In case you don't read our Roller... Breaking news on RTM release date

re: In case you don't read our Roller... Breaking news on RTM release date

Linchi Shea — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 21:37:38 GMT

From a product marketing perspective, I wonder if this is unique, I mean, having the launch event in Q1 and making the delivery in Q3. But then I'm not a marketing guy.

re: In case you don't read our Roller... Breaking news on RTM release date

RickHeiges — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:45:52 GMT

Did everyone see the video about the last day for Bill Gates as a Microsoft Full-Time Employee? That day will be in July. I think that some of the SQL Server team got pulled off of development to help plan for that last day. That is the real reason for the delay. ;-)

This may mean even more for the next cycle. MSFT wants to release a new version every 2-3 years (approximately). A slip here means SQL Server 2011 may more easily become SQL Server 2012. Just a thought. :-)

re: In case you don't read our Roller... Breaking news on RTM release date

Bart Czernicki — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:57:53 GMT

SQL 2008 really should be a SP3-SP4, same tools just a few add-ons. I played with the CTP for a month (I know its not feature complete yet)

- Installation is finally done right

- SSAS has the much needed Aggregations Tab (just use BIDS helper now)

- finally MDX performance improvements (nothing really new)

- T-SQL improvements...meh, nothing of signifigance like SQL 2005 (ranking functions, CTEs, pivot)

- Entity Framework/LINQ...nice but not really SQL 2008 and for now u can deal with the "poor man's" SQLMetal and LINQ to SQL for a lot of the core stuff.

- Reporting Services finally feels more mature, better Report Builder...err Designer :). Nice visualizations from Dundas (already available for SQL 2005)

- finally the stupid exe is called ssms in SQL 2008; sqlwb in SQL 2005 or isqlw in SQL 2000. :) Wonder if the SSIS service is still called MSDts... :)

If you have SQL 2000 and plan on migrating in 6-9 months..wait for 2008. If you have 2005; you'll probably wait for SQL 2012 :)

re: In case you don't read our Roller... Breaking news on RTM release date

Denis Gobo — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:32:03 GMT

>>- T-SQL improvements...meh, nothing of signifigance like SQL 2005 (ranking functions, CTEs, pivot)

There are a couple of exiting things

table values parameters are going to be big if you are doing any web work where people can upload comma delimited files

date and time, datetime2

I will save 5 bytes per row by switching to date from datetime, unfortunately I can't use smalldatetime because my data goes back before 1900. Some of my tables have billions of rows, combine that with backup compression and we are talking about big savings

merge AKA upsert

nice to have, I assume it performs better than if exists then update else insert code

spatial

I think this is going to be another biggie

Now compare this to the upgrade from SQL 7 to SQL 2000, what did we get? UDFs, Indexed Views? Anything else?

re: In case you don't read our Roller... Breaking news on RTM release date

Bart Czernicki — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:49:43 GMT

"Now compare this to the upgrade from SQL 7 to SQL 2000, what did we get? UDFs, Indexed Views? Anything else?"

SQL Server 7.0 was released in late 1998/early 1999 and SQL Server 2000 was released in ....Sep 2000 (?). So the gap was 1.5 years or so (?)

SQL 2005 - November 2005

SQL 2008 - Q3 2008 (that is a 3 year gap)

T-SQL-wise the only other thing I think was instead of triggers that wasn't big at all (I remember using it a couple times on views and having the insert statements disperse into tables). The basic XML support int t-sql 2000 was decent and we used that in pretty interesting parts of our Web UI some 6 years ago.

I know certain features to some people are cticical and minimal to others. In my opinion this just builds on the SQL 2005 innovations and SQL 2008 doesn't really innovate much at all (i.e. just borrows from other existing products: BID Helper (aggreagtions) and Cube Design, Red Gate with their intellisense, entity framework (no I am not going to say FoxPro had it for years or its the same thing as HiBernate) but it has been done before). I just think this feels a lot more of a SP than any other release and ties/fixes a lot of items up.

Even going from 7.0 -> 2000 (depending when u upgraded: SSAS 2000, new DTS API, Reporting/Notification Services, 64-bit etc). There was some decent stuff in there.

re: In case you don't read our Roller... Breaking news on RTM release date

steve dassin — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 06:39:14 GMT

hello Bart,

>entity framework (no I am not going to say FoxPro had it for years or its the same

>thing as HiBernate) but it has been done before).

Care to elaborate? What do you think MS is trying to do here and what is its real connection with sql server if any? Are they copying existing/pre-existing technology just to grab some market share? Do you think server folks should be concerned with it? Inquiring minds would like to know :)