Welcome to the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT) bio page! The SQLCAT manages all customer activity out of the SQL Server engineering organization back in Redmond, WA. The team is currently celebrating their 10th year in existence. The goal of the team is simple: Engage with the most interesting SQL Server customer projects across the world (Interesting is usually defined by large scale, complex and challenging) and learn how the product behaves. We then use these learnings to improve the product as well as share with the community so everyone can build any application, regardless of size and complexity, successfully on the Microsoft SQL Server platform.
Lindsey Allen
SQL Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT) Best Practices
After several years managing IT development team building in-house sales force automation system, Lindsey Allen joined Microsoft Consulting Services the summer of 1995. Lindsey specializes on system architecture and database design and has worked with many Fortune 500 enterprise customers across various industrial segments in the past 14 years. She transitioned to SQL Server Product Unit SQLCAT team in the summer of 2005. Lindsey is currently managing SQLCAT Best Practice and Customer Lab team. She gained strong database performance optimization expertises by working with the challenging mission critical customer workloads and enterprise-grade host and storage hardware. Lindsey has a Master of Engineering Science Degree from University of Western Ontario specializing on Finite Element Analysis.
Mark Souza
SQL Server Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT) Founder
Mark Souza is a Director in the Microsoft SQL Server development organization. He heads up all customer and ISV programs for the Microsoft SQL Server unit. These teams specialize in implementing the most challenging customer database applications worldwide. His experience focuses on the issues related to the distribution, modeling, design, and performance of data with a distributed computing application. Mr. Souza uses this customer experience to drive high quality SQL Server product planning back in Redmond. Mr. Souza's twenty seven years in the Information Technology business has consisted of database administration, end-user tool management, systems engineering database specialist/lead, client/server architect, Microsoft regional data technology specialist and SQL Server development customer advisory team. Mr. Souza has a Masters Degree in MIS from Marist College and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from SUNY Potsdam. He enjoys spending quality time with his wife Lisa of 23 years and three beautiful children (Andrew 15, Megan 13 and Jennifer 11). He also enjoys flying airplanes, reading, running, sports and attending broadway shows in his spare time.
Denny Lee
SQLCAT BI
Denny Lee is a Senior Program Manager based out of Redmond, WA in the SQL Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT) - DW/BI Group. He has more than 13 years experience as a developer and consultant implementing software solutions to complex OLTP and data warehousing problems. His industry experience includes accounting, human resources, automotive, retail, web analytics, telecommunications, and healthcare. He had helped create the first OLAP Services reporting application in production at Microsoft and is a co-author of "Professional Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint", “Professional Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 with MDX”, “Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Data Warehousing with Analysis Services” and “Transforming Healthcare through Information [Ed. Joan Ash] (2009)”. In addition to contributing to the SQLCAT Blog, SQL Server Best Practices, and SQLCAT.com, you can also review Denny's Blog at http://dennyglee.com/. Denny specializes in developing solutions for Enterprise Data Warehousing, Analysis Services, and Data Mining; he also has focuses in the areas of Privacy and Healthcare.
Carl Rabeler
SQLCAT BI
Carl Rabeler has been working with Microsoft SQL Server and Business Intelligence for over 10 years as a consultant, mentor, writer, speaker and trainer before finally joining Microsoft in early 2006. Carl has written several SQL Server and Business Intelligence books and numerous technical white papers, has presented at many SQL Server and BI conferences, and has provided mentoring and consulting services for numerous companies around the world. Carl enjoys sailing, mountain climbing, bicycling, diving, traveling, and live music.
Kevin Cox
SQLCAT
Kevin Cox has been specializing in database projects for most of 35+ year career. He started with SQL Server with the first version of Sybase 1.0 in 1987. Kevin has a MBA degree and a Bachelors degree in Computer Science. He is a frequent lecturer and author on database oriented topics. Outside of work, Kevin is an avid runner.
Nicholas Dritsas
SQLCAT BI
Nicholas Dritsas has been working with SQL Server and Business Intelligence for the past 10+ years as part of Microsoft Consulting Services and SQL Server Product Group. In his time at MCS, he acted as a Lead Architect to a number of Fortune 500 SQL Server and BI implementations, including Hilton Hotels, Nestle USA and Walt Disney. Since last year, he joined the SQL Server’s Customer Advisory Team working with the largest and most complex SQL Server and BI projects in Asia. Nicholas has presented numerous times in internal and external events and conferences around BI subjects and best practices.
Prem Mehra
SQLCAT
Mr. Mehra is a Program Manager with Microsoft Corporation in the SQL Server Development Organization. His expertise is in developing architectural solutions, which exploit technologies such as relational database, transaction and message servers, and connectivity products. Prior to joining Microsoft Corporation, Mr. Mehra was an Associate Partner at Andersen Consulting and a Senior Consultant at IBM. He has more than thirty-seven years of experience in the IT industry and has helped in implementing leading edge applications at many of the top Fortune one hundred companies. Mr. Mehra has spoken on several IT topics in seminars and conferences across the world as keynote speaker and as an instructor. He holds Master of Electrical Engineering degree from University of Toronto. He is the co-author of book, "Netcentric Computing", published by Auerbach.
