I did a session yesterday on SharePoint in the SQL track at Teched Europe in Berlin.  I included Todd Klindt, who also speaks a lot on SQL and SharePoint so we could really reach both the SQL and SharePoint Audience.  We had a packed room with nearly 50/50 SQL and SharePoint Crowds.  We had over a third with 1TB plus environments and a few SharePoint newbies.  In the session I really wanted to give a sneak peak of the SharePoint 2010 databases at the same time address the gap between SharePoint Admins and SQL dbas.

1. Built in Support for Secondary database for SQL Mirroring (WooHoo! – Demo’d by Zlatan Dzinic in my session.)

2 More Scalable Database Schema in Config and Content Database – content database schema is better designed for scale (see #4)

3 Support for File Groups for Content Databases (Much better structure for scale!) – All the blobs are no longer in one massive table.

3. SSP split out into separate application databases (with a bunch of new ones) – I’ve already hear that MS IT is using Resource Governor with some of the new databases such as with the the logging database.

4. New Logging Database with soon to be published schema with read and write access

5. Health checks based on timer jobs which can self heal the database index fragmentation

6. Large list throttling controls (To alleviate bottlenecks and SQL blocking)

7. Configuration Based backup, alleviating config database consistency issues allowing for a cleaner restore

8. Unattached Content database restore – allows the recovery of files once the databases are online in SQL reducing the amount of Recovery Farms and making it much quicker to restore

9. Better support for Snapshots (as well as recovery from snapshot with Unattached content database restore)

10. Awesome integration with SQL with External Lists, Power Pivot, BI, SQL Reporting Services, and way more!!!