What’s New in SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008 delivers on the Microsoft data platform vision by enabling organizations to run their most mission-critical applications while lowering the cost of managing the data infrastructure and delivering insights and information to all users. This platform has the following qualities:

• Trusted—Enables organizations to run their most critical applications with very high levels of security, reliability, and scalability.

• Productive—Enables organizations to reduce the time and cost required to develop and manage their data infrastructure.

• Intelligent—Provides a comprehensive platform that delivers insights and information where your users want it.

TrustedIn today’s data-driven world, organizations need continuous access to their data. SQL Server 2008 provides robust security features, reliability, and scalability for mission-critical applications.

Protect Your InformationBuilding on the proven strengths of SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 extends its security capabilities with the following enhancements:

Transparent Data Encryption:
SQL Server 2008 enables encryption of entire databases, data files, and log files, without the need for application changes. Encryption enables organizations to meet the demands of regulatory compliance and overall concern for data privacy. Some of the benefits of transparent data encryption include searching encrypted data using either range or fuzzy searches, more secure data from unauthorized users, and data encryption. These can be enabled without changing existing applications.

External Key ManagementSQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive solution for encryption and key management. To meet the growing need for greater security of information within data centers, organizations have invested in vendors to manage security keys within the enterprise. SQL Server 2008 provides excellent support for this need by supporting third-party key management and hardware security module (HSM) products.

Enhanced AuditingSQL Server 2008 improves compliance and security by allowing you to audit activity on your data. Auditing can include information about when data has been read, in addition to any data modifications. SQL Server 2008 has features such as enhanced configuration and management of audits in the server, which enable organizations to meet varied compliance needs. SQL Server 2008 can also define audit specifications in each database, so audit configuration can be ported with databases. Filtering of audits to specific objects allows better performance in audit generation and flexibility in configuration.

Ensure Business ContinuityWith SQL Server 2008, Microsoft continues to give organizations the ability to provide highly reliable applications with simplified management.

Enhanced Database MirroringSQL Server 2008 builds on SQL Server 2005 by providing a more reliable platform that has enhanced database mirroring. New features include:

• Automatic page repair. SQL Server 2008 enables the principal and mirror computers to transparently recover from 823 and 824 errors on data pages by requesting a fresh copy of the corrupted page from the mirroring partner.

• Improved performance. SQL Server 2008 compresses the outgoing log stream in order to minimize the network bandwidth required by database mirroring.

• Enhanced supportability

• SQL Server 2008 includes additional performance counters to enable more granular accounting of the time spent across the different stages of Database Management System (DBMS) log processing.

• SQL Server 2008 includes new Dynamic Management Views and extensions of existing views to expose additional information about mirroring sessions.

Hot Add CPUExtending existing support in SQL Server for adding memory resources online, Hot Add CPU allows a database to be scaled on demand. In fact, CPU resources can be added to SQL Server 2008 on supported hardware platforms without requiring application downtime.

Optimized and Predictable System PerformanceOrganizations are faced with growing pressure to provide predictable response and to manage increasing volumes of data for growing numbers of users. SQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive set of features to provide scalable and predictable performance for any workload on your data platform.

Performance data collectionPerformance tuning and troubleshooting are time-consuming tasks for the administrator. To provide actionable performance insights to administrators, SQL Server 2008

centralized data repository for storing performance data, and new reporting and monitoring tools.
Extended EventsSQL Server Extended Events is a general event-handling system for server systems. The Extended Events infrastructure is a lightweight mechanism that supports capturing, filtering, and acting upon events generated by the server process. This ability to act upon events allows users to quickly diagnose run time problems by adding contextual data, such as Transact SQL call stacks or query plan handles, to any event. Events can be captured into several different output types, including Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). When Extended Events are output to ETW, correlation with operating system and database applications is possible, allowing for more holistic system tracing.

Backup compressionKeeping disk-based backups online is expensive and time consuming. With SQL Server 2008 backup compression, less disk I/O is required, less storage is required to keep backups online, and backups run significantly faster.

Data compressionImproved data compression enables data to be stored more effectively and reduces the storage requirements for your data. Data compression also provides significant performance improvements for large input/output-bound workloads such as data warehousing.
Resource GovernorSQL Server 2008 enables organizations to provide a consistent and predictable response to end users with the introduction of Resource Governor. Resource Governor enables database administrators to define resource limits and priorities for different workloads, which enables concurrent workloads to provide consistent performance to end users.
Plan FreezingSQL Server 2008 enables greater query performance stability and predictability by providing new functionality to lock down query plans, enabling organizations to promote stable query plans across hardware server replacements, server upgrades, and production deployments.