What do medieval archaeology, fish farming, Southwestern University of Chongqing and Microsoft Business Intelligence have in common? If you know, you should tell Donald Farmer, because he has been deeply involved in all of them at various times. Donald has worked in the Microsoft Business Intelligence team for 8 years covering many subject areas: data integration, information quality, metadata intelligence, master data management, OLAP, predictive analytics and self-service BI. He is a well-known speaker at Microsoft and other industry events, and the author of several books and articles.

Great news from SQLBits! We can now confirm that Donald Farmer has agreed to do a pre-conference training day and the key note for our SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 day. As Program Manager for Project Gemini, no-one is better placed to tell you what is going to be in R2 and what is not! More information about the Pre-conference Training Day and SQL 2008 and R2 Friday will be released soon.