SQL Server 2008 will be coming out sometime this summer (in theory). At last week's TechFuse event in Minneapolis, and in blogs I sometimes read, I've started to pick up on a number of useful features and improvements that should make one strongly consider upgrading when the Release to Market (RTM) is ready (certainly this is not all-inclusive):

Situation: We have a stored procedure running a query whose WHERE clause is given as a parameter. No, that's not the problem in and of itself, at least not today =). [Treat this as a non-negotiable requirement for now]. Within that WHERE clause there might be a query against a field, call it myField. This field is a varchar and wildcards are not used. Platform: SQL Server 2005.

Problem: myField has been changed to a varbinary field and holds an encrypted value — thus can no longer query directly against it. How do we make this work?