Gianluca Hotz is an independent consultant, trainer, speaker and a Mentor at SolidQ 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. He is among the original founders of ugiss.org, where he served as vice-president between 2000 and 2016 and is currently serving as president, for his contribution to the community he has been a SQL Server MVP since 1998.