Damir in Wonderland

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It’s been just over 5 weeks now that I’ve been working at Microsoft and my head is still spinning.  The first week I was here we had the team and Microsoft Canada launch events.  Then it was off to Atlanta for MGB – Microsoft’s internal sales and marketing conference. 

MGB was great because it was the first time I have seen Steve Ballmer present in person.  This man has more energy than all of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders of the last 20 years put together!  He is closely matched and almost surpassed by Orlando Ayala, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of Small and Mid-Market Solutions Group. Both of these guys get you off your seat and excited.

From MGB, back to Toronto (for a week) where I delivered my first presentation as a Microsoft employee - SQL Server Reporting Services (great feature that gets even better in SQL Server 2005!).  This was for a group of folks from Bay Street. 

No time to relax - off to Seattle for TechReady1, our internal technical training conference.  That was AWESOME!!!  I learned so much about upcoming products like Windows Vista, Exchange, Office 12, BizTalk 2006, and (my favourite) SQL Server 2005. 

At TechReady it became even more clear that joining Microsoft was exactly the right move for me.  Some of my friends and colleagues, when they heard about my move looked at me and asked What are you doing going to Microsoft?   You’re an Oracle guy!   Yes, I have been mostly working on with Oracle for the last 4 or 5 years, but in reality I have also been a SQL Server and other Microsoft technology guy for as long as I have been an Oracle guy, as evidenced by the technologies that I have written books about (see the results of a search on my name at Amazon.com).

The reasons for my move have a lot to do with what is coming out of Microsoft in the next 12-18 months, like SQL Server 2005.  Being a database guy I am really pumped about the new features in this next release like database mirroring, partitioning, the new concurrency mechanism and much, much more.  Stay tuned to this space and I’ll tell you why I think they are all sooooo cool and can be useful to DBAs, and IT Pros dealing with databases in general.