Complete Data Platform for Small-to-Medium Businesses
SQL Server Standard is a complete data management and business intelligence platform, providing best-in-class ease of use and manageability for running departmental applications.
SQL Server 2008 and the Data Platform
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, music, documents 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 enables you to consume your data within custom applications developed using Microsoft .NET and Visual Studio and within your service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process through Microsoft BizTalk Server while information workers can access data directly in the tools they use everyday such as the 2007 Microsoft Office system. SQL Server 2008 delivers a trusted, productive and intelligent data platform for all your data needs.
Here Are Some Of The New Features
Protect valuable information
- Transparent Data Encryption
Enable encryption of an entire database, data files, or log files, without the need for application changes. Benefits of this include: Search encrypted data using both range and fuzzy searches, search secure data from unauthorized users, and data encryption without any required changes in existing applications.
- Extensible Key Management
SQL Server 2005 provides a comprehensive solution for encryption and key management. SQL Server 2008 delivers an excellent solution to this growing need by supporting third-party key management and HSM products.
Create and manage auditing via DDL, while simplifying compliance by providing more comprehensive data auditing. This enables organizations to answer common questions, such as, "What data was retrieved?"
Manage by policies
Policy-Based Management is a policy-based system for managing one or more instances of SQL Server 2008. Use this with SQL Server Management Studio to create policies that manage entities on the server, such as the instance of SQL Server, databases, and other SQL Server objects.
SQL Server 2008 introduces significant improvements to the service life cycle for SQL Server through the re-engineering of the installation, setup, and configuration architecture. These improvements separate the installation of the physical bits on the hardware from the configuration of the SQL Server software, enabling organizations and software partners to provide recommended installation configurations.
- Performance Data Collection
Performance tuning and troubleshooting are time-consuming tasks for the administrator. To provide actionable performance insights to administrators, SQL Server 2008 includes more extensive performance data collection, a new centralized data repository for storing performance data, and new tools for reporting and monitoring.
Integrate any data
Keeping disk-based backups online is expensive and time-consuming. With SQL Server 2008 backup compression, less storage is required to keep backups online, and backups run significantly faster since less disk I/O is required.
- Partitioned Table Parallelism
Partitions enable organizations to manage large growing tables more effectively by transparently breaking them into manageable blocks of data. SQL Server 2008 builds on the advances of partitioning in SQL Server 2005 by improving the performance on large partitioned tables.
- Star Join Query Optimizations
SQL Server 2008 provides improved query performance for common data warehouse scenarios. Star Join Query optimizations reduce query response time by recognizing data warehouse join patterns.
Grouping Sets is an extension to the GROUP BY clause that lets users define multiple groupings in the same query. Grouping Sets produces a single result set that is equivalent to a UNION ALL of differently grouped rows, making aggregation querying and reporting easier and faster.
With Change Data Capture, changes are captured and placed in change tables. It captures complete content of changes, maintains cross-table consistency, and even works across schema changes. This enables organizations to integrate the latest information into the data warehouse.
With the introduction of the MERGE SQL Statement, developers can more effectively handle common data warehousing scenarios, like checking whether a row exists, and then executing an insert or update.
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Pipeline Improvements
Data Integration packages can now scale more effectively, making use of available resources and managing the largest enterprise-scale workloads. The new design improves the scalability of runtime into multiple processors.
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Persistent Lookups
The need to perform lookups is one of the most common ETL operations. This is especially prevalent in data warehousing, where fact records need to use lookups to transform business keys to their corresponding surrogates. SSIS increases the performance of lookups to support the largest tables.
Key Usage Scenarios
Departmental applications requiring best-in-class manageability and ease of use
Small to medium scale online transaction processing (OLTP) applications
Decision Support Systems requiring basic reporting and analytics
The following table shows system requirements for SQL Server 2008 Standard (64-bit) x64:
Component Requirement
Minimum: AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon 64, Intel Xeon with Intel EM64T support, Intel Pentium IV with EM64T support
Processor speed:
Minimum: 1.4 GHz
Recommended: 2.0 GHz or faster
Operating System
Windows XP Professional x64
Windows Server 2003 SP2 64-bit x64 Standard1
Windows Server 2003 SP2 64-bit x64 Data Center1
Windows Server 2003 SP2 64-bit x64 Enterprise1
Windows Vista Ultimate x64
Windows Vista Enterprise x64
Windows Vista Business x64
Windows Server 2008 x64 Web1
Windows Server 2008 x64 Standard, Windows Server 2008 x64 Standard without Hyper-V1
Windows Server 2008 x64 Data Center, Windows Server 2008 x64 Data Center without Hyper-V1
Windows Server 2008 x64 Enterprise, Windows Server 2008 x64 Enterprise without Hyper-V1
Windows Small Business Server 20082
Windows Server 2008 for Windows Essential Server Solutions2
Windows Server 2008 without Hyper-V for Windows Essential Server Solutions2
Memory
RAM: Minimum:512 MB
Recommended: 2.048 GB or more
Maximum: Operating system maximum
1Management Tools are supported in WOW64, a feature of 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows that enables 32-bit applications to execute natively in 32-bit mode. Applications function in 32-bit mode even though the underlying operating system is running on the 64-bit operating system.
2Supported Operating Systems for SQL Server Standard for Small Business
Note:
SQL Server 2008 is not supported on Windows Server 2008 Server Core installations.
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