SQL Server 2008 CTP Now Available

The CTP Download of SQL Server 2008 (aka Katmai) is now available on MSDN here.

RedmondMag.com have a useful overview of some of the new features here.

I am pretty sure that I will download and install the CTP in the near future and will be able to give you my personal impressions on the product.

I expect to be building a new development PC over Christmas so I will probably install it on a Virtual PC on that machine once it is ready.

In general, I am a pretty big fan of SQL Server, I first started using the product when it was version 6.5 and all my prior database experience was in Oracle and Access. Coming from Oracle, I found SQL Server to be a lot easier to setup, run and administer than Oracle was and that still remains true for me today.

As a database, Oracle is still far more flexible and tunable than SQL Server is, and Oracle still is, of course, heavily used by the vast majority of corporations in the world; however SQL Server has gone from being something of a joke in the database world, fit only for small departmental databases, to being able to compete with Oracle in a large number of situations and be used as the main corporate database for quite a few major corporations. SQL Server is far easier than Oracle to run and often requires little day to day effort to keep in ticking along.

As a Siebel consultant, I almost always end up doing Siebel on either Oracle or SQL Server, it is very rare that I have to implement Siebel on DB2 or Sybase for example (OK how about never!). My current Siebel 7.8 project in Sweden is on SQL Server 2005.

I will confess that I still miss PL/SQL as opposed to T-SQL in some ways, especially the complete lack of the powerful decode function in T-SQL; but that aside, SQL Server is my personal favourite in every way and I use it extensively.