SQL Server 2005 SP2 has been released to the web
Today SQL Server 2005 SP2 has become officially available for download. It will be available on DVDs or CDs in March.
Besides fixing lots of issues that have been reported, SP2 also enables several BI functionalities of Office 2007.
Decimal data can now be stored as variable length in the SQL Server 2005 Enterprise and Developer Editions using the vardecimal storage format which can be used to minimize the disk space that is needed to store existing decimal and numeric data types. No application changes are required to use its benefits. It stores decimal and numeric data as variable length columns and can be enabled or disabled at a table level on new or existing tables. If you have declared a decimal or numeric column with high precision but most values in the column do not require many digits of precision, you can potentially save a large amount of the disk space that is needed to store the table. A new stored procedure is provided to estimate the reduction in average row size with the new storage format.
On the XML related front, we added a new table valued-function sys.dm_exec_text_query_plan to return text XML query plans that contain an XML nesting level greater than or equal to 128. If you are having many other areas where the current nesting depth limit in the XML data type is problematic, please let me know.
More details on what's new in SP2 can be found on the MSDN site.