Gianluca Hotz is an independent consultant, trainer and speaker specialized in architecture, database design, high availability, capacity planning, performance tuning, system integration and migrations for Microsoft SQL Server.He has been working as a consultant in the IT field since 1993 and with SQL Server since 1996 starting with version 4.21 on Windows NT. As a trainer, he was in charge of the SQL Server courses line for one of the largest Italian Microsoft Learning Partner (Mondadori Informatica Education) and still enjoys teaching people through regular class training and on-the-job training. He also supports Microsoft on the field as a speaker and expert at local and international conferences, workshops and university seminars.Gianluca joined SolidQ (previously known as Solid Quality Mentors and Solid Quality Learning) as a mentor in 2003, was one of the acquisition editors for The SolidQ Journal between 2010 and 2012, has served in the global board as a voting member between 2012 and 2014 (representing minority shareholders) and as internal advisor between 2014 and 2015. He was one of the founders of the Italian SolidQ subsidiary where he held the position of ad interim CEO between 2007 and 2014 and director of the Data Platform division between 2015 and 2016. He left the company in 2019 to pursue his own business.Being among the original founders of ugiss.org (Italian User Group for SQL Server), and ugidotnet.org (Italian dot NET User Group), he's also a community leader regularly speaking at user group workshops, he served as vice-president for UGISS between 2001 and 2016 where he's currently serving as president. For his contribution to the community, including newsgroup support in the past, he has been a SQL Server MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) since 1998.