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Run business-critical data management applications with enterprise-class scalability, high availability, and security
Manage online transaction processing (OLTP) on a very large scale
Perform advanced analytics on large amounts of data in data warehouses
Create reports on the analysis of large amounts of data
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise 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. SQL Server 2008 Enterprise provides the highest levels of security, reliability, and scalability.
Unlimited Virtualization
Data and Backup Compression
Resource Governor
Transparent Data Encryption
All actions audited
Extensible Key Management
Advanced Data Mining algorithms
Mirrored Backups
Oracle Publishing
IA64 hardware support
Enable encryption of an entire database, data files or log files, without the need for application changes
Search encrypted data using both range and fuzzy searches
Prevent access to secure data from unauthorized users, and data encryption without any changes to existing applications
Comprehensive support for encryption and key management
Support for third-party key management and HSM products
Create and manage auditing via DDL while simplifying compliance by providing more comprehensive data auditing
Answer common questions such as “Who accessed our customer data?”
SQL Server 2008 builds on SQL Server 2005 by providing a more reliable platform that has enhanced database mirroring including automatic page repair, improved performance, and enhanced supportability
SQ SQL Server 2008 enables the principal and mirror machines to transparently recover from common types of data page errors by requesting a fresh copy of the suspect page from the mirroring partner transparently to end users and applications
Database Mirroring requires data transmissions between the participants of the mirroring implementations. With SQL Server 2008, compression of the outgoing log stream between the participants delivers optimal performance and minimizes the network bandwidth used by database mirroring
Provide a consistent and predictable response to end users
Allows organizations to define resource limits and priorities for different workloads which enable concurrent workloads to provide consistent performance to end users
Enable greater query performance stability and predictability by providing functionality to lock down query plans enabling organizations to promote stable query plans across hardware server replacements, server upgrades, and production deployments
Enable data to be stored more effectively and reduce the storage requirements for your data
Provide significant performance improvements for large I/O bound workloads like data warehousing
Dynamically scale a database on demand by allowing CPU resources to be added to SQL Server 2008 on supported hardware platforms without forcing any downtime on applications
Add memory resources online (supported in SQL Server 2005 as well)
Policy-Based Management is a framework for managing one or more instances of SQL Server 2008
Ensure compliance with system configuration policies, monitor and prevent changes to the system that violate your company policies
Reduce total cost of ownership by simplifying administration tasks
Significant improvements to the service lifecycle for SQL Server through the re-engineering of the installation, setup and configuration architecture
Separation of installation of the physical bits on the hardware from the configuration of SQL Server enables organizations and partners to provide recommended installation configurations
Extensive performance data collection, a new centralized data repository for storing performance data and new tools for reporting and monitoring, streamline performance tuning and troubleshooting
8KB limit on User Defined Functions and User Defined Aggregates increased to 2GB
Perform multiple operations efficiently with the new MERGE command
Benefit from fully compatibility with Windows Server collation support
Experience other programming improvements including the ability to:
Insert multiple rows using a single INSERT statement
Operate on values using rich assignment operators
Initialize variables during declaration
Pass large amounts of data efficiently to and from functions and procedures using new Table-Valued Parameters
Enable developers to issue queries against data using a managed programming language such as C# or VB.NET, instead of SQL statements
Enable seamless, strongly-typed, set-oriented queries written in.NET languages to run against ADO.Net (LINQ to SQL), ADO.Net DataSets (LINQ to DataSets), the ADO.NET Entity Framework (LINQ to Entities) and to the Entity Data Service Mapping provider
Use the new LINQ to SQL provider that enables developers to use LINQ directly on SQL Server 2008 tables and columns
Object services layer of ADO.NET enables change tracking, and persistence of data as CLR objects
Developers using the ADO.NET framework can program against a database using CLR objects that are managed by ADO.NET. SQL Server 2008 introduces more efficient, optimized support that improves performance and simplifies development
Build spatial capabilities into applications with new support for spatial data
Built-in spatial library makes it easy to program against spatial data
2 new spatial data types provide wide range of capabilities:
Implement Round Earth solutions with the new GEOGRAPHY data type. Use latitude and longitude coordinates to define areas on the Earth’s surface.
