August 18, 2025 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Next Great Thing
August 18, 2025 at 7:50 am
The gist was that Hadoop was going to make data warehouses obsolete.
I thought the idea behind English Query was going to be huge. Looking at BI Genie and AI, perhaps I was right, just a bit early in thinking so.
About a decade ago, I saw a SQL Bits (Westminster) presentation on NOSQL. It looked like a lot of SQL Server work was going to evaporate. In some cases, the use cases were absolutely right for NOSQL. In others...well, PostGres has come into its own.
My experience is that there is usually a lot of fear surrounding shifts in technology. The tech world hypes up these changes in an unhealthy way. Yet, when you look at businesses, they change much more slowly. A sudden change risks alienating their customers, and customer retention is far cheaper than customer acquisition. This makes many of their choices conservative. Just look at the schedule for upgrading older versions of SQL Server.
August 18, 2025 at 7:58 am
I liked this perspective a lot. Every few years there seems to be a “next big thing” that’s supposed to completely change our jobs, whether it was cloud, blockchain, or now AI. In practice, most of those technologies end up adding to the toolbox rather than replacing roles entirely.
For me, the real lesson has been to stay adaptable — pick up enough knowledge about the new tech so you can speak to it, but continue building depth in core skills like data modeling, performance tuning, and automation. Those fundamentals don’t really go away, no matter what new trend shows up.
August 18, 2025 at 10:08 am
Hadoop! I forgot about that one, good reminder David.
Just to be clear: I don't wanna make it sound like I don't like AI. I do, and I use it every day. I think it'll make a bigger impact than blockchain did, but not as big as, say, virtualization or the cloud.
August 18, 2025 at 12:19 pm
Yeah, Hadoop was touted as the litmus test if a business would survive: "Companies will be dead in 3-5 years if they don't move to Big Data!" That was just about 10 years ago, and where is Hadoop now?
While Hadoop had some merit to the technology, there was certainly a lot of hype and promise about it. Like Hadoop at the time, the same is happening with AI. While I do believe that there is some merit in the technology, there is more hype than truth about it. It's also a misnomer to call it Artificial Intelligence. They are some very impressive algorithimic search, summary, and rule-based engines (i.e. concensus), but no reasoning or intelligence involved.
Will it make an impact? Yes. There are areas that will be significantly affected by the technology, but just making everything "AI enabled" is a marketing hype. Search engines, text processing, image processing, etc. will benefit from the technology. Anything where repetitive rules-based processing can be applied will benefit. Otherwise, let's keep an eye out for the marketing smoke and mirrors.
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August 18, 2025 at 1:55 pm
We hired AI specialists. One of the things they are tasked with doing (at a bare minimum) is internal lunch and learn sessions. The gap I am seeing behind the hype is that the education piece is very sparse. I suspect that this is because, behind the headlines, very few have a clue what problem AI solves for their business.
The more I learn about AI, the more I feel that data and information quality are going to mute the successes. I've also seen a case where someone has (finally) bitten the bullet with data/information quality and found that having to think about data/information quality presents all sorts of unexpected benefits.
Someone on SQLServerCentral made the distinction between using AI and implementing AI. Many of us are already using AI; I suspect few are implementing it.
August 19, 2025 at 11:52 am
Years of past experience will continue to count, as many problems we have solved are unique in nature and limited to specific domain and business area, and yes, at the same time, we need to be adaptable to newer technology and trends…
AI at current stage, does not seems to take way the job of experienced database developer..
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