I saw an interesting note about how Intel is warning developers that they need to learn to program with multiple cores. They're saying 100 cores on a chip isn't far away. I'm sure there's a lot of truth here and it worries me. I think we'll see some really poorly build applications as most programmers struggle here. It's probably similar to what we saw when people tried to move from a command line / DOS environment to an event driven model like Windows. I know I had issues learning some concepts there.

I'm wondering how much this would apply to DBAs, however. We have an OS (SQLOS) on top of another OS, and together, these two systems need to manage the parallelism and threads we use. In most cases, we don't care about threads, though in SQL we sometimes want to limit things.

Moving to a parallel, multi-threaded world will be tough. I struggled in college and barely understood some of the concepts, though to be fair, there weren't a lot of places to practice and it seemed to be a very specialized skill I didn't want. Now I wish I'd done a little more work, but perhaps it doesn't matter. I can go on writing my SQL queries and let the SQL Server platform manage the cores.