SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) - New features for IT Pros

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SQL Katmai was recently officially branded SQL Server 2008. The June community technology preview (CTP) is the 1st publicly available release which was announced at TechEd 2007. Microsoft has publicly committed to releasing the product in 2008, but nothing more specific than that. A guess would be RTM the in the first half of 2008.

The SQL Server 2008 June CTP is officially supported on the 32 or 64-bit versions of the following operating systems: Server 2003 SP1 or SP2, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, and XP SP2. More detailed install requirements here. Note: Server 2008 isn’t listed. It finished the install for me on Beta 3, but not everything seemed to work.

Check out some of the exciting new capabilities of SQL Server 2008:

1. Enhanced Security – Easily encrypt the entire database, data files, or log files, without the need for application changes. Also, integrate key management with other 3rd party key management and HSM solutions for additional security and compliance.

2. Hot Add CPU – You can now add one or more CPUs on the fly. You can still hot add memory like you could in SQL 2005.

3. Database Mirroring improvements – clients can add database mirroring without requiring application changes, database mirroring implementations enable automatic recovery of the corrupted pages from the mirror database (in the event of a hardware failure), transparent to the end user or application

4. Enhanced Reporting – new enterprise reporting engine is more scalable, easier to create and share reports internally and over the internet, has the ability to manage multiple reporting servers and infrastructure, and has integration with Office 2007

5. Policy Based Management – Policies for database operations such as query optimizations, naming conventions, backup and restore operations, and index management will automatically be enforced and monitored and will enable users to publish these policies to thousands of servers

Data Compression – Automatically shrinks data warehouse fact tables while improving performance, also decreases database backup times and storage space required.

Get started

Download & Install SQL Server 2008:
1) Register here. (you must do this 1st)
2) Download the SQL Server 2008 June CTP here.

Websites:
SQL Server 2008 public homepage
SQL Server TechNet TechCenter
Connect Homepage – Feedback, Downloads, Events, Webcasts, etc

Whitepaper : SQL 2008 Overview

Webcasts:
TechNet Webcast: SQL Server Code Name "Katmai" Overview (Level 100)
TechEd SQL Server 2008 Webcast – SQL Overview (DAT201)
TechEd webcasts will eventually become available here.

TechEd PPTs:
· Beyond Relational
· Manageability
· Data Warehousing