SQL Server 2008 R2 Guide

This document is designed to help you understand the features and capabilities of the new version of SQL Server 2008 R2 and take a tour of its capabilities.

Organizations are looking to compete and grow by reducing costs, reducing time to market and identifying the highest value opportunities for their business. We’re moving forward to rapidly address these challenges with new capabilities in development, manageability, business intelligence and data warehousing and by delivering the first relational database cloud offering with Microsoft SQL Azure. We have a vision for an information platform that goes beyond storing and managing your data to help you deliver greater value from your data across your business in the applications your people use every day.

A key element of this vision is to focus on the people at the center, the users of SQL Server:

• IT and database professionals who support expanding information needs through IT services
• Business intelligence (BI) practitioners and end users who are looking to quickly mine data for business insights to increase customer satisfaction and drive business results
• Developers who build solutions to quickly capture business opportunities in an increasingly competitive market

Microsoft is committed to deliver an information platform that provides you with a complete set of enterprise-ready technologies and tools to help you realize more value from your information at the lowest total cost of ownership.

• SQL Server 2008 R2 delivers enterprise-class reliability, scalability and security, which is why it is already seeing rapid adoption among organizations that need to support mission-critical scenarios.
• Customers can now achieve “private cloud” operations capabilities in their own datacenter — by consolidating and virtualizing their datacenter, managing by policy and helping drive IT costs down while ensuring business uptime and agility.
• Microsoft, along with its global partners, can now deliver highly scalable data warehouse appliances based on standard reference architectures for guaranteed performance, while giving customers choice in which partners and configurations best suit their needs.

The key challenges we prioritized addressing with SQL Server 2008 R2 are broken down into three main categories:

Data Scale, Quality and Compliance. Data volumes especially for decision support systems are growing exponentially and the ability for the hardware and software to support this growth is essential. As information becomes more readily available to the rank and file of organizations, the ability to apply authorization rules and automate access also becomes critical.

Administrator Efficiency. If you look at the trend of technology over time you’ll see that we’re graduating more and more database administrators, and that’s great but the problem is that the proliferation of software and database applications is increasing at a greater rate than the number of database administrators on staff so what you get are these overburdened administrators. On top of that, the increase in the hardware computing capacity tends to leave a lot of underutilized hardware. So IT admins not only need to become more efficient in managing a large number of applications, they also need to ensure that resources are optimally utilized.

End-User Empowerment. This is essentially about enabling end users to do more with less dependency on their IT departments. IT was cited by end users as being a major bottleneck to reporting and analysis projects and from an IT perspective, they simply could not keep up with every change an end user demands. Providing end users with intuitive tools that enable them to build their own reports and models for analysis was a major challenge for IT.

This guide will walk you through the major upgrades, new features and changes that address these challenges. In addition, the second part of the guide will help you get started in the installation and testing of the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Beta.