SQL Server 2008 is being released too soon after
SQL Server 2005, and it’s not going to be
widely adopted. But I’m here to tell you I don’t buy that
contention: A lot of customers have their eye on SQL
Server 2008, and they’re ready to jump on board because
they need the strong BI enhancements SQL Server 2008
brings. Three areas with major enhancements will make
droves of customers move: Reporting Services, Database
Services, and operational management.
If you accuse me of being biased toward SQL Server
Reporting Services (SSRS), I am; so let’s cover it first.
SSRS in SQL Server 2008 boasts a shiny new standalone
Report Designer, introduces the Tablix—the ultimate data
region—and no longer requires Microsoft IIS.
In previous releases of SQL Server, everyone (e.g., end
users, CIOs, and industry analysts) railed at Microsoft for
holding a hard line on requiring Microsoft Visual Studio
2005 or Business Intelligence Development Studio for the
SSRS Report Designer; SQL Server 2008 liberates us from
that requirement by providing a full-featured standalone
Report Designer. And with the new Report Designer, we
can build reports using the Tablix, a new data region that
offers tabular flexibility married with cross-tab capabilities.
The Tablix replaces the table, matrix, and list and offers
the ability to build side-by-side cross-tab sections each
with corresponding group aggregates. If you’ve ever run
into the limitations of the matrix, you’ll want to migrate
to SQL Server 2008 as soon as possible.
And SSRS 2008 has been detached from IIS, which is
a beautiful thing when you want SSRS to play nicely with
other applications (and their security) and with Share-
Point. SSRS now uses HTTP.sys, similar to how SQL
Server 2005 works for native Web access for procedures.
The relational engine (aka “Database Services”) has
some new features that make SQL Server 2008 compelling.
Here are the ones I think will win over the most
customers (especially the BI folks).
Merge statement. The Merge statement lets you insert and
update records in the same statement, a biggie for tracking
historical changes while loading a data warehouse.
New DateTime data types. New DateTime data types
permit separation of date and time information with
support for greater range and precision, as well as handy
time-zone offset aware DateTime types.
Table valued parameters. With the table valued parameters,
you can now pass tables as parameters into stored
procedures, which should eliminate the need to parse a
comma-separated value (CSV) list (or similar) within the
proc. You can even pass an ADO.NET DataTable as a
parameter, which should make it very easy to work with data
between the Microsoft .NET framework and SQL Server.
Larger user-defined data types. In SQL Server 2008, the
8K ceiling has been removed for user-defined data types
including .NET CLR types. With the restriction removed,
you can create more full-featured types and aggregates.
Change Data Capture. Change Data Capture will track
and expose database changes, a dream for DBAs. Incremental
extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL)
processes will be able to leverage this feature to identify
and extract only new and changed data.
For daily operations for most databases, SQL Server
self-manages and self-heals; hard-core DBAs like to beat
up SQL because it doesn’t have a ton of knobs to constantly
adjust. I think most of the criticism is posturing
for job security, but SQL Server 2008 will deliver “more
knobs” with a Resource Governor and the Declarative
Management Framework (DMF).
Resource Governor is long overdue, providing the ability
to corral resource-hungry databases within definable limits
and priorities, therefore enabling good performance in tandem
with concurrency. The DMF’s features are policy based,
which gives you the ability to apply the same custom settings
across many SQL Server servers via a policy. And even
though old-school DBAs can’t beat up SQL Server for having
too few knobs, they can still say SQL Server is for sissies
because the install process is easy, even easier than before.
The list of SQL Server 2008 features is longer than my
arm. It’s great that database mirroring gets its 2.0 revision,
geospatial data support is coming, and we can code in C#
in Integration Services with Visual Studio Tools for Applications
(VSTA) support. A lot of customers are going to
see value in the items I highlighted above and say “See ya
SQL Server 2005 (or 2000), we are moving on up to 2008!”
Call me partial, but I think SQL Server 2008 is all about
BI, and once the word gets out, 2008 is going to have a lot
of fans.
Special thanks to Ashton Hobbs of Solid Quality Mentors
for his thoughts regarding SQL Server 2008.
