Microsoft SQL Server

SQL Server 2005 is the Data Platform Leader

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is a comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run today's increasingly complex business applications. SQL Server 2005 allows companies to gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage.

Solutions

• Business Intelligence - Gain deeper insight into your business with integrated, comprehensive analysis and reporting for enhanced decision-making.
• High Availability - Ensure business continuity with the highest levels of system availability through technologies that protect your data against costly human errors and minimize disaster recovery downtime.
• Performance and Scalability - Deliver and Infrastructure that can grow with your business and has a proven record in handling today's large amounts of data and most critical enterprise workloads.
• Security - Provide a secure environment to address privacy and compliance requirements with 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 easily managing very large amounts of data.
• Developer Productivity - Build and deploy critical business-ready applications more quickly by improving developer productivity and reducing project life cycle times.

Why Upgrade to SQL Server 2008?

With the release of the most recent version of SQL Server, Microsoft has delivered a Trusted, Productive, and Intelligent Enterprise Data Platform. There are enhancements and new capabilities engineered into SQL Server 2008 to enable your applications to run better and reduce the amount of time you need to spend managing them. If you have been running. If you have been running existing applications on SQL Server 2000 or 2005, you will find a set of exciting new capabilities to improve your applications and reduce support needs within a familiar management interface. Many of these new features can provide immediate benefits without the need to make application changes.

Key Reasons to Upgrade to SQL 2008

• Experience the benefits right away - Significant enhancements ranging from Data and Backup Compression to query performance and enhance database mirroring are available without the need to modify your existing applications.
• Enhanced Security and Auditing - Get data encryption and database auditing capabilities within existing applications.
• Improved System Management Capabilities - Features like policy-based server management and new tools, such as Performance Data Collection, help you effectively manage the growth of your data.
• Performance Management - There have been many performance enhancements made throughout the technology stack, including the enhancements within Analysis Services, Reporting Services, and Integration Services. For Example, Unisys and Microsoft set a new ETL performance record by loading one terabyte of data in less than 30 minutes using SQL Server 2008 Integration Services.
• Predictable System Response - New features such as query governor and data compression along with general scalability enhancements provide scalable solutions that are more reliable for very large enterprise systems.
• Developer Productivity - Tools like Entity Framework and LINQ, and new data / time, FILESTREAM and spatial data types provide powerful and easy to use application development enhancements.
• Enhanced Business Intelligence Capabilities - Additional reporting capabilities integrated with Microsoft Office applications and a new report designer application allows the creation of enterprise reports without the need for Developer Studio.
• Application Compatibility and Ease of Migration - There are upgrade tools available from Microsoft to help manage your upgrade from prior versions. Compatibility has been maintained with the majority of functionality which should enable most applications to upgrade seamlessly.
• Mainstream Support - With the latest version of SQL Server you can benefit from a long term and current support path.
• Consistent Pricing and Support - Microsoft continues its pricing policies of SQL Server 2005 with some additional improvements. In addition, by participating in Microsoft's Software Assurance Program you are eligible for product upgrades, support, and other benefits.

With the new release of SQL Server 2008, there are many benefits to upgrading your existing applications to the latest release. SQL Server 2008 provides Data Platform for your enterprise applications.

SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008 delivers on Microsoft's Data Platform vision by helping your organization manage any data, any place, any time. Store data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents, such as images and rich media, 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.

SQL Server 2008 provides the highest levels of security, reliability, and scalability for your business-critical applications. To take advantage of new opportunities in today's fast-moving business world, companies need the ability to create and deploy data-driven solutions quickly. SQL Server 2008 reduces time and cost of management and development of applications.

Access data from across your enterprise and provide control over your data no matter where it is stored - from the largest servers within the data center to desktops to mobile devices. SQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive platform that delivers intelligence where your users want it. Information workers can access data directly using the tools they use every day, such as the Microsoft 2007 Office system.

SQL Server 2008 enables data to be consumed from custom applications developed using Microsoft .Net and Visual Studio and from within service-oriented architectures (SOA) and business process through Microsoft BizTalk Server.

Enterprise Data Platform

• Policy-based Management
• Performance Data Collection (Data Collector)
• Data Compression
• Resource Governor
• Transparent Data Encryption
• External Key Management / Extensible Key Management
• Data Auditing
• Hot-Add CPUs and Hot-Add Memory
• Streamlined Installation
• Server Group Management
• Upgrade Advisor
• Partition Aligned Indexed Views
• Backup Compression
• Extended Events

Dynamic Development

• Grouping Sets
• MERGE Operator
• LINQ
• Change Data Capture
• Table-Valued Parameters
• ADO.NET Entity Framework and the Entity Data Model
• Synchronization Services for ADO.NET
• CLR Improvements
• Conflict Detection in Peer-to-Peer Replication
• Service Broker Priorities and Diagnostics
• ADO.NET Data Services

Beyond Relational

• Spatial Data with GEOGRAPHY and GEOMETRY data types
• Virtual Earth Integration
• Sparse Columns
• Filtered Indexes
• Integrated Full-Text Search
• FILESTREAM Data
• Large User-Defined Types (UDTs)
• Large User-Defined Aggregates (UDAs)
• DATE / TIME Data Types
• Improved XML Support
• ORDPATH

Pervasive Insight

• Fixed Query Plan Guides (Plan Freezing)
• Star Join Query Optimization
• Enterprise Reporting Engine
• Report Builder Enhancements
• Improving Rendering for Microsoft Office Word and Excel
• Partitioned Table Parallelism
• IIS Agnostic Report Deployments
• Persistent Lookups
• Analysis Services Query and Writeback Performance
• Best Practice Design Alerts
• Analysis Services Dimension Design
• Analysis Services Time Series
• Data Profiling