The first database appliance Britt built was a test appliance for oil pipelines, nuclear reactors, and paper mills – it collected and stored ultrasonic imaging data. After 25 years in the database industry including building major parts of different commercial database servers, storage engines, open source databases, replication products, and developer tools, Britt is working to build a database appliance product line for SQL Server.

Since joining Microsoft in 1995, Mark has worked on SQL Server, Visual Studio, BackOffice, and Security, and spent several years in the field engaging with customers and partners in over 40 countries across Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Mark is currently driving joint HW/SW solutions as part of the SQL Server Appliance Engineering team.

Rob is currently Product Unit Manager for the SQL Systems Engineering Organization. In this role he has responsibility for SQL Server Performance efforts, the SQL Server OLTP and Data Warehouse Reference Architectures as well as the SQL Division appliance designs and delivery. Previous to this role, Rob was Product Unit Manager for the SQL Server Engine Base organization, driving SQL’s Tier 1 Mission Critical initiatives, around High Availability, Virtualization, Data Replication and Security. Rob joined Microsoft in May of 2004. Previous to Microsoft, Rob was CTO for Pervasive Software in Austin, TX a mid-market database vendor, and, before Pervasive, Rob held a variety of leadership roles within the IBM and Tandem Corporations.