The first full day of SQLPASS 2007 was held today at the Convention Center in Denver. In the morning keynote, Microsoft’s Ted Kummert once again reiterated that SQL Server 2008 will RTM in Q2 of 2008. Based on what I have seen, I believe him. He also announced that there will not be a price increase for SQL Server 2008 compared to SQL Server 2005.

We also saw build 1075 of Katmai (SQL Server 2008) running during the keynote demos. One new feature that got a lot of applause was Intellisense support inside of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Intellisense has been in Visual Studio since at least version 6.0, so it is long overdue inside of SQL Server.

Another Katmai feature that generated lots of enthusiasm was Resource Governor, which allows you to dynamically limit CPU and memory usage by workload (based on connection string information, using a classifier UDF). You can create Resource Groups and then limit how much CPU or memory can be used by that group. This lets you limit runaway queries, prioritize workloads, etc.

Bob Beauchemin from SQLSkills has a couple of very interesting posts (here and here) talking about the different versions of the .NET Framework and their relationship to SQL Server 2008, and the various client data access stacks and how they relate to SQL Server 2008.