At Tech Ed USA, we announced that SQL Server “Kilimanjaro” is officially going to be called SQL Server 2008 R2.
This reflects the nature of this upcoming release by highlighting that the core product has not changed and that this release builds on the current release of SQL Server 2008.
SQL Server 2008 R2 is focused heavily on expanding our Business Intelligence capabilities. Specifically we have announced the following new features in SQL Server 2008 R2:
- Self-service analysis (Project Gemini)
- Self-service reporting tools
- Application and multi-server management
- Support for multi-core processing
- Master Data Services
Master Data Services was announced today at Tech Ed USA which provides a single authoritative data source to ensure the integrity of data across the organization. Using MDS customers can manage critical data assets by enabling proactive stewardship, enforcing data quality rules, defining work flows aroudn data changes, notifying impacted parties, managing hierarchies and sharing the authoritative source with all impacted systems.
What does all this mean? It means that using SQL Server MDS customers can provide governance to manage data across the organization and provide a unified framework for rapidly building applications against that data.
SQL Server MDS will ship as part of SQL Server 2008 R2, so watch out for a CTP in the second half of 2009. SQL Server R2 is on track to ship in H1 of 2010.
