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Automatic page repair:  You have a mirrored database, and then a single page file fails. SQL Server will automatically recognize that and obtain the copy from the mirror one. Yes, I saw that working.

                Compressed backup. This can make a 77MB backup turn into a 19MB backup. And can make the backup finish in half of the time. But the best thing is that the restore process is faster too.

                Compressed log shipping

                Transparent encryption

                You can add new CPU’s to your server on the fly

                Data auditing

                Declarative management framework: You can configure things like: It is not allowed to have objects under the dbo schema and things just happen. You have a nice console to check if there is any violated rule.

                Row Level Compression and Page Level/Dictionary compression. Imagine you have a varchar column that in 80% of the case is “New Zealand”. That could be stored only once! Cool, eh?

                Resource governor. You can set things like: Connections with the username equals “blah” cannot use more than 20% of the CPU and X Gigs of Ram. Yes, I saw that working too. So now SQL has “resource pools”.

                Disconnected scenarios without having to rewriting applications.

                Filestream Data Storage. You create a column that is a file, but you store only the file name there. SQL Server stores the file in the file system and maintains the consistency between the relational data and the file.

                You can have up to 100000 columns in a table. And if you do that, you must be a mad dude.

                Filtered indexes: I want to filter this column ONLY if this other column is greater than 56. Woohoo!

                Hierarchical data type.

                DateTime2 data type – higher precision.

                DateTime with offset data type.

                Virtual Earth integration

                Geometry location data type.

                Geography spatial data type.

                Merge T-SQL statement. If you are an Oracle Certified too you already know what that means.

                Data Mining in Excel

                And some details: No 60, 65 or 70 compatibility levels anymore. No pubs or northwind databases installed with SQL Server.