Hi,

My name is Prakash Sundaresan (and I have a Chinese name as well - 孙博凯) and I lead the SQL Server R&D team in China. I just moved to China (for the 2nd time) a few weeks ago. As I begin to get to work here on building the team, ramping up our R&D efforts, working with customers and partners in the region etc., I find that there is a great deal of interest, from a variety of quarters, in what SQL Server R&D will be doing in China – hence this blog. Here, I plan to discuss not only the work we are doing in the SQL Server China R&D team, but also broader topics – the ongoing transformation of our field from Database to a modern comprehensive “Data Platform”; interesting applications customers and partners in this region are building using our technology; issues that may be of interest to students and others looking to build careers in this technology area; and anything else people want to discuss about working in China, global development etc.

Before I dive into any of these topics, let me first introduce myself a little bit. As you may guess from the name (how I got my Chinese name is a different story for another time J), I was born and raised in India. After getting my Bachelor’s degree, I went to the US, as many others do, for graduate studies. I spent a couple of years (and got a Masters’ degree) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At this time, Madison had a really strong program in Databases with pioneering faculty such as Dave Dewitt, Mike Carey and several others.  More importantly, if you were a poor graduate student looking for a research assistantship, this was the crowd with all the $$$! Thus began my first professional fascination – with the database and information technology field – one that has lasted to this day.

After graduating, I spent a year at Digital Equipment Corporation (fondly known as DEC – for those who still rememberJ) working in the Advanced Development lab in San Francisco with the esteemed Dr. Jim Gray, Tom Barclay and others.  This was my first exposure to industry, and I learnt so much in that year, it was an absolutely amazing experience. I will save more detailed thoughts for another time, but suffice it say that to this day, I owe a large part of my professional development to that first year and to Jim’s tutelage, as I’m sure numerous others do. All of us who have known him continue to hope for Jim’s safe return.

Part-way through that year, DEC sold their Rdb product line to Oracle, so there was no longer going to be a database group at DEC going forward. So, after my year at DEC was up, I went to work at Informix, which at that time was starting a team in Portland Oregon to work on XPS, their massively parallel database. I had a great time up there, helping to build a state-of-the-art parallel database and bringing it to market. We had some spectacular benchmark numbers and some great customer wins, achievements those of us involved cherish to this day. During this period however, Informix went through some challenging times, with a troubled acquisition of Illustra, an ill-advised public battle of billboards and lawsuits with Oracle, and some accounting missteps (to put it mildly). I learnt some valuable lessons in my time at Informix, not only in the art of software engineering but in terms of what is really important in life. Eventually, I decided to leave Informix to go work for Microsoft, which at the time was trying to become a serious player in databases with a little-known product called SQL Server for Windows.

It’s been an interesting ride ever since. I have been with Microsoft for close to 10 years now, all with the SQL Server R&D team – I suppose you call me a certified “database-head” by now! Over the years, I have played various roles in this team. In my earliest days, I was part of the core SQL Server Engine development team, working in the Query Processor and helping to ship SQL Server 7.0. It was the “good old days” as they say – working on pure code, getting SQL Server to scale on the multiple-processor machines that were becoming commodity at the time. Subsequently, I played a variety of roles, from being a Performance Lead for the RDBMS, to managing the Query Execution team, to leading the team working on core Engine improvements for the WinFS project (I’m sure this topic will come up again – it always seems to J).  

Even as I took on these roles of increasing responsibility, there was a growing discomfort inside me.  I was being asked to provide leadership and make decisions on the future direction of the product, but I did not feel like I had a good understanding of the needs of the customers for whom ultimately we were building the product. Why did a customer (or partner) choose SQL Server over the competition, or vice-versa? What was working well for them, and what wasn’t?  What were the biggest pain points for them with SQL Server and the Microsoft platform in general – for the developer, for the DBAs / IT folks, and for the CIO? I had some general ideas of course, but did not feel like I had a really clear picture. So I decided to go fix this. How? What better way than to go work with customers directly for a while. I was very fortunate that there is a team within the SQL Server product group, called SQL Customer Advisory Team  (or SQL CAT for short), that worked with our highest-end customers, helping them with architecture and best-practices so they would be successful with the product, and thus helping us build design wins and references. This team had originated in the US, but was now expanding internationally into Europe and Asia. They were looking for someone to cover Asia and the timing worked out so I joined the team, relocating to Shanghai for my first stint in China. I spent close to 18 months on this team and during this time, I had the pleasure of working with over 20 customers all across the Asia-Pacific region – from building the first-ever core-banking system on SQL Server (in Japan) to the first-ever end-end telecom OSS system (in Korea), to a variety of data-warehouses and BI systems, large-scale OLTP systems, SAP systems, and everything in between. It was an incredible learning experience – learning about the product and how customers used it of course, but also about our customers themselves, our field, our partners, and more generally about how business is done in Asia.

