My name is Duncan Davenport, and if you’re here for the first time, allow me to share a little background about myself.

I’m a SQL guy. I wasn’t always a SQL guy, but that’s mainly because things were mostly ISAM when I got started. (If you don’t know what ISAM is, don’t worry about it, almost no one does anymore. ISAM is Indexed Sequential Access Method, and is basically flat files with a secondary index file that points back to rows by key). Anyway, I discovered SQL in the early 90s and never looked back.

But I’m a bit of a technical grognard (in the old soldier sense). I’ve been in IT since 1975. It’s easy for me to remember when I started: my first day of computer school (Control Data Institute: “Can a phone call change your lfe? Like working with your hands but not getting your fingernails dirty?”) was also the day my second son was born. So I missed my first day (Thanks, Graham! 🙂 ), but hey, everyone remembered who I was.

When I graduated (1^st in class), I went right into working for what was called, in those days, a Service Bureau in East Providence, Rhode Island. These were the days of mini-computers, all of which were aggressively proprietary, and I became an expert with Datapoint minis. I was there when PCs first arrived on the scene (we really shouldn’t have laughed), and made my living developing custom business software solutions all over New England.

In the early 80s I moved my family back to Hawaii. My wife and I had met in college on Maui, and returning to the islands was a dream of ours. We lived on Oahu for 13 years, during which time I transitioned into the PC world, and worked for a variety of employers, mostly developing for multi-user DOS-like environments. I did some very early windows work (have you ever seen Windows on an amber monochrome monitor?), and was exposed to early versions of MS Access during this period.

We finally moved to the Seattle area in 1994, and I got my first gig working with real SQL as a contractor at Microsoft. I was fortunate to be working with a true SQL fanatic during this period, and I had the “proper” fundamentals drilled into me right from the start. I found I not only loved SQL development, but had a real knack for it, grasping the principles inherent in set manipulation right from the get-go.

But I wasn’t just doing SQL at that point. I worked as a contractor for a local firm, and I was frequently the guy they sent in to do the whole soup-to-nuts project. I’d do the analysis, design, front-end coding, back-end database design and coding, testing, deployment, and eventual support. I spent a lot of the 90s doing Access to SQL conversions, which were seldom as straightforward as the customers had thought they would be.

I also focused on Microsoft certifications during this period, and eventually taught SQL Classes at a local training center as a certified MCT.  I thoroughly enjoy teaching, but my schedule hardly ever leaves time for it.

In mid-2000, I got a contract position at Microsoft Research. This was one of the most exciting projects I have ever had the pleasure to be associated with. It was early in the dawn of social computing, and I was working for the resident Sociologist at MSR where we did data-mining of the Usenet, and we pushed MS SQL in ways it was not used to being pushed. It was during this time that I first went full-time at Microsoft, as I felt like this was an opportunity not to be missed. At this time, there were two VLDB MS SQL databases out there: Jim Gray’s, which was full of images, and ours – which was full of integers! I got a bit of a reputation with the SQL team at Microsoft, and they had me do presentations at TechEd and PDC, which I found I thoroughly enjoyed.

After about 4 years, I found that I was dissatisfied with doing development for purely academic uses, and returned to contracting. I was now, however, thoroughly jaded by doing “cool stuff”, and returned to Microsoft after only a couple of years. I worked for early Windows Mobile, and eventually ended up in the Visual Studio team, working with the brilliant Gert Drapers on the initial “DataDude” project – what now shows up in Visual Studio as SQL Database Projects. From there, I worked in an incubation team developing context-sensitive searching, and eventually found myself in the SQL Team working on context-based enhancements to Full-Test Search, just as Azure started coming through the door. While we managed to get the Symantic Engine into the next release of SQL Server, being a SQL guy on the SQL Team was not the fit you might think, as all the other Devs were C++ focused. I did a bit of PMish work, and made all of our team’s changes to SSMS, but in the long run I could see the end of the road for FTS (and anything else that wouldn’t fit in Azure), and instead opted to return to contracting.

Over the next few years, I did contracts for Expedia, and some data design work in the business units at MS, before taking a position at a small company downtown where I’ve hung my hat for the last couple of years, writing innovative SQL and keeping a small shop operating efficiently. And next? Well, we’ll see.