I am Second Employee of Adventure Works

Interesting enough, I got an email reads

Hi Jian Shuo,
It is very cool to execute the following statement in SQL Server 2000 if you have the sample database Adventure Works 2000 installed:
SELECT *
FROM Employee
WHERE (EmployeeID = 2);
The result would be:
       2       Jian Shuo       2       1       Wang            0       509647174       Engineering Manager     1997-12-121964-12-13    adventure-works\Jian    Jian@adventure-works.com        1       MQiang Wang     249-433-7659    1       M       1       2       43.2692 2       21      0       1       2003-1-15 19:26:14      {69C8C27C-87DF-45B4-9A46-AB603268AB1B}
It is noticed that the first name is stored as "Jian Shuo" with capitalized ‘S’ and a space between "Jian" and "Shuo", which is your preferred written form in your article before. Also, it is different than other Chinese-liked first names such as "Jinghao"(EmployeeID = 77) and "Jinghao"(EmployeeID = 241), making it the only Chinese name with a first name separated into 2 words in the database.
I’m not sure whether this imaginary employee is based on your figure so I’m writing to get your confirmation.
BR

That reminded me that I was listed as Employee ID #2 of the famous fiction Adventure Works in the sample database of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and all versions after that. In that sample database, I appeared as Engineering Manager with few other people reporting to me, and I reported to Employee #1,  Terri Duffy. To find out more, you can just do a query in any Microsoft SQL Server after 2000.

How come? The person was me. I remember I signed a lengthy legal form to release my name for use in future Microsoft product in sample database. I am sure that most of the names listed in the sample databases are actual Microsoft employees at that time.

So, besides the things I have done, I am also a fiction employee of the fiction famous company that lives only in the database of millions of copies of a piece of software around the world.

To answer the question why my name is entered as "Jian Shuo Wang", instead of "Jianshuo Wang", here are some articles I wrote about it.

I briefly explained why I didn’t have English name (Jason Wang seems to be closest choice), and why I started to us Wang Jian Shuo since 2008 instead of Jian Shuo Wang. For the first name, I used Jianshuo (connected to form a single word) most of the time in early days of Internet, and then started to spell it the current way (with a space in between, and capitalize the S), because I feel it is the way to reflect my Chinese identity better. There are three characters in my Chinese name, so should the English counterpart.

1 thought on “I am Second Employee of Adventure Works

  1. 我之前在找工作时写了一篇 找工作随感:为什么我没有英文名字 。看了本尊,感觉戚戚然焉。

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *