Interview with a SQL Server Business Intelligence Expert and Wiki Ninja - Sergey Vdovin!!!
This week's interview is with Sergey Vdovin!
Some of his stats:
- 7 Wiki articles
- 82 Wiki edits
- 16 Wiki comments
- 167 Forum replies
He's published 7 quality articles. Here are some examples:
SSRS: End-user defined parameters set and cascading hierarchy
SSAS: Slicing and dicing over data differences between SSAS databases
SSRS: Merge data from different datasources into one dataset inside SSRS report
SSAS, SSIS: Extending Project Server OLAP Cubes via push-mode processing
It's great to FINALLY be able to interview Sergey, and we think you're to love it! So let's dig in...
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1. Who are you, where are you, and what do you do? What are your specialty technologies?
Hello to the community. It is quite an exciting moment - the interview is a kind of a personal direct assessment while, for example, the guru competition is a kind of indirect assessment - writing the articles was a little bit easy.
My name is Sergey [Aleksandrovich] Vdovin (s ergeyAvdovin.com ) i have some expertise in solutions construction based on Microsoft Business Intelligence and Project Server platforms. Originally i am from Sverdlovsk, USSR (Yekaterinburg, Russia), the places that influenced me the most are depicted on the picture:
So most of the time I spent in Yekaterinburg: in school (scientific university center) in a class with in-depth study of physics and mathematics we discovered some interesting things like Cantor's theorem and Schrödinger equation . First two courses of Ural State Technical University (now a part of URFU) were a pretty relaxing joinery after the scientific canter and I was promoted by our radio-technical faculty dean to an energy saving scientific firm inside the university – there I had an opportunity to try myself in different fields – electronics engineering, civil engineering and software development. The latter was the most exciting and I started to investigate software development around database platforms.
At some point SQL Server appeared and following a pretty common evolution path the experience covered a lot of elements of the Microsoft Business Intelligence Stack plus several years of experience with Project Server. In parallel I was proposed by one of our university professors from Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences to try some researches, this yielded in some PhD related activities (not finished, but still in mind). At some point scientific and professional paths intersected in Young Scientists Summer Program at International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis with a pretty ex?iting research and experience with SQL Server and Wal-Mart: Using Data Mining for Explanation and Prediction of Systems Behavior . After that I moved to Moscow for several years:
And I visited the exciting TechEd North America 2013 (first time in the U.S.):
I lived 1,5 years in Bali, with a visit to Australia:
And now again I'm in Yekaterinburg, thinking about new opportunities:
2. What are your big projects right now?
Currently i have quite an important and interesting project - job searching with, fortunately, relocation - it is still not in a very active state - more like preparations, with relocation, probably (not really sure), somewhere in that direction:
Getting to Si, Ja, Oui, Hai, and Da
It is just one example of the numerous statistics that shows that probably I will be more useful in some other country. U.S. is a nice choice here but if Trump becomes the president I may reconsider ;).
3. What do you do with TechNet Wiki, and how does that fit into the rest of your job? What is it about TechNet Wiki that interests you?
I do think that it is rather useful to have parts of your experience and thoughts reviewed by the community in order to connect your resume with a bigger real world (outside of a company).
4. Do you have any comments for product groups about TechNet Wiki?
It would be nice to have latest Microsoft cloud Business Intelligence and Collaboration technologies incorporated into TechNet wiki environment – right now I'm writing the interview in world online – it is much less stressful than the TechNet wiki editor ;).
5. Do you have any tips for new Wiki authors?
- It is a well-known tip but again (and for myself): good to read Wiki: How to Contribute Content to TechNet Wiki .
- Word Online is pretty comfortable for writing .
6. What could we do differently on TechNet Wiki?
- As for my experience (and i saw some complaints from other members as well) the TechNet wiki editor seems to be a rather old one and not really stable - it requires quite a lot of attention (or knowledge) from a writer if to compare to other Microsoft technologies. It every time reminds me when we began to write articles in LaTeX , previously having only experience with Microsoft word - on one of the first pages of the manual there was a pretty nice phrase: "windows users harden by working with LaTeX" - it is a little bit confusing to have a similar harden experience today ;).
- As a lot of people do I widely use google search engine and the TechNet wiki is a pretty hidden beast here as for my experience if to compare how often we see the content and how valuable it is – if something can be done here I think it would be useful. For example i came to the wiki from SSRS forum announcement - not from the common search I usually use in every day life – although I saw links to the wiki several time in the search the overall impression was like about something not really alive.
- Think it was being discussed somewhere already but it seems that the navigation system of the TechNet wiki could be improved. Microsoft has beautiful data navigation tools in business intelligence cloud stack – good candidate to solve the task.
That is all as for today, thanks for reading and see you all at my site
By the way, the site got one of the prizes (8) in the Russian Microsoft WebMatrix competition ;)
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Well, thank you Sergey for such great answers and great contributions to SQL BI on TechNet Wiki! Also, I loved your answer to the first question, taking us on a tour of where you've lived and visited! It's great to get to know you!
Everyone, please join me in thanking Sergey for his community contributions!
Have a fantastic new year in 2016!
- Ninja Ed