SQL Server 2008 delivers on Microsoft's Data Platform vision by helping your organization manage any data, any place, any time. It enables you to store data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents, such as images and music, directly within the database. SQL Server 2008 delivers a rich set of integrated services that enable you to do more with your data such as query, search, synchronize, report, and analyze. Your data can be stored and accessed in your largest servers within the data center all the way down to desktops and mobile devices, enabling you to have control over your data no matter where it is stored.

SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition is a comprehensive data management and business intelligence platform that provides enterprise-class scalability, data warehousing, advanced analytics, and security for running business-critical applications. With this edition, you can consolidate servers and perform large-scale online transactional processing and reporting

 

• High Availability Ensure business continuity with technologies that protect your data against costly human errors, and minimize disaster-recovery downtime.
• Performance and Scalability Deliver an infrastructure that has a proven record in handling large amounts of data and critical enterprise workloads.
• Security Address privacy and compliance requirements and built-in features that protect your data against unauthorized access.
• Manageability Manage your infrastructure with automated diagnostics, tuning, and configuration to reduce operational costs while reducing maintenance and managing very large amounts of data.
• Business Intelligence Easily query and analyze large amounts of data in your data warehouse and data marts to transform it into business insight.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 provides a trusted, productive, and intelligent data platform that enables you to:

• Run your most demanding mission-critical applications.
• Reduce time and cost of development and management of applications.
• Deliver actionable insight to your entire organization.

SQL Server 2008 New Features:

• Trusted - Run your most mission-critical applications on a highly secure, reliable, and scalable platform.
  • Use Resource Governor to manage concurrent workloads
  • Protect sensitive data with Transparent Data Encryption and advanced auditing
  • Reduce storage requirements and increase query performance with data compression and Sparse Columns.
• Productive - Reduce the cost of managing your data infrastructure while streamlining development of data applications.
  • Enforce policy compliance consistently across the enterprise with the Policy-Based Management
  • Access data by defining business entities instead of tables and columns with the ADO.NET Entity Framework.
• Intelligent - Drive business intelligence throughout your organization, manage reports and analysis of any size or complexity, and empower users by providing powerful visualization and integration with the Microsoft Office system.
  • Troubleshoot, tune, and monitor SQL Server 2008 instances across the enterprise with Performance System Analysis
  • Build high performance analysis solutions with scalability, performance, data mining, and user interface enhancements in SQL Server Analysis Services
  • Take advantage of improved performance, usability, visualization, and integration with the 2007 Microsoft Office system in SQL Server Reporting Services
  • Integrate location-enabled applications through support for spatial data

 

TOP NEW FEATURES TO ENTERPRISE:

• Manage large, growing tables more effectively by transparently breaking them into manageable blocks of data with partitioned table parallelism.

• Take advantage of failover clustering enhancements in Windows Server 2008.

• Recover corrupt data pages from a mirror server with enhanced database mirroring features.

• Use online operations to add new nodes to a peer-to-peer replication solution without taking replication offline.

• Use Resource Governor to proactively control workload prioritization and resource allocation.

• Improve restore times, and reduce backup volumes with new support for backup compression.

• Reduce downtime for hardware maintenance with hot-add CPU capabilities.

• Use Performance Data Collector to troubleshoot, tune, and monitor SQL Server 2008 instances across the enterprise.

• Employ enterprise-wide encryption solutions with Extensible Key Management and Hardware Security Modules.

• Encrypt data without modifying applications, using Transparent Data Encryption.

• Audit all actions with the new Audit object

• Store data more effectively and reduce storage requirements for your data using data compression.

• Use star join query optimizations reduce query response time by recognizing data warehouse join patterns.

• Integrate the latest information into the data warehouse using change data capture.

• Build high-performance analysis solutions to reach virtually any number of users with scalability and performance enhancements in SQL Server Analysis Services.

• Advanced Data Mining algorithms

• Take advantage of on-demand processing and better performance with the re-engineered reporting engine for SQL Server Reporting Services.

• Increase extract, transform, and load (ETL) performance in SQL Server Integration Services with scalable lookup tasks.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise : Overview

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 : Technologies