SQL Summit has been touring Sweden this week and today we've finally got to the grand finale at "China Teatern" in Stockholm. With 600+ attendees in all four cities the tour has been a blast with a lot of interesting discussions.

This morning I had the good fortune to listen to Kalen Delaney giving us a history lesson on SQL Server from the early Sybase venture that began 1984 to where SQL Server 2008 is today and beyond.

There was a lot of information to grasp, but one of the main points was that every release has been aimed towards improving on of the M.A.R.S aspects. M.A.R.S stands for Maintainability, Availability, Reliability and Scalability.

Kalen argues that every release have worked on all four but focused more on a particular one and for 2008 it has been the Maintainability that got that extra love. With the resource governor and policy based  management SQL Server gets extremely easy to manage.

Here's some pictures from the keynote:

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Sql Summit 2008 Event site: http://www.expertzone.se/sql2k8/