It was 2005 and I had the honor of listening to Jim Gray give one of the keynote sessions at the PASS Summit. I remember but a few details in the talk itself. What stands out the most to me here is how I remember feeling enlightened after he shared his insights into where our world was headed. Of all the keynotes I have attended over the years I would put his talk easily into my top five, and perhaps even my top three favorites.
One of the details I recall he discussed was the idea of exabytes. Until that talk, I had rarely even heard of the phrase terabyte. But here was Dr. Gray moving past my realm of terabytes, pausing a moment to mention the word petabyte, and discussing just how many exabytes of data storage we would all have in the next decade or so. In a lot of ways I felt like I was listening to Carl Sagan give a talk. Here was someone taking very complex ideas and breaking them down into terms that even I could understand. Dr. Gray was a wonderful communicator of ideas and concepts, and his time on stage that day has stayed with me all these years.
These days it is not uncommon to talk about terabytes. I see people talk about having a 50TB database in the same manner we used to talk about a 50GB database. I have even seen someone talk about having 1TB of RAM for a server. Unthinkable! But not for someone like Dr. Gray. He not only could think it, he could talk about it, and about the challenges we would all face as a result.
I’m fortunate to have been there to listen that day.
