Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008 has been released to manufacturing today!

The official News Release is re-posted here:

REDMOND, Wash. — Aug. 6, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the release to manufacturing of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, the new version of the company’s acclaimed data management and business intelligence platform. This version of SQL Server provides powerful new capabilities such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis services. SQL Server 2008 provides the trusted, productive and intelligent platform necessary for business-critical applications.

“Microsoft developed this release of SQL Server with the customer in mind,” said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft. “SQL Server 2008 is the only major database that includes comprehensive, tightly integrated functionality for data management as well as advanced business intelligence out of the box. By offering a complete solution, we save customers time and money and allow them to focus on deriving the most value from their data assets.”

With more than 450,000 customer and partner downloads of SQL Server 2008’s Community Technology Previews (CTPs), more than 75 large-scale applications already in production and more than 1,350 applications being developed by nearly 1,000 independent software vendors (ISVs) on SQL Server 2008, it’s clear that customers and partners are excited about the capabilities now available in SQL Server 2008.

Tim Whitehorn, founder and chief executive officer of event management software provider ServiceU Corp., said, “We selected SQL Server 2008 because we can entrust it with our critical business applications. SQL Server 2008 is highly secure and reliable, and offers the best value on the market today. In addition, it accelerates the time frame for deploying new features and enhancements, and that to us makes SQL Server a winner.”

A number of enterprise customers from various industries are testing SQL Server 2008 including Clear Channel Communications Inc., Hilton Hotels Corp., Simon & Schuster Inc., Siemens AG and Xerox Corp., among many others.

SQL Server is an industry leader in both scalability and performance. It is the first and only database management system to be proven capable of delivering scalable results on TPC-E, the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s (TPC) newest and most challenging online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark, with 13 published benchmarks to date.¹ Also demonstrating the performance of SQL Server 2008, Unisys Corp. and Microsoft set a new extract, transform and load (ETL) performance record by loading 1 terabyte of data in less than 30 minutes using SQL Server 2008 Integration Services. In addition, SQL Server 2008 has proven its scalability in large-scale data warehousing, as demonstrated by its recent 10-terabyte TPC-H benchmark.²

“We saw a 35 percent improvement in throughput on the system that we upgraded to SQL Server 2008, with no code changes on our end,” said Gary Oberg, vice president of IT and development at Applied Discovery (a member of the LexisNexis group). “This translates straight to the bottom line for us, as the more documents we can upload, the more we can process.”

Microsoft is setting additional benchmark records with ISV solutions, including a world record on four-socket industry-standard blade servers in a three-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark, and demonstrated the largest benchmark ever on the Siemens Teamcenter digital product life-cycle management solution, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Dynamics AX and the Camstar Manufacturing Execution System solution.

SQL Server is a key component of the Microsoft Application Platform, a suite of products and technologies designed to help customers build, run and manage dynamic business applications. SQL Server 2008 is available in the following editions:

SQL Server 2008 Enterprise. SQL Server 2008 Enterprise is a comprehensive data management and business intelligence platform that provides enterprise-class scalability, data warehousing, security, advanced analytics and reporting support for running business-critical applications. With this edition, it is possible to consolidate servers and perform large-scale online transactional processing.

SQL Server 2008 Standard. SQL Server 2008 Standard is a complete data management and business intelligence platform that provides best-in-class ease of use and manageability for running departmental applications.

SQL Server 2008 Workgroup. SQL Server 2008 Workgroup is a reliable data management and reporting platform that delivers secure, remote synchronization and management capabilities for running branch applications. This edition includes core database features and is easy to upgrade to the Standard or Enterprise edition.

SQL Server 2008 Web. SQL Server 2008 Web is designed for highly available, Internet-facing Web-serving environments running on Windows Server. SQL Server 2008 Web provides the tools necessary to support low-cost, large-scale, highly available Web applications or hosting solutions for customers.

SQL Server 2008 Developer. SQL Server 2008 Developer allows developers to build and test any type of application with SQL Server. This edition features all of the functionality of SQL Server Enterprise but is licensed only for development, test and demo use. Applications and databases developed on this edition can easily be upgraded to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise.

SQL Server 2008 Express. SQL Server 2008 Express is a free edition of SQL Server that features core database functionality including all of the new SQL Server 2008 data types, in a small footprint. This edition is ideal for learning and building desktop and small server applications, and for redistribution by ISVs.

SQL Server Compact 3.5. SQL Server Compact is a free embedded database designed for developers and is ideal for building stand-alone and occasionally connected applications for mobile devices, desktops and Web clients. SQL Server Compact runs on all Microsoft Windows platforms, including the Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems, and on Pocket PC and smartphone devices.

