What's New in SQL Server 2008 R2 Editions

With SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft continues to be the value leader, offering rich functionality to support OLTP and BI workloads out of the box at a low cost of ownership relative to competitors. With increasing hardware innovations, SQL Server continues to be the only major database vendor who does not price per core for multi-core processors. 

What’s New in SQL Server 2008 R2 Editions

Built on SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2 delivers higher mission-critical scale, more efficient IT, and expanded reporting and analytics through self-service business intelligence. SQL Server 2008 R2 introduces two new premium editions to meet the needs of large scale datacenters and data warehouses.

·         SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter

·         SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse

New Premium Editions:

Datacenter

Built on SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter is designed to deliver a high-performing data platform that provides the highest levels of scalability for large application workloads, virtualization and consolidation, and management for an organization’s database infrastructure. Datacenter helps enable organizations to cost effectively scale their mission-critical environment.

Key features new to Datacenter:

·         Application and Multi-Server Management for enrolling, gaining insights and managing over 25 instances

·         Highest virtualization support for maximum ROI on consolidation and virtualization

·         High-scale complex event processing with SQL Server StreamInsight™

·         Supports more than 8 physical processors for highest levels of scale

·         Supports memory limits up to OS maximum 

Parallel Data Warehouse

SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse is a highly scalable data warehouse appliance-based solution. Parallel Data Warehouse delivers performance at low cost through a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture and compatibility with hardware partners – scale your data warehouse to tens and hundreds of terabytes.

Key features new to Parallel Data Warehouse:

·         10s to 100s TBs enabled by MPP architecture

·         Advanced data warehousing capabilities like Star Join Queries and Change Data Capture

·         Integration with SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS

·         Supports industry standard data warehousing hub and spoke architecture and parallel database copy

Investments in Core Editions

SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise

SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise delivers a comprehensive data platform that provides built-in security, availability, and scale coupled with robust business intelligence offerings—helping enable the highest service levels for mission-critical workloads.

The following capabilities are new to Enterprise:

·         PowerPivot for SharePoint to support the hosting and management of PowerPivot applications in SharePoint

·         Application and Multi-Server Management for enrolling, gaining insights and managing up to  25 instances

·         Master Data Services for data consistency across heterogeneous systems

·         Data Compression now enabled with UCS-2 Unicode support

·         High-scale complex event processing with SQL Server StreamInsight

SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard

SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard delivers a complete data management and business intelligence platform for departments and small organizations to run their applications—helping enable effective database management with minimal IT resources.

The following capabilities are new to Standard:

·         Backup Compression to reduce data backups by up to 60% and help reduce time spent on backups *

·         Can be managed instance for Application and Multi-Server Management capabilities

·         High-scale complex event processing with SQL Server StreamInsight™

Capitalize on Hardware Innovation

There was always a demand from customers to increase the number of logical processors supported in SQL Server. In SQL Server 2008 R2 the number of logical processors supported has been increased from 64 to 256 and it will take advantage of the multi-core technology. This will help improve performance and scalability for very large data warehousing applications.

Optimize Hardware Resources

This is a great new feature for database administrators as it will provide a real time insight into Server Utilization, Policy Violations etc. This feature will help organizations to strictly apply organization wide policies across servers thereby helping them maintain a healthy system.

Manage Efficiently at Scale

This feature will help database administrator to gain insight into growing applications and databases thereby helping them to ensure better management of database servers.

Enhance Collaboration Across Development and IT

Database Application development will be more closely integrated with Visual Studio 2010 which will help to ensure higher quality during the application development along with easier deployments and better handling of changes over time.

Master Data Services (MDS)

A Master Data Service (MDS) is a kind of data service that is responsible for: managing, in a single place, the uniqueness, integrity, quality, and interrelationships between the data that matters the most. This will improve the quality of your data because of centralized approach of defining; deploying and managing master data thereby ensure reporting consistency across systems.

Build Robust Analytical Applications

Using Microsoft Office Excel 2010 you can build robust analytical applications which will allow in-memory, column oriented processing engine to allow users to interactively explore and perform complex calculations on millions of data at lightening speeds. Using Microsoft Excel 2010 you can easily integrate data from multiple sources such as corporate databases, spreadsheets and external data sources.

Share and Collaborate with Confidence

Using Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010 users can easily publish reports to SharePoint sites thereby making it available across the organizations. The other advantage is that the reports can be refreshed automatically and you can also maintain version controlling and tracking using SharePoint. Once you start using Microsoft Office SharePoint the SharePoint Administrators will have the ability to set server policies and monitor them more effectively thereby securing the business critical information