REDMOND, USA: Microsoft Corp. has announced the release to manufacturing of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, the new version of the company's acclaimed data management and business intelligence platform.
This version of SQL Server provides powerful new capabilities such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis services. SQL Server 2008 provides the trusted, productive and intelligent platform necessary for business-critical applications.
"Microsoft developed this release of SQL Server with the customer in mind," said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft.
He added: "SQL Server 2008 is the only major database that includes comprehensive, tightly integrated functionality for data management as well as advanced business intelligence out of the box. By offering a complete solution, we save customers time and money and allow them to focus on deriving the most value from their data assets."
SQL Server has been well-received in the analyst community. Noted Forrester Research Inc. analyst Noel Yuhanna wrote in a January 2008 report, "The Forrester Wave: Information-As-A-Service, Q1 2008," "Microsoft is (one of) the only vendor(s) with top enterprise search and business intelligence reporting capabilities. It offers strong support for aggregation, summarization, search engine and dashboards. Transactions across distributed data sources and long-running transactions are also strengths for Microsoft."
"We saw a 35 percent improvement in throughput on the system that we upgraded to SQL Server 2008, with no code changes on our end," said Gary Oberg, vice president of IT and development at Applied Discovery (a member of the LexisNexis group). "This translates straight to the bottom line for us, as the more documents we can upload, the more we can process."
Microsoft is setting additional benchmark records with ISV solutions, including a world record on four-socket industry-standard blade servers in a three-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark, and demonstrated the largest benchmark ever on the Siemens Teamcenter digital product life-cycle management solution, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Dynamics AX and the Camstar Manufacturing Execution System solution.
