I've just viewed a pretty good video (Channel 9 Interview) demonstrating (and I mean almost all demonstration) of some of the new features in Visual Studio 2008.  Although, I am not big on building business logic in the data-tier from a personal perspective, there are still scenarios where it makes sense.  So, it is great to see how much the SQL Server team has put into making the Database/Visual Studio Developers life so, much easier.

Here's a list of some of the topics that are discussed/demonstrated in the video:

- SQL Management Studio improvements including IntelliSense
- New Data Types for just dates or times (no more storing time when you only need the date)
- New Hierarchical data support .IsDescendent(), that can automatically pull a hierarchical view of data (no more custom recursive queries)
- New Grouping Sets statement which enables you to automatically group dimensions in a query for easy aggregation and reporting
- New Merge statement which provides automatic insert/update semantics for keeping multiple data sources in sync
- New FileStream attribute that enables you to include files that are stored in the server file system, but can be managed by SQL Server
- New data types and support for Geodata and geometry
- New support for optimizing "empty" or row/column tables using the sparse keyword

Here's the link to the video: Click here to see

Very impressive new features,

~ Robert Shelton

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