I am a keen follower of Formula 1 racing, it could be the speed, the danger, the money, the politics, the glamour, I don't know, but it keeps my interest. I had a brief break a few years ago for various reasons that I might blog about at some time in the future but I have watched pretty much every race in the last few seasons.

For those of you not aware of the motorsport series known as Formula 1 it is a single seat racing car competition where the drivers get a car with between 730bhp and 950bhp and 23 adversaries. They race throughout the year, in about 18 locations across the planet, from Australia to Canada to Bahrain to Singapore and lots in Europe and other locations. For some time Michael Schumacher raced for the Ferrari team and had a 'purple streak' where he won 7 world championships. He was immense, very few other drivers had a level of skill to match his and few other teams had cars as good as the Ferarri's. Michael Schumacher finished racing in F1 in 2006. There was a chance he would return last year as a Ferrari driver had a horrific accident and was unable to race. He had a series of tests and was found to bit unfit to race at the time due to an injury he had recently sustained. This season, 3 years after he quit, he is back racing, this time with the Mercedes GP team. Now there are all sorts of reasons this might have been contrived - a historic German racing team with a German driver who has 7 world championships to his name has a lot of marketing potential for one thing!

Regardless of the benefits, this is a big risk for Schumacher's reputation, if he is rubbish, for what ever reason, people will always mention that, in their 2nd breath about him. Today in an interview broadcast on BBC TV Ross Brawn said that development in F1 is incremental, each year, the technology builds on that developed in the previous year. He cites this and a few other possible reasons for why Schumacher hasn't been the fastest driver this year.

If you were taken away from your technology for 3 years would you be any good when you came back? To have some sort of parity, consider whatever technology you use gets a new version every year. Count back 3 versions. Can you believe that, if you had stopped back at that version, you would be able to pick up the current version and be as effective as you currently are?

For SQL Server, we currently have SQL2008 (inc R2), previous to that 2005 and before that 2000. If you had stopped using SQL Server at version 2000, would you be able to pick up SQL 2008 and get working without any problems? I am not certain, in some ways things haven't changed much, such as the SQL standard but other things have changed enormously such as being able to store geographic and geospatial data types, reporting services, RAM and CPU support, dmv's, schema use and so on.

How do you think you would cope with a break from your work for the next 3 versions from now?