Microsoft releases SQL Server 2008

Our long wait is over:

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/aug08/08-06SQLServer2008PR.mspx

We've been getting along just fine with SQL2K5, but some of the features in this new release are really going to make our lives easier.

One great example is what they call "Transparent Data Encryption". At first blush, this doesn't seem like a particularly useful feature for us, because our database servers are stashed behind so many layers of physical and network security that it would be extremely difficult for anyone malicious to get at them. And hard drives with PHI never, ever leave the data center.

But in spite of all of that security, we have had a couple of requests from our more security-sensitive clients to encrypt their data at rest. To date, the only reasonable approach to that problem is to encrypt the disk volume that the database is on, inevitably impacting performance in a big way.

This new feature of SQL Server will allow us to physically encrypt their data with minimal fuss, and, presumably, without a noticable performance hit.

I'll post in the future about other key SQL2K8 features that we plan to incorporate into our systems.