New exciting BLOG coming from SQL Server Customer Advisory Team

Hello SQL Server Community! My name is Mark Souza and I work on the SQL Server product team and manage all customer programs. One exciting team that I manage is called the SQL Server Customer Advisory team (SQLCAT). This team spends 75% of their time away from the halls of Redmond, Washington working directly with the largest and most challenging SQL Server implementations across the world. We have implemented several systems 10TB+ in size, high volume banking systems as well as trading systems. Many of the deployments we’ve worked on were on hardware with 32-64 processors, large amounts of memory and on the most sophisticated SAN solutions. When SQL Server or any database management system is stressed at these levels you learn a lot about the internals of the product and what it can and can not do. The SQL CAT team objectives are three fold:

a) Provide quality assurance to ensure success of these enterprise systems.

b) Drive the enterprise feature requirements back into the product

c) Create Best practices from our learnings

This blog will be about these learnings and best practices. It will be technical and targeted mostly at the enterprise customer space. We welcome comments, questions, dialog from anyone at anytime, but remember we bring a deep technical knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server so leave the licensing questions for the marketing guys J

The Customer Advisory Team Members who will be posting:

Mark Souza – 23+ years working on RDBMS technology with 12+ on Microsoft SQL Server. I get to manage these database geeks

Tom Davidson – 25+ years database technology with 10+ Microsoft SQL Server specializing in Performance and Tuning

Prem Mehra – 35+ years in the database industry specializing in IO technologies and High Availability

Bren Newman – 12+ years Microsoft SQL Server and former member of the Replication development team.

Stuart Ozer – 25+ years database experience. Has built more TB+ data warehouses than I can count.

Prakash Sundaresan – 7+ years on the SQL Server Engine development team. Knows the Query Processor inside and out.

Kevin Cox – New member to the SQLCAT unit but brings 25 years of industry experience and strong SSIS and OLTP skills

Howard Yin – Another newbie SQLCAT guy. Comes from Oracle originally but we let him join us anyway. All around great skills with the product.

Lubor Kollar – 17+ years database engine development, 9+ with SQL Server. Currently member of SQLCAT with ongoing background responsibility as Group Program Manager on the Engine development team.

Gert Drapers – Has recently moved to Visual Studio team creating cool database development tools but is allowed lifelong membership to SQLCAT. Also the best SQL Server developer in the world.

Starting in September, we will be posting often. Let us know if there is a specific area of interest and we would be happy to blog about it. Enjoy!