Before I describe the contents of this book and why I think you should just take it over to the counter and buy it, I would like to give you an insider?s look at the SQL Server 2008 product dev- opment cycle. I believe this insight will provide you with a deeper understanding of how SQL Server is continuing to evolve. The rest of this book will show you why SQL Server is enterprise-ready. For the past 5 years, I was a program manager at Microsoft in the SQL Server product unit. During this time, I owned various features within the product, including SQL Server Agent, SQL Server Express, and most recently, database security. When I joined SQL Server in 2002, the product team was in year 3 of planning and implementing theYukon (SQL Server 2005) release. One of my first responsibilities was to own the Create Database/ Database Properties dialog in SQL Server Management Studio. After working with the user interface (UI) design team and various UI developers, we crafted the interesting grid-based dialog that you see today in Management Studio. However, arriving at the implemented Create Database dialog was not as straightforward as we wanted.