This week is the annual Microsoft BUILD conference, and once again, I'm not there. I've been trying to get to this event for 3 years, but scheduling keeps getting in the way. This year I was ready to register, but had a potential conflict for last weekend that would have had me gone all last week before coming home for a couple days before leaving again. I decided to limit travel, and my event cancelled.

Grrrr, next year I'm just registering.

I miss the old Microsoft PDC, a development conference that really inspired me to look to the future of computing. I was fortunate enough to attend two of them and came back with knowledge and excitement that had me writing lots of code. I have the feeling I'd be just as excited if I were there this week. I'm watching the changes in C# now, and I look forward to trying a few out.

If you haven't watched the opening keynote, you should. It's an interesting look at how Microsoft is really trying to grow computing in a few ways. We could argue about whether these will succeed or fail, but it is good to see someone thinking about the fact that many of us will want to see our applications and data move from phones to tablets to desktops and back. Some of us may even want applications in a HoloLens (though not me).

Certainly there are security concerns with moving information around, and definitely there will be design issues with displaying information across devices. I can't imagine things will be as smooth as Microsoft demonstrates, but I do think that all of the work and effort Microsoft is going is really for one purpose: we need our data to be everywhere. On every device, on demand.

To me all of this work really highlights the fact that more and more of our data needs to be available in many formats, and projected to many places and devices. We, as data professionals, will need to ensure we can meet the needs of our users, which might be ensuring we can duplicate (replicate), update, and manage data across instances, through ETL transformations, even "stretched" into the cloud. Certainly some of our data will be in file systems in documents, but I think lots will not be, especially data that our organizations will want to surface through software applications.

The future gets more exciting all the time for data professionals. Embrace it, enjoy it, and extend it.