Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, DiskKit, MVL, DVD, GER

SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, DiskKit, MVL, DVD, GER Enterprise Data Management and Business Intelligence Platform
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.

Top Enterprise Only Features:
- 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.

Protect valuable information
Transparent Data Encryption
- 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.

Extensible Key Management
- Comprehensive support for encryption and key management;
- Support for third-party key management and HSM products.

Auditing
- 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?”.

Ensure business continuity
Enhanced Database Mirroring
- 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.

Automatic Recovery of Data Pages
- 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.

Log Stream Compression
- 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.

Predictable Response
Resource Governor
- 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.

Predictable Query Performance
- 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.

Data Compression
- 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.

Hot Add CPU
- 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).

Manage by policies
Policy-Based Management
- 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.

Streamlined Installation
- 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.

Performance Data Collection
- 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.

Simplify application development
T-SQL Enhancements
- 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.

New Table-Valued Parameters
Pass large amounts of data efficiently to and from functions and procedures using new Table-Valued Parameters.

Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
- 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.

ADO.Net Object Services
- 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.

Store any information
Spatial Data Types
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.

Date and Time
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.

HIERARCHY ID
- 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.

FILESTREAM Data
- 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.

Integrated Full Text Search
- 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.

Sparse Columns
- 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.

Large User Defined Types
- SQL Server 2008 eliminates the 8KB limit for User Defined Types (UDTs) allowing users to dramatically expand the size of their UDTs.

Integrate any data
SQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive platform delivering business intelligence where your users want it.

Partitioned Table Parallelism
- 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.

Star Join Query Optimizations
- Improved query performance for common data warehouse scenarios;
- Star Join Query optimizations reduce query response time by recognizing data warehouse join patterns.

Grouping Sets
- 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.

Change Data Capture
- 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.

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Pipeline Improvements
- 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.

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Persistent Lookups
- 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 High-Performance Connectors
- SSIS has new connectors for SAP Netweaver BI, Oracle and Teradata, specially designed for high-performance loading of data into an enterprise data warehouse.

Data Profiling Tool
- 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.

Backup Compression
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.

Deliver relevant information
Analysis Scale and Performance
- 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.

Block Computations Block
Computations provide a significant improvement in processing performance enabling users to increase the depth of their hierarchies and complexity of the computations.

Writeback
- 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.

Drive actionable insights
Enterprise Reporting Engine
- 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.

Internet Report Deployment
Customers and suppliers can effortless be reached by deploying reports over the internet.

Manage Reporting Infrastructure
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.

Report Builder Enhancements
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
Built-in forms authentication enables users to easily switch between Windows and Forms.

Report Server Application Embedding
Report Server application embedding enables the URLs in reports and subscriptions to point back to frontend applications.

Microsoft Office Integration
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.

Predictive Analysis
- 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.