It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again. Our host for edition 190 is Todd Kleinhans, and he asks us to write about mastering technical skills.

I like that topic. Most of all, of course, because I spend a lot of time teaching, which is for most people the other side of mastering new skills, or improving existing skills. But also because I believe that we all live in a world of continuous learning. Those who do not learn will fall behind. Gradually at first, then ever faster.

Of course, that does leave us with the choice of which technical skill to work on. There are so many options nowadays. And if you don’t look at Azure or its competitor services for just a week or two, you will have missed the announcement of yet another new service, a rebrand, a functionality change, and perhaps also something is discontinued.

My choice is a different one. Instead of trying to be a generalist who knows a bit about everything that is available in the cloud, or even on premises, at any time, I have chosen to be a deep specialist. I do SQL Server performance tuning. And I do it very well, as should be expected for someone with my years of experience in this specialization.

Sometimes, people ask me whether this is still a relevant skill. Microsoft keeps adding features that (try to) fix known performance issues. AI keeps getting better at identifying performance problems. Will manual query tuning become obsolete?

Well, that depends. If your idea of query tuning is to look for scan operators with a Predicate property to identify index candidates, and then look for Key Lookup operators and make indexes covering, then I predict that you will be out of work soon. Perhaps already. AI is good at recognizing known patterns. And Microsoft is working to alleviate those by releasing features that work for the 95% of standard cases. We don’t need you for that category anymore.

But Microsoft can not and will not build and release features that fix unforeseen things. And AI will not and can not recognize patterns it has not seen before. And yet, from working for my clients, and from talking with attendees in my courses, I know that such problems exist. Every company, every database system, has its own unique challenges. Those are the cases where, at this time, I get hired because a company’s regular staff can’t fix the problem. And in the future, those will be the cases where companies look for specialists after realizing that AI was not able to help them.

Those are never the easy cases. Those are never the standard performance problems. Those are the problems that can only be identified and solved by a combination of very deep technical knowledge, plus human creativity and out of the box thinking.

In the coming years, the demand for query tuning specialists will go down. But that will be only the relatively easy part of the job. The known issues that Microsoft is going to address in the ever growing list of Intelligent Query Processing features. The standard pattern that AI can recognize from its huge training input. What then remains is a lower demand, but for even higher trained specialists. The people who currently get hired after regular staff (or the cheaper consultants) have to throw the towel.

That’s why I believe that deep understanding of execution plans remains relevant. Not for the standard problems and solutions. You never needed my training for that. But for all those problems that you only find by digging really deep, and truly understanding all the mechanics at play.

And because I believe that a deep understanding of execution plans remains relevant, I will continue to improve my own skills in that area. And I will also continue to share my knowledge with all who want to remain relevant as a query tuning specialist. I will continue to speak at conferences. I will continue to write my blog. And I will continue to create training videos, to make sure that everyone who wants to can access my knowledge, at their own time, their own place, and their own pace.

In fact, I released a new set of videos earlier this month! The basic level of block 6 (Sorting and grouping) is now available fur purchase. And until September 15, you can still benefit from the Early Bird discount: the full set of five videos, with a total play time of 2:42, for just $89.95. Hurry up! After September 15, these videos will return to their normal price of $99.95 for the set (or $24.95 for each individual video).

Thank you Todd for giving me the opportunity to explain why I believe that query tuning and execution plan knowledge are still relevant skills, perhaps even more than before, though for a  smaller audience. And thanks for the opportunity to put in some gratuitous advertising for my videos!