Pricing and Availability
SQL Server 2008 is now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will be available for evaluation download on Aug. 7, 2008. SQL Server 2008 Express and SQL Server Compact editions are available for free download today at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver.

As previously announced, pricing for SQL Server will not increase with SQL Server 2008. More information is available at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/sqlserver.

¹TPC benchmarks are produced by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). Full results are available at http://www.tpc.org. Results referenced are current as of July 29, 2008.
²HP Integrity Superdome, 63651 QphH@10TB, 38.54 $/QphH@10TB, available Aug. 30, 2008.

Microsoft Focuses on BI for SQL Server Kilimanjaro

Microsoft unveils a road map for SQL Server “Kilimanjaro,” which will contain new BI capabilities. Microsoft officials also discuss plans for the DATAllegro integration with SQL Server, which they say will enable SQL Server to penetrate deeper into data warehouse environments by improving scalability.

Microsoft offered the public a glimpse of the future of SQL Server at its Business Intelligence Conference in Seattle.

During his conference keynote, Ted Kummert, vice president of Microsoft’s Data and Platform Storage division, laid out the company’s plans to build additional business intelligence capabilities into SQL Server. This version of SQL Server, code-named Kilimanjaro, will include self-service reporting updates and new BI functionality code-named Project Gemini.

According to Microsoft, through Project Gemini, users of SQL Server Kilimanjaro will be able to grab data and create their own BI applications and assets to share and collaborate on from within popular Microsoft Office productivity tools. The Gemini component of Kilimanjaro features a SharePoint midtier for publishing, collaboration and management; Excel-hosted Gemini client Self-service Data Preparation; and a column-based storage engine.

“Kilimanjaro will allow an end user to leverage the technology they are familiar with Excel [and] SharePoint to produce a report and share it with their colleagues for further collaboration,” said Tom Casey, GM of SQL Server Business Intelligence, in an interview with eWEEK. “It’s a combination really of self-service BI and knowledge management. Additionally, the environment is an IT managed one, so intelligence captured through the application will be transferred back into SQL Server. No more lost intelligence sitting in Excel files on the end user’s desktop.”

The new self-service reporting capabilities will include an upgrade to Report Builder as well as features such as a reusable component repository.

“One of the more groundbreaking features here is the composite reporting, or ‘grab-and-go’ reporting, capabilities [that allow] someone like the CFO to easily come in and pull a few charts into a report with [the] complete capability to drill down into data as needed,” Casey added.

The announcement comes roughly two months after SQL Server 2008 hit the streets. In his keynote, Kummert stressed the company will stick to plans to release major updates to SQL Server every 24 to 36 months. Kilimanjaro, however, will be available within the next 12 months via a community technology preview (CTP). Full availability is scheduled for 2010.

On the coattails of that announcement, Microsoft also clarified its road map for recently acquired DATAllegro. The integration effort is code-named Madison and will provide an appliancelike solution in collaboration with hardware partners Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Unisys, Bull Systems and EMC. Madison will be available via CTP in the next 12 months, with full availability in 2010.

Microsoft starts sharing details on SQL Server ‘Kilimanjaro’

Not every team at Microsoft is insisting on secrecy about futures. In fact, the SQL Server database team is taking a much different course than its Windows brethren.

Just a couple of months after releasing to manufacturing SQL Server 2008, Microsoft is starting to offer details about its next release of its flagship database. That product, code-named “Killimanjaro,” will ship in the first half of 2010, according to Microsoft officials. The first tech preview test builds of Kilimanjaro are due in the first half of 2009, the Softies said.

Microsoft shared information about Kilimanjaro at the company’s second annual Business Intelligence Conference, which kicked off on October 6 in Seattle.

Kilimanjaro is set to include self-service analysis tools (codenamed “Gemini”) that Microsoft is saying will allow information workers to better “slice and dice data and create their own BI (business intelligence) applications and assets to share and collaborate on from within the familiar, everyday Microsoft Office productivity tools they already use.” Gemini will incorporate an update to SQL Server Analysis Services, plus some new in-memory components, some “splicers” and add-in exerpiences based on Excel, and deeper SharePoint integration, enbling users to share analyses they’ve created, Microsoft officials said.

Update: It seems Microsoft also is planning to fold the master-data-management technology it acquired a while back when it bought Stratature into the Kilimanjaro SQL Server release.  Originally, Microsoft was talking about making MDM part of Office 14; perhaps it will simply be the BI-component complements to O14.

