Past weeks haven't been boring, if you look at the amount of database related news from Microsoft. And plenty of stages to let the world know it's still moving... BI Conference, Mix'07. And now TechEd.
At BI Conference, the new version of SQL Server was officially announced. At Mix'07 besides Silverlight there also were Jasper and Astoria. To see the presentations go to sessions.visitmix.com and search on the session code DEV18 for Jasper and XD006 for Astoria.
The binding word for Jasper and Astoria and Katmai is Enity Data Model. You may find several usefull video's on Channel9;
Yep, a lot of developer stuff, but it will show the importance of EDM for data driven applications and thus access to the database. Also, judging from this press release, one of SQL Server 2008 main delivery goals is accessibility of data.
With TechEd started, there is also more and more info about Katmai, including this recorded webcast. Like expected, a lot of Entity Framework (includes EDM) here. Other very noteworthy additions; spatial data types (demo with Virtual Earth), policy based management, data and backup compression, resource governor and a FILESTREAM data type. FILESTREAM is about storing metadata in SQL Server and the file itself on the file system, while maintaining a relation between them (including for BACKUP/RESTORE, I imagine something like with Full-Text Indexes on SQL Server 2005). Sounds like WinFS, doesn't it?
Also the first CTP's are out, based on the Developer Edition. Download the x86 and/or x64 versions here, after having registered.