When I was a kid I read a lot of science fiction books, all predicting that we would be driving in flying cars or have regular trips into space.  There was this anticipation that we'd have robots helping us with many of the chores of our everyday life and that computers would be much more intelligent that they are now. That hasn’t come true, but the world has dramatically changed since I was 12 years old.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn gave a talk recently that looked at the future. He acknowledged that we didn't have flying cars, but we have had something that has changed our world: data. He looked at the early web, anonymous and slow and the 2.0 model of social interaction and offline identities moving online. It's hard to know where the next evolution of the web will go, but I think that the dramatic explosion of data will be a part of it.

We collect so much data, and there is a tremendous call for the analysis and aggregation of that data. We seem to be fascinated, and driven by the regular presentation of information. For a long time that involved numbers, but there is tremendous growth in new presentation techniques that blend data, using colors and shapes to help us understand. It's amazing how much people even want to manipulate the data, especially when some gesture-based, iPad-like interface is involved.

For the data professional this is great news. Our skills will be in demand, and there is tremendous opportunity in learning how to better gather, store, analyze, and present data. Our RDBMS systems have grown to encompass an amazing array of tools to assist us, and if you need something that isn't built in, there are so many vendors providing tools and utilities that make almost anything possible.

We live in an age of data, one that I find very exciting.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

• Windows Media Podcast - 20.8MB WMV

  

• iPod Video Podcast - 14.9MB MP4

  

• MP3 Audio Podcast - 3.5MB MP3

  

The podcast feeds are available at sqlservercentral.mevio.com. Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there. Overall RSS Feed:

or now on iTunes!

Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

You can also follow Steve Jones on Twitter: