Q1: What is SQL Server 2008 R2?

SQL Server 2008 R2 delivers several breakthrough capabilities that will enable your organization to scale database operations with confidence, improve IT and developer efficiency, and enable highly scalable and well managed Business Intelligence on a self-service basis for your users.

Q2: Tell me about the new SQL Server 2008 R2 Data Center Edition?

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:

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

2) Highest virtualization support for maximum ROI on consolidation and virtualization

3) High-scale complex event processing with SQL Server StreamInsight

4) Supports more than 8 processors and up to 256 logical processors for highest levels of scale

5) Supports memory limits up to OS maximum

Q3: Tell me about the new SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse Edition?

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:

1)10s to 100s TBs enabled by MPP architecture

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

3) Integration with SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS

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

Q4: What investments were made in SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition?

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:

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

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

3) Master Data Services for data consistency across heterogeneous systems

4) Data Compression now enabled with UCS-2 Unicode support

Q5: What investments were made in SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition?

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:

1) Backup Compression to reduce data backups by up to 60% and help reduce time spent on backups

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

Q6: How does SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition capitalize on hardware innovation?

SQL Server 2008 R2 helps you take advantage of the latest hardware technology advancements and enables high scalability building on top of industry-standard hardware for great total cost of ownership. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 working in concert enable customers to scale up to 256 logical processors.

In addition, Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 takes greater advantage of the processing power of new multi-core systems. This means support for more virtual systems per physical host, leading to potential cost reductions while increasing the scalability and flexibility of virtual infrastructure. New Hyper-V Live Migration allows organizations to move a virtual machine between two host servers without any interruption of service. All this helps organizations continue to get the best value out of their hardware and take better advantage of consolidation opportunities.

Q7: How does SQL Server 2008 R2 help gain rapid insight from high-speed data?

Gain rapid insight from streaming information using SQL Server StreamInsight. StreamInsight lowers the cost to extract, analyze, and correlate streaming data, enabling companies to find opportunities and exceptions in real time.

A highly optimized engine built on a lightweight streaming architecture allows queries to be rapidly executed on high-speed data with low latency. Developers can write StreamInsight applications using .NET in their language of choice. With a large community of developers working with familiar tools, businesses can maximize the time to value of StreamInsight solutions and reduce the time and cost required to create them.

Flexible deployment scenarios and a central management interface help IT deploy and manage StreamInsight solutions efficiently while accurately tracking resource usage.

Q8: How does SQL Server 2008 R2 ensure uptime and security?

Provide consistent and predictable responsiveness to end users using SQL Server 2008 Resource Governor. Resource Governor enables organizations to manage their SQL Server workloads and system resource consumption by specifying CPU and memory limits for different applications, ensuring that concurrent workloads provide consistent performance to end users.

Protect your valuable information with flexible, transparent data encryption for databases, data files, and logs files. SQL Server 2008 data encryption helps organizations secure data from unauthorized users without having to change the underlying application.

Facilitate compliance and provide an audit trail that enables you to answer questions like “who accessed our data” with SQL Server Audit.

Q9: How does SQL Server 2008 R2 Manage Efficiently at Scale?

Investments in application and multi-server management will help organizations proactively manage database environments efficiently at scale through centralized visibility into resource utilization and help streamline consolidation and upgrade initiatives across the application lifecycle—all with tools that make it fast and easy.

Increase visibility and control
Gain quick insights into SQL server instances and applications with tools like new wizards that help enable fast and easy multi-server management setup and reveal versioning information for more control over server sprawl, no professional services required.

Optimize resources
Quickly identify consolidation opportunities with dashboard viewpoints, data and log file utilization rollups, and utilization trends through adjustable capacity policies helping eliminate underutilized servers.

Improve efficiencies
Accelerate deployments and upgrades through a new concept, a single unit of deployment, that packages database schema (database, tables, stored procedures, etc) with deployment requirements and can be extracted from existing applications or created in Microsoft Visual Studio, helping reduce deployment trial and error.

Q10: How does SQL Server 2008 R2 Enable Self-Service Analysis and Easier Collaboration?

Broaden the reach of business intelligence tools to a larger audience and foster ad-hoc analysis by empowering users to create their own analytic applications through the PowerPivot add in to Excel (formerly known as "Gemini") and SQL Server 2008 R2. With PowerPivot, users are empowered to create solutions using data from both IT-managed and external sources, carry out rich ad-hoc analysis and modeling, extract value from data more easily, and publish and share reports for their colleagues to view.

Reduce the time and cost of reporting with intuitive end-user tools that make it easier for people to find, use, and share information. Report Builder 3.0 in SQL Server 2008 R2 makes it even easier for end-users to create reports faster, and fosters collaboration and consistency by making them easier to share.

Enable self-service analysis while maintaining IT guidelines and control by providing IT-supported platforms like SharePoint to publish their solutions while ensuring accessibility and IT governance.