> All SQL Server DBA's and developers need to learn about .net...or get left behind.

Okay, I'll bite. There are a couple of posts in this thread urging me and other DBAs to "be there or be square" with regard to .NET. Who knows, maybe this time the doomsayers are right. Unless I get on the bandwagon NOW!!!! and get with the program on .NET, I'll be selling apples on the street corner in three years, while some pimply teenager gets stuck maintaining my databases.

But first, a word from reality...

1. The principles of database design and SQL are not likely to change that much in the next twenty years. Incrementally, yes. In a revolutionary manner? No.

2. Database is a big enough chunk for most people to bite off. Lord knows it keeps me busy. It's likely I'll learn a few things about .NET that a database guy needs to know, and leave becoming an expert in it to those with a need to know.

3. Most programmers do not find database very interesting, and thus have mixed results when designing schemas. It isn't likely that .NET is going to make programmers love database more. Which is fine... more work for me.

4. The rush to learn the latest technologies can keep one way busier than necessary. I've been in this business since 1984, and here, in capsule form, are some of the highlights...

a. Learn DB2 or you'll be unemployed in two years.

b. Learn Unix or you'll be unemployed in two years.

c. Learn to program in C or you'll be unemployed in two years.

d. Forget C, learn to program in C++ or you'll be unemployed in two years.

e. The real wave of the future is top-down structured design. Pretty soon, we'll be forced to adopt it, and those who don't will become dinosaurs.

f. Scratch that, all real programmers are learning Warnier-Orr diagramming. It's catching on -- EDS uses it -- and pretty soon all programmers will be forced to learn it.

g. Object-Oriented Design will soon replace all procedurally-oriented code, and those programmers who can't learn the new paradigm will find themselves out of a job.

h. Distributed client-server applications (i.e., "fat client") are the way things are going, and woe to the programmer who can't understand the concepts of networking.

i. Client-server is an outmoded architecture, as the configuration costs are too high. Thin client is the latest thing....

And ditto: Ada, Pascal, Java, Perl, object-oriented database, AI, code generators, OLAP, Power Builder, C#, etc., etc., and etc.

Some may counter that I'm enshrining ignorance. Hardly. I just have a healthy enough respect for what I do that I know I must pick my battles.

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