SQL Server 2008 Overview

SQL Server 2008 delivers on Microsoft’s Data Platform vision by helping your organization manage any data, any place, any time. Store data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents, such as images and rich media, directly within the database. SQL Server 2008 delivers a rich set of integrated services that enable you to do more with your data such as query, search, synchronize, report, and analyze.

SQL Server 2008 provides the highest levels of security, reliability, and scalability for your business-critical applications. To take advantage of new opportunities in today's fast-moving business world, companies need the ability to create and deploy data-driven solutions quickly. SQL Server 2008 reduces time and cost of management and development of applications.

Access data from across your enterprise and provide control over your data no matter where it’s stored—from the largest servers within the data center to desktops to mobile devices. SQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive platform that delivers intelligence where your users want it. Information workers can access data directly using the tools they use every day, such as the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

SQL Server 2008 enables data to be consumed from custom applications developed using Microsoft .NET and Visual Studio and from within service-oriented architectures (SOA) and business processes through Microsoft BizTalk Server.

Solutions

Business Intelligence

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 provides a scalable Business Intelligence platform optimized for data integration, reporting, and analysis, enabling organizations to deliver intelligence where users want it.

Top New Features

• Create high-performance Analysis Services solutions with optimized cube designers, subspace computation, and MOLAP-enabled writeback capabilities.
  
• Implement enterprise-scale Reporting Services solutions through new on-demand processing and instance-based rendering.
  
• Build flexible and effective reports with the new Tablix data structure and rich formatting capabilities.
  
• Expand reach, and empower more users through optimized integration with the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Server Consolidation

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.

Top New Features

• Centralize security auditing with new comprehensive data auditing capabilities
  
• Enforce policy compliance consistently across the enterprise with Policy-Based Management
  
• Control workload resource prioritization with Resource Governor
  
• Optimize storage with built-in data compression and backup compression
  
• Consolidate data services monitoring with Performance Studio
  
• Gain from consolidation of servers with virtualization of databases

Data Warehousing

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is a scalable and reliable Data Warehouse platform for Business Intelligence. Through integration with the Microsoft BI platform, it enables actionable business decisions at the lowest cost.

Top New Features

• Data compression
• Backup compression
• Partitioned table parallelism
• Star join query optimizations
• Resource management
• Grouping sets
• Change data capture
• MERGE SQL statements
• Scalable Integration Services

Virtualization and Server Consolidation

One of the fastest growing technologies in the IT sector is Server Virtualization, sometimes referred to as Hardware Virtualization. Server virtualization transforms hardware into software and enables multiple operating systems to run on a single physical machine as virtual machines (VMs). With server virtualization, you can consolidate workloads of underutilized server machines onto a smaller number of machines and increase the utilization of your resources. Using a virtualization strategy you can use fewer physical machines which can help reduce costs and provide a flexible infrastructure with enterprise-class manageability and performance.

Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is a comprehensive data platform that provides the scalability, availability, security, and manageability that you need for mission-critical OLTP applications.

Top New Features

• Implement peer-to-peer replication quickly with the new visual designer, and add nodes without stopping system activity
• Audit all actions across the enterprise and consolidate audit reporting
• Help protect sensitive data with automatic, transparent data encryption
• Use Performance Studio to troubleshoot, tune, and monitor SQL Server 2008 instances across the enterprise
• Take control of workload resource use with Resource Governor
• Store all kinds of business data with native support for relational data, XML, file streams, and spatial data
• Reduce storage requirements and improve performance with data compression, backup compression, sparse columns, and filtered index and backup compression
• Optimize database mirroring performance and eliminate downtime with automatic recovery of suspect pages

Application Development

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is at the heart of a comprehensive data platform that enables you to access and manipulate business-critical data from a variety of diverse devices, platforms, and data services across the enterprise.

Top New Features

• Map data structures to business entities by using the new ADO.NET Entity Framework.
• Use consistent syntax to query diverse data through .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) extensions to Microsoft Visual C# and Microsoft Visual Basic.NET
• Create occasionally connected solutions using SQL Server 2008 Compact Edition and Microsoft Synchronization Services
• Consolidate data storage through the SQL Server 2008 support for relational, XML, Filestream, and geo-location-based data

Integrate and manage all data

Use the enterprise-scale data warehouse platform of SQL Server 2008 to efficiently implement and manage unified storage for all of your business data.

Boost data warehouse performance

• Integrate large volumes of data into your data warehouse faster by using SQL Server 2008 Integration Services, and consolidate real-time data by capturing data changes
  
• Increase the manageability and performance of large tables with partitioning, which enables you to manage growing volumes of data and users of your SQL Server 2008 data warehouse more efficiently

Consolidate all data for optimized reporting and analysis

Work with all of your data and interact the way you want through support for both relational and non-relational data, including new data types such as FILESTREAM & Spatial

Incorporate data from multiple sources directly into a single report

Use the data source view to integrate data from across the enterprise and create a Unified Dimension Model that consolidates data from heterogeneous, enterprise-wide data stores, such as SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, SAP and Teradata, to create a holistic view of your business, helping end users gain enterprise-wide insight
Consolidate all data for optimized reporting and analysis

• Work with all of your data and interact the way you want through support for both relational and non-relational data, including new data types such as FILESTREAM & Spatial
  
• Incorporate data from multiple sources directly into a single report
  
• Use the data source view to integrate data from across the enterprise and create a Unified Dimension Model that consolidates data from heterogeneous, enterprise-wide data stores, such as SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, SAP and Teradata, to create a holistic view of your business, helping end users gain enterprise-wide insight

Flexibility

Choose the data services consolidation solution that is best for your business

Consolidate servers with multiple databases and instances

• Use SQL Server 2008 to host multiple databases in a single server instance to centralize data storage and management
  
• Run multiple instances of SQL Server 2008 on a single server to enable the isolation of database applications while reducing hardware costs, energy use, licensing costs, and administrative overhead

Consolidate data services through virtualization

• Run multiple SQL Server 2008 instances on the same physical computer using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role, with one or more instances of SQL Server 2008 services in each virtual machine.
  
• Take advantage of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise licensing. With EE license for processors run an unlimited number of virtual database servers.
  
• With SQL Server 2008 EE license mobility; reassign existing SQL Server 2008 licenses across servers in a server farm.

Transfer and migrate databases and data easily

• Choose the right data transfer approach to consolidate data from a wide range of technologies in SQL Server 2008, including:
• Backup and restore
• Attach and detach
• SQL Server Integration Services
• Upgrade existing SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 databases directly to SQL Server 2008