Microsoft ships the final Technology Preview for SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data War

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Today, Microsoft shipped the final Technology Preview of SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse and announced the Technology Adoption Program (TAP). Customers interested in joining the Technology Preview or the TAP, that officially starts now, should email mdsontap@microsoft.com. This is a significant milestone on the integration of DATAllegro technology as Parallel Data Warehouse now runs on Windows Server and SQL Server.

This Technology Preview offers customers the following benefits:

• High scalability to hundreds of terabytes and high performance through an MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) architecture
• Hardware choice with appliances planned for HP, Dell, IBM and Bull
• Comprehensive BI platform with integration to compelling Microsoft BI tools such as PowerPivot, Reporting Services, Analysis Services and Integration Services

Tsavo Media is just one of several customers from 8 different industries including financial services, telecommunications, insurance and media and entertainment that have joined the second Technology Preview. Microsoft will host their data warehouses for the duration of the program. For the Technology Adoption Program (TAP), the customer will host their data warehouses on premise on their own hardware.

Early performance tests on Parallel Data Warehouse indicate that the final technology preview is, on average, 45 percent faster than the first technology preview. Microsoft built and tested a Parallel Data Warehouse appliance with up to 50 nodes, 320 cores and 137 TB of physical data storage.

As you can see, we continue to make steady progress towards the release of Parallel Data Warehouse. Although our intent was to deliver SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse in the first half of 2010, we are still gathering customer feedback and working to ensure the high quality release our customers expect. Based on feedback from the customer Technology Adoption Program, we expect to announce more specific release timing, final configurations and pricing for our hardware partners in early summer (northern hemisphere). Stay tuned!

Additional Resources:

• Parallel Data Warehouse: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2...data-warehouse
• SQL Server 2008 R2: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx

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