Many large companies have been hesitant to use SQL Server as an enterprise-class database. How do you get through to that segment? I think enterprises do take it seriously. The question is, Can we eliminate all hesitancy with this set of releases? And if you take a look at the database benchmarks, at the app platform benchmarks, at the SAP benchmarks, at the customer references, I really do think we can change not only the reality with this set of releases, but I think we're in a position to change what I'll call the last bit of hesitancy in the perception [of SQL Server's scalability], at least relative to Unix. I think when people look for mainframe migrations, they're going to be hesitant about moving off mainframes to anything because they've got a lot of legacy built up.

Compared to Oracle, has it been a question of scalability, stability, features or something else? I would argue it's been a question of perception, not of any of the above. We hope to not only be better with this set of releases but to have people understand that we are better. And we'll see.

You had a five-year cycle between SQL Server releases. What did you learn from the experience? And do you feel you lost some sales opportunities? I want to have more rapid releases, but, man, we've been gaining market share this whole period of time. Now that we've got the new release, woo baby. I think we're in a great spot.

It was more important for us to get .Net integrated into the SQL runtime [than to ship the database sooner]. I do think we should have had the ability to release some of the other features while we were still cooking and baking that. We batched everything up, and therefore we did a very long release cycle. But if you take a look at the BI stuff, there's this set of things that we could have brought to market on a shorter time frame.