The latest SQL Server 2008 CTP is available on Connect.
Notable features new in this CTP:
- Intellisense in Management studio. (About bloody time). This was demo’d at PASS back in Sept.
- Change tracking. What we’ve done all these years with triggers, just without the triggers.
- The Performance warehouse. This I really want to play with, even if it’s just to see what pieces I can use on 2005 or 2000 servers.
- Plan freezing. To be able to freeze the plan cache at a point in time, and to move query plans from one server to another. I see this as a fairly advanced feature, probably only really useful in specific cases. (and probably a feature that will be badly abused)
- Resource Governor. This must be my number one anticipated feature for 2008. The governor allows the creation of limitations and priorities based on properties of the connection, eg login name, application name, host name. It’ll be a very nice way of limiting the damage that ad-hoc queries do to a server’s performance, without stopping them outright.
- Geospacial data types and functions.
- The filestream data type
Now I just need to install virtual PC on my laptop and it’s playtime…..