  The Silicon Vertex Detector of Belle II is a state-of-the-art tracking and
vertexing system based on double-sided silicon strip sensors, designed and
fabricated by a large international collaboration in the period 2012--2018.
Since 2019 it has been in operation providing high quality data with a small
number of defective channels (<1%), a large hit-finding efficiency (>99%), a
good signal-to-noise ratio (well in excess of 10 for all sensor configurations
and tracks). Together with the good control over the alignment, these are all
essential factors to achieve good tracking reconstruction and physics
performance. In this extended paper we try to document all the aspects of the
SVD challenges and achievements, in the spirit of providing information to the
broader community and help the development of high quality detector systems,
which are fundamental tools to carry out physics research.
