If you pay attention to product marketing today one of the things you may notice is that they are constantly inventing new problems for which they can sell you a solution. Maybe that isn’t quite fair. Many times they are simply inventing new terms to describe problems that already exist. At the end of the day, we end up with all these “new” products to solve “new” problems we didn’t even know we had.
What have we seen in the last few years that is really innovative? If you think about it, there is really very little. Most of what we have today has very little in the concept of new thought. It is simply applying additional capabilities of what we already have.
Let’s take a look at big table from Google for example. The new idea behind google was to distribute processing over many smaller machines. The concept of distributed processing had already been solved. We already had machines with massive amounts of processors in a single machine. This was due to the need to have a high speed pipeline to enable the many processors to cooperate at a high enough speed. Google simply took advantage of the additional network capabilities that have been increasing incrementally for decades. Now they are still doing the same thing, except using network cables for communication instead of a buss.
How long has it been since SQL, and relational databases were developed. We still continue to use the same work with little enhancement from the original creators.
Even many of the NoSql engines that are “new” are simply an adaptation of old technologies.
We aren’t seeing new sort algorithms. We aren’t seeing new design patterns. New languages abound, but tend to be improvements, or simplification of already existing languages.
Is there anything really new, or are we simply making incremental improvements that are adding up to really big things over time? What have you seen in SQL Server, for example, that has really rocked your boat? Something that made a change in your toolset that you can’t live without?
Perhaps I’m just getting picky in my old age. What do you think?
Cheers,
Ben