I’ve been to the Microsoft Launch 2007 in Frankfurt last week. The event was really huge, 5000-7000 people listening to the sessions and wandering through the halls. Microsoft kicked off their 2008 products Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.

I attended the database/business intelligence tracks and learnt some stuff about the new SQL server features (Change Data Capture, Merge, Resource Governor, Georeferencing, Filestream data type etc). I still need some time to evalute the features but the final server is released in Q3 at the earliest anyway. My colleagues attended mostly Windows Server and security tracks and were most impressed by the Server Core and the virtualisation Hyper V.

Maybe I will post something about the new features soon, so long you can test the SQL Server 2008 yourself: The feature complete February CTP has been released last week and can be downloaded.