Upgrading to SQL Server 2008
When you purchase SQL Server 2008 you are essentially purchasing a family of products, each product providing benefits for various aspects of your business. Click here to see top business reasons for upgrading your Microsoft SQL Server and Business Intelligence systems.
Here are the key technology benefits for upgrading to SQL Server 2008. Plenty of details of these features are available at Microsoft SQL Server website. We have summarized them here for your convenience.
Business Intelligence enhancements
- Create high-performance Analysis Services solutions with optimized cube designers, subspace computation, and MOLAP-enabled writeback capabilities.
- Implement enterprise-scale Reporting Services solutions through new on-demand processing and instance-based rendering.
- Build flexible and effective reports with the new Tablix data structure and rich formatting capabilities.
- Expand reach, and empower more users through optimized integration with the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
Analysis Services 2008
- Develop solutions quickly with the new, streamlined Cube Designer.
- Take advantage of enhanced Dimension and Aggregation Designers.
- Create attribute relationships easily by using the new Attribute Relationship Designer
- Avoid common design problems by using best practice design alerts.
- Optimize performance with subspace computations.
- Enable high-performance “what-if” scenarios by using MOLAP-enabled writeback.
- Take advantage of enhanced data mining structures and improved Time Series support.
- Monitor and optimize analytical solutions by using Analysis Services Dynamic Management Views for enhanced resource monitoring.
Reporting Services 2008
- Author reports with any structure, using the unique data format of Tablix.
- Benefit from enhanced performance and scalability to reach any number of users.
- Render reports to Microsoft Office Word format.
- Integrate Reporting Services with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for central delivery and management of business insight.
- Enable users to quickly gain insight into complex sets of data by displaying data graphically with enhanced visualization capabilities.
Data Mining 2008
- Optimize forecasting with Better Time Series Support.
- Get targeted insight by applying filters with Enhanced Mining Structures.
- Deliver informative and actionable insight in reports with Extended Drill-through Functionality.
- Partition data effectively to confirm the accuracy of insights with new Streamlined Built-in Support for Holdout.Validate accuracy and stability of models simultaneously with new Cross Validation.
- Take advantage of new features, introducing more actionable insight at the desktop, with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Data Mining Add-Ins for Office 2007.
Always-on (high availability)
- Recover corrupt data pages from a mirror server with enhanced database mirroring features.
- Take advantage of failover clustering enhancements in Windows Server 2008.
- Add new nodes to a peer-to-peer replication solution without taking replication offline.
- Improve restore times, and reduce backup volumes 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
Data Warehouse
- Data compression
- Backup compression
- Partitioned table parallelism
- Star join query optimizations
- Resource management
- Grouping sets
- Change data capture.
- MERGE SQL statement.
- Scalable Integration Services
Security
- Use Policy-based Management to help enforce security polices for data services across the enterprise.
- Encrypt data without modifying applications, using Transparent Data Encryption.
- Employ enterprise-wide encryption solutions with Extensible Key Management and Hardware Security Modules.
- Audit all actions with the new Audit object