Update No. 2: Microsoft is not making master data management part of Kilimanjaro after all.  From a spokeswoman: “Kilimanjaro will work with MDM solutions but will not include MDM functionality of its own.” So it looks like MDM still, potentially, couldbe part of O14.

At the BI conference, the SQL team announced one more new codename to add to its repertoire: Project Madison. Microsoft is describing Madison as a “solution”; from its description, it seems that means data-warehouse appliance. Madison is based on technology Microsoft recently bought when it acquired DATAllegro, a data-warehouse-appliance vendor. Microsoft is promising that, via Madison, it will be able to help users with data-warehousing workloads spanning hundreds of terabyes of data and thousands of concurrent users.

Microsoft is planning to release a Madison Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build in the next 12 months. No word from Microsoft on when — or in what form — Microsoft plans to ship Madison.

Microsoft’s BI platform includes Excel and other Office applications, SharePoint Server for “team BI,” PerformancePoint (scorecarding) Server for organization-wide BI and SQL Server for data-platform needs.

When I asked the SQL Server team why they already were starting to talk publicly about Kilimanjaro,  Microsoft BI general manager Bob Lokkentold me that his team was committed to providing customers with insight into their future roadmap. He noted that Microsoft has said publicly that it plans to deliver a new SQL Server release every 24 to 36 months and wanted to make sure its partners and customers know where it’s going.

SQL Server 2008 – Features, Function and Value

Problem
In preparation for the upcoming MSSQLTips.com SQL Server 2008 web cast, I want to start to introduce some of the new SQL Server 2008 technologies at a surface that will start to shape the industry.  The features are across just about every major component in the product suite so the benefits should be broad and perceived as beneficial not only from an IT perspective, but also from a user perspective.  This should ultimately yield a significant business benefit as SQL Server 2008 is adopted in 2008 and 2009.

Solution
Let’s jump into each the of new SQL Server 2008 product categories, features and provide references to some of these technologies as additional points of reference.

