OMG this is my most wanted feature like EVER. It was promised but removed from SQL Server 2005. Will it really come this time? If so, I promise to convert all my apps to 2008 immediately upon release.

I was also pretty excited when I learned about this. It seems so obvious that it should have been there sooner. At Tech Ed I sat in on a really cool session with some of the senior members of the SQL team. It was cool because they talked about a list of possible features and asked us to vote on which ones we'd like to see most! They are also adding new types for geography and geometry. So we'll be able to store points, lines, shapes, and latitude and longitude in their own sql data types. Pretty cool stuff.