<p>I'm looking mainly at things like new SQL syntax, new kinds of locking, new capabilities etc. Not so much in the surrounding services like data warehousing and reports...</p>

[{'answer_id': 75515, 'author': 'Joel Coehoorn', 'author_id': 3043, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/3043', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': "<ul>\n<li>New separate types for Date and Time, instead of just Datetime</li>\n<li>New geographic types for lattitude/longitude</li>\n<li>Change Data Capture is pretty neat if you're doing anything where auditing is important</li>\n<li>Configuration Servers, for maintaining multiple databases.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>That's what caught my attention at the Heroes Happen Here launch back in April.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 75520, 'author': 'MagicKat', 'author_id': 8505, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/8505', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>HotAdd CPU. <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb964703.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb964703.aspx</a></p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 75522, 'author': 'Phillip Wells', 'author_id': 3012, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/3012', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>There\'s a great article on the new T-SQL features <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721270.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a> (by SQL guru Itzik Ben-Gan). It covers</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Declaring and initializing variables\n<li>Compound assignment operators\n<li>Table value constructor support through the VALUES clause\n<li>Enhancements to the CONVERT function\n<li>New date and time data types and functions\n<li>Large UDTs (GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY)\n<li>The HIERARCHYID data type\n<li>Table types and table-valued parameters\n<li>The MERGE statement, grouping sets enhancements\n<li>DDL trigger enhancements\n<li>Sparse columns\n<li>Filtered indexes\n<li>Large CLR user-defined aggregates\n<li>Multi-input CLR user-defined aggregates\n<li>The ORDER option for CLR table-valued functions\n<li>Object dependencies\n<li>Change data capture\n<li>Collation alignment with Microsoft® Windows®\n<li>Deprecation\n</ul>\n'}, {'answer_id': 75532, 'author': 'Mostlyharmless', 'author_id': 12881, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/12881', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>Did you check the whitepaper on the website? \n<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/overview.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer"> SQL Server 2008 Overview. </a></p>\n\n<p>I cannot recall off the top of my head, but it atleast has a nice database to object linking functionality. They have geospatial types too, if you need to use those.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 75554, 'author': 'Andrew Jahn', 'author_id': 5831, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5831', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p><a href="http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/9/d/69d1fea7-5b42-437a-b3ba-a4ad13e34ef6/SQL2008_ProductOverview.docx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">white paper on SQL Server 2008</a></p>\n\n<p>This should cover most of the new features. I noticed the new date time data types and new security features.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 75716, 'author': 'stephbu', 'author_id': 12702, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/12702', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Filestream blob storage is the biggest bonus to me</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 76078, 'author': 'David Vidmar', 'author_id': 11063, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/11063', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Page compressiong sounds really nice to me. Haven\'t used it yet, though.</p>\n\n<p><a href="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/linchi_shea/archive/2008/05/11/sql-server-2008-page-compression-compression-ratios-from-real-world-databases.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://sqlblog.com/blogs/linchi_shea/archive/2008/05/11/sql-server-2008-page-compression-compression-ratios-from-real-world-databases.aspx</a></p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 76786, 'author': 'Community', 'author_id': -1, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/-1', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Sparse indexing for those with lots of NULLs. Also the DATETIME2 data type that a lot of people have been waiting for 0001-01-01 through 9999-12-31.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/75487', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5777/']