T-SQL Tuesday #100 – Looking Forward 100 Months

Invitation and roundup from T-SQL Tuesday founder, Adam Machanic.

Let’s look forward…

Anyone who has been in IT for more than 10 minutes knows how the industry works. IT loves its trends, but things tend to be very cyclical. Our current crop of “cloud” technologies are nothing new at the heart of things. The cloud, a wise person once said, is merely someone else’s server. And we’ve seen prior iterations of these same hardware sharing ideas going all the way back to the 1960s. Machine Learning, likewise, has been around in other guises for several years. Columnstore ideas are decades old even if they’re new-ish in the Microsoft space, and even in-memory has a rather deeper history than many realize. None of these “new” technologies about which we’re so excited are actually new, even if they’re newer (and hopefully better) implementations.

It is possible, of course, that a more rapid cycle could break the trend. It is possible that newer technologies will be truly new. Or perhaps the future will simply bring more of the same, a continuation of the everlasting IT sine wave.

Your mission for month #100 is to put on your speculative shades and forecast the bright future ahead. Tell us what the world will be like when T-SQL Tuesday #200 comes to pass. If you’d like to describe your vision and back it up with points, trends, data, or whatever, that’s fine. If you’d like to have a bit more fun and maybe go slightly more science fiction than science, come up with a potential topic for the month and create a technical post that describes an exciting new feature or technology to your audience of June 2026. (Did I do the math properly there?)