What's New in SQL Server 2008 (Code name 'Katmai')

  • Article

SQL Server 2008 (code name 'Katmai') delivers on the Microsoft data platform vision by enabling organizations to run their mission critical applications. Following are the main qualities of the new platform:

  • Trusted: In today's data driven world, organizations needs continuous access to their data. It is very important to have features such as reliability, security, and scalability.
    • Security: on the security front, SQL Server 2008 provides features for transparent data encryption, external key management, and enhanced auditing.

It is now possible to encrypt your entire database, data files, log files without needing any application changes and without affecting end users. This enables organizations to meet the demands of regulatory compliance and overall concern for data privacy.

SQL Server 2008 provides excellent support for managing security keys within the enterprise by supporting third-party key management and hardware security module (HSM) products.

For the growing need of auditing related compliance needs, this version of SQL Server can be used to audit activities on your data such as when particular data was read, what data was modified and by whom, etc. You can define audit specifications on each database, so auditing can be ported with databases. Filtering of audit of specific objects allow better performance in audit generation and flexibility in configuration.

    • Reliability: SQL Server 2008 has enhanced data mirroring with new features such as automatic page repair, improved performance (using compression of outgoing log stream), enhanced supportability (new performance counters) and new dynamic management views, and extension of existing views to expose additional information about mirroring sessions.

Hot Add CPU allows a database to be scaled on demand. More CPU resources can be added on supported hardware platforms without requiring any application downtime.

    • Scalability: New reporting and monitoring tools, centralized data repository for performance data collection and extensible performance data collection features will surely enable database administrators to better performance tune and troubleshoot applications.

Other important features like extended events, backup compression, data compression, resource governor and plan freezing. Resource Governor enables DBAs to define resource limits and priorities for different workloads, which enables concurrent workloads to provide consistent performance to end users.

Plan freezing enables greater query performance stability and predictability by providing new functionality to lock down query plans. This enables organizations to promote stable query plans across hardware replacements, server upgrades, and production deployments

  • Productive: SQL Server 2008, along with .NET Framework and Visual Studio Team System, enables organizations to reduce the time and cost required to develop and manage their data infrastructure.
    • SQL Server 2008 introduces new Declarative Management Framework (DMF), which is a policy based management framework for SQL Server database engine. Policy administrators will use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to create policies to manage entities on the server, which could be across multiple SQL instances. 3 main components of DMF are: Policy management, policy administrators who create policies, and explicit administration.
    • A higher level of data abstraction thru ADO.NET entity framework.
    • Microsoft Language Integrated Query (LINQ) to issue queries against data by using a managed programming language such as C#, or VB.NET, instead of SQL statements. SQL Server 2008 has new LINQ to SQL provider that enables developers to use LIND directly on SQL tables and columns.
    • CLR integration and ADO.NET object services.
    • Improved SQL Broker scalability (Conversation priority and Diagnostic tool)
    • Transact SQL improvements (Table value parameters, object dependencies, etc)
    • Occasionally connected system (caching, notification and synchronization based)
    • Beyond relational data support by new data types.
  • Intelligent: SQL Server 2008 contains new business intelligence features. Some of them are listed below:
    • Data compression and backup compression
    • Improved performance for large, partitioned tables.
    • Star join query optimizations
    • Resource Governer
    • Scalable Integration Services
    • Enterprise Reporting Engine
    • New Report Designer
    • SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 Integration with Microsoft SharePoint
    • Microsoft Office Rendering

Microsoft has annouced that it will launch SQL Server 2008, along with Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, at an event in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 2008.