Alex Kriegel, PMP, MCSD/MCTS, works as a Systems Architect for the State of Oregon; prior to this he worked for Pope and Talbot, Inc., Psion Teklogix International, Inc., and for Belorussian Academy of Sciences. He received his MSc. in Physics of Metals from Belarus State Polytechnic Institute in 1988, discovered PC programming and relational databases in 1992, and has never looked back since. Alex is certified as a Project Management Professional (PMP) by the Project Management Institute, and also holds various Microsoft certifications. He is also the author of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Weekend Crash Course (Wiley, 2001), SQL Functions (Wrox, 2005), and co-author of Introduction to Database Management (Wiley, 2007), and the first edition of this book.

Boris M. Trukhnov, OCP, has been working as Senior Technical Analyst/Oracle DBA for Pope & Talbot, Inc., in Portland, Oregon, since 1998. His previous job titles include Senior Programmer Analyst, Senior Software Developer, and Senior Operations Analyst. He has been working with SQL and relational databases since 1994. Boris holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. He is a co-author of Introduction to Database Management (Wiley, 2007).