The goal of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is to quantify the brightness of every object in a large fraction of the northern sky down to some faint limit and to follow up with a spectrocsopic survey of 105 quasars and 106 galaxies selected from the imaging data. An automated telescope will measure the brightness in five color bands of an estimated 5 x 107 galaxies and a somewhat larger number of stars. The major goal of the SDSS is the detailed mapping of a volume of the nearby universe (to about z=0.2) many times larger than the largest structures predicted by current theories of structure formation. The quasar survey allows the measurement of structure to the horizon scale and, via the absorption line systems, of the evolution of structure over the age of the universe. The SDSS is nearing the end of the commissioning phases of both the photometric and spectroscopic modes and results already obtained include the observation of a large sample of high redshift (z>4.5) quasars, of the first field methane dwarf star, and of galaxy-galaxy lensing.