The other day during the Tech-Ed South Africa 2008 closing keynote it was announced that SQL Server 2008, formerly code-named Katmai, had gone gold and would release onto MSDN the same day. This is awesome news and the team has worked hard on this release.
The most important new features in my opinion are:
- Spatial support in the form of the new GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHIC data types with support for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards.
- New support for storing date and times, namely the DATE, TIME, DATETIME2 and DATETIMEOFFSET data types.
- Sparse columns that reduce the overhead of NULL data on the disk.
- Page compression to reduce the I/O costs of storing and retrieving data at the slight cost of processor performance.
- Filtered indexes to provide optimised query plans for commonly used and under-performing queries.
- Change Data Capture (CDC) to record changes in data across tables, seamlessly.
- Intellisense in the SQL query editor when working against SQL Server 2008. Hopefully support for older versions is added soon.
You can see all the new features over here and the download is currently available on MSDN and TechNet.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be testing the new features and I’ll post my findings as I go. I’m eagerly waiting for Map Server for Windows to add support for SQL Server 2008 as I’m sure it will kick the collective butt of PostgreSQL and PostGIS.