T-SQL Tuesday #199 Invitation: Back to on-prem?

It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again! And we’re almost to number 200! T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly community blogging event started by Adam Machanic in 2009. Each month a host picks a topic, participants write about it on the second Tuesday of the month (9th of June), and the host posts a recap with links to all the responses.

The Topic

I was intrigued by this blog post from Alexander Arvidsson (blog | bluesky | linkedin): The Whiplash Effect – The Skills We Forgot We’d Need. He talks about the fact that more and more clients are considering moving back to on-prem. Or at least consider it an option when brainstorming architectures. There might be many reasons for this (and it might be a Europe thing, who knows), such as cost, performance or political climate. Alexander then poses the questions: do we still have the skills to create an infrastructure and data platform on-premises? Haven’t we lost too many skills after a decade of cloud computing? When was the last time you had to deal with a slow SAN? (it’s always storage. And if it isn’t, it’s DNS) Or had to set up Kerberos? Or had to deal with file paths that were too long for Windows to handle?

So, dear reader, I want you to think about what would happen if suddenly your company or your client asks to build everything on-prem again (or maybe a hybrid architecture). Possible angles can be:

• what skill do you think you would have to learn again?
• or, maybe you are still on-prem, you never left for the cloud, but what do you think that people would struggle with?
• do you have some war stories about on-prem, something that the script kiddies of today wouldn’t understand?
• if you had to train a junior to work on-prem, what would be your best advice?

The Rules

1. Publish your blog post on Tuesday, June 9, 2026. Posts should go live between 00:00 UTC and 23:59 UTC.
2. Include the T-SQL Tuesday logo in your post, linked back to this invitation post.
3. Let me know you participated by leaving a comment below or sending a trackback (I have to approve comments, so don’t worry if it’s not directly visible). Feel free to also use the #tsql2sday hashtag on your favorite social media platform.

A week later, I’ll post a roundup of all participating blog post on this site. If you’re interested in hosting a future T-SQL Tuesday, contact Steve Jones at tsqltuesday.com/requesttohost.

I’m looking forward to your contributions!