A lifetime ago I was an 80s high school computer geek and I dabbled with Sinclair BASIC, Z80 assembler (Sinclair ZX81), 68008 assembler (Sinclair QL) and Forth (Jupiter Ace). They were exciting times to be "into computers"... I've worked in IT since 1985, and I've been a software developer in various languages including MSBASIC, COBOL, VB, VBA, Java and Python. I've been using SQL since 1989 (starting with Ingres but mostly it's been Oracle with about 10 years using SQL Server in there somewhere), and I'm still surprised by just how much I *don't know* about all of the above... :thinking: Over the years, my work has become much more data-focused, with data migrations and general ad hoc business data query requests from users. I wanted a tool that could assist me with this kind of work. I've spent too many years using Excel and I dislike manually populating Excel sheets from databases, especially if I know the task is going to have to be repeated. I don't enjoy repetition, and I also have an aversion to embedding sql queries within Excel, so I needed to find another way. So this brought me and my career to the various data blending tools... Before KNIME (which I first heard about and started using in March 2021), I had had recent experience of using Alteryx and some experience of using Talend Open Studio. In my view, KNIME rocks! Each of the commercial data blending/transformation products has its strengths but KNIME works for me, for the things I generally want to do. As a developer (sometimes freelance), I need a tool I can personally afford when I'm between contracts, and for me, the fact that KNIME AP is open source and *free* for me to use means that I can continue to further my knowledge even during those times... *If you have read this far, I can only apologise, as that's a minute or so of your life you won't get back... ;-)* Brian Bates