Thomas Kejser
SQLCAT
Thomas has been working with SQL Server since version 6.5 and performance tuned cubes since OLAP Server 7.0. He has worked on some of the largest cubes in the world. Performing fast loading of warehousing and removing every bottleneck is one of Thomas specialties. He holds a master degree in computer science and has 10+ years of experience with developer coaching and scalable architectures on both OLTP and OLAP systems.
Peter Scharlock
SQLCAT ISV
Peter Scharlock has over 25 years of career database experience. He joined the SQL Server development team in 1996 when SQL 6.0 was the shipping product. As a member of the SQLCAT ISV team Peter is currently responsible for the SQL development team's technical interaction with the Microsoft Dynamics development organizations. Prior to this role he had similar roles working with Strategic Healthcare ISVs and other Global Microsoft ISV Partners. He regularly presents at Microsoft and ISV Conferences.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Peter was a Mainframe (IBM / Tandem NonStop) embedded SQL programmer, analyst, and consultant primarily in the Healthcare, Telecommunications, and Logistics industries. He has lived and worked extensively in Europe and the Middle East.
Michael Thomassy
SQLCAT
Michael Thomassy is a Program Manager in the Microsoft SQL Server development organization. Since joining Microsoft in 1995, Michael has been an Architect in Microsoft Consulting Services and Microsoft Technology Centers leading many large scale SQL Server implementations with dozens of Fortune 500 companies. In 2006, Michael joined the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team designing the largest and most complex SQL Server implementations specializing in OLTP and HA. Michael has a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from Auburn University.
Mike Ruthruff
SQLCAT ISV
Mike Ruthruff has been with Microsoft since 1997 and with the SQL Server product group since 2001. He is currently Program Manager on the Customer and Partner Team focusing on partners in the healthcare vertical. Mike's specializes in scalability and performance of the relational engine with special focus on I/O performance. He has a degree in mathematics from Virginia Tech.
Mike Weiner
SQL Customer Advisor Team - Engine focus
Mike Weiner is a Program Manager working with Microsoft's high-end hardware partners and focusing on the core SQL Server Engine. Mike has worked with SQL Server since SQL Server 6.5 when he was in a support role with Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS). Before joining the CAT team he spent a number of years as a Dedicated Support Engineer at Microsoft working primarily in the large enterprise space and onsite with many financial services institutions. The focus on many of the projects was around high throughput, low latency transactional systems. VLDB managment and stringent high availability requirements were also critical implementation details within the engagements. All combined he has over 12 years of experience working with enterprise customers on their SQL Server environments, both in troubleshooting and architecting. In his free time Mike is an avid sports fan and can usually be found ousdie of work on the soccer pitch or watching some type of sports on TV.
Stuart Ozer
SQLCAT
Stuart Ozer is a Group Program Manager in the SQL Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT) -- part of the SQL Server Product Group. Stuart focuses on gathering learnings and best practices from large-scale customer experiences with the newest technologies being introduced by the SQL team. He is also directly involved in the architecture and deployment of several new showcase applications on SQL Server being developed by customers internationally. Over the years, Stuart has specialized in the design and implementation of enterprise scale data warehouse solutions including relational database, ETL and OLAP components. Stuart works closely with the engineering teams that are planning enhanced Data Warehousing capabilities in future versions of the product.
Stuart has been at Microsoft for 11 years. He recently returned to the SQL Product Group from a 2-year stint inside of Microsoft Research where he collaborated with biologists in inventing a series of database-centric techniques for use in biological sequence analysis applications. Prior to his work with the SQL product group, he directed the development of the multi-terabyte data warehouse for WebTV / Ultimate TV at Microsoft. In the early 1990s, Stuart co-founded and managed Infodynamics -- a San Francisco Bay Area data warehouse consulting firm focusing on enterprise-scale data integration and decision support solutions. His 25 years of industry experience include earlier product management and field consulting positions at Compaq, IBM and Metaphor. Stuart is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and travels worldwide.
Past Members
Past members of the SQLCAT team include: Eric Jacobsen, Tom Davidson, Gert Drapers, Craig Utley, Bren Newman, Burzin Patel, Sharon Bjeletich, Richard Tkachuk, Paul Mestemaker, Lubor Kollar,and Juergen Thomas
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sql, server, best practices, whitepapers, analysis services, data mining, olap, datawarehouse, datawarehousing, availability, clustering, capacity, collation, data types, data warehouse, database, design, index, mirroring, optimization, partitions, performance, precision, processing, querying, scalability, security, reporting services, integration services
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