Microsoft's recent policy of Glasnost has meant that we now enjoy direct, technical communications about their products from the people responsible for building them. In the bad old days, when all communication was filtered through the obfuscating glass of the marketing department, one would read through the gobbledygook of the marketing press releases, glean what little sense one could, shrug, and move on. Nowadays, one wades through hundred of blogs, tens of videos and countless twitters, before reaching roughly the same conclusion.

This thought hit me as I tried to make sense of the information regarding the CTP of SQL Server 2008 release 2 (previously codenamed 'Kilimanjaro'). It is due for release in July, to coincide with the Office 2010 CTP, and promises to be the most substantial "point release" ever. Is there a central, consistent theme to the release? Or is it easier to understand R2 as representing a wonderful opportunity to slip all those things into SQL Server 2008 that were 'time-boxed out' by the original deadlines? In amongst the technical buzz from Microsoft, are we just hearing the voice of SQL Server catching up with changes to Windows Server, Visual Studio, and SharePoint/Office 2010?

I started by trying to seek out the reality behind the concept of 'self-service business intelligence', provided via a new Excel add-in (Gemini). These new BI capabilities have been whetting appetites since October 2008, when Donald Farmer first demonstrated how the in-memory, column-oriented processing model allowed users to slice, dice, pivot and sort two million rows of data, right for within Excel. However, relatively little new detail has emerged since about the underlying changes to Analysis Services, or about Gemini's new "DAX expressions", for multidimensional calculations, and what they mean, if anything, for the future of MDX.

What strategies underpinned the move to make IT administration easier? Dashboard viewpoints are a new feature, allowing administrator to manage policies on their servers and "identify consolidation opportunities". However, the central pin in the "manageability" drive seems to be Master Data Services (MDS), a tool by which to centrally manage all critical business data in financial and ERP applications. It's potentially an interesting tool for some people, but seems to have been rather haphazardly shovelled into SQL Server, having originally been announced as part of SharePoint 2010. We'll also have 'Low Latency Complex Event Processing' for capturing and analysing usage patterns in the database and making it easier to detect, for example, fraudulent activity. Again, however, details are sketchy.

Elsewhere, smooth integration with SharePoint 2010 is promised often, as well as better integration with Visual Studio. There will also be improvements to the way that virtualization is done, and an increase in the number of logical processors supported from 64 up to 256, exploiting improvement in the new 64-bit Windows Server 2008 r2. There will be self-service reporting (with Virtual Earth integration), a few minor additions to the TSQL Language, and we'll also get compression of Unicode strings.

No. We're not going to find a unifying theme behind the new release. It is a Muesli release, a disparate mix, with a number of tasty nuts and raisins thrown in. Perhaps Microsoft’s new way of announcing releases acknowledges the huge complexities of the server products. No sound bite will do justice to what will be delivered, but like Muesli, there will be plenty to chew on when SQL Server 2008 R2 arrives.

Cheers,

Tony.