SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 CTP

Microsoft is releasing the SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 Community Technology Preview Tuesday, November 7th.

Here are some of the changes:

Database Engine

• Maintenance plans are now supported by the SQL Server Database Services installation. Before SP2, you were required to install SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) to run maintenance plans on a server-only installation.
  
  
  
• Maintenance plans now support multiserver environments, logging to remote servers, and multiple schedules. For more information, see How to: Create Multiserver Maintenance Plans How to: Create a Maintenance Plan and How to: Add or Modify Maintenance Plan Subplan Schedules.
  
  
  
• Added new functionality in the SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition to provide an alternate storage format that can be used to minimize the disk space needed to store existing decimal and numeric data types. No application changes area are required to use its benefits. This new storage format, known as vardecimal storage format, stores decimal and numeric data as variable length columns and can be enabled or disabled at a table level on new or existing tables. If you have declared a decimal or numeric column with high precision but most values do not require it, you can potentially save the disk space needed to store the table. A new stored procedure is provided to estimate the reduction in average row size with the new storage format.
  
  
  
• Added logon triggers and a common criteria compliance enabled Option for sp_configure to support common criteria in the SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition.
  
  
  
• The sqllogship application is now supported. This application performs a backup, copy, or restore operation and associated clean-up tasks for a log shipping configuration.
  
  
  
• Plan cache improvements that provide improved system performance, better use of the available physical memory for database pages, and the ability to return text XML query plans that contain an XML nesting level greater than or equal to 128 by using the new sys.dm_exec_text_query_plan table-valued function.
  
  
  
• SMO for Relational Engine Features
  
  
  
  • Table.CheckIdentityValue() correctly generates the schema name for the fully qualified object name.
    
    
    
  • Column.AddDefaultConstraint() works against table columns for SQL Server 2000 database instances.
    
    
    
  
  

To see all the changes go here