The inclusion of PowerShell will reinvent the way DBAs manage their environments by taking complicated cursors out of management scenarios. This is the debut of PowerShell in SQL Server, and there are some rough spots. But I expect they'll be ironed out soon enough. I've even heard rumors that PowerShell will eventually replace sqlcmd as the command line interface.

Policy-Based Management and PowerShell integration are the biggies, but Management Studio has added some other nice features, such as Server Groups, which allows you to run queries against multiple servers at once. However, I'm not fond of the new Activity Monitor. It may be a step in the right direction, but it just isn't useful in its current state.

Another new feature that isn't quite there yet is the ballyhooed Resource Governor. The Resource Governor lets you define limits on CPU and memory usage for certain workloads. This is good enough to prevent some traffic jams -- like query processes consuming too many resources on an OLTP server, for example -- but it's a far cry from what's needed to define and isolate rogue queries.

In short, SQL Server 2008 is a solid release packed with significant improvements. Not all of the new features are fully fleshed out, but some are surprisingly mature and many are extraordinarily useful. A few will allow DBAs to manage multiple servers as easily as one, and perform certain tasks and operations in a fraction of the time they take today. Read on for more detail on , , , , , , , and .

Improved management