Microsoft has made a few major public-facing changes in the past 5 years. These changes include a departure from longer release cycles in their main products and a transition towards subscription-based services (for example, Office 365 and Azure services). The ideas surrounding continuous delivery and agile software development have also shaped the way that Microsoft has been delivering on their flagship integrated development environment Visual Studio, with releases occurring approximately every six months. This change in philosophy is now flowing into the development cycle of SQL Server. Due to the similarly constant release cycle of the cloud-version of SQL Server (Azure SQL Database), there is a desire to keep both the cloud and on-premises versions of the product as close to each other as possible. As such, it is unsurprising to see that the previous release cycle of every three to 5 years is being replaced with much shorter intervals. A clear example of this is that SQL Server 2016 released to the market in June of 2016, with a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2017 being released in November of 2016 and the Release To Market (RTM) of SQL Server 2017 happening in October 2017. The wave of technology progress stops for no one. This is very clearly true in the case of SQL Server!