For those looking on MSDN or TechNet to download the RTM version, hold off.  The final version will be released to MSDN and TechNet on May 3rd, 2010 and to Microsoft Volume License customers on May 13th, 2010.

Some of the features you can look forward to in SQL Server 2008 R2 include:

• StreamInsight which provides you a low latency event processing system, which is designed to import data in near realtime.  StreamInsight is perfect for processing log files, or telephone call records which are contently processed into the platform.
• Master Data Services allows you to build a single point which holds your business data from multiple applications into a single repository.
• PowerPivot is probably the most talked about part of SQL Server 2008 R2 as this allows end users to enjoy the power of the SQL Server Analysis engine on their desktop so that they can create dynamic data applications where they can slice and dice the data any way they need to, without having to be connected to the SSAS instance.
• SQL Server 2008 R2 now fully supports Live Migration and Virtualization under Hyper-V.
• You can run SQL Server 2008 R2 on some of the largest hardware available, as SQL Server 2008 R2 supports 256 logical CPUs in a single server (with the data center edition).

If you are wondering if you have the RTM release of SQL Server 2008 R2, the build number for SQL Server 2008 R2 is 10.50.1600.1.  If you have another build then you don’t have the RTM release.

As part of the release announcement Dave Jones from the Mississippi Department of Transportation gave an overview of how MDoT uses SQL Server 2008 R2 as an early adopter using PowerPivot, Report Builder 3.0 and SSRS to meet internal needs on a highly available clustered install.

We also heard from Ron Van Vanten from Premier Bank Card who is the Directing Officer of Business Intelligence.  They manage over 40 TB of data under SQL Server, with a data warehouse which is over 20 TB in size.  They are over 150 instances of SQL Server hosting this data. Premier Bank Card is using the self service features of SQL Server 2008 R2 such as SSRS, Report Builder and PowerPivot to empower its business users to make better decisions while reducing overall costs.

The third customer that we heard from was Ayad Shammout of Care Group Systems.  Ayad talked a little bit about how PowerPivot was able to help their users quickly and easily learn how to analyze data without having to wait for IT resources.

The Parallel Scaleout Datawarehouse Edition has not gone RTM yet.  It has gone into a second RC build, and will be released later this year.

There are some major changes in what each edition supports with SQL Server 2008 R2.  Some of these include that Express supports 10 Gig databases.  The SQL Server 2008 R2 standard edition will now include backup compression saving customers from needing to purchase a third party solution to get the backup compression which was introduced in SQL Server 2008.

Be sure to check out the SQL Server 2008 R2 official launch site http://www.sqlserverlaunch.com/.

Denny

The basic jist of PowerPivot is that you can download a huge amount of data from your data warehouse, then slice and dice the data, analyzing it with the power of the SQL Server Analysis Services engine.  The downside of all this you ask?  Really, really big Excel workbooks.  And when I mean big, I mean big.  The user can download 30+ Gigs of data into the Excel workbook, which Excel will compress into an Excel workbook of up to 2 Gigs.

Now by default the users will probably save these documents to their desktop, or their My Documents folder.  So when your users start wanting Office 2010 installed be sure that your file servers, and home directory servers have the free space for these huge files.

If you use roaming profiles (like most larger companies do) you’ll want to set some expectations with your users that if they store the files somewhere that needs to replicate data from the workstation to a server it’ll take a long time to replicate these large files on login and logout of the computer.

Now, also don’t forget those quotas.  If you’ve got a 500 Gig quote setup on the users profile directory on the file server, and they try and upload a 1 Gig PowerPivot file from their My Documents folder some bad things are going to happen.  So in addition to adding more disk space to the file server, you’ll need to increase the quota size for the users that will be using PowerPivot.

Denny

2010 revenue projection of $3.2M which is a 15% reduction from the 2009 numbers.  But even with this reduction PASS is planning on spending 40% more on the SQL Server community.  They were able to increase the community spending, by ratically reducing the IT expenses by 67%.

Wayne then named some outstanding volunteers that work with PASS.  This includes Tim Ford for his work on 24 hours of PASS, Grant Fritschey for his work on the new SQL Server Standard, Amy Lewis who is the leader of the BI virtual chapter, Jacob Sebastian who is heading up the PASS Member Outreach program in India.

This year there are two passion awards being given out.  The first was presented to Charley Hanania for his work with the European PASS Committee, his work with the Swiss PASS Chapter.  He has be working with PASS for 4 years so far.  The second was presented to Allen Kinsel (Twitter) for his work in preparing the PASS conference.

Tom Casey (Twitter) who is a General Manager of the SQL Server Product Team at Microsoft then took the stage.  He has reminded us that only 20% of the people have the information that they need to do their job.  Specifically they need more information from there data, and how SQL Servers BI product suite can help the other 80% of the people out there get the infomation that they need.

Tom brought Ron VanZanten from First Premier Bankcard to talk about how SQL Server BI is used by them to drive their business and why they picked SQL Server over Oracle and Teradata.  First Premier Bankcard selected SQL Server because of the Office integration, as well as the pricepoint that SQL Server comes in at.  First Premier Bankcard has gone from a new customer to an early adopter running SQL Server Madison for their data warehouse which has reduced some queries run time from hours to minutes.

Tom then talked about how the new Power Pivot platform is going to make it easier to the Information Worker to get the information they need, while IT will still control the data and the application.  This is expected to make the Information Worker more efficient without having to requesting that the IT department put together the new application.

Tom brought Amir Netz (Twitter) of Microsoft to the stage to show a demostration of Power Pivot.  The demo included bringing 100 million rows into Excel from the data warehouse then filtering that data against values which were simply entered by hand into another sheet in the workbook.  As for sharing these huge documents we have Power Pivot for Sharepoint which allows you to upload the Excel workbook to the Sharepoint portal. The application can then automatically refresh the data and allow anyone who needs to view, and then slice and dice the data via the sharepoint portal without having to download the application.  The work is all done on the sharepoint server, by using your SSAS serer to do the needed processing.

When you configure Power Pivot for sharepoint you get a very interactive set of managemet screens in the sharepoint configuration.  It will show you who’s using the files, how often they are being used, and trends which show the usage of the documents over time.

The downside to putting all this new Power Pivot functionality in your org is that Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010 Enterprise Edition, and SQL Server 2008 R2 are all required to make this all work.  This ends up being a pretty pricy solution if you don’t have Sharepoint and SQL already.

Denny