Welcome!

Welcome to the DataWorks team blog. If you’re a regular on our MSDN site https://msdn.microsoft.com/data, the public newsgroups or follow Angel’s or Sushil’s blogs you’ve already run across some of the folks from this team. We wanted to create this team blog to create an informal channel so more members of the team can easily share what’s going on with the technologies they work on. Hopefully you’ll find the information interesting and you’ll take the time to give us your feedback. 

Let me start by telling you a little about the DataWorks team. (You probably don’t recognize the name because it’s an internal team name and not a product name.) We’re the team responsible for Microsoft’s data access technologies. Right now, we’re working on updates to ADO.Net, MDAC (ADO, OLEDB, ODBC) and our SQL JDBC driver. (Did you know that MS has a JDBC driver for SQL – works on Unix too!) We’re also hard at work adding Web Services support to the next version of SQL Server and we’re continuing to support and maintain technologies like DAO, DBLIB and ESQL (at least for a little while longer). 

As for me, I’m Alyssa Henry and I’m the Product Unit Manager for this team. I’ve been working on data access at Microsoft since 1996 when I joined the data team as a PM for DAO. I went on to design and ship the first versions of ADOX, ADOMD, JRO, SQLOLEDB and Oracle OLE DB and then subsequently managed the team responsible for the design and development of all of MDAC, ADO.Net, JDBC and SQL Server protocols. Prior to joining the data team I spent a number of years both within MS and in the industry as a developer building line of business applications. I’ve stayed in this team for almost 9 years now because I love the team and the technology. I’m looking forward to sharing more about the team and our technologies through this blog.

Thanks for reading and welcome to our blog!

Alyssa Henry
Product Unit Manager - Dataworks Team
Microsoft