An announcement was released yesterday on eWeek from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference that said SQL Server 2008 will come in August. This means that the RTM must be very close since we're almost halfway through July now. There is also a blog entry from the Database Platform Insider.

While there still could be a delay or two, it appears the SQL Server team will make their goal of shipping a new version within 3 years with plenty of time to spare. Please join me in congratulating them in meeting this goal.

I've recommended for some time that you should really consider SQL Server 2008 if you are looking to upgrade older servers, and now that it's ready to be released, I continue to urge you to consider it over SQL Server 2005. This is my opinion, but from what I've seen, the changes from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 are all additions to the product without much change in functionality. This means that any testing you've done on SQL Server 2005 should be valid for 2008 as well.

And think about all the great new features in SQL Server 2008 that you might consider. Some of the ones I think will have a great impact are:

• Resource Governer - I've sent this to SQL Wish for years, perhaps a decade and I'm glad to see it finally coming. There's some learning and knowledge that needs to come from those of us in the community as we use this feature, but it's a fantastic addition to the product.
• Policy Based Management - It organizes rules and somewhat replaces DDL triggers, and it's a tool that I was really looking for as a production DBA. Not all the features work with downlevel servers, but you can defintitely run many of your rules against SQL Server 2005 and 2000 servers and find those that are out of compliance.
• Compression - It's Enteprrise only, but seeing the data compression features make me wish I had a terabyte sized system.
• Date and Time!! - They're finally separate so you can query as salesdate > '2008/07/09' instead of salesdate > '2008/07/09 00:00:00'.

I'm not sure about other features like TDE ( I foresee lots of lost keys), Sparse columns, Spatial, etc., but the great thing is that you don't have to use them if you don't need them.

Now that things are very close, look for more SQL Server 2008 content moving forward.