The Microsoft Stack: No Need to Hesitate on SQL Server 2008 Migration

By Patrick Hynds

September 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)

After several rounds of betas and community technical previews, Microsoft has released SQL Server 2008. Almost all organizations have some version of SQL Server in their environment, and since Microsoft does not really come out with new versions that often, it is pretty stable. You might even have very old versions like SQL Server 7 still kicking around (I have run into SQL Server 4.2 a few times in the last couple of years), but it does pay to upgrade.

The new hardware, especially 64-bit processing and the added memory space that grants, can really ramp up your application performance. So with that in mind what does this new SQL Server promise?
 
If the tagline Microsoft is using is a good indicator (and it is in my opinion), then SQL Server 2008 is trying to be the back-end engine for the Web and especially Web 2.0. You will see "Your Data, Any Place, Any Time" around, and I think that is really a reference to the Web. There are new capabilities in SQL Server to store music and images and even unstructured documents, which all have applications for Web sites.

While this seems to be the main marketing message, it is only the tip of the iceberg of new features. Over the last few versions of SQL Server, data warehousing has been ramping up, and this version is no exception. Writeback enabled MOLAP (Multidimensional OLAP) in SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services will remove the need for ROLAP (Relational OLAP) queries in many organizations and result in a big performance gain. Other OLAP improvements are on the tool side, where Microsoft has been busy helping consolidate the market by buying up ISVs with interesting offerings, coupled with extensive integration with Microsoft Office 2007; much of what used to be the strict province of Excel is coming to Word and the rest of Office.

A new cross-validation feature helps prevent human errors and also opens the door for building data mining add-ins for Office 2007 that let organizations really integrate their analysis into their business processes.

Related Search Term(s): database management, SQL, Microsoft

Share this link: http://www.sysmannews.com/link/32850