Implement Flat Earth solutions with the new GEOMETRY data type. Store polygons, points, and lines that are associated with projected planar surfaces and naturally planar data, such as interior spaces
New date and time data types:
DATE – a date only type
TIME – a time only type
DATETIMEOFFSET – a time-zone aware datetime type
DATETIME2 – a datetime type with 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
Enable database applications to model tree structures efficiently
New system type, HierarchyId can store values that represent nodes in a hierarchy tree
Implemented as a CLR User-Defined Type (UDT) that exposes several efficient and useful built-in methods for creating and operating on hierarchy nodes with a flexible programming model
Allows binary data to be stored directly in a Microsoft Windows NTFS file system while preserving the data as an integral part of the database and maintaining full transactional consistency
Automatic support for backup operations
Enables scale-out of large binary data traditionally managed by the database to be stored outside the database on more cost-effective storage without compromise
Enables high-speed text searches on large text columns
Full Text search indexes are fully integrated into SQL Server databases, so there are no additional files to manage
New Sparse column attribute can be set on any data type to prevent NULL data from consuming physical space in the database
Provides highly efficient way of managing large sets of NULL data in a database
SQL Server 2008 eliminates the 8KB limit for User Defined Types (UDTs) allowing users to dramatically expand the size of their UDTs
SQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive platform delivering business intelligence where your users want it.
Partitions enable organizations to manage large growing tables more effectively by transparently breaking them into manageable blocks of data
SQL Server 2008 builds on the advances of partitioning in SQL Server 2005 by improving the performance on large partitioned tables
Improved query performance for common data warehouse scenarios
Star Join Query optimizations reduce query response time by recognizing data warehouse join patterns
Grouping Sets is an extension to the GROUP BY clause that lets users define multiple groupings in the same query
Produces a single result set that is equivalent to a UNION ALL of differently grouped rows making aggregation querying and reporting easier and faster
Enabling Change Data Capture allows changes to be captured and placed in change tables
Captures complete content of changes and maintains cross table consistency and even works across schema changes
Enables organizations to efficiently integrate the latest information into the data warehouse
Data Integration packages can now scale more effectively making use of available resources and managing the largest enterprise scale workloads
New design improves the scalability of runtime into multiple processors
The need to perform lookups is one of the most common ETL operations and is especially prevalent in data warehousing where fact records need to use lookups to transform business keys to their corresponding surrogates. SSIS increases the performance of lookups to support the largest tables
SSIS has new connectors for SAP Netweaver BI, Oracle and Teradata, specially designed for high-performance loading of data into an enterprise data warehouse
Enables users to analyze source data for a variety of properties such as data type, lengths, histograms of data values, and the strength of integrity relationships. Helps improve the quality of data going into a data warehouse
Keeping disk-based backups online is expensive and time consuming. With SQL Server 2008 backup compression, less storage is required to keep backups online and backups run significantly faster since less disk I/O is required
SQL Server 2008 drives broader analysis with enhanced analytical capabilities and with more complex computations and aggregations
New cube design tools help users streamline the development of the analysis infrastructure enabling them to build solutions for optimized performance
Computations provide a significant improvement in processing performance enabling users to increase the depth of their hierarchies and complexity of the computations
New MOLAP enabled writeback capabilities in SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services removes the need to query ROLAP partitions
Provides users with enhanced writeback scenarios from within analytical applications without sacrificing the traditional OLAP performance
Reports can easily be delivered throughout the organization both internally and externally with simplified deployment and configuration, and increased scalability including the ability to scale out a reporting workload across multiple servers. This enables users to easily create and share reports of any size and complexity
Customers and suppliers can effortless be reached by deploying reports over the internet
Increase supportability and the ability to control server behavior with memory management, infrastructure consolidation, and easier configuration through a centralized store and API for all configuration settings
Easily build reports with any structure through a redesigned Report Builder end-user tool that has the familiar look and feel of Microsoft Office 2007, including a “ribbon” interface and the ability to integrate powerful visualizations into reports
Built-in forms authentication enables users to easily switch between Windows and Forms
Report Server application embedding enables the URLs in reports and subscriptions to point back to frontend applications
SQL Server 2008 provides new Word rendering that enables users to consume reports directly from within Microsoft Office Word. In addition, the existing Excel renderer has been greatly enhanced to accommodate the support of features like nested data regions, sub-reports as well as merged cell improvements. This lets users maintain layout fidelity and improves the overall consumption of reports from Microsoft Office applications
Better Time Series support extends forecasting capabilities
Enhanced Mining Structures deliver more flexibility to perform focused analysis through filtering as well as to deliver complete information in reports beyond the scope of the mining model
New cross-validation enables confirmation of both accuracy and stability for results that you can trust
New features delivered with SQL Server 2008 Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007 empower every user in the organization with even more actionable insight at the desktop
Enterprise
