Usergroup meeting follow up post
As promised here is a follow up to the questions and
points raised during the meeting tonight.
We didn't get to cover full text but here are my posts on iFTS in
SQL 2008 which works very differently to how it does in SQL
2008.
Compression of a large table, how much space do you
need?
The compression process, compresses the table 1 page at a time so you don't
need to have enough free space to hold a copy of the table you are compressing.
Which is good.
Viewing and importing Spatial data.
There aren't any products on the market at present however the belief is
there will be within a short period of time. There are many mashup style apps
that work with spatial data in Virtual Earth, the interface to VE and Google
maps is not via any of the formats that SQL understands and so you have to build
some translation mechanism in between. This is largely because VE and GM both
allow shapes on maps to have additional data like push pins, colours,
popups.
Importing data is a different story as the GIS market is already established
(MS is a bit late to the game) there are many providers that can import data and
convert data. ESRI is the largest player in terms of source data many other
companies exist to handle data from different sources
Slowly Changing Dimension transform in SSIS
The component in SSIS doesn't use SSIS. it would be good if it did but it
doesn't. Largely becuase TVPs really need to be supported as well which they are
not and also the component would be a SQL specific component which wouldn't be a
god thing. Not sure if they are going to be developing one. It wouldn't be too
difficult to develop a script component that did it.
There are also a number of scenarios that the MERGE statement doesn't
handle.
SQL2000 to SQL 2008
This has been discussed in other forums and the general advice is to do a
side by side upgrade, it is supported in an inplace upgrade with the exception
of Itanium 64 servers. The jump from SQL 2005 to SQL 2008 isn't as vast as that
from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005 and so going straight to SQL 2008 is not a bad choice.
The setup process is much better and generally features have been stuck on the
side, not many features have been rewritten (one big exception beng iFTS), this
means you don't have to use many of the 2008 features if you don't want
to.
Database size increase with encryption.
I've been told that the database size doesn't increase
when you turn on TPE (Transparent Data Encryption) see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb934049(SQL.100).aspx
.
Everything else
If there is anything else I've missed off then feel free to contact me.
Simon
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