Here are the givens:
- you are going to want to scream about this question
- this is an Oracle shop and will continue to be
- all current environments are MSSQL 2000 Standard Edition
- the answer(s) will help make a business case for upgrading
- choice will be 64-bit and Enterprise Edition (leave that to me!)
- end-of-life means nothing -- they have me (scary, isn't it?)
- there is no development against SQL Server
- there is (extensive) development with MS Access (recently 2007) that is only under duress moved to SQL Server
- Windows Server 2003 operating system with no ounce of consideration of 2008
- no data warehousing
- no business intelligence
- overwhelming percentage of accessing/supported applications are third party commercial off-the-shelf
- scale of database size and usage negates the fact that you can 16-node cluster MSSQL 2008 instead of 8-node with MSSQL 2005
Here is the question, disregarding new features in MSSQL 2008 (which I believe to have a handle on), what significant improvements have been made in MSSQL 2008 to features that exist in MSSQL 2005 and not in MSSQL 2000?