I watched a terrific webcast yesterday afternoon from Microsoft on SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) programmability.  It didn’t go in depth for all changes in 2k8, but it did go over the highlights I suppose you could say.  It was very informational to me. New data types There are four new datatypes in SQL Server 2008, although they did not deprecate any of the existing types.  They are all date and time centric, one is now timezone aware, and all of them have much greater ranges and precision than were available before.  It is a little ironic because VistaDB 2.x had a date and a time as two separate types, and now SQL Server does as well.

Date – Range 1/1/1 – 9999/12/31.  A much higher range for dates is allowed.

Time(n) – Time only with N digits of precision after the seconds.

DateTimeOffset(n) – Date, time, and timezone information.  All are stored in UTC with an offset to the TZ setting.  This is supposed to become a new system type as well.

DateTime2(n) – No timezone support, but large date range and precision increases over the standard DateTime.

NOTE:  All of (n) maxes out at 7 digits.  This gives you 100 nanoseconds of precision and is actually the highest resolution Windows supports anyway.

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