IT Forum: SQL Server 2008

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Yes, I know you might still think of SQL 2005 as a new product, but SQL 2008 is nearly with us and there are many reasons why people are looking to upgrade.  There was a useful session at IT Forum which looked at the release of SQL 2008, and explored the new facilities that it will provide.
In a nutshell, it promises:

  • Managing massive amounts of data on multiple devices
    • Data is everywhere and needs managing. Consider the fact that many laptops can have around 1 TB of storage. How do you manage that type of distributed data model?
    • SQL 2008 has enhanced database mirroring to improve performance, thereby resulting in improved resilience. And also has optimised and predictable performance.
    • Connect data from any device such as PC, laptop or phone
  • Bringing Business Insight to more users and making this simpler
    • The ability to get the data out in a way that makes it useful to the right user communities/individuals in the organisation - to get more value out of their Business Intelligence.
    • Every user can get actionable insight - delivers information via MS Office with better integration between Word and Excel to bring data mining to a much broader audience
    • There's a fantastic new report writer tool, with excellent visualisation.
  • Spatial data management
    • This spatial ability is built into all flavours (including the free SQL) at no additional cost.
    • A great example used was how many coffee stores are within 1 km from the route to work? The answer is spatial and not traditional SQL. So the simple thing is to use longitude and latitude as the storage type, and when combined with a simple map and https://maps.live.com it's really powerful.
  • Transparent data encryption
    • The application, e.g. SAP or an internal system, does not need any changes for the database to be encrypted.
  • Sight and sound data types
    • This allows documents to be stored in a more cost effective manner.
    • Users can access these documents as data with full text search, query across relational and text data.
  • The same pricing for SQL2008 as for SQL 2005

Posted by Ray