The latest version of SQL Server is SQL Server 2008, formerly code named Katmai. It builds on the capabilities and strengths of the previous versions and offers a far more enhanced, secure, reliable and richer product than ever before. SQL Server 2008 is designed to provide you any time, anywhere access to data with more intelligent and programmable features.
Some of the new features in SQL Server 2008 are:
- A policy-based management that helps to enforce security polices for data services across an enterprise
- A new Audit object that audit all actions
- Support to publish data services that can be consumed by rich Internet applications through a simple URI syntax
- Support for Web technologies, such as AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight, to consume data services in applications that are highly interactive
- New data types for date and time such as DATE, a date-only type, TIME, a time-only type, and DATE TIME OFFSET, a time-zone-aware date time type
- A new system type, Hierarchy Id, that can store values representing nodes in a hierarchy tree
- Improved performance on large partitioned tables
- A new LINQ to SQL provider that enables developers to use LINQ directly on SQL Server 2008 tables and columns
- Support for large User-Defined Types (UDTs) by removing the 8-KB limit and thus allowing users to increase the size of their UDTs
- A new GEOGRAPHY data type that enables you to store spatial data and perform operations on it
- A new GEOMETRY data type that enables you to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it.
These, however, are just a few of the new features. There are a lot more powerful and innovative features which have been built into SQL Server 2008 which you can discover day by day as you work with it.