Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2008 To Manufacturing

Microsoft announced Wednesday that the 2008 version of SQL Server, its data-management and business-intelligence platform, has been released to manufacturing.

The company said new capabilities have been added, such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis. Microsoft is also touting its support for aggregation, summarization, search engines, dashboards, transactions across distributed data sources, and long-running transactions.

Applications in Development

Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Data and Storage Platform Division, said the 2008 version "is the only major database that includes comprehensive, tightly integrated functionality for data management as well as advanced business intelligence out of the box."

A preview version of the new SQL Server is already in use, following more than 450,000 downloads. Microsoft said more than 75 large-scale applications are in development, and more than 1,000 independent software vendors are creating about 1,300 applications using the new platform.

According to the software giant, enterprise customers already working with SQL Server 2008 include Clear Channel Communications, Fidelity Investments, Hilton Hotels, Simon & Schuster and Siemens AG.

Microsoft is pointing to SQL Server's record of benchmarks, such as being the "first and only database-management system to be capable of delivering scalable results" on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's (TPC) new online transaction-processing benchmark, for which it has received 13 published benchmarks so far.

The company also cited benchmarks from hardware vendors, such as IBM's No. 1 performance result using SQL Server 2008 on a 64-core System x3950 M2 server. In addition, Unisys and Microsoft said SQL Server 2008 set a new record for ETL (extract, transform and load) performance. Testers were able to load one terabyte of data in less than 30 minutes. For large-scale data warehousing, the new platform achieved a recent 10-terabyte TPC-H benchmark.

Seven Editions

The new version is available in a variety of...