The long road to SQL Server 2005 ends here.

This blog’s been very quiet this past couple of weeks, and for a very good reason; we were all hard at work putting the finishing touches to SQL Server 2005. We RTM’ed yesterday and if you’re an MSDN subscriber you can already download it (along with Visual Studio 2005).

I joined the SQL Server team almost 4 years ago so it’s been a very long journey for me personally and I’m happy to see the product ship. This is definitely the biggest product release I’ve ever been part of and I’m tremendously excited.

Please don’t hesitate to let me know what you think of the new XML feature. We’re already working hard on future improvements and we’ll welcome your feedback.