SQL Server 2008 RTM Available for Download - SQL 2008 Server

Enable
encryption of an entire database, data files, or log files, without the
need for application changes. Benefits of this include: Search
encrypted data using both range and fuzzy searches, search secure data
from unauthorized users, and data encryption without any required
changes in existing applications.

SQL
Server 2005 provides a comprehensive solution for encryption and key
management. SQL Server 2008 delivers an excellent solution to this
growing need by supporting third-party key management and HSM products.

Create
and manage auditing via DDL, while simplifying compliance by providing
more comprehensive data auditing. This enables organizations to answer
common questions, such as, "What data was retrieved?"

> Learn more about SQL Server 2008 Security

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.

SQL
Server 2008 enables the principal and mirror machines to transparently
recover from 823/824 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.

> Learn more about SQL Server 2008 High Availability

Policy-Based
Management is a policy-based system for managing one or more instances
of SQL Server 2008. Use this with SQL Server Management Studio to
create policies that manage entities on the server, such as the
instance of SQL Server, databases, and other SQL Server objects.

SQL
Server 2008 introduces significant improvements to the service life
cycle for SQL Server through the re-engineering of the installation,
setup, and configuration architecture. These improvements separate the
installation of the physical bits on the hardware from the
configuration of the SQL Server software, enabling organizations and
software partners to provide recommended installation configurations.

Performance
tuning and troubleshooting are time-consuming tasks for the
administrator. To provide actionable performance insights to
administrators, SQL Server 2008 includes more extensive performance
data collection, a new centralized data repository for storing
performance data, and new tools for reporting and monitoring.

> Learn more about SQL Server 2008 Manageability

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.

The
Object Services layer of ADO.NET enables the materialization, 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.

> Learn about SQL Server 2008 ADO.NET Object Services and LINQ

SQL Server 2008 introduces new date and time data types:

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 in a more efficient way than currently possible. New system type HierarchyId can
store values that represent nodes in a hierarchy tree. This new type
will be implemented as a CLR UDT, and will expose several efficient and
useful built-in methods for creating and operating on hierarchy nodes
with a flexible programming model.

Allow
large binary data to be stored directly in an NTFS file system, while
preserving an integral part of the database and maintaining
transactional consistency. Enable the 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 makes the transition between Text Search and
relational data seamless, while enabling users to use the Text Indexes
to perform high-speed text searches on large text columns.

NULL
data consumes no physical space, providing a highly efficient way of
managing empty data in a database. For example, Sparse Columns allows
object models that typically have numerous null values to be stored in
a SQL Server 2005 database without experiencing large space costs.

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

Build spatial capabilities into your applications by using the support for spatial data.

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.

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.

SQL
Server 2008 provides 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. Grouping Sets produces a single
result set that is equivalent to a UNION ALL of differently grouped
rows, making aggregation querying and reporting easier and faster.

With
Change Data Capture, changes are captured and placed in change tables.
It captures complete content of changes, maintains cross-table
consistency, and even works across schema changes. This enables
organizations to integrate the latest information into the data
warehouse.

With
the introduction of the MERGE SQL Statement, developers can more
effectively handle common data warehousing scenarios, like checking
whether a row exists, and then executing an insert or update.

Data
Integration packages can now scale more effectively, making use of
available resources and managing the largest enterprise-scale
workloads. The new design improves the scalability of runtime into
multiple processors.

The
need to perform lookups is one of the most common ETL operations. This
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.

> Learn more about SQL Server 2008 Integration Services and Data Warehousing