Microsoft has recently announced that SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 will RTM in April 2010, and will be officially launched on May 12, 2010. From historical experience, this means that the RTM bits will be available on MSDN Subscribers probably one to two weeks after it is declared RTM, and that SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 will be available for purchase on May 12.  That is not very far away…

SharePoint 2010 requires SQL Server. Here is some information regarding the relationship between SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server.

SharePoint Server 2010 Hardware and Software Requirements

SharePoint 2010 is 64-bit only. It requires Windows Server 2008 SP2 or Windows Server 2008 R2. It will not run on a Server Core installation.

It requires one of these versions of x64 SQL Server:

                SQL Server 2005 SP3 CU3 (Build 4220) or greater (Note: SQL Server 2005 goes out of mainstream support in April 2011)

                SQL Server 2008 SP1 CU2 (Build 2714) or greater

                SQL Server 2008 R2

Microsoft’s official position is still that SQL Server 2008 R2 will be available in the first half of 2010, even though the SharePoint team has announced a May 12 launch date.  If I were planning on a brand new SharePoint 2010 deployment, I would want to be running on Windows Server 2008 R2, using SQL Server 2008 R2. This will give you the best performance and the most functionality. For example, PowerPivot in SharePoint 2010 requires SQL Server 2008 R2.

I have put together some sample code that shows how to determine what edition and version of SQL Server is installed on an instance. This makes it easier to take advantage of version specific features (such as data compression) and edition specific features (such as online index creation) where appropriate.

-- Method 1: Retrieve complete version info, parse results in C#
SELECT @@VERSION AS [SQLVersionInfo];
-- Method 2: Detecting the edition and version of SQL Server from T-SQL
IF SERVERPROPERTY('EngineEdition') = 3
    BEGIN
        PRINT 'Enterprise Edition'
        IF CONVERT(INT, CONVERT(FLOAT, CONVERT(VARCHAR(3), SERVERPROPERTY('productversion')))) > 9
            BEGIN
                PRINT 'SQL Server 2008 or greater';
                -- Do something like use data compression on an index
                
            END
        ELSE
            BEGIN
                PRINT 'SQL Server 2005 or lower';
                -- Do something like create an index in online mode
                
            END
    END
ELSE
    BEGIN
        PRINT 'Standard Edition';
        -- Create an index in offline mode
    END