2017 - A Decade of Change

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. - Niels Bohr

In a comment to Doug's blog on licensing, Joel Garry, pointed me to this article from June 1997 predicting what we'd be doing today.  I found it quite an interesting read, with some absolutely on the money predictions.

• DBA profession as we know it will evolve into a set of more specialized jobs, some of which will involve non-DBA activities
• Ads will announce employment searches for "SAP v. N/Oracle v. M specific DBAs."
• Intelligent agents and self-monitoring systems will be required to control increasingly dispersed and diverse distributed databases. These developments will whipsaw DBAs. On one hand, the demand for DBA services will be undercut as jobs are increasingly de-skilled and automated, with centralized control ever more possible for widely distributed systems. On the other hand, the geometric explosion in the number and functionality of machines ensures that DBA expertise will be more valued than ever
• The placement of application code and business rules will continue to be an issue: Should they be stored in the middle tier of an architecture or in the database itself? The introduction of application servers, Web servers, DataBlades, Data Cartridges, relational extenders, and new development tools cloud the issue further
•  Specialized servers will proliferate as application servers for homegrown or customized packaged applications

as well as the misses.

• the future DBA will work less overtime
• Cheap holographic memory will hold terabytes of data in less than a cubic centimeter of space
• IS managers will develop new hiring criteria. They won't look for specific skills as much as broad experience and the ability to adapt quickly to the product du jour
• All client machines will have a local database system that must be synchronized periodically with a central server

Read through and wonder. I also liked the musing on the impact of the Nintendo Generation on our industry by the way. 

Anyway late Friday ten years after seems like a good time to add some preditcions of my own for the decade that will be 2007-20017. Think of it as some survivors, some deaths and some births.

Disks won't die.

Despite the long predicted advances in, and inherent advantages of solid state disks, they still won't meet the capacity and cost requirements of the multi-terabyte storage system of the next decade. Even the smallest companies will routinely store hundreds of gigabytes of data and require as much again in terms of indexing. The current trend to abstracting storage will continue however and almost no DBA in 2017 will be able to specify how many or which disks their data will be stored on.

DBAs won't die

Neither will the role of the DBA die, though it will continue to evolve towards service level and application management. A knowledge of application programing languages such as java will become indispensable as the DBA becomes held repsonsible for all aspects of the technical administration of corporate applications and not just the data and sql layers.

Servers Will Die

The coming decade will see corporations virtualise huge swathes of server resources, both physical servers and as indicated above storage. This will lead to reduced costs of provisioning and deployment for corporations and increased complexity and interdependency for administrators. It is unlikely that the support budget will rise appropriately.

Oracle databases will die

Not the Oracle database, it would be prediction 1 otherwise, but individual organisations will lose significant amounts of data, indeed may go under, as a direct result of the security of their databases being exploited. Database Security professionals will be a highly sought after resource.

Mobility will change everything

The widespread adoption of wireless, mobile computing and an increased drive in the affluent west away towards what today we call a work-life balance will result in more fragmented and co-operative applications - though web 2.0 will be a dirty word by then - and at least one core application that has yet to be invented will be the talk of the news, much as social networking sites dominate non-specialists technology discussions today.

Everyone will have more friends

A result of the explosion in social networking and communications technologies as well as an increase in globalisation will mean that more people than ever will form real and significant relationships with people from across the globe. Already today teenagers have more people they count as friends by an order of magnitude than my generation did - the fact that most of these are online rather than classmates is a clue to the way their adult social networks will develop.