Wednesday, March 26, 2008

SQL 2008 - A Developer's Perspective

It looks like SQL 2008 is on the horizon, and I'd say it is a pretty signifigant release. Here is a video highlighting some of the changes in SQL 2008 that affect developers...check it out [HERE].

If you don't want to watch the whole deal, here are some of the highlights-


  • New geospatial data types

  • Entity Framework (use Linq and objects in SQL?)

  • Sparse Columns (better data storage for big columns with little data)

  • New Filestream data type (awesome...files are stored on NTFS, but tracked through SQL)

  • New Datetime data types (base time on GMT, auto adjust for client?)



Another one, that wasn't included in the video, is the new table type SQL variable. Not to sure about the details yet, but the upshot is that you can do multiple SQL CRUD operations on the equivalent of dataset in one trip to the SQL DB, I see lots of neat possibilities there.

Read more about that here-

http://visualstudiomagazine.com/features/article.aspx?editorialsid=2438

If you want to take it out for a spin, you can get a copy of the Express CTP version here-

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/trial-software.aspx

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