Keyvan Nayyeri

This is going to be interesting for you: today Microsoft dropped the final build of SQL Server 2008 to the manufacturers.

SQL Server 2008 was planned to be ready at the end of 2007 along .NET Framework 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 and Windows Server 2008 but for some reasons Microsoft delayed this release to now.

Even though some developers think that SQL Server 2008 doesn’t add much to its prior version, but this is absolutely wrong and this new release comes with major new features that enriches the last version extensively.

I’ve been studying about SQL Server 2008 in the past months as I did for SQL Server 2005 in order to apply its sweet new features in my projects. Unfortunately many of these sweet features are not used comprehensively by developers and many developers are still sticking with traditional features so I think that it’s necessary to spread the word about these features to let everyone use them broadly.

On the other hand, recently I’ve been wrestling with the licensing of SQL Server 2008. Last month I got my dedicated database servers with SQL Server 2005 from MaximumASP but I hoped that I can work around this in order to apply SQL Server 2008. Unfortunately I couldn’t disregard the stability so stuck with SQL Server 2005 in the short and mean time.

But all in all, SQL Server licensing wasn’t very appropriate and was following the same licensing methods of other database software. My expectation was to see something different from Microsoft in order to make it easier and affordable for smaller businesses and online solutions to apply SQL Server in their projects.

Fortunately SQL Server 2008 comes with a much better licensing and the introduction of Web edition has made it very appropriate for many online small businesses so this is good news for me and for many other clients as well.