Yesterday, Microsoft bought Zoomix, a very cool Israeli company. (<tangent> Israel is one of my favorite words - rich with layers of meaning: Isra meaning "one who struggles" and El, a Hebrew name for God </tangent>.)
Sunday I meet up with a friend who has a PhD in Computer Science and does research in a government lab. He said the most important database trend was semantics - identifying meta data about data. He also said the Oracle was all over semantics and Microsoft was behind the curve on this one.
Zoomix is a database semantics company researching data cleansing, linguistics and how these technologies become practical with databases. The Jerusalem based company will be integrated with Microsoft's Israeli research center and their work is going to integrated into future SQL Server versions.
Sounds cool to me.