Demos

TechEd Europe Keynote - The Next Wave: Bringing Dynamic IT to Life

Watch Bob Kelly's keynote to understand the broad Microsoft vision for the next generation of Microsoft IT solutions. View the complete keynote (1:30) or skip to a SQL Server 2008 demonstration shown at 1:02.

SQL Server 2008 Overview Demo

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 provides a trusted, productive, and intelligent data platform that enables you to run your most demanding mission critical applications, reduce time and cost of development and management of applications, and deliver actionable insight to your entire organization. This 7-minute video walks you through the feature enhancements available with SQL Server 2008.

Microsoft SQL Server Data Platform Vision – SQL Server Expert Series

Organizations are seeing a confluence of factors meeting to create a data storage explosion. Microsoft’s data platform vision helps organizations meet these data explosion needs and the next generation of data-driven applications. Ted Kummert, Corporate Vice President of Data and Storage Platform, spends 10 minutes illustrating the Microsoft data platform vision.

SQL Server 2008 Overview – Microsoft Business Intelligence Summit (May 2007)

View the a 30-minute section of the keynote from day 2 at the Microsoft BI Conference where Ted Kummert, Corporate Vice President of the Data and Storage Platforms Division, discussed the SQL Server 2008 release including the data platform vision and detailed product demonstrations.

SQL Server 2008 provides a number of reporting enhancements that enable you to quickly and easily generate the reports that your organization needs, in the format that you want, and in a layout that makes sense of the data they contain. Report Builder has been enhanced extensively in SQL Server 2008 to enable users to easily build ad hoc reports with any structure.

Through a tight interoperability with Microsoft Visual Studio, developers can easily build and maintain robust, secure, scalable BI applications. SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio offers a single tool that covers multiple types of BI solutions and provides a single, consistent environment for developing ETL, analysis and reporting solutions.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Pervasive Insight Vision – SQL Server Expert Series

Delivering on the data platform vision, Microsoft continues to invest in and evolve pervasive insight, which allows customers to deliver real-time insight broadly and deeply within their organizations, with rich and personalized data experiences. Spend 10 minutes with Tom Casey, General Manager, Microsoft SQL Server, to learn about how SQL Server 2008 delivers pervasive insight across the organization.

To help track data changes and ensure data warehouse consistency, SQL Server 2008 introduces Change Data Capture (CDC) functionality to log updates in change tables, which makes it easy to identify rows that have been modified and to determine the details of the modification and its cause.

SQL Server 2008 Data Warehousing Vision – SQL Server Expert Series

Organizations continue to invest in deriving business value from their data by investing in a BI and Data Warehousing solution. SQL Server 2008 focuses on providing excellent performance for the full data warehouse environment. Ram Ramanathan, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft SQL Server, spends 10 minutes discussing the Data Warehousing enhancements available in SQL Server 2008.

SQL Server 2008 introduces new date and time data types: DATE – a date only type; TIME – a time only type; DATETIMEOFFSET – a timezone-aware datetime type; DATETIME2 – a datetime type w/ larger fractional seconds and year range than the existing DATETIME type. The new data types enable applications to have separate data and time types while providing large data ranges or user defined precision for time values.

Table valued parameter will provide an easier way to define a table type as well as allow applications to create, populate and pass table structured parameters to stored procedures and functions.  SQL Server 2008 MERGE SQL Statement will provide new statements within the SQL language to enable developers to  either insert information or update information with a single statement.

With mobile devices and workers on-the-go, occasionally connected has become a way of life. SQL Server 2008 delivers a unified synchronization platform that enables consistent synchronization across applications, data stores, and data types.

SQL Server 2008 enables database applications to model tree structures in a more efficient way than currently possible. HierarchyID is a new system type that can store values that represent nodes in a hierarchy tree.

SQL Server 2008 allows for a seamless transition between managing relational and nonrelational data. This enables users to easily access documents as data, encode complex hierarchies within XML, and query across both relational and text data.

SQL Server 2008 Beyond Relational – SQL Server Expert Series

Increasingly, applications are incorporating a much wider variety of data types than is traditionally supported by a database. SQL Server 2008 will go beyond traditional data types to support all digital data types of the future. Spend 5 minutes to with Quentin Clark, General Manager, SQL Server Database Engine, to learn more about beyond relational data.

SQL Server 2008 ADO.NET – SQL Server Expert Series

ADO.NET Object services provide developers with substantial gains in efficiency when compared to the current practice of using a third party solution or writing a custom O/R layer. Spend 5 minutes with Brit Johnston, Director Data Programmability, SQL Server, to learn more about ADO.NET.

SQL Server 2008 Dynamic Development Enhancements – SQL Server Expert Series

Delivering on the Microsoft Data Platform Vision, Brit Johnston, Director Data Programmability, SQL Server, spends 4 minutes discussing the four key areas of SQL Server 2008 dynamic development; entities, a family of product editions, Visual Studio integration, and rich services.

Database Mirroring is a technology for increasing database availability. Database Mirroring transfers transaction log records from one server to another, allowing quick fail over to the standby server. In the event of a failover, client applications can automatically redirect their connection to the standby server. Fast failover with minimal data loss has traditionally involved higher hardware cost and greater software complexity. However, Database Mirroring can fail over quickly with no loss of committed data. In addition, Database Mirroring does not require proprietary hardware, and it is easy to set up and manage.

One of the most difficult tasks that administrators face in managing complex database environments is ensuring that all elements of the system conform to their company's established security and usage policies. Administrators need to constantly monitor the security surface area of the entire database serve, along with permissions and settings for every database, table, user, role, and schema. Policy-based Management is a system for managing one or more instances of SQL Server 2008.

SQL Server Extended Events is a general event-handling system for server systems. The Extended Events infrastructure is a lightweight mechanism that supports capturing, filtering, and acting upon events generated by the server process. This ability to act upon events allows users to quickly diagnose run time problems by adding contextual data, such as TSQL call stacks or query plan handles, to any event.

SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Data Platform Vision – SQL Server Expert Series

Delivering on the data platform vision, Microsoft continues to invest in and evolve the enterprise data platform for increased data protection, query performance, and IT staff productivity. Quentin Clark, General Manager, SQL Server Database Engine, spends 5 minutes discussing how SQL Server 2008 delivers on the enterprise data platform vision.