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>> Hi. I'm Anna Thomas,
a Data and Applied Scientists on the Azure SQL Team.
In this episode of Data Exposed,
I'm joined by Mark Russinovich,
our CTO of Azure,
and we're going to talk a little bit
about the future. Thanks for joining us, Mark.
>> Thanks Anna.
>> So the first question I have for you is an easy question.
I'm on the SQL Team,
this is a data show,
can you tell us a little bit about your history of data?
>> Well, so data is actually a key part of the Cloud Platform.
I have been in Azure since 2010,
and already by the time I'd started,
Azure SQL Database was one of
the first PaaS services that came up on the platform.
So it's been part of the Azure journey.
>> You've talked a little bit about your history,
can you tell us about where we're going,
where do you see the Azure platform or
data specifically headed over the next few years?
>> So I think there's a couple of trends you're starting to see.
One of them is multi-modal infrastructure,
data infrastructure, CosmosDB being
a really great example of that,
with five or six APIs and counting on top of
the same core which provides all of those different APIs.
These awesome consistent capabilities like geo-replication,
and multi-master, and different consistency levels.
So I think you're going to see more of that.
Also bringing compute to the data,
is something else that you're also seeing.
Again, CosmosDB with the introduction of spark,
you'll see this in our storage service too.
There's going to be compute coming to that as well,
and even the storage has multi-modal on top of that.
So those two plus those capabilities
that CosmosDB has really pioneered like global replication,
is the trends that you're seeing in data.
>> As far as the database landscape goes,
what do you think is the next big thing?
>> There's a few next big things.
I think more near term,
the next big things are
basically having this consistent capabilities
across all these different data services trying to.
While you've got this concept of data lake,
you'll still see these data islands end
up in these particular data stores,
you're going to see bringing the analytics capabilities
on top of a data like where you can
ingest and process data from diverse sources.
I think that's a big thing that's happening right now.
Another one, I think that you've
mentioned before me getting into, is Blockchain.
If you take a look at what a Blockchain is, it's a database.
It's a distributed shared database that's decentralized,
but at its core, it's a database.
It's keeping track of transactions.
Interesting thing to me is if you take a look
at all of the existing Blockchains,
they're all brand new database implementations.
They don't have the ecosystems that are more mature like SQL have,
and it would be interesting to look
at what Blockchain capabilities
are verifiable logs capability,
that is one aspect of Blockchain,
could we bring to an existing mature database.
>> So as you talk about these databases,
and new databases, and the specialized use-cases,
do you see in time that we'll continue to
diversify the different types of databases in the landscape,
or do you think we'll start to simplify and
converge to one database?
>> Yeah. It's a really good question. I think there's always
this underlying trend which we've effort to say,
we can put all of the databases converged on one to rule them all,
but I think that the reality is a little more complex.
There's different workloads that have
different data access patterns that need to be optimized,
and there's different APIs that are
better suited different applications
in the way that they store data.
So if you take a look at NoSQL and SQL,
the NoSQL emerged because SQL just wasn't great at handling
the data access patterns and storage,
that NoSQL was great at.
You don't see a convergence of those two technologies and saying,
NoSQL and SQL are on top,
they are even the same infrastructure,
much less having the same APIs.
So there's going to be different cases,
and they're likely going to be more rather than more convergence.
Even in the case of Azure SQL, in the case of SQL,
there's different services that
are optimized for different workloads.
Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL,
two different workloads, same
API underlying different infrastructure optimized for each case.
So bottom line is,
I don't believe that there's going to be a bit convergence.
I think if anything,
we might see more specialization.
>> Well, very interesting, thanks Mark.
Thanks for sharing, and thanks for joining us today on our show.
Thank you all for tuning in to this episode of Data Exposed.
Be sure to tune in next time where we ask
Mark about SQL specifically.
In the meantime, feel free to like this video,
comment on what you'd like to see more of,
and subscribe to our channel.
Until next time, thank you.
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