I suppose this is where my second professional fascination started to develop – with business in Asia. Of course, being originally from Asia, I had somewhat of an innate “connection” here. But I had never actually worked in Asia and when I was growing up, India was not exactly what you would call a “dynamic economy”. However, as anyone who has spent any time in Asia in the recent past can attest to, there is now a different energy in the air here – you can feel it right from the moment you land as your fellow passengers get ready to disembark the plane, if you know what I mean!  It is stating the obvious to say that this is a time of tremendous transformation – for China, India, and the entire region. If one could list the top 5 global phenomena of our age, there may be some less pleasant items such as global warming and the geo-political tensions that bedevil us today, but amongst the positive ones I’m sure would be this historic rise of Asia. And of course, the tremendous impact of information technology, the Internet and other technological innovations on all of our lives and work. So in terms of future career direction, I had a strong suspicion that my life in the future was likely to revolve around the intersection of these two great phenomena of our time, Information Technology and Asia.

After spending 18 months in the CAT team, I returned back to Redmond. Around this time, the SQL Server team was transitioning from shipping SQL Server 2005 to turning the focus on the next release. While SQL Server 2005 was a great release (and has since proven to be the most successful release of SQL Server ever in the market), it took a long time coming. We had clearly struggled to match our engineering processes to the tremendous growth in the size of the team and the business. It was also a time of some considerable change in our industry – a lot had transpired since we had started the SQL Server 2005 journey 5 years prior, and it was time to take stock and point the ship in the right direction for the next decade of growth. Coming off my stint in the field, I was given a unique opportunity to serve as Director in our Strategy team, with responsibility to oversee the planning for the next release as well as to help craft the long term direction for the SQL Server product and business.

It was a great job, one that stretched me in many different ways. We drove the planning for what will now ship as SQL Server 2008, focusing up-front on release themes, complete end-end customer scenarios within each theme, and distinct “improvements” (aka features) within each scenario.  And we drove a complete re-engineering of the way we build our software, with much more emphasis on making sure these improvements are really complete and high-quality before they show up in main-line builds of the product. The jury is still out on these changes to some extent, and any change is very hard, at least initially; but indications so far are that they well were worth the effort and pain for what they are buying us in terms of quality and predictability.

We also drove a ground up review of our product and technical strategy. I don’t want to discuss publicly much of what resulted, but suffice it to say we ended up with a much clearer understanding of our strategy and direction going forward. Paul Flessner, Senior VP for SQL Server, summarized some of this in his open letter in April 2006. Internally, we crystallized this notion of a Complete Data Platform which defines the scope of what we think is needed to serve customer needs going forward. It is a pretty fundamental and broad redefinition of our field as we know it. We have not talked much about this externally at this stage, but you will see us begin to do that much more going forward.

While it was extremely gratifying to be able to work on issues of such breadth and significance to our product and business, in the back of my mind a clock was ticking, and getting louder as time went by. Asia was calling! It was time to go. Luckily for me, just in the last year, we had decided to start R&D teams in both India and China, our first real R&D forays outside of Redmond. We were looking for someone to lead our newly formed China R&D team, and I jumped on the chance.

So here I am, in China again. Based in Shanghai, but with teams in both Shanghai and Beijing.

If you have read this far, you must have been quite bored when you started and even more so by now J. I’ll stop here. Next time we’ll discuss what a Complete Data Platform really means, or what exactly we’re doing in our China R&D team, or something of the sort.