SQL 2011 - What's new?

Currently studying the next version of SQL code named Denali.  Potential release date in July of 2011, so I'll call this SQL 2011. (Edit: It was delayed and is called 2012....)

What's new?

• Contained databases - This is supposed to make it easier to move databases between servers
• HADRON - New High Availability & Disaster Recovery options
• Support for Server Core - Look ma, no GUI!
• A bunch of changes in SSMS that I don't really understand yet
• Column-based query accelerator
• Multi-Subnet Clustering
• Itanium no longer supported

These are just the highlights.  I'll drill into each one of them (plus much, much more) in the following posts.