Release Candidate 0
Release candidate 0 is now out, coming out at the end of the week before last. It was just in time for the IT Pro week at TechEd and there was lots of information and excitement about the product.
I haven't really had much of a chance to work with it, but I have spent some time with SQL Server 2008 over the last six months, watching as some improvements were made and being promised others. This latest copy is very complete and while I saw a couple bugs last week at TechEd, they were fairly small, low priority, more annoying display things in SSMS than anything. A couple I couldn't reproduce, so I'm not too worried about them.
I did see some good demos of the T-SQL Debugger, Intellisense, the Resource Governer, and a few more things. Since I've been a production DBA, those administrative features are more important to me and I actually was on a couple panels discussing things like this for TechEd Online. I didn't see my panels up there, but I'm sure they're being edited down and will be there soon.
While working the Database booth for Microsoft last week, I had so many people ask me when SQL Server 2008 is coming out. I don't have any new info on this, but a couple things to think about. The first is that I've heard TPC results are only good for six months if the software is pre-release and the current results are from 2/27/08, so Aug 27th is the day by which SQL Server must be released for those benchmarks to stand. The other thing is that a few groups in SQL Server development have mentioned they have really knocked out almost all their bugs, so it appears that RC0 will be the last cut of software before RTM.
I think that's OK, as long as it works well, and so far it does seem to do that. A few people I talked to are working with MIcrosoft to run it as a pre-release product and supposedly quite a bit of the internal SQL Servers up in Redmond have been upgraded.
I stil think that SQL Server 2008 is a better upgrade than SQL Server 2005 at this point. The core product is the same, with new features added to SQL Server 2008, but nothing really broken. If you're testing on 2005, you should be able to quickly redo those tests on SQL Server 2008. And if you're upgrading from SQL Server 2000, it's just as hard to go to SQL Server 2005 as SQL Server 2008. So why lose three years off your lifecycle?
There are lots of blog postings starting to come out on RC0, so I'd look at this summer as the chance to dig in and learn a few new things about how SQL Server is changing.
TechEd 2008
This was my fourth TechEd conference and I was a little disappointed. It was the big news from last week as so many journalists that work in the Microsoft space were there, but it was a much smaller show, only about 6000-7000 people from what I heard, and didn't have the energy of past shows. It didn't help that there were no major announcements to be made, with two major products (Windows 2008 and Visual Studio 2008) being released earlier this year and others (SQL Server, Exchange), not having a new version. Even Hyper-V wasn't complete, though I ran through a couple labs and things seemed to work for me.
Conferences are a great way to learn, however, and I'm sure that most people attending the show would say they learned something. The interactions with others are incredibly valuable, especially in the center of the show where Microsoft staffs booths with both employees and volunteers like me. I spent a few sessions talking with developers on compression and data services and learned more in those 5 minutes than hours spent researching things on the web. There's just something about that face to face interaction.
With the sessions being videotaped and recorded, and then sent on DVD to attendees, I'm tempted to skip all sessions next year and spend all my time asking questions of the developers.
Steve Jones
| Steve's Pick of the Week: NYSE to Sell Market Data to Web Sites - I thought this was very interesting as it shows what the value of data can be. The stock market has always been full of people getting rich by trading stocks, but now they make more revenues from selling the information than the stocks. That's amazing. |
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.podshow.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
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Today's podcast features music by Incompetech. Kevin Macleod has some great compositions in all genres of music. Check him out at www.incompetech.com.
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