As you may have heard by now, I am joining the wonderful team at SQLskills as a Principal Consultant starting on May 1, 2012. I am very excited by this opportunity, since I will have the chance to work with a small group of amazing people that I truly like and respect. Hopefully, some of their greatness will rub off on me… 

First is Kimberly Tripp (blog|twitter), who I have known and looked up to for years. Long before I was a speaker or author, I can remember seeing Kimberly presenting at Microsoft TechEd, and being inspired to learn more about SQL Server. I also had the opportunity to take a one week immersion class from her back in 2006, which was extremely useful for my day-to-day work at NewsGator over the years after that.  I originally met Paul Randal (blog|twitter) in early 2007, while he was still at Microsoft. Paul spent nearly nine years at Microsoft working on the Storage Engine Team, rewriting DBCC CHECKDB, and becoming an expert on the internals of SQL Server. I have gotten to know him much better over the past five years, and I have been very impressed with his knowledge and straight-forward attitude.

I became aware of Jonathan Kehayias (blog|twitter) back in 2007/2008, when I noticed how many questions he was answering on the MSDN SQL Server Engine Forums, which was extremely impressive. Since then, he has become a Microsoft Certified Master in SQL Server 2008, a SQL Server MVP, written an excellent book (Troubleshooting SQL Server – A Guide for the Accidental DBA) , and has become probably the world’s foremost expert on SQL Server Extended Events. I first learned about Joe Sack (blog|twitter) when I bought one of his books (SQL Server 2008 Transact-SQL Recipes), which I have used many times over the years! Of course, he has written a number of other books, and he did his time in the trenches as a Premier Field Engineer (PFE) at Microsoft.  More recently, he helped get the SQL Server MCM program reorganized and more accessible to non-Microsoft employees.

All in all, it is a great group of well respected people and SQL Server experts that I am really looking forward to being a part of!

Filed under: SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012, Teaching Tagged: SQLskills