• Security and Data Auditing
  • Transparent Data Encryption – This is encrypting the data while it is on disk and remains transparent to applications
  • External Key Management – This new functionality relates to consolidation of key management and integration with external products
  • Data Auditing – This is one core feature of SQL Server 2008 that will include a number of new features to include:
    • The introduction of first class ‘AUDIT’ objects
    • Auditing DDL (data definition language) commands
    • Support for multiple logging targets
  • Additional information – http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/futureversion/datamanage/default.mspx
• Availability and Reliability
  • CPUs – Support for pluggable CPUs which means that a CPU can be added on the fly and recognized by SQL Server 2008 just like memory in SQL Server 2005
  • Database Mirroring – Enhanced Database Mirroring to include compression of mirror streams, enhanced performance and automatic page-level repair for the principal and mirror
• Performance
  • Data Compression – This new feature provides the ability to easily enable or disable data compression as an online command as well as offer more efficient data storage above and beyond traditional data compression
    • http://blogs.msdn.com/manisblog/archive/2007/08/13/data-compression-with-sql-server-2005-sp2-and-katmai.aspx
  • Backup Stream Compression – The ability to configure compression with server level control or backup statement control of all backup types (full, differential, transaction log)
  • Performance Data Collection – When you are experiencing a performance issue the biggest problem is pinpointing the problem, so with SQL Server 2008 Microsoft is introducing a single common framework for performance related data collection, reporting, and warehousing
  • Improved Plan Guide Support – With SQL Server 2008 plans can be frozen for permanent query usage as well as pull plans directly from plan cache with SQL Server Management Studio integration
  • Resource Governor – If you have had the need to segment your SQL Server resource utilization then you should be looking forward to SQL Server 2008 because you will have the opportunity to create pools and groups to segment the resources and govern them independently
    • http://decipherinfosys.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/new-features-in-sql-server-2008-i/
• Management
  • Policy-Based Management Framework – The ability to manage objects via policies as opposed to traditional scripts with inherent monitoring and enforcement
  • Microsoft System Center – Integration with Microsoft System Center which a product from Microsoft to improve operational costs
  • Extended Events – Another new feature is Extended Events which is a high performance yet light weight tracing infrastructure with insight into the core engine independent of SQL Trace
• New Data Types
  • Date Time Data Type – The datetime data type will now be able to support the following:
    • Precision to the 100th nanosecond which is 7 digits past second
    • Time-zone datetime offset to translate the datetimes across numerous time zones
    • Rather than having to parse the datatime for just the date or just the time, now SQL Server 2008 will have date only support as well as time only support
  • HierarchyID – With the introduction of the HierarchyID data type this data type will be hierarchical-aware and will be accompanied by built-in functions, methods, etc. to support complex hierarchies in your data with .NET
    • http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/bobb/2007/08/02/NewSQLServer2008DateTimerelatedTypesAndADONET.aspx
• Development Enhancements
  • Entity Data Model – With SQL Server 2008 will come the concept of a ‘business entities’ vs. tables, this will enable the ability to model more complex relationships as well as be able to retrieve entities as opposed to a result set of rows and columns
  • LINQ- LINQ is a new .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations
    • http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa904594.aspx
  • SQL Server Change Tracking – This feature provides the ability to have change data capture without a comparable value
  • Table Valued Parameters – Ability to create variables of a table value data type and be able to pass this variable into a stored procedure
    • http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid87_gci1266498,00.html
  • MERGE statement – Another term for this new feature is ‘upsert’; this commands provides the ability to programmatically INSERT data if it does not exist or UPDATE the data if it does all in 1 set of logic
    • http://www.sqlteam.com/article/microsoft-announces-sql-server-2008
  • Large UDT’s – The 8000 byte limit is no longer applicable for on CLR-based UDTs and UDAs
  • Spatial data – SQL Server 2008 will support GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY data types with built-in spatial function support and spatial indexes to support more GIS needs
    • http://www.directionsmag.com/editorials.php?article_id=2477
  • XML enhancements (support for lax validation, office 12 support, xs:dateTime support, lists/union types, LET FLOWR support, etc.)
    • http://www.codeplex.com/MSFTXmlProdSamples/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=5717
• Service Broker
  • Interface – A new user interface and tools will be released for working with Service Broker in order to add, drop or edit Service Broker objects directly in SQL Server Management Studio
  • Conversation Priority – The ability to set message ordering with a send and receive impact with levels one to ten
• Data Storage
  • Data Compression – Reference the Performance section above
  • FILESTREAM Attribute – With this feature get the best of both worlds with functionality from BLOBs in the DB vs. BLOBs on filesystem
    • http://blogs.msdn.com/pedram/archive/2007/06/04/store-any-data-in-sql-server-2008-katmai.aspx
  • Integrated Full Text Search – With SQL Server 2008 Full Text Search is fully integrated into the relational engine with no external storage, no external service as well as more efficient and reliable costing
  • Sparse columns – SQL Server 2008 has more efficient storage for ‘wide’ tables with many columns that repeat and do not contain data
  • New index types – New indexes include:
    • Spatial indexes
    • Hierarchical indexes
    • FILTERED indexes (indexes on filtered values within columns)
• Data Warehousing/ETL
  • Partitioned Table Parallelism – This feature eliminates the one thread limit per partition
  • Star Join support – SQL Server 2008 now supports a star join with no special syntax which is completely optimizer based with full backward syntax support
    • https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/content/content.aspx?ContentID=5562
  • Data compression – Reference the Performance section above
  • Resource Governor – Reference the Performance section above
  • Persistent Lookups in SSIS – There is no longer a need for re-querying for lookup operators and cache lookups in multiple ways with the ability to persist lookups to disk
  • Improved thread scheduling in SSIS – This is accomplished by a shared thread pool and pipeline parallelism
  • SQL Server Change Tracking – Reference the Development Enhancements section above
  • MERGE statement – The MERGE statement will add a great deal of value with slowly changing dimensions
  • Scale-out analysis services – With read-only storage multiple Analysis Services SQL Servers can be leveraged
  • Subspace computations
  • New tools for cube design
  • Best practice design alerting
  • Backup cubes with better scalability
  • Excel – Data-mining add-ins for Excel
• Reporting
  • Reporting Services Deployment – IIS is no longer required to run Reporting Services
  • Rich-text support
  • Enhanced visualization graphing
  • Word – Reports can be rendered to Microsoft Word
• Deprecation
  • Many of the ‘old’ features are removed to include:
    • 60, 65 and/or 70 compatibility modes
    • NOLOG and/or TRUNCATEONLY for the BACKUP command
      • http://blogs.technet.com/andrew/archive/2007/08/02/what-s-missing-from-sql-server-2008.aspx

Next Steps

• With all of these new features comes the potential for vast changes in building and managing applications.  As you begin to research these new features consider how these new opportunities will drive change in your applications, users and ultimately your business.
• The SQL Server 2008 CTP is now available – Download the SQL Server 2008 CTP.  As time permits, consider downloading and installing the latest version of SQL Server as a means to learn about the new features.
• Here are some additional information sources for SQL Server 2008:
  • SQL Server 2008 Product Overview
  • SQL Server 2008 CTP
  • TechEd 2007 Power Point presentations on SQL Server 2008
    • Beyond Relational
    • Manageability
    • Data Warehousing
• If you are looking for a jump start to learn about SQL Server 2008, then check out the MSSQLTips.com SQL Server 2008 web cast.

