SQL Server 2008 intro
Category microsoft
Moving from a "database" to a "data platform".
Native support for filestreaming, better datetime handling, geospatial datatype.
Over time will add more and more support for unstructured data types.
Adding more offline support via Synchronisation Services (I know no details)
New capabilities for detailed auditing, and building compliance architectures on top of that auditing.
Transparent data encryption: database-level encryption keys. Backups also encrypted. No changes to applications are required - hence the "transparent" bit. Prevents security breaches due to access to live data files or backups thereof. This is NOT enabled by default, but seems fairly straight-forward to set up and use.
Reliability. Backup compression (hooray!) Turned off by default though. Faster than uncompressed. Only works with SQL Server 2008. Improvements to mirroring, including self-repair of damaged database pages using mirrored copy. Good stuff. Log compression to improve mirroring performance.
Scalability. Better parallelism. Dictionary-based compression for denormalised data in Data Warehouses. Improved resource pool management through the Resource Governor: assign database users to different workgroups based on attributes of the connection string, then manage CPU utilisation cut offs based on pools of workgroups. Can change the resource allocations dynamically.
Higher buffer hit rates through data compression. Performance improvements in Analysis Services.
Moving from a "database" to a "data platform".
Native support for filestreaming, better datetime handling, geospatial datatype.
Over time will add more and more support for unstructured data types.
Adding more offline support via Synchronisation Services (I know no details)
New capabilities for detailed auditing, and building compliance architectures on top of that auditing.
Transparent data encryption: database-level encryption keys. Backups also encrypted. No changes to applications are required - hence the "transparent" bit. Prevents security breaches due to access to live data files or backups thereof. This is NOT enabled by default, but seems fairly straight-forward to set up and use.
Reliability. Backup compression (hooray!) Turned off by default though. Faster than uncompressed. Only works with SQL Server 2008. Improvements to mirroring, including self-repair of damaged database pages using mirrored copy. Good stuff. Log compression to improve mirroring performance.
Scalability. Better parallelism. Dictionary-based compression for denormalised data in Data Warehouses. Improved resource pool management through the Resource Governor: assign database users to different workgroups based on attributes of the connection string, then manage CPU utilisation cut offs based on pools of workgroups. Can change the resource allocations dynamically.
Higher buffer hit rates through data compression. Performance improvements in Analysis Services.
