Other than enrich MS?

What does it do besides new extensions (read: lockins). Why should I use it?

Perhaps you should do a little research for yourself?

There are a number of improvements to the reporting services elements, these might be useful if your organisation is pursuing an MS based BI strategy.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/reporting.aspx

I consider myself a fairly heayweight SQL Server optimiser, and I can't outperform the Merge statement. It's certainly going to be of use to stock control.

Also, the Linq front end will help the objects only sheep who've fallen for Sun's "middle tier / sell more hardware paradigm" propaganda.

It's still missing a few things though, true parallel query, for instance.

^^ no more silly chopping up of delimited strings or passing in bloated XML. Well worth the upgrade in my book. Spatial datatypes? seem a bit niche to me, perhaps I'm lacking imagination.

Or millstone, perhaps. Sticking with Postgres.

However thanks for the feedback, most of which was constructive. Not certain there's much there outside of BI worthwhile for any but the very heaviest users (but BI users above say positive things).

Regarding merge, I don't see what it gets you (except lockin). I suppose I'll use it someday and see if I can equal it performance-wise (I too am a good optimiser).

But thanks all.

Oh, and Mr. "You should use it if you want your DB Apps to run slower and your DB server to consume more memory." - that post was about as useless and information-free as mine.

I agee with AC, thanks for the positive comments - Reg could do with more of them.

Just to add my own 2 cents worth, MERGE doesn't actually represent lock in - it is part of the SQL 2003 standard.