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Today, SQL Server 2008 R2 received an official release date. It will be listed on Microsoft’s May price list, and will be available by May 2010.

SQL Server 2008 R2 showcases Microsoft’s continued commitment to business intelligence and mission-critical workloads. Since we made this release available as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) in August 2009, it has been well-received by the community with more than 150,000 downloads. Key customer benefits include:

· A trusted and scalable platform with high availability, Master Data Services supporting data consistency across heterogeneous systems, StreamInsight enabling high-scale complex event processing, and support for high scale applications with up to 256 logical processors.

· IT and developer efficiency through central management of multiple database applications, instances or servers, accelerating the development and deployment of applications and providing improved support for virtualization and Live Migration through Hyper-V™ in Windows Server 2008 R2.

· Managed self-service business intelligence empowering a new class of business users to build and share powerful BI solutions with little to no IT support, while still enabling IT to monitor and manage end-user generated BI solutions with the new PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint

“SQL Server 2008 R2 is freeing up our IT departments to focus on bigger challenges while keeping control of our most valuable asset, our information,” said Fabio Catassi, CTO Mediterranean Shipping Company. “Using Excel and PowerPivot as an interface for Self-Service BI, we are modeling, analyzing and pivoting millions of records in memory and publishing our BI solutions to SharePoint in few minutes. This also allows our geographically remote office branches to access them from a URL at a fraction of the time, and our IT department to centrally manage and monitor information.”

Customers with Software Assurance can upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2 and take advantage of the new features without incurring additional licensing costs.

There’s still time to download, preview, and provide feedback!
Go to http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2Downloads.aspx to get more information and to download the November CTP of SQL Server 2008 R2. And let us know what you think: connect with the SQL Server 2008 R2 Development Team and provide feedback.