For most of us, especially readers of this book, SQL Server—in any version—is the heart of the system. We take care of it, perfect it, use more and more recent versions, and spend lots of time getting to know, and, most of all, befriending it. We use many tools to employ it in a better, safer, more convenient, and more efficient way: first through procedures, scripts, and applications we create, and then through tools supplied by Microsoft and applications supplied by various vendors. This is the ideal state for us, apart from those difficult moments when a presentation is needed, or, worse still, when we have to plan a budget for the environment of which we take care.
Unfortunately, in the big picture of our database environment, we have internal and external clients. These are our supervisors, project managers, and department directors. Although they give us our tasks, our data, servers, instances, clusters, and so on take most of our time. But our clients constantly require something, demand and expect something from us. A report for tomorrow? No, it’s for this afternoon! A new set of script changes? As if I care; we have wage processing tonight! I can’t enter the database; why does it take so long? These are only a fraction of the demands I’ve heard this month alone.