Despite the fact that I was in the Storage Engine, and there's always been humorous rivalry between the Storage Engine team and the Relational Engine (a.k.a. the Query Processor) team, I did actually get along with some of the QP guys

One of my good friends, Conor Cunningham, has been wanting to get back into blogging and we're extremely pleased that he's now blogging on SQLskills.com - see his new blog at http://www.SQLskills.com/blogs/conor. Before Conor left Microsoft last year to head home to Texas (the Seattle rain gets the non-natives or rain-hardened Scots eventually), he was the Development Lead of the Query Optimizer team and influenced much of the Query Processor architecture. Conor's probably forgotten more about how the Optimizer works than I'll ever know!

So - I for one will be following his blog avidly.

Welcome Conor!