The slickest session yet

SESSION 3
The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Overview of SQL Server 2008

After a brief overview of SQL Server through the ages, the session was formally introduced as a broad walkthrough of "Katmai" (or SQL Server 2008 to you and me). The speaker was eager to concentrate on 4 key themes:

• Enterprise data platform
• Beyond relational
• Dynamic development
• Pervasive insight

2008 offers a number of new features to bolster its postion as a secure trusted platform including trasparent data encryption (without the need to amend your calling application in any way). In fact, encryption can simply be turned on at column level at design time. Other techniques discussed were external key management, data auditing, pluggable CPU's and enhanced database mirroring.

2008 also promises optimised and predictable performance with advances in data compression, backup compression, performance system analysis and query optimization. 2008 allows the designer to limit the proportion of CPU devoted to each application on the box. This is achieved viat he RESOURCE GOVORNER.

Productive policy-based management allows the designer to specify rules which must be adhered to when maintaining the database and an alert system to flag-up breaches of the rules. For example, you may want to ensure that all table names within the Personnel database start with a pnl_ prefix. If this convention is broken, then this will be reported to you.

The next topic concentrated on the availablity of data - "any place any time". 2008 incorporates techniques to facilitate disconnected usage with data beiing cached locally. It goes without saying that there are reliable methods to ensure trouble-free synchronisation takes place between client and server. Data collision and conflic resolution techniques were also discussed.

Next on the agenda was the Entity Relationship Model. The idea was to move away from the constaints of the table structure in order to better model complex business rules and relationships. For example, you may devise an entity for Accounts Payable which may combine columns from a number of tables. When designed, the entity resembles a new table which can be both queried and updated. A demo on the ERM then followed.

A big idea of 2008 is to break the constraints of the relational model in order to effectively store unstructured data such as GPS downloads, movies, documents, XML data etc. Integrated querying accross both relational and text data was also discussed as was the provision for a new data type DateTime2 which provide accuracy down to 100 nano seconds (is that a millisecond?) rather that just a second.

I must admit, the next topic was one of those "wow" moments. Location Intelligence - whcih allows for the effective capturing/querying of location/spatial data - sees the introduction of Geometry and Geography data types. and Virtual Earth integration.

The demo which followed showed how the latitude/logitude coordinates of addresses can be stored within the database as geographic points whilst coordinates of roads and highways are stored as lines. A simple SQL query was composed to show all the coffee shops which exist within a 5 mile radius of a partucular location with the output being plotted onto a Virtual Eath map.

The final section of the presentation discussed Pervasive Insight and enterprise data warehousing. more specifically, it focused on 2008's ability to scale in order to manage large numbers of users and data.

I thoroughly enjoyable session indeed.