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Eric L. Brown

My first experience with computers was in 1973 in second grade, in a small-town school on Long Island. I still remember the ratta-tat-tat of the Teletype onto giant rolls of gray paper. Wow!

It wasn’t until high school that I found computers again, this time in the form of the Commodore Pet. It was early programming: BASIC and FORTRAN. I wasn’t sure if computers would work out. Slowly, personal computing emerged, and by the late ’80s I was an information worker–as a college student. My college education was in philosophy and communication studies, which may seem at odds with computing but are not. Philosophy is about logic and abstraction, and communication is about input and output.

My professional computing work began in earnest in 1996 when I began work at Multiple Zones International as a product manager. While there I realized the next big wave was the Internet, and I raced to get a job at a dot-com. I worked for three dot-coms before ending up on the SQL Server Product Team at Microsoft. Of my dot-com days, we did implementations of SAP, Great Plains, and early main frame integration with e-commerce. At one point in my early DB years, we cut the edge of SQL Server capabilities by owning a 500GB data warehouse running SQL Server 7 and 2000. In the three years I was on the team, I ran “Yukon” readiness. I have written a column for SQL Server Magazine, and I have written extensively about SQL Server for MSDN Magazine and MSDN online library.

Since leaving Microsoft officially, I have worked on this book and started an e-commerce hosting company. I am now working for Quilogy as a senior consultant on the Business Intelligence National Practice.

If you want to ask me a question or comment about the book, please e-mail meat eric@aboutsqlserver.com.