Comprehensive Data Platform

SQL Server 2008 works in conjunction with current and new data access technologies to provide developers with a comprehensive data platform on which to build data-centric solutions that access, consume, and manage data from any data source and streamline its delivery to relevant users.

Data Connectivity Technologies

Microsoft provides developers with a wide range of data connectivity technologies to enable them to access and manage data from disparate sources.

Native data access technologies, such as ODBC drivers and ADO/OLEDB, provide developers with access to a wide range of databases and data source. ODBC remains the most commonly used data access technology and supports access from Visual Studio solutions to SQL Server 2008. ADO and OLEDB enable developers to connect to databases and other data sources, including SQL Server 2008.

Microsoft also supports a set of managed data access technologies, including the ADO.NET Entity Framework, the ADO.NET data providers, and the .NET Framework LINQ. The ADO.NET Entity Framework enables developers to work with data at the conceptual level, eliminating the impedance mismatch between the logical database schema and the business logic in applications. The ADO.NET data providers enable developers to access any type of data from any type of data source in a wide range of applications, from traditional client server to applications running on compact devices. LINQ enables developers to query and manage all types of data by using their native programming language.

The Microsoft data platform also enables developers to access non-Microsoft data by using technologies such as XML, JDBC drivers, and PHP drivers.

Rich Data Programmability Capabilities

The rich set of data platform technologies available in the new versions of SQL Server and ADO.NET enable developers to build the next generation of data-centric solutions that meet the most demanding requirements. These technologies also reduce the overall complexity of designing, developing, and maintaining data-centric solutions.

LINQ provides extensions to Visual Basic and C# that enable developers to query data natively from these languages. This provides a consistent syntax for both data access and business logic code in applications. When using LINQ, compared to embedding SQL code inside business logic, developers benefit from faster query processing, design time error checking and type checking, and IntelliSense support for data access code in the development environment.

Traditionally, developers have accessed data by referencing the tables and columns in which that data is stored. This means that developers need to be familiar with the database structure and fully aware that any changes to that structure dramatically affect an application. The ADO.NET Entity Framework enables developers to work with data at the conceptual level by using entities and relationships, which removes the need for developers to be aware of the underlying database storage structure, and thus isolates the data access logic in an application. It also simplifies solution development and maintenance because developers can work with business entities that mirror the entities in their application domain.

Business applications often require complex procedural operations to occur at the database level. Transact-SQL is designed for working with relational data and set-based operations, but not procedural programming, so developers often extract data, work with it in the business logic or data access layer, and then save the data back to the database. This results in passing excessive amounts of data between layers, potentially across the network, and can affect the application performance.

Alternatively, developers write extended stored procedures and functions and use COM interoperability to work with them. However, neither of these solutions is ideal because of the complexity involved in writing such code. Since the release of SQL Server 2005, the SQL Server Database Engine has hosted the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR).This enables developers to write stored procedures and user-defined functions in managed code, by using languages such as Visual Basic and C#.

Your Data, Any Place, Any Time

The Microsoft data platform enables developers to create data-centric solutions that access data from any place, and at any time, and supports a wide range of native and managed connectivity technologies, programming languages, programming frameworks and Web services.

Through the support of multiple programming languages, the data platform enables developers to use the most appropriate language for their needs without restricting the data source or tasks that developers can work with.

However, some applications cannot have a permanent connection to the data source that they use. The data platform supports this scenario by providing SQL Server Compact Edition and Microsoft Synchronization Services to support occasionally connected solutions.