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June 4, 2006
Introductions - or, who is this guy and why is he blogging?
I'm terrible at introductions.
In formal business, Donald Farmer, Group Program Manager for Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services says all that needs to be said for many people. I am just what my name card says, and there's no need to know any more. I can rarely be so reserved. Customers and partners soon learn more than they need to know about my travels, my garden, my trips to the supermarket for shampoo, and so on.
Thankfully, blogs, even when about business, are relaxed. B-EYE blogs in particular are more like an evening event at TDWI, albeit without the drinks and nibbles - though you could supply your own whilst reading. There are good friends here, and colleagues, and other vendors, and - although we're mostly talking shop about business intelligence - we can also catch up on recent events, or share some stories and smiles. In that setting, I'm not just a program manager at Microsoft. I'm husband of a gifted artist, and proud father of my son. My childhood in the Scottish highlands and islands is as likely to sidetrack the discussion as my practices in data warehousing. My passions for food, wine, enlightenment philosophy, medieval history, modern art or wildflowers are side-by-side with a restless curiosity about information quality, performance tuning, data modeling, or unstructured data.
So, here in my B-EYE blog, don't expect formality. Chances are, I'll be writing this with a glass of wine to hand. Often I'll be writing at the end of a long day of difficult design decisions or working through customer issues. On other days, I'll just have put down a new book of poetry, or have come in from the garden, and those will be bubbling in my mind.
Nevertheless, I will be writing mostly about business intelligence: more particularly about data integration and the daily work involved in delivering a data integration platform to market. I trust I will give some insight to the decisions we have to make as platform designers and developers: how we make those choices, how we prioritize and resolve and explain and rethink: how we look at the market: how we emerge into the daylight when a product has shipped to find real people using it to solve real problems, often in ways we never intended.
I am anxious that it should be interesting - but I know I'm among friends, and I should just relax and get blogging.
Posted by Donald Farmer at June 4, 2006 2:45 PM
Comments
Donald, welcome to the site!! We are glad to have you and look forward to your participation in the community.
Posted by: Shawn Rogers at June 5, 2006 9:53 AM
