Bob Muglia and Ted Kummert delivered a keynote address to more than 2,00o attendees at PASS Summit 2009, where they made key announcements:

• Upcoming SQL Server 2008 R2 community technology preview (CTP)  would be available in November.
• SQL Azure is now feature-complete and goes live in January.
• Two new editions of SQL Server to address high-end, mission-critical scenarios:
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (formerly project code-named “Madison”)

PASS is the Professional Association for SQL Server.

Key SQL Server 2008 R2 Features

SQL Server 2008 R2 is the next-generation information platform that is designed to deliver the following:

• Managed self-service business intelligence. Expanding powerful BI tools to all users with SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel and empowering a new class of business users to build and share powerful BI solutions with little or no IT support, while still enabling IT to monitor and manage user-generated BI solutions.
• Greater IT and developer efficiency. Enabling administrators to centrally monitor and manage multiple database applications, instances or servers, accelerating the development and deployment of applications and providing improved support for virtualization through Hyper-V with Live Migration in Windows Server 2008 R2.
• A trusted and scalable platform. Supporting data consistency across heterogeneous systems through SQL Server Master Data Services, enabling high-scale complex event-stream processing through SQL Server StreamInsight, and supporting scale-up scenarios for the largest available x64 and Itanium hardware (up to 256 logical processors).

SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP will be available for download in November. More information and the sign-up for the SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP.

SQL Server for High-End, Mission-Critical Scenarios

SQL Server R2 Datacenter delivers a high-performing information platform that provides high levels of scalability for large application workloads and managing an organization’s database infrastructure. With support for up to 256 logical processors and unlimited virtualization, SQL Server Datacenter and Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter provide a foundation on which to build enterprise-class solutions.

SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse extends Microsoft’s offering in data warehousing by providing scalability and performance from tens to hundreds of terabytes at a low total cost of ownership (TCO). SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse will be available on industry-standard hardware from Bull, Dell, HP, EMC and IBM.

Demos at PASS

There were several SQL Server demos including:  SQL Server 2008 R2 running on a 1,200lb. server rack with 192 CPUs, Live Migration using System Center Virtual Machine Manager (Edwin Yuen), Application & Multi-Server Management (Dan Jones), Master Data Management and Self-Service Reporting – loaded 60M rows to a server farm with 320 cores at a rate of 3TB/hr...and then a query against this returned 2B rows in several seconds!! (Amir Netz), Report Builder 3.0/Visual Studio 2010/.NET Entity Framework (Pablo Castro), and last but not least SQL Azure Database (Liam Cavanagh).

Also notable was the announcement of a new TPC-E benchmark world-record of 2,012 tpsE! 

PASS Keynote

Checkout clips of the keynote.

For more information about the PASS announcements, see Microsoft Elevates Mission-Critical Commitment With New SQL Server 2008 R2 Premium Editions, Delivery of November CTP.

Roadmap

More information on Microsoft’s Data Warehousing offerings can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/fasttrack.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 will be available in the first half of 2010. More information about it can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx.

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation