Centralize auditing with new, comprehensive data auditing capabilities.
Enforce policy compliance consistently across the enterprise with the Declarative Management Framework.
Control workload resource prioritization with Resource Governor.
Optimize storage with built-in data compression.
Consolidate data services monitoring with Performance Studio.
Resource Governor
Support for relational data, XML, FILESTREAM, and spatial data Watch the short video.
Data compression and sparse columns
Automatic recovery of suspect pages
Visual designer, and add nodes to a peer-to-peer replication configuration without stopping system activity
Extended Events (Xevents) Watch the short video.
Enhanced database mirroring Watch the short video.
Automatic, transparent data encryption
Use Performance Data Collection to troubleshoot, tune, and monitor
Use Policy-Based Management to manage one or more instances of SQL Server 2008 Watch the short video.
Data compression
Backup compression
Partitioned table parallelism
Star join query optimizations
Resource management
Grouping sets
Change data capture
MERGE SQL statement
Scalable Integration Services
Create high-performance Analysis Services solutions with optimized cube designers, subspace computation, and MOLAP-enabled writeback capabilities.
Implement enterprise-scale Reporting Services solutions through new on-demand processing and instance-based rendering.
Build flexible and effective reports with the new Tablix data structure and rich formatting capabilities.
Expand reach, and empower more users through optimized integration with the 2007 Microsoft Office system
Top New Features
Use consistent syntax to query diverse data through .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) extensions to Microsoft Visual C# and Microsoft Visual Basic .NET.
Create occasionally connected solutions using SQL Server 2008 Compact Edition and Microsoft Synchronization Services.
Consolidate data storage through the SQL Server 2008 support for relational, XML, FileStream, and geo-location-based data.
Map data structures to business entities by using the new ADO.NET Entity Framework
