At its recent TechEd conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft announced new innovations from the SQL Server team. The next release, SQL Server 2008 R2 (formerly SQL Server ‘Kilimanjaro'), is intended to empower end users to make better decisions through self-service business intelligence, and help IT drive greater efficiency and reduce costs through new capabilities such as multi-server management and Master Data Services. The first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2008 R2 will be available in the second half of 2009 and Microsoft is on track to ship SQL Server 2008 R2 in the first half of calendar year 2010. In 2010, Microsoft will also introduce complex event processing for real-time insight into streaming information. This will offers customers and partners faster time to solution and equal or better performance than competitive alternatives to gain insight from streaming information.
Kirk Haselden, product unit manager for master data services at Microsoft, recently elaborated on the new product's capabilities on the SQL Server News Blog. Haselden wrote, "with its strong focus on business intelligence technologies, SQL Server 2008 R2 will continue to offer enterprise customers exceptional value through more pervasive insight into their data.
SQL Server 2008 R2 will provide new capabilities to empower end users to make better decisions through self-service BI, which translates to increased productivity and lower costs." SQL Server 2008 R2 will also include master data services that provides information workers with a single authoritative data source to ensure the integrity of the data they use to make critical business decisions, application and multi-server management that reduces the complexity of developing, deploying, and managing applications across multiple instances of SQL Server, and a new central management point that helps scale database management and identify consolidation opportunities.
Also available is support for greater than 64 logical processors that provides customers with greater choice for delivering high performance and scalability and enables customers to take advantage of multi-core technologies.
For more information on SQL Server 2008, go here.