One of the main features of SQL Server 2008 is database backup compression. In SQL 2008 you can now specify the backup as:
BACKUP DATABASE ‘WSSDatabase’
TO DISK = ‘C:\WSSDatabase.bak’
WITH COMPRESSION;
Or if your GUI inclined:
This will make managing your content databases a little easier, especially if your already getting heckled by your SAN Administrator or the poor guy trying to backup those 150GB backups.
The second feature is Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), this allows you to specify a key that is used for data encryption for example:
ALTER DATABASE ‘WSSDatabase’
SET ENCRYPTION ON;
The scenario where I think this feature works nicely is this; imagine your pay-role people want to store pay details, you could firstly ensure that the site collection they use is located in a nominated content database, then you could turn on the encryption and have another secured means of protecting your data.
Further information can be found here.
Those two features are pretty compelling, on all our new deployments we are recommending SQL 2008.