The SQR Evangelist & Family

About the SQR Evangelist

Darrin Miller is a self-proclaimed SQR Evangelist who has dedicated a large portion of his life to spreading the word of SQR to the world. His SQR report suite development experience has transpired in both the government and the private sector and has focused on a variety of industries including, personnel utilization, healthcare, and retail.

With over a decade of experience integrating Oracle applications and SQR, his wealth of knowledge is a true asset to any organization embarking on integrating an RDBMS application with SQR. Moreover, Mr. Miller’s thorough understanding of the features and benefits of the SQR language sets him apart as a leader in providing software development methodologies and practices that facilitate code flexibility, standardization, and optimization.

Mr. Miller’s first exposure to SQR occurred in 1992 when he was employed as a Civil Servant within the Department of Defense (DoD) for the United States Air Force. There he designed a variety of mission critical report suites with SQR. Prior to ending his 5-year career with the DoD, Darrin managed an organization tasked with converting one of the Air Force’s largest tape based data repositories to an Oracle RDBMS. This conversion effort required meticulous massaging of legacy ASCII file data into an Oracle RDBMS ready format. His tool of choice for this ETL adventure was SQR.

After his stint with the DoD, Mr. Miller’s first private sector experience led him to a company named Integrated Medical Networks that specialized in developing health-care software. One of his first projects was to assemble a committee of personnel within the company to select a report authoring tool to be used throughout the company and released to clients. After 4 months of extensive cost benefit analysis of market leading report authoring tools, the committee selected SQR hands down as the report writer of choice. Having always believed in the power and flexibility of SQR, Darrin was even more convinced of SQR’s true worthiness after comparing it to a variety of tools, so much so that he decided to join SQRiBE Technologies, the marketers of SQR at the time, in 1998. One merger later, SQRiBE Technologies became Brio Technology. Today Brio Technology has been renamed Brio Software.

As an employee of SQRiBE Technologies/Brio Software Expert Services, Mr. Miller has functioned in the following roles:

Sr. Consultant

Mr. Miller’s initial responsibility as a member of Brio Software Expert Services (BSES) was to provide guidance, leadership, and training as related to designing and implementing report suites developed with SQR Server and BrioReport Builder.

SQR Evangelist

Mr. Miller’s first role change at Brio Software was to be established as the "SQR Evangelist" for Brio Software. In this role, he traveled the world promoting the features and benefits of the SQR language to potential clients for Brio Software via rendering pre-sales and post-sales consulting. While functioning within this capacity, Mr. Miller authored over a half dozen white papers related to Brio Software products. Additionally, he presented two presentations at the Brio Software Insight 2000 User’s Conference devoted to development practices with SQR.

Sr. Product Specialist

With a thorough knowledge and understanding of the interdependencies and integration points between Brio.Report and Brio.Portal, Mr. Miller received his first promotion at Brio Software to the position of Sr. Product Specialist. In this role, Mr. Miller was responsible for developing report suites with SQR and facilitating execution of these report suites via Brio.Portal.

Engagement Manager

As Engagement Manager, Mr. Miller planned, organized, coordinated, and controlled the entire post-sales SQR Applications Systems Development Life Cycle for a variety of clients. In this capacity his role was to guide international, multi-cultural, teams of developers in successfully designing and implementing enterprise-wide SQR report applications accessed world-wide.

First Encounter

I’ll never forget my first encounter with this unique language. The year was 1992. I was employed as a Civil Servant within the Department of Defense working for the United States Air Force at Brooks AFB in San Antonio, TX. I had just written an application for the base telephone operators to direct incoming telephone calls. The application consisted of some ten or so database tables utilizing an Oracle RDBMS. The front end was developed with Oracle Forms. Two weeks prior to my rotation off of the project and one week after its initial release my manager came to me and said, "OK, the screens are done and look pretty good. How are the reports coming?" Stunned, I replied "Reports? What reports? You never mentioned reports." "Oh, yes," she said, "There are reports. There’s one we need to create to print the base telephone book. There is another that will be used for internal maintenance, etc. etc." "OK," I said, "So what do we use around here to create these reports?" My manager walked over to the bookshelf and pulled out a gray three ring binder fashioned as a book entitled SQR – Structured Query Reportwriter. She tossed me the book and said, "Around here we use SQR." "SQR?" I replied, "I’ve never heard of it". "Well, here’s the book," she said. "Go out to the reports directory and yank a copy of a report as an example. Get together with Sandy and have her walk you through one and you should be OK." Two weeks later after reviewing the book and working with Sandy, a series of SQR reports were also available as part of the application. Who would have thought that some six years later I’d be working for the very company that marketed SQR.

Over the years and within whatever company I worked for I made sure to secure SQR as one of our core application development tools. Although the language does appear to be a montage of various languages, the true beauty of SQR is the power and flexibility that said language offers, coupled with the scalability and performance of the SQR engine.