This week was TechEd, and I watched a few highlights of the event remotely from the ranch in Colorado. One thing was quite apparent from the coverage is that the cloud is very important to Microsoft. They've backed off the "everything in Azure" message that we have been seeing for a few years, and I saw quite a few talks and demos about hybrid applications and the private cloud. One that's located in your data center.

However the cloud is still important, and I wonder if this piece is true. It talks about five things Redmond doesn't want you to know, and the first item is that the cloud is first. New releases of products will likely come in the cloud first, and in a version you can buy second. The article mentions Sharepoint, but many other Microsoft products live in the cloud, including SQL Server.

Is that a bad thing? Many of us complain about the quick release cycles of SQL Server, so having new releases take longer in the box may be preferable. It's already a challenge supporting two or three versions of SQL Server. If releases continue to come every two years, I suspect many DBAs will be supporting five or six versions in their companies very soon. That will be challenging, especially as many of the monitoring and troubleshooting skills we will build or buy may not work with all those versions.

I don't know if the rest of the items listed in the article are true or even important us data professionals. However I do think that if SQL Server moves toward a cloud-first development model, I think it might be something that many DBAs appreciate.

Steve Jones