SQL Server 2008 R2
The final answer has mostly arrived, the long awaited projects “Madison” and “Kilimanjaro” are getting near to CTP stage and will be available soon as SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP. This was announced earlier today at TechEd; which also concided with the release of the SQL Server 2008 R2 site.
Some of the details from the new site:
What's New in R2
With this new release, IT professionals, developers and business users will experience the following benefits:
Capitalize on Hardware Innovation
Increase in the number of logical processors supported from 64 up to 256. This will provide customers with more choices for obtaining single system scalability with high performance.
Optimize Hardware Resources
Dashboard viewpoints provide real-time insight into utilization and policy violations to help identify consolidation opportunities, maximize investments and maintain healthy systems.
Manage Efficiently at Scale
Through new extensions in SQL Server Management Studio, organizations will gain insights into their growing applications and databases and help ensure higher service levels through policies and dashboard viewpoints.
Enhance Collaboration Across Development and IT
Streamline Application Lifecycle Management through integration with Visual Studio. A new project type enables a single unit of management for packaging database schema with application requirements. This ensures higher quality application development while also accelerating deployments, moves, and changes over time.
Improve the Quality of Your Data
Centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data can ensure reporting consistency across systems and deliver faster more accurate results across the enterprise.
Manage User-Generated Analytical Applications
Comprehensive management thru Microsoft SharePoint gives IT the ability to manage and secure all BI assets, thus freeing the original authors to focus on the priorities of the business.
Report with Ease
Decrease time and costs developing reports by giving users the ability to design their own queries, reports and charts through powerful and intuitive authoring and ad hoc reporting capabilities.
Get More Out of Your Data
New support for geospatial visualization can produce new insights and discoveries when geospatial data is combined with corporate data for reporting and analysis.
Build Robust Analytical Applications
With the in-memory analytics add-in for Microsoft Excel 2010, business users can quickly access, analyze and summarize vast amounts of data directly in Excel without the assistance of the IT department.
Consolidate Your Data
New “data mash up” capabilities will simplify time consuming data gathering and consolidation tasks. Integrate data from multiple sources, including corporate databases and external sources, using powerful tools within Microsoft Excel.
Share and Collaborate with Confidence
New collaboration tools make it easy to share analytic applications and reports through Microsoft Office SharePoint, where they are refreshed automatically, maintained, and made accessible to others.
I’m really excited to play around with the CTP and dig into the MDM and multi-server management components. Hopefully when the CTP is out I’ll find some time to try and post on the new features.
