So, I've been getting quite a few pings about providing a list of new features to look for in Katmai (Sql 2008) – well, I put together a list below, and this isn't even everything (though it's a lot of the major stuff) – I even tried to categorize it (and some things may appear in multiple categories). I'll be blogging/presenting/etc. on many, many of these in the coming months, so stay tuned:
Security/Auditing
– Transparent Data Encryption (encryption while data is 'still' on disk, transparent to applications)
– External Key Management (Consolidation of key management, integration with external products)
– Data Auditing (1st-class 'AUDIT' objects; DDL support; audit objects, principals, data, etc.; support for multiple logging targets)
Availability/Reliability
– Hot-Pluggable CPU support
– Enhanced Database Mirroring (compression of mirror streams, enhanced performance, automatic page-level repair for principal/mirror)
Performance
– Data compression (easy to enable/disable online, more efficient data storage (this is NOT traditional data compression))
– Backup stream compression (server level control or backup statement control, all backup types)
– Data collection (single, common framework for data collection, reporting, and storage/warehousing)
– Performance data studio
– Improved Plan Guide support (plan freezing, pull plans directly from plan cache, SSMS integration, etc.)
– Improved transaction logging (bulk-logging of INSERT INTO and MERGE statements)
– Resource Governor (create pools and groups to govern, define classifications based on built-in functions, segment resource utilization amoung groups)
Management
– Policy-based management framework (manage via policies vs. scripts, enterprise-wide support, automated monitoring/enforcement, etc.)
– Integrate with Microsoft System Center
– Extended Events (high perf lightweight tracing infrastructure, NOT sql trace, integrated with ETW, unprecidented insight into goings-on)
– Powershell integration / provider
– Powershell scripting support in SQL Agent
– Server Group Managment (multi-server support for DMF, ad-hoc queries, etc.)
Development Enhancements
– Improved datetime datatypes (100th nanosecond precision (7 digits past second), time-zone datetime offset, date only, time only)
– HierarchyID datatype (hierarchical-aware data type, ORDPath values, built-in functions, methods, etc.)
– Entity Data Model support (develop 'business entities' vs. tables, model complex relationships, retrieve entities vs. rows/columns)
– LINQ
– Sql Server Change Tracking (Change Data Capture, get 'diff' data changes WITHOUT a comparible value (i.e. datetime, timestamp, etc.))
– Table Valued Parameters
– MERGE statement ('upsert' data, also includes deletion functionality)
– Large UDT's and UDA's (no more 8000 byte limit on CLR-based UDTs, no more 8000 byte limit for UDA's)
– Multi-parameter UDA's (pass multiple parameters to a UDA)
– ORDERED user defined tables (able to specify ordering specifications for UDF's to allow better optimizer decisions)
– Spatial data (GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY data types, built-in spatial function support, spatial indexes)
– XML enhancements (support for lax validation, office 12 support, xs:dateTime support, lists/union types, LET FLOWR support, etc.)
– Inline initialization and compound assignment
– Intellisense
– Insert over DML (Consume output from OUTPUT)
Service Broker
– New UI and Tools for working with (add/drop/edit functionality within SSMS, Diag tools, )
– Conversation Priority (set message ordering, send/receive impact, 1-10 levels)
Data Storage
– Data compression (see above)
– FILESTREAM attribute (get the 'best of both' functionality from BLOBs in the DB vs. BLOBs on filesystem, no more "to blob or not to blob")
– Integrated Full Text Search (FTS fully integrated into DB engine, no external storage, no external service, more efficient and reliable costing)
– Sparse columns (more efficient storage for 'wide' tables with many columns that repeat and don't contain data)
– Filtered indexes (indexes with WHERE clauses)
– New index types (spatial indexes, hierarchical indexes, FILTERED indexes (indexes on filtered values within columns), etc.)
Data Warehousing/ETL
– Partitioned Table Parallelism (no more thread limit per partition)
– Star/Snowflake join performance improvements (no special syntax, optimizer based, uses BITMAP filtering, full backward syntax support)
– Data compression (see above)
– Resource Governor (see above)
– Persistent Lookups in SSIS (no more re-querying for lookup operators, cache lookups in multiple ways, persist lookups to disk)
– Improved thread scheduling in SSIS (shared thread pool, pipeline parallelism)
– Change Data Capture (see above)
– MERGE statement (see above, great uses with slowly changing dimensions)
– Scale-out analysis services (read-only storage supports multiple AS servers)
– Subspace computations
– New Tools for Cube design
– Best Practice Design Alerting
– Backup cubes with better scalability
– Data-mining add-ins for Excell
Reporting
– IIS Agnostic Reporting Services Deployment (no IIS required to run RS any longer)
– Rich-text support
– Enhanced visualiztion (graphing)
– New Word rendering (render reports to Microsoft Word)
Deprecation
– Many 'old' features ARE REMOVED/GONE (those that have been deprecated for some time – 60/65/70 compat modes, nolog / truncateonly syntax, etc.)
That's the list I've got for now…I'm sure I missed something or 2, and I'll continue to add to the list if I see something left out. I'm sure there are LOTS of questions around each of these, so I'll be continuing to blog on subsets of the features in-depth over the next few weeks/months. If there are specific questions, by all means post to this blog and/or email me via this blog, and I'll be sure to answer them directly or in a post covering the topic in question. Stay tuned!
Chad is an Architect, Administrator, and Developer with technologies such as Sql Server (and related technologies), .NET, Windows Server, and the Microsoft Clustering stack (MSCS, NLB, HPC). After nearly 5 years at Microsoft in a variety of roles related to pushing the limits of the Microsoft stack in many of the largest, most complex Sql Server installations in the world, he now provides consulting to many different customers and clients ranging from startup to Fortune 50. Most recently he has been spending much of his time as an architect at SpruceMedia, Inc., a startup firm in the Facebook/Social Advertising space (http://sprucemedia.com) and resides in the Redmond, WA area where he also spends a significant amount of time writing, talking, presenting and blogging about the data-related technologies on the Microsoft stack. Chad regularly posts Sql Server related content, tools, and advice with the MSSQLTips team and on stackoverflow.com at http://stackoverflow.com/users/169012/chadhoc. Chad can be contacted via email at chad dot boyd dot tips at gmail dot com.
