Moving on from Microsoft

Not too long ago, I handed in my notice to Microsoft, terminating my employment mid-June 2012. I suspect this is slowly leaking out on the Twitter and Facebook these hours – as is tradition in the connected world.

Resurrected!

I have decided to resurrect my old blog. There are new battles to fight and information to share.

First of all, a summary of what I have been doing the last 4 years:

I joined the SQLCAT team working on the largest SQL server installations I the world. It is exciting stuff and as far as I know, I have worked on:

• The largest single SQL database in the world: at 75TB
• One of the fastest core banking systems around: 13K business tx/sec, mapping to 52K database writes/sec (2 inserts, 2 updates per tx)
• The most scaled cube in the world: 1000 concurrently executing MDX queries in a 4TB cube racking up 50K IOPS per server – 4 servers
• The biggest SQL scale out system around – at 1PB using DPV
• Tuning for the ETL World Record
• Some of the fastest I/O systems ever attached to SQL server

I have tried to keep up with publishing whitepapers as I went along, sharing all I could. Two notable papers come to mind:

• The Data Loading Performance Guide
• The Analysis Services 2008 Performance Guide

Along with this, a ton of information on SQLCAT.com in the form of blogs, top 10 lists and TechNotes.

I wanted to bring back this blog, because I think there are a lot of things worth talking about that can be said without going through the somewhat long publishing process of Microsoft. For example, one of my big passions these days is good data modeling, without which the above could never have been achieved. I am almost sure that some of the discussions I will start on this subject will step on some feet (Data Vault modelers, consider yourself warned)

So here I am, back again. And let me stress right away: the opinions expressed on this blog are my own, not those of Microsoft.

Location:Helsinki, Finland

Moving to SQL CAT Team

I have been very silent on this blog for some time now.

 

The reason is that I have been hired to work for the the SQL Server CAT team. In the future I will be working with (even more of) the most challenging SQL Server installations in the world. My focus on BI will probably continue but I will also apply my OLTP tuning skills again.

 

My technical blog will now be found on: http://sqlcat.com

 

I would like to thank you for your comments and feedback and I look forward to hearing from you in the SQL CAT blog community

 

Sincerely
Thomas