With every new release, you can generally classify new features and changes to existing features into 3 group:

• Things that require rearchitecture/major code change (including new code) to take advantage of
• Things that require some/minimal changes to take advantage of
• Things that you benefit from just by upgrading

While I was at the SQLPASS summit a couple of weeks back, most of the coversations on SQL Server 2008 were around the big and shiny features like Resource Governor (which really rocks btw), MOLAP enabled write-back, LINQ, DMF, backup compression, etc…. There are other features that didn’t get quite as much mention though they will likely help just about any deployment though the medium and large ones will likely benefit more.

I’ll be looking into some of these features, picking out the ones that require little or no change to an existing system to take advantage of - things you get just by upgrading.

One such feature is hot-add CPU. With SQL Server 2008, you now have the ability to add CPUs to the server without needing to bring the server down and restarting. This is takes advantage of some of the work done in 2005 where you can dynamically allocate/de-allocate existing CPUs (via affinity setting) without needing to restart the instance. With 2008, you can do this with nett new CPUs on the server. It doesn’t allow hot-remove but the need for removal is far lower than adding.

Customers who struggle with trying to balance between provisioniong a server that will serve them for as long as possible without taking it offline for upgrades vs. increasing resource utilization will love this feature. With hot-add memory already supported in SQL Server 2005, users can now provision a lightly populated server and increase RAM and/or CPU when they need to without incurring downtime. One clever default behaviour is that new CPUs added to the server will not automatically get used by SQL Server. You will need to run RECONFIGURE before SQL Server will start assigning work to the new CPU. This is a good thing because you might have added the new CPU

• for another instance in a multi-instance server - very common in consolidated environments (and this is a great feature for it)
• for a non-SQL Server workload on your machine - backup agents, management agents, etc…

Before you run out there and start plugging things into your server, do note that you need to have supported hardware and operating system else, you’ll be hitting that speed-dial for customer support in no time. Also, as of this time, this feature is only available on the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server 2008.

joe.