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10 reasons why SQL Server 2008 is going to rock

10 reasons why SQL Server 2008 is going to rock

10.  Plug-in model for SSMS.   SSMS 2005 also had a plug-in model, but it was not published, so the few developers that braved that environment were flying blind.  Apparently for 2008, the plug-in model will be published and a thousand add-ins will bloom. 

9.  Inline variable assignment.  I often wondered why, as a language, SQL languishes behind the times.  I mean, it has barely any modern syntactic sugar.  Well, in this version, they are at least scratching the the tip of the iceberg. 

Instead of:

DECLARE @myVar int
SET @myVar = 5

you can do it in one line:

DECLARE @myVar int = 5

Sweet.

8.  C like math syntax.  SET @i += 5.  Enough said.  They finally let a C# developer on the SQL team. 

7.  Auditing.  It’s a 10 dollar word for storing changes to your data for later review, debugging or in response to regulatory laws.  It’s a thankless and a mundane task and no one is ever excited by the prospect of writing triggers to handle it.  SQL Server 2008 introduces automatic auditing, so we can now check one thing off our to do list.

6.  Compression.  You may think that this feature is a waste of time, but it’s not what it sounds like.  The release will offer row-level and page-level compression.  The compression mostly takes place on the metadata.  For instance, page compression will store common data for affected rows in a single place. 

The metadata storage for variable length fields is going to be completely crazy: they are pushing things into bits (instead of bytes).  For instance, length of the varchar will be stored in 3 bits. 

Anyway, I don’t really care about space savings – storage is cheap.  What I do care about is that the feature promised (key word here “promises”) to reduce I/O and RAM utilization, while increasing CPU utilization.  Every single performance problem I ever dealt with had to do with I/O overloading.  Will see how this plays out.  I am skeptical until I see some real world production benchmarks.

5.  Filtered Indexes.  This is another feature that sounds great – will have to see how it plays out.  Anyway, it allows you to create an index while specifying what rows are not to be in the index.  For example, index all rows where Status != null.  Theoretically, it’ll get rid of all the dead weight in the index, allowing for faster queries. 

4.  Resource governor.  All I can say is FINALLY.  Sybase has had it since version 12 (that’s last millennium, people).  Basically it allows the DBA to specify how much resources (e.g. CPU/RAM) each user is entitled to.  At the very least, it’ll prevent people, with sparse SQL knowledge from shooting off a query with a Cartesian product and bringing down the box.

Actually Sybase is still ahead of MS on this feature.  Its ASE server allows you to prioritize one user over another – a feature that I found immensely useful.

3.  Plan freezing.  This is a solution to my personal pet peeve. Sometimes SQL Server decides to change its plan on you (in response to data changes, etc…).  If you’ve achieved your optimal query plan, now you can stick with it.  Yeah, I know, hints are evil, but there are situations when you want to take a hammer to SQL Server – well, this is the chill pill.

2.  Processing of delimited strings.   This is awesome and I could have used this feature…well, always.  Currently, we pass in delimited strings in the following manner:

exec sp_MySproc 'murphy,35;galen,31;samuels,27;colton,42'

Then the stored proc needs to parse the string into a usable form – a mindless task.

In 2008, Microsoft introduced Table Value Parameters (TVP). 

CREATE TYPE PeepsType AS TABLE (Name varchar(20), Age int)
DECLARE @myPeeps PeepsType
INSERT @myPeeps SELECT 'murphy', 35
INSERT @myPeeps SELECT 'galen', 31
INSERT @myPeeps SELECT 'samuels', 27
INSERT @myPeeps SELECT 'colton', 42

exec sp_MySproc2 @myPeeps 

 
And the sproc would look like this:

CREATE PROCEDURE sp_MySproc2(@myPeeps PeepsType READONLY) ...

The advantage here is that you can treat the Table Type as a regular table, use it in joins, etc.  Say goodbye to all those string parsing routines.

1. Intellisense in the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).  This has been previously possible in SQL Server 2000 and 2005 with use of 3rd party add-ins like SQL Prompt ($195).  But these tools are a horrible hack at best (e.g. they hook into the editor window and try to interpret what the application is doing). 

Built-in intellisense is huge – it means new people can easily learn the database schema as they go.