I attended the Special Ops Tour for SQL Server 2012 in Denver recently. It was an event that was showcasing some of the changes in SQL Server, with presentations and networking for the local SQL Server pros. It was fun to get out for a half day and see some friends from the area and extra exciting as the RTM was announced the day before our event.
During the opening talk, there was a slide with a very interesting statistic. It talks about the last few years had seen 40% data growth for many organizations, but IT budgets had only grown by about 5%. Those two numbers don't really relate well to each other since the cost of IT operations can dwarf the cost of storage, but for how long? At some point 40% growth will catch up and become a significant cost in your organization.
The 40% growth does show that data professionals become increasingly important to companies. As "Big Data" becomes something that more companies need to deal with, the skills that we have as data professionals will become more valuable. We have to learn to separating out the information from the noise, enforce data quality, and learn to manipulate large volumes of data more efficiently. SQL Server is growing to help us with enhancements to SSIS, DQS tools, and even Hadoop processing capabilities, but we need to learn how to better use these tools. Storage is also an issue, and so many products and tools are available to help here. We have lots of compression tools, some de-duplication tools for backups, and more, but we need to learn how these tools fit in our environments, and what the ROI is for our organization.
Budgets are not going to keep pace with the requirements we face. We need to learn to work smarter, more efficiently, and more effectively to get the most out of the limited funds available.
Steve Jones
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