Download MS SQL server 2008

You now can download MS SQL Server 2008 Release Candidate 0. It is available for a 180-day evaluation and can be downloaded from MSDN There is a X86 and a X64 version available.

If you are already familiar with MS SQL server it can be nice to check out what is new in the latest release. There are some nice improvements and new functions available. By reading the release documentation we find some nice new things in MS SQL Server 2008 RC0.

For example we have some new data types.
Newly introduced are 4 new variables on date and time data types. These types enable applications to have separate types for date or time, increased year range, increased fractional second precision and time-zone offset support.

Hierarchical data can now be made really hierarchical by making use of a new datatype called the hierarchyid data type which can be to query and perform work with hierarchical data by using Transact-SQL.

However the new data type which I would like to explore is the spatial data types which are new in MS SQL server 2008. Those 2 are geometry and geography data types. The geometry data type supports planar, or Euclidean (flat-earth), data. The geography data type stores ellipsoidal (round-earth) data, such as GPS latitude and longitude coordinates. These new data types support the storage and manipulation of spatial data objects such as linestrings, points, and polygons. For more information about working with spatial data in MS SQL server you can read this article at MSDN.

Also improved is the Full-text search engine which has now become a fully intergrated part of SQL server.

TSQL has some new or improved features:

ALTER DATABASE SET COMPATIBILITY_LEVEL replaces sp_dbcmptlevel for setting the database compatibility level. Also make sure you checkout Compound Operators, the CONVERT Function, Date and Time Functionality which now support for the ISO week-date system.

Also look at the new GROUPING SETS The GROUPING SETS, ROLLUP, and CUBE operators are added to the GROUP BY clause. There is a new function, GROUPING_ID(), that returns more grouping-level information than the existing GROUPING() function. The non-ISO compliant WITH ROLLUP, WITH CUBE, and ALL syntax is deprecated.

The merge statement, this new Transact-SQL statement performs INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE operations on a target table based on the results of a join with a source table. The syntax allows you to join a data source with a target table or view, and then perform multiple actions based on the results of that join.

Those are some of the new features in the MS SQL server 2008 Database Engine. However there is a lot more to explore in release candidate 0. If you are into MS SQL server this is a must have and worth the time to check it out. Setup a Virtual Machine and install the server to play arround with.