Life alone is not a circle, Tech too

Sometimes I feel like tech just goes in circles.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, we had .dat files, COBOL scripts, and everything was file-based. If you wanted to “query” data, you wrote code.

Then came the 90s — DBase III+, FoxPro, Clipper — we wrapped those files with something that felt like a database. It was local, but it worked.

Then came centralization. RDBMS, DML, everyone moved to SQL, normalized schemas, and central servers. It was clean, elegant, and still works 🙂

Fast forward to 2010: ELT was a pain. Then came External Tables — query files directly again! Hive, Impala. Data Engineers felt super cool.

Now, in 2025, the cool kids are all-in on Managed Tables again — Inserts, Conversion, and that now you can convert an External Table to a Managed Table with predictive Optimization and fine-grained governance.

Maybe tech isn’t a straight line, it’s a spiral staircase — we revisit the same floor, just getting better.

“Life alone is not a circle, Tech too.”