Oracle Gold Partner

SQL Server Database Questions

[Return to main FAQ page]

What are the benefits of Microsoft SQL Server 2008?

To summarise the SQL Server 2008 features highlighted by Microsoft, SQL Server 2008 delivers on:

  • Scalability
  • High Performance
  • Reduced hardware and maintenance costs
  • Enterprise class manageability and performance

Why should I propose an upgrade from SQL Server 2000 or 2005 to SQL Server 2008?

SQL Server 2008 has a number of extra enhancements and capabilities that allow applications to run faster and more effectively. It is also designed to reduce the amount of time that SQL Server DBAs spend managing the database environment.

  • Application Compatibility – Data encryption, database auditing capabilities, Data and Backup compression and database mirroring are a few examples of the features that can be utilised without the need for modification of any applications.
  • More effective data growth management – New or enhanced tools such as Performance data Collection or policy based server management will help you to ensure that the growth of data is well managed.
  • Capitalise on business intelligence – SQL Server 2008 incorporates additional reporting capabilities that can be integrated with Microsoft Office applications. Developers can also create enterprise reports with SQL Server 2008’s  new report designer application rather than Developer Studio.
  • Scalability and Enhancements – Scalability has been increased through improvement of old features and the introduction of new features such as query governor and data compression. Enhancements within areas such as Reporting, Analysis and Integration Services have been initiated to improve overall performance throughout the entire technology stack.
  • Easy Migration – Microsoft provide upgrade tools that assist with upgrades from previous versions of SQL Server.

What are the key features of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition?

Key features of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition include:

  • Unlimited Virtualization
  • Transparent Data Encryption – encrypt entire database, data or log files without the need for application changes; search encrypted data; prevent access to secure data from unauthorised users.
  • Resource Governor – allows for the definition of resource limits and prioritisation to deliver consistent performance to end users.
  • Data Backup and Compression – reduced storage requirements and significant performance improvements for large workloads such as data warehousing.
  • Extensible Key Management – support for encryption, key management and HSM products
  • Advanced Data Mining Algorithms
  • Mirrored Backups – SQL Server 2008 provides enhanced database mirroring, including automatic page recovery and repair, and improved performance through log stream compression.
  • ‘Hot Add’ CPU functionality – scale the database without any application downtime
  • Policy-Based Management – manage multiple instances of SQL Server 2008, simplify administration tasks and ensure universal compliance with system configuration policies
  • Improved Data Collection – New centralised area for capturing and storing performance data, along with new tools for performance tuning, troubleshooting, reporting and monitoring.
  • Business Intelligence through data integration – improved grouping and partitioning functionality and better performance on large partitioned tables; improved query performance [incl. Star Join Query optimisations to reduce query response time]
  • Improved SSIS – more efficient and effective scalability and workload distribution; increased lookup performance for larger tables; high performance loading of data into warehouse through new connectors for SAP Netweaver BI, Oracle and Teradata
  • Incisive System Analysis – SQL Server 2008 improves on previous versions with more advanced infrastructure analysis capabilities that can be used as a basis for optimised performance solutions; MOLAP enabled writeback capabilities eliminate the need to query ROLAP partitions
  • Reporting – Ability to scale out a reporting workload across multiple servers; simplified deployment and configuration; Internet Report Deployment; improved Report Builder; Report Server Application Embedding
  • Microsoft Office Integration – Word and Excel functionality
  • Improved Installation, Setup and Configuration – the installation, setup and configuration architecture has been re-engineered to deliver a more streamlined installation process.
  • Simplified Application Development – Improved, with T-SQL Enhancements, New Table-Valued Parameters, Language Integrated Query [LINQ] functionality to build directly onto SQL Server 2008 tables and ADO.NET Object Services.

What would you like to do now?

Or…