Beginning, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Administration

Introduction

Microsoft officially announced SQL Server 2008, codenamed Katmai, at the first Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) conference in May 2007. I suppose I had the same reaction as many others — "Already?" SQL Server 2005 had only been released a year and a half earlier, and I started to wonder if it was too soon. I can't tell you why I thought that. I also knew that it wasn't unusual for Microsoft's product teams to start planning for the next version of a product by the time the current version had been released. I knew that the time between the SQL Server 2000 and the SQL Server 2005 releases was too long. And I knew that Microsoft was committed to more frequent and consistent release cycles of two to three years for new versions of SQL Server.

I expected SQL Server 2008 to be more of a product refresh than a full new release. Most of the public material available hinted at that. It was designed to build on the framework laid out by SQL Server 2005, which offered two benefits. First, organizations that had already migrated to SQL Server 2005 would find the transition to SQL Server 2008 to be easier than moving from SQL Server 2000, or other database products. Additionally, Microsoft had solidified itself as a player in the BI market space by bundling Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services as part of the SQL platform.

What I didn't expect was that some of the changes made were not incidental, but fairly significant. As you'll read in this book, ...