The SDSS Data Release 8 (DR8), made publicly available in January 2011
by the SDSS-III collaboration, contains the larger image of the sky
ever made covering ~14.000 sq deg or a third of the whole sky. DR8
includes measurements for nearly 500 million stars, galaxies, and
quasars, and two million spectra. In this talk we present an overview
of the main scientific themes of SDSS-III from extrasolar planets to
the large scale distribution of galaxies in the Universe, in
particular, the work being done by the Brazilian Participation Group
at LIneA (www.linea.gov.br). As member of the SDSS-III collaboration,
we host a mirror of the Catalog Archive System (CAS) database
containing 12T of catalog data which is available to the community
through the SkyServer web application. We also discuss data access
tools for images and spectra via the Science Archive System (SAS)
interface.