This, my first book, is dedicated to Steve Potts, an extraordinary teacher. He willingly gave up his lunchtimes and endless extra hours teaching an intense, hyperactive, and very inquisitive eleven-year old how to solder together computers and write 6502 assembly language. Amazingly, I can still do both! If you are reading this Steve, a huge "thank you"—it was time well invested. You kindled an interest for life that turned into a career that has taken me to some fascinating places no one could have imagined back then.
In chronological order, I would like to thank Dilip Ventakesh at Packt Publishing, who first approached me with the idea for this book back in 2011. Likewise to Professor Mark Whitehorn, Chair of Analytics at the University of Dundee in Scotland, who not only encouraged me in this endeavor, but spent his valuable time taking me through an impromptu telephone crash course on authoring.
Equal thanks go to our patient reviewers at Packt Publishing, especially Sonali Tharwani, who together with our external reviewers, Phil Brammer (@PhilBrammer) and Raunak Jhawar, reviewed every chapter of this book. I would also like to thank Allan Mitchell, who gave us very useful and detailed feedback on the BI stack chapters.
An extra special thanks must be extended to Simon Robinson, a good friend and colleague, and Senior Software Engineer at Nokia. I had the pleasure of working closely with Simon for three years, and know him as a highly competent database developer and DBA. He not only reviewed the Hadoop chapter for us, but also added valuable extra content born out of his greater experience with Hadoop in a production environment. Thanks Simon!
My final reviewer thanks also go to two fellow database professionals, who are also good friends, for their dedication to this title. Alison Coughtrie, Data Warehouse Architect at the University of Dundee in Scotland, and Lynlee Moon (Li Li), EMEA DBA Manager at NewEdge in London, who have both done great jobs at very short notice turning around their reviews. A personal "thank you" from me to both of you.
Of course my final thanks must go to my co-author and SQL Server BI Developer, Rachel. Over ten months, we have spent every weekend and countless evenings researching, writing, and rewriting this book as the shifting sands of a brand new and very large SQL Server release have moved beneath our feet. Your journalistic training, writing discipline, attention to detail, and enthusiasm have all made this a better book than I could have written by myself, and it has been good fun and a pleasure writing it with you. Somehow, and thankfully, your good sense of humor has remained intact! A big thank you for being a great co-author who has truly shared an immense effort.
When do you want to start writing the next one?