I attended a presentation on SQL Server 2008 in Cambridge last night. I'm sure the list of features are available elsewhere so I will just add some comments on things of interest.
The presenter was Dr Andras Belokosztolszki - one of the SQL gurus at Red Gate. This was part of a series of presentations being given by NxtGenUG - coming up are:
Media Centre
ADO.NET data services
F# (presented by the Don Syme - guy who invented it)
WPF
ADO.NET framework
LINQ
Future presentations will be in the Red Gate offices and the Microsoft Research centre at Cambridge.
Andras has a blog at http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/andras/default.aspx
SQL Server is planned to now be on an 18-36 month release cycle - less than the previous 5 year (SQL Server 2000/SQL Server 2005) gap. The idea is to have faster, incremental releases that will be easier for customers to upgrade. Note that this also means that since Microsoft only support the current and previous version of SQL Server, customers will have to upgrade SQL Server faster than before.
The current release of SQL Server 2008 is CTP 6 (Community Technology Preview v6 - released 20 Feb 08) and it is now "feature complete".
The RC is planned for Q2 (June)
The final release (RTM - Release to Manufacturing) is planned for Q3.
Perhaps confusingly Microsoft have said SQL Server 2008 is being launched on 28 Feb 2008, but "launched" is really a marketing term. This is because the release is feature complete and the list of features will not now be changed (unlike with SQL Server 2005 when various features that appeared in pre-release versions of the software were pulled from the final release because they were not ready). So the idea is that customers can now prepare for the release, understand what is in it, work with the CTP software etc.
Note that at present it doesn't install side by side with SQL Server 2005 (but it does with SQL Server 2000, strangely).
A number of new features are those requested by customers such as intelliSense (although if you use SQL Prompt you already have this!), and the ability to insert multiple values in a single insert statement:
insert into tablename (COL1,COL2) values (1,2),(2,3),(4,5),(10,20)
Here are a few other features:
separate date and time datatypes
a filestream datatype to make it easier to store documents in the database
MERGE - insert, update and delete in a single statement
MERGE FactBuyingHabits AS fbh
USING (SELECT CustomerID, ProductID, PurchaseDate FROM PurchaseRecords) AS src
ON (fbh.ProductID = src.ProductID AND fbh.CustomerID = src.CustomerID)
WHEN MATCHED THEN
UPDATE SET fbh.LastPurchaseDate = src.PurchaseDate
WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN
INSERT (CustomerID, ProductID, LastPurchaseDate)
VALUES (src.CustomerID, src.ProductID, src.PurchaseDate);
table valued parameters
the Enterprise version supports data compression - which delivers a performance improvement due to more data fitting into a data page.
Better support of system dependencies.
Filtered indexes.
Here is the link to the main Microsoft SQL Server 2008 page.
https://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/default.aspx
Here is a blog from the development team