Rick F. van der Lans is an independent consultant, author, and lecturer specializing in business intelligence, data warehousing, and database technology. He is the managing director of R20/Consultancy which is based in The Netherlands. Rick has advised many large companies worldwide on defining their data warehouse architectures. He is the chairman of the annual European BI and Data Warehousing Conference organized in London, he writes for B-eye-Network.com, BI-platform.nl, and for Database Magazine. He is the author of several books on database technology, including Introduction to SQL (Addison-Wesley, 2006), currently in its fourth edition.