

You're Not Late Yet

We found that 20% of our respondents are already using AI in the context of database management, and 35% are planning to. We believe that many of the 32% who say they don't currently have plans to use AI will change their tune in the next few years.

Image
Redgate1

AI is not a panacea. It is a tool like any other, and it requires active and wise technological leadership to keep it aligned with business objectives. As Jeff Foster, our director of technology and innovation, says, "You need decent code reviews, human oversight and process-based guardrails to help prevent the buildup of technical debt."

How It's Used

Generative AI may be just a tool, but it is a unique one, as reflected in how people are using it in database development. More than any other task, our survey respondents are using AI for testing and development tasks that involve database schema (65%). AI is also used for generating and optimizing queries and code, and for generating sample data. These are areas where AI has unique and powerful benefits.

We believe it's critical to understand that, at the phase of AI adoption in the database business, the tool is best used to support IT professionals in the day-to-day performance of their jobs. As we can see in how Generative AI is currently being used, its greatest impact today comes from streamlining and automating tasks. Using it for generating business insights is far down on the most popular uses.

Image
Redgate2

We believe AI will ultimately be integrated into business decisions and that its use for "insights" will increase. However, that should not happen before we use the technology to make IT pros' jobs easier. Focusing on IT worker productivity will serve to get the group trained up on AI's capabilities, while providing them a time-saving benefit in their day to day.

We think it's appropriate and promising that the #1 task that organizations are looking at AI to streamline is query optimization. That's exactly the kind of work that benefits from human judgment combined with the pattern-matching skills of AI.

Image
Redgate3

Generative AI will have a significant impact in many aspects of our jobs, as well as in the fundamental products and services that companies sell. But business will always be competitive, and at all levels of employment, from entry-level coder to CEO, it will remain necessary to apply human creativity to find ways to use — not be used by — technology. The more work we do to provide our IT professionals with exposure to these tools today, the more successful they will be in the future.

Tushita Gupta is Head of Product Design at Redgate Software

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...