SQL Server 2008 Goes RTM

Published: August 20, 2008

by Alex Woodie

The long wait for SQL Server 2008 is over, as Microsoft recently announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of the new relational database management system. Developers will have a slew of new features to take advantage of, and while commercial applications likely won't be adapted to support the new database for some time, in-house developers can immediately utilize the links with Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.

SQL Server 2008 was originally slated to ship in late 2007 along with Visual Studio 2008, which shipped in November. The products lost their synchronization, however, which required Microsoft to issue a new release of Visual Studio 2008, Service Pack 1 (SP1), and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, both of which went out last week. Now that all the tools and platforms are up to date, developers can start using all of the shiny new widgets Microsoft has provided.

And shiny new widgets there are aplenty. New features include support for data encryption and compression; support for geospatial data; policy-based management; full-text search capabilities; support for Language Integrated Query (LINQ); new date and time types; and new change data capture to enhance ETL. Enhancements of existing features include better database mirroring; OLAP performance enhancements; new Report Builder features; and closer integration with Excel and Word.

Microsoft is heavily touting the business intelligence prowess of SQL Server 2008 by highlighting the new database's reporting and dashboard capabilities and stressing data warehousing performance enhancements intended to close the gap with Oracle's database, which has led the high-end data warehousing market, and DB2 to a slightly lesser extent.

According to Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the data and storage platform division at Microsoft, SQL Server 2008 is the "only major database" that comes ready to perform data management and advanced business intelligence out of the box.

Microsoft has certainly held an advantage in the BI arena. After all, it has been the only major database vendor that also sells the BI tooling to build data warehouses, data marts, multidimensional databases, and other BI applications, which has given it a dominant position in the midmarket. However, with the recent industry consolidation--Oracle's purchase of Hyperion, IBM's purchase of Cognos, and SAP's purchase of Business Objects--Microsoft will face more complete BI offerings from its traditional database and application competitors, and more overall competition in the midmarket.

While it strives to reach the high end dominated by Oracle, Microsoft is also looking to attract more customers from the low-end, such as those who would otherwise use free and open source tools like MySQL to build database-driven Web applications.

To that end, the company has launched a new Web Edition with SQL Server 2008 that's been optimized to work with other open source components, such as the Apache Web server or the PHP scripting language, and compete with the so-called LAMP (for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack of Web development tools and middleware. So instead of LAMP, we can have WASP (for Windows, Apache, SQL Server, and PHP) or WISP (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, and PHP). The new Web edition is limited to four-socket servers.

Other editions include the Enterprise Edition, which has no processor limit and costs $25,000 per processor; the Standard Edition, which is limited to four-socket servers and costs $6,000 per processor; the Workgroup Edition, which runs on one- or two-socket servers and costs $3,899; and Developer, Express, and Compact editions.

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