Multiple Cores
Someone at Intel blogged that there are some fundamental changes coming for developers in the near future. They are starting to talk about shipping many more cores in their chips, possibly hundreds, and this will fundamentally change that way applications need to be written to take advantage of this.
I have done a little parallel programming in college, and I'll say that I didn't really understand it that well. Moving to multi-threaded architectures and synchronizing threads was something that seemed esoteric and in its own niche twenty years ago, but I bet that by the time I retire the vast majority of computers will have more than 8 cores and I'd hope that most software will take advantage of this situation.
I've welcomed the addition of more cores because the problems I have with computers are solved with by running tasks in parallel: multitasking. I'm not sure how many IT people work like I do, but I expect that there are any number of business people that keep multiple applications running simultaneously. I have Outlook, 1 or 2 email messages, One Note, a few browsers, iTunes, and more running all the time on my machine. I don't necessarily need stellar performance from any one of those applications, but I'm switching back and forth often, and I need constant performance from all of them.
And I've noticed that as I've gone to multiple cores, things have gotten better.
I hope DBAs don't need to learn how to program in parallel computing, since it's hard, complex, and I'd hate to see us trying to debug something written on SQL Server. I'm counting on the developers at Microsoft being very aware of the trends from Intel and working to find ways for SQL Server to efficiently use as many cores as possible, whether that's 4 or 400.
However I do think that application developers will start to develop applications differently with multiple cores and parallel tasks. I can see them writing applications that do more background work with the database, potentially many more round trips getting smaller pieces of data. Perhaps they'll be looking for multiple databases to store their data in and combine data in the application instead of the server.
It will take awhile, and I think we'll see a number of poorly written applications. I know moving from the DOS based world to an event driven, Windows model was difficult for me, and there was a time when we had many, many, poorly written Windows applications because lots of developers had similar struggles moving to a new model. Eventually that will smooth out and parallel programming becomes more commonplace and second nature to more and more programmers.
One thing for sure, the application development world will continue to be interesting for some time.
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