On April 21 Microsoft announced SQL Server 2008 R2 has been released to manufacturing.
The downloads on Technet/MSDN on May 3. International downloads on May 13.
You can read about the changes in R2 on the Microsoft SQL Server site. There are a few significant changes that are worth examining.These are the some that we wanted to point out that might be of wide interest.
- Data Center is a new edition.
- Enterprise Edition is limited to 8 CPUs.
- Express R2 supports 10GB databases
- Powerpivot is a great BI add-in for Excel 2010
- Backup compression is in Standard edition
A few blogger announcements: