We just finished the SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Keynote. That’s quite a mouthful.
One of the problems I saw with this release was that not a lot of people knew what
went into it. R2 products are strange in that people just sort of assume they
are nothing more than Service Pack releases. Well, this isn't actually the case.
There were some really cool things shown in the keynote this morning. PowerPivot
being my all-time favorite. Excel on Analysis Services steroids would be an
apt description. Analyzing huge sets of data within Excel was sort of tricky
because you ran into a million row limit. This was only half the problem though.
Performance was painful if you had that many rows in Excel -- sluggish at best.
PowerPivot helps change this dramatically. The demo just shown pulled down 100,000,000
rows of data into Excel, filtered down to 19, and then filtered back up to the initial
set -- all within a second. That's pretty cool.
Just don't hit print.
