[eNet Silicon Valley Power News] Microsoft recently announced that the official version of the company’s latest database software version, SQL Server 2008 R2, will be released in May this year.
Microsoft released the SQL Server 2008 R2 Technology Preview (CTP) in August last year for developers to download and test. So far, this version is still open for download and has been downloaded more than 150,000 times.
SQL Server 2008 R2 provides business intelligence (BI) self-management capabilities; allows IT staff to centrally detect and manage various database applications, instances, and servers; improves virtual support through Hyper-V and Live Migration; leverages SQL Server Master Data Service allows the platform to support data from heterogeneous systems; leverage SQL Server StreamInsight to handle complex event streaming programs; and support x64 and Itanium hardware with up to 256 logical processors.
In addition to the traditional Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition, SQL Server 2008 R2 adds Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse. Among them, the former is a high-performance information platform that can support large-scale applications and manage enterprise database architecture, while the latter extends Microsoft's existing data warehouse functions, expanding its scale and performance to hundreds of terabytes.
SQL Server 2008 R2 is priced higher than SQL Server 2008 version. According to the prices listed by Microsoft, the standard version is priced at US$7,499 per processor, which is higher than the previous version's US$5,999. The enterprise version is priced at US$28,749, compared with only US$24,999 for the previous version. As for Datacenter and Each processor at Parallel Data Warehouse is priced at $57,489.