Well, I did decide to get up and go to the general session today, despite my concerns from yesterday.  I decided that I'd let the Dell dude establish his own reputation.  And I'm glad I did.  The information he shared was not particularly relevant to the work I do, but for others it probably was.  He was a bit more animated than the HP guy, and used other companies' experiences for his points rather than their own.  But most importantly, he kept his presentation short.  Good job!

Then, Jim Gray from Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center came in and talked about where things are going in the future, including the merging of objects and databases where he pointed out that people were asking the wrong question (”How do you put objects into databases?”) and should have been asking, “What kind of an object is a database?”.  Subtle, but a HUGE difference.  He also made some interesting predictions such as, “in 10 years we'll be dealing with Petrabytes as commonly as we talk about Terrabytes today” and that at that point, we will just store everything, reverting back to systems that are just INSERT and READ only, no updates, no deletes.  Interesting idea.

By the way, for those of you wondering how much storage it will take to store “everything” the answer appears to be about 16 Exabytes (whatever those are).  Fun talk, but my head was hurting from all the stretching he did.