Today I downloaded and installed SQL Server 2008, both the Express and Standard Edition. The first thing I noticed was the huge files to be downloaded. The Standard Edition was almost a full DVD, a little bit more than 3 GB, while the Express Edition was about 500 MB.
The install process is a little bit tedious involving two reboots. The first is needed after a hotfix install (Windows installer 4.5) and the other one is needed after the installation completes. This goes for both Standard and Express Edition. When installing the Express Edition you have to separately download and install Windows PowerShell.
This doesn’t sound as a good start for this database engine, but if you survive the installation there are a lot of nice stuff waiting for you…
More about the installation
The things about the installation process mentioned above are not things that should scare you. The install procedure runs smoothly as soon as all required software and updates are installed. One good thing is that the pre-defined installation types are gone and you are forced to select what stuff to install. I like that, but others may not.
The Express Edition now supports to be installed as a named instance other than SQLExpress, which makes it possible to have the 2005 version installed side-by-side with the 2008. I named my instance SQLExpress2008, and it works great!
Tools
The SQL Server 2008 is one great database server, including all tools for profiling, analysis, management and configuration. The SQL Server Management Studio for SQL Server 2005 is one piece of junk, so I was hoping that the update for SQL Server 2008 would be better. Unfortunately the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio is more or less exactly the same as the 2005 version. There are a few improvements though, some of them are:
- Select top 1000 rows
This menu item is great because it allows you to select only the top rows of a table. If you want to see more rows, activate the query pane and you can remove the top 1000 clause. - Edit top 200 rows
This menu item is the same as above, pretty similar to Open table in the 2005 version. It allows you to view and edit the top 200 rows in a table. - Spatial results view
When a table contains a column for a GIS object, a select query will display the result as a table, but also a new tab for previewing the GIS object. This works really nicely but the view is a little bit slow. You may consider to use some kind of 3rd party tool for this particular data.
The SQL Server Configuration Manager shows all your instances of SQL Server installed on the system, all versions including Express Editions.
New data types
There are some new data types to be selected when designing the tables:
- geometry
A data type for storing planar or Euclidean data. The data type conforms to the OGC standard. - geography
This is the ellipsoidal version of the geometry data type above. - hierarchyid
This is an interesting data type to represent a position of a record in a hierarchy. The type doesn’t automatically represent in a tree. It’s up to the client application to make the records form some kind of hierarchy. This data type is a variable length data type and is extremely compact, supporting arbitrary insertion and deletion.
The hierarchyid type is available to CLR clients by the SqlHierarchyId data type. - datetime2
This type can be seen as an extended version of the old datetime type, supporting fractional seconds. The default precision is 7 digits with an accuracy of 100 ns.
How to use when developing
Because of my interest in the back-end of software development I had to try out the new data types by implementing a small windows forms application. These tests will be presented in a separate post in a day or so.
Read more
The MSDN: Microsoft Developer Network contains a lot of information about the SQL Server 2008, including the new data types and tools. Read about it on SQL Server 2008 Overview and SQL Server Developer Center.