Microsoft SQL Server 2008 RTM

So SQLServer 2008 made it to RTM today. This is a pretty big release of the product and combined with the Data Access technologies such as the Entity Framework which is part of the Visual Studio wave, there is a lot of innovation to get developers and ITPRO excited.

For the ITPRO there are some great things such as Enhanced Clustering support, support for a new Management architecture which is completely customizable and a whole bunch of performance enhancements, specifically around OLTP and multicore architectures, with the first TPC-E result on a 64 core machine.

For the developer, there are some other great things such as stream support, so you do not have to decide whether to store you files on the hard drive or in the database and secondly the big area is Spatial support, so you can add location awareness to information and then have this mapped through technologies like Virtual Earth.

There latest press release is found here.

Finally you can get up to date on SQLServer  if you are an ITPRO on Technet EDGE here or if you are a developer, you can go to Channel9 here.