Keynote - SQL Server 2008 R2:The Data Platform for Software Plus Services

Day 2 begins...

Keynote - SQL Server 2008 R2:The Data Platform for Software Plus Services
Roger Doherty
Senior Technical Evangelist

Couple Silverlight nods given. No real mention of adoption rate...
IIS7 Smooth streaming ability - stream vid a different qualities depending on bandwidth, etc.

Ability to create .NET classes and persist in DB. Even he doesn't see it as that big.
XML as first class citizen. Nice, but did not think that was new.
HierarchyId data type - potentially cool for storing hierarchical data.
Sparse columns - up to 30K columns since columns with NULL are not allocated space. Cool! "SELECT *" only returns non-null cols. Interesting...
Datetimeoffset type supports time zone. Once in a while useful.
Can now persist blobs to NTFS. WAY better performance. Nice, but he's giving the impression that it's very raw still. To quote, "Give it a try maybe in SQL2011."

Indexing better. Filtered index to do something like not indexing null values. Awesome for sparse tables (like FacetEntityValue).
Integrated fulltext search - 2 people in the room had ever used it. He seems disappointed.

Talked specifically about improving/developing JDBC and PHP access APIs.
Fancy talk to say they are working on integrating .NET ORM type capabilities.
Microsoft Synchronization Framework as alternative to replication (more fine grained control)

VS Team Database Edition
Integrated change management code, including source code integration. Nice.
Db refactoring support. Scary powerful.

Some interesting stuff in here. It seems like some of the functionality could be used in place of NHibernate. Don't know which is better. It feels to me (and I could be wrong) that the VS/SQL Server capabilities are really good for a clean model -- all of your stuff coming from SQL Server, classes that look just like your db tables. NHibernate has stuff we use extensively for connecting to other dbs and building a clean object model from twisted data models. Feels like we blow a lot of the MS advantages out of the water when we do that.