Tuesday began with an overview of SQL Server 2008. I haven't really looked into the next release since there are so much other technology that have had my attention so this was a great opportunity to brush up. 

Since I work at the ATE booth I couldn't stay to the end but here's my take-away's from that session:

Intellisense in the query window!!!!

Title says it all.

Entity Framework

Contraire to popular belief. Entity Framework is not a SQL Server 2008 technology. I've known this for some time but since they showed EF in this overview talk I decided to ask. The message was basically that SQL Server benefits from using EF as the conceptual model over the storage while EF won't have any particular benefits from using SQL Server 2008 instead of any other RDBMS.   

SQL Server Compact Edition

This is a new and improved version of the in process database that Microsoft already shipped earlier versions of. This is a new and improved version which will replace SQL Express as the default database engine in Visual Studio 2008.

It's a really  capable In Proc engine with support for synchronization with a larger engine like a fully fledged SQL Server which enables a really interesting set of scenarios for occasionally connected clients and for stand alone applications.

It has no Stored Procedure support nor does it support table value functions but it has a vastly improved change tracking and conflict detection when synchronizing with a master database then previous versions did.

I'm really excited over this technology and will play around with it when I get home. More to come there.

Performance

SQL Server 2008 will come with a data compression which massively reduces the footprint the database and backup files will take on disk. It's also heavily optimized so compression / decompression is lightning fast, or so they say ;)

Another performance issue they've addressed is that of resource management. When several applications or, users of different part of an application, do time consuming work. There where really no way to limit how much resources that time consuming work could take up. So if that heavy report ran first, the rest of the users might have to share a very limited set of resources. In SQL Server 2008 there will be a resource governor that will configure workload sets (processor power, memory consumption etc) and assign them to work based on user, application, query etc. A really great feature !!

Improvement in Security

In SQL Server 2005 they added the ability to encrypt data in the database. There was a challenge with that specific set of technology since the encryption / decryption wasn't transparent to the data access API's. This meant a bunch of custom code in the applications to support encrypted data in the tables. There where also challenges in the key management where keys couldn't be as external as some scenarios required.

In SQL Server 2008 both these issues has been addressed. The encryption / decryption is transparent to the data access api's and keys are handled more flexible.

They also added Data Auditing to audit what happens to the data, kind of a security log for tables. This will make it possible to track who did what and when.

Management

The new management model has capabilities to create policies that a database need to conform to. These policies would define a set of rules that a DBA decides databases in the enterprise needs to follow and can then apply them to a server to enforce them or to check if their followed. Together with the new multi-server management feature this means that a DBA can set up policies and run them across the enterprise to configure the server environment. The API's are also available from powershell and hooks nicely into the Design For Operations and Dynamic Systems Initiative from Microsoft which means that you will be able to administrate and configure databases centrally using system center.