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.

One 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。

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