Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog. Perhaps I should start off by answering the old Admiral Stockdale question: who am I and why am I here?

I'm a Senior Applications Developer in Microsoft's internal IT department.  I've been designing and coding PC and mainframe databases since 1979, and I've worked on just about every platform there's been; an incomplete list would include Vulcan, dBase, Clipper, r:Base, VSAM, RAMIS, DB2, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, and of course SQL Server (since 4.21).  I've been with Microsoft since 1999, and I've been working with SQL Server 2005 for over two years now.  My primary areas of expertise are database design and T-SQL coding.

After acting as an internal resource for Microsoft SQL developers for several years, I'm looking for venues to share best practices and lessons learned with a wider audience.  The establishment of this blog is a concerted step in that direction, as was my first publication in a trade journal (XML To The Max: Get More Power Out Of Your SQL Server, TechNet magazine, Spring 2005).

Please feel free to comment on and question anything and everything you see here, and thanks for reading!

     -wp