Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2 has been made available for download.
**What’s New:
15K partitioning Improvement.**
Introduced support for a maximum of 15,000 partitions in tables and indexes in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2 in the Enterprise, Developer and Evaluation Editions. For details on how this support can be enabled and disabled, along with recommended operation paramaters, see the white paper Support for 15000 Partitions.
Reporting Services in SharePoint Integrated Mode.
SQL Server 2008 SP2 provides updates for Reporting Services integration with SharePoint products. SQL Server 2008 SP2 report servers can integrate with SharePoint 2010 products. SQL Server 2008 SP2 also provides a new add-in to support the integration of SQL Server 2008 R2 report servers with SharePoint 2007 products. For more information see the “What’s New in SharePoint Integration and SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2)” section in What’s New (Reporting Services).
SQL Server 2008 R2 Application and Multi-Server Management Compatibility with SQL Server 2008.
SQL Server 2008 Instance Management.
With SP2 applied, an instance of the SQL Server 2008 Database Engine can be enrolled with a SQL Server 2008 R2 Utility Control Point as a managed instance of SQL Server. For more information, see Overview of SQL Server Utility in SQL Server 2008 R2 Books Online.
Data-tier Application (DAC) Support
Instances of the SQL Server 2008 Database Engine support all DAC operations delivered in SQL Server 2008 R2 after SP2 has been applied. You can deploy, upgrade, register, extract, and delete DACs. SP2 does not upgrade the SQL Server 2008 client tools to support DACs. You must use the SQL Server 2008 R2 client tools, such as SQL Server Management Studio, to perform DAC operations. A data-tier application is an entity that contains all of the database objects and instance objects used by an application. A DAC provides a single unit for authoring, deploying, and managing the data-tier objects. For more information, see Designing and Implementing Data-tier Applications.
Download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8fbfc1de-d25e-4790-88b5-7dda1f1d4e17
Release notes can be found here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/microsoft-sql-server-2008-sp2-release-notes.aspx
Denis has been working with SQL Server since version 6.5. Although he worked as an ASP/JSP/ColdFusion developer before the dot com bust, he has been working exclusively as a database developer/architect since 2002. In addition to English, Denis is also fluent in Croatian and Dutch, but he can curse in many other languages and dialects (just ask the SQL optimizer) He lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and three kids.
