SQL Quiz: My Journey Towards the SQL Server World

My friend and SQL Server MVP, Jonathan Kehayias (@SQLSarg) tagged me and it is now my turn to disclose the path that I travelled to reach the SQL Server World.

After I read Jonathan’s post, I tried to travel backward through my career in the IT industry. It was fun, very interesting and emotional.

I never got a chance to touch a computer in the school. My first exposure to computers took place in 1990 at Rogate Ashram, India, a religious house run by Rogationist Fathers from Italy. Head of the Ashram, Fr. Vito Antonio Lipari gave me the first lessons of computers in 1990 and I picked them up pretty well.

Fr. Vito Antonio Lipari

Fr. Vito had a Toshiba laptop and that was what we used for the initial training. I don’t remember the model or the ram, hard-disk size etc, but it was a cute little laptop that I liked very much. (I am glad that I could find an old photograph of the laptop from my photo album)

The Toshiba Laptop that I first worked with

The computer was equipped with 5 software programs.

1. Wordstar -  A word processing software like MS Word.
2. Lotus 123 -  A spread sheet application, like MS Excel,
3. Professional File -  A software that provides an interface to create data entry screens and view reports.
4. Q&A – An italian softare which is used to generate quizzes, where you can enter objective type questions and their answers. The software randomly generates test papers that can be printed and given to the students.
5. Banner – A software that allows to format/shape text and print in a variety of attractive fonts and layouts.
6. DBase – A relational database management software

That was a very humble beginning and then I got a number of opportunities to work with DBase and that is when I developed an interest in database management systems. The journey continued to FoxBase and FoxPro in the next few years.

FoxPro was my favorite database management system those days. I wanted to explore the capabilities of FoxPro to the maximum. However, very few learning resources were available (and accessible to me) at that time. I could find no good FoxPro book in the local book store. Internet access was not easy.

Finally I came up with my own learning resource. I created a Foxpro report from the internal help file of foxpro (foxhelp.dbf) and then generated a text file output from the report. It generated a large text file and I managed to print them all. There were close to 700 pages and I took them to a local book binding store and created a reference  book out of it.

Honestly, that was the first and last book I studied from the first page to the last page. I was not been that sincere even when I was in the school. None of the books I purchased after that were read/studied completely.

I moved to a new company in those days and soon had to switch to Clipper. It was not hard to pick up because a major portion of FoxPro commands were supported in clipper too. After working with Clipper for close to two years, I switched to Visual Foxpro for a short while.

From Visual Foxpro, I moved to SQL Server 6.5 in 1997. That was my first meeting with SQL Server. We then moved to SQL Server 7.0 and then to 2000. I got the opportunity to work on a number of large SQL Server 2000 projects having large databases and complex business requirements.

The experience I gained from designing and building applications in Foxpro/Clipper for verticals such as manufacturing, banking, insurance etc, has helped me tremendously in the later part of my career. I am deeply indebted to those colleagues and seniors who have contributed directly or indirectly towards making me a better Relational Database Citizen.

Let the game continue and let me Tag:

1. Pinal Dave (@pinaldave)
2. Steve Jones (@WAY0utwest)
3. Michael Coles

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