About the author
Ray Rankins is owner and president of Gotham Consulting Services, Inc. (http: //www.gothamconsulting.com), near Saratoga Springs, New York. Ray has been working with Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server for more than 27 years and has experience in database administration, database design, project management, application development, consulting, courseware development, and training. He has worked in a variety of industries, including financial, manufacturing, health care, retail, insurance, communications, public utilities, and state and federal government. His expertise is in database performance and tuning, query analysis, advanced SQL programming and stored procedure development, database design, data architecture, and database application design and development, with recent specialization in Sybase to SQL Server migrations. Ray's presentations on these topics at user group conferences have been very well received. Ray is coauthor of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Unleashed, Sybase SQL Server 11 Unleashed, and Sybase SQL Server 11 DBA Survival Guide, all published by Sams Publishing. As an instructor, Ray brings his real-world experience into the classroom, teaching courses on SQL, advanced SQL programming and optimization, database design, database administration, and database performance and tuning. Ray can be reached at rrankins@gothamconsulting.com. Paul Bertucci is the founder of Data by Design, LLC (www.dataxdesign.com), a global database consulting firm with offices in the United States and Paris, France. He recently spent 6 years as the Chief Architect and Director of the global Shared Services team for Autodesk, Inc. running BI/DW/ODS, Big Data, Identity Management, SOA, Integration (EAI & ETL), MDM, Collaboration/Social, SaaS application platforms, and Enterprise Architecture teams. Prior to Autodesk, he was the Chief Data Architect at Symantec for 4 years. He is also co-founder and CTO for Diginome, Inc. (www.diginome.com), a data provenance/integrity software company. Paul has more than 30 years of experience with database design, data architecture, big data, data replication, performance and tuning, master data management (MDM), data provenance/DataDNA, distributed data systems, data integration, high-availability, enterprise architecture, identity management, SOA, SaaS, and systems integration for numerous Fortune 500 companies, including Intel, Coca-Cola, Apple, Toshiba, Lockheed, Wells Fargo, Safeway, Sony, Charles Schwab, Cisco Systems, Sybase, Symantec, Veritas, and Honda, to name a few. He has authored numerous database articles, data standards, and high-profile database courses, such as Sybase's "Performance and Tuning" and "Physical Database Design" courses. Other Sams Publishing books that he has authored include the highly popular Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Unleashed, Teach Yourself ADO.NET in 24 Hours, Microsoft SQL Server High Availability, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed, and Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Unleashed. Mr. Bertucci is a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as Informatica World, Oracle World, and the MDM Summit, and at Microsoft-oriented conferences such as SQL Saturday's, Silicon Valley Code-Camp, PASS conferences, Tech Ed's, and SQL Server User Groups. He has deployed numerous systems with Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, DB2, Postgres, MySQL, NoSQL, Paraccel, Hadoop and Oracle database eng
