Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2008 R2 to Manufacturing

PowerPivot for Excel enables information users to create reports in a familiar environment—Excel—without having to rely on their IT department. At the same time, IT pros can monitor the use of these business-critical applications and gain insight into how data is being used in their environment, Casey said. He also noted in a conversation this morning with SQL Server Magazine that the SQL Server team worked directly with the Office team to modify Excel 2010 so that slicers are now a part of Excel, rather than an add-in. And PowerPivot for SharePoint lets users collaborate and share data across their businesses.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) has been enhanced to support three new data sources: Microsoft SharePoint List, Microsoft SQL Azure, and Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse. SQL Server 2008 R2 SSRS also includes Report Builder 3.0, which offers new capabilities including geospatial visualization support, edit sessions, and the Report Part Gallery, as well as support for new RDL features such as maps, sparklines, and data bars.

Master Data Services helps you standardize your business data (i.e., so that you have one version of the truth). You can use it to create, manage, and deploy master data models. It’s available in the Developer Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Datacenter Edition.

Application and Multiserver Management lets you seamlessly apply policies across multiple servers and see what’s changed as well. SQL Server 2008 R2 supports up to 256 processors on a single SQL Server system.

StreamInsight is a low latency event-processing platform that’s available in SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Datacenter Edition. It gives you the ability to process high volumes of data quickly for near real-time analysis.

Support for live migration and guest clustering are new to this version and give you more efficient ways to migrate your SQL Server instances to Hyper-V and cluster on virtual machines. Casey told SQL Server Magazine that the new guest clustering functionality lets people choose the matrix of physical and virtual machines that’s right for them.