SQL 2008 Feature Pack

Not so much a Pack, as a collection of very useful tools for SQL 2008 , that can be downloaded here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D68DE3C9-60A9-49C9-A28C-5C46BBC3356F&displaylang=en

I will be investigating the Reporting Services Integration with MOSS 2007 very soon, but for the time being here is some information on the downloads, that are being called the SQL 2008 feature pack.

  • Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies – pretty much the same as the one for SQL 2005, but with the ability to use the enhanced reporting in 2008.
  • SQL Server Native Client – One DLL, that contains OLEDB and SQL ODBC drivers for close application integration, they allow the development of new application that take advantage of some of the new features in SQL 2008.
  • SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components – Pretty much what it says on the tin,  Data Transformation Services 2000 runtime (DTS), SQL Distributed Management Objects (SQL-DMO), Decision Support Objects (DSO),  and SQL Virtual Device Interface (SQLVDI) are all supported with this feature pack.
  • SQL Server Data Mining Add-ins for Microsoft Office 2007 – Allows you take advantage of SQL Server 2008 predictive analytics in Excel 2007 and Visio 2007. Table analysis for excel allows you to use simple data mining models on data contained within your spreadsheets.  Data Mining for Visio allows you to render data mining models directly in Visio.

All in all pretty good stuff for nothing!