SQL Server 2008 - is it time to adopt it?

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 was released over twelve months ago and many of our customers are beginning to think about taking it onboard. Generally this new release of SQL Server is more evolutionary than revolutionary. At first glance Management Studio seems to be quite familiar, you have to go looking to find many of the new features. This article will pick out a few of the new features and enhancements that appeal to me and may help you decide if to upgrade. With hundreds, if not thousands of changes this list is totally subjective of course.

Firstly the installation process has been improved with the new Installation Centre. This aims to bring together all the installation and maintenance task in one place. Whether you want to install a new instance, repair a damaged instance, change your edition or add an instance to a cluster it is all launched from the installation centre. The installation wizards themselves seem more comprehensive than the previous releases.

For administrators, two interesting new features are Central Management Server and Policy Management. Central Management Server allows you to use one instance to store the registration details of all your other instances. From Management Studio you connect to the Central Management Server and you are connected to all other instances. Queries can then be run against all your other instances and policies can be applied to all your other instances in one operation. Unfortunately the Central Management Server itself cannot be managed from the Central Management Server. Policy Management allows you to create rules that apply to one or more instances. For example database should be in full recovery model. These rules can then be checked or enforced on one or multiple instances. It allows the Database Administrator (DBA) to ensure a consistent approach to management across a network of SQL servers. As you imagine these two new features are obviously aimed at administrators who want ease the workload of managing multiple servers.

For developers one interesting new feature is the introduction of separate date and time data types. Previously dealing with dates both with and without a time could be tricky. This should be easier now. New data types also give support for multiple time zones and accuracy to a hundred nanoseconds, if anybody is interested!

The new Merge statement is useful as it allows batches of changes to be incorporated into a reporting table. It will look at the data and work out if the changes are inserts, updates or deletes (if required). In previous releases this was done with stored procedures which were a task to write. On a personal note it is unfortunate that the syntax is not the same as the Oracle Merge command.

Many developers will be pleased to see a debugger has returned to SQL Server, as there was in SQL Server 2000 but not in SQL Server 2005. It is back in SQL Server 2008 in the Management Studio and additionally this debugger can debug scripts as well as stored procedures and user defined functions. So it is not only back but also improved!

I hope you have found this brief introduction to a few of the changes in SQL Server 2008 interesting, knowing Microsoft they will soon have another release of SQL Server for me to get to grips with! I could go on for days about SQL Server and do on my courses, where hopefully I will see you soon.