Buck Woody's awesome links to better prepare for the 70-432 SQL 2008 Implementation and Maintenance

While other solutions exist to solve this problem, the best solution involves using a certificate signed assembly to call sp_send_dbmail. This solution prevents the need to take additional steps to add users to msdb and the DatabaseMailUserRole, and it removes the risks associated with having TRUSTWORTHY ON.

With SQL Server 2008, new Windows collations (denoted by *_100 in the collation name) were added that are in full alignment with the Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems. Some of these new collations are not supported with earlier versions of the native data provider during connection to a SQL Server 2008 database, if both the client and the server environment are not in Unicode.

When a query is cancelled that is currently executing in SQLCLR an System.Threading.ThreadAbortException exception is raised. It seems harmless enough to add a catch or finally block to your code to cleanup necessary resources. What I found is that it is not just as easy as catching the ThreadAbort. In some scenarios the ThreadAbort can be upgraded to a rude abort and the catch/finally block(s) are not executed.

In this white paper we discuss two of the new features in SQL Server 2008, Star Join and Few-Outer-Row optimizations. We test the performance of SQL Server 2008 on a set of complex data warehouse queries designed to highlight the effect of these two features and observed a significant performance gain over SQL Server 2005 (without these two features). On average, about 75 percent of the query execution time has been reduced. We also include data that shows a reduction in the number of rows processed and improved balance in parallel queries, both of which highlight the important role the Star Join and Few Outer-Row features played.