Microsoft SQL Server 2008

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, and deliver actionable insight to your entire organization

Trusted SQL Server provides the highest levels of security, availability and scalability for your mission critical applications.

Productive SQL server reduces the time and cost of development and management of data applications

Intelligent SQL Server enables all users to make informed decisions by delivering the right information to the right user in the right format.

• Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence platform provides a scalable infrastructure that enables information technology to drive business intelligence throughout your organization and deliver intelligence where users want it.
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• Data Warehousing

  Microsoft SQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive view of the business, by increasing the freshness of the data, incorporating all your systems, and validating the data while reducing the burden on your IT department.
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• Online Transaction Processing

  SQL Server 2008 provides a scalable, high performance database engine for mission-critical applications that require the highest levels of availability and security, while reducing the total cost of ownership through enhanced enterprise-class manageability.
  
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• Application Development

  The Application Development solution provides developers with a comprehensive programming framework, web services and data connectivity technologies to efficiently access and manage disparate data.
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• Server Consolidation

  SQL Server 2008 reduces hardware and maintenance costs by providing a flexible server consolidation solution with enterprise-class manageability and performance.
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SQL Server 2008 Data Platform Vision

Today a variety of factors are converging to create an information storage explosion. The amount of digitally born information within an organization is increasing dramatically, enabled by new types of information, such as digitization of data from digital imaging and video, and sensor information from RFID tags.

Growing regulatory compliance and globalization require that information be stored securely but also be available at any time. Users must shift through mountains of data to find relevant information. Furthermore, users want to use this information on any device and within applications that they use daily such as the Microsoft Office System.

The cost of disk storage has dramatically decreased; FLASH storage has enabled mass data storage on new devices. Organizations can now store more data and reduce storage costs. However, numerous challenges still remain in managing this data explosion.

The Microsoft Data Platform vision meets the needs of the coming data explosion and the next generation of data-driven applications by providing Your Data, Any Place, Any Time. Organizations require a data platform that can store and manage a wide variety of data including XML, e mail, time/calendar, file, document, spatial, and so on while providing a rich set of services to interact with the data: search, query, powerful data analysis, detailed reporting, seamless data integration, and robust data synchronization. Users can access information from creation to archival and on any device, from the desktop to a mobile device.

Microsoft Data Platform is a complete end-to-end solution that meets these challenges and more, by delivering innovations in four key areas that support data platform vision: mission-critical platform, dynamic development, beyond relational, and pervasive insight.

What’s New in SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008 delivers on the following four key areas of the Microsoft data platform vision:

• Mission-critical platform

SQL Server 2008 enables organizations to run their most complex applications on a secure, reliable, and scalable platform while enabling IT to reduce the complexity of managing their data management infrastructure. SQL Server 2008 provides a secure and trusted platform by securing valuable information in existing applications and enhancing the availability of the data. SQL Server 2008 introduces an innovative policy-based management framework that enables policies to be defined for explicit and automated administration of server entities across one or multiple servers. In addition, SQL Server 2008 delivers predictable query performance with an optimized platform.
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• Dynamic development

SQL Server 2008 along with the .NET Framework reduces the complexity of developing new applications. The ADO.NET Entity Framework enables developers to be more productive by working with logical data entities that align with business requirements instead of programming directly with tables and columns. The new Language Integrated Query (LINQ) extensions in the .NET Framework revolutionizes how developers query data by extending Visual C#® and Visual Basic® .NET to support an SQL-like query syntax natively. And support for occasionally connected systems lets developers build applications that enables users to take data with them on devices and later synchronize their data with central servers.
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• Beyond relational data

SQL Server 2008 enables developers to consume and manage any type of data from traditional data types to advanced new geospatial data. Developers can build next-generation database applications that feature new location awareness support and that enable document management capabilities.
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• Pervasive business insight

SQL Server 2008 provides a scalable infrastructure that can manage reports and analysis of any size and complexity while making it easier for users to access information through deeper integration with Microsoft Office. This enables IT to drive business intelligence throughout the organization. SQL Server 2008 makes great strides in data warehousing, enabling users to consolidate data marts in an enterprise data warehouse.
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