455  Paul Randal on Developers and Databases

We catch up with Paul Randal, previously with the Microsoft SQL Server team, about all the little details of SQL Server all developers should know.

Paul Randal started in the industry in 1994 working for DEC on the VMS file system and check/repair tools. In 1999 he moved to Microsoft to work on SQL Server, specifically on DBCC. For SQL Server 2000, he concentrated on index fragmentation (writing DBCC INDEXDEFRAG, DBCC SHOWCONTIG) and various algorithms in DBCC CHECKDB. During SQL Server 2005 development was the lead developer/manager of one the core dev teams in the Storage Engine, responsible for data access and storage (DBCC, allocation, indexes & heaps, pages/records, text/LOB storage, snapshot isolation, etc). He also spent several years rewriting DBCC CHECKDB/repair. Since SQL Server 2005 shipped, Paul has managed the Program Management team for the core Storage Engine to become more focused on customer/partner engagement and feature set definition. Paul regularly presents at conferences around the world on high-availability, disaster recovery and Storage Engine internals. His popular blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine.