Gert Drapers is the Group Engineering Manager for the Visual Studio Team System Database Edition product as known as the “Data Dude”. After 3 years of Ashton-Tate where he was first introduced to SQL Server in 1988, Gert joined Microsoft in 1991. Prior to his current position he was a member of the SQL Server development team where he held various positions varying from development to management. He contributed to SQL Server 7.0, 2000 and 2005; some SQL Server artifacts he worked on are: BULK INSERT, SQL-DMO, SQL Query Analyzer, SQL Profiler, DTS, SQL Agent and SMO. After SQL 2000 he joined the Indigo team where he designed the System.Transactions API and worked on MS-DTC and the web services (WS-AT) transaction specification. In September of 2003 he joined the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team where he focused on helping customers design and implement the largest SQL Server implementations in the world. In July 2005 he started the DataDude project, which goal in life is to provide an offline schema development and deployment environment for SQL Server and other data stores. Right now the team is finishing up the 3rd release of the product! When Gert is not working, he is spending time with his wife and three lovely daughters; loves to cook and make music. Besides that he is serving the SQL Server community by writing tools and articles which are published on http://SQLDev.Net and various magazines.

Pablo is a Software Architect in the SQL Server group at Microsoft. He has worked in various areas of SQL Server and he's currently focused on making data and the web work well together with technologies such as Data Services (Project Astoria).

I am a principal architect of Velocity - the distributed caching platform. Before Microsoft I worked in the Oracle database engine building the object-relational support, XMLDB, XQuery and secure enterprise search product.

Isaac Kunen is a senior program manager on the SQL Server engine programmability team. Isaac has recently been concentrating on spatial database support, in addition to working on the SQL Server type system, SQL CLR integration, and database extensibility. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2005, Isaac was a developer at BEA Systems.

My name is Michael Wang, and I’m currently a senior program manager lead in the SQL Server engine application platform product team of Microsoft. My team is primarily responsible for driving & delivering product features and improvements for sever side programmability that covers SQL data types, libraries/functions, SQL relational accessibility, T-SQL procedure programming & logic, SQLCLR, T-SQL supportability,globalization and etc.

I am lead program manager in the SQL Server Reporting Services team. Prior to becoming a program manager, I graduated from Harvard in 1997 with a Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics and joined Microsoft shortly afterwards. My past projects include mainly development of business intelligence applications and data mining algorithms.