  The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has identified a total of 212 cataclysmic
variables, most of which are fainter than 18th magnitude. This is the deepest
and most populous homogeneous sample of cataclysmic variables to date, and we
are undertaking a project to characterise this population. We have found that
the SDSS sample is dominated by a great ``silent majority'' of old and faint
CVs. We detect, for the first time, a population spike at the minimum period of
80 minutes which has been predicted by theoretical studies for over a decade.
