Early in my career, I worked on a large Novell Netware installation. We bought a server that was about 1/4 the size of a modern rack, which contained a number of blade slots each holding some type of hardware: CPUs, disk adapters, network adapters, and even disk drives. The disk slots held ~30MB drives, which were large for that time. Both in capacity, and physical size. Each of these monsters weighed a pound or more, and felt like it was built to withstand a fall from a table top.

That's one reason that I'm amazed by the 64GB storage in my phone and stunned by the 500GB mSata card I recently bought. The storage capacities we have available to us today, in small companies and startups, are truly stunning to us as data professionals, but not to the people that have the space available. It seems on a regular basis people easily fill up the space they have and clamor for more. Whether that's valuable data or not, I do know that much of that data still requires management and takes effort from us as data professionals.

We're not going to get more help, so as our databases grow, we need to find ways to manage more data, of disparate forms. Not just rows in tables, but Excel files, binary files of all sorts, XML extracts, Office documents, Hadoop hives and who knows what else. We need to be better at working with varying patterns of data, and perhaps files, at scale in order to continue to efficiently manage our workloads.

Just like system administrators that are starting to deal with hundreds or thousands of virtual instances, we have to be able to write code that helps us manage data in large quantities. I like PowerShell for more and more tasks, but without a doubt, writing efficient T-SQL that works with sets, learning SSIS, package design patterns, and more will become the skills that differentiate the valuable and capable DBAs from those that just keep the lights on.