SQL Server 2008 RC0 Available

The release of SQL Server 2008 has hit another milestone with the news that Release Candidate 0 (RC0) has been made available for public download this morning. This was initially released to Technet Plus and MSDN subscribers last Friday. It is expected that this will be the final release prior to SQL Server 2008 RTM in Q3 this calendar year. This release includes support for upgrading failover clusters from previous versions of SQL Server, as well as several bug fixes and minor improvements that have been made in response to the customer feedback Microsoft has received from previous CTPs.

Interest and excitement is continuing to build for the release of 2008, with 100,000 people downloading the last CTP (CTP6 Feb), and 250,000 total downloads of SQL Server 2008 CTP's. I am also seeing huge amounts of interest from customers who are looking to upgrade straight to 2008 to get the full benefit of features such as Policy Based Management, Resource Governor, Filestream data, Business Intelligence and Compression.