Managing Your Client Data

SQL Server 2008 includes many new features to assist with Client Data planning and administration. Learn how to use features such as policy-based management to help ensure that your organization addresses its compliance requirements.

High Availability – Always On

Recover corrupt data pages from a mirror server with enhanced database mirroring features
Take advantage of failover clustering enhancements in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008
Add new nodes to a peer-to-peer replication solution without taking applications offline
Improve restore times and reduce backup volume size with new support for backup compression
Improve concurrency with locking enhancements
Reduce downtime for hardware maintenance with Hot-Add CPU capabilities
Use Resource Governor to proactively control workload prioritization

Visit the SQL Server 2008 High Availability Web page

Compliance

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to encrypt the data at rest.
Change Tracking and Auditing to find out who did what and when. (Why is proving much more difficult until we can use TSQL to read minds!) These are much lighter weight than profiler and trace and so can be left on without significant performance degradation.

Learn More about SQL Server 2008 Compliance

MSDN Webcast: Addressing Compliance with SQL Server 2008 (Level 300)

Watch the SQL Server 2008 Compliance Webcast

Andrew Fryer’s Compliance Blog

Policy-Based Management

Policy-based management (which was called the declarative management framework) allows the DBA to set conditions on any configurable facet of SQL Server and then decide what to do if they are broken or someone attempts to break them.
Create policies to test and report on many aspects of SQL Server, and policies can be applied on a single database, a single instance of SQL Server, or on all the SQL Servers that you manage.

SQL Server 2008 Policy-Based Management provides a new system for managing SQL Server. You can create policies to test and report on many aspects of SQL Server, and policies can be applied on a single database, a single instance of SQL Server, or on all the SQL Servers that you manage.

With Policy-Based Management, you can test the SQL Server configuration options and many of the security settings. And for some security settings, you can create policies that detect database servers that are out of compliance and then take steps to force them into compliance.

Learn More About SQL Server 2008 Policy-Based Management

Administering Servers by Using Policy-Based Management

How to: Evaluate a Policy-Based Management Policy

SQL Server 2008 Policy Based Management blog