Introduction

Database technology is constantly evolving. The interplay among major database vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle, as well as the inevitable pressure of the open-source community, has demanded that database systems continue to push forward in both features and scalability. This fact means that the everyday database professional is constantly in a "catch up" mode. This book is an attempt to simplify that process by distilling the flood of information available.

The very nature of a book like this, where the subject matter is so broad, is to ensure that the important points get included, but we can't possibly include everything that SQL Server 2008 supports. In fact, the authors had numerous long conversations, not about what we had to put into the book, but the trade-offs of what we had to leave out. We tried to find a balance, providing at least general coverage of the most important topics. This meant that we had to sacrifice the "deep dive" in some situations to ensure that we could address as much as possible without overloading the reader.