Microsoft have released a raft of SQL Server 2008 White papers. These can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/white-papers.aspx. Although fairly high level the first business intelligence white paper outlines some of the significant changes made to 2008, in order for it to better compete in the Data Warehousing space.
There are 6 separate white papers dedicated to Business Intelligence alone. The introduction to new Data Warehousing features has a great deal of information on new features that will further enhance the BI offerings from Microsoft. This document includes details on the following enhancements:
SQL Server Relational DBMS DW Improvements:
- Star Join
- Partitioned Table Parallelism.
- Partition-Aligned Indexed Views
- GROUPING SETS
- MERGE
- Change Data Capture
- Minimally Logged INSERT
- Data Compression
- Backup Compression
- Resource Governor
Integration Services Improvements:
- Lookup Performance
- Pipeline Performance
Analysis Services Improvements:
- MDX Query Performance: Block Computation
- Query and Write back Performance
- Analysis Services Enhanced Backup
- Scalable Shared Database for AS
Reporting Services Improvements:
- Reporting Scalability
- Server Scalability
