Back in the first half of the 1990s, SQL Server was supplied on four floppy disks. Later, it migrated to CD. Today, it can be downloaded or ordered on DVD. SQL Server has moved on, not only in how it is delivered to us, but also where it resides after it has been installed. It has grown from a better-than-Access database on nothing more than desktop PCs, to a truly corporate, enterprise-standard relational platform that consistently out-performs the competition in the latest Transaction Processing Council (TPC) speed tests - see the link at the bottom of this page. SQL Server is now one of the big players.
There are two major and immediate challenges ahead for SQL Server, which in turn present challenges for us as SQL Server professionals. The first challenge is the cloud —cynics might claim this is merely hosting on a large scale, a marketing exercise applied to the old computer bureau services of the 1970s. True, cloud is an outsourced hosted service,...