Application Development
Improves developer productivity by providing integration between frameworks, data connectivity technologies, programming languages, Web services, development tools, and data. Develop data-centric solutions that access, consume, and manage data from any data source, and enable efficient delivery to relevant users.
Build scalable, data-centric solutions that target any workload, from the smallest device to the largest servers, and enable your applications to grow with your business needs.
Business Intelligence
Use the enterprise-scale data warehouse platform of SQL Server 2008 to efficiently unlock data from multiple sources and efficiently manage a unified storage for all of your business data. Use powerful wizards and innovative design tools for building integration, reporting, and analysis solutions within a single environment, and enjoy the increased developer productivity and faster capitalisation on new analysis and reporting capabilities. Deliver a rich, personalised user experience, enabling more users throughout the organisation to drive action from the insight they gain through an extensible and embeddable architecture that is optimised for Microsoft Office interoperability
Data Warehousing
Provide development teams with tools that enable a productive and collaborative environment for building solutions.
Benefit from the increased scalability, manageability, and performance offered by SQL Server 2008.
Provide deep analytical capabilities, rich visualisation and collaboration, and enterprise reporting to all employees.
Online Transaction Processing
Build a database solution with the performance and scalability capabilities required by today’s applications.
Provide a database application with always- on capabilities, while minimiszing management and performance overhead.
Provide a secure data platform for your mission-critical data. Reduce the time and cost of managing infrastructure with innovative and automated policy-based administration and improved tools for monitoring, troubleshooting, and tuning.
Server Consolidation
- Choose the data services consolidation solution that best suits your business.
- Manage, monitor, secure, and optimise consolidated data systems effectively.
- Build enterprise-scale consolidated data solutions.
Analysis Services
- Build comprehensive, enterprise-scale analytic solutions with actionable results.
- Scaleable for today's business with a Unified Dimensional Model for simplifying multiple analytical needs and interoperability with the Office 2007 system.
- New features such as a Cube Designer and "what if" scenarios are included.
Data Mining
Predictive insight through intuitive and comprehensive data mining tools that are integrated to enable on the fly discovery and extensible to other applications.
High Availability—Always On
With database mirroring, fail-over clustering, a resource governor and other new features SQL Server 2008 increases availability, decreases downtime and improves manageability.
Integration Services
SSIS provides a scalable enterprise data integration platform with rich ETL solutions utilising .NET. Script tasks can now be created in Visual C# and Visual Basic.NET
Manageability
Providing a scaleable policy-based management for one or more instances of SQL Server, along with tools for performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and tuning that enable administrators to more efficiently manage their databases and SQL Server instances.
Performance and Scale
SQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive data platform that can grow with your business. Scale-up individual servers, scale-out very large databases and optimise performance.
Programmability
Develop powerful applications using new and enhanced T-SQL features. Control more data more easily with increased data type support and improvements in the storage engine and data store.
Reporting Services
A complete server-based platform designed to support the delivery of relevant information across the entire enterprise reporting lifecycle. Providing rich and engaging reports with flexible design capabilities, managed and centrally deployed.
Security
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 offers security feature enhancements that help provide effective management of security feature configuration, strong authentication and access control, powerful encryption and key management capabilities, and enhanced auditing.
Spatial Data
Delivering comprehensive spatial support to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications, ultimately helping end users make better decisions.
The list of core new features are listed by the focus areas of the key pillars of the new product; Trusted, Productive, Intelligent.
TRUSTED
Protect valuable information
- Transparent Data Encryption
- Extensible Key Management
- Auditing capabilities
Ensure business continuity
- Enhanced Database Mirroring
- Automatic Recovery of Data Pages
- Log Stream Compression
Enable predictable response
- Resource Governor
- Predictable Query Performance
- Data Compression
- Hot Add CPU
PRODUCTIVE
Manage by policies
- Policy-Based Management
- Streamlined Installation
- Performance Data Collection
Simplify application development
- Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
- ADO.NET Object Services
Store any information
- DATE/TIME, new types
- HIERARCHY ID
- FILESTREAM Data
- Integrated Full Text Search
Sparse Columns
- Large User-Defined Types
- Spatial Data Types
INTELLIGENT
Integrate any data
- Backup Compression
- Partitioned Table Parallelism
- Star Join Query Optimizations
- Grouping Sets
- Change Data Capture
MERGE SQL Statement
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Pipeline
Improvements
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Persistent
Lookups
Deliver relevant information
- Analysis Scale and Performance
- Block Computations
- Writeback
Drive actionable insights
- Enterprise Reporting Engine
- Internet Report Deployment
- Manage Reporting Infrastructure
- Report Builder Enhancements
- Built-In Forms Authentication
- Report Server Application Embedding
- Microsoft Office Integration
- Predictive Analysis
Hardcopy Links
Sep 2007 - SQL Server 2008 vs Oracle 11G, Mark Whitehorn
Jun 2007 - Data Integrity, What It Means And How To Achieve It, Mark Whitehorn
Microsoft Links
Technical
Visit the Microsoft technical area for SQL Server
Support
Visit the Microsoft support area for SQL Server
Learning Resources
Visit the Microsoft learning area for SQL Server
Community
Events and Webcasts
View events and webcasts from Microsoft on SQL Server
Forums and Blogs
Visit forums and blogs from Microsoft on SQL Server
Free SQL Server 2008 ASP trial
Sign up for a FREE Microsoft SQL Server 2008 account and be among the first to experience and test Microsoft’s newest, most intelligent data platform. Provided in a secured MaximumASP environment, you can evaluate Microsoft’s new data management and analysis platform in advance of the official release set for the second quarter of 2008. MaximumASP, Dell and the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) are pleased to collaborate, with the support of Microsoft – to offer a website that offers you the opportunity to:
- Understand the new product features in Microsoft SQL Server 2008
- Exchange information with expert users in the SQL Community, on discussion forums and blogs and set up an account to test drive Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 for yourself
To participate all you need to do is fill in a web form at:
SqlServerBeta.com