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Changes

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Changes

This isn’t one of my more typical technical posts so if you’re looking for profound technical insights you can skip the rest of this. This summer I went through a career change that will probably impact what I blog about so I thought I should share it with my readers. As many of you know, I was one of the original members of the Microsoft MDM product team. Early this summer I was (in the words of my favorite euphemism) made redundant on the MDM product team. After a number of panicky weeks I found a new job as an architect on Microsoft IT’s internal MDM project. This means I went from being an MDM vendor to an MDM practitioner.

I’m really excited about having the chance to work on what is becoming one of the biggest MDM systems I’ve ever heard of. We’re in the process of moving Billions of records into our MDM hub which will grow to terabytes of data. This means I’m going from writing about how to build a partitioned, scaleout solution in SQL Server to implementing one. It also means I’m working on interesting problems like how do you scale matching algorithms to huge data volumes while maintaining near real-time response time and what kind of algorithm do you use to achieve high match quality with Asian languages and address formats. I also hope to find out how Service Broker can be used to provide an asynchronous, scalable execution environment for MDM services.

What this all means to my blog is that I won’t be writing much about Microsoft’s MDM products anymore but I hope I’ll have some interesting things to say about implementing a real-time operational MDM hub at huge scale. It also means I probably won’t be doing as many presentations at conferences. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Bottom line, I’m embarking on a new adventure so I wanted to share it with you.

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