SQL Behind the Scenes – English

Himanshu talks about FILESTREAM and SQL Server Client and their advantages. He discusses the challenges of implementing these new features in this release. He also describes improvements that have been made in the 2008 release.

Vu and Drew are build engineers who manage and build all the binaries of SQL 2008. They discuss the check-in and the build process and the technologies that help them produce up to 30 builds a day. They also discuss the challenges of investigating build breaks and integrating with Visual Studio…

As a developer for the Relational Engine, Miles dealt with scalar expressions and data types. He worked on the improvement to add new DATETIME types and discusses the challenges of implementing multiple calendars (focused on the Islamic calendar).

Jun Fang is a Development Lead in the SQL Server team.  He led a team that was responsible for data type, sparse columns and wide table, and spatial support features.  Team pioneered the CLR feature in SQL, providing the extensibility framework for both internal and external programming…

Serena is a new member of the SQL Server team. As a tester she looked for bugs and failures by using automated tests on the system. She also worked on a feature called SQM - which runs once a day and tracks how customers use the different features.

Christian Kleinerman is a Group Program Manager and he has been working on SQL Server for 8 years. He talks about some of the key features in SQL Server 2008 that have been delighting customers. An explanation of Resource Governor is also provided.

Xin talks about the query optimization testing team and how they work to achieve the best performance and delivery. Technical difficulties and his work on the StarJoin features are detailed. He later talks about his position and experience on the team, starting work early in the process and…

Jing Chang is a Tester in the SQL Server Entity Framework.  She discusses her job as a tester for SQL Server and the challenges of her work. She works with entity frameworks, mapping and metadata. She also gives us an example of her daily life.

Peter Zabback talks about his work as a developer and the primary features that he worked on. He talks about challenges like introducing new features without regressions and how this becomes increasingly complex.

Roger Fleig talks about working as a test manager for the SQL Server engine. He also discusses his challenges including adding a large number of new features, innovations and changes to SQL Server 2008 without breaking anything, and operating the testing on the same scale as customers.