It gives me great pleasure to announce two new additions to the SQLskills team - Stacia Misner and Simon Sabin. Stacia's a BI expert who will be working alongside Liz Vitt, and Simon's a developer expert who will be working alongside Bob Beauchemin. Bringing Stacia and Simon on-board really strengthens the capabilities of the SQLskills team as we now have two widely-known and respected Subject Matter Experts in each of the three areas we operate in:

• DBA/ITPro - me and Kimberly
• BI - Liz and Stacia
• Developer - Bob and Simon

Their blogs are at http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/stacia and http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/simons/, respectively (with a SQLskills.com-hosted blog for Simon coming soon) and their bios are below (in their own words).

Welcome!

Stacia Misner

Stacia Misner has over 23 years of experience with improving business practices through technology and has been providing consulting and education services for Microsoft’s business intelligence technologies since 2000. Prior to becoming an independent consultant, she spent nearly six years at Aspirity  (acquired by Hitachi Consulting) as a member of their Microsoft Gold-Certified Business Intelligence practice for which she developed and delivered a variety of BI courses including Microsoft’s SQL Server Accelerator for Business Intelligence, SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence Ascend, and Business Intelligence Voyage courses.  Stacia has presented at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), Microsoft’s TechEd, and SQL Server Magazine’s SQL Server 2005 roadshows. She has 8 years of experience in business intelligence architecture and implementation, data warehousing, OLAP, ETL, and reporting and analysis, as well as 15 years of experience in technical project management. Stacia is a Microsoft Certified IT Professional – Business Intelligence Developer, and a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist – SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence Development.

Stacia Misner is the author of:

• Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition: Start Now! (Microsoft Press, 2007) - a registration benefit when you download SQL Server Express Edition.
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Step by Step (Microsoft Press, 2006)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services Step by Step (Microsoft Press, 2004)

and co-author of:

• SQL Server 2005 Administrator’s Companion (Microsoft Press, 2006)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services Step by Step (Microsoft Press, 2006)
• Business Intelligence: Making Better Decisions Faster (Microsoft Press, 2002)

Simon Sabin

Simon runs his own database consultancy company Onarc Consulting. He specialises in SQL Server focusing on the areas of search, distributed architectures, business intelligence and application development. He has worked with SQL Server since 1998, and has always focused on high-performance, reliable systems.

Simon graduated from Nottingham University in 1996 and joined CMG as a consultant working on many varied systems over 7 years. He has spent the last 2 ½ years working for the largest Internet job board company in the UK developing a passion for search and the discoverability of data.

He was awarded MVP status by Microsoft in 2006, and is a regular speaker at SQL Server events, as well as writing for the SQL Server Central and Simple-Talk.com websites. In 2007 he co-founded SQLBits aimed at delivering SQL Server to the masses with the first free conference held in October 2007 for over 300 professionals.